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?
