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There is little doubt that Rawat's lack of high school or university education made him noticeably ignorant as a teenage guru and as the years went on his further education seemed to consist of Three Stooges movies. At any rate excessive alcohol consumption did not make him amenable to concentrated study and his ignorance remained. I have thought that he would be unique in this amongst other of the successful gurus/ NRM leaders of our day but last week I stumbled over this DVD (see photo) at my local library.
Elron is a far more successful guru than Rawat, although he is now dead. A good comparison of their relative success and financial clout would be by comparing their respective movie stars. LRon's followers include such fabulously wealthy "stars" as Cruise and Travolta and Mrajee has/had Michael Nouri. Nouri is probably a nice guy and pretty successful but you get the picture.
To my surprise, Elron, in a pretty tame interview by a Rhodesian TV guy (not exactly a major media personality), comes across pretty well as ignorant as Mrajee. I won't say that Mrajee has copied his ignorance from Hubbard's though EV seemed to have learnt a lot from Scientology's tactics towards its critics. And they both have little personal quirks, Mrajee's long, long pauses in his speeches and Hubbard's really, really weird smiles at the end of his pronouncements.
Sometimes you wonder who might have copied whom but maybe these groups might just appear similar due to convergent evolution. The DVD ended with a full screen message about Scientology: "It Works!"
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