Premies and the Counter Culture
One of the great ironies of Prem Rawat's career is that his influence converted 10s of thousands of counter-culture youth, hangers-on and wannabes into a spiritually oriented regimented way-of-life (from a few weeks to 50 years) while he used his position to free himself of all family and social restraints so he could, to a large extent, do whatever he wanted and, as Michael Dettmers reported,"I don't recall Maharaji ever really caring, in a consistent way, about the welfare of anybody but himself, Marolyn and his children."
Counter-Culture Values:
- Consciousness expansion through the use of marijuana, LSD, and other drugs
- emotional openess, freedom and variety, liberation, peace, music, communitarianism, sexual liberation, live and let live, tolerance, magic, universalistic
Prem Rawat
- Discipline, regimentation, only one way, exclusivist
- Exclusivist: Prem Rawat's Knowledge is the only way, all others are worthless
- Prem Rawat is the only true Guru, all other gurus are weeds compared to Prem as a tree
- Prem Rawat was a chiseller and had a forked tongue, he would reverse his teachings at will.
There's little doubt that during the brief life of the 1960s-70s Counter or Alternative Culture there was a move in the zeitgeist from public revolutionary rhetoric to personal spiritual paths. This is commnly accepted whether you think the counter-culture was "self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic," or the portal to a New Age.
Rennie Davis attempted to portray this move as the best and the brightest of the "peace movement" becoming members of Divine Light Mission to achieve the goals of the '60s through Prem Rawat's meditation and His Divine powers. Stephen Kent's research published in "From Slogans to Mantras" was able to name only a handful of premies who had any claim to activism other than attending the 1971 May Day Peace March. Gail Winder and Carol Horowitz investigating for the realist in 1973 found very few premies who had actually had had much contact with political movements. They wrote that premies were the disillusioned, frustrated, bored, heavily into drugs and dabblers into other mystical religions and importantly:
"large numbers of premies have dropped out of the organization, and that D.L.M.'s premie census figures are inflated and exaggerated, since drop-outs are included." - What's Behind the 15-Year-Old Guru Maharaj Ji? The realist, December 1973
Unlike the realist, most publications printed DLM claims without actually checking how inflated their numbers were.