March 2025

Bonnie Piper: At a conference in Costa Rica concerning the environment, Dr. Robert Mueller from the United Nations said that we have a very limited time to deal with the environmental catastrophes threatening the planet at this time. I’m wondering what you say about that?
Benjamin Creme: Apart from the number one absolute priority of saving the starving millions of the world, Maitreya has made the environment the priority of our time and He said it must involve every man, woman and child. Everyone must do something to save this planet from the destruction which we’re causing. He says there is no difference between you and the planet. There is a total continuity of atomic structure through the whole of creation. Every atom is related to every other atom, so when we despoil the planet as we are doing, we’re actually destroying our own life. One day we will realize that the one we call God, nature, the environment or humanity are one and the same. They are inter-related so intimately that you cannot divide one from the other; so it behoves us to look after the planet.

BP: What you are saying is somewhat in alignment with ideas in recent years that have come out through books like The Global Brain: that, in a sense, the earth is our body.
BC: Indeed. We are a part of the expression of a great divine Being, a heavenly Man Who ensouls this planet, Whose body of expression is the planet and everything in it, including ourselves. We are thought forms in the mind of that creating Logos, and the Logos doesn’t make a division between humanity, the animal kingdom, the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, the environment, the air. All are closely related. One cannot exist without the other. It is a dream on the part of the Logos to bring all of that to perfection and, unfortunately, for a very long time, we have been gradually despoiling our planet. This process is speeding up to a really dangerous extent. It has to be rectified.

BP: It appears that although the world is coming together in many ways, in some ways, paradoxically, there’s a lot of further fragmentation happening.
BC: Maitreya has something to say about that. As soon as political systems around the world die, tribalism and racism appear. It happens because politicians cannot solve the problems of their changing societies, so the people take the law into their own hands. But He says: “This always leads to destruction.” It is not a good thing but it is an inevitable process as the forces of unity fall away and change occurs, and then those demagogues and opportunists look to take over power. But He also says that the culture of creation is diversity, and this is the basis of every nation and every religion. Try to remove these differences and you only provoke destruction. He says that’s why trade and commerce is so dangerous. “Once you open the flood gates, the water will spread everywhere.” They will be out of control and that, in a sense, is doubly dangerous. As soon as you loosen the ties that bind, you release forces which very easily get out of control; then it will take the power and the energy of the Hierarchy to regain that kind of stability.

BP: Could you speak about this whole issue of unity and diversity, oneness and ‘manyness’ and also the process of the change itself. If I understand correctly, you’re saying in the process of change itself, it may look like things are falling apart before they come back together in some form that’s useful?
BC: Precisely, if it is along the evolutionary Plan. That which works against the evolutionary Plan leads to destruction. That which is for the evolutionary Plan is essentially unity in diversity. The absolute essence of individuality and personal creativity is basic to creation but the aim of all evolution is towards unity. These two things have to go side by side so that every expression of unification is with the total acceptance of the individual uniqueness of every person and, in a world sense, the uniqueness of every nation. The coming together of unions, federations, conglomerations must take place in a context of complete acceptance of the diversity of every single nation. All of us are governed as nations as well as individuals by certain great energies called rays and these determine the quality of a particular nation. The rays governing France are not the same as the rays governing the United States, and there is no reason at all that they should imitate one another. Diversity is the very nature of life. It gives it its flavor, it gives it its richness, like a many facetted jewel or a rich carpet or tapestry with all the different, interweaving threads which are all wonderful in themselves and together make a total harmony when they’re expressing themselves in their original uniqueness.

Standing Together is a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation, and for peace, equality and social justice. It was founded in 2015 by a coalition of activists and since then has become the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel.

Some of its efforts in recent months gained global attention, including a campaign to hold protective presence at road junctions in the West Bank, allowing aid trucks and their drivers to safely pass settler protests that tried to block them; ongoing protests to stop the war; and collecting food from people in Israel and sending it to Gaza. Since the announcement of a ceasefire and return of hostages in January 2025, Standing Together has continued its public pressure campaign on the Israeli government, calling for a complete ceasefire deal and the release of all hostages. …

In Part Two of this article, spokespeople Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood answer questions about Standing Together’s strategy for building political power in Israel; striving for Palestinian equality within the country; and how people in the international community, especially the US, can help.

The following transcript has been edited for length and content.

Building political power in Israel
Question: [In your opening statement], you touched upon different strategies on how to approach the bigger issues you’re trying to resolve. On your website and in the creation of your movement, you have taken the time to create a theory of change. So how do you plan to end the occupation? How do you end inequality? How do you make people in Israel and Palestine live safely and securely?

Alon-Lee Green: How do you change? It’s a good question because when we look at our society, when we look at the reality that we face on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, we understand that it is long, long years, and it’s still going on. There are a lot of factors in our reality that are just deepening. The occupation is becoming deeper, the Jewish supremacy in our land becomes stronger.

Just a few years ago in 2018, a law was passed in Israel, the Nation-State law, declaring that Jewish people in Israel are first-class citizens and Palestinian citizens in Israel are second-class citizens. Arabic was an official language until then and it was degraded into being not an officially acknowledged language after that.

So we see that reality doesn’t stop with those very regressive forces saying we’re satisfied with having 400,000 people in the settlements and having these sets of laws that are declaring this and that. No, they keep on moving. And that is a question of power. They have a lot of power, but they’re not the majority of the Israeli people. Settlers in our society are 5% of the entire Israeli population. How many percent do they hold in parliament? Almost 20%. How many percent do they hold in government? More than 20%.

How is it possible that such a small minority hold such big political power? These are good questions to ask. We try to ask ourselves, how do we not just condemn reality, but actually change reality? …

We are working in the field of politics and that means building power. In order to do so, we need to organize people [according to] their self-interest and to form it into a majority. And yes, it means also working with people that do not hold the same values as us. If I want to get to the end of this room, I cannot just jump from here to there. I need to take some steps on the way. Our strategy is working with people and forming coalitions. It means making compromises. It means also asking where people are at. Who are the people you’re trying to convince? How do you move them?

And in these past 14 months, which have been terrible in all possible ways, we also faced a lot of persecution and threats ourselves. We needed to move apartments sometimes because of political violence being directed at us. But this strengthened our belief in the interests of the people, our compassion for our own people, our ability to see the tragedy, the grief of people, to understand it and not distance ourselves from our society, but actually to be an internal force in our society. This allows us to bring together Palestinians and Jewish people from very different realities and narratives.

This is the only way to operate in a society that is so complicated. It is not only Jewish. It is not only Palestinian. It is mixed. And no one can solve what is going on in our land without the people living in it, without looking at the Israeli society and understanding that it exists — even though some people criticize us, calling us ‘normalizers’, calling us people that are acknowledging the existence of Israel. Israel exists and it has a society. You cannot bypass the people. Understanding who are the people that live in our society is a key part of changing the reality on our land.

Rula Daood: The fight is not just a fight for existence. It’s a fight to have a place and a society where both of us are really equal, where both of us are first-class citizens, where both of us are not afraid of saying who we are, our identities as a Palestinian, as Jewish. And where both of us can walk in the streets and not be afraid of being arrested just because we said something wrong.

And this is a dream maybe that I have many times. It is a fight for somehow belonging, because we don’t really have it. This Jew and this Palestinian are sometimes looked at as outcasts, because we dream of many big things in a system that’s really not equal, in a country that identifies itself as Jewish and democratic, which don’t really go with one another.

So when we go out in the streets, many times we feel really lonely. The sense of belonging is not there. We feel it when we’re together, but outside in the streets it’s not there.

When you ask me what I’m fighting for, my dad very much loves football, which is soccer for Americans. So we watch football each and every day. I wanted to go to a football game. We went to one football game in Israel, and it was very difficult. People were standing and chanting stuff, saying Hatikvah (the national anthem), holding the Israeli flag.

And I didn’t feel it’s mine. It doesn’t speak to me. When I think of what I’m fighting for, it is that sense of belonging, that maybe someday I can go to a football game, and stand with all of the people there, chant something that I feel belongs to me and speaks about me but also belongs to Alon-Lee, and speaks to Alon-Lee. That is the kind of thing I am fighting for. It is belonging. It is feeling really at home in the only place you call home. …

Moderator: A question from the audience: Rula, what do you need from Jews right now? What do you need Jews to understand about your life as a Palestinian Israeli citizen? What do you need Jews to understand about this moment?

RD: I need you to understand that you cannot give up. You cannot give up on people. You cannot give up on organizing people. You cannot be in despair. This is not the moment. It is the moment to understand that there is a huge opportunity to change the Middle East. It is there. And what you can do, especially Jewish communities with the influence and power and the well-organized communities that you have, is to push forward for a solution for the people living back home.

There is a huge opportunity right now because Saudi Arabia is in the game of wanting a normalization with Israel. And the only way it may happen is if there is an independent Palestinian state for my people, and real equality for me within the Israeli society. What you can really do right now is to organize people, your communities, to demand from your people in power in the Congress and the Senate a solution that says it is time to change history and take action — not just to stop this war, but to stop all the wars to come, by declaring and pushing towards an independent Palestinian State, because it is about time for us to be free and for us to be equal. That is one thing you can do, and you do have the power.

For more information: standing-together.org/en

This book about Krishnamurti (1895-1986) is long and complex but its central importance is that, unlike much writing about and by Krishnamurti, it convincingly and in detail explores the role of the Masters of Wisdom in his life. (Coming from an early Theosophical perspective, Sanat refers to them as the “Perennial Masters”, who teach the “Perennial Philosophy”.)

Sanat’s work about the role of the Masters in Krishnamurti’s life throws a different light on the man who many in the West have accepted as a great and illuminating teacher. Krishnamurti (K) himself played down (at least publicly) the role of the Masters because it was counter to his teaching that refuted any reliance on authority. He spoke against the idea of teachers or gurus of any kind — not so much necessarily to deny the Masters’ existence but to stress its irrelevance to each individual’s self-reliance; the aim is always self-discovery along with self-forgetfulness, or, as K put it, “dying to the known”. “You are the door through which you yourself have to go.” No one should rely on a ‘guru’ or a Master. Nor should they even rely on Krishnamurti himself. Perhaps his lack of focus on esoteric ideas made K’s teaching more palatable to modern Western audiences. But it can also be seen as a gap.

Sanat establishes the reality of Maitreya, Gautama Buddha and other Masters, and traces their important part in Krishnamurti’s evolving life — not as hallucinations or ‘visions’ as some commentators have averred. He quotes Madame Blavatsky: “[The Masters] are living men … We call them Masters because they are our teachers and because from them we have derived all the theosophical truths however inadequately some of us may have expressed and others understood them. They are men of great learning whom we term initiates, and still greater holiness of life… .” Readers of Alice A.Bailey, who received telepathically most of her writings from the Master Djwhal Khul, will have no difficulty in accepting Sanat’s account of the reality of the Masters; nor will readers of Share International, which every month during Benjamin Creme’s lifetime published an article from a Master of Wisdom. However, Sanat is writing for an audience that has been accustomed to the idea that, for most of his life’s teaching, K dismissed the idea.

The first indication of the Masters’ role in K’s life is how, as an unkempt child, he was ‘discovered’ (recognized) along with his brother, by Charles Leadbeater, on a beach in Adyar in 1909, and was then adopted and brought up in the UK by Annie Besant. (Both Leadbeater and Besant were early Theosophists.) A Master must have had a part to play. Then, there is the evidence in K’s first book At the feet of the Master, produced when he was only 14, where the introduction says: “These are not my words; they are the words of the Master who taught me.” Later commentators seem largely to have forgotten this book, or thought it was written by Leadbeater, and K did not refer to it in his later years of teaching.

The Masters were responsible for Krishnamurti’s development — culminating in the gruelling, initiatory ‘process’, as K himself called it.* The Masters were real, physical beings who brought in spiritual energies through K. In chapter 2, ‘A new perspective’, Sanat demonstrates the relevance of the perennial wisdom teachings to the discoveries of modern physics, in particular the notion of ‘subtle energies’. Modern esotericism talks in terms of ‘energies’ that are counter to what most people in the West believe. However, those who practise Transmission Meditation are very aware of the energies sent from the Masters.

A demonstration of the presence and influence of the Masters and Maitreya in K’s life is clear from his account to a small number of associates in 1910: “When I left my body … I went at once to the Master KH’s house and found him there with the Master Morya and the Master Djwhal Khul…Then we all went together to the house of the Lord Maitreya and there we found many of the Masters…” (p140).

In 1924, Sanat recounts, while K was staying in Italy, and when he was undergoing his painful initiatory ‘process’, he gave a message from Maitreya to his close associates in “a style totally different from his own manner of speaking”:

“Do not look for the Great Ones when they may be very near you.
You are like the blind man who seeks sunshine.
Learn to serve Me, for along that path alone will you find me.
Forget yourself for then only am I to be found.
You are like the hungry man who is offered food and will not eat.
The happiness you seek is not far off; it lies in every common stone.
I am there if you will only see. I am the Helper if you will let Me help”

Sanat believes that Krishnamurti may be “considered the esoteric too serious to discuss publicly”, for the study of the esoteric should not be simply academic but a living experience of transformation. However, we might wish that in the later part of his life K had been more open with his audiences — maybe more people would now accept the reality of the Masters of Wisdom and Maitreya.

*According to Benjamin Creme, this was part of specific preparation to enable K to be able to ‘endure’ physically the powerful energies involved in overshadowing by Maitreya — since he was chosen to be a possible vehicle for Maitreya prior to Maitreya having decided that he himself could appear [in a mayavirupa, a self-created body].

The Inner Life of Krishnamurti: Private Passion and Perennial Wisdom
by Aryel Sanat, Quest Books, USA, 1999

We regularly read of global-warming-caused or intensified climate disasters — island nations sinking into the ocean due to sea level rise, farmlands lost to salt-water intrusion, massive hurricanes and tornados, crucial lakes drying up from drought, and on and on. Most are happening in poorer nations and faraway places we don’t think about much. However, when disasters occur around us, we suddenly pay attention. And we have an opportunity to fully absorb the associated lessons.

The personal toll
One of the lessons of the recent series of fires in Los Angeles was the personal toll. Early on I learned that a co-worker’s beautiful home in Pacific Palisades burned down completely in the Palisades fire, and she and her husband were left with only their cars and the clothes they were wearing. This was one of an estimated 16,000 homes and other structures destroyed in that fire alone. Our household was threatened by two different fires during the “perfect storm” of near hurricane-force winds blowing embers everywhere, dangerously dry vegetation, and heat. The stress was intense: what’s most important to take? Will the flying embers start new fires? How fast will the fire spread? Which route would be best to escape (if there’s time)? What about neighbors who have medical needs? Where would we go if our home burned? Sleep was hard to come by, and the only focus was fire preparation and getting news updates, with emotions on high alert. The jolting realization was that climate disasters can affect anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The importance of action
Inside Climate News reports: “Global warming caused mainly by burning fossil fuels made the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the recent deadly fires around Los Angeles about 35 times more likely to occur, an international team of scientists concluded in a rapid attribution analysis…” Report co-author Theo Keeping, a wildfire researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires at Imperial College London, added, “With every fraction of a degree of warming, the chance of extremely dry, easier-to-burn conditions around the city of LA gets higher and higher…” So, the sooner we act aggressively, the sooner we can effect change.

Another warning came from Maitreya and the Master Jesus, who appeared as two African American men at an expo booth another co-worker and I were staffing in April of 2007. Christopher, the younger of the two (Maitreya in disguise) warned that “The oceans are dying. It’s coming to an end….It’s all dead if people don’t act NOW,” referring to the sad state of our environment. The older gentleman spoke of how dark things seem, and said he didn’t know what to do. The answer is: whatever we can do on an individual and group level to spur our political representatives into effective action we must do! …

Signs of hope and spiritual protection
Our Share International co-worker and her husband (not part of the L.A. glitterati) whose house burned, through an unlikely series of circumstances were able to rent a fully furnished apartment owned by a friend of a friend. Despite their losses, they feel blessed and taken care of. Their insurance had not been canceled before the fires as many policies had been, and they will rebuild.

Miraculously, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self Realization Fellowship’s Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades escaped any significant damage. A public restroom was destroyed, but the museum a few steps away was untouched, as were the temple and all the other historical structures around the lake and the beautifully manicured grounds. …