information about John Yarr

I have been contacted by someone who is making a film about the band James. He wants to use the photograph that I have of John Yarr but needs to be certain that it is actually him. I said that I think it is him but I can't be 100% sure. What I am hoping is that people who have seen him more than I did could confirm that the photo is definitely him. Or not. Also, if anybody has any photographs of Yarr of their own or press clippings or any interesting material they could send them to me and I can pass them on and maybe put them on this blog. andrewmclarenlewis@gmail.com

is he the one?

The Messiah Does a Bunk

 

19870501.pdf (freethinker.co.uk)

From 'The Freethinker' from May 1987.

We know that he went to Leeds and bought a house there.

Mari-Ann Barrett was one of the four women who were with John Yarr in the Divine Light Mission who formed the nucleus of the emerging cult.

John Yarr was charged

I have found something more about John Yarr. I have no idea if it is true but it seems credible to me.

The reason Lifewave ended was more than that, it was due to the accusations of sexual misdemeanors with children from 1976-1986, not just adults, though it was not made public at the time. Yarr was questioned by D.C.Shakespeare in 1986, and charged and detained with a court case in 1999/2000 in Chichester, but the case was dropped by the CPS because police hadn't kept their records from the original investigation. It was standard policy to keep them for only ten years at that time. In 1986 the Adepts close to Yarr and those living with him at Slindon met to discuss the claims and then decided to end the cult.

I found it on a forum. https://forum6250.rssing.com/chan-59167626/article3041-live.html

review of Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I am reading Zen and the Art of Consciousness by Susan Blackmore. She understands more about true enlightenment than John Yarr or Mooji put together. Some parts of the book are boring, such as when she is writing about philosophical concepts such as free will.

There is no point in discussing philosophical concepts here. I'm sure Yarr and his Adepts will say there is no point to thinking, it is experience that matters. Except that I don't believe they have experienced true enlightenment: Susan Blackmore has.

There are just a couple of things I want to mention about free will though. Susan says that science tells us that everything has a cause therefore everything is predetermined. I know that is what you learn on a philosophy course but that's not true. Science tells us that some things are random. We live in a universe where some things happen because of previous things and some things happen at random. How that affects our understanding of free will I don't know but I think it's important to point that out.

Then there are the ethical implications of not having free will. It seems that someone who is enlightened does not feel they have free will and does not feel regret for past actions. Is it good to have people who never feel regret? Does it make them more capable of actions that harm others?

If they were always accepting everything that would be one thing. However, they seem to accept that their cult leader is abusing children yet at the same time not accepting that someone they have initiated doesn't want to continue to be part of their cult - they get very upset about that.

Before I read this book I understood certain things. I understood that there are two forms of enlightenment. Both are nonduality, but nonduality can manifest in two different ways. First, you can perceive everything you see to be part of you. Second, you perceive that there is no you.

I understood that sense perceptions are important in how a self is formed. Somehow sense perceptions become woven together to create a self. Susan Blackmore shows more about how this happens. I have quoted two passages from her book below.

page 129

"The difficult part, in my experience, is the letting go, but then it always is. This practice has a very odd quality about it. Self seems to dissolve into the multiple threads so that there is no longer any central self whose attention switches to one stream or another. So there is no longer a 'string of beads', or a 'stream of consciousness', or a 'movie in the brain', but experiences and experiencers that co-emerge all over the place and not to anyone in particular. It is much more like Dennett's 'multiple drafts'."

pages 154 and 155

"Then suddenly it's possible. Perhaps all those years of practising some kind of letting go have stood me in good stead. There goes the traffic noise, thrumming along. Someone has been listening to it all the time. Let it arise, let it be for however long it stays, and let it go. Meanwhile, in parallel with that, something else has risen up. The birds are singing. The drill has started up again. There's a sense that each arises, stays for a while, and fizzles out. They're not being attended to one at a time, but go on in parallel with nothing holding them together.

It is the fizzling out that is the tricky bit. I notice that as each sound or feeling dies away, or ceases being brought into play, there is a bit of me that wants to hang onto it; that wants to keep saying, 'I experienced that. I remember it. I exist.' But the task is clear. Let all these threads do their stuff, and that includes fizzling out again. So they are let go. It is possible after all. They do just seem to arise and fall away again, but not to me.

I have a little chuckle. For years and years I have understood John's instruction to 'Let it come, let it be, let it go' in the following way. Here I am, being mindful, practicing meditation, sitting in the middle of my world, and along comes some thought or idea or perception. What I must do is let it arise - here in my consciousness - let it be for a little while and then, when its time is up, let it go out of my consciousness again. I've done it for years, and very useful it has been too.

But now it seems that it isn't like that at all. No, not at all. Rather, there are myriad things arising and staying for a while being experienced by someone and then fizzling out again. The meaning of John's meme is to let that happen. It is not that they are happening to me. They are not coming, being and going, to me. It's all just happening anyway, whether I like it or not. The task is not to prevent it, not to interfere with it, not to suppose that there even is a me who could interfere with it all. Ah."

The problem that I have with Susan's position is that if you don't believe that the Self (or the illusion of Self) has a supernatural cause then you have to believe that it is an evolved characteristic. Either it has evolved through Darwinian natural selection or it is intimately associated with an evolved characteristic. It must have a purpose. To blithely say that we can get rid of it and everything will be fine is taking a big risk.

I used to think that we don't need a Self. That was because I believed in traditional Buddhist and Hindu belief systems. This included the concept of reincarnation: enlightenment means we don't have to reincarnate. Now I no longer accept these belief systems I think people are taking a big risk in playing about with their heads.

You go on intensive meditation retreats and you don't know what you will end up with. It affects different people in different ways. It could be mental illness. You want to risk your mental health? For what? The Truth?

I know that the peak of Everest is the highest point on Earth. I don't need to go there to prove it. I certainly wouldn't want to live there. I know that my Self isn't real. I don't need to spend vast amounts of time and money on intensive meditation retreats to prove it. As for being in a state of no-Self 100% of the time, I wouldn't want it even if it was easy to achieve. I have no reason to believe that it is a superior state of being. I gave up believing that when I gave up believing in reincarnation.

another abusive cult leader

When Lifewave broke up I was living in Leeds. I had a friend Carolyn who wanted to continue to see John Yarr. She persuaded me to see him, which I did a couple of times in 1987. I decided not to see him after that, I hadn't been very impressed when I had. He did turn up at her flat another time when I was there.

I had a council flat in Leeds and I managed to get someone in London to swap flats with me. Brixton Hill wouldn't have been my first choice of areas in London to live in but I was happy there to begin with. In 1998 someone moved in next door to me. He seemed quite nice but now I have found out that he went on to become an abusive cult leader, far worse than John Yarr.

He doesn't live in a council flat in Brixton Hill any more. He has his own ashram in Portugal. He has large numbers of followers and has become rich. There is a lot of stuff on him on the web including this: Becoming God: Inside Mooji’s Portugal Cult.

He's called Mooji, but when I knew him he was called Tony. I used to talk to him and his girlfriend Mitch. I knew he was interested in spiritual things because he had a picture of Ramana Maharshi hanging from his neck. He had been to India and was a follower of Poonja (Papaji), who was in turn a follower of Ramana Maharshi.

So he is part of the nondualist tradition, which I knew nothing about at the time. Their ideas are quiet different from what was taught in Lifewave. His ideas would be similar to those of Andrew Cohen, another follower of Poonja, who was another abusive cult leader.

You might say that power corrupts. The last time I saw Tony was on a bus. I went up to him and tried to talk to him. He was very rude to me. I thought at the time he might be having an off day when he's not interested in small talk with someone he hardly knows, but now I realise that he was an evil bastard even then. Who knows who you might have living next door to you?

After I had left the area he had meetings at his Brixton Hill flat. Satsangs, he called them. He can seem quiet nice when he wants to but I read that he had vast amounts of cash hidden in the flat ready for smuggling to Portugal so he could buy land for his ashram. How many of those who sat at his feet suspected anything like that?

Mooji -- Underbelly Exposed

what he does to women

sign the petition to remove charity status

Tim Booth radio interview

Tim Booth is the singer in the band James. In the 1980s he was part of Lifewave in Manchester. I remember sharing a bus journey into Manchester with him. I also remember fellow band member Jimmy and his wife Jenny.

Tim recently did an hour-long interview broadcast on the radio a few days ago. He mentions Lifewave but only briefly. He said he did long hours of meditation. These days he is more interested in drugs such as psilocybin, mostly for its therapeutic purposes.

The interview can be heard here.

There is another interview in the Independent newspaper James: ‘We were so hopelessly indie-schmindie it made Belle and Sebastian look like Whitesnake’. They have a new album. This interview has 3 paragraphs about Lifewave, mentioning John Yarr by name. I didn't realise that one of the ‘enlightened teachers’ went round and beat him up.

narcissism

I came across something in an article in The Times (saturday review 09/01/21 by David Aaronovitch). It is a review of The Act of Living by Frank Tallis.

"It seems appropriate at the moment when I'm writing this to end with one of the key personality traits identified by psychotherapy: narcissism. We are born thinking we are the alpha and omega. However, Tallis writes, "the infant learns that he or she is not the fulcrum around which everything turns. Other people are not there simply to meet needs and there are limits to his or her powers." The child learns that this is so and has to accept it.

"But Freud warned that it is always possible to slip back, to regress and suddenly find that we are repossessed by the megalomania of infancy." And there we have the narcissist. Whose condition, as the child psychotherapist Melanie Klein wrote, can "mutate into something more monstrous. Narcissistic entitlement can become so grotesque that the affected individual covets more or less everything. The narcissist becomes envious and hateful... Only the narcissist has a right to exist."

Occasionally the worst happens. Such a person becomes a leader and projects his narcissism on to an entire people. And can you imagine what would happen if such a person was to be elected to the most powerful job in the world, the presidency of the United States? You sense it wouldn't end well."

I've never been a big fan of Freud but sometimes he had an insight into human nature. When someone becomes enlightened, it seems to them that everything is part of them. Does this mean that when someone becomes enlightened they become narcissistic, as if only they exist?

The Theosophical Society always said that when we come to know our unity with other human beings we will treat them with respect and the world will be a better place without the problems of violence, manipulation etcetera. Perhaps the opposite is true, that enlightenment makes people manipulative.

Then you have the question of why some enlightened people say they don't have emotions when it's obvious to anyone who meets them that they do. As Daniel M Ingram has written:-

"Why is it that even the few people I do know who claim to have eliminated the internal feeling of all emotions (e.g. Gary Weber, a Vedanta practitioner, who I have just met briefly, and he seemed to be a very nice guy with an interesting message), still totally seem to manifest emotions externally?"

If someone sees an ice cream they may have desire for it. How does that work though for someone who perceives themselves not to be separate from the ice cream, or anything else? Perhaps they have problems registering their own desires. They have problems registering other people's desires and needs. Then they don't care if their actions cause others suffering.