The transcribers charged with making some kind of rational sense of Rawat's blatherings are proving mightily reticent over putting any of his recent Kuala Lumpur diatribes into the public domain. Apparently Prem returned to the hackneyed 'at the time of your death' number for the Malaysia show. This is the old chestnut where Rawat raises the possibility that if you don't immerse yourself in 'Holy Name' pretty much all the time then when you get to the terminal experience you will not have access to this passport to paradise ? release from samsara ? nirvana ?
As a belief system it's not much worse than any other but how does Rawat and his EV claque square this need for a death bed concern with the Rawat meditation and their claims to be non religious ? What is it that is being achieved by meditating at death ? And how can a belief in an existence past bodily death be secular ? Clearly no Christian could accept the Rawatian doctrine because for Christians the triumph over death is unequivocally the reserve of the belief in and the relationship with, Christ. Virtually no other religion would regard it as anything but a blasphemy for Rawat to be cast in the roll of ferryman.
So what is it that Rawat is telling the world ? The claim to be non religious is pure sophistry, Rawat is promoting a very particular belief system, it may be a very arid belief system, it may be cynically synchretic and it may manipulatively 'unitarian' but it's concerns are undoubtedly 'religious'.
Of course devoid of any 'membership' or congregation, lacking any moral code and having no core philosophy it is true to say that EV is not a religion or a religious movement. Perhaps the best way to describe Rawat's promotional set up is a 'null religion', competing with religions for adherents but providing none of the moral, philosophical or social support that is usually associated with a religion.
Perhaps Prem is just losing the plot, having instituted the secular revisionism, he now finds out that he's run out of secular material and is having to go back and pillage orations from the Mahatma era. Who knows maybe the Krishna suit is being let out at the seams this very minute.
Nik
