Monte Leach: Many people believe that it’s too late to restore the environment, that there’s little hope for a sustainable, healthy future. Do you subscribe to that view, or do you think there’s still time to turn it around?
Benjamin Creme: I think there is still time. It is not just my opinion because that would be no better than anyone else’s. But it is certainly the view of Maitreya that there is time to turn this dangerous situation around.

Following a crash programme of aid for the starving millions of the world and the implementation of the principle of sharing, will be the saving, protection, and healing of the environment. This involves everybody; we all use the environment.

Maitreya says there are two environments, an inner and an outer. The outer reflects the inner. If the inner is disturbed, the outer also is disturbed. We are witnessing this today. Because we are so disturbed in our inner environment, not recognizing ourselves as spiritual beings related to each other, we rape, pillage and despoil. We inflict our greed and aggression on each other in wars and all sorts of aggressive actions and reap the results: a gradual erosion of the very environment which keeps us in being as a species. If we do not address this problem, the human and sub-human kingdoms of this planet will die out.

Many ecologists recognize this fact. The “Green” agencies have been talking about this for years, trying to impress on governments the need for change. But at the Earth Summit in Brazil in June 1992, some major nations, most notably the United States, refused to sign the very resolutions which would address these urgent problems. The atmosphere is heating up, the air, the rivers and seas of the world are becoming so polluted that we are poisoning ourselves all the time. It is simply the extraordinary resilience of the human body, mind, and spirit that has prevented our destruction before this time.

ML: How do we turn the situation around? I fear that if we wait until we make the internal changes that you were talking about, it could be too late.
BC: Left to ourselves that might well be so. Luckily, we are not left to ourselves. Maitreya, the World Teacher, is in the world, living in London since 1977. There is a large group of Masters, his disciples, also in the world. They are ready to come forward to show us the steps we must take to stabilize the world. The resources of the world must be shared, used to the utmost of their good for humanity as a whole, instead of, as now, being misused by the few. When we in the developed world accept and implement the principle of sharing, we will find that we are happier and richer living a simpler lifestyle. We have to learn to live more simply so that all people can live.

ML: Is that the key, in your view, to cleaning up the environment?
BC: Yes, it is a problem of the developed world usurping and wasting the resources and destroying the environment.

ML: Some people would also argue that a major problem is in the developing world where there’s so much poverty that people use and abuse resources just to survive.
BC: It is a Catch-22 situation for them.

ML: It is. How do we change that?
BC: We create the conditions which force the people of the developing world to cut down their rain forests to earn the currency to buy food and other resources from us. The entire system needs to be reorganized.

As I understand it, the principle of sharing will work out something like this: a new United Nations agency will be established; all the nations will be asked to make an inventory of what they have and what they need, what they produce and what they have to import. From this, the world’s ‘cake’ will be known. Each nation will be asked to make over, in trust for the world as a whole, that which it has in excess of its needs. Out of that common pool of excess, the needs of all will be met.

A very sophisticated form of barter will replace the present economic system. That will relieve the people of the Third World from destroying the very resources which the entire world needs just to live. We do not need forests just to make chopsticks. We need forests for the interchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen, so that we can continue to exist along with the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

We have to realize our interdependence. That is the key. We are one group, one humanity, and have to work together for the benefit of all. Until now, that has been impossible for us even to recognize, let alone accept. But with Maitreya guiding us, and showing us the alternative self-destruction we will be galvanized to take the needed steps. The governments of the world will sign the necessary resolutions. The plans which today are only blueprints will be implemented because we have no alternative. If we would continue as a species, we must address these problems. Since we must, we will.

Technology of Light

ML: Although we in the developed world may choose to live a simpler lifestyle, we still need energy sources. We need clean water, clean air. The environment is so polluted now; we have the greenhouse effect and other major problems. How can we come to terms with this situation?
BC: The Masters of our Spiritual Hierarchy, who are coming into the world with Maitreya, have the technology to neutralize the greenhouse effect, the pollution of the atmosphere, even the effects of nuclear radiation. We have to wind down the fission process of creating energy. What I am not advocating, or even suggesting, is returning to the old days humanity living in pastoral conditions, and so on. We will still have a prosperous, well-balanced, modern lifestyle, with all the technology which we are capable of inventing. We shall be given the blueprints of technology which at the moment we cannot even begin to imagine. It would boggle the mind of the most advanced scientist.

ML: But we’re not going to be waiting for Maitreya and the Masters to give us the technology to make these changes. We can’t just sit back and say: “They’re going to give us the technology to clean up the planet, so we don’t have to do anything.”
BC: When we accept the principle of sharing, and when that process is actually working out in the world, we will be given the gift of new technologies. I do not mean that we will be given an instrument and shown how to use it. We will be given the secrets of how to create this technology. Then our advanced scientists will develop it.

There is a new technology — the cold fusion process — that is in the offing. I would say that in a very few years from now cold fusion will produce a rather large proportion of the earth’s energy needs. But after that there is another technology which Maitreya calls the Technology of Light which will provide unlimited energy for all our needs.

Factories will be run by robots. We think of robots which make cars in factories today as being very sophisticated, but compared with those of the future, these are the primitive beginnings of that technology. By thought alone we will create the machines which will make the artifacts of our daily living. This will allow man the time for the investigation of his own nature, for recreational and creative pursuits and so on. An entirely new and highly sophisticated technological world will be created, but only when we see ourselves as one humanity. If that technology were given now, we would destroy the world with it. We almost destroyed the world with nuclear weapons. Nuclear fission is the most dangerous way to tap the energy in the atom. That same energy streams to us from the sun. The Technology of Light will use energy direct from the sun. It will even be applied medically, and with our growing genetic experimentation will allow us to create new organs in the body as needed.

ML: Are there any indications in the world now that this technology of light might be in the offing?
BC: There is a town in what was the Soviet Union which has all its light and heat sources relayed direct from the sun through one of the satellites. The technology is still in its infancy but eventually it will make all war impossible. An army, even one man with a rifle, can be pinpointed on earth through this technology. A submarine thousands of feet under the sea can be rendered totally harmless. Even a terrorist in an aircraft with a bomb in his hand can be rendered completely harmless. It is a super-Star-Wars scenario, but taken to the ultimate degree, and directed for the good of all not under the control of any one government.

ML: I wouldn’t want to put that kind of technology in the hands of the US Pentagon or the Russian military establishment.
BC: I could not agree more. No one nation will be able to usurp the control of that technology. It will be in the hands of our Spiritual Hierarchy and various committees of the United Nations. It can only be administered through the United Nations. It is a global technology.

ML: I’m used to thinking in terms of solar energy, geothermal, wind power and other renewable sources.
BC: In the short term they will have their place. We could right now do away with all nuclear fission and have energy from wave power, solar energy and wind. As you say, all of these could supplement the present energy resources tremendously. We could, and should, shut down every nuclear establishment in the world today. They are deadly.

ML: Appropriate technology, then, will be a bridge toward the cold nuclear fusion process?
BC: Which will be a step towards the Technology of Light. That will transform all life on this planet. Having unlimited resources means that no one nation or group of nations, as for instance those who produce oil today, can dominate the international financial scene. If oil were superseded today, whole groups of nations as power mongers would fail.

ML: What you’re talking about is predicated on …
BC: … the acceptance of the principle of sharing. When we actually implement the principle of sharing, and create the conditions for justice, and therefore of peace, this technology can be freely given.

ML: Because they’ll see that humanity …
BC: … is one, sees itself as one.

ML: And mature enough to deal with it.
BC: Of course.

Underground nuclear testing

ML: Perhaps we can go on to another pressing issue — underground nuclear testing. You have said in Share International and elsewhere that nuclear testing has a devastating effect on the environment, and not only the local environment.
BC: It is impossible to have an underground nuclear test without creating an earthquake — not necessarily in the immediate vicinity but anywhere in the world. Of every 30 major earthquakes, some 21 or 22 follow a nuclear explosion. There are other reasons for earthquakes, but the vast majority are the result of underground nuclear testing. We need not test nuclear bombs. The scientists involved in nuclear testing are trying to maintain their jobs by producing refinements of the existing mechanisms of the various bombs. Just as in the commercial fields companies are producing more and more prettier-packaged goods to keep their products going, so the scientists are producing refinements of their technology simply to keep the technology going, and with it their jobs. Self-interest is causing these earthquakes.

ML: And that’s having a devastating effect.
BC: Yes. As I have said, you cannot produce an underground nuclear explosion without creating an earthquake. Also, you cannot produce an underground nuclear explosion without throwing into the atmosphere thousands of tons of dust saturated with nuclear radiation which eventually falls into the oceans, rivers, and reservoirs of the world. We are all taking in nuclear radiation every time we breathe and drink.

ML: It would be safe to say that most scientists wouldn’t or don’t see the connection between underground testing and earthquakes.
BC: They do not see the connection because they do not want to see it. But any intelligent person knows that there is a connection.

ML: Another connection that most people wouldn’t be aware of is the one between humanity’s actions, and even humanity’s thinking processes, and the world’s weather patterns. That might seem like science fiction to people.
BC: This is harder to explain, but perfectly true. We do have a direct effect on our environment. Very soon, under the tuition of Maitreya and the Masters around him, humanity will come to understand that what we call God, what we call nature, our environment, and what we call humanity are one. There is no separation between these. Everything, according to Maitreya, is interconnected. Every atom, every particle within every atom, is related to every other particle throughout cosmos. Therefore, what happens in one aspect of creation inevitably has an effect on another.

Humanity is part of its everyday environment; we call it nature. The destructive thoughtforms of humanity create the conditions of imbalance and tension in the world. The imbalance between the developed world and the Third World, the poverty and suffering which ensues from that imbalance and therefore the thoughtforms of pain, agony and of destruction, pour into the mindbelt of the world. They affect what are called the devic elementals whose work it is to control the weather patterns of the world.

ML: What are the devic elementals?
BC: They are elemental forces which control and organize the patterns of nature. They are energy forces and respond to human thought. When our thoughts are in equilibrium, they are in equilibrium. When our thoughts are destructive and chaotic, as today, the devas go out of equilibrium. This has resulted in the complete distortion of the world’s weather. For instance, we see floods, major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, torrential rain where they have never been known, lack of rain where it was normal; hurricanes. All of these phenomena have been with us since we can remember but in controlled patterns. All of that has gone. There is no set pattern in the world’s weather today.

When we come into equilibrium by creating the conditions of equilibrium living together in peace, sharing the resources of the world, creating, thereby, harmony in the world the devas will return to their preordained forms and patterns and create equilibrium once again. They respond directly to human thought.

ML: To sum up, our environmental problems are very serious, but they can be solved.
BC: They can, and will, be solved. Probably within the next 30 years, this planet will be saved.

ML: By our own actions.
BC: By our own actions, under the inspiration and guidance of the Masters. But we must accept the principle of sharing and the simpler lifestyle which that demands. We must set about restoring the health of the planet.

ML: But you’re not talking about giving up all our possessions and returning to the Stone Age hewers of wood and gatherers of water.
BC: On the contrary, the new civilization will be more fulfilling, richer, more splendid, creative and abundant than any before.