Illustration by David Jesus Vignolli

For some months, we had run a Sahaja Yoga meeting in the old Chinese Laundry in Soho, was now a rehearsal space. Every evening as we went in, Ben Elton and Rowan Atkinson, both writers of Mr Bean series and many others, who rented the space in the time before us, were coming out. Elton was always friendly, "Ello mate" he would greet us, Atkinson always looked miserable and avoided eye contact.

We had more than twenty regular attendees and when we found a much nicer venue, above a new age bookshop in Golden Square, with a room overlooking the beautiful greenery of the square, we moved. The bookshop was only 200 yards away from the Chinese Laundry, but when we moved, not one of our regular attendees followed us to the bookshop!

The bookshop manager was a Sanskrit scholar. For reasons I didn't ask him to explain, he was quite shocked that we proposed to raise Kundalini without knowing any Sanskrit, but he didn't stop us!

In no time, the bookshop meeting became very popular with more than thirty new people coming, but none of them, despite our encouragement, would ever come to any other Sahaja events.

One night, fed up with the apparent lack of progress, in the middle of the meeting I pointed to Shri Mataji's photo and told them that Shri Mataji was God, the Adi Shakti, that She caused the Big Bang, created the entire universe. There was no response and the meeting progressed as usual.

Afterwards, at the end of the meeting, over tea and biscuits, I asked a number of our regulars if they'd heard anything unusual, experienced anything special? They all looked puzzled, not one of them had heard what I'd said about Shri Mataji’s divinity. Mahamaya is always a wonder to behold!