INTERVIEW WITH
MICEAL LEDWITH L. Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D
By Louise SaintOnge of MastersConnection, LLC
Transcribed by Bertha Rainen

This is Part 3 of a 4 Part Series
(Click Here for Part 1)

MC: I was intrigued with the comparisons and the similarities and differences between Jesus’ and Buddha's teachings that you talked about. One of the things you said is the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus, were both “world subverting”. Can you explain this and then go on to some similarities and differences?

MICEAL: Well, both the Buddha and Jesus had teachings that would have really changed the world if they had got out there in the form they were intended to have. To my mind there are of course vast differences between the Buddhist teachings and that of Jesus, -- that’s another day’s work -- but to my mind, even if the scrolls of Nicholas Notovitch had never been found, I would have had to ask myself today, “Was Jesus in India?” because when I look in the New Testament I find so many parallels to the teachings of Buddha. And that is something which you may very rarely find admitted to by any scholars of the New Testament, or that you will rarely, if ever at all, find admitted in a professional and scholarly Commentary on the New Testament either.

I myself have pinpointed, without any great time or effort devoted to this, more than a hundred places where the teachings of Jesus parallel that of the Buddha. That’s extraordinary. For example, all the major parables of the New Testament, are also found in the Buddha, but the Buddha lived 550 years before Jesus.

MC: Can you give a couple of examples?

MICEAL: Well, the parable of the Sower, the parable of the house built on sand, the parable of the treasure in the field, all the well known major parables of Jesus are also found in the Buddha. So does that mean that Jesus was a plagiarist? Absolutely not. Any more than the Buddha was a plagiarist. What it does mean is that both the Buddha and Jesus were part of a much higher wisdom and much more ancient tradition. Christian religions are not, (as they strenuously would like to maintain to this day), the revealers and bearers of a completely new teaching and knowledge that had never before been exposed. They are not. What they are, in fact, is a corruption of a much more ancient and rich wisdom that predates them by many, many centuries.

So the Buddha and Jesus are both conduits of that ancient wisdom that pre-dated them both. That is a better insight than just asking if they borrowed from one another. As far as I am concerned the greatest proof that Jesus was in India and Tibet and was taught there, is the similarities between his teaching and that of the Buddha, so close in fact that in many cases it would be almost impossible to maintain that they were expressed and couched in those forms without some close acquaintance of Jesus with the Buddhist teachings.

Even if the Notovitch scrolls had never been found, I would have put my money on that, that Jesus was in India. But, you see, the thing is, if you take up a major commentary on the New Testament, you know, huge, detailed books, which tell you every source where Jesus is referring to: to the prophet Isaiah, the prophet Jeremiah, and any parts of the Torah or the Pentateuch, did they ever mention the Buddha in any of those references? Not a mention. Not one mention, and yet the most blatant and obvious background to the teachings of Jesus are the teachings of Buddha Gotama, yet it is never mentioned. So if the scrolls had never been found by Notovitch, I would still be saying Jesus must have studied in India. Indeed that similarity with the Buddha is something that perplexed me for many years before I had ever heard of Notovitch’s discovery at Hemis in 1887.

MC: It is amazing some of the references you made.

MICEAL: I took a lot of them out, by the way, because the DVD was –

MC: Getting too long?

MICEAL: It is an unusually long DVD, but I didn’t set out to make it any particular length, but only to make it as long as it has to be to get the essentials of the message across. These statements in the DVD do not set out to challenge individual elements of the Church’s history, instances such as the evils of the Inquisition or of the Crusades, but the DVD is in fact assailing the very foundations on which the entire structure has been erected. As such, a lot of people who either don’t know the facts of history, or more likely don’t want to know them because they already have a neat and tidy picture in their minds of exactly how things were, well, that kind of person is going to find the content of this DVD very unwelcome, and will try to pick holes in it, or discredit it where they can. The oldest trick of all as we know is to try to discredit the messenger. As such, I had to incorporate, albeit in very summary form, the main evidence for the truth of this material. It covers a vast amount of research and summarizes it into a relatively short space, but that is still long.

MC: How long is it actually?

MICEAL: It is three hours and forty minutes, on two discs.

MC: You said Buddha and Jesus were accused of luxurious living because they never practiced a harsh asceticism.

MICEAL: No, they didn’t, because they realized that the problem was not with the body. Asceticism is all about punishing the body and fasting and doing penance all the time. The problem is not the body. Ramtha® has taught this endlessly. The problem is the consciousness that guides the body. So if you punish the body to try and change yourself, you are only dealing with the symptoms, not with the cause. The Buddha and Jesus in their ministries never practiced asceticism in the normal sense of the word.

MC: But that is what we think. That is some other myth that has come down through time.

MICEAL: You see, here is the way it is, Louise. History has remembered certain things that great beings, for instance, like Jesus or Apollonius, or Ramtha® or Ham or Krishna, did. But the reason why they did those things is usually not remembered. So what happens is that people who didn’t understand why those great ones did something, started to slavishly copy what they did, without the understanding. Some great masters wore white, some didn’t like fish, some didn’t like meat, some got up at 3 o’clock in the morning to do certain disciplines. There were probably very good reasons why they did all of those things. But all that was remembered was the externals of what they did, and these were then turned into rules and regulations that are supposed to bring you to something rather vaporously called “holiness” by osmosis.

Getting up at three o’clock in the morning, or eating a diet of fish, or shunning meat, or shaving your head, will not do anything to bring about your enlightenment on their own. But lesser people come along afterwards and slavishly imitate what the great ones did, but with no understanding of what they were about at the time those externals were noted about them. The great beings acted in this way, but we usually just imitate the activities and then, when there is no understanding to go with them, they become just laws and rules. We forget that the reason why they did those things is what we should be imitating, not just the empty actions. But of course we no longer know what those reasons were. So we obey the laws and rules but those can never make you like that great person who acted in the way described externally by those laws and rules. That is one of the major pitfalls in religious practice, and that is where the big shift needs to come.

MC: Jesus and Buddha spoke disapprovingly of those who had a thirst for miracles. You told a sweet story on the DVD of Buddha meeting the yogi who was trying to walk on water.

MICEAL: The Buddha came by a river one day. He wasn’t anxious to advertise who he was, but he was in a hurry. Normally, if he had time he would have waited for the ferry but he was in a hurry so by elevating his frequency he walked across the river on the surface of the water and remained bone dry. This guy was watching him, who fancied he was himself on a spiritual path and was greatly impressed, to put it mildly, and this guy started focusing. He wasn’t an initiate in some of the schools there. He started focusing on how to walk on water but the reason why he wanted to walk on water was so that he would be revered by the people in the same way in which they revered the Buddha when they saw this happening. Well, he spent twenty-five years at this with no tangible result, except presumably a lot of wet laundry. The Buddha happened to come by after twenty-five years and the guy says, “You know, I spent twenty-five years focusing on doing what you did here long ago and I can’t do it.” The Buddha said, “Didn’t you have five cents in your pocket? You could have given it to the ferryman. He would have brought you over to the other side.” (laughter)

So here it is, you know, the difference between those who want to do miracles in order to have the adulation of lesser beings. You cannot ever accept adulation from other beings because you are ruining their evolution as well as your own.

MC: And the fact that so many people will spend so much time on something so trivial. That being the point as you said earlier about the source. It is that they are looking at the external –

MICEAL: They are looking at the results and missing the source the created the results.

MC: And there is twenty-five years of a life.

MICEAL: Yeah, maybe he learned something from that.

MC: Maybe, focus or something like that.

MICEAL: Just in case, always keep five cents in your pocket.

MC: You say that the relevance of a real Jesus for us today is summed up in three major statements, one of which you said, “When you pray for something, believe it is already yours and then it shall be so”. What are the two others?

MICEAL: One of them was when he was preaching and the people accused him of blasphemy. You know, the main accusation made against Jesus always was blasphemy. Because they tried to kill him he said, “You know, doesn’t it say in your own scripture that you are all Gods?” He was quoting Psalm 82. And he said, “Why do you want to kill me when I am just quoting from your own scripture, ‘You are all Gods?’” So those three things that I selected from the New Testament are bits of the secret teachings that survived into the New Testament, but I picked them because they are things that people would have at their own disposal in their own copies of the New Testament.

This DVD wasn’t just aimed at people in our School. Hopefully it will reach many, many more than that, because people need to know this material and get out of the ignorance that has crippled us all for millenia. But those would be three statements of Jesus that they could well ponder because, you know, it is all contained in that one statement, “When you pray for something, believe it is already yours.” That is the complete art of manifestation. How do you accomplish happiness, great wealth, fantastic health, or stave off the effects of aging? You have the answer there and the remainder is just embroidery. If a person really took that to heart they could accomplish anything in their lives, and that lesson has been repeated in their own way by every great teacher who ever walked this earth.

The great difference between Ramtha® and us, I often think, is that whenever he thought of something, however marvelous or bizarre, like becoming the wind, which Ramtha® was for two centuries, whenever he conceived of something in his mind, he knew it could be manifested. Would we ever have conceived of becoming the wind? It seems to be nothing, a vapor. Would you lose your identity? He thought of that and he knew that once he thought of something, that it could be done.

However, when we think of something it’s very different. We, in one of our brighter moments, think of some wonderful stuff and our instant reaction is, “Is it possible? Is it feasible within the laws and regulations, structures and paradigms?” We always imagine that there is a box, a set of parameters within which we must operate, and perhaps accomplish what most people would regard as absolutely amazing. But we always believe that there is this box in which we operate, there is always a set of structures to the universe within which we must function, however miraculously. However, the really illuminating truth is that there is no such structure. Whatever we conceive in our minds is possible to manifest.

That is the difference between the great teachers and ourselves. We reason ourselves out of it by imagining that we have to operate within certain pre-determined limits, and any “miracles” we do, have to be done within that compass. Ramtha® never thought of it that way. Why? Because he knew that the structures and the paradigms and the reasons are generated from within us, as Jesus also said afterwards, which is quantum physics, so whatever you conceive to be, it is possible – whatever it is. There is no pre-existing set of rules to govern what we can do. To accept that is the badge of the slave, not the master.
MC: And this is what the great teaching of the Ram is, that you are God.

MICEAL: That is exactly it, and if we took that seriously we would know that God is not bound by anything in terms of potential, and the existing realities are simply the results to date of what God has reached on to do so far.

MC: And that whatever you focus upon, so shall it be. Consciousness and Energy creates the nature of reality.

MICEAL: Ramtha® was the first person to ascend in this civilization, and all of the great mystery schools that have come down to us have been affected by him. I remember years ago he was talking about the Goat God who is well known in history, and he said at the end of his discourse – I happened to be sitting beside him on the stage that particular night -- and he said turn to your neighbor and share that with them. He was beside me and said I wanted to ask him a question.
He said, “Sure.”
I said, “Who was the Goat God?”
He said, “Ham.”
I said, “Yes, I know that the Goat God was Ham. In fact, in the Bible, Egypt is referred to as the Land of Ham. “But,” I said, “What I am really asking is who was Ham.”
And he said, “It was me.”

So he has been active in all the major mystery schools and traditions down the ages. He was the first to ascend and he is the source of all of those movements of enlightenment down through history.

MC: Miceal, one of the most beautiful things that we both said (Stephany and I) needs to go on the website permanently. It was another major teaching that is quite alien to the message of the four Gospels and the New Testament and it is called the Hymn of Praise for Women.

MICEAL: Oh, yes.

MC: Which is again, another thing that didn’t come down through the ages.

MICEAL: No. I gave one night’s talk on that, I think it was in March, on Jesus’ teachings about women – very sublime. It is in the Notovitch scrolls and also in Abhedananda, and is very different indeed from the New Testament attitudes.

(The following Hymn of Praise for Women was spoken when one of the spies sent by Pontius Pilate to keep track of Jesus roughly pushed an old woman out of the way so he could get closer to Jesus and not miss any sedition he might speak.)
     Jesus said: “Whoever respects not his mother, the most sacred being after his God, is
     unworthy of the name of son. …Respect woman for she is the mother of the universe,
     and all the truth of divine creation lies in her. She is the basis of all that is good and beautiful;
     as she is also the germ of life and death…She gives birth to you in the midst of suffering.
     By the sweat of her brow she raises you, and until her death, you cause her the gravest
     anxieties. Bless her, and worship her, for she is your one true friend, your one support on
     earth…and in the same way, love your wives and respect them, for they will be mothers
     tomorrow, and each later on the ancestress of a race. Be lenient towards woman.
     For woman’s love enobles man, softens his hardened heart, tames the brute in him,
     and makes of him a lamb. The wife and the mother are the unappreciable treasures
     given unto you by God…Protect your wife in order that she may protect you, and all the
     family. All that you do for your wife, for your mother, or for a widow, you have done unto
     your God.”

MC: Very beautiful.

MICEAL: He is talking there about the absolute primordial, fundamental role of women in the origin of everything. The womb of the universe comes through woman and that is what has preserved all that is most precious and beautiful in human life. Not just life itself, but also all of the values and so forth that are precious, have come down to us through women. And, of course, that is a very alien idea to what has actually happened, because as I have said, I think I said it in that talk, the most sexist, the most antifeminist institution in Christian history has been the Christian Church.

Unfortunately, it does not end there because when you ponder how much of Constitutional law and regulation that has been inspired by that Christian witness in all of the Western democracies, and those states that were not quite democracies, but absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies as well, you realize the impact that that particular anti-feminism has had in shaping the history of Western civilization. And not just there. Some of the eastern or Middle Eastern civilizations now are even better examples of this. That has been a catastrophic thing. One of the absolute cores of Ramtha®'s teaching has been that women have been the most despised category in all of human history.

MC: The Ram is such an incredible teacher of that, of bringing that wisdom forth again.

MICEAL: The greatest teaching of it is that he is coming through a woman.

MC: Yes, yes, extraordinary. You have so many letters after your name. It is hard to keep track of how many letters there are. Based on your experience in your studies –

MICEAL: In many ways it just indicates how much you have to unlearn, but at least you know the field, and do know what you are talking about. Knowledge isn’t everything, but it is a crucial thing.

MC: Right, but you have really lived and breathed and contributed to the very arena which you are revealing such incredible truth about. I am curious what it has been like for you to be in this position as far as colleagues’ disapproval, attacks, commentary, what you have had to –

MICEAL: Let me put it briefly and succinctly. It has been horrendous, absolutely horrendous. But I feel that I only began to realize something important relatively recently after a decade of this, which has all been, you know, insidious and low key, and underhand, etc. A lot of it has been high key too. There isn’t a person in Ireland who hasn’t heard of Ramtha® because of me being linked to the School. I mean, in the eyes of the media there, the most sensationalist thing is that I “ran off and joined a strange cult,” and all that jazz. We all know that stuff. We have all had it in our own ways.

But I decided that I am not going to acknowledge that anymore by entering into the drama. I believe that if somebody decides to take issue with all the garbage that has been expressed about me, if they want to accept that unquestioningly and allow it to dictate how they relate to me, well then, I say, “So be it. You can align yourself with the power interests of the religions and with the destroyers of truth. And so be it, it is your choice”. And some people whom I would not have expected have allowed themselves to be affected in this way, quite often to serve their own thinly veiled purposes. But I say, “Go for it, but don’t count me in to form part of your drama for you because I am moving on and leaving you there”.

No, it has been horrendous. God knows we all have faults and failings up the gazoo, including myself, but, you know, it is always much easier to destroy the messenger and then you don’t have to listen to the message or assess its value. That is what most people are after who have such a morbid fear of change.

MC: Right.

MICEAL: Basically, you know, I had decided to come here from Ireland before any controversies ever arose about me, and I would still be coming here if nothing had ever arisen because I knew as the result of all those years of study where the gaps in the knowledge were. This is not speaking antagonistically now to anyone, but if you look around you dispassionately as a scholar with information and say “what does this system, the system of Judaism, the system of Islam, the system of the Christian Church, Buddhism or Hinduism, what do they tell us about what is going on here?” We are living in a world such as is represented in that globe there on my table, which is a foot in diameter. The entire atmosphere of this world would be represented by about the thickness of a coat of varnish on that globe. It’s a fragile canopy that is protecting us from all sorts of things. We are living in a very fragile and delicate world. We want to know what the heck is going on here. Are we the center of the universe?

Giordano Bruno, four hundred years ago, was burned to death for suggesting that there might be intelligent life elsewhere. That was a major offense and that’s what they reacted against unthinkingly without any consideration as to whether the statement might be based on fact or not.

The Church couldn’t swallow that. Pope John Paul in 1992 apologized for the treatment of Galileo Galilei. Bruno was his mentor mainly because the change from the views of Copernicus was made by Bruno. Copernicus said the sun is the center. Bruno said no, this solar system is not at the center. It is a system without a center. We are here just a part of a vast cosmos and our location in the universe has no particular geographical significance.

MC: And so your voice is, if you are talking about shaking things up, to put it mildly, requires a lot of courage on the one hand, but yet when you know the truth for yourself, then courage is really a secondary thing.

MICEAL: It is a secondary thing because, you know, I am not claiming any exclusive possession on this fact. I have no corner on this, obviously. Everyone can sense this themselves. But if you do not just take it on somebody’s word, but if you know yourself that this is the way reality is, you don’t have a choice really, unless you want to become an absolute fool. So whatever frenzies may be kicked up, they are really only the death throes of ways of thought that advances in knowledge have made outmoded. When the chicken’s neck is wrung, it flaps its wings and jumps around and there is a lot of drama.

If religion only had the sense to try to get a better understanding of what it was supposed to be about, then the world, of course, would be a far better place because, I think, all those people, - and as I said before most of them are very good and sincere people - they just don’t have the information or they don’t have the will to look for it. They don’t want to look at it. They just want to keep the machinery running, oiled and serviced.

MC: Yes.

MICEAL: Well, yes, they are going down the spout and the spiral is tightened and accelerating. So I don’t rejoice to see that happen. I would wish that a different and more enlightened future would face religions, but I think that’s a pipe dream.

MC: Are you hopeful?

MICEAL: No. I mean, I tried my best for a long time to see if I could generate any responses. You can never say absolutely that there won’t be a response. In that sense I suppose I still am hopeful. But, you know, would I put my life savings on it happening? I don’t think so, (even though that is a small amount of money to risk!). No, I think the odds are against it. But you know, where there is life there is always hope. There can be a paradigm shift. There can be a tipping point. But I am not overly optimistic. I have given up worrying about that side of things and I say, you know, go for what we know is true. We have a lot of people in our school who are doing precisely that and I am going with them.

MC: Do you see a shift in the School in any way? Any comments at all?

MICEAL: Yes, I think there has been huge movement in the School in the last year or two. It is not just the very obvious one that JZ has taken the wonderful step of a much more personal and prominent part in teaching. But I think the whole trend of what Ramtha® is teaching and so forth, has accelerated as well to match the shift that we have made on our part. There is no doubt about it. I think that we can take and accomplish much more now than we could have ten years ago. I came to the School in 1989 and I think that the stages that all of us have made, the efforts we have made, have built a foundation which makes it easier for ourselves and for people who have come later, to build upon. It has produced a context and a structure to build upon. So, yes, I certainly do think there has been a great shift in the school.

MC: See, now I think that is hopeful. That is very hopeful.

MICEAL: If you were to ask me what do I think is going to happen in the world ahead of us, say a hundred years from now, if you ask, “Where do you think the religions will be then?” Well, I would say, because the religions are built on what I call in another DVD, the “four great diseases of the mind,” and they respond perfectly to the four great diseases of the mind, so the religions will still be here a hundred years from now. All of them, but vastly reduced in size, and vastly reduced in influence. That is what I imagine will be the case. Of course there will also be vast sectors of the world’s population that will have moved forward, away from that way of looking at things. But as long as human nature does not root out these diseases, then religions will continue to be there to feed on whatever sectors of the population have not been able or willing to move forward.

MC: How interesting.

MICEAL: But they will still be here. Why? Because they cater to a disorder deep within human nature.

MC: That most of us are not even aware of.

MICEAL: That which we are not aware of. And that is why when I say to the groups in the School,
“Am I talking about religion? No, I am talking about those issues that allowed religion to arise in the first place.” Even if there were no religions on the face of the earth today, these would still be issues in 2006 for you and me, because if we do not confront these issues within us, then there is the risk that you are going to corrupt the teachings of Ramtha® just like the teachings of Yeshua were corrupted 2,000 years before. We have one great advantage now, which is that the teachings have all been recorded and thus the record is there and the teachings can’t be corrupted by anyone else’s version of them. That aspect is safeguarded. The teachings themselves cannot be adulterated. But what I am speaking about is the ways in which we can corrupt the effects of the teachings within ourselves, thus very effectively neutralizing their ability to accomplish a transformation.

MC: Do you have suggestions for books to read related to this DVD? We will keep it to that because I know you have a library of suggestions.

MICEAL: Yes, I know. You know, for the first Prophets Conference that I spoke at, I think I gave them about fifty books or so as reference, because it was a very controversial subject. That’s probably a sure guarantee none will be read!

MC: How about the top three?

MICEAL: I have been asked to write the Preface for the new German edition of Notovitch which is just about to be published. Now remember the hullabaloo that happened when Notovitch first published that book. Most of the people that I knew in my professional life as a theologian had never heard of the scrolls of Nicholas Notovitch -- never heard of them. When you think of the uproar that the original publication caused for a few decades after 1894, and well beyond, and that is still in living memory, it is extraordinary that so few have heard about them, and it shows you how suppressed and how cleverly sidetracked the whole issue was by categorizing it as delusional unprofessional, fanatical and hypocritical, etc.

We just discovered yesterday that there was a previous German edition of Notovitch in 1894 but it was never followed up on – I think there were three printings. So I have written the preface for the new German edition of Notovitch. If I were to recommend reading for somebody out of this particular discussion we have had, maybe they should get the Notovitch book. It has been published several times in English in the last three years and it is called The Unknown Life of Jesus or The Hidden Life of Jesus and the editor’s name is Nicholas Notovitch. That might be a start.

Now there is nothing in the Notovitch book about the major influence on Jesus from Egypt. Notovitch for the most part deals with India and Tibet. But at least it is a book that fills in those eighteen missing years from age 18 to 30. With regard to the earlier missing years of Jesus in Egypt- there’s no book or scrolls to fill those in directly, so what I have done is reverse engineer the matter from the character of his preaching and teaching in Israel from the ages of thirty to thirty-three, and the symbols and rites and ceremonies that he used. I realized, of course, that they came, almost all of them, from the initiations of the Egyptian mystery schools. When you view them from that perspective, everything starts to make complete sense.

But when you see Jesus preaching and teaching with all these rituals and you look back to Egypt, you see that they are the very same rituals and symbols. I have included a map of the traditional travel routes of the Holy Family during their stay in Egypt, but apart from that details are in short supply.
So I wait for the day when documents will come to light in Egypt that will tell us exactly what Jesus was there to do. I will put my money on the fact that he was there to accomplish what I say in this DVD.

MC: Wonderful. So be it.

END OF PART THREE
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