The DLM underclass
Posted by: 13
Post title: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 01:32:02
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
The images you line up in your book review sounds unpleasantly familiar to me. And the line at the end, suggesting this was surely some dark and dismal underclass of DLM which was more generally populated by wealthier 'normal' people threw down a bit of a challenge.

There was one premie I knew, though not well, who was 'sorted'. An architect, who owned a big fancy motorbike and his own house. Quietly spoken and well dressed. He may have chosen not to get to know me on account of the other premies I was associated with.

When I went to Leeds university, I stayed in a student flat that had been organised for me by my Dad, and after those few weeks, took a room in a premie house. I wasn't there long, but there was one suicide threat with a fellow spending the afternoon on a roof threatening to throw himself off - well two, the next day he sat under a meditation blanket with a gas bottle and turned on the tap. He was very bad at suicide, and lived till cocaine finished him off in his 50's. We had one fellow taken off to the mental health hospital and quite a few drug parties. Not very conducive to the meditative or scholarly life. So I threw my student grant, all of it, on renting a house of my own, and moved in there with my girlfriend. We even had a spare room. All quiet for a fortnight.

A premie beat up his girlfriend, who was a friend of my girlfriend, so she gave her the spare room. She came with her two kids. Things went downhill really fast. I'd had a letter telling me I needed an operation for suspected cancer, and was in the bath scrubbing myself up before checking into the hospital when one of the kids set the house on fire. No-one was killed, but it was close, and I found myself on the street with a blackened face (rubber backed carpets! Not good in a fire!) a pair of underpants and a shirt. A neighbour gave me a blanket as we stood and watched the flames come up through the roof and then it all collapsed. It was quite entertaining to walk into my lab at university on the way to the hospital to let them know I wouldn't be able to come to classes for a while. The flames had singed my hair, and the smoke penetrated every pore, that two baths at a friend's house failed to entirely remove. I stood there with half a head of hair, black eye-liner and a set of very badly fitting clothes explaining my appearance. The teacher acknowledged I'd need some time out to sort myself out, and then I had to tell them that actually, the house fire wasn't what I came to tell them about, and it might take a little longer. Homeless, penniless and a cancer diagnosis (by letter!) in one day.

So that was how I got familiar with the underclass of DLM. Down on my luck, I was taken in by others with nothing material to give. I got a very cheap flat above a chip shop in the most run down part of Leeds. It stunk, and it was dangerous walking around there at night. But my student grant was in the habit of arriving at the end of term instead of the beginning, so the flat didn't last more than a few weeks, and we were evicted. And taken into a house full of aspirants. Seven men, all just released from prison, squashed into a terraced two-up two-down, and then me and my girlfriend. All the men there had been in for burglary, and were having a go at getting their lives back on track, and becoming aspirants was part of that. An initiator had been round, who had told everyone that their houses should be kept in a state were Maharaji could walk in the door and feel at home. I came back from uni one afternoon to find the house stripped of wallpaper in an ardent devotional splurge, ruined by my pointing out that none of us had the money to buy new wallpaper, or the skills and tools to stick it on the walls. So we were all crammed into a now extremely shabby hovel.

One of the men had been married, and separated, and was at war with his ex. He told me how he'd been threatened by a gang of men working for her, so he had broken into a school to steal some acid to throw in her face. He got to the chemistry lab, but didn't know one chemical from another. So he gave up on that, and then, afraid to leave his fingerprints behind, set fire to the school. The school was destroyed. It wasn't long after hearing this tale that I answered a knock on the door to find four men with bats and big sticks in their hands asking for Floyd. I was very surprised that when I told them he wasn't in, they just turned round and walked away.

Anyway, that would be the beginning of my being part of the underclass of DLM. Or rather being part of it. I could go on for pages describing the burglaries and fraud, the drug use, addiction, prostitution and deaths from heroin use. The only people I got to know who lived in a more organised way were people who learned trades - carpenters, electrician, decorators. But their enterprises were set back during the years of persistent Maharaji events, when these people spent all the time and money they could scrape together to travel somewhere foreign for a couple of days. 

No-one I knew seemed to have an ambition beyond getting to the next event. The rest of the world was an illusion, we were privileged to know the truth, and whatever experiences that came our way were sent to us for a reason. Judgement and ambition were taboo.

I was part of that great mass of insanity, and your description of the book is easily believable to me.

I got out of that loop eventually when satsang was cancelled, and I was quite shocked by that (and relieved). I didn't know what to do with myself, and stood one day in a newsagents looking through the magazines, trying to imagine what people aspired to and why. Nothing made sense to me at all, till I saw a Yachting Monthly, and realised that if I bought a second hand boat, I could have a place of my own where I didn't have to pay rent or get a mortgage (and the job). That spark of adopting an ambition that was nothing to do with the cult was the start of crawling out of the underbelly.

I'd be curious to know if other premies from those days experienced anything like a 'normal' life. I did meet a few premies in America who had money, but they either inherited their money or were flipping real estate or involved in scams or drug dealing. Myself, I saw nothing other than the under class really. Was there another class?



Re: The DLM underclass
Posted by: lesley
Post title: Re: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 06:47:08
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
I was in a very upmarket squat at one stage.  a whole terrace overlooking Regent's Park, mostly offices it was empty and then it was very full of squatters, not all premies after a while but it was premies who started it.  There were about six of us in the one room but it was a very big office room with big windows looking over the park and a stone balcony.  

Looking back I think I was reasonably lucky because I got asked to be a house mother in a premie house and I am still friends with the man who organised it, he was very good at doing that sort of thing, he acted as housefather and collected money from the other premies and paid all the bills and I got free board.  I remember when the festival in Copenhagen was on he paid for my travel and bought me a Mother Nature dress I fancied - 2 pounds, and gave me 5 pounds spending money, I was very impressed.

He had a job and a suit, he could rent houses and create a stable environment but then he'd get overwhelmed by the forces of chaos, the people that would turn up and of course once there were little children, I don't think I will forget a kid sitting on the wickerwork seated stool at the dining table and he was just pooing, it was dripping through and his mother was just watching and not about to clean it up.  I had already left when it happened but I heard the landlord cried when he inspected the property.

Once I stopped being house mother I got jobs ending up as the cook in a vegetarian restaurant which was a great job for me.

It all worked well for a little while.  I enjoyed the spacious public baths and my friend had joined us in the squat and made it work well even plumbing in water from the rainwater tank on the roof.  The forces of chaos overwhelmed the place, outside our room it became disgusting and there were crazies - one man threw a kettle of boiling water at a poor woman's head for no reason at all just because he was feeling upset in himself.  I didn't see it happen but I was glad to move on from there. 



Re: The DLM underclass
Posted by: 13
Post title: Re: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 07:12:32
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
There were premies who lived in squats and some who saw drug abuse, burglary, fraud, and so on. And then there must have been some, the ones I never met, who were doing OK. 

And then how does all that compare with people who had the good fortune to never hear of Rawat and get sucked into his cult? Really normal people. I think I met most of them when I was hitching, which was a lot of the time! But then, they might have been the just kindest of the 'normal' people.



Re: The DLM underclass
Posted by: lesley
Post title: Re: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 16:58:04
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
I think maybe our generation were in a position where there are big numbers of teenagers needing to leave home and it was quite possible to do?

Between 16 and 18 I was mainly with a band of hippies, not sure how I met them but living near Salisbury there was an arts college there and lots of hippies.  They were a nice bunch and pretty together, most of us got jobs and there was a stable couple who organised things so we were able to rent houses.  But we were always coming up against the edges of serious drug dealing and one time we were threatened and so scared we upped sticks and moved to another town overnight.

I had made contact with my mother and she must have talked with my grandmother who offered a little cottage she had in the woods near Southampton, said she'd give me the paint and could I paint it.  My mother helped me enrol in art college studying ceramics.  Even my father helped - he came with his rotovator and tore up the grass so I had a quarter acre veggie plot.

For a little while there I was so on track.  I have a memory of walking down the lane on my way to college and the time is coming so I am planning how I am going to introduce the veg I am growing into my zen macrobiotic diet.  and happy with the clay work.  All I really needed was for the right man to walk by.

Then my friends caught up to me.  the forces of chaos began to whirl and the paintwork became multicoloured.  A premie came around and I went down to London.

Standing at the back of the satsang hall where premies would take you back to their place to sleep.  I remember one couple who had a nice place and a room with mattresses for visiting premies and making us breakfast in the morning and a merchant seaman who had his own flat and a sewing machine and he turned up the hems on my jeans which were too long as well as providing breakfast.

the next one was a squat, it would have been okay except for the unwanted attentions of a guy who was there but not part of the premie scene.  After getting K the next day I went back home to the cottage though I don't suppose it was long before I was back in London for some satsang event and then doing the house mothering.

So then by the time I am moving into the grand Regents park squat I am with my ex.  From there we go holidaying various places - we went camping going down the coast to Devon where his family came from and there was this field.  A young man had set up a huge tent and there were lots of little tents set up around the field we were in the next door field and he invited us to come to his tent where he had a dance party going.  It was great fun and I wanted to dance and my ex didn't want to dance and really I should have left him then and there but instead I just felt so confused.  I remember the look of compassion from the man who watched this interaction but stepping back a minute what I wanted to say is I think there were a lot of young people living in fields at least during the Summer months but you could have lived all year round in his.

Yes, I think you're right, it was generally kinder people who picked me up hitching.  I never got into trouble though one time I got into this truck and as soon as I settled in took in the girly calendar on the dashboard and started to realise I was in trouble but we kept talking as he drove and I think he just felt I was too nice, and he dropped me off unharmed.



Re: The DLM underclass
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: Re: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 10:39:52
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
Your extraordinary and extraordinarily well-told story and the fact of the DLM underclass described by you and prembio leaves me speechless again. (But that never seems to stop me. ) As for your story... just when I think there couldn't possibly be more!

As for the DLM underclass, in many ways it permeated the whole thing. The ashrams were actually an aberration compared to the grit and grind of the vast majority of premies. And as eveyone knows, even the ashrams were certainly no bastion of sainthood and virtue what with their mental health breakdowns, unnatural suppression, ill-equipped and awkward social behavior, explosive love triangles and what not. They just wore a cult-sanctioned aura with hints of piousness and sanctimony - an easy-way-out shelter that many were incapable of providing for themselves. Even the higher-ups (the DLM upperclass?) were sub-par compared to their real-world peers and counterparts. It's just that they thrived on a new-found platform they used to elevate themselves above others in a vastly smaller competitive pool.

This is really just my way of affirming the existence of a vast DLM underclass, which may have been the backdrop behind these recent books that I haven't read.

As for my exposure to it, being young, naive and close to homeless in 1974, I moved in with a couple of premie drug dealers and their premie wives and young kids in a rundown section of the city. Everyone knew about their history, but I was too street smart illiterate to too new to the scene to have a clue. Then I fell in love with a girl who was shooting-up behind my back with her girlfriend. Nobody wanted to fill me in about that, either. I left that scene to move into the ashram later in 1974.

Drug dealers, drug parties, nearly broke single moms, transient menial jobs, marital cheating, little if any home ownership, disillusioned, aimless, little ambition and little hope of breaking away... largely (with some exceptions) describes the premie community that surrounded me at the time. Maybe the worst part for me was that when I became a community coordinator, they saw me and sometimes treated me like Prem's patsy because they hadn't sold themselves out to such an extent... unlike the mahatmas who praised me for my devotion before hitting me up for shopping sprees.

No, the worst part was the fact that they were all fortunate enough to drift away over the next few years and I didn't. Too steeped in it to see my own delusional blind spot - duped - I hung in there through the heavy devotional period and for another thirty-some years, always doing my best to be a "good" premie.
_______________________________

Bob!! What about all your posts about all those beautiful, sincere and innocent people who were exploited by Prem Rawat?? 

Well, that's all true as well. It's just that the false promise of Knowledge brought out the best in the broad spectrum of the underclass... the high spirits and higher aspirations (epitomized by the spirit of the counterculture at the time) in everyone for a while, which created an explosion of hope, high-mindedness and good intentions (that actually did pave the road to hell for many who bought into it.)

And no, Prem apologists!! I didn't know anyone who "came for the wrong reasons" as Prem tried to claim in one of his notorious dodges.

And what about talking out of both sides of my mouth when talking about lost education and other sacrifices when much of the underclass may not have been on that trajectory anyway? Prem could have encouraged his followers to go in just about any direction and they would've done so. Instead, he shouted - demanded - that any focus, aim or ambition other than total surrender, devotion, dependence on and obedience to him was pure "mind": the express lane to total darkness and confusion.



Re: The DLM underclass
Posted by: tommo
Post title: Re: The DLM underclass
Date: 11/11/2024, 15:50:15
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
"No-one I knew seemed to have an ambition beyond getting to the next event. The rest of the world was an illusion, we were privileged to know the truth, and whatever experiences that came our way were sent to us for a reason."

That sums up pretty well why knowledge was poisonous.  The nothing "in this world" really matters thing sucked the life out of people  --  My friend Chris - best man at my wedding - brilliant and entertaining - never aspired beyond hospital porter - lived in desperate damp bedsits in Luton pretty much all of his all too short life.  

My problem was that one of the first effects of Knowledge was that -- if you were a stupidly naive, go with the flow, and trusting hippy type in the first place then Knowledge just confirmed and deepened that attitude but now with the religious sanction of the big G.  Take everyone at face value,  judge nobody, judge nothing that happens -- it's all there to teach you and bring you back to the lotus feet.  Obvious problems are not really your problems -- the problems of other people are not your business -- don't be in the way --let grace sort it out.

But to be fair the 70's in England was indeed " Life on Mars" -- it wasn't just premies and Knowledge --it was also the effects of teenage angst, naivety and the drug- riddled embers of the hippy scene that premies were all too proud to trace their lineage too.  In fact to have been really really messed up before Knowledge was almost  a badge of honour because it sort of proved how desperate and sincere you had been as a seeker of truth.   It was almost de rigeur for 70's satsangs to start with some earnest protestation that without Knowledge and Miraji  I would have died of drugs but now I have this ..etc etc.  As a 16 and 17 year old I simply and utterly believed every bull shit word of it- all premies were my heroes.  

But the 70s were mad anyway.  My first University digs was a squat on Brixton where I had a little bedroom with a parrafin heater behind the kitchen. I liked the guy that ran it that I paid the rent to -- he called himself 'Linton' cos it was cooler than his real name 'Hosia'  -- no doubt bequeathed to him by his religious Jamaican ma and pa.  He made a living partly by dealing grass and then on Friday nights right through until Saturday morning he would host gambling nights in the kitchen  - hard for me to sleep-- he marked the cards!  But we all got on fine and half the nights of the week I would toddle off to the Palace of Peace.  

Strange times.  But the premie houses were just the same.  I started one up in Luton shortly before going to University while I worked as a kitchen porter for a year before making the wise decision to go to University.  There were three of us premies-- all working as porters - Chris, another guy Rich (who unbeknown to us had another cross to bear -- he was gay but afraid to come out then)  -- the house started out fine -- paid the rent , well kept,  went to satsang etc but eventually it got caught up in the maelstrom - and just became a place where every premie and loosely connected type from 20 miles around would feel free to stay - bring booze and drugs etc, I left the place when it got to the point that I couldn't get in my own room cos some couple had taken it over--- and so gald to get back to my parents for a couple of months and then on to London and the Brixton squat



Re: On the Other Hand
Posted by: prembio
Post title: Re: On the Other Hand
Date: 11/11/2024, 16:06:54
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
We have a word in Australia: squattocracy, the people who ventured out of the "settled" areas and "squatted" on large areas of land that they were able to exploit with cattle and sheep, survived, became rich (or not) and held on to at least part of their holdings.

So I thought about all the homes of premies I stayed in for a night or for weeks or for satsang for one night. Premies were very generous with their floor space in those days. Nearly all the houses were rented but that wasn't unusual for their age group.

I don't think I ever unknowingly "squatted" and I wouldn't have. I don't like cities and I believed in property rights as one of the bedrocks of safe society. I didn't see premies smoking dope though I knew it occurred. I preferred straight premies which I think was the majority before 1984. I certainly had many non-premie friends who smoked a lot.

Every premie home I ever stayed in was clean though those with more than one or two children could be messy. Love affairs were not uncommon, as were unrequited "crushes." There were some young children who suffered at the hands of their mothers' ideas about how to cure them of the cold and flu and others who were always hungry due to their mothers' ideas about a proper diet.

Some young children were "dumped" in childcare and they cried and one particularly "devoted" mother let her non-premie husband take their daughter back to the USA so she could concentrate on K. & M.

I may be a suspicious, judgmental prig but I liked nearly all the premies I ever met (nearly all the non-premies for that matter).

It certainly didn't take long to realise that beneath the surface appearance of premies at satsang and how they presented to "new people" there was another world altogether but they meant well.

They were led by a different sort of person so their ideals could never be realised.

That was my experience so that was why I found these two books so shocking



Re: On the Other Hand
Posted by: 13
Post title: Re: On the Other Hand
Date: 11/12/2024, 00:51:38
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
I took my motorbike to a premie's workshop to be repaired. He sold it, and used the money to get to an event in Europe. I saw the premie bus pass with him on as I was standing by a roundabout, hitching. I didn't like him.

But I did also find the majority of premies likeable, even all the ex-cons.

I grew up in the country and spent much of my youth sneaking up on wild animals, playing about of rivers, building rafts and so on, going too far down abandoned mines and too far up quarry cliffs. Took me a long time to realise I just really don't like cities. I haven't been to one for years now, and would be happy not to have to go again. And DLM was maybe an urban thing, I think built around urban types of angst. I never met a premie farmer.



Re: On the Other Hand
Posted by: lesley
Post title: Re: On the Other Hand
Date: 11/12/2024, 15:05:04
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
That's a pretty exciting childhood, John.  I remember building a dam with my brothers out of sticks and stones and lots of mud across a very little stream in one of the wilder parts of Richmond park and then catching tadpoles to inhabit the little pond we'd made. 

I don't like cities either.  and I was born in London.  My mother was a country girl and I am like her.  I don't know that my father was a city person, maybe it was just that he did not have the ground under his feet, when we moved out to the country I think what he wanted was the gun and the dog more than the countryside and night skies.

I've been thinking about that moment when I decided to travel down to Heathrow to see Guru Maharaj Ji arriving on a jumbo jet.  I think it must have been happening all over the country - young hippies hearing about it from hippies turned premies and deciding to go see.  

Once you were there in London the mahatmas were already organised and you were on the nightly satsang production line that took you through to the K session, there were lots of us.  

I liked most of the premies I met too - the people I was meeting at the back of the satsang hall as well as the premies themselves.

Wasn't there a premie with a farm who milled flour?   as a housemother I was supposed to buy it but I just couldn't - I struggled to make anything light and fluffy or nice to eat out of it and I just couldn't comply even though I felt guilty for not doing it.