That's the whole point! So much of what happened to us in the cult was traumatic enough to result in varying degrees of ptsd. In fact, it's likely that premies to this day meditate as a way of coping with the very stress caused by their involvement in the cult! That leads me to this from you:

Simply put, apply that to our everyday lives when we were premies and there you have it: "Guru Maharaji. The Lord. All powerf... the chaotic disruptor of our lives!

Remove him and everything reverts to peaceful.

"...25 years later, it has just got worse with time not better."

Thankfully and after all that time, I'm glad to hear that that horrible sensation finally began to subside.

For me, however, the ptsd element surely has something to do with why I'm still posting here. So many examples of traumatic episodes in the cult, not the least of which were several premie suicide attempts with hovering bongo instructors who were simultaneously scolding me for calling for professional assistance while calling for (in front of other premies!) more satsang, service and meditation as a solution. Aside from that...

Example 1: While doing full-time service in several ashrams, premies would call at all hours asking for someone to give them satsang. It always seemed like the moment we all sat down for dinner an hour before forty or more people were about to arrive for nightly satsang (or we had to pile into cars to go to a hall) and at a time when very hungry premies who worked all day at full-time jobs could barely get a break between work and nightly satsang. So I always took the calls. (Please forgive me for whatever came out of my mouth!)

To this day, I can't linger on a telephone call and engage in any more than the bare minimum of words necessary to get through the call.

Example 2: When I held a relatively commendable and high stress job, I was also secretly handling finances for a community with leased commercial space for events and Knowledge Sessions, out of which we ran a U.S. national "Mail Order Library" (the "Netflix" of Rawat videos at the time). For that, I managed and was a signer for one of only a few official Elan Vital checking accounts in the U.S. As a result, we decied to use that account for one of Rawat's biggest public events in NYC at the Jacob Javits Center.

All of this unfolded soon after the trauma of the Team Trainings, after which Team Training instructor Valerio oversaw big event management teams. He stated unequivocally that our Team Training "task" was to guarantee a $50,000 profit from that public event as a condition for it to even be included on Rawat's tour.

There I was, burnt out from a stressful job and all of that secretly happening in my "spare time." One night at 11:30 p.m., way past my bedtime when I was about to collapse, I got a call from the national finance manager who demanded an up-to-date financial update for that event on the spot. Fully conditioned to never say "no" in the arena of of service/participation, I tried to put it off to the next morning, but I buckled under the coercion and spent the next two hours dutifully complying with a perfect update.

Shaking, angry, resentful and just plain pissed-off -- sailor language silently rolling off my tongue -- all because I was involved in something having to do with peace... versus BEING A GOOD PREMIE!

That's the back story to my previous post in this thread about breaking down and shouting "This isn't peace!!"

Many thanks to you and Roger. For me, this is a spot-on conversation about the reality of life in that cult.