Prem Rawat

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Prem Rawat
Prem Rawat or Maharaji
Born	December 10, 1957 Dehradun, India

Prem Pal Singh Rawat (प्रेम पाल सिंह रावत), also called Maharaji (formerly called Guru Maharaj Ji), was born on December 10, 1957 in Dehradun, India.^[1] He has, since the age of four,^[2] been addressing people around the world on the subject of finding peace within and says that he is able to offer a practical way to do so. He calls this method "Knowledge" and describes it as taking "all your senses that have been going outside all your life, turn them around and put them inside to feel and to actually experience you".^[3]

At the age of six, he was revealed these techniques of "Knowledge" by his father and succeeded him when he died in 1966, being accepted by his father's followers as their satguru (Sanskrit: true teacher) and assuming the role of "Perfect Master" at his father's funeral.^[4][5] He thereby became the recognized leader of the Divine Light Mission (DLM) that was started by his father and began taking his message to people throughout the Indian subcontinent.^[6]

In 1971 he was invited to speak in London and Los Angeles and attracted substantial media attention, some of which referred to the 13-year-old as the "boy guru".^[7] In 1972 he began touring the world talking about inner peace and teaching Knowledge, revisiting the UK and the US and speaking at events for the first time in Switzerland, Germany, Kenya, South Africa, Japan, and Australia.^[8] His marriage to a Westerner in 1974 precipitated a family rift and Rawat's mother and his eldest brother Satya Pal Singh (Satpal)^[9] secured control of DLM in India through legal proceedings.^[10] Rawat remained in the West and in the 1980s he began the slow dissolution of the Divine Light Mission,^[11] stepped away from the trappings associated with an Indian guru and continued to appear to audiences as Maharaji, a teacher and public speaker, promoting the same message and offering the same techniques of Knowledge.^[12] At that time, non-profit, charitable organizations with a minimal structure manned mainly by volunteers were established in several countries called Elan Vital, whose main purpose is organizing events to which Rawat is invited to speak.

According to The Prem Rawat Foundation, he has continued to promote a means to achieve a lifelong, individual experience of inner peace,^[13] and that his message is that "it is only by individuals finding peace for themselves can the world be at peace" and that he is able to assist in this endeavor. Starting in 2001, he has been invited to address various institutions on the subject of peace,^[14] and has, through the Prem Rawat Foundation, spearheaded various humanitarian initiatives.

Rawat has attracted controversy for what his critics consider a lack of intellectual content in his teachings, leading a sumptuous lifestyle, and making what critics and religious scholars regarded as personal claims of divinity.

Rawat lives with his wife in Malibu, California in the Unites States. They have four grown children. He is an experienced airline transport-rated pilot and holds a number of pilot ratings on jet airplanes and helicopters. His résumé discusses skills in computer graphics, computer-aided design, and development of aviation software. He is listed as co-inventor on a US Patent for a world-time watch for aeronautic applications.^[15] A US citizen since 1977,^[16] he reports that he supports himself and his family as a private investor, and that he has contributed to the success of several startup companies in various industries, including software.^[17]

[edit] Childhood in India

Prem Rawat at age 6

Rawat was born in India where he attended the Catholic-run St. Joseph's Academy elementary school in Dehra Dun. He was the fourth and youngest son of Shri Hans Ji Maharaj and his second wife, Jagat Janani Mata Shri Rajeshwari Devi.^[18][19] At the age of three he began speaking about fulfillment, love, and peace at his father's meetings.^[20] In these early days, Rawat was known both as Sant Ji^[21] and as Balyogeshwar.^[22] When he was six years old, his father taught him the techniques of Knowledge, including young Prem among his other students. In 1966, at age eight, Rawat succeeded to the role of Satguru and leadership of the DLM upon the death of his father, which was unusual since it was not in accordance with Hindu tradition of primogeniture.^[23][6] His family told American reporters during the early 1970s that Shri Hans was away from home at the time of his death, and that shortly beforehand he had written a letter home to his family essentially naming Rawat as his successor. There is a witness account by Shri Hans' personal driver which refers to Shri Hans' request for Prem to succeed him.^[24] Speaking much like his father, he took the stage and assured those that mourned his father death, that the master would always be with them and that he would continue his father's work.^[25] His succession was generally accepted when the crowd responded to him as their teacher.^[26][27] Afterwards, his mother and brothers came on stage to pay their respects to him.^[28]

The young Maharaji

Rawat remained in India for five more years, continuing to offer the Knowledge his father had championed. In the late 1960s, a small number of young Western seekers, many of them hippies, had come across Rawat at his home in Dehra Dun. Several of them asked him to vist the West, where, they said, many young people would be interested in what he had to offer. In October 1969 he sent a mahatma to London to begin teaching Knowledge on his behalf. In 1970 many of his new Western followers traveled to India to see and hear him and were present when he announced at a gathering at India Gate in Delhi that he was ready to begin the task of bringing peace to the world. This gathering of 1,000,000 people on 8 November, was reported to be one of the largest ever in the history of New Delhi and was the culmination of an 18-mile-long procession.^[29]

According to the Dutch religious scholar and minister Reender Kranenborg, this speech called the Peace Bomb marked the start of the Maharaji's mission to the West.^[30]

[edit] The 1970s

Maharaji arriving for the first time to Los Angeles, United States, July 17, 1971. He was known then as Guru Maharaj Ji, he dropped the title "Guru" in the 1980s and is now called Maharaji by his students.

Rawat first came to the West during his school holidays on June 17, 1971, visiting the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. He traveled without his family and reported that he arrived with only twenty-five pounds sterling in his pocket.^[17] He was interviewed by BBC, and spoke at the first Glastonbury Festival, where he again offered people peace, and made brief trips to Paris and Heidelberg, Germany, and on July 17 flew to Los Angeles and began a tour of American cities.^[31]

Before returning to India, Rawat established the US Divine Light Mission, or DLM, in September 1971 in Denver, Colorado, and it coordinated Rawat's subsequent U.S. tours and events. In 1972, Rawat returned to the West, this time accompanied by his mother and eldest brother, Satpal, and an entourage of mahatmas and other supporters. That year the organization held a multi-day event at Montrose, Colorado at which two thousand people attended.^{[citation needed]}

In November 1973, DLM booked the Houston Astrodome for a three-day gathering coinciding with Shri Hans' birthday and called "Millennium '73".^[32] Reporters in attendance estimated various days' attendance at between seven and twenty thousand. Rennie Davis, a former member of the Chicago Seven, was a prominent spokesman for the group at that event.^[33]

By the early 1970s, DLM was operating in South America, North America, Europe, and Australia and had established ashrams, whose members were required to take a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience.^[34][35][36] In 1972 Time magazine reported that Rawat suggested "a stringent life-style for his devotees, devoid of drugs, sex, tobacco and alcohol." to people living in ashrams. ^[37]

In 1974, DLM was reporting that 60,000 individuals were practicing the techniques of Knowledge in the United Kingdom and "it was a successful movement because it stressed access to the inner world, the attainment of peace and certainty ('never leave room for doubt in your mind'), direct experience of God within and the use of guaranteed methods".^[38]

J. Gordon Melton, a religious scholar and United Methodist minister, believed that Rawat comes from a Sant Mat lineage and claimed him to be a "Perfect Master", an embodiment of God on earth.^[39] The psychologists of religion Jan van der Lans and Frans Derks of the Catholic University Nijmegen wrote that in this "new religious movement, the devotee’s relation with the guru is considered identical to his relation with God".^[40]

The first posters about Rawat in the early 1970s said, “Meditation is not what you think.” At that time, Rawat was already making a distinction between the "mind", which he described as including the dark or negative thoughts that a person may have, and "heart", the place within each person where peace can be found. Lans and Derks wrote that according to Maharaj Ji, "all evil should be attributed to the mind", and that such concept of mind indicates the obstacle of freeing oneself from former bonds, referring primarily to a "state of consciousness characterized by everything but passive, nonrational confidence and trust."^[41] Reender Kranenborg, a religious scholar who specialized in new religious movements and Hinduism, and who was also a Christian reverend, described Maharaji's speaking style as resembling Christian evangelization campaigns and using a terminology in which one is requested to "surrender to the Lord". The Lord, according to Kranenborg, was Maharaj ji himself, but the content of his message was not Christian.^[42] Other scholars studied the DLM and Rawat from Max Weber's perspective of charismatic authority.^[43][44] During these years, claims of divinity made by the Indian mahatmas, his family, and some followers where reported by the media,^[45][46] claims which Rawat denied in several interviews given to the press and on television.^[47][48][49] He also responded by saying that yes, he is human but that "guru is greater than God because if you go to guru, guru will show you God".^[50]

In an autobiographical book by an early follower who was quite involved with the DLM in the early 70s, Sophia Collier writes, "There are those who sincerely believe that Guru Maharaj Ji is the Lord of Creation here in the flesh to save the world. And then there are those who know him a little better than that. They relate to him in a more human way... to them he is more of a teacher, a guide, a co-conspirator in their personal pursuit of a more heavenly way of life.".^[51]

In May 1974 at age sixteen, Rawat married Marolyn Johnson, a twenty-five year old flight attendant and one of his early American students.^[52] The marriage to a Westerner apparently precipitated a rift between Prem and his mother, for what she described as his pursuit of a "despicable, nonspiritual way of life." ^[53] Rawat took control of the Western DLM away from them, and his mother disowned him and returned to India with two of his brothers. His mother gained control of DLM India through legal means and appointed the eldest brother, Satpal, as leader of the DLM in India. The other two brothers split in allegiance, one siding with Prem and one siding with Satpal. Most of the mahatmas in the West either returned to India with his mother or were fired. Rawat later commented to the press on the family rift, saying "They live in India and I think [my mother] was upset that I married a foreigner. She thought I had married out of my caste or something like that."^[54] According to an article in the 1979 Sociological Review, immediately after his marriage, Maharaj Ji gained financial independence from his mother and family through the generosity of his devotees, and these contributions allowed him to follow the lifestyle of an American millionaire.^[55]

In the 1970s Rawat spoke in more than twenty countries and received the keys to the cities of New York, New Orleans, Monterey, Oakland, Detroit, Miami, and Macon in the United States, and Kyoto, in Japan.^[56]

[edit] The 1980s and 1990s

Prem Rawat speaking to the public at the Royal Albert Hall, London. October 12, 1981. At that time, he started to be called "Maharaji" by his students.

Rawat returned to India in October 1980 for the first time since 1975, and spoke to over 38,000 students in Delhi on newly acquired land.

He returned to South America for events for the first time since 1976, and visited Mexico for the first time. He continued to hold large, multi-day events for his students in Cartagena (Colombia), Miami, Rome, London, New Delhi, and Kansas City (Missouri). Other cities where he spoke included Cancun (Mexico), Lima, Sao Paulo, and Leicester (UK). He obtained a private pilot’s license and began training to obtain certifications and ratings for operating various types of aircraft.

For a time around 1980, the center of operations moved to Miami, where activities included a project known as DECA. DECA was concerned with the customization of a Boeing 707 intended for Rawat's work, and the development of a commercial executive aircraft refurbishing facility. Rawat never used the 707 aircraft and it was later sold to a new owner, and the DECA business was sold to Aircraft Modular Products (AMP), a leader in the field of business jet interiors. (AMP was sold in 1998 to B/E aerospace for $118 US million.^[57])

The Encyclopedia of American Religions describes that in the early 1980s Rawat personally renounced the trappings of Indian culture and religion, and disbanded the DLM, to make his teachings independent of culture, religious beliefs, and lifestyles.^[58] Other scholars, such as Kranenborg, George D. Chryssides and Ron Geaves also described a departure from divine connotations.^[59][60] Rawat continued delivering the four techniques of Knowledge which, according to Chryssides, afford self-understanding and self-realization, in a manner that is independent of culture and not bound to the traditions of India.^[61]

In 1983 the Western ashrams were closed and the Divine Light Mission changed its name to Elan Vital.^[62][63] The video production organization was renamed "Visions International,"^[64] and it began producing video versions of Rawat's addresses. According to America's Alternative Religions, during the 1980s, Rawat stepped away from the image of himself as a "Perfect Master" and dropped the title "Guru Maharaj Ji" in favor of "Maharaji". He continued to appear to audiences as Maharaji, a teacher, and established a minimal organization called Elan Vital. In this new role, "he may be reaching more listeners than ever, especially abroad, but his role is that of a public speaker, and the original religious movement is essentially defunct."^[65] An article published on December 4, 1987 in The Times of India, describes Rawat's mission as involving international tours during which he explains to "people in general without any distinction of caste, color, race, stature, or wealth that the source of happiness, peace and contentment lies within one's own self. [...] He is trying to prepare humanity to face and overcome the present day tussle and turmoil prevailing in the world in the name of achieving world peace, on individual basis. In fact what Maharaj Ji is trying to do is not being comprehended by most of the people, with the results that he is included in the category of those persons who have become mere machines to collect wealth, while Maharaj Ji has taken a pledge to complete this huge task without any monetary consideration."^[66]

Rawat continued to tour extensively in the 1980s and 1990s, most often at the controls of a series of executive jets leased for his use. He held multi-day events in over 40 countries and in 1990 he spoke at over 50 public events all over the world. In December 1998, Rawat spoke via a live, interactive global satellite broadcast from an event in Pasadena, California, to 86,600 participants in 173 locations in 50 countries. In 1999 his message started being broadcast on a regular basis via satellite to North American cities with similar initiatives in other regions and countries.

[edit] Prem Rawat today

Prem Rawat speaking at the University of Salamanca's first "Conference on Peace". (June 30, 2003)

Although based in the U.S., Rawat is active all over the world. Between 1965, when his addresses were first documented, and until July 2005, he addressed audiences at 2,280 events around the world. Between January 2004 and June 2005 alone, he delivered 117 addresses in Asia, Europe, and North America.^[67][68]With a more culturally neutral approach, Rawat now concentrates on what he calls a "universal message of peace" and "self-fulfillment",^[69] introducing people to the possibility of inner peace. According to the Prem Rawat Foundation, his message is currently distributed in eighty-eight countries, largely on video and in print. His message is broadcast in various TV channels such as Canal Infinito in South America, Channel 31 in Australia, Kabel BW in Germany, Dish Network in the U.S.A, and others. The video broadcasts have won awards from various non-related entities.^[70]

Rawat reportedly travels about eleven months out of the year on world-wide speaking and training tours. In addition to speaking at large gatherings of students and interested persons, he speaks at various cultural, educational, and community forums. He reportedly spoke to more than a million and a half people in a 2005 India tour.^[71]

In 2001 a new organization, the Prem Rawat Foundation, was founded as a non-profit organization largely for the production and distribution of audiovisual and other materials containing Rawat's message.^[72] The Foundation also oversees several humanitarian efforts around the world, providing food and medical relief to war-torn areas and medical care in impoverished areas.^[73] On March 24, 2006, Rawat inaugurated a facility in the tribal area of Jharkhand, India, called "Food for People". It was developed and operated, in consultation with local village elders, to provide 45,000 free meals to children and adults in need each month. The facility is run by fifty local villagers trained by volunteers of the Raj Vidya Kender. The facility was developed with the financial support of The Prem Rawat Foundation.^[74]

Elan Vital organizations remain active in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Switzerland, and are engaged in event organization, logistics, and fundraising. These entities are much smaller now than the DLM has been in times past, with only a small paid staff and volunteers doing most of the work and preparation for events. While these organizations report that they seek and accept Rawat's input, he is not an officer, director, or employee of Elan Vital or the Prem Rawat Foundation. They report he receives no income from them for his services or from the sale of materials other than reimbursement for documented tour and speaking expenses.^[75] There are other independent, volunteer-based organizations that promote Rawat's teachings locally in countries of all five continents.^[76]

[edit] Access to the techniques

The techniques of Knowledge, comprises four techniques that Rawat claims will help his students direct their senses within to experience inner peace. Students often describe the experience as "going within." The Prem Rawat Foundation describes the practice of Knowledge as having no bearing or compatibility problems with peoples' existing religious or spiritual belief system.^[77]

According to George D. Chryssides, this "Knowledge" is based on self-understanding, providing the practitioner with calmness, peace, and contentment, as the inner-self is identical with the divine, and that Maharaji emphasizes that Knowledge is universal, not Indian, in nature.^[78]

These techniques are the same as taught by his father, Hans Ji Maharaj, who in turn learned them from Swarupanand, his teacher. Jeffrey K. Hadden cites Maharaji in saying that "Knowledge is a way to be able to take all your senses that have been going outside all your life, turn them around and put them inside to feel and to actually experience you... What you are looking for is inside of you."^[79]

Kranenborg writes that the techniques of Knowledge, also known as kriyas, originated from the Surat Shabda Yoga or Sant Mat, the Path of the Sound Current.^[80] This alleged relationship to Surat Shabd Yoga or Sant Mat is neither denied nor acknowledged in any literature from the organizations that support Rawat's work, or by Rawat himself.

During the period when the organization was at its largest, a student's access to the techniques was constrained through a layer of intermediaries. A mahatma or, in later times, an instructor would, in a "Knowledge selection" process, decide and choose which aspirants would receive the techniques. Once an aspirant was chosen, he or she would then be granted access to a "Knowledge session" in which the techniques were revealed. The approach to receiving Rawat's techniques of Knowledge has become much less onerous since the year 2000. The use of personal mentors and instructors in smaller groups has largely been abandoned in favor of taped or live instruction by Rawat himself via satellite video or cable television programming^[81] along with on-line newsletters for information dissemination. Access to the techniques is now governed by a much less restrictive self-paced and self-assessed preparation process, perhaps reminiscent of a more open attitude prevalent during Rawat's initial foray into the West.

As of 2005, there is a self-paced process of preparation, called "The Keys," before a person is taught the techniques of Knowledge. Going through the Keys process involves watching video materials in which Maharaji presents the understanding necessary to learn the techniques of Knowledge.^[82] However, students must be at least eighteen years old and of legal age in their country in order to prepare for and be taught the techniques of Knowledge. The sixth Key is the “Knowledge Session”, in which persons ready to learn the techniques are taught by Rawat via a multimedia presentation available in fifty languages. These techniques are taught at no cost.^[83]

[edit] Number of practitioners of Knowledge

According to the Prem Rawat Foundation, Rawat has, over the years, engaged over nine million people in 250 cities and fifty countries. They estimate slightly more than half a million have been taught the techniques since he came to the West, about 125,000 of this number between January 2000 and April 2004.^[84] In 1997, "Religions of the World: A Latter-day Saint View" estimated a general membership of appox. 1.2 mil. worldwide, with 50,000 in the U.S.^[85] Volunteers estimate an additional 125,000 are currently in preparation to be taught the techniques, 65,000 having been in preparation five months or more, with these numbers on the increase in many countries. A press release states that 2004 was the first year where the number of new students has exceeded 50,000.^[86] Printed and audiovisual materials are available in approximately sixty languages, and the organizations estimate Rawat currently has hundreds of thousands of practicing students worldwide, representing a wide variety of backgrounds and personal situations. However, since there is no longer any membership component to the organizations, it is difficult to determine with precision the number of persons actually practicing his techniques. Chryssides' Historical Dictionary of New Religious movements (2001), estimates 15,000 people practicing the techniques in the United States and 5,000 in the United Kingdom.

'Premie' is the name given to students of Rawat in India and other Eastern countries. It stems from the Hindi word "prem" (prema in Sanskrit), which means "love"; "premie" means "lover." Until the early 1990s it also was the name given to his students in the West, and it is still occasionally used. Nowadays students of Rawat sometimes refer to fellow students as "People that received the techniques of Knowledge," "People with Knowledge," or more generically as "Maharaji's students."

[edit] Excerpts

Prem Rawat addresses an audience of diplomats, and government and civic leaders at a runner-up event to the celebration of the UN's 60th anniversary at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, where the UN Charter was signed in 1945. (June 2005)

Peace needs to be in everyone's life. Of all the things we have tried in this world, there is one thing we have never given a chance. That one thing is peace. If we want to hope for something, maybe we could hope in our heart that peace will come in our life. The peace that we are looking for is within. It is in the heart, waiting to be felt, and I can help you get in touch with it. It is not the world that needs peace; it is people. When people in the world are at peace within, the world will be at peace.
Maharaji.^[87]

[edit] Acknowledgments

Rawat has received proclamations and resolutions that honor his work from the governors of Michigan, New Mexico, New Hampshire, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,^[88] and the keys to the cities of New York City; New Orleans, Louisiana; Oakland, California; Kyoto, Japan; Detroit, Michigan; Miami, Florida and Miami Beach, Florida. In 2006 he received the title of "Ambassador or Peace" from the International University of Peace Unipaz.^[89]

In May 2006, Rawat made a guest appearance for a half-hour interview with Rajiv Mehrotra on his weekly talk show on Doordarshan TV,^[90] one of the national TV stations accessible all across India.

For accolades by business, academy and government leaders see Wikiquote.

[edit] Criticism

Amongst the many scholarly articles, books, and encyclopedias that refer to the DLM and to Prem Rawat, there were various critical observations and comments made about him and his students by a number of authors: the DLM had no substantial contents, claimed sociologist Ralph Larkin in 1978; irrationality among students was claimed in a 1981 article about the DLM by a student of religion named Wim Haan that appeared in the magazine about religious movements of the Free University of Amsterdam;^[91] materialistic, spoilt, and intellectually unremarkable and Rawat discouraging critical thinking was claimed in a 1982 Ph.D. thesis about new religious movements and mental health by the sociologist Paul Schnabel;^[92] Rawat having become a charlatan, leading privately a life of idleness and pleasures hidden from the average followers by the professor of psychology of religion Jan van der Lans in a 1981 book about followers of gurus written upon request for a Dutch Catholic institute;^[93] and concern about financial exploitation of followers by the psychiatrist Saul V. Levine.^[94]

J. Gordon Melton describes that in the mid-1970s several ex-members became vocal critics.^[95] Another scholar, James Lewis, elaborates their charges of brainwashing and mind control.^[96] In an FAQ article about opposition to Maharaji and his message, Elan Vital claims that there are a handful of former students that actively engage in opposing Rawat, his students and organizations, and lists a series of complaints against them related to their activities and motivations, and characterizes them as a 'hate group.'^[97]

Some of the criticism leveled at Rawat derives from key personnel who, after they parted ways with Rawat in the 1970s and 1980s, began making allegations against him about purported anxiety. These key personnel included Robert Mishler (who died in the late 1970s) and later Michael Dettmers. Mishler, ex-president of the DLM, said in a Denver radio interview in February 1979 (a few years after leaving the mission) that Rawat "had tremendous problems of anxiety which he combatted with alcohol."^[98] In an article that appeared in the local newspaper of Frederick County, Maryland in 1979, Mishler claimed that he proposed to Maharaji to tell his followers plainly that he was not God and to live only off his own tax-free gifts instead of income from the missions, but that "the Maharaj ji" responded to him by saying “What about me?”^[99] According to Melton in a 1986 article, Mishler's complaints that the ideals of the group had become impossible to fulfill and that money was increasingly diverted to Maharaji's personal use found little support and did not affect the progress of the Mission.^[100]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Books by Prem Rawat

• Guru Maharaj Ji The living master: Quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji (1978) published by the Divine Light Mission
• Rawat, Prem Clarity (2003) Published by The Prem Rawat Foundation 1st edition ISBN 0-9740627-1-5

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Prem Rawat

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Maharaji

[edit] Official websites of Prem Rawat

• 'Maharaji', Prem Rawat's personal website. Available in 16 languages.
• The Prem Rawat Foundation
• The Keys website - Keys for preparing to receive the techniques of Knowledge
• Broadcasts, online radio, audio-visual materials about Maharaji and his message, Europe - Available in 11 languages
• Raj Vidya Kender, India
• Portal for contact information Information about volunteer groups world-wide, news, etc.
• Excerpts from recent addresses