The following is from Andy Christie's website.  I recall the mentality.

It's 1974 and I'm sitting in a lotus position on the floor of an auditorium in Reading, Pennsylvania, with about 800 other people from all over the country. We’re waiting for the Guru to appear onstage and sit in the throne we built and decorated with 3,000 primroses. Guru Maharaji is a twelve-year-old boy from India and the latest incarnation of Lord Krishna, the blue Hindu God with all the arms.

But instead of the chubby holy boy, a skinny cowboy about my age steps up to the microphone and says "Jai Sat Chit Ananda"—Being-Consciousness-Bliss—and tells us he has some very blissful news. Then he runs offstage without telling us, and I’m annoyed because now I have to wait to be blissed out.

I’ve arrived here because I wasn’t a very good regular hippie. I was okay with the pot and the ponytail and the headband, but I just made believe I was feelin’ groovy. There was all this love and brotherhood pressure everywhere and I wasn’t totally getting it. I was an artificial flower child. I didn’t love everybody the way you were supposed to. I just liked them. So I was experimenting with Eastern religion to figure out what I was doing wrong.

I rode down from New York in the flower truck to decorate the stage. And now I'm waiting for three friends who are driving down in a separate car. We grew up together in Queens, and progressed from "The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost" to "The Sex, The Drugs and The Rock & Roll." And now I kind of got them into this. They’re really late, but Shirley from Hempstead tells me time is an illusion, so it’s cool.

I just met Shirley. She’s a beautiful vegetarian, pale as a bean sprout, a Long Island Lotus sitting next to me with her left knee touching my right knee. She has a red dot on her forehead, right above her mascara. They all have dots—all the Jewish and Irish and California girls. The guys, too. Including me. I have a red dot on my forehead. It looks like we’ve all been shot between the eyes. We’re Premmies—the Hindi word for our family of counterculture nonconformists. It means "Follower."

The cowboy isn’t back with the news yet, so I look around for Mahatma Fakirinand, the Guru’s right-hand holy man. We call him The Laughing Mahatma because he finds western culture so funny, but I don’t see him anywhere. Shirley tells me that’s because he’s in prison.

She’s got her eyes closed, but I guess her third eye sees my mouth hanging open, so she tells me somebody threw a cream pie in the Guru’s face last night, and the Laughing Mahatma, who was tacking saffron bunting to the stage at the time, shattered the guy’s wrist with a claw hammer.

This doesn’t sound very Jai Sat Chit Ananda to me and when Shirley sees the expression on my face she giggles the way you laugh at a puppy tripping on its ears. She says I’m so attached to this world. All this Maya. Darkness and delusion. It’s not our real home.

She’s like, a genius. Then she holds my hand and we rock together like autistic children. And I can’t wait for my friends to meet her.

I’m here to Receive Knowledge. Which is a formal ceremony—like a Bar Mitzvah—for people who’ve decided psychedelic drugs and music and sex and jealousy aren’t the answer. That Jesus and psychotherapy and material possessions aren’t the answer. That plain old America isn’t the answer. This pre-teen Guru in the Nehru jacket and the Don Ho shirt says love is the answer, just like the hippies. But a different kind of love. Love without object, without attachment. Because attached love is illusion. Husbands and wives, mothers and sons, family and friends: all illusion. I don’t get this either, which is why I’m anxious to Receive Knowledge.

I’m peeking at how nice Shirley’s hand looks attached to mine when the cowboy finally walks onstage with a huge grin and tells us the news.

An hour ago, three new Premmies, were killed in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. Then he unfolds a piece of paper and reads off the names of my three friends.

A state trooper got the auditorium’s number off one of the flyers they found scattered in the back seat of the crushed car. And Guru Maharaji himself took the call.

Shirley is squeezing my hand and I look up and can’t believe what I’m seeing. She’s smiling. Almost everyone is. Some people are clapping. The red dots are nodding up and down while the cowboy’s gushing about the mysteries of Maharaji’s grace and how blessed my friends are to have broken free while coming to him. Like they’re the lucky ones.

But I’m not listening anymore. I’m crying and kicking my way through a sea of blissed-out Premmies. They’re not even human anymore and I hate them.

I ended my experiment at the payphone out in the lobby, making three calls to New York, to three ordinary families. Three illusions. They were all in the middle of dinner, but they were all happy to hear my voice. And the first thing each of them asked was whether their boy got here okay. And as much as I wanted to break the connection, I didn't. I delivered the news.

On the bus ride home, I rubbed the dot—the bullet between the eyes—from my forehead.