Posted by 1972

I used to post on this forum and its forerunners quite extensively - mostly numbing everyone with numbers, money, and waffle about organisations and Charity Law; for new readers/posters who didn't know me back then, here's a cult involvement bio https://ex-premie.org/pages/journs/nikw.htm  I would add the fact that as an outspoken ex premie I attracted the cult's attention, was stalked and my family, including at the time a child, doxxed. I can't pretend these behaviours do not colour my view of Prem and his followers.

My immediate response to the family disclosures surprised me, I felt genuinely saddened - I've known about all the large scale dissemblements, the fakes, the lies and the petty fraudulences surrounding Prem for over two decades, but the failures we are now seeing presented seem especially depressing.

I suppose my unexpressed wish for the end of Prem's career as a 'charismatic' was for a philosophical defeat, that at some point it would be obvious to everyone that the fictions, the dishonesty and the unreason would simply bring the circus to an unremarkable halt.

To have Prem's career end- and whatever the WOPG/PRF priesthood wants, this is emphatically has to be an end, - as a miserable loss of all authority because of harm to children is an ignominy that will taint everything and everyone associated with Prem.

In reality challenging the dishonesty of Prem's movement in the early 2000s required not so much a philosophical engagement, but rather addressing the affront to the public interest of exploiting charitable and tax exempt status that Prem's backing organisations employed.

Prem's abandonment of Church status in the US, and replacing most of the Elan Vitals was a direct response to ex premie activity, and which had more to do with consumer rights than the questioning of beliefs. Ironically ex premie activity likely made Prem's movement just a little bit more honest than it would otherwise have been.

An unavoidable result of the family disclosures is that once again the Prem supporting organisations are in the centre of focus; as Maria 77 puts it a post below:

Given that Rawat has access to children all over the world and most and foremost to his grand children, the abuse does not concern only the past but the present. That makes his strategy to make people not care about abuse even more dangerous because it allows him not only to get away with his past crimes but continue them in the present uncontrolled.

Part 2. Trustee and Organisation Management: Safe Guarding responsibilities

Whatever was hoped or expected by releasing the private family discussions, the managements of the various Prem supporting organisations have legal and moral obligations to acknowledge, consider and explain all of the following:

a) that the allegations have been made

b) what are the Rawat family's and specifically Prem's personal relationship to the relevant organisation.

 the steps the Trustees/Management are taking under Duty of Care and Safeguarding responsibilities.

 what action the Trustees/Management are obliged to take in reporting these allegations as
i) Law enforcement issues,
ii) Regulatory issues,
iii) public reporting issues, as material facts in respect of garnering donations and other activities.

In the post Epstein era, even where allegations relate to historic abuse, publicly registered organisations cannot collude in covering up material that may be relevant to safeguarding concerns. It is not necessary for legal action to be in play. Beyond the fact of the disclosures, how the family now seeks resolution is private to those hurt and abused. But the organisations need to demonstrate their compliance with all regulatory and legal duties to the public in the face of the information that they now unavoidably have. What those duties are will depend on jurisdiction and local regulatory structures - what they can't do is pretend it's business as usual.

If the Trustees/Managements have integrity then every Prem supporting organisation will immediately suspend activities, acceptance of donations etc, and institute a review, bringing in external Duty of Care and Safeguarding advisors to establish how each organisation is to respond to the fact that its ultimate person of control has been accused of behaviour that may suggest a continuing threat to one or more vulnerable individuals and groups that the organisation may come into contact with.

The key jurisdictions are the US and the State of California (TPRF), Australia and the State of Queensland (IRF), Spain and Netherlands ? (WOPG) and the UK (HDSK). While I can't speak to the other jurisdictions, the UK situation is unequivocally set out at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-report-a-serious-incident-in-your-charity and which defines loss of reputation as a serious incident that must be reported. With potential media investigations in play, the HDSK Trustees can't say there is no substantial reputational risk facing HDSK, and they should act without delay.

Truthfully, if Prem has any integrity and was concerned about his family and those who have followed him for fifty years and more, he would now retire, close all the organisations and give up any kind of public presence. Not that I have any hope that is what he will choose but it would be the honourable thing.

I leave it to others whether they see value in contacting organisation Trustees to enquire about or remind them of their duties to the wider community as well as premies, or whether contact with oversight bodies is relevant. I've yet to decide what action if any I will take, although if the current journalistic interest in Prem's UK activities makes it to publication anyone that maters will have been alerted.

I have some views on the wider issues of abuse, cult history and responsibilities which I've posted as Part 3.

Part 3. Blame, responsibility and guilt

I know that a lot of former followers disagree with my perspective on this, I'm repeating because in my view the family disclosures go the very heart of the thing that is unique about the Prem Rawat cult.

For those of us who were early western adopters, broadly the 1970 to 1975 premies, we did a very strange thing. For nearly all of us except perhaps a few young children who were inducted by their parents, we teenagers and young adults adopted as their focus of veneration a living person who was younger than us, something which was not just culturally peculiar but a very real transfer of the normal distribution of responsibility.

Although I'm only a year and bit older than Prem, I look back on that time with a degree of guilt at having accepted someone who by dint of relative maturity, must have been more vulnerable than me, and was in a position of exposure to what can fairly be described as 'group madness'. Not that I had any determined influence, I was just some kid in the crowd, but being in a crowd doesn't absolve personal responsibility and even a young person can step aside and say "this is wrong," I don't recall anyone doing that. When I left, I left quietly.

Of course veneration of Prem started in India - Prem was elevated to godhead long before all but a very few western recruits got involved in the hysteria, undoubtedly those who bear the greater blame for stealing Prem's childhood are his family and the so call mahatmas. Those individuals gave Prem the most disturbing childhood and adolescence, lacking any meaningful passage to maturity he was propelled to an adulthood for which he was wholly unprepared.

 Amongst the most blameworthy of course are Prem's mother and assorted mahatmas amongst whom we know one to have been unequivocally a child abuser but I would suggest there were others who were equally malign influences. The precise combination of malignancies we'll probably never know - unless that is Prem chooses to honestly examine his life and make it public.

The abused individual, whether the abuse was psychological, deprivational, injurious or sexual does not of course have free pass to themselves become an abuser. But the early life of an abuser is important to understanding what is frequently a cross generational propagation of abuse, it is a sequence that is often hugely difficult to break. It's to be hoped that at the personal level Prem's children have found a way to break the cycle, all the evidence from family psychology tells us it's a hugely tough journey.

The cult that, depending on your perspective, Prem was born into, or alternatively which was built around him, has been abusive in multiple forms, and albeit largely lacking the intimate abuse experienced by Prem's children, in many ways it has the character of an abusive family. The structures of the cult, its hierarchies, its legal supports, its organisations, its money generating enterprises need to address their inherent abusive nature - without that all involved, including the Rawat family members are not going to be released from the abusive grip.

I want to make one final point about responsibility. There are two individuals both entirely peripheral to what most of us would see as the main story of the cult, but whose actions had profoundly harmful consequences. Firstly the English lawyer whose inventive legal structure redirected donations from the nascent US Divine Light Mission, to 15 year old Prem's personal bank account. Secondly the California Judge who without any serious consideration granted Prem "emancipated child" status. In concert these two actions set up a culture shocked adolescent, surrounded by unquestioning enablers and self interested grifters, to have access to wealth, power, opportunities and temptations that he was wholly unprepared to deal with and for who there was no supervising adult to step in and say no.

In this circumstance, while no individual can be held up as the abuser, the young Prem Rawat was IMO undoubtedly subject to a profound structural abuse. It's easy to berate Prem for his multiple failures as an adult, some of which now seem possibly to meet the level of outright criminality but in considering the whole story we shouldn't neglect how that adult was made.