MAITREYA THE ALLEGED CHRIST

Many people have taken an interest in the work of a Scottish so-called artist named Benjamin Creme who promotes the idea that a so-called World Teacher or Messiah named Maitreya the Christ has manifested himself on Earth and is currently living in London as a member of the Pakistani community.
For over 20 years Creme has been saying that any minute now, this alleged Maitreya the Christ is going to go on worldwide television, speak to every man and woman on Earth telepathically in their own language, and reveal himself to be the World Teacher who will lead humanity to a new era of peace and harmony.
Some people accept this declaration from Mr. Creme and eagerly await the long, long, long, long delayed emergence of this Maitreya. (Creme has been saying he is going to emerge into public prominence any minute now since 1982. In the fairy tale, the boy only had to cry wolf 3 times before the people stopped giving him any credibility.) Christians seem to generally believe that this Maitreya fellow is the antichrist & the pure personification of absolute deception and evil, and I believe there are quite a number of Christian websites you can visit if you want to acquaint
yourself with their point of view. As a person who is neither a Christian nor a Creme devotee, I want to put my point of view out here for the world to see!
I first heard of this matter in early 1982 when I read an advertisement for Benjamin Creme's book THE REAPPEARANCE OF THE CHRIST AND THE MASTERS OF WISDOM in a magazine. It sounded interesting so I sent for it and read it. At first, I found it all very convincing and very impressive. So much so that I did quite a bit of work to promote the Creme message. Howsoever, I never did commit myself 100% to believing in it since I had learned that it is silly and stupid to ever say you believe anything that you have not absolutely seen for yourself is true. Only fools believe anything. You either know and say so, or you don't know and say so, and if you don't know, you can give things a probability rating based on the strength of the evidence. I thought Creme's message had a pretty good probability rating- maybe about 70%, I was pretty impressed with it- but I never did fully commit myself to "believing in it" like some sort of idiotic fanatic. But I did do a lot of work to promote it, so much so that my work caught the attention of the Tara Center in North Hollywood, the American HQ for promoting the Creme-Maitreya business. They actually asked me to write a book explaining the whole thing for popular promotion- they liked my writing style, they said I had a good manner of "stepping down" high-level spiritual concepts into plain language that Joe Sixpack and Sally Floozie could understand. So I wrote the book and gave them my manuscript and they declined to publish it because my text was full of words like "reportedly" and "allegedly" because, as I said, I don't believe in nothing that I ain't seen is true with my own eyes! They wanted a book whose writer was totally convinced that Creme's story was the gospel truth. So, I lost my golden opportunity to become a famous new age author! But I was still quite impressed with Creme's message and continued to promote it. But as time went by, more and more doubts began to creep into my mind about it. For instance, Creme said in 1982 that Maitreya was about to do his Day of Declaration business any minute now, emerge into public prominence and become known as the World Teacher. Well, of course, Maitreya didn't do it in 1982. And Creme had an excellent and very convincing reason why not. And of course, Maitreya didn't do it in '83, nor in '84, nor in '85, nor in '86, and on and on and on and to this day Maitreya has still not done it, although Benjamin Creme has been saying over and over and over and over that it's going to happen any minute now, and he has always had extremely good and convincing reasons why it hasn't happened yet. So how many times does the boy have to cry wolf before the people stop paying any attention to him? Benjamin Creme has a good thing going, lots of people still are interested in what he says, and I suppose there are enough donkeys in the world that he can keep the thing going for the rest of his life, and maybe after that somebody else will pick up the ball and keep running with it & 200 years from now people will still be listening to Creme Number 7 who is still saying that Maitreya the World Teacher is about to do his Day of Declaration any minute now!
Another reason I began having some doubts about the whole thing is that, one time when I arranged a meeting to play Creme's tape for all comers to hear, a man from Alaska came to hear it. After it was done he disgustedly said Maitreya's program for world salvation was nothing but Fabian Socialism. Well, I had come to have a lot of respect for people from Alaska. It seemed like whenever I ran into anyone from Alaska, they impressed me as really fine folks, tough, intelligent, decent, free-spirited, probably the last people in America who still had something of the original spirit and virtues by which the colonists won independence and set up a country that for a time was the best thing going in the world, I think Emerson called America in the early 1800s, "God's last attempt to save humanity" or something like that. Anyway, 200 years later the folks in the lower 48 and Hawaii appeared to me to have become totally corrupted and degenerated by the soft easy life but the folks from Alaska seemed to still have something of the Soul of America in them. So I had considerable respect for this Alaskan fellow's opinion of the Creme thing.
Then, there was the matter of "Share International" magazine, which I subscribed to for a while. It seemed to me that the whole message of this magazine was that I should feel horribly guilty for being an American with any wealth at all, and I should strip myself naked and give away everything I had to try to help the poor starving Third Worlders. Well, I wasn't exactly starving but I sure wasn't filthy rich either. I was a small business man working 12 to 14 hours a day seven days a week for an income somewhere around the official poverty level getting harassment and oppression from the government at every twist and turn and I didn't exactly feel I owed it to anyone to just give away everything I had that I had worked pretty darn hard to earn, to them. Yes, no doubt plenty of Third Worlders had it pretty rough, but that wasn't my fault, I was working my butt off for a fairly meager existence here in America, honestly earning what little I had, and didn't feel obligated to give everything I had to the Third Worlders. Yes I certainly would like to see the Third Worlders better off, but that would have to come from a change in macro-economic policies beyond my immediate ability to influence or control. I was trying to do what I could to understand economics and how the system could be better made to run for everyone's benefit, and share what I learned about the subject with others, and not vote for Democrats and Republicans whose policies were engineered to benefit only the super-rich, and I felt that was about what I could do for the Third Worlders, but "Share International" wanted me to empty the pockets of my tattered jeans and take the shirt from the Salvation Army Thrift Store off my back to give to them, and I felt like that was just asking a little too much self-sacrifice.
Then there was the matter of Benjamin Creme's art. He was an artist, that was how he made his living, and so since he was supposed to be the world's foremost divine spokesman I was interested to see what his paintings were like. I was very disappointed when I saw them. He did some cubistic figure paintings that were like poor imitations of Picasso. And he did some rather chaotic and nondescript and unremarkable abstracts. Nothing that I'd say had much of the divine spirit in it. If you want to see some artists who I think really show the divine spirit in their work, look at Thomas Hart Benton, look at Emily Carr, look at Michaelangelo, look at Delacroix and his friend Gericault, compare them to Benjamin Creme and let me know what you think. I mean that; if you'll do that I really would like to know what you think. Art is important to me.
And the philosophy of Maitreya's alleged plan for world salvation didn't sit too well with me. Like the Alaskan fellow said, it was Fabian socialism. For instance according to Maitreya, allegedly, we're supposed to have the right to food, education, housing and health care. These are called Positive Rights according to the political philosophizers. Well, I didn't like that at all. I liked the idea of the Founding Fathers the the USA that we're supposed to have God-given rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to have whatever weapons we feel we need to have for adequate self-defense, freedom from harassment by the government or confiscation of our property unless they have good evidence that we've committed a serious crime, and freedom to work for an honest living at the trade of our choice. The political philosophizers call those Negative Rights, i.e. the right to not have your life interfered with by the government unless they have good reason to believe you've committed a serious crime. The Positive Rights by contrast are things that some people think the government ought to give you on a silver platter by right of birth. I wanted the Negative Rights but not the Positive Rights. Food, education, a house, health care, etc. are things I would want to have the right to work for and earn, and I would want the government to maintain a reasonably good economy so it wouldn't be overly difficult or impossible for me to earn those things, but I certainly don't agree that I or anyone else should have the right to have the government just give us those things without our having earned them. I think Nature gives us the right example.
Nature does not give us a house, but gives us materials that we can use to build a house. Nature does not set us a table in the wilderness with a nice lunch on it but Nature gives us the opportunity and right to hunt, fish, farm etc. and earn our food.
But the final straw came when I heard Benjamin Creme interviewed on a radio program one day. He was asked a question about crime in America. He answered that the reason there is so much crime in America is that the gun lobby will not let the government confiscate everyone's guns. That did it, of course anyone who knows anything at all about the real world knows that crime goes up when there is strict gun control and crime goes down when the average person is allowed and encouraged to have guns and the reason is very simple, 99.8% of gun owners are not the slightest bit criminally inclined and would only use their guns to prevent crimes, not commit them. So they can keep the criminals in check pretty handily if they do have guns.
Whereas when there is strict gun control the criminal types get guns on the black market or use other weapons, they know their victims will have a very hard time defending themselves and so crime goes up. That is how the real world works and evidently Benjamin Creme didn't know that or has some other reason why he wants the people defenseless. Anyway after I heard that I no
longer gave Creme the benefit of the doubt and entertained any notions that he was promoting something good.
Maybe Maitreya is the antichrist as the Christians say. Most likely, I'd say, he doesn't exist. Look to the divine spirit in you as your savior, not some alleged Messiah. That's my opinion on Maitreya the Alleged Christ.