Prem Rawat Maharaji Biography Page 11

On March 9, 1975, Prem Rawat and Marolyn's first child was born. They called her Premlata, meaning "Vine of Love." A month later, as soon as his young family was able to travel, they flew to India. Sat Pal had informed authorities that Prem Rawat was planning to "instigate riots." However, he was able to meet many of his students briefly under supervision of the military and police. At the Jhumri Talaiya Ashram in Bihar, he and Marolyn had an Indian-style wedding ceremony and feast, attended by a huge crowd of well-wishers.

By 1974, the headquarters of the U.S. DLM occupied four stories of a Denver office building. Prem Rawat was not yet old enough to legally manage the organization, and it had begun to develop a life and a direction of its own. The person in charge, Bob Mishler, began to feel that Prem Rawat should take on a figurehead humanitarian leadership role. He thought that the instructors should take over the responsibility for spreading Knowledge.

Some senior managers, Mishler included, had become so caught up in running the organization that they had reportedly stopped practicing Knowledge. By neglecting their practice of Knowledge in favor of running an organization, they had in effect abandoned the primary purpose for which the organization existed. An ex-official later reported in his autobiography that an angry Mishler had slammed his head into a wall during a disagreement over the storage of photos.

Another wrote, “I was working at the grandly named International Headquarters of Prem Rawat’s work in Denver. It was a time of change, but to me the most significant development was the desire of Bob Mishler, the man in charge at the time, with a charismatic but driven personality, to downplay Maharaji’s role as the teacher to a point of near invisibility. Bob felt this would be more acceptable to the American mentality. Maharaji rejected the plan, holding the role of the teacher as essential — that you couldn’t take the teacher out of the equation. Bob found the rejection hard to take, and he became increasingly unhappy, in the end resigning his role.”