Prem Rawat's First Meditation Technique: "Divine Light"

When Prem Rawat, or Maharaji ("the Ultimate Ruler") as he calls himself, or Guru Maharaj Ji as he was called first came to the West, he spruiked his Knowledge as the method to achieve God realization through his four empowered techniques of meditation. However, there was a reason his organisation was called Divine Light Mission and that was the primary importance of the Divine Light. Meditation is basically boring: silently repeating a mantra or chanting interminably, concentrating on your breathing, trying to solve an insoluble koan … boring. But Divine Light - "brighter than a thousand suns" - was touted as being spectacular, colourful, intense and exciting. This sounded like a good chance to see a divine light show and maybe if you'd been reincarnated as a particularly saintly soul and diligently applied yourself to squeezing your eyeballs you could even one day see the guru himself, the Lord of the Universe, inside that divine light, imprinted on your eyeballs permanently. Trying to display this inner reality was an obsession amongst DLM photographers who used a variety of techniques to portray the "Golden Donut."

In the first technique, or Divine Light as it was formerly known, place your hands thus: the thumb and middle finger of your dominant hand stroke across each eyeball from outer corner to inner, coming to rest with a light but firm touch on the upper inner corner of each eyeball. Your forefinger rests in the middle of your forehead, just above the eyebrow line (your 'third eye'). In the early 70's the mahatmas who gave people Knowledge on Maharaji's behalf, and who performed this technique on them, often used to press the eyeballs painfully hard. This produces vivid colors in the more exciteable and impressionable and Western premies were taught this was the Divine Light, rather than neural entopic phenomena called "phosphenes". Apparently it is common for professors in college to have their students gently press on their eyeball in the dark. When done correctly, a football shaped white patch will be seen just off center of your field of vision. This is a bundle of axons attached to your fovea becoming active.I have no idea why this should be done at all let alone commonly.

By the late 1980's Maharaji gave direction to give Knowledge the "gentle way", emphasizing that it was not the pressure on the eyeballs that counted, and the point of touching the eyeballs with the thumb and middle finger was simply to steady them to allow you to focus better. In the late 1980's he made this more explicit when he personally gave "Knowledge Reviews" to virtually every person who was still interested and taught that Knowledge was not about "Big Light" experiences as Mahatma Gurucharanand recounted on film.

Hans Rawat (Prem Rawat's father Shri Hans Ji Maharaj) extolled the effects of meditating on the Divine Light:

Someone who can live in a mountain cave meditating on the Divine Light is indeed fortunate. Birds sit fearlessly in his lap and drink his tears of joy. He really is blessed. Meanwhile, we romp around in the garden of imagination and destroy ourselves, as our life ebbs away.

In 1973 a 24-year-old informant in an interview with the Fifth Estate magazine (a 1970's "counter-culture" publication), gave details of the technique:

Divine Light: "It involves pressing on your eyes. The retinas in your eyes are sensitive to light and they're also sensitive to pressure. And when you apply pressure to the outer areas of your eyes, it causes the nerve cells in your eyes to fire and stimulate your occipital cortex (visual area of the brain.) You get the sensation that your head is flooded with light." There have been some personal published reports of "Knowledge Sessions" in which the Divine Light technique is discussed.

And the ultimate dream was that you could dissolve into that light and never return. Let's hope Rawat does, and soon.

Light was stressed even in some videos that apparently had nothing to do with meditation.

All the outrageous, incredible information published here about Prem Rawat's Divine Light or 1st technique of meditation is sourced from public statements made by the Rawats in official magazines published by their organisations.