Joe and others have written several posts below that I am 'bending over backwards' to be reasonable with premies, or trying to blur the dividing line, or something like that. There are several critical posts to me in the long thread below (started by Will but most of the thread is about Ghi) about my saying that I thought what Ghi wrote was 'reasonable'.

I have thought about it a bit, and here is my response:

First, for most of us who were long-time premies, there is a lot of love and tender feelings mixed up in what we went through. I certainly loved Maharaji more than anyone for a long time, and sacrificed a huge amount for him. I now feel that my love was misplaced, clearly, and I could have been doing much better things with my time than following M.

As a consequence, there is a huge mixture of emotions in me, ranging from anger and betrayal, through disappointment, to poignancy and even tenderness still. I am happy to say that these are all subsiding, but of course they have left a legacy.

As a result of this, I don't *just* see sincere premies as spouting logical inconsistencies which must be dissected and deconstructed (although I agree that must and should be done), but also as people who are tenderised, who see themselves as having loving hearts that they are offering to a powerful and loving master, who can feel attacked by us here, and whose 'experience' is confirming them in their belief about M and their own lives.

I personally think that they are misguided, that Maharaji does not love them in any meaningful sense, that their 'experience' is due to a self-fulfillling belief system, that they have given up on any critical thinking or awareness of their own inner life, and that they talk in meaningless cliches.

But I was there myself, comparatively recently, and I empathise with them. That means, I know how they feel. Not just 'I know how they feel', because all of us who post here know that, I think, from our own experience. But I was a devoted premie recently enough to actually empathise with them; I am not sure how well those exes who left a long time ago can actually *empathise* with sincere premies, meaning still feel what they feel, as opposed to remembering what that feeling was from the past.

Please note, I am *not* saying that the typical premie apologia should not be challenged. On the contrary, it must be deconstructed and shown to be the uncritical wishful thinking that it is. I think I do this on my site, and certainly many of you posting here do that very effectively. Joe, I thought your line-by-line dissection of Ghi's post effective, and I learnt from it; Will, your deconstruction of the Keys, and the general 'there is no such thing as M's Knowledge' is masterly. I am grateful for Cynthia's and Jim's no bullshit stance. And many others.

But these are all styles of response. We are different people, and we will and should respond differently. For some of us, the anger or betrayal is dominant, and we respond accordingly. For myself, the anger and betrayal are sometimes dominant, at other times something else is. When I read Ghi's 'Reasonable...' post, I was affected by it - I felt what it was to be a premie, it reminded me of the exact same way I talked and *felt*, until not so long ago. Fortunately, I was also able to think critically about my own feelings, and so was not swept up in the mushiness of it all.

For me, premies are not the enemy (well, actually some are, but not most, not Ghi anyway). I agree with Joe's point that in many cases there is no alternative but to deconstruct what a premie is actually saying, and that will in most cases be perceived as being hostile. But that can be done in different styles and in different ways.

I have my own style, and that is the way it is. As Cynthia so often says, if you don't like it, don't read my posts.