Prem Rawat (Prem Pal Singh Rawat) whose devotees call him Maharaji (meaning Ultimate Ruler) first came to attention in the West as Guru Maharaj Ji - the self-proclaimed Perfect Master and Lord of the Universe ridiculed in the media as a fat, squeaky-voiced God boy. He had inherited his titles and position as the Satguru, The True Revealer of Light and Spiritual Master of the Divine Light Mission, India (Divya Sandesh Parishad) when his father died in 1966. His father, Hans Rawat, was a successful Indian guru, self titled HRH (His Royal Highness) Yogiraj Param Sant Satgurudev Shri Hans Ji Maharaj. As a child the youngest Rawat son was informally called Sant Ji, more formally Balyogeshwar ("Born King of the Yogis") and even more formally Param Sant Satgurudev Shri Sant Ji Maharaj. In the West Rawat dropped these more verbose titles in the early 1980's and instructed his followers to call him Maharaji. He has also changed the names of his organisations many times: Divine Light Mission (DLM), World Welfare Association (WWA), World Peace Corps (WPC) and Divine United Organisation (DUO) became Elan Vital in the early 1980's and in 2001 The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF) was created and from 2010 his major orgs are Words Of Peace Global (WOPG) registered in Holland, Words of Peace International (WOPI) in the USA, HDSK (Human Development through Self Knowledge) in Great Britain and Raj Vidya Kender (Royal Knowledge Society) in India. He no longer claims to be an Incarnation of God but an internationally famous humanitarian leader and teacher of peace. He's neither.

While Guru Maharaj Ji was on his international tour last November, he held a program in Frankfurt, Germany, for the local premie community. After satsang and Arti, Maharaj Ji pulled his chair to the edge of the stage and the audience gathered around him for "casual" satsang:

So. How's the Frankfurt community doing'? I've seen the premies from Heidelberg here? How are the premies in general doing? Pretty good or pretty bad? Understanding Knowledge or having very difficult times? Very difficult times? Hmm?

You make effort in the right direction. It's like trying to take pictures. You don't press the shutter. You press the rest of the camera, and nothing will happen. You just have to press the shutter and you'll have a picture. Same way: you make the effort in the right direction and you will get positive results. You make the effort in the wrong direction and you will not get positive results. I think premies in general are trying. They are. I think just with everybody's cooperation things are starting to move back again.

The way I put it in Denver, was like a big tugboat: they don't go very fast, but just start to go tug, tug, tug, tug, tug, tug, tug, tug and then slowly just start to move out. You can just barely see the whole ship it's moving, the whole ship it's pulling. But after a little while you can most definitely see the result. It's nice. Frankfurt premies are lucky. They're able to have this conference. Everybody was able to come together and have this satsang. That was really nice. Maybe the only thing that you missed was questions and answers. That was supposed to be scheduled. But ask me about questions and answers - I'm an expert at that for seven years I'm an expert at questions and answers.

The thing is that, the more chance you have, the more opportunity that is given to premies to ask questions, the more craziness comes out. You open up something that goes out, and when you do that, lot of craziness can come out and it starts to go all over the place.

But when it's just listening, or it's just understanding service and surrendering to satsang, it is much more beautiful I feel. And I feel premies get a lot more when they surrender and they listen to satsang. I think satsang is a lot more beautiful than trying to have so-called question and answer sessions because we - I used to have a lot of question and answer sessions, and premies would, well, the only benefit premies would ever get from those questions and answers was the satsang that was given for the answers. So it's much better to just listen to some satsang and just try to understand, try to digest.

You'd be surprised if you read, well, the satsang that was given tonight or satsang that has been given earlier that you were present in. Three days later, four days later, two months later, you hear the same satsang again - it's completely amazing, it's completely suprising, because I mean, it's completely amazing because you can digest it a little bit better.

In just terms of talking, it's happening so fast, everything is going so fast, that sometimes it's hard to grasp all of the satsang, but then when you get a chance to sit down and maybe read the whole satsang or maybe get a chance to listen to it again - it is a lot better.

Someone asks if they can go to California to be with Maharaj Ji

Listen. You don't want to go to California. There is the San Andreas Fault that runs from San Francisco all the way to San Andreas, Mexico. And it's a fault. It's a geological fault in the land, and one of these days it's supposed to just split. You don't want to go to California. It's not where we are -- where we are. You

understand what I mean? It's not where we are in terms of country-wise or city- wise or whatever have you - it's where we are at, if we are at a nice place it's very beautiful.

This kind of satsang hasn't happened in years.

Laughter and clapping

There's a lot of love, and then also premies have to understand that if there were fifty thousand premies trying to do this, I'm pretty sure somebody would get killed. Small, miniature - small programs like this - two hundred people here - doesn't hurt - except when you almost got squashed against the stage.

No, these guys have got very bad names. They don't need bad names they do have pretty good service. They try to do their best. Before, it was a little crazy, I must admit - premies got thrown around everywhere, but now it's really beautiful; you don't get rushed through darshan. Before it was like either you could do pranam or you could see me, but now you can at least do both and have Holy Breath, if you need it.

That's a lot of satsang, lot of service. Lot of people look, they say we want to do service, we gotta find some service, we gotta look for some service to do. Sometimes you just have to find service if somebody can't give you service - you just have to find some service to do in your community, and there's a lot of service that you can do - lot of satsang, lot of meditation. We need to be strong, we all need to be very strong - you agree? We need to be all very strong, have a lot of understanding.

We are not trying to run questions and answers - we don't want to get into that …

It's what my experience is and that's what you're going to learn from me.

There are a lot of people who think maybe they'll learn a lot of things if they're with me. All these guys have learned is how to do a lot of service. Forget about everything else.

Divine Times, February    1977 3

Prem Rawat's "Knowledge" has three parts: regularly listening to his speeches, doing voluntary work for organisations serving him or donating money and daily meditation correctly practicing the four techniques he recommends. The techniques are so simple it's hard to see how they could be practiced incorrectly. First technique ("Divine Light") involves sticking your thumb and middle finger on your eyeballs (NB: with eyes closed) and your index finger between your eyebrows. Second technique: ("Heavenly Music") poking your thumbs into your ears and listening. Third technique: ("Holy Name") thinking about your breathing (NB: continue to breathe). Fourth technique: ("Nectar") curling your tongue backwards and tasting. Rawat's father taught slightly different techniques but either way it's difficult to see how these could produce the benefits claimed for them especially as Rawat claims His Knowledge is the only method of attaining real happiness and love in this life.