Being of the Jewish persuasion, I'm not exactly the kind of person given to confession, but allow me the ecumenical luxury of confessing at least one thing in this first paragraph of what may well turn out to be the Mahabharata of blog postings:
Writing about Prem Rawat and the gift that he offers is not easy.
It's not easy for a few reasons.
First off, what I want to say existed long before words -- long before nouns and verbs and the leaky vessels we construct to float our shaky boats of babble. Secondly, words are approximations of the real thing at best. Like menus, they indicate something's cooking in the kitchen, but they are not the food itself. And thirdly, the dog ate my homework.
I don't know how it works, but there are years of my life I can barely remember, but seconds with Prem that remain a vast eternity, indelibly impressed on my heart like some kind of rock 'n roll Rosetta stone.
I never laugh so hard or cry so long as when I'm in his company. I never feel so good.
The first time I heard about him, I was both ecstatic and afraid -- ecstatic at the thought I might finally experience what I'd been born for -- afraid that somehow, grand impostor that I was, I would be the only person on the face of the Earth not to get it. Forget it. I got it.
Yes, that moment happened -- the moment of oooh -- the moment of aaah -- the moment of finally coming into my own after years of imagining my own was someplace far away -- in a forest, cave, or future lifetime.
What has he taught me? How to wake up -- and stay awake. How to appreciate. How to feel. How to simply be.
What Prem Rawat offers is not so much a teaching as it is transportation to the place we've either been seeking our entire lives or have given up on long ago -- the place of no judgment, the place of no doubt, the place of no worry, no fear, no problem.
Here! The place of remembering. And what we remember here is love -- plain and simple. For love is the name of the game...