Meditation

When Prem Rawat, or Maharaji ("the Ultimate Ruler") as he called himself or Guru Maharaj Ji as he was called, first came to the West, he spruiked his Knowledge as the method to achieve God realization through his four empowered techniques of meditation. However, there was a reason his organisation was called Divine Light Mission and that was the primary importance of the Divine Light.

Meditation is basically boring: silently repeating a mantra or chanting interminably, concentrating on your breathing, trying to solve an insoluble koan … boring. But Divine Light - "brighter than a thousand suns" - was touted as being spectacular, colourful, intense and exciting. This sounded like a good chance to see a divine light show and maybe if you'd been reincarnated as a particularly saintly soul and diligently applied yourself to squeezing your eyeballs you could even one day see the guru himself, the Lord of the Universe, inside that divine light, imprinted on your eyeballs permanently. Trying to display this inner reality was an obsession amongst DLM photographers who used a variety of techniques to portray the "Golden Donut."

Many of the more excitable creatives among the early followers of Rawat claimed to see this brilliant Divine Light (especially if they squeezed very hard) until in 1987 he began a series of "Rejoice events," re-educational seminars in which he taught the remaining Western premies altered meditation techniques, cut the hours of meditation in half and told them that they had taken on Indian ideas instead of the real practise of Knowledge, which they could now incorporate properly into their lives.

Prem Rawat's senior disciple, the long-term number one devotee, the former Mahatma Gurucharanand, explained the new interpretation in the Passages video: "I remember when Maharaji started having these er Rejoice programs and uh giving people Knowledge reviews that was the time he began really talking about the simplicity and that stillness inside. So one person said "Oh Maharaji, I want to thank you so much that today you made something so clear to me. My friend and my brother always used to tell to me they would see big light and they would hear celestial music and taste nectar and this and that but I would feel only that peace, that calmness inside. And I would always feel bad that was wrong with me that I don't have these thundering experiences but today you made it clear that's very calming and quiet experience." They were now taught that the big thundering of Light and Divine Music and tasting of Nectar they had been told of in the 70's, and that they assumed each other had been experiencing, was a mistake.

The Myth of Maharaji's Meditation