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

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.

what I used to believe

Ever since I was at school I have wondered if there is any truth in religion. I didn't like the idea of God. The Hindu idea of Brahman seemed more likely. Although God and Brahman are often thought of as the same, they are different. God is a being who has thoughts and emotions, likes and dislikes. Brahman is not a being, it is pure consciousness.

When it comes to life after death, I didn't like the idea of heaven and hell. Reincarnation seemed more likely. It isn't that people are rewarded or punished perpetually, it's more that there are consequences of actions. If you behave in a hateful way then you may end up in an unpleasant situation.

So I was attracted towards the religion of India. Hinduism, and Buddhism. Buddha didn't believe in Brahman, so it was a bit of a puzzle how that fitted in. Lots of people believe that all the religions are saying the same thing really just expressing the truth in different ways.

I think that people who commit suicide probably don't believe in life after death. If you believe in heaven or hell then it seems unlikely you would want to kill yourself: you're not going to go to heaven. If you believe in reincarnation then you're not going to solve any problems, just make things worse for yourself. I was unhappy as a teenager and I thought about suicide but not seriously. I thought Enlightenment would be the more sensible thing to do, then I would be free of suffering.

Sometimes people think of Enlightenment as the death of the self, especially in Buddhist ways of thinking. I can now see that this is misleading. The self is just a small part of your mind. The self is like a part of a machine that you can remove and the machine keeps on running much as before. Thinking continues. Emotions continue. Sensing and movement continue as before. Suffering continues, although there is no sufferer.

I couldn't see this when I was young. I thought that Enlightenment would be the end of suffering. There are many things that people think Enlightenment is. I have come to the conclusion that it is about nothing but Nonduality. Nonduality means that you no longer perceive that the world is separate from you. Before there was Subject and Object, after Enlightenment there is just one. The Subject is you, the Object is anything you turn your attention towards.

I used to wonder if Enlightenment was a permanent state of consciousness, or something that you might glimpse just once in a particularly deep meditation. I thought perhaps it could be either. Maybe the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is this. I also wondered if, when it becomes a permanent state then it might be possible for the lower self to be more and more controlled by the higher self. Eventually there would be a perfected human being with mind and body controlled by God or Brahman. He or she would be an expression of God: when he or she speaks then it would be God speaking to us. I wondered if there have ever been people like that.

Not all Hindus believe in Brahman, and some Buddhists believe in something similar to Brahman. One of the most important Hindu teachers was Shankara. He taught something called Advaita Vedanta. Each of us has an inner consciousness, which is something different from the mind. This inner consciousness or awareness is called Atman. Our Atman seems to be different from Brahman, but this is an illusion. We can overcome this illusion and then we will be enlightened.

I thought that if there is any truth in religion it would be this. This is the clearest expression of the truth, other religions are attempting to express the same reality but none so well. I thought that it is possible to prove this. If I meditated then I could become enlightened and then I could prove it to myself. I would not be able to prove it to anyone else, but they would have the choice of following the same path.

This was the fundamental idea in my spiritual beliefs. Without this my spiritual beliefs would have no basis. Accepting it would allow me to develop my beliefs to incorporate other ideas consistent with it. A common idea is that there are different levels of reality. There is the physical world, which is the lowest level. There is the level of Brahman or pure Consciousness which is the highest level. Between these two is the level of the mind.

That gives us three levels. You can subdivide them to get five or seven levels. The Theosophical Society and various occultists talk about seven levels of reality, but whether it is seven, or five or three is not important. We have a presence on each of these levels of reality. They are called Planes of Existence or Planes of Consciousness.

I used to believe in the idea of spiritual progress or spiritual development. We are all on a path of development. Some of us are progressing rapidly, some of us are slower or have stopped. It is our destiny to escape from the cycle of rebirth and end suffering. It is the most important thing that we can work towards in life. It's as if we're all in prison but there is an escape hatch. The method of escape is something that was built into us from the beginning.

It's only recently that I came across facts which challenged these ideas. I read a book by Daniel M Ingram which is about Enlightenment. He writes a lot about what Enlightenment isn't. He doesn't believe that it frees us from reincarnation. He doesn't believe in reincarnation. He doesn't believe that Enlightenment will make us better people. He thinks it is just about Nonduality.

Another thing about Ingram's ideas is that he writes about two completely separate forms of spiritual development. These two forms give different but comparable results. His path is the path of Theravada Buddhism, the path of vipassana meditation combined with samatha meditation. This, he assumes, is the original teaching of the Buddha.

However, he heard about another path. This is called Actualism (also called Actual Freedom) which seems to be a method that a man called Richard in Australia stumbled upon. Ingram tried this method and got spectacular results. You could say there are many methods of development, but I thought they all have the same end result. Now it seems there are different results.

It's as if there isn't an escape hatch, there are two escape hatches, and we can't be sure where either of them leads. This makes it seem that there's nothing natural about spiritual development and Enlightenment. They aren't our destiny, they aren't inbuilt into us. Meditation isn't something natural, like placing a pot plant in the sunshine so it can grow. Meditation is unnatural, forcing the mind to do something against it's nature. Starving parts of the brain of sensory stimuli so that they shut down and make us perceive things that aren't real.

It's just playing about with your brain. Making your brain do tricks. Perceptual distortions. You perceive that everything is light. You perceive that you're in a vast empty void. You perceive that everything is part of you. You perceive that there is no you and things are aware of themselves. You perceive your Self stopping and then your brain rebooting followed by a bliss wave. All these are common perceptions. If that's what you want, fine. But there's no point in it, any more than there's any point in stamp collecting. When you've got the complete set, what do you do then?

So Ingram's book and his venture into Actualism caused me to doubt the validity of my core spiritual beliefs. There were other things too. Someone who had been in Lifewave wrote an account of his Enlightenment experience. We didn't have anything like that in the 1980s. He said that everything seemed to be part of him. It would have been easy for me to have thought that this isn't what Shankara meant by Enlightenment. I could have said that the Lifewave Enlightenment isn't the real Enlightenment.

However, it's easy to see that if someone starts perceiving everything to be part of them then they can explain that by thinking that they must have merged with the universal consciousness. Whether you call it Brahman or God. So I started thinking that the whole idea of Atman and Brahman is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of this state of consciousness. This isn't proof of the existence of Brahman or God. People in early India had no concept of brain functioning and could only explain their experiences by supernatural ideas.

I found lots of other people who had the same experience of perceiving everything as part of you. Suzanne Segal wrote the same thing in her book. Someone on a different forum said the same thing. The author Ken Wilber describes it, he calls it One Taste. It's quite common. It's not exclusive to the John Yarr club.

One Taste doesn't appear to be the same as Ingram's Enlightenment. They are both Nonduality but they are not the same. Whatever it is that Actualism achieves is different again. There are similarities between all three.

I have become a materialist. The world is pretty much how Richard Dawkins and others see it. If you think that I am rejecting the Wisdom of the East then there are two things that you should realize. First that Buddha didn't believe in Atman or Brahman. Not all meditators have the same realizations. Second that in India there is a long tradition of materialism. It is called Charvaka or Lokayata. There was a man called Ajita who was teaching this at about the same as Buddha in the same part of India.

I'm not trying to indoctinate people into my own beliefs. I'm just trying to explain why I don't believe what I used to believe and what many believe today. I've wasted enough of my life trying to reach a goal that isn't there. I want to tell people what I would have liked to be told 40 years ago. I hope that this may help them. Or at least make them think.