NZ Skeptics Podcast: Divine Light Mission
So what's our third cult tonight? Well, I mean, technically it was kind of a diet cult, but not in a way that would be a reasonable segue. They were quite stringent vegetarians on the surface.
But the Divine Light Mission, kind of from almost its inception or at least since its introduction into American and British culture in the 1960s, everyone always sort of had a lot of side eye to it. No one really authentically believed anything that he was teaching. But, you know, what can you do? Their leader was an eight year old boy.
OK, I wasn't expecting that. Well, yeah, of course you weren't. You didn't read the newsletter.
I know. Exactly. I'll shut up now then.
But no. Yeah. So I came across the Divine Light Mission when I was actually researching Scientology. Again, loving my life at the National Library in the Catherine Mansfield room. Sometimes it's just worth looking at the various manuscripts and portfolios that people have just donated there. And somebody just had a bunch of random pamphlets and letters. And I was looking at it, as I said, for Scientology. So this particular portfolio of stuff that someone had donated, lots of personal letters, correspondence, a lot of stuff from Scientology. And in the middle of it all was probably the, I felt really bad. It was from the 1970s. It was essentially someone's Christmas letter, you know, the kind of letters that your mom would write and tell all your family, distant friends, you know, people who don't quite make the birthday card list, all the stuff that happens happened in your family or the past year. And this poor family, they're like, yes, one child, you know, one child has joined the Scientologist, and his other child has gone and joined an ashram for the Divine Light Mission.
And I thought that's a really interesting name to be in an ashram and it's Divine Light Mission because it sounded a little bit Christian, but you know, the ashram sort of is an Indian concept. So I kind of put that away until I had time to write about it. And it was an interesting journey, not as much about New Zealand as I anticipated. But what I did find in terms of the Divine Light Missions work in New Zealand, or at least the influence it had in New Zealand, was actually pretty prominent. They had two members, one which would probably be more well known to skeptics by the by than others, than the other, even though the other is probably more famous. Jenny MacLeod, the New Zealand composer, which I guess is sort of along the lines of, you know, related to your choir work, Craig. She was a longtime member of the Divine Light Mission. She actually donated her house on Ohiro Road in Karori as a centre or as an ashram for that cult. And then the second is Billy TK Senior. He was a long time member.
Okay. The Billy TKs and their weird religious beliefs, huh?
And I guess the other fun fact in New Zealand that I found out is that their former premises on 24 St. Stephen's Street in Parnell is now occupied by the Unification Church or the Moonies.
Oh?
You know, when you think about cursed properties like Haydn, you know, in between Haydn, I think there was a weird Buddhist group that's sort of run by the Chinese government or is pro-Chinese, tried to purchase the place before the deal fell through. But anyway, so what is the Divine Light Mission? And it's really sort of hard to get and I found it hard to kind of get a good grip on what the Divine Light Mission was because, you know, either what's out there is super, super negative or, you know, just essentially bland and uncritical. And there's a reason for that.
Very early on, sort of in the early 2000s, one of the major administrators at Wikipedia was a Divine Light Mission member. So he would sort of, yeah, yeah, so…
A bit of a conflict of interest?
Yeah. I think his name was Jossie Fresco. And he also had a couple of sub-administrators under him who were also Divine Light Mission members. So at the time, and this is like what, 2009, 2008. So we're, you know, early 2000s now. You know, you'd never see the word cult or any sort of accusations grace the Wikipedia page for Divine Light Mission. And now that's kind of changed a little bit. But the Divine Light Mission did not necessarily start with this eight-year-old kid. He comes from sort of the Brahmin caste. So they're kind of like the high caste, the very wealthy caste. And it was started by his father who had sort of a spiritual belief system, Sant Mat. I mentioned Sant Mat when it came to Colin Amory, I guess now a couple of months ago. This man, Hans Ji Maharaj, he kind of started building this gathering in India because he was kind of preaching sort of a, let's abolish the caste. And he was also teaching meditation techniques. And he's just getting very popular, started getting a following, getting lots of money, you know, that allowed him to buy a car, get a nice property. He had a wife, but his first wife could only have a daughter. So he ended up being allowed, you know, and this is before plural marriage was made illegal in India. So he was able to get a second wife. And his second wife, who became known as Mata Ji within the Divine Light Mission, she went on to give him the four sons that he wanted. It was the youngest son, Prem, who sort of, the story goes, he was a bit of a precocious speaker.
He was doing public speaking very early, like maybe even age two, four years old, and not just public speaking, but he was preaching in a sense. And then his father died quite suddenly in 1966, when Prem was just, you know, eight years old. And it's not quite clear what the story is in terms of whether his father actually chose his youngest son is to be successor, or whether he actually chosen his older son. The messages are mixed because of the schism that I'll talk about in a few minutes. But anyways, somehow, his mother was potentially considered to be the next leader, his older brother was being considered the next leader. And before either of those two could actually sort of nominate themselves, the story goes that Prem just started speaking to the assembled and everyone kind of agreed that he would be, you know, he was going to be the guru of the group, or what they call the Satguru, or the Perfect Master. And so that's how it was, he kind of has a coming out celebration, when he was 12, a very famous speech knows the peace bomb speech. And that was seen by some Americans who were, you know, visiting India. And but due to his age, due to Prem's age, you know, again, being eight, 12 years old, being pretty much a child, running the Divine Light mission, and the financial, you know, advantages and enjoying that was largely shared by all the family members. And he also had, you know, a lot of senior teachers, like are called Mahatmas, who would travel around the world, and how they would recruit Westerners, like particularly the British and the Americans is that they would have yoga classes. And over a period of month, they would sort of say, you know, you're going to learn this Knowledge soon. And it's going to change your world, going to change your life. And then finally, you know, once they knew that they had, you know, these people locked in ready to go, they would teach them the Knowledge. And what the Knowledge is, is just these four really weird meditation techniques that I kind of described in my article. And also, I added a video called Lord of the Universe.
And there's a person, an ex-Premei, an ex-member from the 1960s, who describes how it goes. And basically, it's like putting your hands in your ear and putting pressure on your head. And you're just listening to the sound that your body makes, or your head makes, when it's complete silence. Or, you know, you're like putting your fingers on your eyes, and you're just paying attention to that, you know, that pressure and that light that comes about when you put the pressure on your eyes. Now, that's all fine and good. Some people sort of thought that was pretty weird. But they did lose a kind of quite a few of the early hippies, and they gained quite a few skeptics when it was revealed that, oh, yeah, because you now have this Knowledge, you need to give your life, and, you know, start devoting your life to this child. And some people thought that was really, really wild and silly. But of course, you know, this isn't, you know, this is a cult for a reason. And they were able to successfully recruit, you know, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. I think in the 70s, at the height of their fame, they're saying they had like a few million members. I guess if you've got a kid who is, can talk the talk, who, you know, has got the patter and looks like any adult preacher, I can imagine for some people, that could look like divinely inspired.
Like, how has somebody so young got the temperament of someone who's a grown up? How are they so wise? You know, it couldn't possibly have happened naturally. It must be some kind of spiritual thing. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also like, we have seen this in America.
There is a, there was an American, a child preacher named Marjo Gortner. There's a really interesting documentary that's out about him. And, you know, sort of, he was big, and then he sort of fell away from it.
And then he tried to get back into it in his 20s, or like, as a young adult in the 1970s. Definitely worth watching the documentary, because yes, getting back into it cynically as like a stoner, but still trying to use his abilities as an ex-child preacher in order to con people. Yeah, definitely an interesting documentary.
But this is the other side, like, you know, we talk about the 60s and 70s. And on one hand, it's all this, yes, very Eastern religion. But on the other hand, it is the Jesus Freaks, is this, you know, Christian youth culture that is building up.
So both Marjo and Prem are kind of very similar in this way. You know, coming from, you know, kind of taking different angles and coming from different backgrounds, but, you know, having the same effect. My thing with this whole Prem story is that, you know, who is actually pulling the strings? And, and certainly some sources, you know, most sources say it's the family.
But I think once you start getting more and more Americans and Westerners who are into Divine Light Mission, I sort of feel in the background that there was sort of a bit of a power struggle, because it's the Westerners who bring in all the money. So if you are very successful, and you're sort of busy in the West, and you're organizing, you know, the American or the British branches, you start getting pretty territorial, and you want some recognition for the money, you want, you know, power commensurate to the people that you're bringing in for that, you know, the benefit that you're bringing to your organization. Interestingly enough, however, you know, because I also kind of think that there's, you know, when you have an eight year old kid, who is the figurehead of this organization, you think you can control him.
And sometimes, you know, people, you know, some organizations are really good at controlling their children. But again, there seems to be the struggle that once his kids started hitting, like 1415, he wanted to start going to the West, and his mother did not like that. But yet, you know, he is the leader.
So who's going to stop him from going to the West and talking and giving his talks and meet our meeting his followers, and he does. And he starts liking the Western life. Because he's also a out of from under his thumb of his mother.
And he's able to, you know, watch movies, he got really into mafia movies, like the Godfather, he's able to eat meat, he's able to do all this stuff without anyone watching him. And he has all these lackeys who are also covering his tracks and keeping his, you know, his meat away from his vegetarian followers, and all the fun. So he's getting a taste of this decadent life that, you know, the Westerners are happy in a kind of like, you know, his Western, you know, inner circle are kind of happy to give him in many ways, even though his Indian family, they're trying to hold on to the influence that they have.
It all kind of comes to the head in about 1973, 1974. 1973, they try to have this big millennial celebration event called Millennium 73. And it's just sort of like a three day festival.
It was all intended that they were going to fill out this the Houston Astrodome. Things got kind of wild, people had all these different predictions, like aliens are going to come visit. But Prem was promising that, you know, they were going to bring about world peace.
Because of this event. On one hand, it's a financial bomb. Like they had to, they were like, a few years before they were able to pay off all their debts.
They did not fill the Houston Astrodome. They maybe only filled a third of it. But other people say that it was like the significant youth culture event of the decade.
But because of the significant debt that was brought on that, you know, that was incurred from this event, this started developing again, more of a schism. I think the sort of shingles, or the shades or whatever it's called, fell from Prem's eyes about, you know, his family's management. I think more of the American and the British senior staff kind of want to do away with all the sort of Indian ritual and devotional excess that came with having all the family members also being called part of the divine family.
Because that was the other thing. You have Prem, who's the leader, who's going to be the lord of the universe, the child god. But each of his members, each member of his family was also considered divine.
So they are also required lots of devotion, lots of money and lots of gifts. There's controversy with that they had to sell lots of prop, they had to sell some of the property, had to sell like, you know, they had rented a computer in 1973. And they had to sell that.
Wow, that that's pretty early to be having a computer. Well, one of the things that they would do is that they would actually get really great demographic data from all their followers who came in, you know, they would know who had what sort of jobs and how they could utilize them. And to particular, you know, do they want to, are they really good at, you know, building ashrams? Are they really good at making money? Who's well, who's your wealthier members and who's your poorer members, you know? So what happens in 1974, that really sort of breaks up the family is that he starts dating his, you know, or he actually gets married at the age of 16 to his much older girlfriend, Marilyn, you know, she's in her 20s.
And his mother just says, you know what? Nope, you are no longer the divine, you're no longer the perfect master. You're not the divine Lord anymore. You are pretty much a very naughty boy.
You know, as I say, it's very much like it's very much that scene in life of Brian. But yeah, she kind of said, you know, nope, this guy, he isn't, you know, my own son is not the perfect master anymore. They end up actually going to court and figure out which, how, who gets what, who, how are they going to cut up this whole cult? And it seems that his family in India, they got to keep the Indian ashram.
So all of these Indian Mahatmas or instructors came back to India, whereas Prem got the far wealthier American and British branches. And what happens throughout the, maybe the 70s and 80s is that Prem really tries to find his own feet because now he no longer has his mother and all these other, his brother is sort of keeping him in line. You know, he kind of waffles a little bit on whether he's going to do the Indian devotional stuff.
You know, on one hand, he sort of start, you know, he's like, yep, we're going to start wearing these 70s business suits. And then he starts going back wearing the traditional ceremonial garb. He shuts down all the ashrams at one point because they weren't making any money.
And then he considers opening back up again, because, you know, for the very religious and spiritual members who want to do that before finally shutting them down in the 80s, I think eventually what happens is, what does happen is that by the late 80s, he shuts down the divine light mission entirely. So, you know, he shuts down all the ashrams. He tells all of his members, people have been following him since the 1960s, destroy everything, destroy all my books, destroy anything that has mentions divine light mission, destroy all the materials you have, burn them.
And we see something very simple, something semi-similar with Scientology in New Zealand, when they were about to go into their court case back in the 60s. I think Lady Hort had burned, you know, or at least made a show for journalists of burning lots of Scientology files. Yeah.
And I guess also with Scientology, there was a point where they told everybody to get rid of all their books because there were new versions, new translations from L. Ron Hubbard's handwriting, the golden age of tech, you have to buy it all again. Yeah, but this is not quite the case that, you know, he's not, what Prem isn't doing is telling people to buy new things. Yeah.
He's just telling the kind of, it's kind of like an Adidam Samaraj situation, whereas Adidam kept on getting new freaking names and renaming his group. I guess, yes, Prem was renaming his group, but he wasn't re sort of changing necessarily, he was changing how this group operated and how much, who had the power. He was more, he was increasingly centralizing his organization.
So each time he sort of changed the group or shut down an operation, he was getting rid of more and more of the, you know, the outer circle so that he could centralize and funnel more money to him. So what he does in the eighties is that he starts, he reframes his whole meditation, he gets rid of the yoga, gets rid of the meditation, not quite gets rid of meditation. He rebrands the meditation as knowledge sessions.
And pretty much there's a, he reduces the number of people who could teach the meditation or the knowledge on his behalf. And what he does, he just travels around the world, hosting conferences and people come and see him. And that's where the money's coming from.
No longer, you know, people paying instructors to do little tiny yoga classes. It's all coming to him directly through his conferences. He does change the name of the organization from Divine Light Mission to this thing called Elam Vital.
And then in the nine, like early two, and that goes on through the nineties and then it becomes Words of Peace. So he's kind of rebranded himself as a peace ambassador still. But even then he's kind of cutting down now on who can do any teaching on his behalf.
It's fewer and fewer people. But he bought some property in Australia so he can start having a couple of centralized places that he has access to for speaking engagements. One of them is going to be happening in September, which I believe is in Queensland, at the Ivory Rock.
So that's what he does now. And he's spoken in parliament, again, as a peace ambassador. So he's still around, he's still getting money.
He still has a lot of old followers from the Divine Light, from the, you know, the Divine Light Mission days. But he's just, again, as I keep on saying, centralizing and downsizing some of his operations. But, you know, when you're looking at cults like this, and I'll just sort of sum up quite quickly, as parents grow old, parents who joined the mission grow old and maybe pass on, the children who grew up in the mission sort of come out of the little bit more about what happened to them.
And of course, we are getting a couple of stories that are coming out now about potential incidents of sexual assault and sexual abuse in the centers, or in the ashram, you know, well, you couldn't have children in the ashram, but you could have children in this in the prim centers, which was for followers of the Divine Light Mission who weren't taking vows of celibacy or already had children or had normal jobs. So yeah, we're getting more and more of those stories. And there's going to be a book that's going to be coming out from a child of an ex member that should be published in about September, which will be an interesting read.
It'll be interesting to see what she says about growing up in a really chaotic household in that cult. Interesting.
The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things: A Year of Salvage
Like the School of Economic Science, children and teens who grew up in the DLM are starting to share their own experiences now that they are grown up. Author Suzanne Joinson's book, The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things: A Year of Salvage, now available for pre-sale, will explore her working-class childhood while her parents were members of the DLM in the 1980s.
However, and quite sadly, it shouldn't surprise you that some children and teens who grew up in the DLM report being victims of sexual abuse. For quite a while, the most public accusations were against longtime associate Jagdeo, who used to run activities for children. However, as recently as January 2024, Prem has come under fire, as his youngest son Hans accused both parents. Currently, there is no evidence online that this is being pursued legally, and the accusation has only been documented by online, second-hand sources. This is not to discredit Hans Rawat, but to signify the difficulty in even verifying that the accusation has been made by the actual Hans Rawat.
Final thoughts…
While the DLM and Elan Vital are no longer an issue, Prem Rawat is still given the occasional platform in New Zealand. Embarrassingly, that attention has been given by individuals who maybe should have done their research before presenting him in the beehive as any sort of authority on peace. There has always been disdain thrown at Prem and the DLM by adults who made the mistake of choosing to follow the Lord of the Universe, but little is said publicly about the generation that grew up in the Premie centres and satsangs. Maybe they are easy to hide when celibacy was so strongly touted as fundamental to elevated spiritual practice.
And maybe Joinson's book will instigate a revival of criticism and investigation into the DLM, and all the schemes that came after it.