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.
{27}
165 Entr' Acte
Our awareness is usually dominated by our senses. What we see, hear, smell and taste determines the tone of our consciousness unless we are emotionally distracted, or purposefully thinking, or we close our eyes and deliberately focus away from sensation. In itself, this dominance of the senses is a clue, for their scope and aim are accidental; we can imagine rational beings with different senses and thus different windows on the universe. The senses we have give a shape to what we think, but their tyranny is not absolute.
As I type these words the centre of my being is with the meaning I am trying to convey, but I am simultaneously conscious of an ache in my jaw, a sweet breeze on my face from the open window, the weight of my body on the chair, the rustling of leaves in the garden, the ears of one of my cats raised in the forward alert position as he sprawls on the window ledge, a child and his dog appearing and passing on the road at the end of the garden, the ears relaxing, a fly somewhere buzzing...
I can stop typing, as I did a moment ago, close my eyes and make an inventory of consciousness. What I am actually thinking at any given moment seems arbitrary and fleeting: it happens to be these ideas but it could equally be those. Thoughts appear to be as insubstantial as clouds and more transient. What is the sky in which these thoughtclouds float? The self, one supposes, but then my interior geography is more complex than that. For the thoughts come from that invisible region where lies everything that I am not currently conscious of memories, learning, ideals. That region also contains the origin of things I am only intermittently conscious of prejudices, misconceptions, intuitions. It is as if my awareness is a huge sphere, with a tiny central bit illuminated with a se of 'I' and concentric spheres carrying less and less 'I' awareness until they mingle with the general materiality. When you ignore the spurts of thought in the centre it becomes hard to locate external limits of the sphere, hard to put a boundary on the self.
Profoundly unsatisfactory as my description is, the overwhelming feeling I have when I ignore the senses and explore the internal sky is that life is interconnected, joyous and, yes, sustained by something greater than the individual's own biomechanical plumbing. The worst state of being I can imagine is to look within and find that connection broken. In that state must live the cynic and the psychopath. The second worse state would be the person who emerges from the experience and thinks it validates some cherished belief, whether religious or secular.
So over the years I gradually resolved my dichotomy. Experience, whether occasioned by contemplation, Knowledge or psychotropic drugs, demands acknowledgement. The universe is whole, and can be related to in many valid ways. Logic has its limits: it is not just a case of whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent, it is also that we have no place to stand outside the universe from which to make our objective judgements on it.
Maharaji, who is always capable of inspiring these metaphysical concerns, will henceforth take up less space in this chronicle, but he remained an, important part of our lives as we settled in to Brisbane. Indeed, by complete coincidence some months after we moved to Fig Tree Pocket the organisation bought Maharaji a house by the river in that suburb and made it his Australian residence.
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.