This is anon27’s timeline of PY. He was a student at Pathgate for 20 years.
1993
PY was a small-time martial arts teacher, with about 6 dedicated students and 20-40 casual students spread across London and Newcastle. He was just trying to break into the alternative healing / wellness world. He’d bought a large house with a pool in the basement with the first, and only, brainwashed person, a lady. The plan was for him to set up some kind of treatment centre there, based around PY’s chi kung power.
She was super dedicated to him – in love / obsessed with him actually, but he was very casual with her. A few months later, she’d split away, keeping the house. He was very pissed off, and gave no real reasons for what had happened, but said he was “letting it all go”, so we should all just forget about it. We never saw or heard from her again.
Later it became clear the house / money to buy it had always been hers, which is the real reason why he “let it go”. He’d given us the impression that it was the result of, and next step with, a very successful business he’d been building. It wasn’t.
~1994
PY’s claims of superpowers became much more pronounced, but all from martial arts. He lost all his “normal” students over the next time period, leaving a very small core group. Even within that small group, most if not all of us left PY at at least one point or another, but came back.
~1996
He started the 3 year Chi Kung foundation study. What was striking about it was that despite PY saying there would be exams and tests, there never were. The way he taught it was also a lot of waffle. It took me years to realise that without any kind of testing, none of us knew if we were “doing it right”, there was no sense of advancement, and PY didn’t have to actually teach anything!
This meant nobody really learned anything more than if they had picked up a book, but we were paying top dollar of course. It was all martial arts with supposedly esoteric Chi Kung.
~2000
I became aware he was talking a lot more about Buddhism, and started mentioning his trips to see HH. This is when he openly spoke about infiltrating HH’s circle and presence by pretending to be a photographer. He was proud that he’d found this sneaky way in, because it allowed him into places he otherwise wouldn’t have got into, and to be physically way closer to HH than he would otherwise have been, which also meant other people thought he was a lot more important than he was.
~2002
I went for a class, and things had changed. Prayers had started, as had prostrations to PY. He talked a heck of a lot, then we did a bit of martial arts. It all struck me as extraordinary. “Classes” had become “teachings”, more often. PY had become fixated on creating his enlightened lama persona, and was well on the way to doing so, though martial arts were still a big part of things and he wasn’t quite as inflated as he then became.
~2006
PY had fully become who we now know him as, but wasn’t quite as obvious about it as he is now. At Namdroling, PY was in very bad character throughout, which I later realised was partly because he was manipulating the final steps with various people around the monastery to getting his lama robes, and it wasn’t as easy as he’d thought it would be. He got his lama robes, and to me at least, this marked his terminal decline. He’d become so nasty, I packed up my stuff and left.
2010s
Over the years I fought the brainwashing, reached my conclusions, but still had a few doubts, and wanted to see what had become of the students who had stayed (I figured that if they’d advanced more than me, it would have evidence I was wrong), so I went for a class. It was as I’d remembered, but worse. The students who had stayed hadn’t changed one bit! They’d in fact gotten more suppressed and introverted.
I thoroughly checked afterwards what I’d learned and not learned, and found that PY had spent hours saying nothing useful. I went to one more class, to know for absolutely sure, and that was it for me.
Pathgate Survivors 