Life is a tide; float on it. Go down with it and go up with it, but be detached. Then it is not difficult.

He was the leader of a movement known as Elan Vital and its predecessor the Divine Light Mission (DLM) (Divya Sandesh Parishad). He returned to India later that year with 300 westerners who chartered an Air India Boeing 747 to accompany him and stayed in the mission's ashrams. Tens of thousands had been initiated and several hundred centers and dozens of ashrams formed.

Rather than a body of dogma he emphasizes a direct experience of transcendence that he says is accessible through the meditation techniques he teaches. Rawat retained control of the movement outside India and later abandoned the religious aspects of his teachings to make his message more widely acceptable replacing Divine Light Mission with Elan Vital. His message is now distributed in more than 88 countries.