My Worst Ever Date – Seduced Into A Cult

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I have written on my cult experiences before and I wrote this intending it for a new pay to write site that promises payments for personal true stories. Entries there are read by their editors who decide whether to publish or not. They contacted me back to say how interesting it was but added that isn’t ‘dynamic enough’ (whatever that means) for their readers so they can’t use it. Their loss is your gain. I have rarely been lucky in relationships or dating. I think I actually defined speed dating as it often only takes a woman 30 seconds or less to tell me to get lost. I often got stood up, jilted and in one case, a girl’s phone number turned out to be that of a local dog shelter. My worst date however came in 1981, when a lady I’ll call Wendy (not her real name) invited me out, as long as I accompanied her to a talk on ‘transcendental meditation’. I was in a bad place at that time. My dad had died suddenly a few years before and I was unemployed as I left school with few qualifications because I was in such despair over his death. I was also recovering from a nasty attack of Hepatitis. Wendy was a second-hand book dealer and I often visited her stall among others at book fairs in my home city, Manchester. I can’t say I felt anything towards her personally before she suddenly asked me out, but suddenly I felt noticed and wanted. I’d have preferred to take her to a bar or a modestly priced restaurant, and what little I knew of meditation left me sceptical. A lecture sounded boring, but it was a date and suddenly, Wendy was an angel. Unfortunately, she was about to prove to be just the opposite. The talk was at a university hall, and I’d expected it to be organized by academics. I arrived early and saw various smiling happy people going in. Some carried guitars and other instruments. I wondered what sort of lecture involved live music. Others took flowers in. The fixed rictus smiles I saw were a bit creepy. A few people asked me to come in with them, but I told them I was waiting for someone. When they heard that my host was Wendy everyone seemed overawed and they clearly knew her well. That left me alarmed as she had given me the impression that she was in need of an escort, rather than acting as one. Wendy arrived and looked startled to see me. She told me a few years later that she had genuinely expected me not to turn up as I’d looked so critical of the talk when she’d mentioned it. Wendy was with another girl, Lucy, who I later found out was her real lover. Dating me for real was never an option for Wendy. We entered the university building, and I noticed the room was booked out for the night to an organization called The World Welfare Society. Wendy assured me that was who I was seeing. We went into the lecture hall which was quite full. The musicians occupied the front row to allow them to get up with their instruments easily enough. At the front of the hall there was a simple PA microphone system, and a small table covered in velvet cloth, bearing flowers, ghee candles, rose petals and a photo of a middle aged Indian gentleman. I asked Wendy who he was. “Goomradjie,” she replied. I asked if he was coming. Wendy laughed and said no. In fact, the Guru Maharaj Ji (Goomradjie for short) was living in Malibu, and on his visits to talk, he would command a far bigger hall than Wendy and friends had hired. A girl arrived and placed flowers on the altar shrine to Goomradjie and actually kissed his portrait before she sat down. It began to dawn on me that this was a religious gathering, but my atheistic stance on Christianity never prepared me for a Hindu meditation sect. Wendy stayed aloof and chatted to various others around the room. She was clearly well known and respected there. In fact she was heavily involved in organizing the whole show. Her friends, Lucy and Costas, (who would become my primary mentor) took charge of being my main escorts for the evening, and beyond. An elderly Indian gentleman called Charanand started the show off, and acted as its main MC too. He sang a few songs about the joys of Knowledge. The emphasis was on not needing to believe in God because they knew him – faith was irrelevant. Various speakers got up. It looked as if they were picked randomly but in fact they were carefully selected in advance. One girl called Goomradjie her best ever real orgasm. Others were critical of Christianity which resonated with me, while some talked of unemployment, bereavement and ill-health in ways that tapped right into my personal feelings. I went to a bar after the talks and concert hymnal recitals with Lucy, Costas and Wendy to talk about the experience. My sceptical atheistic stance made them wary, as it would for the next five months. The main thing that got to me was the mystery of their secret techniques for seeing and knowing God. I could see that there was something involved and I wanted to know about it if only to debunk it. Wendy kept herself back, letting Costas take over more and more. I went home full of scorn and ridicule for them, but also unable to get them out of my head. Their talks had touched on my experiences closely (because Wendy had talked to me in the months leading to her invitation to the talk). My family mostly had no idea how to handle my increasing conversion processing and glassy eyed trance-stares (even before I was taught the secret meditations). However, one of my aunts had met Wendy, as Wendy had tried to draw her into the cult in a similar way to how she approached me. Pauline told me the cult name was actually Divine Light Mission (later changed first to Elan Vital and then to The Prem Rawat Foundation, its current official title). The World Welfare Society was a local front. Goomradjie had been discredited by his own mother as a charlatan, imposing celibacy on followers while being a married father himself. He had offended genuine Hindus by rechristening his air-hostess wife Durga Ji, adopting for her the name of a high ranking revered fertility goddess. The collapse of Divine Light Mission had been spectacular and the meeting I had been to first was the beginning of a discreet word of mouth revival of the cult’s fortunes. Recruitment now had to be without publicity and strictly by word of mouth. Months later, Costas grew weary of my questioning cynicism and virtually ordered me to stoop questioning the group, or leave. My doubts assailed me but I liked the people I was with, and my curiosity for the Knowledge (the techniques for seeing God) compelled me to stay so I willingly let the brainwashing roll over me. In October 1981, six months after my disastrous date, I was fully converted and given the arcane secret 'Knowledge'. It proved to be hyperventilational breathing, poking yourself in the eyes, listening to your own blood pounding through your ears and breathing your own throat mucus, but at the time it felt miraculous. I was a loyal fanatical follower for several years but then the cracks began to show. Goomradjie was making fewer visits and much money taken to support his cause was being siphoned off and used by local group leaders to finance themselves. Front row tickets for Goomradjie visits were being sold to the highest bidders. We had for many years held meetings informally in one another’s homes but these were suddenly banned – an order that came straight from Malibu. His doctrine is simple – meditation makes you feel bliss. That bliss is God, and he, Goomradjie is the incarnation of that Godhead. If your mind tells you that what you feel and therefore know by experience is wrong, then your mind is wrong, so stop thinking by meditating even more. Anyone who is critical of this is thinking too much and should not be trusted. Thinking of anything or anyone but the Guru is just another delusional mind-distraction, so keep meditating. That is the doctrine my hot date got me into. The final straw was when I drew a girl called Donna into the sect purely so I could be with her. We started skipping meetings to go one dates, and she was as sceptical of the cult as I had been in my early years. On one cinema visit we ran into Costas who started berating us for skipping the meeting in favour of a movie until I pointed out to him that he could only prove that by admitting he was doing the same thing. He avoided me after that. Another high ranking member shoulder charged Donna into a wall at a meeting which I only learned of later, but she never went to one again. It emerged that the big meetings were orchestrated rather than spontaneous. There was a shortlist of elite accepted trust-worthy speakers. The revelation threw the group into a lot of infighting during which many members stopped going, including, by the summer of 1985, me. I completed my education and took up creative writing, as well as talking on my cult experiences in the media. So, if a hot date proves to be a meeting on meditation, politely decline to go along. Your sanity, freedom and your mind depend on it. Arthur Chappell