You only realize you’re getting taken for a ride once you get off the horse.

I’ll start with the basics for those who know nothing about Prem Rawat or me. Then, I’ll describe the untangling process I went through to free myself from his cult of lies, deception, and nonsense.

Prem Rawat.

Prem Rawat, known as Guru Maharaji, came to the West from India in 1971 when he was thirteen, proclaiming to be the Living Master. In recent years, he’s rebranded himself as a humanitarian and best-selling author. Given that he amassed a fortune off the backs of hopeful, trusting, and innocent twenty and thirty-year-olds, I find his current persona ludicrous.

In the early days, his closest followers, primarily Indian men and then Westerners like Ira Woods, Bill Patterson, and Arthur Brigham, who were held in high regard by the rank and file, likened him to Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, and Mohammed. Many loyalists professed he was the Lord of the Universe (whatever that means).

His goal: World peace, one person at a time. Prem offered four ancient techniques of meditation, packaged up as “Knowledge.” The techniques are incredibly simple and taught by many other spiritual teachers. They aren’t his, although they were presented as if he had a copyright on them back in the day.

He’s now sixty-six years old, married with four adult children, living a life of luxury. He travels in his leased private jet, speaks publicly worldwide, and runs an online subscription service that sells his audio and video recordings.

Reliable sources tell me he’s had some serious medical issues in the past few years and has lost his prized pilot license as a result. If you want to work for him these days you’ve got to sign an NDA, (non disclosure agreement). Now, why would an upstanding man of peace want to make sure nothing about his personal life leaks out? Hmm.

Prem came from northern India, where Bhakti yoga, a spiritual practice within Hinduism focused on loving devotion towards a personal deity, was common. Prem’s father was a guru who built a substantial following until he died in 1963. Prem, eight and a half years old, assumed the title of guru upon his father’s death.

The story fed to Prem’s followers back in the 70s was that he had a vision to carry on his father’s work. Perhaps he did, but the story told by one of his closest followers, Charanand, was less magical.

There was a power struggle in one room between Prem’s mother, his eldest brother, and the various mahatmas (great souls/close followers). In another room, Charanand and two other influential mahatmas decided young Prem would be the next guru and led him to a stage where thousands of followers awaited the new Master.

He sat on the throne and proclaimed himself the One. A few years later, he dropped out of school, and in 1971, he took his message to London and the United States, attracting thousands of young people looking for meaning, purpose, and inner peace. I was one of them, a hippy searching for the truth working on my English literature degree at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Me.

I “received Knowledge” in the fall of 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, from the notorious and skull-cracking lunatic Mahatma Fakiranand. Showing me the first meditation technique, he pressed very hard on my eyeballs with his fingers. “Do you see light?” Yes, you idiot, because my optic nerves are on fire, I thought. Despite the rough start, the rest of the session went smoothly. I returned to my apartment at Ohio Wesleyan and practiced what I was shown.

There was something there — something practical, real, and peaceful. I was intrigued and wanted to know everything about this Knowledge and kid guru. And that’s what I set out to do.

When I graduated in 1973, I moved to Boston, joining the local community of several hundred followers. Soon, my college fraternity brother and I opened a natural foods store serving our community and the local neighborhood. That got the attention of the people running things out in Denver, the HQ.

And so began my ten-year involvement as a full-fledged devotee, moving into the ashram, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Over the next ten years, I held various roles with the two organizations promoting Prem’s work, Divine Light Mission and Elan Vital — community director and instructor (traveling the world speaking and teaching meditation techniques) and then President of Elan Vital.

As the President, I reported to Prem’s right-hand man, fixer, and legal and financial affairs manager, Michael Dettmers. I was on the outer edge of the inner circle.

The first thing I did as President was sign resignation papers so that whenever the time came, they could get rid of me easily. I didn’t care — I was happy to be closer to the action.

Michael also assigned me to be the supervising instructor for the staff at the Office of Guru Maharaji, known as the OGM. Twenty people with aviation, financial, and legal jobs lived in two or three exclusive ashrams on Miami Beach.

I lived a charmed life— private meetings with Prem, front-row seats at all his programs, status, power, a rolling expense account, a car, free medical and dental care, and my own room in the ashram. He was always respectful to me. I learned later that others weren’t as fortunate.

This is the thing about a cult — there are perks for those closer to the top. Regular ashram followers got zippo compared to me. Who paid for my perks? The donors of Prem Rawat. Some gave hundreds. Some gave thousands. Some gave millions.

The ashrams closed in 1983—time to downsize and cut costs. Prem had huge bills to pay and was on his aviation kick of going after state-of-the-art private jets that cost millions.

I was probably part of the ashram closing communication process, but I can’t remember what I did. Probably because any of us in leadership positions just did what we were told. There was no questioning or discussion when Prem wanted something to happen. It was all about following his orders and getting stuff done.

By this time, I was dating my assistant, breaking the ashram rules for the first time in ten years. I told Dettmers about it, and he set up a meeting for me with Prem. I explained the situation, and he said I should continue being the President of Elan Vital for now. Forget about being an instructor.

Again, I was lucky. I had a room over my head. The rest of the fifty instructors were fired unceremoniously via a phone call from Michael Donner, a close lieutenant to Prem. They were given a one-way plane ticket to wherever they wanted to go. No severance, no nothing. None of them, including me, had a penny to their name after ten years of service to Prem.

Some instructors psychologically disintegrated for a while. Most clawed their way back into the real world, like I did. I sold business telephone systems, women’s shoes, and men’s shirts for several years, trying to making ends meet.

How I left the cult.

In 1977, on my way to becoming an instructor, a friend of mine in Philadelphia who knew people working in Prem’s home told me he was a heavy drinker. It didn’t make sense to me — a spiritual teacher, the Master of Masters, on mission to bring peace, is knocking back cognac every night.

I was puzzled, and it bothered me throughout my instructor training and the next few years. I thought there was something wrong with me — I must not be devoted enough to understand the Master can do whatever he wants to.

My intuition told me something was wrong, but if I listened, my world would turn upside down. I wanted to believe he was who he was supposed to be. The people around him seemed happy enough, so I worked on letting go of the doubts in my head.

They never went away, but I soldiered on and told myself to meditate more, trust, and enjoy the playful games of the Master.

In 1978, Bill Patterson, head of the instructors, asked if any of us would like to speak privately to Prem. The voices in my head were killing me concerning his drinking. I said yes and had a meeting where I told him I had heard about his drinking and felt confused.

The first thing out of his mouth was, “Who told you?” Then he said that maybe it was a test for his followers. Uh-huh. Spiritual bypass 101.

I left feeling somewhat better, having verbalized my concerns directly to him, but the deep-seated doubt never disappeared completely.

From 1985 to 2000, I raised a family and tried to make ends meet. I attended the occasional program where he would speak and kept meditating. I still believed he was something special, but my feelings of devotion were waning.

Then, in the early 2000s, I read Michael Dettmer’s accounts on the ex-follower website. Michael left Prem in the early 1990s and, in 2000, wrote extensively on what Prem was like behind the curtain. It wasn’t pretty.

You can read a summary of his experience here, along with the experiences of other eyewitness whistleblowers.

I was deeply disturbed after my first reading. It was overwhelming, and I felt like I was almost doing something wrong — snooping into Prem’s personal life — the heavy drinking (again), asking Dettmers to arrange sexual liaisons with female followers, his long term mistress, refusing to admit he was human publicly and overly consumed with accumulating more wealth.

I spent very little time on the ex-follower website for the next few years. I remember telling myself he was a flawed man, and I left it at that. In hindsight, I opened the door to face the truth about him, but I wasn’t ready to walk all the way into the light.

I was in the neutral zone — no longer a complete devotee, but not entirely free from the spell yet. I stayed here for ten years, attending one program in 2012. Seeing and hearing him was mildly pleasant — memories from the past flooded me more than anything else.

In 2017, I introduced him via a video to my fiance, a spiritual and brilliant woman who is an empath, energy worker, and healer. After ten minutes, she begged me to turn it off. He repulsed her. I’d had it, too — his theatrical, over-the-top delivery trying to explain Knowledge looked and sounded staged and fake.

Shortly after, I reread Dettmer’s and others’ accounts of Prem’s behavior. I no longer felt like a voyeur. I wanted to take it all in. It went deeper this time — the patterns of his bad behavior, the misogyny, the pleasure he took in humiliating people, the coarse language, and the smoking and drinking.

I thought to myself, I don’t have friends like this. Why on earth do I need a guru who behaves like an ass?

In 2020, I published an article on Medium called How I Reclaimed My Life After Ten Years in a Cult. Wrting it helped me process. everything I’d been through, and going public was my way of fully opening the door and finally walking into the light.

I felt cleansed, relieved, and free.

But there was more.

In the Fall of 2022, someone privately messaged me on Facebook. I don’t want to mention her name publicly, but she’s a Prem Rawat family member. She wanted to talk about my article and share her experience of him. We spoke on Zoom, and then I met with her in person in early 2023.

What I heard stunned me. It’s not for me to share what she said. When it’s the right time and place, I hope she can speak freely without fear of reprisal.

There’s a big story behind the curtain that may very well blow the doors right off Prem’s world when it comes out publicly. Many of the faithful will dismiss it as hearsay. But it’s well documented.

The final straw was what I heard in my conversations with this family member.

As a result of that, I can’t sit quietly while he does his business, pretending to be this great humanitarian and book author. (Do people actually believe he wrote that book by himself?) Just listen to the voice that the book is written in. It’s not his voice.

I’m going to speak out and publish articles. And, fingers crossed, a French TV documentary on Prem will air in the near future, directed by a well-known European filmmaker. After speaking with the French team, I’m looking forward to being part of the project.

The untangling process.

Here are ten steps that helped free me from the dark web of Prem Rawat.

1. Research Prem Rawat online. Look for the patterns and themes in his behavior. Talk to people who have been around him who have come to their senses. There are three sites I know of: here, here, and here.
2. Accept what you read and hear as the truth. You’ll have to deal with the part of you that does not want to believe you have been fooled.
3. Process your emotions. You might be angry you were misled by Prem. You might think your life has been a waste. When I first read online accounts of Prem, I went through emotions like shock, denial, and rationalization. Then, as I read and processed more, I experienced anger, sadness, betrayal, and finally, resolution and peace. Now I’ve moved into resolve — a commitment to speak out and expose the fraudulent behavior that enabled him to create his multi-million dollar empire.
4. Consider writing your story. Writing helped me process all the loose ends in my head. I found it to be an invaluable tool in the healing process.
5. See Prem as a normal human being, not a deity. When you let go of the belief that he is divine and can do as he pleases, his behavior stands on its own. There’s no more get-out-of-jail card for him because he’s the enlightened Master. I can’t tell you how many people said he can be arrogant, rude, and condescending off-stage. One person told me, “He’s such a smart ass.” Not the kind of descriptions one would expect to hear about a holy man.
6. Ask yourself, why would I want to follow a profoundly flawed spiritual guide? Do I keep friends who act like he does? Do I need his brand of inspiration any longer?
7. Remind yourself that what you wanted in the first place as a seeker of truth was a connection to your higher self. You weren’t just looking for a guru. So, if you have a rich inner experience, do you need a guru anymore?
8. Understand the principle of psychological projection. Those of us who received and practiced Knowledge projected the peace we were experiencing onto our guru as the source of that peace. We listened to people we thought were more enlightened than we were raving about Prem and his magical powers. The community of followers around us supported our projection. In short, we became heavily brainwashed.
9. Accept that your inner experience has nothing to do with him. He’s not God, after all. His Grace is not emanating from him to you like invisible energy waves. Therefore, he has nothing to do with what goes on in your practice of Knowledge. Separate your experience from the teacher. This is a big step. Your experience is directly related to the effort and consistency you put in.
10. If you’ve accomplished all of these steps, you’ve arrived at the last step, renouncing him privately or publicly. Consider doing a ceremony. Mark the ending and establish a new beginning. Write something down and burn it. Say a prayer or make an affirmation about your intentions going forward. Bid the past farewell, heal, and move ahead with no regrets.

As I’ve said in my other articles, I have no regrets — this was my path, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I experienced many beautiful things along the way. Even though a greedy young man fooled me, I have fifty years of meditation under my belt and a wonderful, deeply fulfilling life, inside and out.

My parting words: Take the good, leave the bad. Move on. And speak up. Tell your story. Help tell the truth about Prem.

–Don Johnson

First posted on Medium https://medium.com/mystic-minds/how-to-free-yourself-from-the-prem-rawat-cult-bfb303144a07

January 2, 2024