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I agree with most of the sentiments expressed here. We each have individual ways of dealing with the reasons for our departures from DLM/EV. If revenge makes sense for Sir Dave, it's ok with me. If someone else wants to reach a place of forgiveness, then that's their right. The information that percolates here is critical to sorting out what this experience meant in our lives. I had been away from premie stuff for many years and barely gave my time in DLM a thought until my brother (another ex) came upon this site. The information I have learned has saddened me greatly. What I had come to regard as a benign spiritual pursuit appears to have deteriorated into something almost malevolent, at the top anyway.
The reports of GMJ's behavior remind me of Jim Jones. For those of you who don't know, I was a defense attorney in two trials involving Larry Layton. He was charged with conspiring to kill Congressman Leo Ryan in Guyana, right before the mass suicide inJonestown. I learned everything there was to know about Peoples Temple and Jim Jones in the course of representing Larry Layton. The survivors of the suicide who testified at the trial all said that Jonestown really was a racially diverse, wonderful place --- until Jones came down from San Francisco. Then the place turned into a 24 hour a day nightmare. The Peoples Temple members did just fine without him around. The same seemed to be true with respect to the ashrams and communities I lived in.
The premie communities I lived in were divorced from the big doings in Denver. The communities were good places with mostly good people. The bad experiences I had I chalked up to jerky premies. I thought that GMJ was a beneficent person (the Lord of the Universe actually) who cared deeply for the premies. I often said this at satsang. It now seems that the whole trip is an ugly profit making enterprise, and that the premies are cash cows -- although I never knew any wealthy premies. It is hard to
amass much net worth when you have to drop everything several times a year and go to festivals for darshan. It was the money issue that turned me away from M many years ago, and it seems that money has now become the focus of the enterprise. There's a bad seed at the center of this and it infects everything.
Arming ourselves with information, and insight, allows us all to come to a better understanding of ourselves and our time with this group. |
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