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Would you say that a hoax can fail or succeed ?
How something that actually has no reality can achieve or not achieve anything ? Unless reality itself is a big illusion ?
Just wondering ........
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I don't think DLM was a hoax. Certainly none of the westerners involved in it thought it was a hoax. I really can't imagine that the young Prem Rawat was hoaxing everyone and I'm inclined to believe the family believed in it also.
A hoax has reality. A false religion has reality. Take Mormonism for example. It is obviously completely false in it's theology and it's origins, yet it is a very large and powerful organisation full of very committed members.
But I'm just a simple Australian person and these are ideas for more sophisticated people, like the French. Why not ask Bernard-Henri Levy what he thinks of Prem Rawat? I'm sure he has spent a lot of time pondering the message of Prem Rawat.
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I guess now I must be one of those intellectuals again .......
OK, I'm going to call this a spiritual hoax ! I have no doubts the Rawat family has always been aware that their 'mission' was something totally bogus, that Hans was merely some kind of illuminated whatever, and a good business and source of income if managed properly.
Remember for instance that story Rawat used to tell, about his mother and Hans travelling in a car in India: she would throw some coins whilst passing in front of a temple etc ........ and Hans telling her 'why don't you give it to me ?' ..........
She never believed in the whole charade IMO.
Think also of what Dettmers recalled about some discussions he had with Rawat .....
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No doubt the travelling snake oil part of him is there, but on some level I think he believes it to, if for no other reason than repetition on a daily basis for decades.
I reckon he slips between the two.
To give an example I had a narcisisstic client, not at Rawats level, but still pretty much a total narcissist and I regularly saw himself alter reality to fit into his own idealized conceptions of himself.
This guy was a rogue and regularly convinced himself he was being conned, when business wise he was the biggest fraudster I've known, yet, and this is the odd part, there was also a part of him that was unbelievably naive and soft, almost childlike, just didn't appear very often.
When you're dealing with the level of psychological screw up like Rawat, things get very complicated.
Another eg, went out with someone who 90% of the time was the sweetest person you're ever likely to meet, yet the other 10% was a compulsive liar, ego maniac, and pretty bitchy.
I think Rawat suffers from a form of psychosis, neurosis, mental health disorder anyways, and his control freakery, alway blaming other, and taking credit when things do work, and his obsessive compulsive stuff about hygiene, germs, shaking hands etc just fits into that.
I think when you're that messed up you're beyond the realm that most people can really comprehend, which gives them the space to always be one step ahead.
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One of the reasons I don't believe that is because Rawat is spreading that tale and has been publicly for the last what, 5 years? Since Passages?
What about Satpal and Bhole Ji? Why should they grow up not believing in their father. Everyone else they knew did. If their mother didn't, she was certainly hiding it from everyone else. Do you think she was secretly telling the truth only to them. Plus the tales of Mata Ji being very religious only adds credibiliity to her. A religious person wouldn't go along with a divine deception.
There is a pattern in Rawat's lies. Anyone who has criticised him or broken with him must be denigrated. But the story must also fly with the devoted premies and by the story that they never believed in him but played along for the money works for them because they don't bother to ask if that was true why was Rawat complicit in hiding their lying for so many years.
Have alook at this satsang: http://www.prem-rawat-bio.org/dlm_pubs/unbrokengarland.html#mataji
Does that sound like a person who doesn't believe? Everything in Peace Is Possible about western critics of Rawat is basicvally a nasty lie, why shouldn't what is written about her be also?
Modified by ocker at Thu, Mar 01, 2007, 14:35:36
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Gee those Aussie premies were confused and unclear even back in the 70s! I'm kidding, I think. It would be interesting to know what year that was written because the 70s in Rawat's world spans a lot of concepts and beliefs. Rawat always placed double and triple binds on people, especially the premies closest to him. The closer one gets the more intense the pressure becomes to "understand," or as the Indian Mahatmas used to say "stand under" (as in the lotus feet). Rawat's knowledge fails because it's not real. It's a belief-system, a religion that he made up as he went along, and worse, he was a dumb, uneducated, unsophisticated child making up a religion for innocent people following him -- a child who held regular temper tantrums when people didn't do his bidding and got lots of attention all the time. During the mid-70s when I was an aspirant ('75) Rawat said that knowledge wasn't just the techniques, but following the agya of the Master: him. Pracitcing K was to do satsang, service and meditation and to receive darshan. But, he also said on many occasions that just going through the motions of SSM (I never heard him call it pseudo-K) wasn't enough, that devotion to himself was the way to devotion and realization because through surrrender, the mind became his (and we would supposedly relieved !!). See? It's enough to have anyone going around in circles and there's no way anyone could ever intellectually make sense out of the Rawat religion because blink twice and he changed the level or position of the bar. What he would call "blowing our concepts." Right... Prem Rawat has always set premies up to fail and then he delighted in our failures because it has always made him look bigger and better in his own eyes. Our failures were his success because it puffed up his own self image as our provider. The fact is the opposite has been the truth: without premies, Rawat is just a big fat nothing, but without Rawat, we're a large number of generally very good loving human beings. It's difficult to understand how how narcissists and psychopaths work. There's no love involved; their life is a system of manipulating games and the people in their paths suffer for it. For instance, my father never wanted any of his five daughters to ever succeed in life. If we failed, he actually enjoyed it, would laugh gleefully and feel that he personally succeeded, because our failures proved just how much we needed him for our own identities. (Yes, narcissism is that sick.) Narcissists don't consider that others exist, rather all others exist for their personal purposes. My father never allowed us to read books as kids (we had to sneak reading) without punishment and/or degradation, and getting a higher education was absolutely out of the question. It's the exact opposite of what a good, nurturing parent does and wants for their children. Rawat's the same exact way. I can't count how many times Rawat was gleeful when he denegrated mahatmas/initiators on stage at festivals when he would embarrass them about something they did or said. Narcissism is an ugly personality disorder and very complicated. Rawat has it in spades and that editorial is simply a bit of existential angst of a premie trying to figure out the most current Rawat mindf**k probably passed down from inner circle premies. The cult is top to bottom sick and abusive, and that's exactly why those premies on Amazon have become more and more abusive the more exes try to talk to them: They get it from their Master: Prem Rawat. 
Modified by Cynthia at Thu, Mar 01, 2007, 09:27:56
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Hi Cynthia,
It is very relaxing to read your post, so few people actually understand what a narcissist is like. Having grown up with one I am left with a certain cringe of anxiety that however clearly I say something I will be misunderstood.
Does Rawat believe his own hype is a question that is regularly debated here. To my mind that is not an effective question to ask because a narcissist does not think like that.
The truth of the matter to one of them is whatever they say it is at any given point. And they will trample over anybody that would gainsay them, even over a little thing.
As you say, they do not acknowledge other creatures to be animate. Even my fathers dogs, both kindly loyal loving dogs, could not hack it and eventually crawled away to find sanctuary under my mother's kitchen table.
And yet there's more. Included in the narcissists arsenal is that little boy lost charm - the bit that makes people think they understand him and that he's just frightened so if they are kind to him he will accept being loved and love in return....hah! ..just watch what happens next. 
I never went over to one reality or any of those places. Apart from a lack of interest in what they say, I also decided that should I end up being a subject of character assassination by premies on the internet I could do myself the favour of not knowing what they said.
A liar is a liar. In my family the person whom my father was being the most insulting about would be considered by the rest of us to probably be a particularly nice person.
Modified by lesley at Thu, Mar 01, 2007, 12:45:58
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And yet there's more. Included in the narcissists arsenal is that little boy lost charm - the bit that makes people think they understand him and that he's just frightened so if they are kind to him he will accept being loved and love in return....hah! ..just watch what happens next. Wow, you nailed that one. What a trap that one is! In my family the person whom my father was being the most insulting about would be considered by the rest of us to probably be a particularly nice person. Yup, yup, yup. 
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I'll found out when it was written shortly but I came along 2 years before you and I was told in satsang that all you had to do was practise without belief and the Knowledge would work. Yes SS&M&D and the four commandments was all it would take. Of course by then you had to show you "believed" by going to satsang all the time and doing service else you wouldn't get into a Knowledge session.
Failure is pretty well a certainty in practising Knowledge but I don't think he sets up pwks to fail, it's just the way it is. He's just the obnoxious recipient who inherited the kit and caboodle and has made what boodle he can while running it into the ground.
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Australian premies paranoid? Who would have guessed? Their lives going violently up and down? I'm shocked. Perhaps they ought to reprint this gem of wisdom and circulate it at Amaroo - minus the suggestion that "knowledge" would cure them.
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Surely this little piece of what passed for soul searching comes from that period, & is merely an exhortation to get with the 'devotion' project as being the way to really understand what the nollidge was all about.
I wonder if anything like this was ever written about in any other country in an official Divine Light Mission publication.
For sure it was : DLM was/is an international movement controlled from the top, & great pains were taken to ensure that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet.
Or rather, the realisation that there was something wrong with my practice of
Knowledge and that I could and should do something about it came out on
top.
So what did he feel he should do about it is the key question, & the answer is; move into an ashram/ premie centre; give the largest possible portion of earnings to the 'mission' ; strain every fibre of being to surrender; follow agya unquestioningly etc, etc, etc.
I don't see this as at all an Australian attempt at free speech or whatever you want to call it, but as part of the mainstream effort to get more of the non-core members involved & 'on message', as we didn't say back then.
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Actually I think it was before that time but I hope to find out shortly. I think it was a she, and she was already in the ashram and how she could strain every fibre anymore as an ashram premie and the editor of the Golden Age and satsang 7 nights a week and being devoted as devoted can be and she was a lovely, lovely person eludes me? And if I've got the wrong person I'm pretty sure everything else fits anyway.
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......wif anxiety, boom crash.
There's just been this cop drama on tv written by Ian Rankin, with all sorts of clever allusions to the Sherlock Homes' stories, no doubt lost on most of the viewers, but not on the denizens of the D household who started analysing & pontificating on it whilst yrs truly was falling asleep in an armchair.
Then as the credits roll up I hear 'Babylon's Burning' by the Ruts.
So I spring awake & tell them that I know something about these guys, about how they were West London hippie premies of the later & even more degenerate generation who'd got into smack rather than the good old dope, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Zero interest. Go back to sleep Dad.
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Besides age making us hopelessly unhip, you have installed good bullshit detectors in them. Your posts never fail to make me laugh. Marianne
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sorry, problem with Safari
What I hoped I had said was: It was a she, it was about 1976 after she took over from as editor of The Golden Age, and yes, she was/is a lovely person.
As a former advertising copywriter, it was easy for Derek to invent terms such as 'pseudo Knowledge'. A bit like Gurdjieff prattling on about going the extra mile.
All it does, along with reinforcing the so-called dichotomy of 'heart' and mind', is create anxiety in the true believer who thinks their efforts are not worthy enough.
And thanks for posting my 'deathless prose', Ocker. I was particularly pleased to see the quotes from Koestler and Nabokov again.
Michael McDonald (McDuck)
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what 'ave we 'ere then!
Hi Michael,
Yes it put me in mind of a car trip from nhq to satsang, so that must have been 1976. Derek was driving and Terry and I were in the back - we picked up Julie Collett who had been on tour with the Padster I think.
As soon as she was safely in the car, Derek, with Terry chiming in, started telling her what to say, what the 'latest' was.
I was dumbfounded and wondered how Julie was going to take it - quietly. I expect she said whatever she wanted to anyway.
But it was one of the deluge of 'drips' that troubled me when briefly involved at nhq, I was so relieved when it closed to go back to my dripfree serene zone...blush, well I was quite young..
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I also posted an interview with you by Penny at http://www.prem-rawat-bio.org/premies/mmcd_interview.html
You may enjoy making contact with your younger and presumably more gullible self. I preferred The Ghost in the Machine to the Act of Creation but then I'm not a creative type just a 24/7 hunchback.
Maybe while we have you here you could just inform us, well me actually, probably no-one else gives a damn, of what brought on your final quack. It seems from the letter of David Lovejoy's that Roupell posted here a few years back you were a premie until quite recently, or at least he thought you were.
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Geez, I did talk the talk, didn't I?
I exited in 2001, and gave my explanations on whatever forum # back then.
In summary, it came about from a conversation with Lesley and a re-examination of my time in a training session with Rawat. If you take the 'master' factor out of the equation, then his behaviour at the training was pretty inexcusable, and so much of it was a setup to elicit a particular response. If you read the training transcripts on this site, you see how formulated (and boring) it is.
Looking back at that interview, Ocker, it becomes obvious it has become one series of 'development programs' after another and nothing much has changed except the initial fervour and excitement of the 70s, when a bunch of people thought they could change the world, has disappeared. The other thing that has changed is of course that Rawat is no longer declaring he will bring world peace, or that God will manifest himself.
I hope that I'm less gullible than I was in the 70s. As to Koestler, I don't remember which book I enjoyed more. It wa so long ago, man.
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here's what I wrote in my journey -
Or McDuck, a gentle man of reason if ever there was one. He came round to see us, he must have heard that we were ‘leaving knowledge’ because he wanted us to know that whatever was happening he loved us. We talked for a short time, he understood and he never flinched, I think he was rather glad really to dump his guru so convincingly, he made it look easy.
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