Prem Rawat's (Maharaji) Blame Game

Prem Rawat (Maharaji) claims he was directed by his father to bring the Knowledge to the world. However, despite the constant positive propaganda by his followers, this has not been a great success. He has only a small fraction of the number of his followers that he inherited from his father. There was extraordinary success in gaining new followers in the West in the years 1970 to 1973 while Indian concepts were central to Rawat and his followers' preaching. Numbers rose from 1 to as many as 25,000 in North America and Europe until growth halted in 1974. Despite terrible publicity over the failure of the Millenium festival, Rawat's greed and materialism, his marriage, his family and Indian followers rejecting him, problems within Divine Light Mission itself and general social concern over the proliferation of new cults there was continued though erratic growth through the 1970's. Rawat, himself, no longer received any publicity but his followers held nightly 'satsang' meetings and these attracted enough interest that the number of people prepared to travel to see him peaked around 20,000 by the early 1980's.

Prem Rawat Made Radical Changes To His Organisations, Public Persona and Instructions To His Followers

Rawat made radical changes in 1982/83. He summarily closed the ashrams which had been his major financial source for more than a decade leaving the residents obliged to pay off any debts the ashram they were currently living in had acquired and ordered ("gave agya") that the nightly satsang meetings were to end and that his followers should no longer answer any questions about Himself or the Knowledge but to direct people to watch available videos of Rawat's speeches. He also cancelled the publication of any magazines and ordered them to destroy all their old Divine Light Mission magazines, films, audio and video tapes and photos. And he cut his hair and lost a kilo or two.

Prem Rawat Even Blames Everybody Who tried His "Knowledge" And Were Disappointed & Disillusioned

If you are one of the majority of people who tried Rawat's "Knowledge" and decided it wasn't what he claimed it to be and put it down to experience then guess what? It's your fault! This "Knowledge" which after all is just 4 simple physical methods and a lot of listening to Rawat and Co. talk, talk, talk has a magical method of sniffing you out as a phony. You weren't up to scratch! You weren't ready! You're a loser and Prem's Nit-Pickin' Knowledge isn't going to accept you as worthy. If you'll believe that then you'll even believe that Prem Rawat is secretly the Lord Of The Universe

If you don't seem to make progress with this Knowledge do not blame Guru Maharaj Ji. You have it in your power to conquer the egos and doubts in the mind.

Prem Rawat Blames His Dedicated Followers For His Controversial Teachings and Behaviour of the 1970s

These actions were later defended in videos such as Passages that presented a rewrite of the history of Rawat and his followers (the web-master's comments, rebuttals and snide asides are in italics):

(Narrator - 'Passages' video) "But he was becoming increasingly aware of the need to separate Knowledge from it's Indian cultural packaging. Too many things that were simply a part of Indian culture had been considered incorrectly by Westerners to be an integral part of what Maharaji was offering."

The only salient parts of Indian culture considered to be integral parts were those that Rawat, himself, ordered and ordained. These included agya, arti, ashram, bhajans, charanamrit, his divine dancing, darshan, holi, holy breath, his Holy Family, his Divine Incarnation, lila, his Lotus Feet, that Jesus was a Perfect Master, Krishna, that he was the current Perfect Master, pranam, that his father had been the prior Perfect Master, being the Supreme Power in Person, surrendering to him, worshipping Him, etc and he continued to openly promote them until the mid-1980's.

However these changes did not make Rawat or his Knowledge attractive to people through the 1980's and 1990's and, despite millions of dollars spent on Rawat, luxury hotels, residences and his executive jets for propagation, by the year 2000 he had fewer followers in the West than he had 20 years' earlier, numbers had probably halved despite 20 years of effort. His strategy to divert his students from thinking about this too closely seemed to be five pronged:

Blame his followers for the failure of their practise of Knowledge to inspire them with the "clarity and joy" that would make for successful propagation.
Blame all those people who reject him (the overwhelming majority) for their lack of "thirst" or being in their "mind" and not their "heart"

Prem Rawat Inspirational Speaker in Rome 1980

"this whole act has to clean up, has to come to a point where the propagation can really begin to happen. Where there can be that demonstration, where there can be that "Yes! Knowledge! Yes! Guru Maharaj Ji!" Where people can see, like I said in the satsang, you know, people are gonna look at me, then they're gonna look at you, and if they see something there, then they're gonna look at me again and say "Can I have your Knowledge?". When people look at me, then they look at you, and they don't see anything, they're gonna look not look at me either. Why should they? There is nothing there. You know. Because it reflects in every single thing we do in one sense." - 1980

Q: "When you first arrived in the West, how did people react to your message?"
A: "There was a mixed, mixed reaction that people had. Some people were definitely looking for the Eastern religion and I think you're talking about very much the 60's era who were uh very much so looking towards the East whilst for some other people it wasn't a question of East and West but it was a question of something real, something beautiful and finding that and understanding that and examining that and I think that uh it was that is what really Knowledge always has represented is that deep feeling within regardless of East and West and all the other barriers that we tend to put on." - 1989

Is Knowledge the only Path?

"Whatever you want to follow, follow. When you get it out of your system and you're clear what you really want, I'm here. OK? Knowledge isn't another medal, mm mm, Knowledge isn't an anaesthetic, Knowledge isn't Advil, Knowledge isn't any one of those things. People must come to Knowledge because they want to come to Knowledge. Just as simple as that. If there is going to be reasons, then they will not understand what Knowledge is all about. There can be no reasons." - 1994

Try to open, open the doors, open the doors, open your heart. What the Master says cannot be understood by intellect. If you try to understand what the Master says by intellect, the net result is total confusion because the message is sent to the heart, not to the intellect. When the heart receives the message, "Feel", it's very clear, it's very clear. When this receives the message, "Feel", it says "What?" The message is not for this (points at head) the message is for this (points at heart). When you take Knowledge and put it here (points at head) it does not make sense, does not make sense. Take Knowledge and put it here (points at heart) and it's so obvious, so obvious. - 1994

Rawat's teaching ("what the Master says") is easily understood by the intellect but it's not easily believable and it's certainly false, unless you accept it without due consideration. That is why he castigates 'doubt' and 'the mind' because only if you accept his simplistic teachings that the heart and the mind are separate, antagonistic entities and you should just 'feel' his speeches would you accept his claims that he is the unique source of peace in the world today. Rawat is merely the leader of another insignificant cult whose members enjoy the shared beliefs of any cult member.

When a lot of the mahatmas came to the West they brought with them immeasurable amount of concepts and it kinda went wild and there was no stopping it. The backlash of that I had to directly bear because people would ask me point blank these questions, "Are you this, are you that, you know, what is this, what is that?" Whereas, a event or a question and answer session was very informative for people because the questions were being dealt with, it slowly changed to where you were trying to lay down groundwork of what you are not or what you don't do, what you aren't you shouldn't expect will happen." - 1999

OH MY GOD! Imagine the Horror! Being asked a point-blank question! He quickly made sure that could never happen again.

Well in a way that went on for an extremely long time and this is my key of bringing the history here. That people were very open to Knowledge, that people were very open to me and I really don't think that I have ever felt that that has changed. That people are still very open and when they listen and what they hear they're just as fascinated by it as they were when I was a little boy talking about the same stuff. So that's the good news, the bad news is that the concepts have really gotten us buried in a hole to this day where we're still having to defend ourselves, which I find pathetic, having to defend ourselves and say, "No these things are not true." - 1999

What is truly pathetic is that none of the people listening to this rubbish have the insight or the courage to tell this blustering fool that in fact people are not open to or fascinated by him and his spiel.

"You know and it's a it's a curious little history because there was a time where people would introduce Knowledge to other people and it was wild, it was absolutely, incredibly wild, I spoke 48 languages, in those days, walk on water, walking on water, no problem." - 1999

He has continued to blame his existing followers saying they made false claims about him and the spread of these concepts has severely hampered his attempts to "spread this Knowledge" to this day. One of his ongoing criticisms is that his early followers claimed he could speak many languages though it was a claim that would provoke ridicule every time the young guru spokek in the West as he had a very poor command of English, the only language apart from his native Hindi that he could speak. After 30 or 40 years his English is still obviously a second language and he's still complaining that his devotees sabotaged his mission to bring peace to the world by saying he speaks 24 or 34 or 48 languages. He is such a chump he can't even remember how many languages it is that he doesn't speak. Not only couldn't he walk on water, he couldn't even swim.

"Because, as we are now, we should all get together and we we can really shake down this world. We can. As a matter of fact, we only need four people. One on the North Pole, one on the South, one on the East, and one on the West. Shake it down. And I'll tell you something; if you are able to shake it down good - all the evil in this world will completely fall apart. All there is is the misunderstanding of people. They cannot see, they cannot understand." - Prem Rawat Golden Age, Thursday, June 8, 1974