Hippies In India find the young "Guru Maharaj Ji" aka Prem Rawat

"In the summer of 1971, Guru Maharaj Ji arrived for the first time in the Western world.

The sincere seekers of truth knew immediately that he was, in reality,
the dispeller of darkness and illusion and the revealer of Light."

Before the young guru's flight from the East to the West some foolhardy souls had already made the opposite journey in search of mystical wisdom, enlightenment and Afghani hashish. Those that washed up to Prem Rawat's young feet were not the most obvious chelas suitable to a life of austerity, discipline and celibate poverty but they were all he had.

It wasn't that we deliberately flouted these rules; we simply had no comprehension that there could be such things as rules, much less that they, could apply to us. Instead we passed the first few days walking along the canal bank to Hardwar and hanging out in chai houses, drinking in the local culture.

As Maharaji complained when He was still having ashram problems with "gerbage" in 1976:

It's just like bhang - y'know, everybody used to drink bhang in ashram in India. And all of a sudden they would get just … the eye would, the eyes would be glowing red, and you couldn't even talk to them. Y'know, they would be just … somewhere else, in their own little world, y'know, diving in some cove or something. And you walk right past by them and say: "Listen. You know what's happening?" Y'know? And people would just sit there and go to sleep, or do this (peace sign

It it was awful for the premies, it was even worse for Rawat himself. He had to endure the whining of the premies for years and years:

I remember that in 1971 premies went to India. And till now, I hear their horror-stories that they have to tell: diarrhoea, throwing-up, sick, heat-strokes, waking up all of a sudden and finding a rat about a foot long, crawling on top of them. No food, no good food, and all the things that premies have to tell.

Divine Light Mission wrote of the first Prem Nagr meditation retreat for Westerners. Guru Maharaj Ji's:

five month tour of Europe and North America attracted so much interest that he openly invited all Westerners to be guests of the Divine Light Mission in India during November and December, 1971. This enabled all who desired to attend a huge festival in New Delhi on November 8, 9, and 10, and later an even larger festival in Patna, Bihar on December 24 and 25. Both programs were arranged by Indian devotees to the honor and glory of Guru Maharaj Ji. Between the two programs, all were invited to stay at Prem Nagar Ashram - the "City of Love" - near Hardwar, an the banks of the Ganges Canal. The trip was planned to free people of cultural and environmental blocks and allow them to more completely absorb themselves in the pure realm of spirituality. A 747 Jumbo Jet was chartered from London, and in November hundreds of people from England, the Continent Canada, and the United States converged into India. The radical change in living conditions there produced a lot of sickness and much repressed negativity found its release - the trip proved to be a house-cleaning of body and spirit. The following pages contain the words of Guru Maharaj Ji and his mother Mata Ji, as they patiently guided and encouraged the struggling initiates in the unfolding of spiritual realization

One such "sincere seeker" of a higher spiritual caste (so he thought) was already disillusioned with the fledgling DLM when he accepted a ride to an Indian ashram. Instead of enlightenment he received dysentery, fever and intense boredom. He might not have been more spiritual than the others but he was certainly more astute:

As the car pulled away from the gate I looked up at the sign over the ashram gate that said Premnagar (City of Bliss). It sounded familiar and I had a sinking feeling. My worst suspicion was confirmed as I walked down the path to the ashram's front door. Fate had brought me once again to the feet of the child Guru I had last seen in London. He had just arrived on a jumbo jet with three hundred westerners he called "Premies." I would just have dinner and get an early start in the morning. The ashram, used to hosting only small groups of Indians, had no idea how to deal with that many people, especially westerners. The only running water was a single spigot and the toilets had stopped working. The field behind the ashram had become the latrine. In rural India, where toilets and privacy are unheard of, people are used to relieving themselves in public; but for westerners this was a shock that took a while to assimilate. Cooking was also done outside and flies swarmed happily back and forth from field to the food. Within twenty-four hours nearly everyone had dysentery. However, we were still expected to help prepare meals and sweep the temple grounds, which they called Karma Yoga.

In the morning I awoke with a burning fever. Having slept on the cement floor of the temple, I was powerless to avoid the darshan of Guru Maharajji. This time he sat in the midst of an ornately decorated altar on a throne several feet above the audience. It was just before Christmas and the Hindu shrine was decorated with twinkling, colored lights, which appealed to the westerners missing the holiday festivities at home. I was shocked to hear Maharajji boast, "Why are you thinking about Jesus? Forget about Him, because I am that same being here now." Instead of leaving in the morning as planned, I lay on the cement floor for days, burning with fever, and moving in and out of delirium. The Hindu Gods in their various peaceful and wrathful forms looked down on me from the shrine, gradually merging into a blur of flashing colored lights. Twice a day the child Guru gave darshan, ranting on and on about his greatness, and I began to wonder if, in the midst of this increasing sense of unreality, I had been carried off to one of the astral hells by the asuras (demons) depicted in pictures on the shrine. "The reason you are sick," a devotee said one day, looking down on me with obvious displeasure, "is because you still haven't accepted Guru Maharajji as God."