Joan Apter was one of Rawat's first Western devotees and was an extremely disturbed young woman. She has recounted the story "This Girl Will Die" of her time becoming a devotee of Prem Rawat (Maharaji) many times and it has changed significantly over the years.

She recounted it in the premiespeak of the time at the 50th birthday celebrations of Prem Rawat (Maharaji). She was also a star of the Elan Vital Passages video where she gave the most emotionally intense testimony.

Olivia Arias was a premie of Guru Maharaj Ji and working as a secretary at A&M music when she met George Harrison. They married in September, 1978.

She introduced the premie rock band, Jiva, to Harrison who signed them to his Dark Horse records where they released an album. She attended Rawat's festivals (according to premie gossip) in the late 1970's and was featured in the first "professional" Introductory Pamphlet created by Elan Vital in 1982. There has been no mention of her as a follower of Rawat's since then and Harrison, himself, had no connection to Rawat nor has she ever spoken of Rawat in public interviews.

I'm no expert on astrologers but it seems Jonathan Cainer is as famous an astrologer as one can be in Great Britain. He's featured in one of the tabloids, Hello magazine and has written a book called: Cosmic Ordering: How to Make Your Dreams Come True. Mr Cainer is a widower so it seems one must be very careful using this book. He does not include any links to Prem Rawat's site nor any quotes of his speeches on his own site www.cainer.com. Mr Cainer was outed as a devotee of Rawat's in a series of attacks by Francis Wheen in the the Guardian.

Charles Cameron, an early English premie and graduate of Oxford, created a significant amount of publicity for the young Lord of the Universe, Prem Rawat (Maharaji) or Guru Maharaj Ji as he called himself in the 1970's. He was the person who first "gave satsang" to Rennie Davis in a plane on a flight to Paris. He also wrote execrable poetry and edited the book, Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji? He had left Rawat by the mid 70's and went on to make a career on the fringes of the New Age. His later biographical information made no mention of his time as a devotee of Rawat's either through embarassment or because Rawat has no respect in New Age circles and admitting to following him would destroy Cameron's intellectual credibility.

Julie Collett, formerly an Initiator of Prem Rawat's "Knowledge", was the second devotee of Prem Rawat or Maharaji (then calling himself Guru Maharaj Ji) to return to Australia from overseas. She did not know of David Lovejoy in Sydney and she commenced proselytising in Melbourne. Her role can probably best be described as the "heart" of Divine Light Mission in Australia. Her satsangs were inspirational, devotional and often contained references to the "family" of followers and the love for each other engendered by practising the Knowledge.

Sophia Collier was a young premie who wrote a book, Soul Rush, about her childhood and experiences in Divine Light Mission. She was still inexperienced and without discrimination when she wrote it and the book is probably only of interest to people who were in DLM or those interested in cult life. She was intelligent, immature, foolish, pretentious and the book is as deeply flawed as the organisation was.

"As I discovered later, we were not the only ones for whom some alcohol was the festival's high point. Bob Mishler told me Maharaj Ji got "sloshed." ... "If Maharaj Ji wanted to run a little religion based on his father's teachings and he was able to find people to join, so what? That was his business, not mine."

The person who brought the most publicity to Guru Maharaj Ji (Prem Rawat) is Rennie Davis, the once famous anti-Vietnam war campaigner, one of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial defendants. He stars in the 'Lord of The Universe' and 'Mysterious Miracles, Aliens from Spaceship Earth'. He tirelessly and endlessly explained how the political and counter-cultural movements of the 60's were just the fore-runners for Prem Rawat's mission to bring Peace to the World. His very personal, public testimony of the incredible effects of Prem Rawat's Knowledge and his certainty in and devotion to Maharaji's divinity are unequalled and will never be equalled. In 1973 he told the New York Times that he now loved him. "I would cross the planet on my hands and knees to touch his toe." He did not specify which toe.

Michael Dettmers, ex Personal Assistant, Prem Rawat for 15 years

In early 2000 Jim Heller (real Name) a lawyer from Vancouver, and a person prominent in on-line criticism of Prem Rawat and his so-called "Knowledge" contacted Michael Dettmers former personal assistant to Prem Rawat and thereby began a process of debate that eventually had Dettmers publicly revealing much about Prem Rawat's life that was unknown to people who weren't part of Rawat's inner circle of devotees.

Michael Donner, ex vice-President, Divine Light Mission; ex-President, Divine Light Mission; ex-US National Executive Director, Divine Light Mission; ex-co-ordinator, Prem Rawat's personal staff; ex-instructor for the "techniques of Knowledge"; ex-brother and former anti-War activist.

my personal experience is that m has been drinking since i began in denver in 1973...told then by bob mishler that he was drinking daily...that is daily...since he arrived in america.

Mike Finch was one of the early British premies and a long term follower and sometime close associate of Prem Rawat's. His site may be tad philosophical for most though the introduction to Prem Rawat aka Maharaji and his articles about Prem Rawat are of more general interest. He is a moderator on The Prem Rawat Talk Forum, an informal internet chat group he originally contacted to support Rawat. His long-term partner, Gail Benton, was a loyal devotee of Maharaji for over 25 years and ex-instructor before seeing the light. In October, 2009 he published a book Without the Guru: How I took my life back after thirty years. The first chapter is available here. and his account of "receiving Knowledge" is here.

W. Timothy Gallwey was a small-time tennis coach and early follower of Prem Rawat whose book "The Inner Game of Tennis", published in 1974 at the height of the US "tennis boom" was a success and this led on to a career in writing and business seminars. The New York Review of Books:

"I ask Galloway how he had come to believe Maharaj Ji was God.
'When I first heard him my only approach was to say to myself, He's either the real thing or a con artist.' Well the first times I saw him he just did too bad a job as a con artist. A good con artist wouldn't wear a gold wrist watch or give such stupid answers. When I was staying with him in India I once asked him how much time I should spend on work and how much on meditation and he just said get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later, hardly a profound answer. I decided that if he was doing such a bad job of being a holy man he simply had to be genuine.'
'Did it ever occur to you that he might be a bad con man?' "

Professor Ron Geaves of Liverpool Hope University is the only academic of religion who has bothered to do any "research" or write any papers dealing with Prem Rawat for the past 20 years. This is because he is a fervent believer in Prem Rawat and his Knowledge and has been since 1969 as he testified in the Elan Vital video "Passages".

As a "premie" for over 35 years Ron has presumably sat in formal meditation over 10,000 times, bowed down before and kissed Rawat's feet ("Lotus Feet") scores or hundreds of times and listened to hundreds of his speeches. He has testified that, thanks to Prem Rawat, his own life "couldn't have been better" despite its problems. One would expect that this belief would affect any "research" Geaves has published on Rawat (Maharaji).

Jimmie Dale Gilmore is a country and western singer from Lubbock, Texas whose early career with the Flatlanders (more a legend than a band) was partly derailed by becoming a premie in the early 1970's. He returned to singing in the 1980's and after the usual travails of drugs and despondency has gone on to a succesful career and "cult following" and was nominated for a grammy in 2005.

While meditation is supposedly the cornerstone of Maharaji's teachings, Gilmore - like all Prem Rawat's followers - receive no personal guidance. "I had always thought I was doing something wrong; not wrong in the sense of evil, but just incorrectly. I spent many, many, many years with a sort of low-level guilt about not meditating right. I thought that I wasn't achieving the objective, but I didn't realize I had barely gotten started." In 1981, Gilmore left Denver and Maharaji and moved to Austin, Texas. Gilmore and the Flatlanders' "family" (including Butch Hancock another long term follower of Rawat) now study Buddhism under Tulku Thubten Rinpoche, a young Tibetan lama from the Nyingma lineage who lives in Berkeley, California. Like most people who have been involved with Prem Rawat (Maharaji) they have learnt to move on - better late than never!

Dr Robert A. Hallowitz was an early devotee of Prem Rawat (Maharaji) and received considerable positive press around the time of the Millenium '73 festival which according to Prem Rawat was the "most Holy and significant event in human history". At that time he was a 29-year-old neurophysiologist and researcher who believed that Rawat's "meditation techniques provide a way for man to control an imperfectly designed brain away from fear and stress and toward pure thought and inner peace."

In 1988 Gaithersburg MD physician, Robert A. Hallowitz lost his medical license following allegations that he had sex and used illegal drugs with several patients and portrayed himself as the "embodiment of God" on a mission to bring "light and love into the world" by fathering children.

Jos Lammers, ex-President Divine Light Mission, Holland and Director International Operations (Europe and Australia), International Headquarters, Divine Light Mission

Lammers has written a short memoire, in Dutch and English at www.verlatenwegen.info and available from Amazon in which he recounts his life as a university drop-out in 1970 taking too many drugs (he may disagree it was too many :-) and looking for the "meaning of life" who becomes a "premie" of Guru Maharaj Ji. He moves into the ashram where he discovers a talent for business and organisation that makes the Dutch DLM financially successful. So successful that he is called to Denver to join the international executive staff of DLM as Director International Operations (Europe and Australia). This was a position that was all "pretty unreal", involved in such vapourware as "International Program Development" but he recounts the travails and some of the humorous hypocrisies that the executives of DLM indulged in, the warmth and kindness of the premies and the cloistered opulent lifestyle and relentless shopping of Prem Rawat entertainingly. However the flight of followers from the ashrams and the financial hole that developed decided the executive staff that the only way for the organisation to survive was to cut Rawat's daily allowance from 500 US 1974 dollars a day ($185,00 pa worth far more now) in half. Rawat fired them all and told them "You know, it is not up to you to interfere with the life of the Perfect Master." Lammers had realised by then that his years of dedication had certainly not given him the peace he had sought and was promised and that he preferred "being fired." He returned to Holland penniless and shunned by premies and found that his family and society were far kinder than DLM and life was more rewarding without practising the meditation techniques and listening to and serving Prem Rawat.

David Lovejoy, ex-President Divine Light Mission, Australia and Great Britain, was the first premie to arrive in Australia from India in 1971 and immediately rented a house, opened a Divine Light Mission centre and sank into the maya of aimless dope and LSD "spirituality." Fortunately for Rawat, some less disreputable premies arrived and driven onward and upward by Faith Healy more and more doped-up young freaks and heads were attracted to the Lotus Feet. In every real sense, Lovejoy ended his time as a premie in 1976 though he took another couple of decades to realise it. He maintains an ambivalent attitude to Prem Rawat. While no longer considering him worthy of worship or devotion he publicly promotes a near-magical view of Rawat's past and personal powers in his book, Between Dark and Dark (formerly available from the Byron Bay Echo). This book has now been taken off the market due to the Lovejoy childrens' anger at the scurrilous and malignant things he had written about their mother.

Jagat Janani Shri Rajeshwari Mata Devi (Mata Ji), mother of Prem Rawat and wife of the prior "Perfect Master"

In 1975 she was so disgusted with Prem Rawat's drug abuse and general "playboy lifestyle" she disowned, disinherited and deposed him. Since that time Prem Rawat's following around the world has declined significantly as he immediately lost the 5 or 6 or more million Indian devotees he had been claiming to have. Until her death in November, 1991 she remained the benevolent mother figure of Manav Dharam the organisation headed by her eldest son, Satpal Maharaj, who continued the work of her husband, Hans Rawat, and maintained a powerful Congress Party political presence in Uttakharand. He has twice been a member of the Indian National Parliament (as of 2009).

Bob Mishler, ex-President of Divine Light Mission for 5 1/2 years. He was President of Divine Light Mission and Divine United Organisation International Director between 1972 and 1977. During those years, he acted in the capacity of Prem Rawat's number one right-hand man and later his confidante. He left DLM after complete disagreement with Rawat over his lifestyle and divinity. He was the first close associate to reveal Rawat's failure to use his own meditation to control his fears and habitual drunkeness. These disclosures about Rawat's discreditable, secret life were ??? by John Hand Jr, former vice-President of Divine Light Mission and in later years by Michael Dettmers, Michael Donner, Mike FInch, David Lovejoy among others. Mishler's character was attacked by Rawat's cronies as has been done for all of Rawat's critics.

Unfortunately Mishler and his wife died after the rescue helicopter that had picked him up after an apparent heart attack crashed.

Michael Nouri is a successful actor whose career was probably helped by his dark good looks and whose most well-known role was in the movie, Flashdance. He has been a follower of Prem Rawat since the early 1970's and starred as Jesus Christ in an epic production at the Millenium '73 festival, "the most holy and significant event in human history." Post 2000 he has had numerous TV roles as a handsome older man and in an ironic quirk of casting played in the same series, The O.C., as his guru's niece, Navi Rawat From the photos it appears that Nouri hasn't quite got the hang of this Divine Light meditation yet.

Linda Haldan Pascotto is a "trust fund baby" and has been a premie since the early 1970's. She has been the President of The Prem Rawat Foundation since its inception. She has singlehandedly disproved the single major doctrine of Rawat's religion that his followers do not have a belief in him but a true experience through meditating with the techniques of Knowledge he reveals that is its own validation and allows them an inner peace and certainty available to no other human beings alive today. According to Peace Is Possible, the hagiography Andrea Cagan was paid $60,000 to write by the Prem Rawat Foundation, Rawat established This foundation (TPRF) in November 2001 when he came up with the idea during a conversation with her, an active philanthropist and one of his long-time students.

Perfectly normal "People With Knowledge" about whom there is nothing notable enough to get onto this web page. The reality is that premies are basically quite average in the sense that no matter how long they've been a student of Rawat's and no matter how diligently they've followed his instructions they'll be indistinguishable in a group of their peers except they're nearly all in their late 50's. Check them out.

Brian Kitt aka Mahatma Saphlanand, the only Western Mahatma

The first known and acknowledged Western devotee of Rawat's was Brian Kitt, a flamboyant figure in the London psychedelic scene who hobnobbed with such luminaries as Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band and wished to become a sadhu (holy man). He went to India in 1968 and after the usual adventures and difficulties discovered a guru, in this case, Prem Rawat, and was soon converted. Brian was the "star" of the early Western devotees and became the only non-Indian "Mahatma" and he had an extremely important role in drawing others to Rawat and Divine Light Mission. He was the one who brought Rawat, Guru Maharaj Ji, to the notice of nearly all the early British devotees.

Satpal Maharaj (Bal Bhagwan Ji), eldest brother of Prem Rawat agreed with his mother and became the newly appointed Satguru. He "received Knowledge" from his father at the same time as Prem Rawat did. He and his mother were actively involved in organising and inspiring Divine Light Mission activities during it's phase of expansion in the West before public controversies over Prem Rawat's drug abuse and use of the cash-flow for personal luxury and poor managerial decisions stagnated the organisation. He has been the head of Divine Light Mission, India and Manav Dharam since 1975 and as Satpal Maharaj, he continued the work of his father, Hans Rawat, and maintained a powerful Congress Party political presence in Uttakharand. He has twice been a member of the Indian National Parliament (as of 2009).

Johnny Young is a disk-jockey on a Perth, Australia radio station and has had a successful and varied career in the Australian entertainment industry. He was a teen pop idol in Australian in the late 1960's but was most famous for hosting "Young Talent Time", a sentimental, mawkish children's variety show. In 1977 he met premies in Melbourne who had begun a home birthing clinic and he and his wife and good friends Ronnie Burns (another former teen pop idol) and his wife became premies. With his fame, wealth and media profile Young was an enormous asset to Rawat (Maharaji) in Australia, especially as he is universally considered to be a very nice guy. He arranged the only real press interview for Rawat since the Millenium fiasco but has done no publicity for Rawat since he lost his fortune.