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 Without the Guru:
How I Took My Life Back After Thirty Years
By Michael Finch
BookSurge Publishing 2009
For thirty-one years Michael Finch gave his total allegiance, energy, devotion, dreams, time and love to Guru Maharaji (the Lord of the Universe, Prem Rawat). He also gave the Guru and his organizations two inheritances, a house, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. As Maharaji’s former chauffeur Michael was close to him personally; he lived as a renunciate in Maharaji’s ashrams, and was later authorized and empowered to reveal the Guru’s secret teachings (the “Knowledge”).
Michael explains that Without the Guru: How I Took My Life Back After Thirty Years (BookSurge Publishing)
…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’s background brings a particularly moving voice to the chronicle of his life from “beatnik and hippy roots of the mid-1960s,” (1) and the later struggle to reclaim his life once it had become complexly intertwined with Maharaji. Without the Guru is not only a narrative about extricating oneself from a cult. Michael’s prose is self-reflective, honest, and eloquently describes the overlapping experiences of devotion, spirituality, and being human. In one passage Michael examines what Maharaji meant to him and others within a crowd:
Actually, not loved us so much as he loved me, each of us locked in our own private fantasy that he was really noticing us individually, or we were aching for such notice. We identified the outer guru we saw out there with the inner guru we knew existed in here, so the figure on stage we were yearning for was also our own inner essence. And the consequence of such identification was to give ourselves away, to wrench our self from its true home here and place it at a distance over there on that stage (161).
 Michael’s book is about “a process of discovery,” (247) of how he learned to feel, love and act without Maharaji: “It is a story of being confined within a rigid belief system, realizing it, and discovering how to break out from it” (247).
This ability to recognize the guru dynamic and be able to side-step it, is not just relevant to Eastern gurus such as Michael writes about, but especially to both business and life decisions in our modern western world.
To be mesmerized by the supposed expertise and charisma of a guru-figure, whether religious or business, can lead to dependency, unclear thinking, reliance on flawed beliefs, and bad decisions.
Just how bad such decisions can be was revealed by the tragedy in October 2009 concerning a sweat lodge run by another guru (this one Oprah-approved) James Ray in Sedona, AZ. This sweat lodge was completely unlike ceremonial Native American sweat lodges and violated elementary safety guidelines. Sixty-four people were crammed into a space deliberated created to be physically challenging, and the guru-figure James Ray repeatedly affirmed that they needed to go “beyond themselves” and remain in the lodge, to surrender to something more than themselves. The result was three deaths and nineteen serious cases of collapse.
The interesting thing about this incident is that no one was physically prevented from leaving the lodge. It appears that people stayed against all reason, in spite of severe physical distress, because of the pressure from the guru-figure to surrender and “transcend themselves.” It is easy to say “well, I would have left in a situation like that” — and perhaps you would have. But then it is hard to appreciate how insidious, seductive and powerful the guru dynamic can be. By examining the dynamic in such detail, Michael does us all a favor by showing us an “up close and very personal” (247) view of human relations, in the business environment and in life in general, that it is important we enter well prepared and alert to its dangers.
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