Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:21, 14 May 2009

Prem Rawat and related articles, including their talk pages, are subject to article probation. Any editor may be banned from any or all of the articles, or other reasonably related pages, by an uninvolved administrator for disruptive edits, including, but not limited to, edit warring, personal attacks and incivilty.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Teachings of Prem Rawat article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Misplaced Pages? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2Auto-archiving period: 14 days

See also:

• Talk:Techniques of Knowledge
• Talk:Techniques of Knowledge/Archive 1
• Talk:Techniques of Knowledge/archive2
• Talk:Current teachings of Prem Rawat
• Talk:Current teachings of Prem Rawat/Archive 1
• Talk:Current teachings of Prem Rawat/Archive 2
• Talk:Past teachings of Prem Rawat
• Talk:Past teachings of Prem Rawat/Archive 1
• Talk:Past teachings of Prem Rawat/Archive 2

Archives

1, 2

This page has archives. Sections older than 14 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present.

Name or Word Technique using a Mantra word

"Kranenborg additionally states that it employs mantras while exhaling." This Mantra idea is false and is not verifiable. The current techniques are not public but they have not changed from the old Knowledge days. These are widely available on the web . Misplaced Pages is meant to inform as accurately as possible and hence I am removing the Mantra reference because it is misinformation.

External Links

added plain text *>http://www.ex-premie.org/ Ex-Premie.org - Site of former followers of Prem Rawat. --Nik Wright2 (talk) 17:35, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Teachings of Prem Rawat

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Teachings of Prem Rawat's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Melton1986":

• From Prem Rawat: Melton (1986), pp. 141-145
• From Bibliography of Prem Rawat and related organizations: Melton, J. Gordon. Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America. New York/London: Garland, 1986 (revised edition), ISBN 0-8240-9036-5, pp. 141-145.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 19:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

External links

Added {{No more links}} to EL sect. Cirt (talk) 14:56, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

FORMER FOLLOWERS section

I was surprised to find this while doing a bit of extra reading and I have taken the unusual step of deleting it entirely, but forgot to include an edit summary. Patrick is a convicted criminal]. The passage appears to justify his criminality. Also, the 1st sentence doesn't make sense. Patrick didn't obtain the reports, they are his reports presumably. That makes him the source. In addition to his criminality, I think his obvious bias would have to be referred to if he is to be accepted as a source. --Zanthorp 07:13, 13 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zanthorp (talk • contribs)

You also removed "Conway, Flo and Siegelman, Jim, "Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change Second Edition, Second printing: pp 159 f (2005) Stillpoint Press, ISBN 0-38528928-6" without any explanation of why that did not support the text. I suggest you reinstate your deletion and open up your concerns about the text for discussion rather than deleting a whole section without any proposal for alternative text. Otherwise this looks like a return to editwarring. --Nik Wright2 (talk) 15:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I encourage Zanthorp to make the changes he proposes. Deleting it entirely is not a good idea because it's a notable viewpoint.   Will Beback  talk  00:49, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I believe Conway/Siegelman is self-published and thus falls under WP:SPS. Jayen466 01:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The first edition is published by a reliable publisher. The 2nd edition was apparently self-published.   Will Beback  talk  01:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

So we need to check the first edition to see if it's in there in order to be on safe ground.   Will Beback  talk  01:34, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Someone appears to have an agenda here. SPS says

Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an 
established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has 
previously been published by reliable third-party publications. However, caution should 
be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth 
reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.

The authors had already established their expertise by being published in the first edition, and the second edition is essentially the same as the first -- certainly in the case of Divine Light Mission and all that, which hasn't done anything newsworthy since, perhaps, 1974. The biggest differences seem to be in the page numbers, which are different, as is the type size. We should probably go ahead and cite the second edition, since it is easier to locate for validation purposes.

Regarding Mr. Patrick, he is in fact, a convicted criminal. So what? So was Nelson Mandela. Does that invalidate his opinion? Further, Patrick's book is ghost-written. He isn't literate enough to have done that himself. He's just street-wise. I think the Marcia Carroll quotation should stand on its own strength.

Most courts have held that Mr. Patrick's motivation did, in fact, justify his behavior. The Common Law doctrine involved is called the "justification of necessity." However, Common Law defenses are not admissible in all jurisdictions, although they are included in the Model Penal Code. In the Crampton case, cited in the article, the court found that Patrick was acting as the agent of the parents of Kathy Crampton, a young adult, and ruled that "The parents who would do less than what Mr. and Mrs. Crampton did for their daughter Kathy would be less than responsible, loving parents. Parents like the Cramptons here, have justifiable grounds, when they are of the reasonable belief that their child is in danger, under hypnosis or drugs, or both, and that their child is not able to make a free, voluntary, knowledgeable decision."

Of course, it was significant that members of the "Love Family" who participated in the LSD "sacrament" in the presence of Paul Erdman, a/k/e "Love Israel," learned that Love was "Greater than or equal to God," and, of course that they had a duty to turn over to him all of their money and valuables. Members of the Manson Family had similar insights under similar circumstances, but the California legal system did not have a means to find Leslie Van Houten and the others "not guilty by virtue of temporary insanity."

Scientologists, of course, are not under the influence of mind-altering drugs, as far as any experts have written. They are merely the dupes of an elaborate con-scheme which frequently leads to an angry and abrupt non-coerced exit when they learn that "body Thetans" were created long ago when an evil space tyrant named Xenu dropped nuclear weapons on sentient beings who had previously been secured to volcanoes. Wowest (talk) 04:56, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

You make some good points, but the (possibly) self-published source in question is Conway and Siegelman, who quote Patrick. It's possible that Patrick made similar observations in his own book, but we'd need to find it there. (BTW, Patricks' book was published by Ballantine, a reputable publiser.)   Will Beback  talk  05:22, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The 1st edition of Snapping is available via Google. There's at least one report of the type mentioned in the now-deleted text, on page 159. I think the sourcing is OK, so we should restore the text and Zanthorp can add some mention of Partick's conviction if that's necessary.   Will Beback  talk  06:27, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Nik is quite correct. Somehow by removing the text I also removed the second source. I don't know how that happened. It may have been due to a glitch in the software and if so its not the first problem I've had. The first source, David Barret's book, still appears in the reference list. The quoted section from Barret does not support the deleted text. Thanks Will for the Google link. I checked 'Snapping' pp159,160 and it does not support the deleted text. PP159,160 refers to "jamming the mind" and "putting the mind on hold" to get rid of "uncomfortable emotion" etc. There is no mention of self hypnosis or Ted Patrick. Other available pages barely mention the DLM or its members. When they get a mention, PP174,175 for example, they are lumped together with many other groups including the Moonies, Scientology, the Krishna group, and Bible sects. Under a graph on P175 the DLM is referred to as a "Hindu sect." According to the authors there is a correlation between the "new spiritual and personal growth practices" associated with all of those groups what they call "information disease symptoms." Misplaced Pages does allow the inclusion of fringe theories, however, exceptional claims require exceptional sources. This is exceptional only in that it appears to be inaccurate at least in part and probably poorly researched. It supports the deleted text only in part. there is no mention of self-hypnosis, Conway and Siegelman are not "several scholars" and as far as I know, no source refers to Rawat's followers as "worshippers." Here's the text I removed. "Reports obtained by Ted Patrick and several scholars after deprogramming of several of Rawat's former worshippers refer to the experience of Rawat's "meditation" techniques as self-hypnosis, and as diminishing the ability to think both during the practice and for an extended period of time after cessation." I'm sure this was written in good faith.

The problem is that it is so poorly devised and contentious that I think it best to leave it out of the article pending the outcome of further discussion and further investigation of the sources. An edit war would not be productive and that's not what I had in mind. I'm pretty sure that this can be resolved amicably by discussion. --Zanthorp 08:22, 14 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zanthorp (talk • contribs)

It's a question of process, there's much that should possibly be pulled from the Rawat articles but it would be better to discuss the changes in advance rather than each one of us making the change we want and having everyone else discuss it after the fact. Removing a whole section seems particularly inappropriate. The issue of stray and unrelated references is I think a significant problem throughout the Rawat articles and represents poor editing over time - however merely scrubbing the references is not the best approach, the references may well have supported text which should not have been edited out and the existence of an orphan reference should elicit a check of the history, not summary deltion. --Nik Wright2 (talk) 11:40, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Here is an earlier version of the text:

Former premie (follower of Rawat) Marcia Carroll was deprogrammed from Rawat's cult in 1973 by Ted Patrick. Patrick's autobiographical ghost-writer, Tom Dulack, quotes Marcia at length, describing each of the four techniques in detail within the context of her experience. She concludes: "the more meditation you do, the less able you are to reason. It becomes painful to think at all. So whatever they tell you, you do.... With more and more meditation, you experience a sort of ... self-hypnosis. It keeps you there."

This assessment is seconded by Dr. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman in the second edition of their study "Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change." They quote a former premie as saying "after my deprogramming, it took several weeks before I was able to maintain a train of thought and make two sentences go together without having the whole thing erased. Meditation had become a conditioned response. My mind just kept doing it automatically."

It seems like that material became condensed and perhaps lost accuracy in the process. The material from Snapping is also in the 1st ediiton. Any objections to restoring this verion?   Will Beback  talk  15:59, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Looks like you've been doing some good research. I'm sure there is something else in Snapping from another former premie about it seeming like a bad phone connection trying to listening to his own thinking in his own head after practicing Maharaji's meditation for a while. I know of more examples, personally, but I don't think they've been documented in reliable sources. During the summer of 1973, a physician was quoted on the front page of the Detroit Free Press debunking the meditation techniques. He said that the "light" was actually a phosphene reaction from pressing on your own eyeballs and that the "nectar" was explained by "snot can taste sweet, sometimes." Wowest (talk) 21:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The Lede

The teachings of Prem Rawat are based on his central claim that peace resides in every
     human being and that the human quest for fulfillment can be resolved by turning inward 
     to discover the contentment and joy within.

I think that's inaccurate. I think that the teachings of Prem Rawat consist of meditation instruction and, at this point, nothing else except for a one page list of commandments including "leave no room in your mind for doubt," and "constantly meditate and remember the Holy Name." The part about the Guru being God (or greater than God, on one poster), the Mind being "Satan" and the ... moral obligation to give the guru and his organization all of your time and money now seems to be being blamed on the Divine Light Mission organization. Something should probably be said, though, about the premies who signed over all of their trust funds, money, property and "potential inheritances" to enter the guru's ashrams only to be thrown out on the street, penniless, when they became older and the ashrams were closed. Wowest (talk) 22:04, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages is not about what anyone 'thinks' - it is an encyclopedia, otherwise it would be crammed full of personal points of view. The content must be referenced to appropriate sources, and in the case of a living person, extra care is required. This topic should not be a blog for personal points of view on Prem Rawat. Terry Macro (talk) 23:21, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

References

1. Patrick, Ted with Tom Dulack, Let Our Children Go!: By the man who rescues brainwashed American youth from sinister 'religious' cults pp. 214-215 (1976)E.P. Dutton & Company, ISBN 0-525-14450-1.
2. Conway, Flo and Siegelman, Jim, "Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change Second Edition pp 159 f (2005) Stillpoint Press, ISBN 0-38528928-6.

• Articles on probation