Re: Better than Mao
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: Re: Better than Mao
Date: 07/26/2026, 17:47:01
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)

He left out celibacy, uncompromising obedience to the omniscient, omnipresent guru, no personal ownership of anything other than your worn-out clothing and an oppressive atmosphere of thick judgement for even minor transgressions of the rules. Not to mention prostrating yourself on the floor before an ornate photograph of the guru after singing an extreme and agonizingly long devotional song to him every single morning and every single night with the understanding that all of this would be for the rest of your life... all the while the guru demanding that "when you sing Arti, mean it!" The alternative being leaving, which in the guru's own words was tantamount to death... falling from his life giving and sustaining grace and shattering into a million pieces or some such fate: the worst mistake a devotee or any human being could ever make.

And who was this guru? Prem Rawat. Yes, THAT Prem Rawat, the one featured in digital leaflets plastered all over the internet. The one who created, oversaw and commanded that his followers move into one of those ashrams for an entire decade before they blew up in his face and he was too cowardly to take any responsibility for what he'd done, instead blaming them on everyone else but himself.

And people think I'm exaggerating when, in hindsight, I call those hell holes hell holes.

..as well as all that, I remeber him saying that if anyone leaves, they
Posted by: Jethro
Post title: ..as well as all that, I remeber him saying that if anyone leaves, they
Date: 07/26/2026, 18:14:03
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
will spend the rest of their lives(or was it eternity?) crying their eyes out.

Re: Better than Mao Music
Posted by: prembio
Post title: Re: Better than Mao Music
Date: 07/28/2026, 20:30:38
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
When I look at my 1000 CDs or glance or my 10,000 favourite downloaded songs (.flac if at all possible) I see that they are pretty well all by musicians who are considered by the critics to be the greats or the highly respected.

Yet, call me brainwashed, but I do love the DLM version of Arti especially Tawmeva. I attend bhajanish kirtan bhakti gatherings though I'm a total skeptic so maybe it's just a weird quirk in my brain. Of course, I didn't hear it sung as often as you did. I surmise that it was possible that a premie could have sung Arti over 3,650 times or more.

Once, maybe 20 years ago, I emailed a singer with a cult following who was actually in a cult - you know who I mean - and suggested she do a Kim O'Leary's Greatest Hits Unplugged CD. She didn't do it but at least she didn't threaten to sue me, that time.

"It's not about me."
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: "It's not about me."
Date: 07/30/2026, 08:23:12
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
"and an oppressive atmosphere of thick judgement for even minor transgressions of the rules"

Now why would I say such a thing? It certainly seems to contradict the cult apologists. Perhaps it's in part because of the many times I was finger shushed or watched others get finger shushed for breaking the oppressive silence with undisciplined slippage of innocuous chatter about such things as the weather. Picture a dozen or so devout premies, pious twenty somethings, sitting around a large dining table (one was a homemade elevated floor platform surrounded by pillows) every single morning and every single night for years eating in dead silence.

Clearly it stemmed from the top. Jealous over our love for distractions and things other than himself such as Coca Cola, when a dead rat was found floating in it at a bottling plant, he reveled in pointing out that we love it so much we'd suck the last drop out of the rat. He's the one who demanded that anyone caught drinking so much as a can of beer or smoking a single cigarette be banished from the ashram, a pretty harsh penalty I thought given that he essentially declared it to be a death sentence... even though, according to Mahatma Saphlanand, his mother once scolded him for leaving "empty beer cans and girly mags strewn about the floor of a gifted Rolls Royce," no doubt while smoking cigarettes.

I'm certain he was the inspiration behind what I coined as the crusades, when the late David Smith and a few cohorts literally searched the ashrams - rummaged through drawers - for contraband such as bedside novels, family correspondence, newspapers, non-cult magazines, radios and the like... backed-up by tyrannical hell and brimstone satsang about how such worldly distractions disrupt our connection and rot us from the inside.

When two premies happened to fall in love, it wasn't enough for Prem to simply demand that they pack their clothes and tooth brushes and leave. No, apparently he relished confining them to the ashram by having one or the other transferred to the opposite end of the country. "That'll teach'em," I'm sure he thought, while he was sexually abusing one of his sons or having women followers procured for him or gallivanting about with his mistress.

In "Hear Yourself," finally, after fifty years or so of being alive and as a last-ditch effort to reinvent and salvage his foundering (not floundering) guru worship cult - purported "genius" that he is - ... finally Prem changed his tune to pontificating about clarity, choice, understanding, gratitude, peace, hope and self-knowledge. Family values certainly wasn't one of them.

Anyway, getting back to what I meant to say... I said extreme and agonizingly long. I didn't say it didn't have an earworm-like melody or catchy hook in a few bars when you're in the right mood.   Conservatively, I must've stood through that eternit excruciatingly long song at least 3,400 times. It's still hard to fathom. Admittedly, there were times, many for sure, when I sat there fidgeting in satsang while someone who couldn't string two sentences together without a bunch of ums, uhs, it's likes, you knows and by his graces thinking "Oh crap, we still have to make it through Arti." (I guess I wasn't feeling it on those nights.) The default 5:30 a.m. wake-up alarm was a wandering minstrel gently strumming Arti on a guitar, so we got a double-dose in the morning.

Kim O'Leary? Isn't she the one who wrote and sang stuff like "our father has come to lead us along the path of perfection... please, please, please teach me devotion... you are my Perfect Master, perfect lover too... the answer to my every question always comes from you... you are the giver and the keeper of my soul... Lord You are my life... You are my strength... You are my everything and more..." Seems like there were a lot of "You are my everythings" in those days, which makes sense because he was all there was in those you know what ashrams. Especially when her voice was blaring out those lyrics as we were mesmerized by close-up after close-up of Prem Rawat's face, acne and all, on a giant slide show screen. Reconcile THAT "it's not about me" visual!

In no way do I mean to mock Kim any more than I mock Prem and myself for all the eminently mockable things we did in those days... and Prem still does. I wish her happiness, success in her music endeavors and all the best. And I do want to point out once again that she sang those lyrics year after year for years to a glittery, deified (or self-proclaimed deity) and beaming Prem Rawat ensconced on a throne. Not all that long before he lied to Sara Sidner when he said "It's not about me."

Thank you, Prembio, for all you've done and all you continue to do.



Re: "oh crap we've still got make it through arti."
Posted by: lesley
Post title: Re: "oh crap we've still got make it through arti."
Date: 07/31/2026, 10:52:05
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
thousands of renditions of arti, omg I don't know how you made it through that.

it reminds me how onerous ashram life was.  I was lucky to get chosen as house mother in community houses where yes arti was sung and meditation commenced at 6am but nobody came round waking you up and I was able to sleep til I woke naturally. Even more importantly no visits from honchos and no edicts from on high.

From there I went on to an externally normal life.  Internally I might just as well have been humming arti continuously though.

And I was being scammed up close and personal by my gay in denial husband.  Don't look to me for happiness he says, you should be meditating more and I agreed with him.

:-) the fire on your butt
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: :-) the fire on your butt
Date: 07/31/2026, 17:10:50
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
Oops, I didn't mean to add that grumpy emoji... cant' get rid of it.
What, no visits from honchos and no edicts from on high? You don't know what you were missing! In addition to the crusades... Lark luggage for this one, silk blouses for that one, nothing was good enough for another, special Capezio ballet slippers for yet another one, incessant mumbling gripes from a particularly entitled one, expensive "special diet" ingredients for another, made-to-order room service including a trip to run out and buy capers for another doozy, massages for most (and I forgot to mention multiple daily foot massages for the crazy Capezio lady but not from me!), all day beck & call service and of course all the white glove eggshell walking lest you get a black mark on your report card. Oh, and then there was the guy who slammed a door so hard he put the knob through the wall. Something about "Oceans of grace!!" 

And what did all your extraordinary and successful efforts to enthusiastically implement edicts from on high get you? Not unlike your dreadful experience at Amaroo... "YOU are the problem!" "Get out of the way!" Prem Rawat circa every year the ashrams existed and probably to this very day.

Speaking of this very day, here's something I'll bet you didn't know:

"By eating ice cream the fire on your butt won't be extinguished."

Prem Rawat, India, July 31, 2026