Maharaji aka Prem Rawat: Author

Prem Rawat is too lazy and disorganised to put his teachings onto paper. During his career his teaching has always been through his mainly impromptu speeches or at least it's the same basic speech that he has regurgitated as it has gradually changed as time goes on ….

In the 1980s he made sudden, major changes to how he was presented and how he expressed his message. He even changed his name and titles or at least chose to be named and titled in a less grandiose manner. He closed his major organisation, Divine Light Mission, and started another, Élan Vital though, at best, only half of his former devotees went along for the ride. After the upheaval it took a while for his publicity machine to regain traction. While the major distribution of his speeches are through tapes, DVDs and streaming media some books have been published though they are merely heavily edited transcripts of some of his speeches with fancy formatting and photos of Rawat to break up the boredom. They are not published for the general public but for his core of long-time loyal devotees who show their devotion by buying anything of his. The books are basically self-published vanity press and while grossly over-priced they may not make a profit.

The word 'adi' means ancient in Hindi. ADI magazine was published in 10 issues beginning in 2007 and each issue was available as a pdf for $4.50. It consists of some selected speeches of Rawat's, heavily edited and formatted to make them appear interesting and important. Edited by the indefatigable Ole Grünbaum they feature the standard Rawatist team use of strong colors and large fonts to accent sections of his teachings that are presumably considered the most important and formatted as "poetry." The effort of producing meaningful texts from Rawat's ramblings could have helped turn the energetic young Danish counter-culture intellectual and writer into the aged premie Grünbaum looking decidedly the worse for wear (as seen at right). It may just have been his 40 year career trying to get Danes to accept Guru Maharaj Ji as their Lord and Saviour and Prem Rawat as their inspirational speaker that did the damage though. All those years pressing his fingers into his eyeballs and his thumbs into his ears can't have helped either.

Despite his beliefs in his own Renaissance creativity, Rawat is a very limited story-teller. Therefore he has even had to re-use some of the stories he learnt as a child as a man in his 50's. So he includes the old chestnut, the Sugar Ant and the Salt Ant among others in the TPRF publications the Ancient Wisdom Series.

To further Rawat's claims to be an author and intellectual, philanthropist, artist, top gun, songwriter, poet and internationally recognised Ambassador of Peace, the ADI magazines were cannibalised to create the first Words Of Peace Global published book, The Greatest Truth Of All, An ADI Book.