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.

Mike, you have grown a great deal through the ordeal of leaving Maharaji, so he helped you flourish after all, though probably not in the way that he intended.
– Larry Rosenberg, author ‘Breath by Breath’ and ‘Living in the Light of Death’; founder and guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, USA.

You can see the front pages, contents, and chapter one, in this PDF.

On December 07 2009, this press release went out in the USA.