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.

Working the web: Cults

Creating a cult is a cakewalk, says Clint Witchalls. All you need are a few ideas, an audience and access to the net

Thursday February 13, 2003
The Guardian

I've always thought that having my own cult would be fantastic: all those beautiful women lining up to have my baby, because I'm the third son of Osiris. And if that's not enough, there's always the plump offshore bank account and the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to consider.

To create a cult is a cakewalk. What you have to do is cut random sentences out of books such as Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, the Bible, and The Tibetan book of the Dead; mix them up and paste them on to a piece of card.

And there you have the central thesis for your new religion. The less sense it makes, the better. Like the Shopping Channel, cults work on the premise that there's one born every minute. All that's left to do is to put your kooky ideas on a website, and get yourself down to Leicester Square - or any other place where there is always a captive audience - for a bit of conversion. The only thing that prevents me from starting a cult is the end bit. The bit where I have to drink cyanide-laced Kool Aid, or be burnt alive by an over-zealous Swat team. That doesn't appeal to me too much.

The golden age of cults was in the late 60s and early 70s. Nearly every self-respecting hippie had dabbled with a bit of wicca or shared a bowl of mung bean stew with a Hare Krishna devotee. Remember the Divine Light Mission? Remember the Moonies? Recovering members can be seen licking their wounds at www.ex-premie.org and www.xmoonies.com, respectively.

Nowadays, cults are more low key - you don't want to court publicity when you're making a batch of sarin in your Tokyo basement. It's easy to be fooled into thinking that cults had ceased to exist. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when Brigitte Boisselier, the chief executive of Clonaid, claimed that the company had cloned the first human.

Clonaid was set up by Claude Vorilhon, founder of the Raelian cult. His mission came to him after he met a bearded alien on top of a mountain in France. He had bunked off work. The alien told him _ well, I won't spoil it for you. Visit www.rael.org to get the full story. It must be noted that Monsieur Vorilhon, an ex-sports writer, had previously boasted about his ability to generate free publicity.

The other great ex-sports journalist and master of publicity is our very own David Icke. Although Icke doesn't officially run a cult, he does have quite a band of followers who subscribe to his theory that the world is run by alien lizard people. At the beginning of this year, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland said that if all light could be viewed at once, it would look turquoise. Icke retorted that he knew this already: that's precisely why he's been wearing a turquoise shell-suit since 1991, because it brings him nearer to God. The former BBC presenter's home page quotes Alice in Wonderland: "Dear, dear! How queer everything is today!" For more queer ramblings, watch Icke's show Headf**k on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Another master publicist was L Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. Scientology is meant to help clear people of unhappiness. "L" is long dead, but Scientology is very much alive. It's well known that Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley have all become members, but did you know that Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, is a Scientologist, too?

While rifling through the Ross Institute's database of cults, I was surprised to note that many of the cults I thought had gone into liquidation or migrated to Mars were still thriving. Didn't the Heaven's Day cult members "shed their earthly containers to catch a ride on the Hale-Bopp Comet" in 1997?

Apparently not. A couple of the surviving members have been busy digitising about 20 hours of video material, taken when the majority of the group were still in the here and now. The stragglers plan to join their mates in the Kingdom of Heaven. And if you, too, are interested in graduating from Human Evolutionary Level, you may want to order the free set of CD Roms from www.heavensgate.com.

If you need a baloney antidote after all that, visit The Skeptics Society, run by Dr Nick Gerlich.

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.