The Miami Herald * 13 Mar 1979 * Page 21
Divine Light
The Premies see it but it may be invisible to non-believers
By STEPHEN DOIG
HERALD STAFF WRITER
Denver - The Divine Light Mission, the Guru Maharaji's 15,000-member admiration society, is moving most of its staff to Miami.
Miami may are even notice.
Even here, where the mission has its international headquarters since the moon-faced, young Perfect mMaster arrived in America in 1971, it is the invisible cult.
The Guru's followers - they call themselves "premies" - don't shave their heads.
They don't wear saffron robes
They don't solicit contributions in airport terminals.
They don't claim marijuana as a sacrament.
They don't proselytize door-to-door.
They merely worship Ji whom they know as no less than "the Lord," with complete and utter adoration.
Spokesman Joe Anctil said Divine Light is moving its communications and festival staff to Miami because of its superior airline connexions and because it is a good place for many of the 10 to 12 annual holis, mass gatherings of the faithful who prostrate themselves at 21- year-old Ji's feet.
A holi is set for Miami Beach Convention Center early next month.
When Ji is in town, he'll stay in a rented mansion on Palm Island, off Miami Beach, but he won't move here permanently from his $600,000, 13-acre estate in Malibu, California, Anctil said.
Many of the Denver Premies however are expected to gravitate to the new Mecca in sunny magicstone city.
"By his grace," if he calls I will go," softly promised a premie named Susan, her infant son in her arms.
"You'll be inundated with them," promised Bob Mishler a former Divine Light top official.
The premies unbounded conviction about Ji's divinity is the dark side of the Divine Light, say Mishler and a growing number of former followers.
"My values have always centered on people," said Mishler, 34, an ascetic social psychology student and yoga instructor who had been with Ji from the beginning. That's why I became involved, and ultimately that's why I got out."
Mishler is no mere fallen premie.
For six years, he was the president of Divine Light Mission Inc. And Ji's personal secretary.
Mishler left the cult early in 1977 after losing a struggle to get the high-living guru to tone down his conspicuous consumption of Divine Light Mission's dwindling cash.
Mishler kept his concerns about Ji to himself until the horrors of the People's Temple mass suicide-murders in Guyana shocked the world.
I saw disturbing similarities between the two groups," said Mishler, who lives in a modest Denver duplex. "I also saw similarities between the behavior of (People's Temple leader) Jim Jones and my first-hand experience with the behavior of the guru."
As individuals, premies are the mildest of people, quiet and industrious, Mishler says.
His concern is with the Ji's change over the years from spiritual leader to God on Earth.
Anctil refuses to respond to Mishler and his charges.
"There is no way I am going to discuss this," Anctil said. "If I knew you were going to ask about this, I wouldn't have returned your call."
Mishler catalogued instances of what he called Ji's "contempuous lack of concern for his followers."
He described occasions when the Perfect Master, who packed a rotund 160 pounds on his 5-foot 4-inch frame, would punch aides in the face, or pour motor oil over their heads, or knee one in the groin.
Once, Ji ordered two members of his personal staff to strip and poke each other's penises with sticks while he watched, Mishler said.
Mishler says Ji, who preaches a lifestyle of abstention and vegetariansism, drank large amounts of $30-a-bottle cognac, smoked Marlboros, ate meat and indulged his fascination for expensive cars his devotees would press on him - including a $29,000 Maserati, a $25,000 Rolls-Royce and a $22,800 Jensen.
Ji's days are spent in "total isolation" from the world and his followers, Mishler said.
Ji plays popular music on his top-of-the-line stereo system, said his former ide.
He watches television incessantly. One of his favorite shows was "Streets of San Francisco," which aides were instructed to videotape for later viewing if Ji happened to be travelling.
Ji once built a Heathkit color television set, as aides stood by to hand him a soldering iron and light his cigarets, Mishler said.
All this was financed by the gleanings the Divine Light Mission could gather from the faithful and by direct gifts.
The Mission had an "Active Membership Plan" which included a coupon book for sending in the regular tithes. Premies given subsistence in communal ashrams would turn over thir paychecks and welfare collections, Mishler said.
There were also plans for a "Divine City," still unrealized, where premies could live insulated from the world. After a pilot project near San Antonio was abandoned several years ago, Divine Light considered several other sites, including tracts in Central Florida.
"It bothered me that they were becoming more and more dependent on the lifestyle," Mishler said. "They were becoming serfs for their Lord, psychologically and economically enslaved."
In September 1976, Ji's cash requirements became so substantial a drain on Divine Light's attempts to recruit new members that Mishler prepared a 14-page plan to reorganize Divine Light's financial responsibility to the Perfect Master.
Part of the impetus was the close watch federal and state tax authorities kept on the cult's non-profit tax-exempt status.
[His} source of support from Divine Light Mission is not legally defensible," noted the internal report. "It creates a necessity for the Mission to conceal the use of its revenues, thereby generating mistrust and a lack of credibility with the premies and public at large."
An attached financial outline revealed Ji's support over the first 6 months of the year was $354,000 of which 74% came from Divine Light, the remainder from direct gifts to the guru from premies.
Mishler recommended selling the guru's Malibu residence and some of the cars, having Ji move to a home in Denver and reducing Ji's $200,000-a-year cash salary to $80,000.
Mishler, even then concerned about Ji's willingness to believe in his divinity, asked Ji to unequivocally deny to his followers that he was anything more than a spiritual leader.
."He asked me 'What will happen to me if people don't believe I am the Lord?' " said Mishler. "When I told him it might slow down the cash flow, he said, "That's too risky."
Mishler left Divine Light soon after.
Today, Divine Light suffers from declining membership, its economic strength is also weakening.
In its heyday, the cult numbered more than 50,000 premies around the world. Today, there are 15,000, Anctil says.
The guru still has a personal residence in Denver, an $80,000 ranch style home on a corner in an exclusive neightborhood which Anctil says will soon be sold.
"Really, you couldn't ask for nicer neighbors," said a nearby resident who asked not to be identified. "Those kids are always out there mowing the lawn and pruning the trees. They're quiet and polite."
Mysteries Boggle Minds
BY Stephen Doig
Herald Staff Writer
Initiates in the mysteries of the Guru Maharaj Ji are shown a four-fold path to inner truth, according to those familar with the rituals.
The cornerstone is the Knowledge.
Knowledge is acheived through four meditation experiences taught by the mahatamas, or initiators, after hours of indoctrination.
The experiences are:
- The Divine Light: Created by slight pressure from the fingers on the closed eyelids, triggering the retina to send nerve impulses to the brain.
- The Divine harmony: A roaring sound heard by the stopping up of the ears with the thumbs.
- The Divine Nectar: The taste of the thin coating of mucus on the uvula as the devotee twists his tongue to the back of the uvula.
- The Holy Name: The body's own internal vibration, heard between inhalation and exhalation while meditating.
These are based on long-established yoga principles," explains Bob Mishler, a yoga instructor and former persident of Divine Light Mission, "The nectar is the most difficult to cheive, but anyone can learn to meditate without the religious aspects."
Once given Knowledge, the "premie" - from the Hindu word prem, meaing love - expected to adhere to the other three facets of the cult.
They are:
- Satsang: The "company of truth," a nightly gathering of premies to discuss what the guru has done for their lives that day.
"Everything that is good is caused by His Grace, and everything that is bad is caused by the premie's own unworthiness," Mishler said. - Service: Giving time to Divine Light Mission or its enterprises, or giving cash directly to Maharaj Ji.
- Darshang: The guru's physical presence.
The presence of the guru is a time for premies to prostate themselves on their stomachs before the Perfect Master and kiss his feet. The occasions are the holis, or festivals, held 10 to 12 times a year around the country or overseas. One is to be held next month in Miami Beach.
The premies are expected to leave their jobs and travel at their own expense to be at each festivl. And Darshang is considered an opportune time for laying gifts of cash and valuables at the feet of the guru.
"Being gifts, they are tax-free," Mishler said.
"The mind-control techniques that are used are very persuasive," said Mishler. "It is psychologically addictive."
The Divine Light Mission uses "programming" techniques similar as those used by such as the Hare Krishnas and Moonies, said Mishlker, who adds that it shouldn't be surprising that Ji uses these methods.
He was programmed himself for his role since he wwas eight years old," says Mishler.
Ji is the son of a respected Indian guru, now dead, who passed on the mantle to his adolescent son under the tutelage of his widow, Mata Ji, the Holy Mother.
Ji arrived in America, with the Holy Family in entourage, when he was 13 years old. In 1975, after he had developed a taste for Wesern luxury, however, his mother denounced him as a "playboy." One of her concerns was his marriage at age 16 to a 24-year-old former stewardess from San Diego.
Ji's conspicuous consumption, ideological incosistencies and outbursts of intemperate behavior do not shake the belief of faithful premies.
It is lila, which translates as 'games of the Lord.' " Mishler explains. "The Perfect master, the mahatmas say, does these things to boggle the mind, and being divinely unexplainable, to create acceptance.
"There is no limit to premies' capacity to rationalize everything he does," Mishler said.