A WORLDCENTRIC MESSIAH

I will tell you, Sariputta;
Listen to my speech.
In this auspicious aeon
Three leaders there have been:
Kakusandha, Konagamana,
and the leader Kassapa too.
I am now the perfect Buddha;
and there will be Maitreya too
before this same auspicious aeon
runs to the end of its years.



Amidst the strong passions, revelations, and inspirations of world teachers and coming saviors, Buddhism has registered a little lower on the overall messianic Richter scale. Perhaps it is because the tradition seems to clearly put the arrival date of the future Buddha, Maitreya, far in the future. Or perhaps it is because the ecstatic revelatory passion that might lead individuals to declare their own messianic potential tends to be discouraged in this more sober-minded religion. Whatever the case, one has to search hard to find in Buddhism the same intensity of expectation that has caused so many around the world to see their own religious impulses through messianic and apocalyptic eyes. However, when it comes to the name "Maitreya," it's a different story altogether. Indeed, somewhere along the line, the name Maitreya slipped away from the Buddhist fold, hopped a train to the West, and went off cavorting with all kinds of rogue messianic movements, most notably Theosophy and the New Age.

"I've been using Maitreya as the name for the World Teacher," says Wayne Peterson, a former diplomat with the U.S. State Department. "It's a name, of course, that has been known to Buddhists simply because they always knew that in the future, one would come who would be called Maitreya Buddha." Peterson is one of the most vocal supporters of what we might call the Maitreya conspiracy—the idea, originally put forward by author Benjamin Creme, that the coming World Teacher, the fulfillment of every religious tradition's highest hope for humanity's future, is now working behind the scenes from a base in London. Slowly seeding the world consciousness with his ideas and quietly contacting important political, economic, and religious leaders, he is methodically preparing us all for an eventual public coming-out party the likes of which this world has never seen. "I certainly believe that Maitreya is the Kalki Avatar, now that we're at the end of the Kali Yuga period," Peterson explains. "Many people also call Maitreya the Christ, but it would be best for people to see Maitreya as really a universal figure or a world teacher who is not here for any specific religion or spiritual movement but who will show all humanity another way to live."

This world teacher, this Maitreya, as Benjamin Creme and Wayne Peterson understand him, may have the unique distinction of being the first truly global messiah in history. Or perhaps, we should more accurately say, the descendant of the first global messiah in history. The first, arguably, was born in the late nineteenth century in the esoteric doctrines and astral planes of the Theosophical Society. In those days, the renowned social activist Annie Besant was president of this fledgling but quite popular religious movement founded by Russian prophetess Madame Blavatsky, and she felt strongly that the world was poised for the coming of a new kind of savior—a world teacher who would ignite a global religious revival, a universal messiah who would bring a universal teaching for humanity. Besant, along with her colleague Charles Leadbeater, began a search for a "vehicle" who could bring this new and improved cross-cultural, interfaith messianic figure they named Maitreya into the world. Their search culminated on the west coast of India in 1909, when Leadbeater noticed a young boy playing on the beach who, as he would later put it to friends, had an extraordinary aura around him that contained no selfishness. The boy was J. Krishnamurti and the rest is modern history. Krishnamurti, under the initial guidance of Besant and Leadbeater, grew to become one of the greatest spiritual teachers of the twentieth century—but not in the way that his mentors had foreseen. Indeed, at the age of thirty, Krishnamurti rejected, once and for all, the messianic mission appointed to him, leaving the door open for others to pick up the pieces of the dream of Maitreya and carry it forward. Benjamin Creme, inspired by the esoteric doctrines of Theosophy, did just that, suddenly proclaiming in 1982 that the new Christ had reappeared in the world and was living not in the high Himalayas or in the Old City of Jerusalem but rather incognito amidst the Asian community of London.


THE HIERARCHY OF MASTERS

"And round about the throne were four and twenty seats:
and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders
sitting, clothed in white raiment;
and they had on their heads crowns of gold."



Maitreya is his personal name. As mine is Benjamin, his is Maitreya." When you speak to Benjamin Creme, you have to get used to talking about the coming World Teacher, the prophesied Messiah, as if you were speaking about John Q. Public who lives down the street. It is one of the many likable qualities of Mr. Creme, a longtime student of the work and philosophy of Alice Bailey. If Bailey and Besant were theosophical prophets heralding the coming of Maitreya into this world, then Creme sees himself as a sort of John the Baptist, enthusiastically announcing the imminent appearance of the World Teacher, wherever and whenever he is able to.

"Maitreya is the head and leader of the group of advanced men we call the spiritual hierarchy of our planet, or the esoteric group of masters of wisdom who oversee affairs on earth. For thousands of years," Creme explains, "these masters have lived, for the most part, in the mountain and desert areas of the world—in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies, the Cascades, the Urals, the Gobi Desert." In 1945, at the end of the war, Maitreya announced his intention to return to the world, and this time not alone but with a group of these masters.

The flesh-and-blood masters originally spoken of in Theosophical circles have, in the hands of modern interpreters, sort of morphed into what are often called ascended masters, with a great number of psychics, channelers, and all sorts of unusual folk claiming to be mediums for their messages to the world. If all of this sounds as if we took a left turn into some New Age alternate reality a few paragraphs back, it's good to remember that traditional religions are also filled with just these sorts of myths—the Communion of Saints, the Great White Brotherhood, the Hierarchy of Angels—and that Bailey, Besant, and Blavatsky were speaking about these masters long before channels, walk-ins, crystals, and Shirley MacLaine were even a thought in the Aquarian mind.

Despite these strange trappings and his unconventional entourage, if you're looking for a world teacher with global reach and a comprehensive vision, few can compare to Creme's as yet unseen world savior. No ivory tower ascetic saint is this messiah, we are told. Deeply concerned about the state of the world, politically and economically astute, extraordinarily well-versed in esoteric philosophy, and of course, spiritually without peer—this is a messiah envisioned with an eye toward modernity. His global outlook also underscores a crucial point—the sheer potential for his message to be heard in today's interconnected world. This is not lost on the publicity-savvy Creme, who has envisioned quite a scenario for Maitreya's coming-out party. He calls it the "day of declaration." "The day of declaration will be unlike any that the world has ever seen," Creme explains, "because he will come by demand and appear on the television networks of the world. And we will all know when to tune in, in the different countries, and we will all see his face simultaneously on the television. And this time, he will announce that he is Maitreya. But he won't actually speak. He will come into telepathic rapport with the whole of humanity simultaneously. Each of us will hear his words in our own language, whatever that happens to be. And this is a repetition on a world scale of the true happenings of Pentecost, two thousand years ago, and also a pre-vision of the future ability of humanity to speak telepathically at will over any distance."

If Maitreya sees telepathy as part of our twenty-first-century future, then what about spirituality? What would the alleged incarnation of the Messiah, the Buddha, the Christ, the Kalki, and the Mahdi have to say about spirituality in the twenty-first century? Speaking to me last winter, Creme paused for a moment and posed the question to Maitreya . . . telepathically. "What today is possible for the gurus, the yogis, those who sit in contemplation up in the mountains, abstracted from life—this awareness that they are seeking will become possible for everybody." Creme's voice sounded roughly the same, apparently just passing along Maitreya's thoughts on the matter. "Everyone will grow more and more into the expression of the faculties of divinity. And this will lead to a complete transformation of our lives. Life will deepen. War will become a thing of the past. And the key to it all is the simple understanding that we are brothers and sisters of one humanity. This means that the resources of the world, the food, the energy, the science, must be redistributed more equitably. And when we begin to do that, we create the right circumstances for the demonstration of the divinity in each and every one of us."