Don Johnson was mentioned 3 times in official Divine Light Mission/Élan Vital publications:
There is no doubt he was an high-ranking official of Prem Rawat's Organisations
He has written 6 memoires about his life as a premie of Prem Rawat's and his mature understanding of Rawat:
1st Memoire, July 6th 2020 How I Reclaimed My Life after 10 Years in a Cult
2nd Memoire, April 11th 2023 My Ex Spiritual Teacher Is A Fraud
3rd memoire, April 26th, 2023 The Importance of Leaving Things Behind
4th memoire, August 20th, 2023 While You Were Dedicating Your Life to Prem Rawat
Here's What He Was Doing Behind the Curtain
5th memoire Why I Turned My Back On Prem Rawat
Reviews of Don Johnson's articles
by dedicated followers of Prem Rawat's
Why an Insider Left the Prem Rawat Cult
Hi everybody, thanks for joining me. I want to apologize first for a couple of things. The lighting's not great in this room.
I'm in Spain in a condo, and so I'm dealing with what I've got. It is what it is. I'll do my best.
And I want to share, first of all, why am I doing this? There's a couple of reasons, actually three reasons. When I first started writing about my journey with Prem Rawat in and out of the cult, some people reached out to people that I know and said, what the heck happened to this guy? He was so committed and so deep in the whole thing. And so I want to explain.
I want to explain the process that I went through because it wasn't just random. It wasn't just like I woke up one day and just decided to go renegade and crazy. So I want to explain that.
And by doing that, I hope it can be helpful to anyone that has been in a cult, is in a cult, is thinking of leaving a cult, just to understand that you're not alone, of course, and the difficulties of unraveling are many, and the challenges are many, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, relationship-wise, et cetera. So maybe my story might be able to help you, possibly. And third, for anyone not familiar with Prem Rawat, or anyone who maybe has never done any research about him, I'd like to share a few of the key pieces that I have read or watched over the years that help define his true character.
Eyewitnesses, people close to him. I have my own bits of experience with him. And that may help you understand, if you don't know, what you don't see, because what you see in his presentations and his speeches and so on is one thing.
What happens when he's off-camera is completely a different thing. And that is well-hidden, well-documented, and it's well-hidden, and so on. So those are the reasons that I'm doing this.
And I've got some notes down here, and I'm also gonna do one thing that I haven't done before, which is I wanna read a few of the key pieces that are published online, that have been in the public domain for many, many years. And when I read these, it might take 10 minutes or so. And if you're familiar with these pieces, then feel free to maybe skip to the end, because I've got some closing remarks that might be of interest to you.
So that's the format for today. So let's get started. So why did I start writing? Why did I start to speak out against Prem Rawat? Here's my story in a nutshell.
So I was involved, as many of you know who know me, from the early 70s. And I got involved because of a couple reasons. One, the main reason was I wanted to know more about my inner world.
And Prem Rawat at the time was certainly speaking about revealing that. And there was also a cultural phenomenon at the time about peace, about bringing world peace. The Vietnam War was still, it was still existing, it was winding down.
I was committed to doing my best to create a peaceful world. So that bandwagon, that bandwagon of bringing world peace was also attractive, sort of the outer manifestation, if you will. So I was intrigued, and I received the Knowledge and I was in college.
I went back, I practiced, and there was something there. I was, it was something, there was something very calming and peaceful about it as I began my initial practice of going within. So I got, I said to myself, you know what? I want to find out more about this.
And I want to find out about him. I want to be part of the movement because there was something very attractive to me about it. I felt very drawn to it.
So I got involved. And my journey took me to many different places, to Boston, to Denver, to Atlanta, to Philadelphia, all over the place. And I was interested, I kept getting offered positions within Divine Light Mission.
Be a coordinator, be this, be that. And it was a like-minded group of people. And I got, I believed, I wanted to believe that he was special.
Everybody around him was saying he was special. I wasn't exactly sure who he was, but because of the inner experience and because of how loving and wonderful it was to be part of a tribe, that was also psychologically super important because you're with like-minded people that share the same values, share the same beliefs. And I'm insulated in that.
I'm really deep into it. I wasn't somebody that just had a job and worked on the outside like many people did. Many of you that might be listening to this are like, hey, you know, I got the Knowledge.
I did my thing. And I was kind of at a distance. And great, you know, you had a completely different experience than I did because I made the choice of moving into the ashram.
And that was not because I wanted to be a monk. That was because I wanted to work for Divine Light Mission. And that was my decision, you know, to do that.
And the, you know, the ashrams were created and really were a support system to fund the activities of Prem Rawat at the time. And there were thousands of people all over the world that were pooling their money, giving their money. And it was creating, you know, a foundation, you know, for him to live and to carry on his, you know, travels and teachings and so on.
So, but interestingly, a sidebar is in India, the ashram life is completely different from what was established in America. Ashrams weren't a lifelong commitment. Oftentimes a student went to an ashram.
They lived with a Master. It was part of a much bigger journey of learn and then go out into society and have a job or have a family or do whatever you do. It was one stop along the way, but that's not the way it was presented or that's not the way it existed in America anyway, or in the UK or anywhere.
When you joined the ashram, that was like, you're committed, like for life, at least that was the belief. So the ashrams became a very insular place. And in many cases, they were places where people escaped and took refuge and hid from things.
And in other cases, you know, people were there and just, you know, living their life and enjoying it and contributing and having a great time. Look, I had a great time in the ashram. I had a lot of, I met a lot of beautiful people, some of which are my friends today, although none of them talk to me, that used to be close to me, except maybe one or two.
But there's dozens that knew me that are, I still believe are close to Prem Rawat. They don't wanna have anything to do with me because my beliefs now are different. Okay, it's fine, I get it.
We were bonded because we had similar beliefs and we reinforced each other and we were worshiping Prem Rawat. So there was a lot of common ground. So that's the indoctrination for me, by the way.
I noticed from the writings that I, I kept journals from the time I was in late high school, college, and I kept them as I followed Prem Rawat on. And I have probably dozens and dozens and dozens of letters that I wrote to my parents when I was in the ashram. And within a few months of listening to satsang in the evenings, particularly up when I was in Boston, we would go to a satsang hall at MIT and I would sit there and I would hear these people get up and speak.
And within a very short period of time, I drank the Kool-Aid. I don't know if I believed he was Lord of the Universe or the second coming, but I had, I wanted to believe. When I look back on it, I think, was that the Christian kind of influence that was like, even though I dropped out of church when I was 12, was that the indoctrination about the second coming? Because I sure wanted to believe that he was the second coming.
And I looked for data points and reasons why he might be. And so did lots of other people. So, you know, I followed the crumbs and I listened to people that were close to him.
I mean, they seem completely intoxicated and blissed out and raving about him. Who was I? I was just some guy, you know? I came along and here I am. And I'm pretty distant.
But what happened was, 1977, I was invited to be an instructor. I was in Philadelphia at the time. I was the community coordinator.
And I went out to lunch with a dear friend, pretty in Philadelphia, a well-known guy, who I loved and still do. He's still there with his wife. And he told me, as we were having lunch at a little restaurant in Ballykinwood, he told me, I don't know why, that Prem Rawat was heavily drinking and had been doing heavily drinking out in the Denver, Malibu residences, whatever.
I took it in and then, as I played it back in my mind, days later, weeks later, I just was like, didn't make sense to me. So if he's enlightened and he is the source of love and the, well, Lord of the universe, some people would call him, the Perfect Master, the one, there was something that just didn't, I couldn't connect the dots there. So now I go out to Malibu as an instructor.
I'm sitting in this little, this premie house in Trancas Canyon, not far from the residence, with a whole bunch of other people. And we're being prepared to be instructors, which basically all it was was John Dale, that's another story, Alvaro, other people. We'd get up and give each other satsang.
That was it. We saw him, Maharaji, you saw Prem Rawat once, maybe twice. So I'm sitting there and it's going through my mind.
What about this? What about this? It doesn't make sense to me. I was struggling with it. Anyway, I pushed it aside because I thought, well, there must be something wrong with me.
Nobody else seems to care. Or maybe they do, but they don't say anything because nobody really said much personal at that time. Everybody kept their own stuff completely to themselves.
So I didn't say much. I just said, you know what, Don? Maybe this is your challenge, your test, whatever it might be. You're an instructor now, boom, you gotta go out and do your thing.
Boom, off I go. And I start touring around the world for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I'm still, this thing just keeps coming up.
It's like my intuition, there was something there. This is what I learned later. I completely squashed my intuition.
I didn't listen to it and I'll come back to that later. So at some point, and I've written about this, so I'm not gonna belabor it, but I think in 1978 at the large festival in Tucson, there was an opportunity that came for the instructors. If you wanna have a one-on-one with Prem Rawat, raise your hand and we can set it up.
Okay, I raised my hand. I said, this thing's boiling. I said, I gotta get this out.
So my turn came, I walked in the room. There he is, there I am. I walk up to him and I sit down, I bow, and I say, I say, Maharaji, I said, I hear that you drink.
He couldn't even say you, I just said, like in the third person. I was so intimidated, you know? First thing he said was, who told you? That was what he wanted to know. Who ratted me out? I wasn't gonna tell him who, I just said a Premie in Philadelphia and that was that.
Then he went on to give me a little lecture about my mind, about how it might be a test and et cetera. At this point, I don't remember much more, my mind was swirling. I did my part, I just wanted to get it out, I wanted to speak what was there and see if I could find a little bit more peace.
I walked out of there, I didn't find more peace necessarily, but I did find some resolution that I said what was bothering me. Did it go away? Not particularly. So I went back on tour and then a short time later, Michael Dettmers, who some of you may not know, Michael Dettmers worked with Prem Rawat for about 15 years.
He took over when Bob Mishler was fired and Dettmers became his right hand man. His fixer, his legal and financial advisor and so on. So Michael, for whatever reason, asked me if I would be the president of Elan Vital.
Well, it wasn't something you said no to. So the next thing I know, I'm in Miami and I'm living in a house on Miami Beach with a bunch of other people. We all work in the office of Guru Maharaji in a small office on Miami Beach.
And so at that point now, one of my dreams was I wanna get as closely involved, this goes back to 1972 and now it's 1980, 1981, I wanna get to, I wanna be as close to the action as possible. That was what I just said to myself. I didn't know if it would happen or not.
So now here I am and I'm reporting to Michael Dettmers who's Prem Rawat's right hand man. Michael Donner is around, other people around and we're working on programs and finances and I'm helping to co-manage the office, which is full of people that are doing his books and doing aviation and all of the kinds of things. So I'm feeling like, well, I'm sort of on the outer side of the inner circle, because the inner circle would be people at the residence, the quote, X-rated premies who are able to see what it's really like behind the curtain.
And they're sworn to secrecy, they can't say anything. If they did, they'd be fired. So there's this environment that gets created.
It's like, well, if you're closer, then you're going to get more action and that sort of thing. So I'm doing my thing and I'm feeling pretty good about life at this point. And I pushed this issue of his, this hypocrisy that I felt, this something not right, I just pushed it aside because I was living a pretty good life then.
I had things that lots of ashram premies did not have because of my position as the president of Ilan Vidal, which is more like a figurehead position than anything else. So I continued in that and then that was when the 707 was getting retrofitted. And I would get up and give speeches at the theater in Miami every couple months or what have you and raise money.
Money would come in, cash, suitcases, briefcases of cash. And I'd be in a Miami airport and I'd receive that from the different regions. And then I would turn that over to someone in the office, financial person.
And I don't know what happened after that. I have no idea. But literally it was over half a million dollars in cash, multiple times, bring brought in to finance this project of retrofitting the 707 with all the kinds of things that were in there.
Golden toilet seats, all kinds of expensive items that premies worked their butts off for months and months and months to retrofit this plane. Plane didn't last long, got sold quickly thereafter. It's another story.
Anyway, the point of it is that I pushed aside these doubts and then there was the big reorg, Prem Rawat moved back, moved to Malibu from Miami. I was done. I was given my walking papers along with other people and now I'm on my own.
And so I'm now basically building my family and find a, I'm not building my family at that point. I'm trying to just get a job. I was dead broke.
And the most important thing was I got to survive. I got to make money. So then that period of time from 85 to about 2000, moved to Philadelphia, started a family, my career in leadership development and sales and consulting and so on.
Scrambling to make ends meet for many, many years and feeling a lot of pressure. My interest in Prem Rawat was dwindling at that time. I hadn't completely disconnected.
I got involved in some of the local activities in the Philly community from the 90s into the late 90s. But I wasn't real actively involved because I had much more, I had bigger things to do. I had my two children and my wife at the time, my career.
I was just trying to keep my head above water. So all of that to say that in around 2000, 2001, when Michael Dettmers spoke out and posted the things on the ex-PREMIE website, I read some of those things and I think my mind was pretty much blown probably. And it was probably like, wow, this was really happening.
This was happening during a time I was in Miami. I didn't know about it. And so I think my head spun around a little bit.
I just like, I don't really know what to do with this, but I did make a decision. I thought, you know what? I'm done with telling people about Prem Rawat and that he can be the Perfect Master. I said, I'm just done with it.
I'm not gonna do it anymore because I don't trust the whole thing completely. So, but I hadn't fully let go because I was still kind of almost like semi-denial, like, okay. And then I thought, well, then I created this sort of rationale, which was how about if I say to myself, he's flawed, but there's still something fabulous here.
And that was a way for me to say, I don't wanna just flush my identity completely down the toilet because from the time I received Knowledge, I believed that this was my path, undoubtedly, that I was meant for this, that somehow, and this is where ego comes in, somehow I'm a little special because I stumbled into this guru who might be the second coming of Jesus Christ. And I'm now one of his devotees. I'm a follower.
I'm on the inside. I'm on the fast track. So there's also some spiritual ego, I think that crept into this thing along the way.
And I also had to understand and figure out like, well, wait a second. I believe the universe moved the things in my life, orchestrated things during that time when I was in college so that I could hear about Prem Rawat. Everything in my life coalesced.
That means it must be the right thing. There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with it because everything coalesced to bring me to that threshold. I didn't know how to unpack that.
I really didn't. I really struggled with that. So I just let it sit.
And that's why I didn't do much. And then I thought, you know, okay. So one thing I could do, I could continue my practice of Knowledge.
Well, yes, but I'm gonna do it my own way. I'm not gonna just follow the principles exactly the way that he taught it because I just don't want to anymore. I mean, can I really sit there with my elbows up in the air for 15 minutes with my thumbs in my ears? I was never good at that anyway.
But you know, so that just didn't work for me. So I said, you know what? I will continue to practice the fine art of going within because for me, I got something from it. I felt centered.
I felt peaceful. I felt a lot of energy. And then I just, I realized, well, wait a second.
They're not his techniques anyway. I knew that. These techniques are ancient.
He may have put his stamp on them, but they're not his. So just because I use some of them doesn't mean I'm following him. So I said, you know what? I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do my thing.
And then I went back in the 2006, eight, nine, whatever. And I went back and I did another deep dive on what Dettmers said and what Donner said on the X-Premies side. And I paid attention and I read more.
And the more I read, the more I accepted. And I thought, oh my God, I got completely fooled. So did Dettmerss.
So did a lot of smart people. And I have a lot of friends that are X-Premies now. And a lot of these people that I know are very smart people, very intelligent.
They were in their twenties, just like I was. And we were hopeful. We were trusting.
We wanted to believe, you know? We wanted to be part of something unique and special. So maybe we overlooked a few things in our hope for a better world and our trust in people, particularly in Prem Rawat. I trusted him.
Turns out he was faking it. So I'll get to that in a minute. So my disengagement, as you can see from what I'm saying, was a slow process, full disengagement.
So I drifted, drifted, drifted. And then the more that I let go of my beliefs that I hoped were true, that was the door opener so that I could actually accept without rejecting, without saying, oh, it's that X-Premies website. It's like a porn site for spirituality kind of thing.
I don't want to go there because it's full of nonsense. Well, what I started to understand was if I looked for patterns and themes in Prem Rawat's behavior from various points of view, I can kind of triangulate it with my own intuition and my own experience and come to my own conclusion. I don't have to believe one person, but when you hear multiple people saying the same thing, well, there you go.
And so that continued to happen. And then I think another way for me, it's not the same for everyone, but given my inclination to write, when I started writing, I decided to write an article in around 2020, 2021 on medium and just the article was my journey in and out of the Prem Rawat cult, how I reclaimed my life, blah, blah, blah. And as I wrote that article, it really helped me kind of cathartically understand the process that I went through and make peace with it all.
And I found as I wrote the article that if I was angry, writing the article dissolved the anger and I reached a point of acceptance. Like I have to accept what happened to me. I can't change it.
I can't change the 10 years that I gave away in the ashram. I learned a lot. I traveled all over the world.
I had amazing experiences and I suffered too along the way, but I have to look for what's the good that I can take from this. And that's the way that I did look at my life. I look for what's the good stuff that I can take and how can I let what didn't serve me go.
So I wrote that article and I felt particularly free and I came out publicly and I put my position out there and there was pushback, of course, from various people. And then that's when Hans, Hans Rawat is Prem's eldest son. His wife reached out to me and I had a chat with her and I got to know her and I got to know Hans and I got to know what happened to him when he was a child, which is, I'm not gonna go into all that right now.
It's out in the public domain. And at that point I said, that's kind of the final straw for me. It helped me understand a couple of things.
And I just said, I'm gonna support getting that story out there. It's an important story. He has been, he's been gaslighted about that story.
He's been silenced over the course of time, even when he was younger. So it's really a tragic, it's a tragic tale. And as I began to sort all that out, I also began to realize that the story of Prem Rawat is also a tragic tale.
He was a little kid. He got shoved to the front by a group of zealous Mahatmas in India after his father died. He didn't ask to be the Perfect Master.
He was shoved to the front of the stage as a little kid, eight years old or whatever it might be. And as I read some of the early documentation about that, I think you'll begin to see too, that there was a lot of, there was a lot of things that he made choices when he was a little teenager into his 20s. And he could have made them differently, but he chose to go for the power.
He chose to go for the money. He chose to go for the control. He chose to be worship.
He enforced it. He pushed for it because it was lucrative. And that's a tragic story right there too.
So that kind of brings me up to the third part here, which is, so I've sort of up until this point, I've told my story, kind of the stages that I've gone through and sort of talking about the difficulty of completely unwinding because psychologically, I mean, when I, you know, for anybody that got involved in anything like a cult or a movement like that in your 20s, as we know from research, the brain is not really even fully formed. So it's very easy to become brainwashed, to become consumed by beliefs that you are living in and you don't even know that you have them until you separate them, separate from them. And you begin to see that they're actually just a belief.
So the next part is I'm gonna read some of the key things that made a difference for me. And maybe they made a difference for you if you've read them before. And if you don't know anything about Prem Rawat, then maybe this will give you a flavor for what many of the people who are now ex-followers found out.
And that's one of the reasons why they're an ex-follower. And believe me, there are a lot of ex-followers out there. And I know a lot of them and they're all telling me the same thing.
So here we go. So let's get into it. So let's see.
So Bob Mishler was the first, I think, president of Divine Light Mission in the US. And he was out there with Prem Rawat in the early 70s up to about 76. And he did a radio interview with the Denver Radio Show.
I think it was around 77, 78. Yeah, 79, sorry. And so people called in and asked questions.
Somebody called in and said, is Maharaji a rich man today? Bob says, I don't know what his personal wealth, personal worth is, but you would have to say that he is a rich man. That might sound a bit ambiguous, but his whole financial condition is a bit ambiguous because he has so much of his wealth being provided for him by the church because Divine Light Mission was set up as a 501c3, a church. And he went on to say he has a great deal of income that comes to him in the tax-free form of gifts from his followers.
How he uses that? Well, when I was there, he was spending it. It was amazing how much money he could spend. Now, another statement he made.
Well, I essentially saw that the guru wasn't what he was purported to be. In fact, not only was he not God or divine in any way, he wasn't really even capable of guiding his followers. He didn't know enough about the meditation himself really to be able to even instruct the disciples that were teaching meditation on his behalf when critical questions came up.
Wow. Even though he was supposedly revealing the means to perfect peace to all of his following, he himself had tremendous problems of anxiety, which he combated with alcohol. It even developed into a high blood pressure condition caused by essential hypertension, which is a form of internalizing anxiety.
So here was a man who was supposedly revealing perfect peace to everyone else, and I figured he couldn't even guide his own life let alone guide others. There you go. Caller number 17, it says.
In other words, you were his confidant, Bob Mishler. Yes, he literally used to cry on my shoulder. I remember he was a boy, he was like 15, 16 years old.
Unlike what he advocates, he is not capable of dealing with it by means of meditation, the meditation that he's supposed to teach, right? He ends up drinking excessively in order to cope with the stress. It was very sad to see him drinking himself into a stupor day after day. Okay, it goes on.
I had persuaded him to see that he was going to lose his popularity and ability to do any good at all in this country if he became a cult leader. If he continued to allow his devotees to believe that he was God, that was inevitable. He agreed and we started deprogramming our own membership, telling them to see Maharaji as only a human being who had a great concern for humanity.
In fact, he went along with this image change for about half a year. Then, when he saw that he wouldn't have the same kind of ascribed status that he had as the guru being God, he suddenly realized he wouldn't have the same control over people. He started worrying about what was gonna happen to him in terms of his, you guessed it, finances.
I think the self-doubt was there all along. At that point, he got out the picture of his father and put it up on the wall and he started worshiping it the way his devotees worshiped the pictures of him. That really made me feel sorry for him.
Okay, let's go to a few things from Michael Dettmers. Michael Dettmers was, as I mentioned before, his right-hand man. He said on the forum in 2000, and it was posted again in 2002, Maharaji made it very clear that drinking was not something that the ashram premies could do, so no one could argue then, why would he perpetuate these rules if they weren't good for everyone? That's the hypocrisy issue, number one.
Number two, my experience is, and he was there all the time, that Maharaji didn't drink moderately. Now, I don't have my experience of alcoholism either personally or in my family, so I didn't have any reference point at the time to know if it was moderate or not, but it just seemed like he could polish off five or six cognacs in an evening and get a little bit inebriated, not dead drunk, and sometimes he would get roaring drunk. In any case, he drank every day.
Question to Dettmers, over a period of how many years? MD, Michael Dettmers, all the time I knew, which was 15 years. That's a lot of drinking for a man of peace, for a so-called guru, don't you think? I think so. Let's be clear about this question of morality, Dettmers says.
I don't personally have a problem with anyone who drinks or gets stoned or smokes. His behavior is hypocritical because it contradicted what he preached for so long. That's where it becomes an ethical dilemma.
The second thing is when a person drinks to excess and as a consequence, doesn't exercise good judgment. Dettmers went on, and I'm gonna read this here, to describe a few situations where there was excess drinking and poor judgment on behalf of Prem Rawat that could have caused injury to him and his family, et cetera, so let's go on to another thing. Does Maharajiever blame others for mistakes that are clearly his? Michael Dettmers, all the time.
He does not take responsibility for any of his decisions. He would always look for someone to blame if things didn't go the way that he would like them to go and from that, I've learned that it's typical alcoholic behavior. Okay, let's get to his misogyny and all this other stuff just briefly.
Dettmers, the title of this section is Dettmers arranging liaisons with premie women. Beginning in 1985, Maharaji began a series of affairs with women who were premies. His move in this direction was prompted by his marriage difficulties in 1984.
Although he and Marilyn came to some understanding and resolution over their problems, I do not know if part of that resolution included an agreement that he would be free to engage in extramarital affairs. I know that from Maharaji's perspective, Marilyn was certainly not free to engage in extramarital affairs. At the time, Maharaji and I were particularly close and he told me of his desires to experience other women.
I was not shocked by this desire nor did I have a negative assessment about it. In fact, I thought it might put him more in touch with his humanity, which could only be a positive development as far as I was concerned. However, I strongly advised him not to get involved with premies.
To me, this could potentially be trouble for him and create difficulties for the women as well. Instead, I suggested that he engage the services of a professional escort and I offered to make the arrangements for him. At first, he seemed open to the idea but soon after, he decided against it.
He told me that there was a particular premie woman he had in mind and he asked me to arrange that they meet, which I did. Soon thereafter, he asked me to arrange a meeting with another woman. In the meantime, the first person was left high and dry wondering what was going on.
He cut off communication with her and her only recourse was to contact me. I now found myself in unpleasant circumstances of dealing with the situations he created by his lust and careless disregard for the hurt and confusion it inflicted on his victims. After three such incidents, I told him that his reckless behavior was backfiring and that I did not have time to take care of the negative consequences of it.
Okay, it produced. He responded that by agreeing that I had more important things to handle for him other than procuring women and he would now take care of that himself, meaning he simply delegated the task to someone who was more amenable to it. He continued to have numerous affairs of which I'm aware and it was not too long thereafter that he began to have a more serious affair with Monica Lewis that according to my sources, continues to this day.
That's his longtime mistress that's been well documented. Okay, I've got one more thing to read and it's gonna take a few minutes, but I think it's important because I think it highlights the very human and personal side of what I would call spiritual fraud that Prem Rawat has inflicted upon many people. This is one person's story, but I think it captures the poignancy of disappointment when you give your life and your heart and your effort and your time and your whole being to something and then you find out that it was not true.
It's like being ripped off by a lover. So let me read this. So this was, again, it's on the X Forum website and I've also pulled it off and I pulled a lot of these things that I've just read.
I put them on a separate website that is easy to access if you or someone wants to read more about this. So this comes from a person who was one of his chauffeurs. I believe he was in the UK.
His online name was Jasper. I don't know his real name, but this person died some years ago. So here's what he wrote.
The plane pulled to a stop and sat there for several minutes. Nothing happened. Something wasn't right.
Usually things moved very quickly when he arrived. More long minutes passed. Finally, the door slowly opened and the co-pilot released the stairs.
They folded down with the last step resting on a red carpet on the tarmac. Again, nothing else happened. I stared impatiently at the open door and the waiting stairs for several more minutes.
Then suddenly Monica Lewis, his traveling companion for this trip, appeared and paused at the top of the stairway. She stood there briefly, adjusting her skirt and tight low-cut blouse with her blonde hair tossed by the breeze. She waltzed down each step, full-figured, self-assured towards the limo that awaited off to the side for the guests.
She disappeared inside the limo and then it slowly pulled away. More long minutes passed, 10 and 20. A full half hour went by.
It felt like forever. My eyes remained fixated on that open door. Finally, there he was, standing at the top of the stairs, tightly gripping the handrails on either side of the landing, but something wasn't right.
Patrick, his valet, stood close behind and seemed to coax him to move forward and down the stairs. I wondered solemnly and of grave concern if my Master was all right. Never had I seen him look so small and weak.
He proceeded, hunched forward, with Patrick bringing up the rear to stabilize each step. As they approached the car door, I held open and with a wave of my hand guided him towards the back seat. He stumbled a bit, bumped into me, and then brushed past as he nearly fell into place and slid halfway over to the middle.
Patrick quickly closed the door behind him and jumped into the passenger seat. I returned to my driver's position and with one last safety check, I locked the doors, put the car in gear, squeezed my foot on the gas pedal, and headed towards the exit. After passing through the security gate, I finally offered a warm, friendly greeting, then paused, anxious for his reply.
Silence. Patrick, with his head deliberately turned away from me, stared quietly out the window at the moving pavement. He looked tense and concerned.
More silence. I hesitated to speak another word and then glanced in the rear view mirror to get a brief look at my Master. He sat slumped slightly forward, bracing himself with both hands at his sides with his open palms pressing hard on the seat.
He was blankly looking at the floor and seat backs in front of him and seemed oblivious to his location or surroundings. As I began to vaguely understand what was happening, it became increasingly more difficult to process the situation. Part of me began to comprehend the obvious.
My Master, Maharaji, Lord of the Universe, who I fully believed was God himself in a physical body, was sitting there thoroughly drunk in the back seat of my car. But at the same time that my explanation was simply unacceptable, no matter how true it might be, it just seemed impossible, or at least I didn't want to believe it. That conclusion completely challenged the entire foundation of my beliefs.
So I tried to mentally fabricate an alternative explanation while at the same time trying not to think about it at all. Oh, this sounds so familiar to me. That's my comment.
I desperately needed to engage my mind and come to terms with what was happening. But all my years of conditioning and training were screaming at me not to. I knew that it would be inappropriate to say anything or even ask what was wrong.
If he was that drunk, I was certain I'd be expected to just overlook it and pretend not to notice. I was certain I'd be expected, it wasn't any of my business. And besides, he could do whatever he wanted without ever having to explain himself to any of us mere mortals.
If he needed any help, surely Patrick would have said something. So I cautiously didn't mutter another word while safely and smoothly driving the car. The silence thickened.
Then suddenly a garbled cackling sound came from the backseat. He was muttering to himself, trying to formulate some kind of verbal expression. But then out of nowhere, he simply began to laugh out loud.
The hollow sound of that laugh against the sullen quiet background inside the car rang through the air. But it wasn't the kind of laugh that made others want to join in. It wasn't a hearty ha-ha kind of a laugh or even a laugh that had any reference to something truly funny.
It was a twisted, resentful, superior, haughty kind of laugh. He wasn't really laughing about anything. He was laughing at something or someone.
I glanced at him again through the rear view mirror. His eyes were glazed, red-faced, and he was mouthing soundless words while laughing hysterically, absorbed in his own private joke. He sat there on the edge of the seat, giddy with self-delight, laughing senselessly, but only to himself.
Part of me had begun to look at things differently. I was haunted by that hollow but piercing laugh. At the same time and over 30 years of training, the conditioned part of myself was full of denial, determined to neutralize this confusion and return to a state of focused devotion.
I was torn apart, but tried not to feel or admit it. But I had to know more about the strange side of my Master I had followed for most of my life. Was he a Master of perfection, as I fully hoped and believed him to be? Or was he a Master of deception with a bad drinking problem? The more I looked at it, the more disturbed I became.
I realized that he was neither of those Masters, but he was definitely a drunk. And from that realization, a deeper pain began to settle in as I slowly understood the truth of the situation. He was really just a Master of nothing at all, and I had simply been a fool to follow him.
I don't know. I don't know if anything can say it better than that. The disappointment of someone who completely invested themself in someone who claimed to be God in a human body, and then they find out later that the emperor has no clothes, that the Wizard of Oz is just this little man behind a screen.
So, I don't know, man. That's a lot for me to even read that again. It's like I'm emotionally moved.
And I wanna bring this to a conclusion because we've been going now for 47 minutes or so. And there's more to say. I haven't even gotten to a few other things, but in the interest of time, I wanna wrap it up here and just say that, yeah, so he pretended in the pursuit of power and greed to be more than he was.
He was a figurehead. He was put on the stage. He was a figurehead.
He played the role, and people can say what they want. Oh, but he gave inspiring speeches and so on and so forth. Listen, you can learn to do that just through practice.
You can. Sure, he got good at it. He did it all the time, but that doesn't mean that the experience of Knowledge has anything to do with him.
If you have an experience of Knowledge within you, that's because you did the work. There's nothing to do with him. It's yours.
You earned it. If you have no experience of Knowledge, then it's probably because you never practiced meditation. And maybe you practice some other kind of meditation.
You don't call it Knowledge. You call it whatever. And you have a beautiful experience inside.
Well, that's because you put the effort in to calm yourself down, go within, use whatever techniques you have. You have that experience. So, yeah, we're in interesting times where we have all these so-called gurus falling by the wayside, left and right.
It's been happening for years. And I'm gonna have on Sarita Carroll, who I've had on before. She's a beautiful woman who was in the Osho cult as a child and was abused and had an unbelievable experience.
The Osho cult, Wild Wild World, it was on Netflix. I'm gonna have her back on with me. We're gonna have a conversation about our respective lives and cults.
And I'm gonna ask her about, now it's been a year since her book came out. She had a lot of pushback from Osho believers. When my book came out two years ago, I just wrote a book about my life experiences of living a life of trying to find peace and resolution.
Had nothing to do with Prem Rawat, so to speak. But when my book came out, there was an organized campaign to slander me. That's fine.
I could see that coming. But we're gonna both speak about what it's like to be whistleblowers and the fact that, yeah, it's not always a fun ride. But I'd like the world to know the truth about Prem Rawat because he continues to do his thing.
And I think people ought to know the truth, all the truth about him. So thank you for listening. And watching.
And if you want more information, I'll put a website in the bottom of this video. And love to hear your comments, pro or con. And I hope you're doing well.
I hope you have a wonderful day. And thank you again. And I'll see you again soon.
I'm D. Edwin Johnson. I also write on Medium as Don Johnson:
Connect with me here for updates on my soon-to-be-published book, Living a Conscious Life - A Thinking Person's Guide to Peace, Wholeness, and Freedom.