This article, the first of three, describes the Cincinnati Fabe sisters' deprogramming from premies of Guru Maharaj Ji (now Prem Rawat) - Divine Light Mission members - after 4 and 3 years' involvement, respectively. "White, bright, undergraduates, trying to find meaning in uncomfortable adulthood, they follow authoritarian leaders who answer every question and promise them a vision of truth, happiness and God." Linda Fabe remembered that at her first DLM meeting, she saw "so many people (who) looked happier than any group of people I'd ever seen" … That was the public face of DLM satsang meetings. Behind the scenes, the premies were little different to any group. In these daily meetings premies testified to how the guru and The Knowledge meditation had given them new happiness, peace, and Knowledge of God. As Linda was to discover in her years practicing the Knowledge, these claims were grossly overstated. At a major DLM festival in Orlando she joined the darshan line, bowing and kissing His feet: "(I) didn't feel anything. I was pretty miserable."
The "happy young people" surrounding her explained why: She Wasn't Ready! (ie its your fault) - She needed to receive Knowledge. She "Received the Knowledge" from an initiator in a three-day, intensive Rawat worship satsang session in Ann Arbor. "She was taught how to roll her tongue back to taste God's nectar, to press her closed eyes to see the divine light with her "third eye," to hold her ears to hear the divine music, and to concentrate on her breathing in order to hear the word of God. But I didn't experience anything in my knowledge session. Which is what you'd call disappointing."
In 1977 DLM was reoriented away from meditation towards devotion to and worship of the guru as the most important factor, Devotion not Meditation. "Linda could retreat and admit to being fooled or recommit herself to the new religion. She opted for Guru Maharaj Ji and increasingly oriented her life around DLM, satsang, and those weekend junkets to see and hear Guru Maharaj Ji."
The Fabes reported both the Ann Arbor and Sincininatti communities were unsatisfactory: "Ann Arbor was such an unstable premie community and didn't get together so much for satsang."" … "the Cincinnati ashram was loosely run. The commune no longer is granted full ashram status by DLM's national and international headquarters in Denver." .
The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) * Sunday, Feb 4, 1979 * section B
By Ben L. Kaufmann
Enquirer Reporter
Outside 760 Red Bud Ave, there was no hint of the drama inside the North Avondale home.
Six hired "deprogrammers" were trying to break the allegiance of Barbara and Linda Fabe to the young Indian religious leader, Guru Maharaj Ji.
For their parents, it was jarring. A botched job could mean jail for Harry and Helen Fabe for illegally holding their daughters.
For the daughters, the confrontation was searing.
Linda was the first to follow Guru Maharaj Ji into his Divine Light Mission (DLM). Her induction
First of three parts
began more than three years ago, while she was at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
She introduced Barbara to DLM and she joined a year later. It brought them together and alienated them from their parents.
Linda, 22 today, and Barbara, 24, became premies as the guru's followers are known, travelling at every opportunity around the United States and to Canada and Europe to kiss his feet and bask in his presence.
Unlike the Hare Krishna followers, the estimated 10,000 American worshippers of Guru Maharaj Ji do not affect Indian dress. They do use some Hindi, the language of their guru's home, and they have transplanted some worship practises to their U.S. centers including the Denver headquarters.
Linda had heard about DLM from friends, attended evening satsang sessions where premies told how Guru Maharaj Ji improved their lives, and she had gone away unimpressed. These daily gatherings include testimonies of how he and the meditation premies call The Knowledge have led followers to new happiness.
She was not impressed, but an idea, a hope had been planted in her mind.
When she heard an "initiator," who teaches premies Guru Maharaj Ji's four secret meditation skills, was coming, Linda returned to DLM for an evening.
"The thing that immediately struck me - I remember that first experience very clearly - was that so many people looked happier than any group of people I'd ever seen," Linda recalled in a recent interview.
"What the initiator was talking about completely fit in with my own understanding of things in my own experience."
That night, Linda heard about The Knowledge or meditation techniques. "I don't think at that time they were saying it was God … They said it was love, I think.
"The whole idea of Knowledge was really foreign to me. I thought, 'Why haven't I heard of the four techniques before or anything like that?' "
Nothing Linda had learned at home or in the Isaac M. Wise religious school had prepared her for DLM.
Linda "wanted to check it out more." She had taken the bait.
The children of affluent, permissive parents, Linda and Barbara are in many ways typical of young Americans being attracted to unconventional religions.
White, bright, undergraduates, trying to find meaning in uncomfortable adulthood, they follow authoritarian leaders who answer every question and promise them a vision of truth, happiness and God.
Even, widely circulated stories charging Guru Maharaj Ji with lavish living and a taste for women and costly cars did not dissuade the Fabe sisters.
"It's very gradual," Linda said of her entry into DLM. "People are telling you stuff. And you know that they are sincere, and they're saying that this is their experience they know to be true. And you start believing it.
"Everybody's really nice. They are some really incredible people. They all looked like people I wanted to know. Intelligent. Talented. Nice"
DLM members assured her that everything - playing the piano, being a Jew - went better with Knowledge.
Her characteristic skepticism, undermined by an eagerness to find truth and happiness, was deflected.
Before long, Linda, a pianist and a comfortble Jew bought the whole package. DLM was more than a self-improvement course, Guru Maharaj Ji was Lord.
"Sure, you could play the piano and play it better, but why should you, since this is God?
"Why not put all your energy into God? It could bring you closer to your own religion but what is your own religion anyway?"
"If this is God, what is your religion?"
Similarly, DLM first told her the Knowledge would enhance her Judaism. Before long, it's supplanted it.
DLM, preached the beauty of surrendering "your whole life to the knowledge, to the truth inside you."
At first, "It was scaring me. Yet, I knew I felt it was something I'd probably have to do."
At a program in Orlando more than two years ago "I went in front of Maharaj Ji and didn't feel anything. I was pretty miserable."
That weekend was neither the first not the last time Linda ignored signs all was not as promised. Suppressing her doubts became a key to her belief in Guru Maharaj Ji.
DLM's answer eased her anxiety: "They say it's because you're not open enough to him, to the love he's offering you, and whatever experience you do have is the experience you're meant to have."
She was to learn DLM's answer to every question was to focus on the doubter.
With the characteristic furvor of a convert, Linda found the Ann Arbor DLM too disorganised for her search for Knowledge and God. Whenever she could, she went to Detroit an hour away for evening satsang.
About three years ago, she found her devotion shifting from knowledge to Guru Maharaj Ji.
"That was a hard thing for me to accept" she said.
"I'd read books about gurus and about a relationship between a disciple and a guru and in a sense it sounded really romantic and beautiful because it sounded like a love affair and you could really trust this person.
"But when it came to applying it to my own life, I had a lot of initial mistrust for really trusting somebody else's direction in my own life."
Linda could retreat and admit to being fooled or recommit herself to the new religion. She opted for Guru Maharaj Ji and increasingly oriented her life around DLM, satsang, and those weaeend junkets to see and hear Guru Maharaj Ji.
She was setting herself up to be "brainwashed" or "programmed" as critics of DLM call it. Linda cut herself off from questioning friends and substituted the repetitive litany of Guru Maharaj Ji's praises for other viewpoints.
"I just thought like, well, if this is really something I want to give everything to it … If this is something so marvellous, I want to dedicate my life to it."
In 1976, during a tense visit home during Christmas break from classes at Ann Arbor, Linda didn't go to satsang every night in a rented house on nearby North Crescent Avenue "mainly because I didn't want to scare my parents too much."
Together, at home, for the first time in weeks, it wasn't long before Barbara reacted the Linda's praise of Guru Maharaj Ji and satsang. "Don't talk to me about this anymore," Linda recalled her saying. "I don't want to hear anymore about it."
Linda backed off,"But I was always happy because she would defend it to my parents … She would say, 'This is what Linda is into. Leave her alone.' So I felt good; at least she wasn't condemning me."
Barbara accompanied Linda to a few satsang sessions in Cincinnati and, unknown to Linda, was hooked.
"I was amazed when I found out she started going on her own to sSatsang," Linda said.
"We became very close when she started going to satsang" Linda said. We'd call each other … just to talk about our experiences."
Linda had taken more than a year to buy Guru Maharaj Ji's message. As Barbara would recall later, her induction was much quicker.
Back in Ann Arbor after the winter vacation, Linda received the knowledge from an initiator in a three-day, intensive session, which resembled a nonstop satsang of praise of Guru Maharaj Ji.
She was taught how to roll her tongue back to taste God's nectar, to press her closed eyes to see the divine light with her "third eye," to hold her ears to hear the divine music, and to concentrate on her breathing in order to hear the word of God.
"But I didn't experience anything in my knowledge session. Which is what you'd call disappointing."
As in Orlando, the explanation was Linda was not ready.
But her doubts were eased by all those happy young people surrounding her at the Ann Arbor and Detroit DLMs.
They constantly told each other about their "beautiful experience" with the Knowledge and Guru Maharaj Ji.
"You know it's love," she recalled them saying. "You know its truth because you experience it and the only way you're going ever to find out is if you receive this knowledge.
"So you want to receive it. You trust them. I could believe that if they say that, you know, it's true when you experience it.
"So I could say, 'Okay, well, let me give it a try.' "
Linda quit Michigan to finish her degree at the University of Cincinnati, telling her parents UC offered courses lacking in Ann Arbor.
"The main reason I really wanted to do it was because Ann Arbor was such an unstable premie community and didn't get together so much for satsang."
The Fabes had helped Barbara buy and rehabilitate a Walnut Hills home, and when Linda returned to Cincinnati, both daughters moved in.
To their parents' surprise and anger, Linda and Barbara turned it into a DLM commune before renting it to other premies and moving into the main DLM residence at 820 Delta Ave., Mt. Lookout.
Linda worked briefly as an urban planner for a Cincinnati firm, but her heart was elsewhere. She wanted to devote full time to meditation and DLM, "the most total commitment you could make.
"If this is really God, why do anything else? I was always puzzled by why every premie didn't see it that way."
If there were any discontent in the lives of Linda and Barbara, it was their inability to do more for Guru Maharaj Ji.
The sudden confrontation with deprogrammers at their parents' home and the dramatic days which followed shook that contentment and changed Barbara and Linda's lives.
Until Linda's parents locked her in the kitchen and turned her over to the deprogram team, "Things never fell apart.
"One of the reasons I could continue in it without, let's say, all that much happy experience was because I did experience a growth in my life."
And she believed "I couldn't have said, 'Yes for sure, Guru Maharaj Ji is the Lord,' but I could say, 'Yes, there is a good possibility he is and I aim to find out.' "
As she explained, "Even if this whole thing isn't true, even if it's all a sham, it would be worth finding that out using your whole life to find that out because if it is true, it's God.
"And who do you know that directly experiences God?
"It's worth sacrificing your life even to find out if it's true or if it's not."
Sect Laments Bad 'Press'
Cincinnati's Divine Light Mission (DLM) involves possibly 50 followers of the young Indian Guru, Maharaj Ji, according to a young member of longstanding.
The young man said, DLM depends on word-of-mouth to draw members and has no "official recruiting."
Typically, new members are friends or relatives recruited by premies, as Guru Maharaj Ji's followers are known. They often are invited to Friday evening introductory discussions at a private home.
In recent months, the Cincinnati premies have included two sisters and a brother-and-sister team.
"We try to share, We try to explain."
Insisting on anonymity, he acknowledges that premies have developed an aversion to talking with reporters. It is based, in part, on "bad press" Guru Maharaji has had since he arrived as a 14-year-old guru in the early 1970s, and in the tales told by former premies.
Even James Sivitz, the local co-ordinator, is not free to be interviewed, the young man added. Sivitz and his sister, Susan, are members of the Cincinnati DLM community, he confirmed.
The young man's name and telephone number, and the Sivitz's names, came from a former member of the Cincinnati Group.
"I followed Guru Maharaj Ji even before he came to this country," the young man said, recalling his wide reading about religion.
His family, all Catholics, were unhappy with his allegiance to Guru Maharaj Ji: loving and following a live teacher inspires suspicion. There "always is an element of fear when something is new."
The young man said Guru Maharaj Ji's spiritual influence affects each individual differently. "It's nothing material, it's nothing physical," he said. "You can't put it in words … It goes beyond him.
"It's not just the guy who lives out in Malibu." Guru Maharaj Ji lives on a palatial, walled esstate in Malibu, Calif.
Guru Maharaji elevates an individual's desire to know the truth, to know God, he said, and such self realization leads to a happier, more content life.
It's not easy to explain, given DLM's oral tradition and the differences between Guru Maharaj Ji's teachings and traditional Western religious belief and practice.
For the young man on the telephone, Guru Maharaj Ji provided the "missing piece" in his life, the "love that I never felt."
The young man at DLM agreed, saying the active membership could be 15,000 nationally.
If anything distinguished the Queen City group, it was the high proportion of blacks, she said. Many came to Cincinnati's DLM from other communities.
That has changed, the young man said, as the membership has shifted. At one time, so many young Jews belonged that premies joked about it.
Today, the main DLM commune is 820 Delta Ave., Mt. Lookout, where Linda and her sister, Barbara, 24, lived. It is called a re-ashram, Linda said.
An ashram is a residential community of premies. Unmarried premies in an ashram or pre-ashram are expected to be celibate.
When DLM began in Cincinnati, soon after Guru Maharaj Ji arrived in the United States in 1972, there was an ashram in Hyde Park.N
Apparently, from what Linda and Barbara have heard, the Cincinnati ashram was loosely run. The commune no longer is granted full ashram status by DLM's national and international headquarters in Denver.
There also is a premie house in East Walnut Hills, still owned by Barbara Fabe. Her parents bought her the house, hoping the challenge of rehabilitating the home would snap her out of her worship of Guru Maharaj Ji.