Without The Guru
Michael Finch
For thirty-one years I gave my total allegiance, my energy, my devotion, my dreams, my time, and my love to Guru Maharaji (the Lord of the Universe, Prem Rawat). I also gave him and his organizations two inheritances, a house, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. As Maharaji’s former chauffeur I was close to him personally; I lived as a renunciate in his ashrams, and was later authorized and empowered to reveal his secret teachings (the ‘Knowledge’).
‘Without The Guru’ is a narrative of my time with Maharaji, and my struggle to surrender my life to him and to achieve the liberation that he promised. It is a story of being confined within a rigid belief system, realizing it, and discovering how to break out from it. It is a story of how I came to live, think, feel, behave, and love, without ‘the Guru’, meaning both Maharaji, as the actual guru in my own life; and in a more general sense of learning to face myself and the world without any intermediary or negotiator, of any kind, in between.
Michael Finch