Does getting dressed up as Father Christmas mean you are telling people you really are Father Christmas?

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But surely Maharaji hasn't taught that he's the incarnation of God since the 1970s?

Yep. Sampuranand declared M to be Lord Krishna (the supreme God of Hinduism) onstage before 80,000 people in Delhi, in the late 1990s. M got up onstage straight after, to support the statement. The Indians loved it of course, though many of us Westerners were a little startled. What about the PR trainings we've had, where we're taught to tell media people that M has never claimed to be God? Maybe it doesn't apply if his statement is not made on American soil??

http://www.ex-premie.org/pages/macgregor1.htm

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Because of this perpetual, subtly worded flip-flop between divinity and humanness - a little tilt toward perfection, then back toward fallibility - M's game in the quarter-century since his world salvation epoch has been a perilous one. On the one hand he could no longer afford to offend the western world by baldly claiming godhood. On the other, the premies whose emotional dependence on him was established in the early 1970s - who were not only his devotees but, for the most part, his financial underwriters - wanted him to be divine. That was a real bind. To alienate the old flock, or repel a new one?

(The bind was neatly summed up by a T-shirt which appeared - and quickly disappeared - at Amaroo '97. It read: 'Salutations at the Lotus Feet of the Principal Speaker'.)

As a result of the unresolved confusion, there have been (and still are) corporatisations, internationalisations, professionalisations - workshops, trainings and the teaching of PR mantras. ('Maharaji receives no compensation from Elan Vital.' 'Maharaji has never claimed to be God.'...) Yet the Krishna costume was still dusted off from time to time; darshan lines were secretly revived; pranams are done in Residences and other quiet spots; and (this is one we hardly ever talk about) to this day hundreds, sometimes thousands, of premies go down a wormhole, twice a year, to 1973. Under the aegis of (yes) Divine United Organisation, they gather with tens of thousands of other premies, spend entire days saying jai satchitanand, spend entire evenings shouting bhole shris, queue for hours to kiss Guru Maharaj Ji's feet, hurl themselves face-down into the dust whenever his shadow threatens to appear from behind a tent-flap, sing arti behind a delirious throng of mahatmas, and listen to Prem Pal Singh Rawat openly feted - as in times of old - as the Lord of the Universe, the embodiment of Krishna, and the saviour of the world. (And all this infantilism is effected quite simply: they just go to Delhi.)

http://www.ex-premie.org/pages/journs/macgregor.htm

POV, here are the words of Arti to jog your memory:

http://www.ex-premie.org/papers/iarti.htm

And when I called you a madman earlier I was just joking, but now I'm not so sure.  Get help man!