Kabir

Is Prem Rawat a Solitary Sant?

Prem Rawat and Counterculture by Ron Geaves

One of Geaves arguments is that Prem Rawat can best be defined as a 'solitary sant' who realized the ultimate truth within creation, with particular reference to the presence of the divine within the human being and therefore experiences a higher reality in daily life. He acknowledges Rawat was born into an Indian religious milieu and had his astonishing success while using that conceptual baggage but has striven to remove all unnecessary accretions to his message since at least 1971.

We can examine Rawat's actions with the accepted Sant tradition to determine whether Geaves is correct.

Prem Rawat has quoted or spoken about some famous Indians who are considered to be sants and given them his imprimatur. They are:

  • Mira Bai
  • Kabir
  • Tulsi Das
  • Ashtavakr
  • Surdas
  • Eknath
  • Ravidas
  • Brahmanand

Ron Geaves cannot deny the early 1970s Divine Light Mission bricolage of occulturage but he attempts to disassociate Prem Rawat from the mistaken views publicly proclaimed by his followers. He attempts to argue about the young Prem Rawat's ideas and beliefs always with the clear subtext that shows Rawat thinking and acting in a way that Geaves thinks a solitary sant ie "a sant is someone who has realized the ultimate truth within creation, with particular reference to the presence of the divine within the human being and therefore experiences a higher reality in daily life" would think and act. Assuming such a person has ever existed. Only Prem Rawat can know his thoughts, others can only know what he was publicly saying and doing.

Geaves uses the academics Daniel Gold, Karine Schomer and Charlotte Vaudeville as references in his argument. Vaudeville has written the highly respected "A Weaver Named Kabir: Selected Verses with a Detailed Biographical and Historical Introduction." Rawat has spoken about these intellectuals:

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. - Prem Rawat

None of these translators who include people such as the highly respected academic, Charlotte Vaudeville have a fraction of the wealth of Rawat himself. It would be interesting to hear what Kabir would say about Rawat's materialism and opulence, the money for which has all come from his followers. Kabir worked throughout his life and did not ask to be supported in luxury by those who respected him.

Sants were a diverse lot but had much in common, they were harmonious, taught salvation could be attained by doing good deeds and by means of Bhakti or sincere devotion to God. They denounced caste distinctions, supremacy of the Brahmans, and idol worship. They attached no importance to the performance of rituals and ceremonies or to pilgrimages to holy places and temples and other places of worship were not important. They denounced insincerity and hypocrisy.

Geaves Argues Prem Rawat Did Not Preach a Millenial Message

The explanation for the millennialism may lie in the myths of Christianity being closer to the surface in the American psyche than the much more secularized North Europeans.

The sants were not promoters of a futuristic utopia or an afterlife of bliss in paradise, but rather they focused on the possibility of fulfilment in the present. … To what degree Prem Rawat actually saw his goal as ushering in this 'new age' is debatable p168

Prem Rawat taught that He was Initiating an Aquarian Age of 1000 years of Peace on Earth and he openly taught this until the early 1980s. There is an overwhelming amount of official DLM source material which show that he continued some rituals such as darshan secretly until the present day. He has continued to talk about being able to inspire inner peace, but also talks about world peace through use of His Knowledge.

He also argues without evidence but his recollection that "The author does not remember being overtly millennial" and that:

The explanation for the millennialism may lie in the myths of Christianity being closer to the surface in the American psyche than the much more secularized North Europeans.

His former colleague, Mike Finch, who was told about Rawat by Geaves, author of "Without the Guru" who also wrote the definitive text In The Light of Knowledge, 1973 explaining Divine Light Mission doctrines at the time claims that Geaves and other European followers were intensely millenial. We have no direct evidence currently available as nearly all the saved publications come form the USA but as Rawat was preaching a very millenial message at the time it is hard to believe that Ron wasn't caught up as much as everyone else.

Geaves Argues Prem Rawat Removed Indian Ideas From His Teachings starting in 1971 but especially since 1974

For several years, there was a liminal period in which he experimented with organizational forms, closed down the ashrams, removed the Indian accretions and set up new channels to communicate his vision to remaining followers (Geaves, 2006b).

So soon after the original counterculture success that began at Glastonbury, Prem Rawat would begin to dismantle the cluster of beliefs and practices that made DLM an Indian movement. In addition, he would distance himself from the counterculture and its millennial hopes and the attempt to link him with countercultural syntheses of Eastern beliefs and Western esotericism.

Geaves had previously written:

Geaves had previously written that "In the period of 1977-1982, the ashrams were reopened and a more gentle approach was taken towards deconstruction."

"The period from 1977 to 1982 was marked by a re-opening of the ashrams and a series of international events in which Prem Rawat inspired personal loyalty and devotion from the already committed through a number of highly charismatic appearances in which he would dance on stage."

Dancing on stage was only one of the rituals originating in Indian religion that Rawat and his followers performed during the 1970s.

The author does not remember being overtly millennial

A closer look at developments in the early 1970s would find much of the above becoming problematic in the Western environment. We have already seen that early British and American followers persuaded Prem Rawat to attend Glastonbury to fulfil prophesies concerning the advent of the New Age and that rumours of an avatar visiting the Fayre were prevalent in the counterculture grapevine. This tendency would reach its apex two years later at the aptly named Millennium '73 Festival at the Houston Astrodome in Texas.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, new directions were to weaken counterculture identification with the guru, although the considerable following that had developed in the West during the 1970s remained alongside him as staunch supporters of his work. Their definitive worldview that included both the hope of inner transformation and outer revolution, combined with Eastern philosophy and Western esotericism, would be diffused into a watered-down New Age set of beliefs and practices, mainly confined to holistic or alternative medicine.

The need to discover other resources to counteract the psychic damage done to individuals as a result of drug use and excessive hedonism was over as premies raised families and moved into middle age. New forms of counterculture would remain focused on Glastonbury and Stonehenge as sites of sacredness throughout the 1980s but would rarely discover Prem Rawat or be aware of his impact on their predecessors.

The author does not remember being overtly millennial

Click Here To See that Prem Rawat Continued Indian Beliefs and Practices until 1983

And continued others secretly,

  • Prem Rawat Did Nor Believe He Was God
  • Prem Rawat Did Nor Believe the Things that were said about him by his followers or family
  • Prem Rawat Beganto Remove Indian concepts to his teaching in 1974
  • Prem Rawat's charisma was the source of the success of Divine Light Mission
  • a hierarchical structure (Prem Rawat and his family members followed by a renunciate order of mahatmas, celibate ashram devotees, and the wider body of non-celibate followers;

It would appear from this millennial language that any sense of Prem Rawat's 'solitary sant' origins had been lost by these counterculture students.

The counterculture youth joining DLM had no idea that the young Prem Rawat could be defined as a 'solitary sant.'

The sants were not promoters of a futuristic utopia or an afterlife of bliss in paradise, but rather they focused on the possibility of fulfilment in the present. … To what degree Prem Rawat actually saw his goal as ushering in this 'new age' is debatable

The parting of the way with counterculture

The explanation for the millennialism may lie in the myths of Christianity being closer to the surface in the American psyche than the much more secularized North Europeans. Whatever the reason, the relative failure of the Astrodome event to match expectations of attendance, leaving the mission in considerable debt, was seen by academics as one of the principal reasons for the decline of the movement. In addition, the failure to fulfil prophesies created disillusionment in some North American followers. After Millennium '73, Prem Rawat would radically transform and overhaul the vehicles used for the transmission of the message, picking up momentum during the decades following his arrival in the West in 1971, while simultaneously striving to maintain the central message that peace is possible. He would move the emphasis away from global peace to individual fulfilment arguably consolidating his empathy with the 'good news' central to sant discourse (Geaves, 2004a: 45-62). He would begin a process of rooting out the more obviously Eastern beliefs and practices that were culturally embedded in a message that had originated in India, although it should be noted that the global vision of peace was not an Indian export but rooted in

countercultural expectations. In the 1980s, he would also begin to critique the 'New Age' beliefs of his followers. Both sets of meaning constructions would be combined together as 'concepts', a term taken to include all constructions of reality that would include religions.

Prem Rawat's attempts to transform the organizational structures and to eradicate the more overtly Indian cultural and religious aspects of his

they announced that Prem Rawat had been 'corrupted' by his stay in the West and that the eldest brother was taking over as the new satguru and leader of DLM. However, the reality of the apparent decline was more to do with a period of rebuilding that was required as the young adult Prem Rawat took on the actual leadership after the departure of his mother and brothers. For several years, there was a liminal period in which he experimented with organizational forms, closed down the ashrams, removed the Indian accretions and set up new channels to communicate his vision to remaining followers (Geaves, 2006b).

So soon after the original counterculture success that began at Glastonbury, Prem Rawat would begin to dismantle the cluster of beliefs and practices that made DLM an Indian movement. In addition, he would distance himself from the counterculture and its millennial hopes and the attempt to link him with countercultural syntheses of Eastern beliefs and Western esotericism. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, new directions were to weaken counterculture identification with the guru, although the considerable following that had developed in the West during the 1970s remained alongside him as staunch supporters of his work. Their definitive worldview that included both the hope of inner transformation and outer revolution, combined with Eastern philosophy and Western esotericism, would be diffused into a watered-down New Age set of beliefs and practices, mainly confined to holistic or alternative medicine. The need to discover other resources to counteract the psychic damage done to individuals as a result of drug use and excessive hedonism was over as premies raised families and moved into middle age. New forms of counterculture would remain focused on Glastonbury and Stonehenge as sites of sacredness throughout the 1980s but would rarely discover Prem Rawat or be aware of his impact on their predecessors.

1971 to 1973 marks the peaking of the counterculture's involvement with Prem Rawat, an encounter that flourished between Glastonbury Fayre and Millennium '73. To Andrew Kerr and the small group of hippies who worked with him, Glastonbury Fayre was to be the renewal of the countercultural dream that had appeared to have gone sour through commercialization. With hindsight, it is apparent the Fayre was the beginning of the end for the mass manifestation of counterculture that marked the late 1960s. Certainly, as far as the United States was concerned, many counterculture individuals found a way of continuing the dream by transporting both their senso lato and senso stricto understandings of New Age into a NRM built around the message of a 'solitary sant'. Yet they were not to know that there was an innate contradiction in building a perfect organization around such an individual. The dream was to effectively

I began this book with the question to what degree can Prem Rawat be described as a 'New Age' guru? The degree to which counterculture individuals took with them a 'fairly rigid set of ideas about his divinity and the coming of the new age' (p. 199) and appropriated a 'solitary sant' worldview to their own in the early 1970s would suggest the answer would appear to be affirmative. Yet Downton also notes that Prem Rawat's teachings were marked by an emphasis on giving up or challenging pre-existing religious beliefs and concepts (p. 199). The history of the sant phenomena in North India shows this to be one of the trademarks of the solitary sant's role in Indian spiritual life. Downton also noted that during 1971 social forces encouraged millenarian beliefs within the counterculture. He is right to point out that after 1973 there were two sets of concepts that required challenging: those that arose from earlier countercultural socialization and those they had picked up from within the movement.

Prem Rawat's struggle as the first 'solitary sant' to move out of India would see him challenge the concepts and beliefs introduced from the East in the

Counterculture, Occulture and Easternization 175

early 1970s, spurred on by the differences that he had with his family and most of the mahatmas whose religious and cultural worldviews were reinformed by their Hindu upbringing. The two elements identified by Downton, that is countercultural norms and those picked up in DLM, would come under the guru's scrutiny, and in time, so would the Eastern construction of 'guru' come under the 'solitary sant' radar for deconstruction. It is interesting to observe that in Prem Rawat's public discourses of recent decades he has been as critical of the new popular usage of 'spiritual' as he is of conventional religion. His critique of 'spiritual' as a contemporary category of identity marks him out as critical of New Age, perceiving the bricolage of practices and beliefs as just another mindset. Downton makes an important observation that it was only after 1973, when millenarian beliefs declined, that Prem Rawat's counterculture students were 'ready for an assault on their ideology' (p. 200). If Downton is correct, he is confirming that the popular perception of Indian gurus as maintaining an autocratic control over their devotees required an overhaul. It would seem that when the gurus came to the West in the late 1960s, their teachings were just as much appropriated and made to fit into existing countercultural ideas on reality and thus undermined ideas of 'autocratic control'.

In the final analysis, I return to the theoretical considerations that inspired me in part to write the book. I hope that I have demonstrated that Easternization is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. I remain unhappy with analyses that perceive it as part of the bricolage that makes up New Age in the senso lato form, creating what Christopher Partridge names 'occulture'. In a diffused form, not very recognizable to its Hindu or Buddhist origins in the East, it can be appropriated by those drawn towards the esoteric or the occult and reordered in the image of these Western beliefs. The 1960s counterculture further diffused it, far more than those who embraced it through theosophy or other movements in the early twentieth century. Some elements of Easternization would embody cherished and time-held traditions of India or elsewhere, and these would insist upon transforming countercultural beliefs. This was no more apparent than in the teachings of Prem Rawat, who I have categorized as a 'solitary sant', even though he may not agree with the label. He does not see himself as 'Hindu' or 'Buddhist' and refuses most definitions of where he fits in the religious/ spiritual spectrum, usually denying that he belongs to either. As the 'solitary sants' defined by Gold (1987) would be equally unhappy with pigeon-holing, it is the closest fit I can find. It would appear to me that that attempt to understand Easternization in the period under investigation would require the type of approach used by naturalists to identify tigers living in their natural habitats. Bruce Kukele uses

176 Prem Rawat and Counterculture

the technique of photographing a section of the tiger's stripes and reimposes the image over that of another tiger caught by the camera in the same area. Although tiger stripes are similar, just as human fingerprints they are never identical ('Tiger stripes, 9 May 2013'). The reimposed images reveal whether the tiger is the same animal or different. I would advocate that any attempt to understand the similarities of Eastern transplants with each other or their synergy with counterculture spiritualities requires such an approach. I have tried to do this with the case study of Prem Rawat and his encounter with Glastonbury Fayre. It reveals a very complex intermingling of worldviews with various players adding to the construction and deconstruction of beliefs, ultimately leading to the destruction of DLM in the early 1970s. An Indian teacher in the West is influenced by the new environment but does not necessarily commit himself or herself to the worldview of new followers.

Prem Rawat does not associate the practice or experience of Knowledge as religion. Drawing upon Jonathan Z. Smith's (2003) model of religion as there (civic or state-sponsored), religion here (domestic or customary) and religion anywhere (pragmatic or apotropaic), it would be reasonable to agree with the decision to place Knowledge outside of religion, for it is certainly none of these, and Prem Rawat's message is either critical of the above categories or treats them as irrelevant. However, he is no longer happy with spiritual either. His encounter with the counterculture has made more dismissive of the term. Ulrike Popp-Baier prefers the term 'self-controlled religiosity' to the contemporary usage of spiritual. She defines this as where 'people select and combine elements from different belief systems, practices and organizations to meet their own specific needs and practices' (2010: 34). Premies may do this to a large degree, and in the years following Glastonbury, purists went along with their guru and disowned most of such practices. Others held that Knowledge was superior but practised a number of elements from different belief systems to meet specific needs and practices. There is no sign that Prem Rawat ever did so himself. He remained committed to the path of the 'solitary sant' who dismisses all such efforts as a non-negotiable failure to achieve the goal of fulfilment.

Each case study is different. Prem Rawat's 'stripes' are unique and do not match any other Indian guru nor provide a perfect fit to the beliefs of contemporary spiritualities, even though there may be some matches. These apparent 'fits' can confuse but should not lead us as scholars to oversimplified conclusions.

Prem Rawat's success globally matches that of Glastonbury Festival, although arguably far less known. The charitable causes reflect the humanitarian activities carried out by the festival, albeit Prem Rawat remains primarily committed to the message that he arrived with in 1971. His words that introduce his website show his commitment to the teachings that first drew his attention to the counterculture: 'What I offer people is not just talk, but a way to go inside and savor the peace that is within.' Experience, embodiment and immediacy still prevail and remain central. In this respect, there are parallels with the festival, although both have moved far from their counterculture origins. Prem Rawat's challenge remains the same as in 1971; how to convince a sceptical or disinterested public that his message is relevant to their lives? Glastonbury struggles with balancing its counterculture origins with its present-day standing as the largest commercial rock festival on earth.