Hi, Livia,

I believe the reason why we were attracted to Maharaji is because of the immense sociological/spiritual/social watershed of the era.

The 20th century represented the final fulfilment of a scientific and materialistic revolution in perception and thought which had begun about four centuries earlier with philosopher scientists like Roger Bacon and Descartes, the former of whom provided us with the sollipsistic vision of reality based merely on our personal sensory perceptions (I only believe in what I can see, feel, hear, touch, taste) and the latter of whom capped this off with his celebrated enthronement of rationality worship (I think, therefore I am).

These were probably the two most influential people in forming what at that time and for most people even now represents the Western mind-set.

The scientific revolution which gathered pace through the Industrial Revolution culminated in the 20th century with heart transplants, moon rocketry and pace-makers, but had left people with an existential gap inside which in previous times had been filled by a belief in or experience of God and the human soul.

The triumph of the materialist world-view was expressed most vividly in the west by unabated consumerism, in the east, by atheistic communism. Popular imagery of the day included endless sociological treatises on the implications of the most affluent society in human history, and Boris Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago...

The churches were empty, as traditional religion bored the shit out of everyone, especially the young, and seemed meaningless.

University students routinely depressed themselves reading the mandatory inductory works into student nihilistic bohemia such as Sarte's Nausea and Huxley's Brave New World.

The arts were in terminal decline. The Modernist Movement had culminated in black and white canvases in the Tate Gallery. Nobody but the tiniest of elites could listen to modern classical music and jazz, while the ordinary run of people still blissed out to Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and the Romantic soulful music of a century before.

The factors which contributed to breaking this cultural impasse were: the availability of free education and the massive university expansion program at least in the UK. France already had the long-established tradition of higher education being open to all possessors of the baccalaureat. This provided a pool of potential Western Viet Cong, financed by their own governments.

The second and vital factor was the Vietnam War, which focussed very many lesser issues into THE totally iconic issue.

The third factor was the availability of LSD, which provided the apparent tool to break from the all-devouring grip of rationality and the Baconian sensory sollipsistic prison back into other and fuller modes of apprehension.

The fourth factor was the extremely large fund of extraordinary talent and visionaries who belonged to and propelled the counter-culture. Some compared the flowering to a whole new Romantic age.

The air of Armageddon was provided by Cold War politics, and the scarcely controlled spiral of ultimate Weaponry of Mass Destruction. There was a sense at the end of the 60's decade that the various promises which the ideal of Progress (natural accompaniment to the scientific/rationalistic/materialist revolution) which had fuelled human hope for some centuries and promised a great paradisical human emancipation had failed big-time in multiple fields:

No one could watch the Moon landing without somehow the sense of its futility, that the bearers of western culture in big boots were on a little isolated dead piece of rock, incapable even of making its own light, while behind was the Earth, exploding in beautiful greens and blue, and fertility.              The technological revolution had produced many labour saving devices, but had also become the tool of major domination of small independent nations, while people twigged that living greatly longer lives didn’t really make you that much happier.

The failure of the student political revolutions of the late sixties meant that capitalism wasn’t going to fade, but was here to stay. The revolutionaries became depressed and either took up arms like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades, or threw themselves further into drugs to find the transcendental reality.

There was the overriding sense that all of the events of the 60’s, the vast proliferation of talent, the participation within massive historical events by so many of the social revolutionary bohemian counter-culture could not have been about Nothing, and had to have been leading to something Immense. The irony otherwise would have been too great. And the goal must have a totally Ultimate meaning.

The revolutionaries were largely from the educated side of society - initially academic in origin, but subsequently fed by other echelons of alienated ‘outsider’ young who identified with student revolutionary cool, the hip and for many real sense of alienation, and student street rebellion.

Most office and factory workers, and middle-aged westerners were excluded from the event (apart from briefly in 1968 in France), because they had to work 9 to 5, and a revolutionary above all needs Time to think and revolt.

On the other side of the world, the Sri Hans family had wished to give birth to a child who would have more powers than ever before. One of their children was gifted with charisma, a naturally commanding public personality and well versed in the Radhasoami teachings.

He also felt a sense of historical destiny - that the West was awaiting him, with all its promises of infinite wealth, adoration, and a ready made following.

The two halves of the objective correlative met in the UK in 1971.