Benjamin Creme is an accomplished modern artist, who has also studied various aspects of esoteric philosophy. These teachings led him to believe in the existence of the Masters of Wisdom, a group of perfected men who are the custodians of the divine plan for the planet. He was quite surprised back in 1959 when he was contacted by one of the Masters, and told among other things that Maitreya, the Master of all the Masters, would return to live in the everyday world and that he, Benjamin Creme, would have a role to play in the event. He chose to accept it and so as Maitreya’s roving ambassador he has been preparing the way in creating the climate of hope and expectancy for Maitreya’s emergence since his first talk in 1974. 
Barbara Simpson - hostess of the radio show “Critical Times“ which is broadcasted nationwide in the US - conducted the following interview with him on Coast-to-Coast-AM on July 27th, 2002.

„We have to make the choice!“

Interview with Benjamin Creme by Barbara Simpson
(Short version, edited)

B.S.: Mr. Creme where did Maitreya come from?

B.C.: He comes from the Himalayas where he has lived for thousands of years in a mountain centre that is about 17,500 feet up. On the 8th of July 1977 he descended from that centre and spent some days on the planes of Pakistan. Then on the 19th of July 1977 he came by aeroplane into London, England where he still is. That is what he calls his centre of force in the world. From there his energy radiates throughout the world and it is his base in the Asian community of London.

B.S.: What effect has he had on what has happened on the planet since 1977?

B.C.: Among many things he has filled the world with his energy and that energy is gradually transforming life in the world. There is a great avatar, called the spirit of peace or equilibrium who overshadows him in a way very similar to the way he overshadowed Jesus 2,000 years ago. Maitreya holds the office of World teacher and has appeared many times before, but always through the process of overshadowing.

B.S.: How did he overshadow Jesus?

B.C.: From the baptism when the Christ consciousness descended on Jesus - in the iconography it is usually seen as a dove descending on a stream of golden light onto the head of Jesus, who was a disciple then, a fourth degree initiate, and is now a very advanced Master, a 6th degree initiate - for three years to the crucifixion when Jesus died on the cross, he overshadowed him. So when people saw Jesus they saw the body of Jesus but usually, not all the time, heard and responded to the teaching and the influence of the mind of Maitreya. In somewhat the same way the great avatar called the spirit of peace or equilibrium works through Maitreya. This is a cosmic being so advanced that we couldn’t contemplate it. He sends his energy through Maitreya into the world and works with the law of action and reaction which we know are opposite and equal. In that way he transforms the prevalent violence and hatred and discord into its opposite so that we shall enter a period of peace and tranquillity and harmony in exact proportion to the existing violence and hatred and despair.

B.S.: I am just curious how that relates to the other religions in the world, because with Jesus we are talking about Christianity. What about the Jews awaiting the Messiah, the Moslems looking for their messiah and the Hindus and the Buddhists and all the other religions that have their own version of Messiah whether it be all the same by different name or in fact different messiahs?

B.C.: It is not different Messiahs; it is the same by different name. They are all waiting for Maitreya, did they but know it. Christians await Jesus as Jesus the Christ but Jesus was the Christ as overshadowed by Maitreya for three years. The Buddhists are awaiting Maitreya under his name because the Buddha who overshadowed the Prince Gautama in the same manner as Maitreya overshadowed Jesus, made a great prophecy that at this time would come into the world a new teacher, a Buddha like himself, who by dint of his tremendous spiritual standing would galvanize and inspire humanity to create a brilliant golden civilisation based equitably on righteousness and truth, so the Buddhists are waiting for Maitreya Buddha. Early Buddhist iconography shows the figure of the Buddha as Maitreya Buddha, who is recognizable by these various artefacts where he is always carrying a pitcher of water on his shoulder and likewise Christians await Maitreya as the Christ carrying a pitcher of water. This is the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, as the previous Age the Age of Pisces was the Christian era. The fundamental iconography of the Christian time is the symbol of the fish; it dominates the whole of the Gospel story.

B.S.: What is that going to mean for us on this planet? What will be the key difference between Pisces and Aquarius?

B.C.: Each experience, each constellation gives their certain qualities in response to these energies. These energies embody certain great ideas. These ideas become our ideals and as we put them into effect so our evolution and our various civilisations proceed. Now in Pisces we have above all become individuals. Humanity has come out of the herd and become potent individualities, individuals in our own rights and at the same time it has given us the quality we call idealism or devotion, devotion to an ideal. But because of the marked individuality that has always been our own ideal whatever we thought was best. Whatever we thought was Gods’ gift to the world would be the best of all possible ideas so that it is America the Great or Britain the Great or France the Great or Buddhism or Christianity or Hinduism or Islam or whatever our ideology is, we have believed it to be the one and only, the best possible. In other words we have had idealism but it has been very narrow and self-oriented and has caused the various divisions and separations in the world today. This is so much the case that it is very dangerous to the world because we have divided humanity and we have atomic bombs which can destroy all life and this has never been the case before.

B.S.: Certainly in the history of mankind there has always been selfishness, there has always been violence, but even back in the days where it has been tribes and not even organized countries there were still tribes that moved in and took over other peoples land. We may have more technology, nuclear weapons and airplanes and communication but the tendency for selfishness, the tendency for human beings to want to have power over others is part of human nature.

B.C.: Indeed, I couldn’t agree more. But the difference with today is that we have the ultimate weapon now, the nuclear weapon which can destroy all life, human and sub-human on planet earth. That is the greatest danger to us today and the divisions in the world, above all the divisions between the developed world and the developing world, the gap between which is growing wider every day, has within it the seeds of a third world war that would be nuclear and destroy the planet. So the Masters have decided to return to the world way ahead of their planned date, they were not expected to come into the world for another 1,200 or 1,300 years from now. But because of the extraordinary situation, in one way the advancement of humanity on its own behalf, but also the dangers existing for humanity, especially since the discovery of the nuclear bomb, have led Maitreya who makes the major decisions to decide to come back into the world. That is what is happening for the first time in thousands of years – they have known for over 500 years that sooner or later they would be required to come back, but not so soon. But in June 1945, at the end of the last World War Maitreya made an announcement to his group that in the very near future, as soon as possible, he would come into the world with a large group of Masters if humanity of its own free will would put its house in order. He said he would come when a measure of peace had been returned to the world and when the principle of sharing was at least in the process of coming into effect, that men’s mind were moving in that direction and when the religious groups and the political groups were putting their houses in order, then he would come and bring a large group of his disciples, the Masters into the world with him.

B.S.: I have always been curious about the name Maitreya. Where does that come from?

B.C.: It’s Buddhist, it is, I suppose, originally Sanskrit and it means “The Happy One, the One who brings happiness to the world”.

B.S.: And he is physically living in London now; he wouldn’t use that name though, so he is going under an alias now?

B.C.: Yes. He doesn’t use the name Maitreya and won’t be called Maitreya publicly, even though he is seen, until he is accepted and can speak to the whole world as the teacher, the World teacher. Maitreya Buddha is the name what Buddhists are awaiting him as and he would of course respond to that if you asked him. If you had the opportunity to speak to him and you called him Maitreya, he wouldn’t reject it, but he doesn’t like these names like the Christ, Maitreya, the Messiah or the Imam Madhi, as he is awaited by Moslems or Krishna as awaited by Hindus. These names are his names, he has been Krishna, he has been the Messiah, he has done a whole lot, but they are divisive. For instance if he says, “I am the Christ” to Christians, well what about the Jews and the Hindus and the Moslems?

B.S.: Exactly.

B.C.: “If I am Maitreya Buddha to Buddhists, what about the others?” So he doesn’t like these. He says, “I am the teacher and that’s good enough for me, thank you very much.”

B.S.: I wonder how we would evolve from a world, aside from political differences which is certainly a factor, but if you just look at religious differences: you have the believers in Christianity, you have the Jews, you have people with Islam, you have as you mentioned the Buddhists and all the other religious sects that there are around the world. I can’t envision all of them joining together into one which is essentially I think what you are saying has to happen.

B.C.: Not really. They don’t evolve into one, but they have to agree that their Messiah or their Christ or their Maitreya Buddha or Krishna has returned and they won’t all and perhaps it will take quite a long time for all to recognize him as the Master of all the Masters. You see people have extraordinary ignorance. The knowledge of the Masters has been open to the world through the teachings of the theosophical society since 1875. Yet most people don’t know about the Masters, it is extraordinary. They don’t know that they are a soul in incarnation, they don’t know that we have three aspects of ourselves: the spirit, the soul and the personality. Humanity is three-fold in this respect and this is the most important thing that people should know and yet they don’t know this. Likewise they are locked into their own idea of God whom they see as the Christ or Allah or Krishna or Maitreya Buddha and so on. God is not somebody we can know except as oneself as an inner experience.

B.S.: Does that mean that there is no God on the outside, that there is no supreme being?

B.C.: I believe there is a supreme consciousness, a supreme principle from which we all come, that consciousness is at the root of the whole of the manifested and unmanifested universe and we are part of that. The qualities which we associate with God, the love, the will, the purpose, the wisdom, the intelligence resides in every aspect of that God including ourselves.

B.S.: Where do the Masters come from originally? Were they normal average every day people like we are?

B.C.: They were normal average every day men and women who gradually evolved to become what we call Masters of Wisdom.

B.S.: But how can they do that evolution, how does that happen?

B.C.: You come into incarnation over and over again. The Masters have done this, we are doing it, and we have all had thousands of incarnational experiences. We are fundamentally souls. The soul which is an aspect of the divine is a perfect reflection of that divinity and takes incarnation, involves itself in matter and so gradually evolves over and over again. If one made no mistakes it would be a case of constant evolution of the quality of our life, becoming more and more like the soul, having the love, the wisdom and the intelligence of the soul, but that takes a long time. It can’t be done in one life. So we have successive lives by which over and over again we go through various experiences until we do it perfectly, until our response is the soul response rather than the personality response. The soul is totally absolutely altruistic, it has no sense of self at all.

B.S.: I am curious as to when all this becomes evident to us. Does this mean that at some point within the next few years perhaps Maitreya will appear publicly and proclaim himself to all of us because again I go back to trying to figure out how you get all the peoples in this world to think alike which is essentially what you are saying has to happen ultimately now whenever ultimately is?

B.C.: It is only relatively alike. What we have to agree on, have a consensus on, is that the world is in great danger, that we are in danger of destroying the world, destroying humanity and the answers to our problems which are real, are very simple. Some of them are more complicated, but the initial ones are very simple, like the quality, which we call sharing. If we were a family we would immediately share what we have, it is automatic. Maybe the father has more than the children, but only because he is bigger. But we share whatever comes into the house. Likewise we have to see ourselves as the human family and share the resources as if we were just a simple unit family, mother, father and a couple of children. This is automatic and natural for a family to do. It could be and will be automatic and natural for humanity to do. It is simple straightforward and perfectly natural to think that there is so much resources in the world that we should share it. Yet today the developed world, which is only about 1/3 of the world, usurps and greedily wastes 3/4 of the worlds food and 83% of all the other resources of the world so that the 2/3 of the world which we call the third or developing world has to make due with 25 % of the world’s food and 17 % of all other resources and they suffer accordingly. They die in the millions.

B.S.: So if we were a third world, if the first world became the third world, then it will all be good?

B.C.: No, if the first world shared its surpluses with the world as a whole, it would all be good.

B.S.: But what about the old saying, I guess it comes from the bible, about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him the fish.

BC: It is the same thing. It doesn’t mean that the man who is learning to fish does nothing; it means he learns to fish, but it also means that before he learns to fish, to enable him to fish, you keep him alive. At the moment there are 26 million people dying in the world of starvation in a world with a huge 10 % per capita surplus of food that is rotting away in the storehouses of the developed world. Maitreya calls this a crime.

B.S.: How do we get beyond? I don’t see the possibility of overcoming the basic nature of human beings which has good qualities and bad qualities. I mean, we can be filled with love and generosity and charity and we can also be selfish and greedy and hateful and lustful. How do you get that out of human nature?

B.C.: It will take a long time, but the basic is the saving of humanity at the present time and the simplest thing is the sharing of the resources of the world. As soon as people share, as the nations learn, as a family that everyone is a member of a great family of brothers and sisters and the food and the goods of the world are given by divine providence for everybody, not only for the developed world, but for everybody, then the problems will begin to lessen and be answered. It will create trust and when you have trust, you have a changed situation.

B.S.: How do you deal with nations that would like to for example convert other nations to their beliefs, aside from whether there is hatred or envy or jealousy or lack of equal opportunity? I mean we are faced now with what is being called the war on terrorism. We are told that the people who hate us, hate what we - meaning the West, the United States, Israel, Europe - have in the first world. How do you deal with that?

B.C.: It’s not that they hate what people in the West have; it is that they hate the fact that the West has it and they don’t.

B.S.: Perhaps if they worked and had the competition and the capitalism and the free enterprise, they might be able to accomplish what the West has done.

B.C.: It is precisely the competition that prevents it. There are three great totalitarianisms in the world. We are witnessing the end of totalitarianism which is really the end of injustice and lack of freedom. It manifests in political, economic and religious terms. The break-up of the Soviet Union is the first sign of the end of political totalitarianism. The West and in particular the United Stated of America is the chief exponent of totalitarianism in economic terms and the religious organisations, the Vatican, the Islam with their tremendous hold over the people, the fanatical devotion to that ideology is totalitarianism in religious terms. All of them are moving towards their end. The last to end will be religious totalitarianism. The political totalitarianism is ending or on the way out. We are faced today with the major effect of economic totalitarianism. The western powers through globalisation have put a stranglehold on the world’s economy. They own most of the products of the world. They own most of the world in economic terms and it is the gap between east and west which is the greatest threat to the stability of the world. This gap has within it the seeds of a third world war.

B.S.: Oh I agree with you on that.

B.C.: That war would be nuclear and would destroy all life on earth. We have to end this totalitarianism and the only way to do it is to share the resources of the world. You see, humanity has been offered a choice.

B.S.: Would it be a misunderstanding of what you are saying and what Maitreya is teaching that the ultimate result would be a world were there are no separate countries, where in essence, I don’t want to say a one world because that brings in a whole political issue, but that’s kind of where I am thinking it is going. Is that accurate or not?

B.C.: I don’t think it’s accurate, no. I think what Maitreya is hopeful of teaching humanity, inspiring the changes which will show humanity that it is spiritual, that we have a spiritual background and that spiritual is practical. He is a very practical man concerned with modern practical problems and has, I believe the answer to these problems. He wishes humanity to understand the relationship, that we are brothers and sisters of one world, humanity is a group, one group, but it’s not the same.

B.S.: You know there are people who believe that for people on this planet to make that huge jump from where we are now to where you tell us Maitreya wants us to be, that it is going to take some potential horrific tragedy. We had a story just last week about the fact that an asteroid is headed for the earth and there is a lot of scenarios about what would happen if it hit the earth and the kind of damage it would cause. Is it going to take the threat of some catastrophic event for any change to be made because people tend not to move unless something kicks them in the pants?

B.C.: Indeed. Maitreya has been waiting to appear publicly, waiting for a stock exchange crash, which he foretold in 1988. He said there would be a world stock exchange crash which will begin in Japan and in 1989-90 the Japanese stock market began to fall, it was then at 40,000 points and it came down to 10,000 points, today it is about 10,500. So from that point of view the stock exchange has already collapsed. The stock market, which he called a bubble that would inevitably burst, did so and he said the same thing will happen in this country, in Europe and the World’s stock markets will come crashing down. He says they are only gambling casinos. The vast majority of the transactions on the stock markets are currency transactions. They have nothing to do with the real economy at all and they are quite unnecessary as they stand now in relation to world trade. They are simply a place for greedy people to make or loose money. At the moment they loose money and he said they will crash. You have created the same bubble in this country and this bubble is beginning to burst. That is what he has been waiting for because he said nothing less will bring humanity face-to-face with reality.

B.S.: It seems like it’s taking a long time with all of the pain and horror and suffering that is out there. Why doesn’t Maitreya just come out and do something?

B.C.: Well there are laws governing this, it is not so easy. There are things Maitreya may do and may not do. One of the things he may not do and will never do is infringe our free will. That is why I have spent 27 years preparing the way for him to help to create the climate of hope and expectancy for his coming so that he can enter our lives without infringing our free will.

B.S.: So we have to make a choice?

B.C.: We have to make the choice! The choice is between being one world and sharing the resources more equitably or self-destruction, all on earth. That is the choice and eventually that is what Maitreya will place before humanity. He said it is our choice and he can’t do it. He comes and his mission will succeed only if humanity responds properly and well to his thoughts, his ideas, his analysis of our situation. He will place before us what will happen if we do and what will happen if we don’t follow that advice. ~

Benjamin Creme started public speaking on this issue back in 1974 by giving weekly lectures by invitation only and since then has literally spoken on tours around the world, western and eastern Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and the United States. He has been interviewed on more than 300 radio and television programs in the United States alone. He is author of ten books, which have been translated into nine languages, published throughout the world by groups responding to his message. He is also the editor of Share International, a monthly magazine that focuses on the political, economic, social and spiritual changes now occurring globally. The magazine is produced in five languages by volunteer staff and is read in over seventy countries. He receives no payment for all this work and makes no claims about his own spiritual status. 

His newest book, entitled “The Art of Cooperation“, is available in good book stores and worldwide through Internet bookstores. Publisher: Share International Foundation. Price: US $ 16. ISBN: 90-71484-26-2.

For further information about the Reappearance of the Maitreya and the Masters of Wisdom contact:

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Internet: www.share-international.org