Dr Robert Hallowitz Robert Hallowitz Disgraced MD and Sex Guru

In the pre-Millenium rush to publicity, one premie MD impressed both the New York Times journalist Ted Morgan and the Rolling Stone journalist Richard Levine. Their comments about him stood out in what were otherwise nearly 100% critical articles. (Brian Kitt, the only western mahatma, Mahatma Param Saphlanand, also got a sympathetic press). Hallowitz told a New York Times reporter: "'I've come to the point where I know there is a Supreme Being and He is one with that 15-year-old boy.' Hallowitz is convinced that the guru's teaching is consistent with recent brain research, and that 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."

Hallowitz' "research" was the basis for the Divine Light Mission belief that Rawat's meditation directly influenced the pineal gland which controlled consciousness. This was nonsense but Hallowitz was considered one of the bright stars of Rawat's followers and was featured in the DLM film Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji? witnessing for Rawat and the Knowledge:

"To be able to go and experience personal Knowledge is such a uplifting experience but to be able to utilise it in one's everyday service whether they be a physician, whether be an artist, whether they be a clerk, whether they be a housemother does so much more for mankind to be able to utilise the Knowledge in the service of mankind."
Who Is Guru Mahearaj Ji?
Dr Robert Hallowitz Disgraced Physician
Dr Robert Hallowitz Disgraced Physician

Hallowitz had a medical practice with partner, Dr John Horton for some years as part of a small premie business community that included Premlata Natural Foods in Bethesda, Maryland. Prem Rawat gave agya that they "collaborate in a group practice which would hire premies, train them when possible and serve as the beginnings of a divine medical school. The facilities in Washington are modern, completely equipped and within a few blocks of the DUO offices". Horton discussed the practice and his collaboration with Hallowitz in an interview titled A Growing Awareness published in the Divine Times of October 1976.

Hallowitz and Horton Premie Collaborators

However, Dr Horton had no awareness that his partner was using Rawat's life as a model for his own and claiming that he was the "embodiment of God" on a mission to bring "light and love into the world" to control and have sex with some of his patients. Hallowitz' life did not continue as Rawat and Horton had hoped or Hallowitz had confidently claimed it would at the time of the interviews in late 1973. Instead once he realized Rawat and his so-called Knowledge were a scam, he decided to use the divine scam himself and he had a ready made gropu of patients to cheat and deceit. His career ended in disgrace with a conviction for sexual abuse and cultism and he lost his licence to practise medicine. Dr. Israel Weiner, the then chairman of the Board of Physician Quality Assurance commented "There is no medical condition which is improved by the patient seeing the genitals of the doctor." It is possible Hallowitz may have had something to do with the disappearance and possible murder of Nancy Lynn Jason. He told one victim "stories about people who had displeased him meeting untimely deaths."

Hallowitz was a regular dope smoker and may have been nothing more than a congenital fabulist. His "satsang" was nonsense and he told one of his victims he had a secret mission "bigger than the CIA." He said that he was committed to fathering many children by many "wives" and that "those that 'turned from him' would not regain their health" and he referred to the devil, whom he called "Lenny." Lenny? I didn't see that coming.

That makes at least two of Rawat's early respected devotees, Hallowitz and Rennie Davis who went on to become gurus in their own minds. Davis hasn't achieved the same notoriety as Hallowitz but he has taken over Rawat's role of harbinger of the Millenium while replacing his worship of Rawat (Maharaji) with worship of himself. Like Timothy Gallwey, Dr John Horton and Dr Edd Hanzelik Hallowitz' dreams of the connection of the divine Guru, the spiritual and the physiological through the mediation of meditation and the pineal gland turned out to be a foolish, forlorn and now forgotten hope.

Unable to practice medicine Hallowitz went on to a career as a quack shyster selling mail-order herbal products "with remarkable health benefits" (aka Snake Oil) and promising R & D into advanced technologies in alternative energy, health care, alternative propulsion, environmental remediation and preservation as founder/owner of PROOF LLC (Private Research Organization for Opportunistic Funding). Very opportunistic. Sounds a lot like Rennie Davis. As co-founder of Biotech Imaging, Inc he claimed to have invented, patented, and developed cell based method for quantifying HIV infected cells in peripheral blood. The worthless stock was auctioned off when Hallowitz defaulted on a home loan of $30,000 in 2003.

Doctor's License Is Suspended
Sex, Drugs, 'Cultism' Cited by Md. Agency
[FINAL Edition]
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext)
Washington, D.C.

Author: Amy Goldstein
Date: May 1, 1993 Start Page: D.03 Section: METRO

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.

A graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, [Robert A. Hallowitz] has held a Maryland medical license since 1974. [Fred R. Joseph], Hallowitz's attorney, said his client has lectured on chronic fatigue syndrome across the country and was scheduled to be featured in a report on the disease on the television show "48 Hours."

In another case described in the documents, Hallowitz invited a man who was a patient on midday golf outings, during which the doctor smoked marijuana. In 1983, Hallowitz also began treating the patient's wife, told the husband he was "cutting him off spiritually" and started visiting the couple at home as often as five times a week.

For the next seven years, the man remained downstairs during those visits, while his wife and Hallowitz had sex in the bedroom, according to the documents. During that period, the man's wife gave birth to two children, who she and Hallowitz said had been fathered by the doctor, according to the board's documents.

Middle-class premies find: Oz in the Astrodome
The New York Times
Originally published December 9, 1973

Dr. Robert Hallowitz is a 29-year-old neurophysiolegist and a research associate at the Laboratory of Brain Evolution Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington. A short, intense, bright-eyed man, he talks as if he were delivering a lecture. "In March, 1973, I came into contact with Guru Maharaj ji. I had a skeptical reaction; I couldn't accept him as a godhead. But with my clinical background, I saw that something was really moving the devotees in a positive direction. During a four month period I sat down and talked with nearly 100 premies. The common denominator was that they came from what we call the social dropouts. By all Establishment Standards they had been living desperate lives, unproductive and antisocial. I was impressed because I know that when encounter groups and other forms of therapy deal with this type of despair, the recovery rate is minute.

"It was visible on the faces of these premies that they were experiencing a radiant and intense peace. And it was infectious; I began experiencing the saure thing. I felt marvelous. I said, I don't know who Guru Maharaj ji is, but he's giving a valid experience and I want it. Since then, I've had experience so intense as to be beyond my capacity to imagine, and if that's suggestion, it's very strong. I've come to the point where I know there is a Supreme Being and He is one with that 15-year-old boy."

Hallowitz is convinced that the guru's teaching is consistent with recent brain research, and that 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.

Because of his evolutionary inheritance, Hallowitz says, man is burdened with a primitive orientation towards fear and survival, which sets the tone of individual and institutional behavior, starts wars, and destroys civilizations. Scientists are already studying the physiological effects of meditation as a way out of this bind. They have found decreased heart rates and oxygen consumption, increased galvanic skin response and low-frequency alpha activity that may be correlated with states of subjective relaxation.

Hallowitz believes that receiving knowledge from the guru "involves a lowering of response to stressful situations, a heightening of capacity for pure thought, a scaling down of body processes, libido, appetites and sleep requirements - it changes the organism's perspective of the environment; we no longer view the environment as stressful, we are no longer draining our vitality. What I'm saying is that meditation brings about physiological transformations that have tremendous implications for our physical and emotional well-being."

To skeptics, this attempt to connect meditation with advanced brain research is but one more example of the guru's flimflam. One of the most vocal skeptics is Paul Krassner, editor of The realist and in Houston to represent the scornful old guard of the protest movement.

Rolling Stone Magazine
The Little Guru Without A Prayer Issue No. 156 - March 14, 1974 (Pages 36-50).

Later I have dinner with Bob Hallowitz, a 30-year old neurophysiologist who received Knowledge last April, an event he describes as perhaps the most magnificent experience in his life. I am puzzled and a bit shaken by our conversation. Here is a man who clearly answered the Guru's call to "give him your love and give him your minds," and he has such a fine mind that I can't help thinking it may not have been an even trade.

Hallowitz, who has just strengthened his attachment to Guru Maharaj Ji by becoming a vegetarian, orders three dinner salads and remarks on the practical benefits of his new lifestyle. Rather than require blind faith, he says, the Divine Light Mission offers an experience, the Knowledge which every person can test for himself. As we begin to eat, Hallowitz tells me about a little experiment he carried out not long ago in which he offered up 20 peanuts to Maharaj Ji by touching each one to his forehead, putting aside two that somehow "didn't feel right." Afterward he de-shelled them all and found that those two were rotten.

Presumably this is not the sort of experiment Hallowitz performs in his research at the Laboratory of Brain, Evolution and Behavior of the National Institute of Mental Health, but he assures me that his work there also corroborates the effectiveness of the Knowledge. Scientists investigating the human brain, Hallowitz explains, have developed a theory about its evolution not unlike the superimposed strata of geological time. According to this theory, the core of the human brain, which includes the hypothalamus, resembles the brain of a reptile and performs only instinctual responses necessary for survival. The next layer, the limbic lobe, which developed at the time of the earliest mammals, adds the element of memory. This is the behaviorist brain of salivating dogs and rats in mazes, where survival-oriented responses are capable of adjusting to past experience. These two older brains, in conjunction with the endocrine system of glands, control such basic human drives as hunger, fear, lust and anger. The third and most recent layer, the neocortex, is the only part of the human brain capable of abstract thinking.

Theoretically, a person who is sure of his continued existence in one form or another, aware that he is part of a universal energy flow, will be less controlled by the fight-flight syndrome programmed into the older layers of the brain. According to Hallowitz, there is a growing body of scientific evidence suggesting that one physiological link between higher and lower consciousness is the pineal gland, which was long thought to be a vestigial organ but might in fact turn out to be the brain's master switch, the Third Eye of mystic tradition. The pineal gland, this theory goes, secretes a hormone that inhibits the action of the rest of the endocrine system, thus allowing human beings a measure of independence from the older brains with their orientation toward the basic values of survival. And what seems to happen during meditation is that the secretion from the pineal gland increases, allowing a person to exist at peace with himself and the world.

In his own life Hallowitz has seen the meditation work wonders. A few weeks ago, he tells me, a shopping bag he was carrying broke as he was leaving the supermarket and it hardly fazed him, although that was just the kind of incident which would have sent him into a spinning rage before he became a premie. He describes himself as having been an intense compulsive person, quick to anger and bearing a large load of self-hate. Like my friend Alan, he also searched for a unifying Truth, which he failed to find in his biological studies or, earlier, in his parents' reformed Jewish tradition.

A year ago he first heard about Maharaj Ji from a young chemist at work who seemed to be a much happier person after becoming a premie. Hallowitz eventually received Knowledge at the Washington D.C. ashram, and after a month of diligent meditation, he had a dream-a new version of a nightmare that had haunted him for years, in which he was always killed in some gruesome manner. In the dream he was alone in a bare white room with a much larger man waving a pistol at him and muttering, "I'll kill you, you bastard." Finally the man placed the gun against his temple and fired. At that moment Hallowitz experienced the full power of the Knowledge as he had never experienced it before-an intense white light that filled his head, a sound of celestial bells chiming in exquisite harmony, the indescribably sweet fragrance of the Holy Nectar and the vibration at the root of his being that is the Word-all this accompanied by a feeling of "finally going home," of ultimate peace beyond description.

Strengthened by this experience, Hallowitz began meditating more intensively than ever mornings and evenings; this created constant friction with his wife, who viewed his devotion to Guru Maharaj Ji as a threat to their marriage and another in a long list of enthusiasms he would pick up, only to drop weeks or months later. But Hallowitz feels certain that he has finally found the Truth and has come to Millennium, over his wife's bitter objections, hoping to ask Mata Ji how he can resolve his marital problems and to talk with the Guru personally about his future service in the Mission.

As I drive him back to the Houston ashram, he reads me a letter he has written to Maharaj Ji explaining his research work and requesting an interview. "l am crying warm tears of love to see and talk with you," the letter concludes: "I would rather be no other place than at your glorious feet." He points out a tear stain in the lower left-hand corner of the letter.

A few days later the receptionist at my hotel hands me a note from Bal Bhagwan Ji, who has evidently gotten wind of my conversation with Hallowitz. It contains the results of a study done by a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Colorado in which premies experienced marked reduction in their pulse and respiration rates while meditating. There is also a list of chapter-and-verse citations from the Bible. The first one I turn to in my hotel Gideon is Genesis 32-30: "And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."