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Share International magazine December 2021
This is an abridged version of
Share International magazine.
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Articles by Benjamin Creme’s Master
From the inception of Share International magazine, Benjamin Creme’s Master provided articles to be published not only at the time they were written, but also whenever appropriate according to world circumstances.
The Teachers and the taught
by the Master —, through Benjamin Creme
Many are the times, throughout his long history, when man has lost his way; but never, until now, has he strayed so far from his destined path. Never, before, has he been in such need of succour, and never, until now, has that help been so readily available. For long ages, the Law has restricted the measure of aid which might be given; man’s free will is sacrosanct and may not be infringed. Today, for the first time in countless centuries, more aid can be freely given than ever before. Today, at his moment of greatest need and despair, the bountiful hands of his Elder Brothers can open, and provide the succour he longs for.
All that is required is the request from man himself. All that is needed is the readiness to accept the advice and wisdom of the Brotherhood, and to change direction.
Many at this time of crisis have lost hope and wait fearfully for the end of all. They know nothing of the hope which fills their future and languish in the midst of change. Many more are impatient with the present and seek change at any cost. They feel the future beckoning with they know not what, and champ at the bit in their eagerness to experience the new. All are subject to the influence of the tensions and stress which characterize this time of change, and, in the light of their disposition, react accordingly.
Into this complex situation the Masters make Their approach. They must so act that man’s free will is not transgressed, yet seek to help in every way the Law allows. Fine will be the judgement needed in many circumstances and cases until a modus-operandi is evolved acceptable to all.
We, your Elder Brothers, counsel the democratic process, with full participation, as that which brings freedom and justice to each one. Nevertheless, there will be many times when Our age-long experience and vantage point in evolution will be to man’s advantage and betterment to accept.
Thus shall we work together, the Teachers and the taught, in harmony and trust; and thus will man learn the ways of the past, of his forefathers, and so bring his aspiration into line with his preordained purpose.
Thus will it be, and thus will man begin to realize the essentials of life, and begin to discard the multitude of useless attachments which today distort his vision, create his unhappiness and threaten his very existence.
Soon, Maitreya, the Master of the Masters, will begin His open mission. Soon, men will be able to hear His teachings and assess them for themselves. Many will find in them the Truth so simply evident that they will quickly join His band of warriors and share His burden. May all who read these words be among them. (Share International, July/August 2004)
The curse of commercialization
by the Master —, through Benjamin Creme
If men are to save this planet from the results of global warming they must do infinitely more than is planned to limit carbon emissions and in a shorter period of time than is generally accepted as necessary. Men have been slow to recognize the dangers, and even now many refuse to take the problems seriously. Such attitudes, there is no doubt, put in jeopardy the future of planet Earth. At most, men have ten to fifteen* years in which to establish a balance before irreparable damage is done.
To achieve this goal, men must change dramatically the present way of life, and embrace simpler forms of living and working. Gone are the days in which men raped and ravaged the planet at will, without a thought for the generations still to come, neither seeing nor caring ought for the environment which has gradually and inevitably decayed.
Each year, and for many years, huge areas of ancient primal forest are cleared of life-giving trees for purely commercial benefits. Commercialization indeed bodes ill for humanity as it tightens its grip on the throats of men. Commercialization, says Maitreya, is more dangerous to men than the atomic bomb, and is showing its destructive power in the economic chaos which rules in the world today. How long will it take governments and their peoples to see this? How long till commercialization squeezes the lifeblood out of humanity, and itself withers and dies?
More and more, the truth of these words is borne in on the minds of millions who now, suddenly, are jobless and homeless and in despair.
This has produced a situation in which Maitreya can step forward into public work without infringing humanity’s free will. Patiently has Maitreya waited many years for this time, sure in the knowledge that the events now taking place would, indeed, transpire. Commercialization has bared its claws and shown its power to harm. The complacency of millions is turning into hatred and distrust of commercialization and the old order of things. Men everywhere are at last ready for a new interpretation of the meaning and purpose of life, for sharing, justice and peace; for right relationship, brotherhood and greater happiness. They are ready, at last, for Maitreya’s call.
Of course, not all men have undergone this change. There are many who imagine they can ‘sit out’ this ‘recession’ and rebuild their fortunes as before. The very rich and clever ones have lost nothing. The gap between themselves and others has simply widened in their favour. They fail to understand that this time is like none other. We have reached the end of the old order. Cosmic forces dictate the changes that must and will take place, otherwise life would flourish no more on planet Earth.
Those who are ready will quickly respond to Maitreya’s Teaching as He puts into simple and eloquent words their heartfelt needs. Others will take longer to forgo that to which they have become accustomed, and for a time disagree. In time, millions around the world will see the need and the logic of the changes which alone will save the planet and its people. (Share International, 17 April 2009)
*This article was written twelve years ago – a fact which makes even more urgent the appeal and advice given above.
[These articles are from Share International magazine, December 2021, are by a senior member of the Hierarchy of Masters of Wisdom. His name, well-known in esoteric circles, is not yet being revealed. Benjamin Creme, a principal spokesman about the emergence of Maitreya, was in constant telepathic contact with this Master who dictated his articles to him.]
(Read more articles by this Master)
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Rallying call!
It has come to our notice that more and more people are receiving our information from the website alone, and thus forgoing the small cost of subscribing to Share International magazine.
Not everyone can, or does, use the internet, and it is essential to have an outer, physical expression, which can display with photographs, the events of which we speak. That means there has to be a magazine, which of course requires a lot of work from volunteers, and a lot of money to produce. There may be a notion that Hierarchy dishes out money for this work, but it is not the case. Subscriptions to Share International are an essential part of maintaining our work and reaching the public. The cost of the subscription is kept as low as possible, the magazine is not subsidised by advertisements and printing and postal charges are mounting all the time.
Surely we would all agree that all those who seriously believe in this work would want to support the magazine, whether or not they read the information on the internet.
Thank you for your support.
Questions and answers – a brief selection
At every lecture he gave around the world, and virtually every day of his life, Benjamin Creme was asked numerous questions covering a vast range of topics. We draw on this large recorded resource and publish answers provided by BC and his Master over the years, none of which have yet appeared in Share International.
Q. It sounds like you say spirituality has been introduced into economics. Is this not so?
A. What I did say is that humanity is going through a great spiritual crisis. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know that we are great gods in incarnation, that humanity is one. We don’t know how to live our lives today. We don’t know how to live peacefully together in terms of interdependence and so on. We don’t know how to co-operate instead of competing. We are in love with competition, and all the greed intensifies it, and the economy is suffering. It’s suffering from economic ills. All the results of competition – the crime, the drug abuse, the starving millions – come about because we don’t live together correctly, because we don’t know who we are. That is a spiritual crisis.
We don’t know who we are as beings; we don’t know that even the constitution of the human being is a spark of God demonstrating as a soul, reflecting on the physical plane as a man or woman, over and over and over again. Some people don’t know that this is the reality of our spiritual constitution, which must be the first thing that people should know. Everyone must know how we are constituted and why we’re here.
What is the purpose of life? Nobody knows. Why are we here? What is the purpose? We don’t know how to live and we think it doesn’t matter. We compete to get the biggest and the best, and the rest doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter. That’s the point. The spiritual purpose of man is to manifest right relationship. A right relationship is the next step forward in human evolution. If one child is starving to death in a world overflowing with food, you don’t have right relationship. Thirty-five thousand children a day starve to death in a world overflowing with food so you don’t have right relationship. That’s the reality and that is why Maitreya will speak in the way He speaks.
Q. Can reality be experienced? Can thought take a person to the experience of reality?
A. Reality can only be experienced. That’s the only way you can know reality. By reality, I suppose one could say it comes from all energies, all events and happenings which we call God.
The time is coming when God will not be an idea in the minds of congregations in churches, to Whom we turn our eyes once a week and implore His help and turn to and worship as if He were out there and not inside ourselves. We can only know it through experience. People will come to understand that we are God, that what we call divinity is intrinsic to every human being and is our very nature. There is nowhere where God is not. God is all there is and that is the reality, moment to moment; so going to a church once a week and looking up and thinking there is God up there and worshiping God, in that way we won’t know Him – we won’t experience God as immanent in our lives in a moment- to-moment experience. Maitreya says, “When you share, you recognize God in your brother. That is your reality.” God is in every one of us. He is our nature. He is not a He, He is not a She. It’s a kind of It. It is an It which is the sum total of all that there is and there isn’t anything else. When we get rid of thoughts, then we can know God. When we go beyond thought, then we can come into the direct experience of that which we agree to call God. That is reality. That is ourselves because we are not separate from It.
(BC, Questions and Answers, Tara Center, Los Angeles, USA, 21 November 1998)
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Readers’ Letters – a small selection
Share International has a large reserve of unpublished letters which were confirmed by Benjamin Creme and his Master to be genuine encounters with Masters, or a ‘spokesperson’. Other letters presented here are new, and, while we cannot confirm or indicate whether a Master is involved, we offer them for your consideration.
Two letters from the same person:
Beautiful greeting
(1) In the summer of 1977, I was on a pilgrimage to San Damiano, Italy. There were many people in two Japanese coaches. As I was walking to the church, I was alone; nobody around except a Japanese lady standing 20 meters away. She wasn’t tall; her face was a perfect oval; she had black hair; her eyes were nut brown and she was dressed in a white, red and gold Japanese dress. She smiled at me and bowed deeply, three times. Astonished, I looked behind me to see if it was me that she was smiling at. In fact, I was alone with her. When I turned back, the beautiful lady had gone.
Could your Master please tell me who she was? What was her message to me?
(Benjamin Creme’s Master confirmed that the ‘lady’ was Maitreya. There was no message.)
Different but the same
(2) Four years ago on Easter Day, after 17 days in a coma from pancreatitis and one near death experience, I saw, on the wall of my hospital room, a half-length portrait of the glorious Christ who was smiling at me. He hadn’t really the same features as in Christian pictures. Who was He please? Maitreya? Master Jesus?
A.G., Retinne, Belgium.
(Benjamin Creme’s Master confirmed that it was an image of Maitreya.)
That which comes from Above
In August 2021 I was sitting in a quiet garden in the sun reading about a theme that Christ taught: ‘you must die before you live’ and about a book Christ the Yogi by Ravi Ravindra who, reflecting on the Gospel of John in the New Testament, wrote about the struggle between light and dark – “between that which comes from Above and that which pulls us down”. The passage continued and included references to the mystic Julian of Norwich, as well as Aristotle and Plato, and then I read the following about the experience of a growing sense of the Divine or soul: “Our attention heightens and improves because we are alert to any signs of the Beloved. We notice the little things around us: trivia, nuances, glances, aromas, hints of beauty. We become detectives of love. We move from being satisfied with gross observation to a more subtle and refined kind of attention.”
At that point I looked up at the sky. A clear space opened up, with clouds all around it, but in the middle of the clear blue space I watched this cloud take shape, forming itself into the letter ‘M’.
Name and address withheld, The Netherlands.
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Signs of the time – a small selection
Spain – On 8 October 2021, a tourist travelling near Soria took several photos in succession of the landscape. When reviewing them later she was surprised to discover a glowing, multi-disc object emitting light rays in only one of the photos. (Source: mufon.com)
In February 2019, I was preparing a meal for someone dear to me, but who I was also a bit frustrated with at that time. I cut a bell pepper in half to take out the seeds, et voilà! I found this heart. (C.Q., Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
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From our own correspondents
Seed saving and sharing – a simple but radical act (an excerpt)
by Elisa Graf
Yet unbeknown to most of us, there is cause for concern as global food crop biodiversity is actually in steep decline. Estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that, in the 20th century alone, the diversity of cultivated crops declined by 75 per cent, and a third of today’s diversity could disappear by 2050.
Biodiversity allows our agricultural systems to be resilient in times of crisis such as climate disruption and provides opportunities for farmers to adapt, as well as the potential to increase production sustainably. According to the FAO, the greatest contributors to the loss of biodiversity are industrial agriculture, deforestation and the excesses of the globalized, industrialized food system.
Seed saving and sharing, a tradition practiced by humans for 10,000 years, is a simple but radical act that more of us can promote and practice ourselves to turn the tide. In recent decades, these traditional practices have come under increasing scrutiny as corporations – mainly four industrial agrochemical companies – have challenged them through lawsuits, as seed propagation and sharing is illegal for already-patented plant varieties. Those most affected by these policies are farmers in developing countries. In response, a global activist movement has grown up around ‘seed sovereignty’, defined as the right “to breed and exchange diverse open-sourced seeds, and be independent from major seed companies”. In addition to restoring biodiversity, seed saving promotes the maintenance of culturally significant traditional plant varieties.
Among the most prominent voices in this movement is Vandana Shiva, whose India-based ecological advocacy organization, Navdanya, has promoted seed sharing since 1987. This agency, whose stated mission is to “conserve and reclaim the commons” has established 150 seed banks and educational programs that support local, traditional and organic farms.
Navdanya reports that only 30 plant species currently supply 95 per cent of the global demand for food, with the four biggest staple crops (wheat, rice, maize and potato) making up the largest share. They point to the fact that modern agriculture’s efforts at ‘uniformity’ have resulted in the loss of more than 200,000 varieties of rice alone. Navdanya has managed to save about 4,000 varieties of rice throughout India, 1,500 of which are conserved in one of their seed banks.
Declining biodiversity hinders the renewal of soil fertility and the controlling of pests and weeds, which leads to more dependency on chemical inputs. Thus, notes Navdanya, “The conservation of farmer bred varieties is, therefore, of primary importance….
As Vandana Shiva puts it, the act of saving and sharing seeds is a political one: “A seed sown in the soil makes us one with the Earth. It makes us realize that we are the Earth.”
The big impact of ‘Little Amal’ (an excerpt)
by Tara Creme
A hugely ambitious and powerful theatre/art piece, which has brought together artists, community and humanitarian groups and cultural institutions, is nearing its conclusion.
‘Little Amal’
The Walk produced by Good Chance Theatre and directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi, presents Little Amal, a 3.5 metre tall puppet created by Handspring Theatre Company, of a young refugee girl from Syria. Handled by a largely unseen group of puppeteers, Amal has travelled 8,000 km from the Turkey/ Syria border in July 2021 through Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, to the UK, following a journey that a young migrant from Syria might take.
There have been hundreds of organized artistic events to coincide with Amal’s visit, but much of the project has involved Amal simply walking, usually followed by huge crowds. Amal, whose name means ‘Hope’ in Arabic, has also visited refugee camps and groups of schoolchildren….
As well as artistic and cultural gatherings, Little Amal has met politicians and religious leaders, was blessed by the Pope in Rome, and visited the United Nations and Council of Europe. From 9 to 11 November she travelled to COP26 in Glasgow, taking part in climate demonstrations and meeting young activists. And later in the month she will visit the Hague, The Netherlands….
Amal represents the tens of thousands of displaced children making their way from war-torn and famine-stricken countries – she is an unaccompanied child searching for a new life. The Walk asks us to consider the experience that a refugee goes through with compassion, not as a political statistic but as a fellow human being, and asks of us the question, “How would you welcome her?”…
Good Chance Theatre calls The Walk a “cultural odyssey transcending borders, politics and language to tell a new story of shared humanity – and to ensure the world doesn’t forget the millions of displaced children, each with their own story, who are more vulnerable than ever during the global pandemic.”…
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The need to make manifest our ideals – a compilation (an excerpt)
We present a selection of quotations on the theme of ‘The need to make manifest our ideals’. The quotations are taken from Maitreya (Messages from Maitreya the Christ and Maitreya’s Teachings – The Laws of Life), Benjamin Creme’s Master (A Master Speaks Volumes One and Two), and Benjamin Creme’s writings.
….
Men must save the world which ails badly. My Masters and I will show the way to do so. It gladdens Our hearts to see the start already made by the ordinary people of the world. It is to them I speak now. Raise your voices. Tell the world your needs: your need for peace; your need for justice and freedom; the need for all people to live in harmony, no matter the religion, the colour, the race. All men essentially are One. They are My brothers and I love each one. (Message from Maitreya, 27 March 2008, A Master Speaks, Volume Two)
***
Good will inevitably triumph because it is the will of the divine Being Who ensouls this planet. But we have to make it so. It does not happen by itself. Maitreya puts it this way: “Nothing happens by itself. Man must act and implement his will.” It does not matter what ideals we have, how much we would love everybody to be at peace, to have enough to eat, not to have millions starving, no little children with swollen bellies because they have had no food for weeks.... It does not happen unless we act and make it so. (Benjamin Creme, The Awakening of Humanity)
***
A new voice is being heard in the affairs of men, articulated by a few sensitive minds among the leaders of the nations. More and more, this voice will give expression to the foremost needs of our time: peace, tolerance, forgiveness of past wrongs, co-operation and sharing for the benefit of all. That voice will issue from the hearts and minds of all who love their fellow-men, creating an invincible demand for world reconstruction and renewal. That voice is the voice of the new era. It is the voice of Maitreya.
Add your voice to that gathering clamour for peace and justice and become aware of your place in history. A new world is in the making and requires the involvement of all: all have a part to play in this great undertaking; none should feel too young or too old to voice aloud their aspirations. (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘The voice of Maitreya’)
***
Many people, and many countries, are in need of help now. As the reality of global interdependence becomes an established fact in our awareness, so the fact that ‘all men are brothers’ will be increasingly translated into structures and practical programmes of action that reflect this reality. (Maitreya, Maitreya’s Teachings – the Laws of Life)
***
God can only work through agencies. You have to become an agent of God and put it into effect in your own life. When you do that something very definite happens. You find you are a member of a very large group throughout the world who feel the same way, have the same ideals of harmony, justice, right relationships. When enough people feel this and act, things change. (Benjamin Creme, Maitreya’s Mission Volume Two)
***
May it be that when you hear the call for a new start you will find yourself in the vanguard of those who stand for change, happy to lower your demands on life that others, too, might live. Only thus can the world be redeemed and turned again in the direction of the Plan….
Never has the need for change been so urgent and so apparent. Never, before, has man sensed the danger of inaction, and stood, as now, ready to open his heart to the plight of his brothers and the future of his planet. (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Reflections of the Divine’)
….
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The following is the full table of contents of the printed magazine December 2021
3 The Teachers and the taught
by the Master —
3 The curse of commercialization
by the Master —
4 Point of view:
A world without money
by Robert C. Koehler
4 This month in Share International
5 Open letter to governments of the world and international institutions at COP26, Glasgow 2021
7 The need to make manifest our ideals – a compilation
9 Seed saving and sharing – a simple but radical act
by Elisa Graf
10 People power will deliver what historic polluters are not
11 Signs of the time:
“Those who search for signs ...”
14 The big impact of ‘Little Amal’
by Tara Creme
15 Indian farmers’ protest – victory for people power
16 The disciple’s responsibility in crucial times – Part Five
by Anne Marie Kvernevik
18 The science of contact and communication
by Aart Jurriaanse
20 45 million people are at famine’s door
by Peyvand Khorsandi and Paul Anthem
21 Letters to the editor: Beautiful greeting
23 Questions and answers
by Benjamin Creme
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