Up to the end of 2025, the online edition of Share International magazine presents a selection of items from the printed edition. Each online edition includes a complete article by Benjamin Creme's Master. Most other articles reproduced here, covering a wide range of topics, are excerpts. The online edition usually also includes a selection of Questions and Answers, Readers' letters, and photographs of Signs of Maitreya's presence. From the beginning of 2026, the printed edition is no longer being produced, but the entire magazine is available on this website.
See the full table of contents of the printed edition at the foot of the page.
From the inception of Share International magazine, Benjamin Creme’s Master provided an article every month for nearly 35 years. These were intended to be published not only at the time they were written, but also whenever appropriate according to world circumstances.
Of all the problems which beset humanity there is none greater than the problem of glamour. It provides the basis for all our difficulties and dangers, and holds the vast majority of humanity in thrall. It is at the root of every division and cleavage and the source of every dimension of pain and suffering. It has its roots in the ancient past of mankind and all but a very few are held under its sway.
Essentially, glamour originates in man’s sensuous, feeling apparatus — the emotional or astral body — and in man’s identification with its action. Through wrong identification with his feelings and emotions — his desire nature — he has surrounded himself with, and lost himself in, thick fogs of illusion and unreality. This constitutes the glamour in which most people live out their lives. Glamour is illusion on the plane of the emotions and provides the greatest obstacle to progress, for the individual and for the race. It throws a multitude of misconceptions across the path of the unwary, and the loftiest idealist is no freer from its influence (nay, he is frequently more prone) than the hardened cynic.
To come to grips with glamour, humanity must recognize its mechanism, by which means the central heresy — that we are separate — is created and maintained. All that tends to reinforce the sense of separateness is the result of the action of glamour, and all that seeks to undermine that heresy works for its destruction. Glamour resides in the notion that man’s desires are real, that they have their own intrinsic validity and purpose, whereas, in truth, they are the cause of all unhappiness; no more real, no less transient, than the mirage of the desert.
The well-meaning aspirant clouds his action with desire for achievement; the idealist looks upon his as the only possible ideal that right-thinking people could hold; often do we see the absurdities of national pride lead nations into actions against the interest of their peoples. These, the actions of glamour, are the product of desire: for power and the fulfilment of ambition. The light of science has rid the world of certain ancient glamours but created others in their stead: the glamour of possessions enthralls half the world while the other half go hungry and die in misery and want.
Eventually, humanity will work through this phase and establish a truer perception of reality. The myriad glamours which beset the race today will one day dissolve in the light of man’s soul, invoked into manifestation as the New Age proceeds. But the present is a time in which new types of energy are making their impact on men’s lives and creating conditions of bewilderment and confusion. The heightened tension of the time fosters the glamours of fear and destruction, erupting into violence of all kinds.
What can be done to free humanity from this ancient thralldom, in part innate in the nature of substance itself? How can man free himself from wrong identification and the tyranny of his self-created thoughtforms? The answer lies in a shift of focus, from the self to the group; in a truer identification with the soul and its relation to all souls. The light of the soul, through the agency of mind, is the great dissipator of glamour, and long ago the Buddha taught the conquering of desire: the Noble Middle Path between the pairs of opposites. In the light of the soul the essential unity is seen, the astral waves subside and the aspirant finds himself at initiation’s gate.
(Share International, April 1984)
These articles 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.
The following is a further selection of questions and answers from an interview for “Seeing Beyond” on Internet Radio Santa Cruz, California, November 1992, with host Bonnie Piper. Part One of this interview was published in the March 2025 issue of Share International.
Bonnie Piper: I’d like to hear a little about what you feel is the changing role of the United Nations.
Benjamin Creme: The United Nations, according to the Lord Maitreya, will gain and gain in power. It will be the most powerful voice in the future time and it is now beginning to take a very powerful stand in relation to world problems, even interfering, if necessary, in the internal affairs of nations.
BP: Many people who are hearing what you just said regarding the United Nations may have a lot of fears come up, the fears of what the phrase one worlders, Commies, pinkos, people who want to have that sort of thing come true with what you’re saying in the greater power of the United Nations and have this incredible fear that somehow we’re going to lose something, [that] it’s a dangerous situation.
BC: No, not all. The United Nations will become the most powerful force in the world. It will be an agency. That’s the point, not a government but an agency through which all international problems will be resolved.
BP: So you’re saying that it will, in some ways, empower us?
BC: It will empower each nation to be itself. At the moment, small nations can be dominated by great nations. That cannot pertain in the future. The United Nations has to become the watchdog of a new world order which is for freedom and justice throughout the world. All nations would subscribe to the necessary force to quell local wars and prevent the injustice of one group.
BP: What about demilitarization?
BC: It is not something that can happen overnight but it can happen, perhaps quicker than people can imagine. The will has to be there but, of course, there are many social factors — millions of people are involved in the manufacturing of arms. To stop creating them will throw all these people out of work. It takes time to adapt military potential to social needs, so it’s a very complicated process. But the will is the first thing. People must feel safe, they must feel that they no longer need this huge arsenal. We should be tackling it; but we should be also be tackling the results of the energies which are now infecting the commercialization of the world.
BP: Certainly, we are challenged at this time to be really in the moment, right here and right now because there is so much change going on. You say in one of your articles in Share International that “It is the experience of many that the world is speeding up.” You have certainly addressed how astronomically powerful nuclear tests have been and I’d like you talk briefly about how they are creating earthquakes.
BC: There cannot be an underground nuclear explosion which is not followed by an earthquake. It so disturbs the vibration of the inner earth that an earthquake is inevitable. It need not be in the immediate vicinity. It could be something on the other side of the world. But an earthquake is inevitable. There are earthquakes caused by other factors but the main factors are underground nuclear explosions. Of course, people don’t realize how powerful they are.
BP: What do you get from your Master or Maitreya about the situation with nuclear energy?
BC: Nuclear energy, as we use it now in the fission process, must be quickly dismantled as soon as possible and replaced by the fusion process. Until now, science has thought the fusion process too difficult. Recently, in fact, there was a breakthrough. Some scientists had created a megawatt of power or something like that by the fusion process. They had built up to some 2000 degrees centigrade and so turned helium gas into the fusion process they wanted.
But there is a very safe, cold method (according to the Master Djwhal Khul, who gave the Alice Bailey Teachings to the world) using a simple isotope of water. By a cold method of fusion we can supply all the world’s needs in the form of heat for energy and so on.
Scientists are looking in the wrong direction. There have been reports recently of experiments with the fusion process, rather simple, rather primitive but nevertheless in the right direction, which have been pooh-poohed by various science bodies because of the power, I think, of the Establishment of the nuclear fission authorities throughout the world — yours, the British, French and so on. The French use more nuclear energy per capita than any other nation and they have an enormous, vested interest in the continuity of fission processes, but it is dangerous, it is lethal, it’s destroying the environment. We don’t know how to deal with the waste. We’re building up an inheritance of lethal, toxic waste for our descendants. Everybody knows this and yet they don’t look for the simple thing which is, as my Master says, “staring them in the face”.
BP: I learned that the military is the number one polluter on this planet; also about the enormous amount of money being poured into the war on drugs in this country. What’s the answer?
BC: Well, Maitreya says politicians are to blame for the desperation of those who are addicted to drugs. Since people are so stricken in life that they cannot even eat properly, they will lead desperate lives so they will steal, they’ll end up in prison if they are deprived of a future, deprived of nourishment. They end up on drugs to help them forget their desperation; and from drugs, He says, “it’s not far to crime, even murder.” He says that people addicted to drugs are suffering from “spiritual starvation — from extreme self-alienation”. Life is purposeless to them and they want to end it. It is a form of slow suicide. He says that “if life has no meaning, this meaning is what must be restored. It is necessary for the person to get a sense of his own worth. You cannot do anything, He says, “without a sense of your own worth. You must know who you are.” You must have a sense that who you are is worthwhile, worthy. Self-esteem is essential; then you can grow in self-awareness and eventually Self-realization. “Self-realization,” he says, “is the aim of all life.”
We present a selection of quotations on the theme of the triumph of the soul over materialism. The quotations are taken from Benjamin Creme’s Master (A Master Speaks, Volume Two), and Benjamin Creme’s writings.
The personality will always be there, but it becomes negative in relation to the soul. The soul needs an instrument, a vehicle, a powerful, clear-cut personality through which to demonstrate. It is not a question of negating the personality, putting ourselves down, losing all self-respect. It is a question of becoming more altruistic, more impersonal, more objective. (Benjamin Creme, The Art of Cooperation)
Thus will be presented to men their only natural course: the adoption of the principle of sharing. More and more, humanity is being edged towards this realization, however distant as yet are they from its actual manifestation. (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Problems awaiting action’)
Common beliefs about energy sources for our era on Earth are:
- Today we use all of the nonpolluting power sources known to humankind.
- Soon after 1989, scientists gave up on getting electrical power from ‘cold fusion’.
- We must accept some pollution, so we need nuclear fission in our energy ‘mix’.
- A ubiquitous source of clean yet power-dense and abundant low-cost energy doesn’t exist.
- The existence of an aether was disproven in 1887.
None of those beliefs are true. For instance, the famous Michelson-Morley experiment only proved that a certain mental model about the universal background energy — known since antiquity as the ‘aether’ — was an incorrect model of it. Instead of being stationary, something that Earth passes through and experiences as a subtle wind, the aether (also spelled ether) is extremely dynamic.
Today, a growing number of young people are learning about a previously unrecognized source of clean energy. I met many of them at a 2024 event called Cosmic Summit; some arrived at it by being fans of ancient-knowledge podcasts. By studying books such as Robert Temple’s A New Science of Heaven, they are open to new vistas and heights of knowledge.
Meanwhile, explorers with science degrees say the basic principles underlying new energy inventions can be applied to fields ranging from architecture to agriculture, health, communication, economics and beyond.
Those frontier scientists have persisted without support from society. However, times are changing. The public call for disclosure of state secrets about nonhuman intelligences visiting Earth is stirring public interest. Disclosure advocates ask “Why do you never see a gas cap on a UFO/UAP?” and “Why do ‘aliens’ seem to worry about our nuclear facilities?”
Such issues are still unacceptable to scientists who want to fit into mainstream academia; theories that involve a new model of an aether are shunned in the physics establishment.
On the other hand, some theories are closer to the standard model of physics, and their proponents try to use standard terminology. Often they work in the small sector named Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).
LENR was commonly known as cold fusion. In 1989, two electrochemists briefly found themselves in the media spotlight around the world. Dr Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons had been pushed into a premature announcement about having generated excess heat in a tabletop experiment. Headlines labeled the process cold fusion because it didn’t require either high pressures or the level of heat supposed to be causing nuclear fusion in the sun or in stars.
Before the end of that year, hot-fusion physicists declared the death of cold fusion. Despite other scientists’ experiments revealing successes with the process now called LENR, governments’ energy research budgets continued to flow into hot fusion. …
Jeane Manning authors books and recently started an online newsletter, Aether or….
Eric Leskowitz MD, is a retired psychiatrist who spent over 30 years studying energy healing, meditation and hypnosis. He founded and directed the Integrative Medicine Project at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, where he served in the hospital’s Pain Management Program for 25 years. He held appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry at both Harvard and Tufts University.
Seeking to understand the source of illness and healing, Leskowitz’s search led him to study energy healing under Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere in the 1980s. Leskowitz also studied clinical hypnosis with the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. His medical practice integrated energy healing, meditation and hypnosis into the versatile approach of Spaulding’s pain management program. He has authored five books, most recently: The Mystery of Life Energy: Biofield Healing; Phantom Limbs; Group Energetics & Gaia Consciousness (2024). Jason Francis interviewed Eric Leskowitz for Share International.
Share International: What is ‘life energy’?
Eric Leskowitz: Life energy is the missing ingredient in Western medicine. Every other healing tradition around the world has this notion of some kind of force or energy to bring about healing. We tend to think of the human body as very complicated machines — fix the broken parts and everything will work out. But there is nothing that really integrates or holds it all together. And that’s where we’re missing something and have to learn from other traditions about this energy. We don’t know exactly its nature. It’s not quite electricity or magnetism. Although it has elements of these, there is something a little more subtle to it. I think that’s an important direction for science and medicine to be exploring.
SI: Could you talk about the various levels or planes of energy and where this knowledge comes from?
EL: Different cultures around the world have developed very similar maps with this energy field. Western science is calling it the ‘biofield’ as a general term. But the most detailed map in the East is from the yoga traditions where they have seven different layers of energy ranging from the physical body that we know as biology (muscles and bone) all the way up to the spirit or soul. An analogy that is really helpful to think about is H2O. Most people will say that it’s water. And, generally, that’s correct but it depends on the temperature of the room. Obviously, if it’s freezing cold the H2O becomes ice and if it’s boiling hot it will become steam or vapor. It’s the same substance but in a very different form depending on the thermal energy level. The human body is the most condensed form of this life energy.
The next level up, if you will, is what the yoga traditions call prana. It’s what Traditional Chinese Medicine calls qi [pronounced chi]. There is a Western esoteric tradition that calls it etheric energy. It’s almost physical, but not quite. And that’s where acupuncture and pranayama [a breathing technique] in yoga work. …
Paradigm shift
SI: Why has Western Medicine been so reluctant to accept this energy, which is so readily accepted in the East?
EL: It’s a very striking contrast and, in a way, that’s appropriate because it is complementary. Opposites complement each other. The yin and the yang make up the whole. They have been more interested in the subtle or internal world and we are more interested in the external world.
Why such resistance? Probably, it’s psychological. A lot of things can be accomplished by learning how to manipulate the external world. Western European culture developed the Industrial Age and because of the value system at that time — world conquest and colonialism — using a machine, whether it’s weapons or factories, to control the world. And that also applied to medicine, using bloodletting or medication, substantive things, to bring about health.
Nowadays, our health system is focused normally on medications and pharmaceuticals, with surgery and radiation being other options, but more and more about lifestyle. But I think it’s a human tendency to get attached to something you spent your life working with and developing. It’s hard to shift gears and, as the saying goes, hard to shift paradigms. We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift where a model of health and illness (but really our model of reality) is changing drastically — from a physical and mechanical or what’s called a materialist view to a mind-body interaction where suddenly the idea that ideas, thoughts, emotions and energy are primary and the physical world follows suit.
Part of it is just a natural reluctance to move on. When physics was beginning to adopt quantum mechanics as the main theory, one of the originators of that theory, Max Planck, said something to the effect that “paradigm shifts happen one funeral at a time”. By which he meant that the old order has to die out and be replaced by the new one. And I think we’re in the middle of that now.
[For more information: themysteryoflifeenergy.com]
Throughout much of the world access to electricity is a given, and those of us lucky to live in the modern world rarely have to think about it. Yet even today, about 750 million people — 80% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa — still have to get by without electricity, with devastating consequences. Access to electricity is crucial for overcoming poverty, fostering economic growth and employment opportunities, and facilitating the delivery of essential social services like education and healthcare, which are vital for achieving sustainable human development.
Since 1972, Barefoot College, located in one of India’s poorest regions of Rajasthan, has been working to solve this problem, training marginalized, illiterate and semi-literate women from the Global South to become Solar Engineers. Rooted in Gandhian principles of service, sustainability, and social justice, the Center was established by Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy to showcase the natural intelligence, creativity and dignity of rural or ‘barefoot’ populations.
Through visual diagrams and hands-on training, the centre’s innovative flagship program teaches women how to design, make, install and repair solar lanterns and home-lighting systems. Roy explains, “This is the only college in the world where you could train rural women through sight and sound, not using the written or spoken word, and make them into solar engineers,” — or as they are affectionately referred to, “Solar Mamas”.
The origins of the program go back to 1966, when solar energy pioneer Pierre Amado helped Barefoot College train local rural people in solar lantern design. Due to the success of these trainings, in 2000, with funding from the European Union, the Barefoot Solar Engineers training program was launched in six Indian states. Supported by UN Women and the Asian Development Bank, trainings followed for women from Afghanistan in 2005 and Myanmar in 2007. In 2008, the Government of India’s Ministry of External Affairs embedded the program under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation initiative. Since then, Barefoot College has trained 1,708 rural women from 96 countries. These women have subsequently brought electricity to more than 75,000 households, saving around 45 million litres of kerosene that would have otherwise been needed to light homes.
With financial support from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, the Solar Mama’s project is now operating in four sub-Saharan African countries: Senegal, Burkina Faso, Liberia and Tanzania, repurposing existing infrastructure into Barefoot Vocational Training Centres. The facilities needed for solar training have been set up, and buildings have been renovated and re-furnished, including appropriate accommodations for women. In addition to offering training for women from each of these four nations, these Barefoot Vocational Training Centres have the capacity to enable women from neighbouring countries to join the solar training and eventually take solar power home to their own villages.
A recent article in The Guardian showcases a Barefoot Vocational Training Centre in Zanzibar, Tanzania, illustrating the concept at work. It reports that the first six cohorts at this centre were trained in India, but they now train the next generation of solar engineers here — 65 women since 2015, who in turn have connected 1,858 houses in 29 villages to power. Women from Malawi and Somaliland have also come here to train.
The not-for-profit group VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), reports on a group of women from Malawi, who traveled to India to train as solar mamas at Barefoot College. The women had to leave their husbands, children, grandchildren, and everything familiar behind, also overcoming the gossip and fear-mongering from neighbors, who said they wouldn’t survive the trip.
Returning home after six months, having persevered through a challenging training, these women caused a real stir in their villages. Having travelled overseas and studied independently they were changed, their confidence in evidence. With the arrival of components to build solar lanterns, provided by the VSO, the Solar Mamas have since built and installed home lighting systems — solar lanterns and wall lamps — in almost 100 homes in their rural villages, about an hour’s drive from Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe.
The VSO notes that the arrival of free solar electricity has been life-changing for many of these women’s neighbours: “Since solar light was installed in her home Elinati Pattison, 48, can sew long after sunset, which has enabled her to expand her tailoring business, doubling her income. She says she now has more time for her family and children. Lines Nguluwe started a mobile-phone-charging business from her house, and also uses the electric lighting to make mandazi [donuts] before sunrise, which she sells for additional income. Children in the community are benefiting too. Edina Livitiko, along with three of the other solar mamas, used their new skills to put electricity into three classrooms at their local primary school.”
In exchange for maintaining the home lighting systems, each of the solar mamas receives a salary of about £10 a month, paid by their neighbours. For many of them, having a regular income has given them more freedom to invest in new side businesses, in education and improvements to farming.
As Barefoot College founder Roy put it, “It’s the women who will change the world. We should actually encourage that as much as possible.”
(Sources: Barefoot College; The Guardian; VSO International)
“We have to decide whether the enhancement of a poorer person’s ability to live up to her potential and expand her freedom is more or less valuable than the associated restraint on the freedom of a rich person to buy another Rolex watch, a larger yacht, a bigger mansion.” Joseph Stiglitz
Essentially, I would call The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024) a socialist manifesto, but Joseph Stiglitz, a renowned American academic economist, calls his ideas “progressive capitalism” or a “rejuvenated social democracy” — he does not, for example, advocate for an entirely publicly owned economy. His focus is on the US where an individualistic approach to capitalism is particularly entrenched. He shows how political and economic freedom are inseparable.
Stiglitz’s central thesis is that ‘freedom’ — political and economic — is impossible for those who struggle to make ends meet, or even for those who spend most of their energy in making money, since they too are bound to materialism. He utterly refutes the view of the ‘Right’, or Neoliberalism, that “the more the government spends the more [individual] freedom is lost”. He traces the failure of Neoliberalism leading up to the economic crash of 2008, saying that it had resulted in a belief in “unfettered markets”, which, in turn, led to greater social and economic inequality, and had “prepared the ground for populism”, along with a ‘strong’ leader like Donald Trump. (The book refers to Donald Trump’s first term as US President but it was written before he was elected as President for a second term.)
The extreme example of a non-equal society that Stiglitz offers was a society based on slavery — only slave owners had any kind of freedom (though we might question the reality of that ‘freedom’ today).
‘Progressive capitalism’ accepts that a society with a “mild form of coercion” — imposing tax and regulations for the public good — will bring about well-being and freedom for a greater number of people. Freedom, after all, is not possible for those “living on the edge”, who have no freedom of action because they have to be preoccupied with trying — and often failing — to meet their minimal daily material needs. Stiglitz quotes Adam Smith: “When the regulation therefore is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”
Stiglitz laments how democracy in the US has declined in recent years: “Voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and a host of other anti-democratic actions by Republican extremists have put American democracy in danger. … The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great.”
Stiglitz is particularly concerned with the climate crisis and the crucial but unmet need for international cooperation because of a general refusal to consider the wider, general good.
In the end, Stiglitz asserts, well-being should be at centre of society’s agenda rather than the sole focus being on economic growth. This could be a lesson for the new Labour government in the UK whose main ‘mantram’ on being elected was “Growth, growth, growth”.
Individual freedom
There is another approach to ‘freedom’ familiar to readers of Share International: that of Krishnamurti . Once he had been ‘found’ in India as a bedraggled child, and brought up in the West by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, he clearly had no need to be concerned with economic or political freedom. On the material plane he was always looked after and took meticulous care of his dress and grooming.
He spoke about psychological freedom, absolute freedom of consciousness which has no need of — is free from — thought or belief. And that the way to a free society is for each individual to change, inwardly and instantly, with a complete and non-thinking awareness. Although Krishnamurti himself didn’t use the word ‘spiritual’ it was a spiritual transformation that he espoused — an awareness that could not be taught, and that did not depend on society. He believed that society can only be changed through individual transformation.
Can we imagine that such a transformation could be achieved in a society that lacks political and economic freedom? Perhaps we all have a responsibility for both individual and societal change. Freedom begins with each of us, alone. But we are also a part of the world, the society around us, where we also need to act.
