I wish to all Happy New Year 2024 !

Thank you for being here and your help all those years!

I would like to share with you my understanding on why people need to recover after the involvement with the Prem Rawat cult and how...

Many religious personality cult victims report severe psychological trauma and difficulty into acknowledging it.

I wish that my experience and study on the subject will help victims, and especially the ex-premies who did devote their lives to Prem and “his” “knowledge” (older and more recent ones) to realize that they were subject to enforced cohesion and that they involuntarily became the mental “slaves” and provided financial, labor and propaganda support to a religious group and its leader.

The way the cohesion by religious cults and the recruiting of new members is achieved in the 21st century is by the subtle but effective means of “love bombing” by the group who at the same time induces submission and supernatural fear towards the cult leader who is presented to them as Superior on an existential level (the Master holds supernatural force or/and knowledge), and most and foremost by being withheld crucial information about the cult and the leader’s activities.

The core questions that each cult victim has to ask themselves to be free, are:

·        Do they know who their “spiritual” leader is in reality and why are they not allowed to pass any critical enquiry or judgement on his behavior, his actions and his past?

·        Had they known before starting believing in this specific “Master”, that he is responsible for criminal offenses, would they still feel devoted to him?

·        In case they would still be devoted to him, why do they apply other standards to him than to any other human beings and they “let him off” with crimes punished by law?

·        And last but not least: if their Master’s spiritual path preaches that money is an illusion then why he needs to spend more money than a country’s annual budget for his own luxurious lifestyle running an international money-earning operation led by him?

The wealth and power that religious personality cults still hold despite their criminal track records, and even though “Masters” such as Osho have been exposed by their ex-followers, even though the Beatles openly spoke about economic exploitation of Maharishi’s followers etc.

Religious personality cults thrive despite the huge track-record of suicides and other destructive effects like psychosis etc. continuously reported to the more sensitive cult-members, as well as the effects of long-term sadistic abusive behavior of the “Master” towards his followers, where he is always right and they are always wrong, and are always put in a position to apologize to the press and the large public for the Master’s current and past crimes and mis-behaviors.

People who have a Spiritual Master are not necessarily under some psychotic delusion, but they are not students of a Spiritual Master because of free choice:

All of the students who believe in a Spiritual Master (usually alive) are being withheld of the information about his conduct and his religious group practices, so they are subject to fraud.

This is the reason they join in the first place and give the “Master” the time and space to coerced them to his belief system where “He” is the only Law of the “spiritual” and the material world.

They gradually become his slaves and devote to their “Master” their lives and give him huge financial support for anything he wants to do, often through illegal means, with global fundraising campaigns and large sums of unreported money globally given in cash.

Many cults also cover pedophiles or other sexual offenders and they are allowed to be trusted with cult member’s children even after series of reported cases. Other cults use illegal activities for fundraising.

Also, in all religious personality cults there is always a group of “ex-rated” followers who are totally devoted although they “know too much”, and also ready to take responsibility for the Gurus mistakes and legal issues, as well as to be used as scape-goats when this is needed. (This is happening still today in Prem Rawat's cult).

Ex-followers who talk about their experience inside their cult are called lunatics, emotionally instable, “hurt” usually they are told by other "premies" that they "freaked out" because of a sick attachment they developed by their own responsibility to the “Guru” or simply that they are disturbed and thus exaggerate and are blaming the cult’s leader for their own issues.  

The large public’s opinion usually is that the Rawat cult is a phenomenon who has a good side when it does not have destructive effects, and a bad side in certain occasions, concerning only some extreme lunatics. This general opinion of people who havent done research on the subject, align unfortunately with the cult’s apologists who say that the victims:

·        either consciously chose to be followers of a sociopath-narcissist-criminal with "charismatic personality traits" and “they asked for it”

·        Or they are lunatics, weirdos believing in crazy religions because they are already crazy, who also “asked for it”, (so it's an extreme phenomenon concerning only people with specific mental disorders, and thus by not caring for them, the people using that argument basically say that they don’t care about that specific minority of people).

However, none of these explanations (or excuses) are valid.

The first is absolutely wrong because religious cults do “silence” the voice of ex-followers and do not admit their systematic economic exploitation of the followers nor the criminal activities of the Guru, and purposely they withhold information about the "onion” layer of the cult leading to a "devotional” core of followers doing “anything” for their Master, as well as information about the cult’s practices and destroy evidence of their past.

No-one from the Guru’s followers when they kiss the guru’s feet in total devotion and bliss do not know the basic information about the Cult: they sincerely believe their Master is not responsible for any misconduct or criminal activity, and this is why the "guru" hides this information from them.

As for lunacy, no, the people suffering already from some psychosis before joining this type of cults are and always have been a minority.

The majority of people joining similar cults are perfectly sane people who go through some crisis or who simply under certain circumstances can be led to submit their free will to a self-proclaimed Guru and divide themselves into:

a) the cult-self where they are followers of the Guru,

and b) their “social” self, they one they use to interact with the rest of the society and most of them are skilled and very logical and successful people in many fields.

Ex-cult victims like Mike Finch in his book “My life without the Guru” explains in depth how a former “hippy” who had thirst for peace and truth and traveled in the 70s in India ended up giving everything to a self-proclaimed God from India.

But what happens when a cult victim finds out the truth about the leader and the group’s offenses?

Other mechanisms are at play.

The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology explains the “closing their eyes to the truth” reaction.

Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state that people feel when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold." A key assumption is that people want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium. Likewise, another assumption is that a person will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance theory explains human behavior by positing that people have a bias to seek consonance between their expectations and reality. According to Festinger, people engage in a process he termed "dissonance reduction," which can be achieved in one of three ways: “lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors.”

·        The first reaction of the cult victim is to deny the truth, and change the facts. The cults victims will “change” the truth because it will create cognitive dissonance to kiss the feet of a person who is responsible for criminal activities.

·        The second reaction – response that is expected from the cult victim is to believe that the cognitive dissonance is part of their spiritual evolution and that the path of devotion to the Master follows the saying (repeated by ex-rated followers to keep the cult victims who “know too much”, quiet) «the closer you get to the fire the more it burns».

·        And the third and last reaction is that of massive disillusionment: the victim has to admin firstly to themselves and then to others the truth and that they is no peace and love to be found in a fire that when you get close to it, it burns, and that they need to re-live their past with the cult as what it truly was, and resolve the internal conflicts created by the relationship with a person with split-personality, that of a “loving Master” and that of an abuser. The only solution is to consider the Master as one integrated personality, see him only as a normal human being.  

Then, and only then, at the 3rd and last reaction to the revelation of the ugly truth about the “guru”, the victim’s eyes are open and recognizes the patterns of the same systematic recruitment of victims to similar religious groups operating as criminal organizations and all of them practicing the same or similar practices.