Sacred journeys : the conversion of young Americans to Divine Light Mission /

Tripping with the Guru Maharaj Ji: 18 premies (disciples of DLM) tell their story to a sociologist. Downton teaches in Boulder, Colorado (U. of C.), for some years now the epicenter of Eastern spirituality in America, so he didn't have far to go to find his subjects. They're a predictable crowd--young, white, middle-class, alienated idealists, college dropouts, veterans of the drug culture and the Nixon-era political disillusionment. Downton traces their career over a five year period (1972-77), briefly compares them with three control groups (non-Boulder premies, Hare Krishnas, and ""normal"" collegians), and discovers that they exhibit most of the classic symptoms of conversion as described by Edwin Starbuck, William James, and later psychologists. Essentially, these people are undergoing an adolescent identity crisis, aggravated by unhappiness at home and at school. For many of them attachment to Guru Maharaj Ji helped refocus personal energies and come to a more positive sense of self. Worshipping their teen-age Lord seems, paradoxically, to have been a path to adulthood. What the long-term consequences of devotion to DLM or any other of the ""new Religions"" will be, Downton, reasonably enough, refuses to say, although the future of the groups themselves looks rather bleak at the moment. And to the extent that DLM is a typical specimen, their total disappearance would be a small loss. As Downton portrays them (with no evident bias), the premies are so boring and their Guru so banal, that the reader probably won't care what happens to them. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.