|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Into The Mystic:
Dear Steve: How exciting that you're going to the
Ramtha conference. I read the book Ramtha such a long time ago. It was very
good and had concepts that at the time seemed hard to conceive, and now seem
so easy to conceive. Time has a way of doing that,
doesn't it? - e-mail letter from a friend on the
East Coast The headlines in the daily papers were
amazing: "Ramtha Seer Isn't Fraud, Scholars Say," (The Olympian), " 'JZ Knight Not Faking It,' Say Scholars,"
(Seattle Post-Intelligencer). After years of cynical treatment, sarcasm,
and outright attack by the media on both longtime channeler JZ Knight, and
Ramtha, the 35,000-year old ascended warrior and spiritual teacher who speaks
through her, what had happened? In a word, "what happened" was a
conference, but it wasn't just any gathering of scholars. This was the
two-day "In Search of the Self" Conference held February 8-9, at JZ
Knight's beautiful French chateau-style spread on the outskirts of the
village of Yelm, WA, about an hour-and-a-half south of Seattle. Sixteen
professors (including the moderators) - from such respected institutions as
the University of Oregon, Colgate, Chicago Theological Seminary, the
California Institute of Integral Studies, University of London, Saybrook
Institute (San Francisco), and the University of South Florida, among others
- presented their findings after a year-long study of Knight, and of Ramtha's
teachings. While it's their collective, learned opinion that Knight is not
faking it, that she's not having multiple personality disorder, and that
psychological and biofeedback tests demonstrated dramatic changes when Knight
was hooked up to scientific instrumentation, the scholars still can't
definitively conclude what to make of it all. "We know something's going
on here," one of the scholars tells me during a coffee break, "we
just can't say, at this point, specifically what it is." For those of you who may not know, Ramtha
is, in the words of JZ Knight, who has been channeling this entity, an
"enigma" - or, more familiarly, the Enlightened One. Ramtha is
ostensibly the spirit of an Atlantean warrior king who lived over thirty five
thousand years ago, and who ascended into his own godlike consciousness. He
has been the subject of many books, magazine articles, and television
programs since first appearing to Knight in her Tacoma kitchen in the late
70s as a shimmering, seven-foot-tall presence. ("At the time,"
Knight told me in an interview, "not only didn't I know who Edgar Cayce
was, I didn't even know what the word metaphysical meant.") Ramtha's School of Enlightenment (RSE) in
Yelm, Washington was formed in the early 80s, and has continued to expand,
both in the breadth of the teachings and in the numbers of students who make
the trek twice a year for the programs. At present, there are over three
thousand students, called "masters" by Ramtha, from 23 countries
worldwide. Unlike many other channeled entities who merely philosophize,
Ramtha provides his students with very specific practices, including one called
"Consciousness & Energy" (or C&E), a breathing technique
for increasing the student's capabilities in such realms as co-creation,
psychic healing, remote viewing, and personal unfoldment. I've also heard of
various medical miracles, involving Ramtha students and distance healing,
that have been occurring as a result of some of this training. (They also
have an excellent website at www.ramtha.com). From my perspective, as a
freelance New Age writer (and not a Ramtha student), the conference in Yelm,
some thirty minutes east of Olympia, is a watershed event in the 25 years
since the New Age burst on the American cultural and spiritual landscape. How
ironic, I think to myself while waiting in the splendid indoor pool room of
the mansion for the conference to start, that the first serious studies of
New Age spiritual phenomena by university-disciplined examiners should be
focused on the 35,000-year old Ramtha. Here, probably, is one of the furthest
out of the channeled entities who've broken such new ground since all this
wildness we call the New Age began unfolding. In fact, the very use of the
word "channeling" appears to have first been coined by Knight to
describe her full-body trance work back in the early 80s. This unique
conference was organized by J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., director
of the Institute for the Study of American Religions in Santa Barbara; Joseph
Bettis, Ph.D., a Buddhist by choice, and former chair of the department of
Religious Studies at Western Washington University; and Brett Alt, a staff
member at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Melton, a Christian minister in
his early fifties, has for the past thirty years been studying the emergence
of new religious movements. He's a freethinker with encyclopedic knowledge,
and an acknowledged champion for the freedom of individuals to worship as
they will. Over the past thirty years, Melton's become an authority on the
New Age, both in the U.S. and overseas, from angels to UFO-based religions
and everything in between. (The weekend I was in Yelm, someone handed me a
copy of the international edition of Time magazine, which had a story about
Melton's testifying on behalf of new religious movements in Germany and
France.) Three years ago, he began to research Ramtha for a new book, Finding
Enlightenment: Ramtha's Modern School of Ancient Wisdom, which will be
published later this year by Beyond Words Publishing of Portland. "The
real idea for the conference of scholars came out of my studies of
Ramtha," Melton tells me, before the meeting gets underway. "I
realized that this was something more than New Age pablum, that Ramtha was
offering a very sophisticated spiritual perspective that had great depth to
it, whether you agreed with the teachings or not. I had to admit that this
wasn't just another regurgitation of New Age ideas." Currently, Melton, Bettis, and Kai
McKenzie, an editor from Friday Harbor, WA, are preparing a book from the
conference based on the papers presented by the scholars. Up at the long
dais, I see some heavyweights in their particular fields. There's Robert
Moore, Ph.D., a Jungian analyst, Chicago Theological Seminary professor, and
author of numerous books on psychology. He's done an analysis of JZ Knight,
and will report that her channeling is "not a part of her own mind, not
multiple personality disorder, but perhaps coming from the superconscious
mind." There's Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., a psychologist and inarguably
this country's leading parapsychology researcher, who, along with biofeedback
expert Ian Wickramasekera, Ph.D., has run a variety of psychological and
biofeedback tests on Knight, both in her waking state and then while in
trance. There's Basil Hiley, Ph.D., a physicist from the University of London
and a longtime collaborator of David Bohm's, and Amit Goswami, Ph.D.,
professor of quantum physics at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the
Univ. of Oregon, both leading lights in the field of quantum physics. There's
John Simmons, Ph.D., from the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
at Western Illinois University, whose focus at the conference is religious
ethics and the Ramtha School. There's Gail Harley, Ph.D., religious scholar
from the University of South Florida, who will read her paper comparing
Knight and her Gnostic school to other radical women spiritual leaders of
earlier times, such as Mary Baker Eddy and H.P. Blavatsky. There's Charles
LeWarne, Ph.D., a historian and currently chairperson of the State of
Washington's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, speaking on the
sometimes controversial effect of the newcomers on the town, and how they've
achieved acceptance in the larger community. There's Constance Jones, Ph.D.,
a Fulbright scholar and sociologist, professor of religious studies at San
Francisco's California Institute of Integral Studies, who's applied her
sociology training to a study of the RSE students. Finally, there's Joscelyn
Godwin, Ph.D., of Colgate University, a specialist on music, philosophy and
alchemy, who reports on Ramtha and prophecy. Whew! A mouthful of Ph.D.'s, but
just imagine: ten scholars from prestigious universities, all coming together
to study Ramtha! I'm struck by the fact that these professors are putting
their academic reputations on the line just by being part of this New Age
conference. And yet here they are, boldly going where no academician has gone
before, into uncharted waters, "into the mystic," to quote the
great Van Morrison. The audience is composed of some eighty invited guests
from all walks of life and levels of consciousness. Sitting next to me is
Elmer Cranton, M.D., in his early sixties, a Harvard graduate, former U.S.
Navy doctor, and chelation therapy specialist, very establishment in a
three-piece suit, and himself a longtime Ramtha student. Just behind me is an
older woman with a kindly face whose nametag identifies her as a Yelm City
Council member. A couple of rows behind her is Linda
Evans, the actress, who's been a Ramtha student and supporter for many years.
Way in the back, there's a video crew with three cameras whirring, capturing
it all for posterity. It's funny, but I suddenly get the feeling of time
travel. First I go backward to the 1920s, to other earlier conclaves of
spiritual radicals whose teachings were originally ridiculed but later
accepted. Then I go forward, to a time in the future when these spiritual
sciences will be in common use, accepted, even taken for granted. There's no
question in my mind, from both the conference and its educated presenters,
and from in-depth interviews with longtime Ramtha students, that something
very amazing is happening at this esoteric school in Yelm. It's something
very new, yet very ancient at the same time, the real results of which
probably won't be known for another decade or two. The big news, at least on one media-driven
level, is that both the psychological and biofeedback testing of Knight and
Ramtha, done by Drs. Krippner and Brett Alt, a staff member at the Ramtha
School of Enlightenment., showed some interesting anomalies. The scientists
first ran their tests while Knight, hooked up to the machines, was in her
waking state, then later when she went into trance with Ramtha speaking
through her. Dr. Wickramasekera is the president-elect of the Association for
Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, and one of the leading experts in
the field. He said that Knight in her "normal waking state had a heart
rate of between 85-90 beats per minute (bpm), but when she went into trance
and Ramtha came through, her heart rate fluctuated between a high of 160 bpm
to a low of 40 bpm in rapid succession. The high reading of 160 bpm might
have been indicative of someone who was jogging, or
in the throes of sexual orgasm, or physical exertion - but JZ was sitting in
a chair, not moving; yet during the channeling, her readings were fluctuating
wildly." "If JZ Knight was deliberately
playing a role, or deliberately acting, I don't think she would have gotten
the test scores that she did," Krippner tells me later, regarding the
psychological tests he performed. "If she weren't genuine, she would
have tried to alter or skew the test scores to make herself
look good. JZ's responses, in my estimation, hung together very coherently,
and, as far as we can tell, they seem to be authentic responses."
Like the other scholars, Krippner, who has
studied psychic phenomena in the Soviet Union, Brazil, and numerous other
countries, couldn't say exactly what or who Ramtha is. Maybe it's that the
instrumentation hasn't been invented just yet that can quantitatively measure
spirit - other than the human mind, that is. But someday, perhaps - who
knows? (A twelve-year-old girl at a laptop in Indonesia is probably working
on it right now.) That's a subject for further studies, but Krippner's
conclusion about JZ Knight's work, and that of the Ramtha School of
Enlightenment, sums it up best. He says, "The reason that JZ Knight is
unique in any setting is not simply that she channels Ramtha, but that the
information that Ramtha is giving is transformative and helpful for so many
people that come here in fairly large numbers." While the scholars had interesting and
informative things to say, it is Knight herself, during her closing remarks
at the end of the second day, who moves many in the audience to tears, myself included. She tells the story of her childhood,
growing up in a poor family in the tiny town of Artesia, New Mexico, with a
stepfather who refused to speak to her. She tells of a young girl who
believed in God but couldn't God in her family's Pentecostal church. She
speaks of a young woman who grew up searching for love and found it more than
once. She talks of growing up to be a mother, a businesswoman, and, suddenly
to her surprise, the medium for a powerful spiritual entity, and subsequently
the leader of a new religious movement in a small town which had never seen
anything like it (and didn't want to, either). She discusses overcoming the
emotional ravages of spousal betrayal and of withstanding the bitter slings
and arrows from those in the media, as well as from other practitioners in
the New Age movement itself: the detractors, the doubters, and the accusers.
She's endured one thing after another, and still she survived, still she
overcame. I get a deepening sense of the strength and courage of this woman,
through the many rivers she's crossed. A few days after the conference ended,
I asked JZ Knight what kept her going through it all, to reach this positive
turning point in the history of her work and her school. She didn't have to
think about it: "It was the Ram," she says, "I've always known
he was for real." The Olympian referenced is from
February 9, 1997. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer referenced is from February
10, 1997. |
