I wonder how Maharaji sees himself playing into that equation?

I think he probably exempts himself from the equation entirely. In other words, there is the world, and then there is Maharaji. Maharaji sits on the top of the world like a jewel in the crown; like a crown on the globe; like a lotus floating on a filthy pond.

But really, Maharaji is a dispicable parasite; a lier who has, from his deception, profited beyond the wildest expectations of personal wealth and grandeur. And what has he done to have justified this extravagant personal wealth and priviledge?

He has undermined thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of people's sense of themselves; undermined their sense of their value as human beings; undermined their belief in and confidence in their ability to think clearly and make decisions in their own best interests.

He has caused thousands of people to have compromised their lives in profound and tragic ways with the end result being the accrual of his personal fortune and the limitless aggrandizement of his own ego. His greed and hunger for wealth, status, the validation of a monstrously distended ego, and the satisfaction of his every whim and passing desire are bottomless, limitless, abysses of need which are classic demonstrations of a destructive pathology.

People may think that for evil to be done, the perpertrator of that evil needs to comprehend the evilness of their actions. Maharaji, like a number of other much more well known socio or psychopaths such as Hitler, Stalin, or even Jim Jones, does not "understand" that his impact is largely destructive and that therefore his actions are evil. His lack of understanding on this point probably exempts him in the eyes of people around him who are convinced that Maharaji cannot be a conman because he seems to really believe his own myth.

Some of the most awesome misuses of power in history, however, have been instigated by individuals with precisely this same crippled sense of self. That they didn't see that they were evil, or at the very least the source of enormous damage, didn't diminish the damage that they did. Nor does Maharaji's distorted sense of his unique value exempt him from the sorrowful manipulation, deceit, and disasterous life decisions his influence has caused thousands of his followers to effect.

Maharaji's most vigorous apologists argue that people who actually listened to Maharaji, and actually had the cupidity to follow his direction were guilty of naivity, or of misunderstanding the essence of Maharaji's message, and were dangerously unbalanced in the "literalness" of their intrepretation of Maharaji's teachings. These committed followers are now accused of not having had a sense of proportion, and are derided for blaming Maharaji for their own lack of responsibility for their lives.

This seems like a sensible, if heartless criticism until the methods of cult recruitment and indoctrination are closely examined. When a person becomes involved with Maharaji, their ability to think clearly and make appropriately intelligent decisions is cast in an increasingly suspect light. Eventually, one accepts that Maharaji is the only one who is capable of true "clarity," and one's own ability to engage in the kind of critical thought that "personal responsibility" implies is fatally undermined.

This is what the apologists will never acknowledge. But the evidence is everywhere evident for those who have either decided to throw off the mantle of intellectual dishonesty required by loyalty to the "Master,"
or who never accepted it in the first place.