Then I was quickly reminded... when I was a seventeen year old senior in high school, she was a freshman. A few years later, after I moved into an ashram, she received Knowledge when she was a senior. As purely platonic friends, I meditated with her for hours in her bedroom at her parents's home. Then she moved into the same ashram at such a young age.

 

In hindsight, there was a recovering heroin addict in the house whose behavior was consistent with occasional use. There were also a few not-so-secret trysts going on. That poor young woman, not mature, confused, surely repressing everything and suddenly bound by poverty, chastity and obedience. I crossed paths with her years later in a different ashram a thousand miles away. Wondering what became of her after the ashrams closed, I found out that she resorted to prostitution.

How many others fell into degraded circumstances... abusive relationships, under-employment, an inability to make important commitments and the like? Real-life consequences of the derailment, altered trajectories, stunted growth and repression so often described on this forum, life-long consequences of Prem Rawat's exploitative and misguided ashram dictates and demands for single-minded focus and devotion. Given what was revealed (by premies sworn to secrecy!) about his grossly hypocritical lifestyle at the time, I now see his dictates (agya!) as cruel, if not sadistic.

Yeah, laughter can turn serious very quickly.

Knowledge spread like wildfire through the underground drug culture in those early days. That's where I first heard about it months before I stumbled upon the "energy that moves the atom moves you" poster. Burglary aside, I started smiling again when you reminded me of our jumbling days, the "one man's trash is another man's treasure" leaflets we flooded neighborhoods with followed a week later with pick-up trucks. Those collections enabled us to open a storefront with second-hand stuff and make enough money to send thirty premies to Rome. Same place our failed sticky fingers food co-op was located.

Those were some lofty, high-energy days. I had no idea they would come back to bite me when, unlike the many who had a hard time with stability and steady jobs, I took a step back and doubled-down on working hard to make-up for a decade of lost, if not wasted time. I took a lot of criticism from premies for having mixed-up priorities at the time but I came back strong in the service/participation arena until I finally left the cult.

With drug addiction and the rest of all that dirty laundry, it was quite a mess in those days. About fifteen years ago, my stepbrother pulled off the road and quietly died of an overdose after decades of addiction. I hope the remaining two of those four friends of yours somehow find comfort and a better way.