I like that you think about these things, and I like thinking about them too. While for me, dissaffection arrived more as a result of disgust with Maharaji's personal conduct, and spread out from there, rather than as a result of calculating as you apparently did, that the sum total of your "experience" was in the debit rather than the credit column, the resulting re-enlivenment of my intellect was like a storm. Very exciting and in fact "radical", or at least it felt that way after having lived with the prohibition against it for so long, and irresistable in its delicious defiance of the autocratic and hypocritical "leader."

One of the things which I used to think about alot was the way in which the discreditation of thinking itself was such a good controlling device. Brilliant actually, if your intention was to control people. It is interesting to me that in a system of belief and practice, where thought is devalued as a less than ultimate discerner of "Reality" - abuse of this surrendered self-volition is rampant.

It made me start thinking that maybe the entire tradition was bogus, or had been characterized by similar kinds of abuse all the way through time. I started wondering whether Christ had in fact been nothing more than a cult leader.

Anyway, the taboo on critical thought in the Rawat religion works very nicely as a way to fend off the kind of thinking that causes a person to finally say, "you know what? This here is a whole bunch of fucking bullshit!" or another favorite of mine "you know what? fuck that!"

Partly why it works so well in the rawatian model is because it really is, at least in part, part of the hindu spiritual tradition. But there is a subtle twist where it is emphasized less for its usefulness on the way to a trasnsendant "inner" experience, and more for its ability to prevent "students" from critically evaluating their "Master." In this second application, Rawat's enjoinder to emphasize the "heart" as opposed to the "mind", and to abhor "dark thoughts" and "doubts", personified as the very essence of deviation from the "true way', salvation, and the master himself, is a brilliant and seamless construct that forbids thinking about its brilliance as a technique of control under the guise of being an expression of concern for the student's spiritual or "experiential" (in Rawat's "non-spiritual" spirituality) well being.