Former Major Donor John Carpenter tells his story

John is a bilingual technical author and former Prem Rawat follower and supporter. In 2007, he interviewed Prem to mark the 50th anniversary of his taking on his mission to propagate 'The Knowledge' in the West.

John was among the first to join the major donor team and continued donating until 2018. He finally moved away from all involvement with Prem Rawat and his organisations in 2019.

This is his story.

This story describes his life before meeting Prem Rawat, which will be the subject of his next article.

Prem Rawat: Knowing Me Knowing You Aha! - Part 2

Premoir 2 - A Perfect (Master) Storm

Photo by John Carpenter

Back in the sixties, words like guru, swami and maharishi were almost unknown in my hometown. I don't recall hearing any of them until Spike Milligan (of Goon Show fame) appeared in a spoof news item.

It was shortly after the Beatles had gone to see Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that Spike, disguised as Swami Ned Teeth, claimed he'd reach the highest known state of consciousness - 'transcendental money.' I laughed like a drain then, but just now, the adage "Many a true word spoken in jest" comes to mind.

Like Spike, I was born into an Irish Catholic home, geographically in England but in most other ways, part of the Emerald Isle. Religious, educational and social interactions all had a distinct draught Guinness flavour.

Our family was one (of many, I suspect) that put the fun into dysfunctionality and, as the youngest of five siblings in a crowded terraced house, my influences ranged from devout to atheistic. Though I eventually leaned heavily towards the latter, I'd been subjected to the one-and-only saviour narrative long before I'd taken my first lungful of cannabis, let alone my last brain-full of LSD. I bought into some, but not quite all of it.

I recall a primary school Bible class where I complained about not having direct access to god's only-begotten son. It seemed grossly unfair to me that our only saviour had died almost 2000 years before I was born. So all I had to go on was what the priests told me. Christ's contemporaries, by contrast, listened live and in person. Some asked for miracles and apparently got them!

Of course, there were those jammy Apostles who hung around with him almost all the time. The old priest teaching the class not only ignored my outburst but treated me with suspicion for the rest of my primary school years.

So, my feeling of religious unfairness slipped into shadowland to emerge years later as a somewhat reactionary search for a living embodiment of Jesus. Except it didn't have to be Jesus at that point; it could have been Buddha, Krishna, or anyone able to save me from the host of sins I'd already committed.

These included Original Sin (part of the Catholic Welcome package) and those unspeakable sins of the flesh that stained your soul even if you never got as far as having sex; merely confessing to thinking about sex would attract a weighty penance.

Oh the complexities of growing up in the sex-without-guilt generation subconsciously believing in the righteousness of guilt-without-sex. I have to admit Catholic propaganda was so strong when I was eight that I told my mother I might have a vocation to the priesthood. God bless her for telling me not to be so stupid and to go out and play football until dinner was ready.

Oddly enough, it was football that first opened my eyes to the notion that Catholicism might not be the bedrock of our religious DNA. I recall asking my father if I could play for a local Boys Brigade team at the request of the protestant kid next door, who said they were short of players. My dad said I could, just as long as I didn't say any of their non-Catholic prayers. So I played but had the feeling that my teammates weren't really to be trusted.

My understanding of this god business seemed infested with other contradictions. Take those random visits from the parish priest when we rapidly hid the whisky. Our local "holy man" was, it seemed, a bit of a lush. And we definitely didn't mention that my sister was a beauty queen who'd been on TV in a swimsuit, though I'd proudly told all the kids in our street about it.

Even so, early propaganda leaves its mark, and the notion of living a sin-free life would occasionally make a ghost-like appearance, most often as a way to deal with disappointment in love. Love itself, of course, remained simple and beautiful, but my ideas of what it was became confused as I waded through puberty muddied with guilt.

Somehow, hidden Papal mandates malingered until my father passed away and the influence of his entrenched beliefs began to fade.

It became clear that my mother was less indoctrinated and, after a burst of fervent confessions and holier-than-thou communions, I realised that the back door of the church had never been locked. So, one fine day, in the middle of mass, I got up and walked out.

A few days later, I announced that I wasn't doing all that Catholic stuff anymore. My mother didn't seem as surprised as I'd imagined she would be and she didn't really try to talk me out of it. By this time, the elder of my two older brothers, an athlete who excelled at football and boxing, had married and moved out.

So, after my father died, my interest in football and other sports also dwindled. In my late teenage years, I began following my peer group into experiments with recreational drugs.

One of these experiments involved astral projecting using a method described by the supposedly ex-Tibetan llama T. Lobsang Rampa. Fake as he was, his method (with cannabis assistance) worked like magic, and I had an out-of-body experience that I recall to this day.

Perhaps it was then that I started looking for something stronger than cannabis, I'm not sure. But I'm certain it was Plato's cave allegory that helped me to start spending lost weekends in a psychedelic romance with Alice Dee, better known as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Now I don't have any great affinity for philosophy, but I was struck by Plato's cave allegory and I've revisited it more than once, especially since reading 'Uncle' Carl Jung. Plato wrote about prisoners trapped in a cave, able to see only shadowy images cast on the wall in front of them by unseen people holding up objects behind them.

This somewhat unusual metaphor represented how most people, relying only on their immediate senses, didn't understand the true nature of reality. Back in 1969, my acid guru explained that LSD was the only way out into the sunlight of the real world, a real-world that was, for most people, both dangerous and illegal.

These people were referred to as 'straights' and our mission, I learned, was to break free from their short-sighted conundrums. This view was supported by a global feeling that, with hindsight, may have been partly a sane reaction to the horrors of World War Two. These days I'd suggest that FlowerPower.com was also a psychic response to the scientism that gave rise to reductionist materialism.

Of course, back then, I just wanted to experience absolute truth and become permanently enlightened. Looking East, taking psychedelics and turning away from alcohol was my peer group's recommended methodology. It was quite challenging for me with an Irish drinking ancestry and an older sister who'd become the landlady of one of the busiest pubs in town.

Nevertheless, I embraced semi-hippyness and began ingesting pills with cosmic names like Strawberry Fields, California Sunshine, Purple Haze, and so on. My acid trips were always mind-bending, without ever quite satisfying my desire to 'touch the face of god'.

That is until the last one, when I and a group of friends bought some US-Army grade LSD stolen from a local psychiatric hospital. This was a much purer form of acid than we'd taken before and when it kicked in, it was pretty wild. Let me provide some details to illustrate what I mean,

We left the little bar where we'd bought and taken our sugar lumps and I drove us, feeling inexplicably like a Spitfire pilot, to my mother's up-market flat, which was empty for the weekend. Now my Mum used her TV as a burglar alarm and, as we trooped into the lounge, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho had reached the point where the private detective was entering the old house at the Bates Motel.

I later learned that Hitchcock had called this his scariest film and nominated this scene as a near-perfect cinematic representation of psychological terror. None of us would have disagreed as we stood watching, open-mouthed and unable to move.

It was our acid guru who came to the rescue, falling to his knees and crawling behind the TV so he could reach the controls without having to witness those fearful images that held the rest of us captive. For what seemed eons, his spider-like hand wandered around groping for buttons while we gaped at a superb overhead shot of Milton Arbogast climbing the stairs toward his grizzly doom.

We all knew what was about to happen would be terrifying, and none of us wanted to look at it, but we were trapped like hares in headlights. It was all over in a flash. Carving-knife-wielding Norman Bates, dressed as his mother, appeared at the head of the stairs. The music rose to ear-splitting levels, and the dreadful scene vanished into a single white dot. Our acid guru had found the volume control and, immediately afterward, the On/Off Switch.

I recall very little of the next 12 hours, except that we all became strangely omniscient, and I discovered disturbing psychic powers that mercifully lasted only until daylight. Abandoning a huge breakfast, which was anathema to our altered states, we hit a nearby park and separated. I lay down beneath gnarled oaks and cloud-gazed until my eyelids grew heavy. Then, for the first time in more than 24 hours, I let them roll shut.

Immediately I began free-falling into my psyche until forgotten wings opened and I soared up into what sacred texts have called 'The Illimitable Sky'. I glided ecstatically through infinities of rainbow-coloured mandalas, each one containing infinities of rainbow-coloured mandalas.

I can't really explain what I saw, but I later came to the conclusion that I'd glimpsed what Arjuna saw when Krishna revealed his true form, that I'd gained insight into what Buddha had realised under the Bo tree and I was, thereafter, certain that indigestion isn't what makes newborn babies smile. It was a breathy wind that pulled me back from the timelessness into raw duality.

"What's happening?" asked my innocence.

"Don't you know?" answered my fearfulness.

The breathy wind grew louder, and a distant, soulless voice clanged like a broken bell. "You're dying."

My heart pounded so violently that I thought it would explode.

Blind panic, then a little miracle. My eyelids snapped open.

Blessed relief, but not for long. Inhuman eyes peered into mine. I hardly dared breathe. The eyes widened. A rumbling growl. A yelp, but of shock.

The dog that had been sniffing my inanimate body sprang back and was called away by its anxious owner.

The gratitude I felt on seeing the limitable sky again was illimitable, but my belief in Alice and acid gurus was shattered. I vowed I'd find a way to get back to those beautiful mandalas without drugs. I turned away from psychedelics with the certainty that there was a beautiful reality inside me and began looking for someone who could help me.

I read Castenada, Ram Das, Yogananda, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and many more.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was setting myself up for a meaningful meeting with some unknown teacher, preferably from the East, who'd understand the inner reality I'd found and would teach me how to embrace it fully without using any psychedelics of any kind.

If you'd like to contact John or me, go here. More information about the real Prem Rawat, stories from ex-followers, and eyewitness whistleblower accounts are here.