Hi there, I thought I should share with you some info, since I am researching the mooji "cult" myself and questioning things.
In 2016 I first heard of Mooji and started watching his videos. I joined an official Sangha in Johannesburg (South Africa).

I never met him personally, and although I will admit I was initially taken in by him, I got an unsatisfactory response from him in one of my letters and started losing interest him when I noticed how impatient and unkind he would be to other people in his videos (in a passive way). The "worshipping" made me uncomfortable too but I was told it was just my mind... Most of us were on a tight budget, but we were not deserving of him coming to visit us here as we were considered too small. There was a kind of lottery where you could get a free ticket to see Mooji. I'm glad I never got it.

There was a suicide in our Sangha in 2017, here in South Africa, by one of its dedicated members.
I thought I should mention this, since I've only seen two suicides mentioned here (one in India and one at the Ashram).
So yes, it has been kept very low key.
As a result our Sangha was closed.
We received no response or message from Mooji when this happened, which I think would have been the right thing to do, from a loving and accountable guru. Instead, the group of us were abandoned as it were. The leader of our Sangha withdrew completely.

A couple of teacher's I've come across seem to have this careless approach about their followers / students. They seem to think it's okay to just up and leave you when it suits them. This is clearly the case here and I think it's why the suicide happened here in the first place. There was very little support to facilitate this teaching of Mooji's, if it was genuine in the first place.

When I finally lost interest in Mooji (before I even considered that it was maybe a cult), I was watching one of his videos and I realised he was doing exactly what he was telling all of us NOT to do: he was operating and acting and thinking from his mind. And I realised, with everything else (the fact that he is so reprimanding, and that we in Africa are not deserving of him), that he is a hypocrite and something is definitely off about him.

I have fortunately had the state of mind to see this. But that's the whole problem with Mooji though, he is dismissive of the mind, in a negative and non-loving way. It's a very clever and misleading manipulation. But even I still feel guilty saying that, which shows even the effect it has had on me.

Chrissy, welcome and thank you so much for sharing your experience! So sorry to hear about the suicide and how poorly m and sangha reacted!
Good for you that you did see through m's games and that you were able to pull out before getting deeper into this cult. You made very good points, thank you!

Earthquake, thank you for bringing a Vedantic point of view in the matter of teachers and their relationship with students. I hope this will be heard and taken seriously by anyone concerned!

Welcome Chrissy, thank you for sharing your experience on this forum. I hear you and how you may feel about sharing this publicly.

Such testimonial should be known by anyone following Moo, but unfortunately only positive experiences are allowed to be expressed in his organization groups. In order to have a full view we need not only the good responses as found on their website and groups but also the less glorious ones. But of course, that would not be good from a marketing position, but would such be even a consideration for those who want to know the Truth, absolute or relative, no matter the cost?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2019 04:41PM by Valma.

Thankyou for the welcome Valma!

Are you an idiot Mooji? How on earth did you think you could get away with this! It's all downhill from here for you buddy! You will face justice.

I spent a good amount of my teenage years listening to his crap. Became dissuaded from studies and my life goals at the ripe age of 15. Flunked college, and thought about seeking a life in Mooji's ashram. I had a dream that Mooji was the devil before I went to visit his Open Satsang, yet I dismissed my intuition.

When I went to his open satsang, one of the local business owners had set up a meeting so that I could meet him in person. Luckily, fate had a drunken night planned out for me so I was in a deep hangover in the morning and missed my meeting with Mooji! Phew! Close Call! Who knows what kind of hypnotic and magical spells he would have cast upon me!

Some suggestions that I would give to anyone recovering is not to try psychotropic drugs as it will enhance Mooji's imprinting on your mind and make you incredibly unstable (found this out the hard way after a few traumatic experiences with psychotropic substances whilst still under the influence of Mooji's ramblings). His mambo jumbo is enough as it is!

This forum has been incredibly helpful and I found the book "How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age"(found on the reading list on this website) extremely useful to ground my mind back in something.

I've been burned severely, I'll be staying away from spirituality indefinitely.

These days, I am still recovering. The chants still remain in my mind, finding myself chanting jollily in the car. There is a long road to go still from here on my journey of recovery, if it ever happens. But what has helped me so far to stay grounded is being with friends, family and reading philosophy (although some would argue that this could probably induce more suffering than mambo jumbo).

If silly Mooji is able to mess with our minds with his old mouth, I wonder how much we are being manipulated by television, music and social media :o

Stay grounded people!

welcome,Chrissyand thank you for sharing your experience with us.

How sad it all is. How cold this abandonement by the moo moos. It just seems to show once more their indifference towards and lack of care for things that are not convenient to them. Their tendency to hush things up. Things that may harm their precious reputation. Which is all they care about. Because that's what keeps the moneymachine going.

Very happy for you that you have seen through the whole charade and are coming to your senses. Gathering information is one of the ways to come to terms with what has happened. This forum has a lot of very useful info. Check it out.

And you are not alone in this!

sorry, didn't mean to write everything in bold letters.

"Spiritual bypassing encourages surrender rather than resistance and boundary setting."

I am posting this here and on the James Swartz thread. Interesting stuff.

This is a quotation from a longer essay.

Matthew Remski suggests that spiritual bypassing often takes place not because we are lazy, but because we are taught to do so.

Quote

Typically (spiritaul bypassing) reinforces an individualistic diagnosis of what’s really social problem. ....my approach is to look at SB not as something individuals do because they’re psychologically lazy, but as something they are taught to do by spirituality organizations that benefit from indoctrinating them into the idea that their product will answer all questions.

Quote

"(Spiritual bypassing) is when a spiritual ideology, jargon, or community leader encourages a person to believe that all problems are solved or solvable. But what’s really happening is that the person is avoiding or defending against more obvious and entrenched psychological or physical wounds.

In the worst cases, bypassing techniques assert that everything – including illness, violence, and sexual abuse – is divine or a manifestation of Oneness. There’s no need to confront abuse or seek medical help because these so-called problems are just part of the greater illusion of life.

Bypassing can be private: “My clinical depression is an issue between me and God/spirit/karma,” or interpersonal: “If only I worked on my relationship with God/spirit/karma my experience of racism or domestic violence would be purified.” It encourages surrender over resistance and boundary-setting. It denigrates critical thinking as defensive against the “Truth”, before which one should simply bow in ecstas

It encourages surrender over resistance and boundary-setting. It denigrates critical thinking as defensive against the “Truth”, before which one should simply bow in ecstasy.

Above all, SB doesn’t serve the person: it serves the ideology and the group that promotes it. If members of a yoga group with cultic dynamics believe that its teachings about the divine answer all questions, the group authority is strengthened. With critiques and questions discouraged, individual agency is weakened.

For the entire essay, go here:

How Do You Know If You’re Spiritually Bypassing?

[matthewremski.com]

Interesting insights indeed, thanks corboy.

Other quote from this same source:

: Denial and bypassing might be synonymous. Members who rush to defend a leader who is obviously causing harm could be a serious example of spiritual bypassing. However, they could also be motivated by other reasons: safeguarding their positions within the community, defending against cognitive dissonance, or protecting sunken costs.

As for the victims of abuse, spiritual bypassing may be what initially motivated them to stay in an abusive relationship with their teacher. But survivors who find the support to be able to speak out are doing the opposite of bypassing. They’re forcing a confrontation with a material history and reality. They are providing reality-checking. In that sense, they are the spiritual teachers of our age, calling both individuals and organizations into transparency.

What would spirituality mean, if not transparency?

Matthew Remski wrote this about Iyengar, a yoga teacher.

Yet this appears to describe the situation in satsang cults as well.

Quote

What also stands out for me is the incoherence of the master’s actual presentation. He gestures at invisible things in such a way that if you can’t see them you must be blind. He throws in padding words that can’t make sense and yet endow the interactions with a scientific or medical aura.

His general bluster is punctuated with the questions that have quasi-mystical overtones: “What is this space here?” “Follow?” “Follow?” They are rhetorical. He is the only person who can answer.

I’ve watched enough of this material to believe that if Iyengar had actually made sense, he wouldn’t have commanded the same deference. His charisma seems based in part in the same quality attributed to Chogyam Trungpa, whose students would call him “unfathomable” — even those who knew he was almost always drunk or high.

The paradox is painful: the greatness of the teaching seems to be directly dependent on how little of it you can understand. This is also how, I believe, the “buzz” around “non-dualism” is so easily conflated with interpersonal dominance. The master who has power because they are doing or saying something you can’t understand is the very embodiment of the impossible realization you are told you want to attain.

It’s little wonder that being in a high-demand ground degrades the capacity for critical and independent thinking. Members spend a lot of time not only accepting rubbish statements as reasonable, but elevating them to the level of brilliance.

Iyengar's Charisma of Incoherance and Selected Indoctrination Defense Statements

[matthewremski.com]