Prem Rawat and Intellectuals
Prem Rawat despises intellectuals or at least he pretends to but he believes he is the greatest intellectual. It's not as if he even knows who any of the respected, public intellectuals are. Whoops!. That's the problem of courrse- respected intellectuals get to be on TV and give "satsang" and they're respected. I mean this is a guy who had trouble doing his pre-teenage homework and spent his childhood terrified that his parents would find out and trying to scam his teachers by paying others to do his homework.
When a teenager, Prem Rawat, the Guru Maharaj Ji and Greatest Incarnation and the greatest intellectual of all time defined intellectuals for his followers:
there are these people who are called intellectual people. Mr Know-em-alls, you know. What they think is right, is correct, is true and they don't care about the other person at all. Even if the other person is saying exactly the same thing they are saying, still they are right, the other person is wrong.
Rawat is as ignorant as he is arrogant and he is oblivious to the obvious truths about himself, just oblivious. Here he is ranting about watching an intellectual on TV. He must have been trying to find the cartoon channel as he often quoted Elmer Fudd in his sermons. But the words could hardly be more perfectly appropriate about himself:
And every time that happens I tell Marolyn, "Listen! Look at this. You know what's even more fascinating than that? People are eating this! All of it. People sit there in front of their TVs, and whatever this guy says, they're not even going to question it." Personally, it really gets me. This guy doesn't even know who he is. There is no difference between that person and the person who is walking in his sleep. Because the person in his sleep doesn't know what's happening to him. You look at this person and he thinks he knows everything. And yet, he doesn't know who he is. His association with himself is fake, is a fantasy! Don't people understand that?
Admittedly only premies actually listen to Rawat and accept his waffle. At the most holy & significant event in human history, Prem Rawat ranted:
I challenge all the intellectuals of this world, I challenge all the scientists of this world to see if they can comprehend with their finite brains what this Knowledge is, to see if they can understand what I am talking about. I just challenge them to, because they just can't.
He further claimed that intellectuals cannot understand him and that no-one is intelligent enough to understand him:
You cannot understand Guru Maharaj Ji by your intellect. You don't have the capacity in your brain. You're not intellectual enough to understand Guru Maharaj Ji. Your heart is not big enough, your brain, your understanding, your memory, are not big enough to even comprehend the experience of Knowledge. Your reasoning is so retarded that you cannot understand whatever is going on. - Maharaji 1979
The Creator has left nothing incomplete for animals or birds or for men. One thing he has left to human being and that is that you can know. But where has human being utilized this privilege or potentiality of knowing things? What have human beings learned? Just see, in all spheres of life whatever man has done has caused his downfall. Wars. I am flabbergasted. Oh, there is a war at this time! I think most probably two months ago everything was going fine. Everything splendid. The Berlin wall there was also demolished. And it went on this way only for two or three months at the most. After that a dead stop. Could all these intellectuals, learned ones and other people manage everything smoothly without warfare only for three months? - Prem Rawat 1991
Like many religious poseurs he name drops Einstein. He gave Einstein some faint praise, "He wasn't out by too much." But compared to Himself, Einstein was "only touching the smallest realm of this world."
Rawat fears knowledgeable people who can challenge his assertions, debate his concepts and highlight and explain his mistakes and failures which is why he always refuses any
debate or discussion. In 1987 he called for a government planned culling of intellectuals but only Indian intellectuals.
Rawat claims those intellectual academic translators of Kabir make terrible translations. These translators may be richer than Kabir but they're a lot poorer than Prem Rawat whose money has all come from his followers. No doubt, Rawat is just the type of phony rich guru that Kabir condemned.
I mean there are people … Kabir died a very poor man, much poorer than those people who take his works and translate them. Ha ha ha, terrible translations cause they don't know what he is talking about."
Now what to say about these philosophers, they are abundantly available. The government has launched their intensive family planning programme in India. I think they ought to do a similar planning with regard to these philosophers and so called intellectuals on a world-wide basis, as they have now become too many. I don't know how it can be done but there number has really swelled a great deal.
He taught that his one year old son was more harmonious that all the intellectuals in the world put together:
To me, Hansia is more harmonious, has more harmony than all of these intellectual people do in this whole world.
The problem with intellectuals was simple, they are intellectual in the wrong way:
because that child is at a place where his mind is not freaking out and that grown-up, so-called intellectual, so-called intelligent … It's like, this is the problem with the world, you see. They're intelligent and they're intellectual and of course they are. But the thing is, they are intellectual in the wrong way. They should be intelligent in that Knowledge which is the most perfect one which doesn't have a beginning and doesn't have a end.
From top to bottom, left to right:
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Alvin Toffler, Betty Friedan,
Antonio Damasio, Henry Kissinger, John K. Gallbraith, Toni Morrison,
Daniel Bell, Roger Penrose, Kurt Vonnegut, William F. Buckley
I am pretty sure that Rawat has not even heard of any of these famous public intellectuals or if he has heard of them knows nothing of their lives and writing.