The Return of the Teachers: An Interview with Benjamin Creme

First of a three-part series

"I have not come to found a new religion. I have come to teach the art of Self-realization, which is neither an ideology nor a religion, but benefits people of all religions and those who have none. I seek to express that which I am through you; for this I come." – Maitreya

Scottish-born painter and esotericist Benjamin Creme has spent more than 30 years preparing the world for the most extraordinary event in human history: the return of our spiritual mentors to the everyday world. Creme has appeared on television, radio and documentary films worldwide since 1982 when he announced that the Lord Maitreya, the long-awaited World Teacher and spiritual master of Jesus Christ, Buddha and many other teachers, was living in London, ready to present himself openly when invited by the media to do so. This event is now imminent.

Creme, based in London, continues to carry out his task as messenger of this news. He has written 14 books, most recently The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007) and The Awakening of Humanity (2008). He is editor of Share International magazine, which circulates in more than 70 countries and is dedicated to the emergence of Maitreya.

Perhaps out of fear that the physical presence of Maitreya signals a being who potentially could control the world, Creme has been called an agent of the anti-Christ. But in an interview with Edge Life, speaking by phone from San Francisco during a visit to America, Creme reminds us that Maitreya is a teacher who, when he makes his long-awaited emergence telepathically into the consciousness of every human being on the planet over the age of 14 on the imminent "Day of Declaration," he will give each of us a glimpse into who we truly are as humanity and offer us the personal choice of awakening.

The process is described thusly: Maitreya, who can change his physical form at any time, will come forward as a consultant on global issues and will be interviewed on American television. Those public and corporate leaders who have met with Maitreya at a conference in 1990 will come forward and support his ideas. Then, when enough people begin to respond to his ideas, the Day of Declaration will take place and Maitreya will emerge to teach and inspire. Maitreya teaches equality, the Law of Karma, the law of cause and effect, and the interconnection of all things.

For those unfamiliar with the Master Maitreya, will you acquaint our readers with who he is and why he is now among us in human body?
Benjamin Creme: Maitreya is the master of all the masters. The masters are men like us who have evolved ahead of us and come to the end of the evolution as a human being on planet earth. Many of them are able to go on to higher planets or higher solar systems, but many of them take what’s called the path of earth service. Those who have taken that path or others who elect to be here for so many thousands of years do so to oversee the evolution of the rest of us, to bring us to the same point eventually that they have now reached.

From our point of view they are perfect. They have nothing more to learn from living on planet earth. It is for them only a field of service, but they seek to help us speed up our evolution as much as possible – and so many of them stay behind to do just that. They have been behind human evolution for countless millenniums, have lived in the remote mountain and desert areas of the world for thousands and thousands of years, but we have come to the end of a cycle which requires their re-entry into human life to send for them into a field of service on the dense physical plane.

The masters can be physical or not physical, depending on their particular path, and about two-thirds of the masters, some 14 masters, will eventually take incarnation as ordinary men on the physical plane. At the moment, my information is that there are 14 masters in the world at present, plus Maitreya, the master of all the masters, the world teacher. He holds the office of world teacher in that group, which we normally call the spiritual hierarchy of planet earth.

And I understand that these masters knew that this was like a predestined experience that they would all be coming back to the planet?
BC: The masters have known for more than 500 years that eventually this would take place. It was thought at first, until very recently, that it would be another 1,200 or 1,300 years before we were ready for all this, but, so far it has been the evolution of hearts and humanity – and so great are the problems facing humanity, problems to do with the earth, the state of the earth’s physical body, and the creation by us of the nuclear bomb that has put a big question mark over the future of humanity – so the masters have come forward far earlier than they would have expected.

On June 19, 1945, at the very end of the last World War, Maitreya made a statement to all his assembled group of masters and high initiates. He said that humanity and its own free will – we have free will, and that’s sacrosanct to the masters, for they never infringe on that free will, even if they could help us by doing so – can take the first step by cleaning house and putting its house in order.

The world teacher, Maitreya, has long been awaited as the Christ by Christians, as Imam Mahdi by Muslims, as the Messiah by Jews, as Krishna or Kalki Avatar by Hindus, and under his name as Maitreya Buddha by Buddhists. They’ve all been awaiting the return of a teacher under these various names. From the esoteric point of view, from which I am speaking, these are all names for one and the same individual, the Lord Maitreya, the head and leader of the spiritual hierarchy of the earth.

Up until now the masters, when they came out into the world to help humanity, did so through the agency of a disciple, never themselves. So, the Buddha took over the body of his disciple, the Prince Gautama, and eventually became Buddha. Maitreya took over the body of Jesus for the last three years of Jesus’ life and demonstrated through Jesus what we call the Christ.

Maitreya is the embodiment of the Christ principle on earth. He embodies the energy of love, the Divine energy aspect of love as the Buddha embodies the Divine aspect of wisdom. In a sense, Jesus was not the Christ, but for the last three years of his life he was overshadowed by the Christ and demonstrated the Christ to those of his time.

So, you indicated that this grand gathering of the masters on planet earth is coming sooner because we have evolved quicker, but also because of the state of affairs on the planet. So both of those things are happening?
BC: Above all, we have the nuclear bomb. If there was a war, a big war, a major war on the planet, it would be a nuclear war, and it would destroy all life, human and subhuman, on planet earth. So the masters are here for many reasons, including their own evolution, but they are here to make sure, so far as they can without infringing on our free will, that we do not have another war big enough for nuclear weapons to be used.

One important thing that you write about, and Share International also tells us, is the coming of Maitreya to each of us through this Day of Declaration. How imminent is that?
BC: I believe it is very true that not even the masters know the exact timing of the Day of Declaration. It depends very much on the speed of response of humanity to the teachings of Maitreya when he talks openly, which he is beginning to do very, very soon.

My information is that the coming forward into the open arena of the world of Maitreya is as near now as it has ever been. It is so close, and then there will be a gap between his coming forward and the Day of Declaration. In that time, he will come on radio and television and everyone will have an opportunity to assess his credentials, to listen to his teachings, to evaluate them, and to take their stance for or against them, and they are to do with the creation of the one humanity.

He says again and again, "Humanity is one. We are brothers and sisters of one humanity. We are all stemming from the same Divine source, whatever the color, whatever the religion, whatever the traditions. We are, underneath all of that, we are one family, one group called humanity."

And, it is the realization of that oneness that he seeks to infiltrate in humanity. Because that is just the truth, then the discrepancies in living standards – particularly between the developed world and the developing world – are so awry that they have within them the seeds of a third world war. That war would be nuclear and would destroy all life on earth, human and subhuman alike, and this earth would become vacant of life for millions and millions of years.

We recognize about nine nuclear powers in the world. The masters have said that this is not honest and true – not nine, but not less than 24 nations have nuclear bombs of various numbers, various degrees, various weights and intensities of explosion. If these were used, then it would destroy everything else.

The masters are coming for one reason: to make sure that this does not happen by lifting humanity above the level where that would be allowed to happen; to inspire humanity to create the one humanity and to demonstrate that in our structures.

The structures of today, the political and economic structures in particular, do not reflect the true state of humanity. Humanity, Maitreya says and all the masters say, is Divine. Each one of us is Divine. We’ve come from a great Divine source. We are each of us a spark of the Divine. That spark could not demonstrate itself at the dense, physical level, so it reflects itself at the soul level.

The members of humanity are really and truly souls. We’re all part of one great oversoul. We are individualized aspects of that oversoul, and the individualized soul – yours and mine and everyone else’s on the planet – incarnates over and over and over again in a physical body, emotional astral body and mental body. These three bodies are temporary bodies that the soul creates and uses for a given time, long or short. In this way, the soul brings its vehicle, the man or woman, and the personality aspect, forward upward more and more towards the light, which the soul itself is. In this process, the physical atoms of the body are reconstructed into subatomic particles, and these become the body of the growing disciple and gradually become the initiate.

There are five great expansions of consciousness that finish the evolution of every individual. The last few lives – it might be 20 or 30 lifetimes, but it’s the last few relative to hundreds of thousands of lives before that time – are the five initiations that bring you from the first to the fifth degree, from the very beginning discipleship up to the master himself. All the masters are fifth-degree initiates or more. The Buddha is an eighth-degree initiate, the one who demonstrated as Gautama Buddha, and in this way they are overseeing our spiritual evolution through the experience of planet earth.

Will the Day of Declaration experience shift our energetic vibration to a higher level?
BC: It will be an extraordinary experience for humanity. Maitreya is omniscient. He is omnipresent, and he will create – and this is the miracle – a telepathic rapport with every adult on earth. Many of them are against the whole process. They call me the Devil’s Advocate, or the leg man of the anti-Christ. They have terrible names for Maitreya and for me. However, the vast bulk of humanity will respond to Maitreya.

Very many years ago, through the Agni Yoga teachings that were given through a great Russian disciple named Helena Roerich, Maitreya wrote, "There was a time when 10 true men could save the world. Then came a time when 10,000 was not enough. I shall call on 1 billion."

Five or six years ago I asked my master, with whom I am in constant telepathic communication, if Maitreya had his billion people yet.

He said, "One and one-half billion."

That 1.5 billion a few years ago is now, according to my master, about 1.8 billion. So nearly 2 billion people are ready to respond to Maitreya, and he is absolutely assured that they will begin the process of transformation of planet earth. They will engage themselves on the actual physical well-being of the planet, which is desperate at the present time.

Eighty percent of global warming is the result of man’s wrongful use of the resources of the planet and the dumping of millions upon millions of tons of nuclear and other waste in the world, creating great toxic areas all over our skies, our oceans, our rivers, and the earth. The very air we breathe is so toxic. That pollution, the masters say, is the greatest killer in the world today. It diminishes the working of our immune system and opens us up to all sorts of illnesses and diseases, some of which are ancient and some are new. Ones that we thought we’d gotten over years and years ago are coming back, and new ones are forming over time.

We’ve poisoned our planet to a desperate degree. We have no idea of how severe the toxification is. We think we have 50 or 100 years to deal with this. The masters say we have about 10 to 15 years to prevent certain aspects of the damage from becoming irreversible.

So he is coming out immediately – very, very soon – he assures us, the group with whom I work, which calls itself the Reappearance Group. He is giving them all sorts of indications that this is the time. In a very, very, short time from now, he will come forward and start talking on television and radio, and then they will gather round him. More and more people will respond.

He’ll say what we need for the world. We need a total renunciation of war. He says we have to learn that war is no more. We must renounce war totally, because now we can destroy all life on earth. To bring this about, he says we have to have trust. This renunciation of war can only happen through trust, and trust can only be achieved by a sharing of the resources of the world.

Humanity must accept that the food, the raw materials, the energy, the scientific knowledge and so on, belongs to everybody, that it is given by Divine providence for all peoples, the rich nations and what are called the developing nations. No one has the right to corner the goods of the world as is done today, whether that be oil or food or any of the things that we think are so important.

Sharing, he says, is the answer for humanity. When we share, he says we recognize that God is our brother – and unless we have that trust created by sharing, then nothing can be done. As soon as trust is established by sharing of the resources, then every other problem can be solved – everything. Nothing needs a war. There is no problem that needs a war to bring it to a resolution.

NEXT MONTH: Maitreya’s perception of America’s War on Terror and the politics of love and fear.For complete information on the emergence of Maitreya and Share International, visit www.shareintl.org.