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.
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. This complex article was written in 2008 and deals with ideas still pertinent today.
Many people await and expect the emergence of the Christ but hold a very distorted view of how that will affect humanity. Many await Him as a Spiritual Magician Who will cancel out their and others’ shortcomings, and so establish everlasting peace. Theirs is a very passive view of this vast and complex happening. For Maitreya, Himself, it is an opportunity to come into a dynamic interaction with humanity, to establish the Principles of the Divine Plan, and to inaugurate the era of Right Human Relationship.
This entails the active response and participation of men and women everywhere: a worldwide, continuous process of change in outer structures and inner perceptions.
Maitreya does not see as particularly open and fruitful those areas of the world where Christians are in the majority. Nor do other major religions inspire in Him more hope of understanding. To be sure, in all religions are men and women who are ready to respond and to act for the benefit of all. Likewise, in every walk of life, in every country in the world, people await the signal that will summon them to action on behalf of their brothers and sisters, known and unknown.
Many await the Christ as the Judge, sent to chasten and punish the lawbreakers. Maitreya, the Christ, is a Teacher, and will indeed teach man the Laws of Life, but a Judge He never was, nor does punishment hold a place in His vocabulary. He will seek to inspire men to know themselves as souls in incarnation, travelling a journey of self-discovery together, and helping each other along the way. He will affirm that competition hinders and deflects men from their path, rendering sterile each glimpse of the soul’s nature.
Men have strayed far from that Path. Commercialization has humanity by the throat and is squeezing every generous thought and gesture out of their lives. The souls of men can endure little more of this oppression and are crying aloud in their agony and frustration. They wonder, then, at the upsurge of crime and mayhem committed by the young in every land.
Maitreya will acquaint men with the origin of wars and military action around the world. He will show how even the climate and weather are disaffected as a result. Men have much to learn about the effects of their actions, and the need for discipline and care.
The Christ comes to teach. Men, free will intact, must respond in order to grow. The Christ, Maitreya, never uses force, even if thus we would the sooner learn. He knows that only that which is undertaken by man’s free will is lawful and likely to bear fruit.
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.
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.
The following answers were given by Benjamin Creme during an interview — New light on Age-old questions — with Dick Larson, 1996.
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 present these letters for your consideration.
I just had an amazing experience. I begin with the background to it: I took two photos of a man sitting on a bench in Barcelona in 2008, who was later confirmed, by Benjamin Creme’s Master, to be a familiar of Maitreya. In one of the photos Maitreya is looking down, and we see his face in 3/4 profile. I kept both photos on my computer and decided to put a thumbnail of one of them on my desktop. To my amazement, when I put the thumbnail on my desktop, Maitreya’s face had turned to face me directly!
I bought a new computer in the summer of 2020. I transferred all my photos to the new computer and, just as I had on the old one, I put a thumbnail of the same photo of Maitreya on the desktop of the new computer. This time however the photo did not change, and he was not looking directly at me, just as in the original photo.
Tonight (23 March 2021), while in a Zoom meeting with friends working on a presentation about Maitreya, I noticed that the name of this thumbnail was simply ‘.jpg’. I thought “That’s not right!” and proceeded to rename the thumbnail ‘Maitreya.jpg’. Just as I saved the new name, I looked at the thumbnail and his face had turned towards me and was now facing me directly!
This feels like a miracle to me!!
(I am attaching both the original photo, and a screen shot of the new thumbnail).
(1) Our Transmission Meditation Group member mailed us an article dated 31 August 2003 from a Massachusetts newspaper about a local health food store. Though he misspelled our last name, put the wrong street address, wrong building number, even a wrong town and no zip code, amazingly the letter arrived within a few days with no problem whatsoever!
Was it a very special delivery?
(2) In October 2004, in the same health food store, I met the same gentleman whom I’d met and talked with there in July. He looked exactly as he did three months ago: tall, black, strongly built, in his forties. However, this time he was wearing a big brown, four-to-five inch high, square Muslim cap, and brown shirt over a white knee-length one.
When I volunteered to help a lady customer get a box of twenty cans of crushed tomatoes into her shopping cart, he was standing right in front of me as I turned around, smiling approvingly. He had a huge five-gallon blue jar filled with reverse osmosis filtered water in his shopping cart. Thinking, “He is Maitreya”, I couldn’t even say how happy I was to meet him again.
He was very energetic and walked right past me to the cashier and out the door to the automobile outside. He saw me staring at him and, if he was Maitreya, I hope he knew every word I was saying to him inside my head.
Would it be possible to let me know whether this was Maitreya or a regular customer of the health food store?
This is a photograph of the hand of Maitreya which appeared on a mirror in a bathroom in Barcelona. The lady-owner went into the guest bathroom and saw a handprint on the mirror and cleaned it off. She thought no more about it.
A few days later she went into her own bathroom and saw the same handprint on the mirror. Luckily, instead of wiping it off, she got in touch with her son, a co-worker in the Share International group in Barcelona. He took a picture of it and sent it to me, and my Master confirmed it as the hand of Maitreya.
It is a fantastic hand, it is real in a way that no print is, it is something like the print on the Turin Shroud of the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. (Benjamin Creme, Share International, November 2001)
My dear friends, I am close to you now. Many of you have awaited My presence for a long time. I am about to step forward openly before all men, and to begin my outer mission. There is no distance between us. Know this. Understand this. When you ask Me through the hand* for help, that help, you should know, is assured. It is possible that you will not recognize that the help has been given, but so it will be. Trust Me to aid you, for it is to do so that I come. I shall exhort you to work with Me for the good of all. This is the opportunity to grow quicker, faster than you have ever done before, and so bring you to the Feet of That One Whom we call God. Be not afraid of the many problems which arise now almost daily in the world. These events are transient and soon men will come to understand that they have before them a future bathed in light. So will it be.
Share International, November 2007 (Received at the end of an interview with Benjamin Creme in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.)
*Maitreya refers to His own hand-print
Questions & answers about the Hand of Maitreya
This selection of quotations is 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.
The old, outworn structures are losing their stability and coherence, thus clearing the ground for the construction of the new-age forms. (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Prelude to change’)
BC: There is a difference between ‘commerce’, for example, trading, and the effect of commercialization. Trading is a legitimate way of exchanging goods and, as you say, has been carried out for untold ages. Commercialization is a situation in which making money (profit) enters every possible field of human activity. Even the provision of healthcare and education becomes subject to this gross materialism. Today, commercialization knows no bounds and cannot be contained. Every service is considered as a commodity, which can be bought and sold, at will. This degrading practice is at the heart of our problems today. (Benjamin Creme, Unity in Diversity)
Annie Besant was a most remarkable woman and something of an enigma. A very detailed biography by Arthur Nethercot from the early 1960s is divided into two volumes: The First Five Lives, and The Last Four Lives.* It is true that her life can be divided into quite different phases: Christian, by upbringing and marriage; secularist; fighter for equality and women’s rights; socialist; teacher; theosophist and, as leader of the Indian National Congress, fighter for Indian independence. She was always a prolific writer and, as she put it, always a seeker after truth with a wish to help others.
The aim of the fairly short biography by Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière (MPB) is different: to show the continuities between these different phases of Besant’s life, using her own autobiographies (she wrote two), and with a useful exploration of the political, social and intellectual contexts. The result is a readable and illuminating book.
The Victorian era into which Annie Besant was born (in London in 1847) was constricting in its mores, especially for women. Girls were expected to marry and were legally subservient to their husbands. But, having unexpectedly been educated by an enlightened woman who believed in educating girls to the same standard as boys, she overcame these limitations, which were compounded by poverty as a child and young woman, and by a failed marriage. She kept going at a time that was rich with new ideas. The Church of England exercised much control in British society but there was a great deal of resistance against its dominance, and a ferment of different, sometimes opposing ideas — Darwinism, and the idea of evolution; the on-going throes of the industrial revolution with the growing power of the working classes; imperialism, along with resistance to it; a materialism, side by side with a great interest in parapsychology and spiritualism — altogether a mass of contradictions.
This book shows how Annie Besant was a part of these movements. From an early age she began to reject aspects of Christianity, particularly the divinity of Jesus. From this rejection of the doctrines she was brought up with, she moved first to a kind of theism — that God is all pervasive and cannot be located in one being. She began to study and write. She took on causes of women’s rights. She ‘preached’ a secular doctrine. After a while she joined the National Secular Society — always writing and teaching. With a great interest in the emerging science of the time, she was always seeking more, and for something that transcended the material. Her eventual espousal of Theosophy satisfied that wish and brought together her interest in science and the transcendental, and ancient and up-to-date thought. Each phase of her life saw Besant take on influential, leadership roles. She was elected head of the Theosophical Society in 1907, a role which she retained until her death in 1933, and for many years was head of the Indian National Congress. …
This book is a fascinating account of the whole sweep of Anne Besant’s life and achievements. It admirably fulfils its aims of showing the coherence and consistency in the extraordinarily varied and rich life of this remarkable woman, who committed her life to truth and to service.
* Arthur H. Nethercot: The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, Rupert Hart-Davies, London, 1960; The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant, Rupert Hart-Davies, London, 1963.
Annie Besant 1847-1933 — Struggles and Quest, by Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière, published by Theosophical Publishing House, London, 2017.
Photographer Camille Seaman was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York, where she studied photography. Since then Seaman has become an award-winning photographer whose work is part of the permanent collection of the National Academy of Sciences Museum in Washington, DC. She has spent decades traveling to the North and South Poles, where she takes portraits of icebergs and documents the dramatic environmental changes occurring there.
“Camille Seaman strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature,” according to her website, camilleseaman.com. Ariane Eroy interviewed her for Share International.
Share International: You have stated, “I was taught from a very young age that we are connected to everything and that everything has a Life Force.” Tell us more about this.
Camille Seaman: My grandfather took it very seriously that all of his grandchildren should understand what it meant to be a true human being. For him that meant knowing that we are interrelated and interconnected with everyone and with everything — not just people. So he had these ways of teaching where he would not just tell us, but show us, because he understood that the difference between believing something and knowing something was actual experience. That physical interaction with something is how you know.
The thing that still stands out to me was him taking me into the woods, and we would stop at each tree. He would literally introduce me to each tree, have me put my hands on it, saying, “This is your relative in the same way that I am your relative and you must respect it.” I see the faces and personalities of trees as individuals. …
I will touch upon stillness because that is a huge part of my work, and it was another one of my grandfather’s teachings. From about the age of 5 until 13, every day, whether it was cold, sunny, raining, snowing — it didn’t matter — I was made to sit outside and be still, for one hour. And I had a favorite spot: I would sit on top this table that we had under a big maple tree. After the hour, my grandfather would call me in and say, “What did you see?” If I was feeling stubborn, I would say. “I didn’t see anything.” And he would say, “Go back outside.”
What I learned in this experience is that when you are still, that border — that otherness, that separateness — between you and nature dissolves. I just want to articulate that that border is built by us. Nature does not recognize that border. We do. But when you are still, that border dissolves. And suddenly you have the most incredible experiences, like a bird will come and land on you, or a butterfly. Or you will notice things that seem somehow magic. “How did that happen?” But it only happened because you were still and nature says, “Ah! You’re back! Welcome back.” And they send this Welcome Committee to say, “We see you!” Whether that is a phenomenon that is happening with the clouds, or an animal, or a spider, even, these magical moments happen when you are still, because then you are not just present, you are interconnected again. …
May 2021
Full contents of the printed edition
- The Master —, through Benjamin Creme: The Christ as Teacher
- Vandana Shiva: Reclaiming our common home — expand the commons to include everything we need
- Kenny Stancil: “We have to act”: Atmospheric CO2 passes 420 PPM for first time ever
- Neena Bhandari: Why rehabilitation is as vital as rescue for child trafficking survivors
- Phyllis Creme: Annie Besant (1847-1933) Struggles and Quest, by Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière (book recommendation)
- Another youth environmental leader makes her voice heard: meet thirteen-year-old Ridhima Pandey
- The hand of Maitreya — a source of help and healing
- Signs of the time: Signs in the skies
- Ariane Eroy: On the grandeur of icebergs and the stillness of human beings — Interview with Camille Seaman
- Aart Jurriaanse: Economics and finance
- A spiritual perspective on economics — a compilation
- Edwina Hughes, Richard Waite and Gerard Pozzi: Climate-friendly food is easier than we think
- Jon Queally: Tens of thousands march in France to demand much stronger climate law
- Letters to the editor
- Benjamin Creme: Questions and answers
