Part 3. Blame, responsibility and guilt

I know that a lot of former followers disagree with my
perspective on this, I’m repeating because in my view the family disclosures go
the very heart of the thing that is unique about the Prem Rawat cult.

For those of us who were early western adopters, broadly
the 1970 to 1975 premies, we did a very strange thing. For nearly all of us except
perhaps a few young children who were inducted by their parents, we teenagers
and young adults adopted as their focus of veneration a living person who was
younger than us, something which was not just culturally peculiar but a very
real transfer of the normal distribution of responsibility.

Although I’m only a year and bit older than Prem, I
look back on that time with a degree of guilt at having accepted someone who by
dint of relative maturity, must have been more vulnerable than me, and was in a
position of exposure to what can fairly be described as ‘group madness’. Not
that I had any determined influence, I was just some kid in the crowd, but
being in a crowd doesn’t absolve personal responsibility and even a young
person can step aside and say “this is wrong”, I don’t recall anyone doing
that. When I left, I left quietly.

Of course veneration of Prem started in India – Prem
was elevated to godhead long before all but a very few western recruits got
involved in the hysteria, undoubtedly those who bear the greater blame for
stealing Prem’s childhood are his family and the so call mahatmas. Those
individuals gave Prem the most disturbing childhood and adolescence, lacking
any meaningful passage to maturity he was propelled to an adulthood for which
he was wholly unprepared.

 Amongst the
most blameworthy of course are Prem’s mother and assorted mahatmas amongst whom
we know one to have been unequivocally a child abuser but I would suggest there
were others who were equally malign influences. The precise combination of
malignancies we’ll probably never know – unless that is Prem chooses to honestly
examine his life and make it public.

The abused individual, whether the abuse was
psychological, deprivational, injurious or sexual does not of course have free
pass to themselves become an abuser. But the early life of an abuser is
important to understanding what is frequently a cross generational propagation
of abuse, it is a sequence that is often hugely difficult to break. It’s to be
hoped that at the personal level Prem’s children have found a way to break the
cycle, all the evidence from family psychology tells us it’s a hugely tough
journey.

The cult that, depending on your perspective, Prem was
born into, or alternatively which was built around him, has been abusive in
multiple forms, and albeit largely lacking the intimate abuse experienced by
Prem’s children, in many ways it has the character of an abusive family. The
structures of the cult, its hierarchies, its legal supports, its organisations,
its money generating enterprises need to address their inherent abusive nature –
without that all involved, including the Rawat family members are not going to
be released from the abusive grip.

I want to make one final point about responsibility.
There are two individuals both entirely peripheral to what most of us would see
as the main story of the cult, but whose actions had profoundly harmful
consequences. Firstly the English lawyer whose inventive legal structure
redirected donations from the nascent US Divine Light Mission, to 15 year old
Prem’s personal bank account. Secondly the California Judge who without any
serious consideration granted Prem “emancipated child” status. In concert these
two actions set up a culture shocked adolescent, surrounded by unquestioning
enablers and self interested grifters, to have access to wealth, power, opportunities
and temptations that he was wholly unprepared to deal with and for who there
was no supervising adult to step in and say no.

In this circumstance, while no individual can be held
up as the abuser, the young Prem Rawat was IMO undoubtedly subject to a profound
structural abuse. It’s easy to berate Prem for his multiple failures as an
adult, some of which now seem possibly to meet the level of outright
criminality but in considering the whole story we shouldn’t neglect how that
adult was made.