Maharaji's Corporate Trainings - the Trainers

In the 1980s a group of close disciples of Maharaji's found themselves without support, without home and with no adult work experience they could fully disclose to prospective employers. For 10 to 15 or more years they had devoted themselves to Guru Maharaj Ji, the Lord of the Universe, living in the Divine Light Mission ashrams, travelling around from city to city giving satsang,and supposedly meditating a lot. Their main activity was making off-the-cuff, sincere speeches about the glories of Guru Maharaj Ji, specious speeches full of self-obsession, wishful thinking, absolute nonsense and completely devoid of factual data. Their training had prepared them well for work as counsellors, natural therapists, spiritual healers, wellness teachers, gurus and Corporate Trainers - work where bullshit and the appearance of sincerity and expertise rule … the appearance.

By the late 1990s Corporate Bullshit Arists were taking over the world with shitloads of impenetrable buzz-speak and Rawat thought he'd use it on his most loyal and dedicated true believers. Prem Rawat still had four dwarves Bonny, Ditzy, Gally, and Pissy sniffing around his feet. For whatever reason Rawat decided to utilise this "expertise" and try to whip his unsatisfactory followers into shape in "team-building" exercises that were known as "the Trainings" amongst the participants. These appeared to have no long-term effect on his organisations success in recruitment though at $1,000 per head it was probably financially successful. Maybe Maharaji was going to try for one more push to recruit reams of new students who really would use his four techniques to make him the respected, world-famous Master he was sure he deserved to be. He was more likely to succed with an Amazonian Ayahuasca shaman.

Assuming Maharaji was sincere about these trainings, he suffered a significant failure of logic - certainly not the first in his career. The people he was using to design and implement these sessions were also long-term devotees - the very people whom he thought required a significant improvement in attitude, understanding and output. They were people who appeared to believe in their methods but then they also appeared to believe in his meditation and methods despite 30 years of practice that surely should have disillusioned them.

He also didn't recognise the elephant in the room. Pretty well all of the participants believed, whether they would admit it or not, that Prem Rawat was God or something very close and in His Presence and under the lash of His tongue they would be very unlikely to learn anything. After all they had been listening to Him for 30 years and still hadn't developed enough insight and self-confidence to realise he was shiite. Actually a few people left the trainings and Rawatism disillusioned with both so it worked for them.

Records of some of the meetings in Miami and England were kept and became public through back channels but Visions International also published a video in 2000 called "The Possibility of Peace" from a "training" in Atlanta.

Nearly all of the participants had been devotees of Maharaji for up to 30 years and so the idea that they needed such training was extraordinary enough in itself. What made it even more remarkable is that most of them had been doing such personal and public recruitment in the 1970's and later relatively successfully despite the derision Rawat as the Guru Maharaj Ji had received in the press. Rawat had ordered them to cease and desist publicly promoting Him and His Knowledge circa 1983 and in 1989 "advised" they not even talk about Him in private.