INTERVIEW WITH
MICEAL LEDWITH
L. Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D
By Louise SaintOnge of MastersConnection, LLC
Transcribed by Bertha Rainen
This is the Final Part 4 of a 4 Part Series
(Click Here for Part 1)
MC: You said something about the three days and nights in the sarcophagus and you talked about breaking the neuronets and that it takes that period of time. That’s what I was curious about with Ramtha® teaching us how to focus and how to change Neighborhood™s, etc., because we are not going into the sarcophagus. Can you make a parallel to that? We are learning in a public arena if you will, and we are trying to incorporate it into our lives. We are not initiates in the traditional sense.
MICEAL: No, we would be very foolish if we think that we had to go through the recipe that they had in Egypt for this. That way is gone. We looked at it only to get a better perspective on what Jesus was about. There are many ways of doing this work. Obviously, if you feel you have to go through a sarcophagus, by all means, go through it. But once you have heard about that particular form of initiation and what it consists of, of course, you can’t do it because you now know what is involved and it is no longer a major test of confronting the unknown.
I used to say that there were two basic ways in the old schools of dealing with all our fears and the issues that keep us anchored in concrete. One method was to cut off the energy to that fear once we became aware of it even beginning to work its way into our minds. If you kept that up faithfully and consistently over a long period of time, then eventually you would starve that fear out of existence.
But there were also more dramatic ways of dealing with our major fears all in one fell swoop, which I would not recommend to anyone. One was called “The Initiation of the Dead.” If I ever mentioned this subject in a talk I was giving I used to say by way of a joke, “You should leave now if you don’t want to hear what this initiation consisted of, because obviously, once you’ve heard about it you can never benefit from or do that test since you know what the test is about.” There were actually people who started to leave the room and who didn’t realize it was a joke. Most people today, if they went into the Initiation of the Dead, would probably have passed away within five minutes.
I had to say, “Come back, come back. It’s a joke.” Basically, if you describe what went on in the sarcophagus you can’t ever do the discipline, because now you know it is only going to last three days and three nights. The point of the initiation in the sarcophagus was you didn’t know how long it was going to last. Maybe you believed it might never end, that this was it, as far as this incarnation went. That was the point of it, and that is how you got over your fears. Once you started feeling the walls or trying to lift the lid you were done for.
MC: Yes, yes, so we are not doing that here.
MICEAL: We are not doing that but that’s not a problem because, as I say, the way in Egypt was not the only way, and in any case it’s now no longer available and we probably should be grateful for that! We are doing it now more gradually, more mercifully I suppose, more like what I said, we are cutting off the energy to the fears and working through them gradually.
MC: Yes.
MICEAL: How difficult is this work? Only as difficult as I, myself, insist on making it.
MC: Yes, that is beautiful, more and more we’re seeing that.
MICEAL: Yes, the work is simple in itself. But because we hang on grimly to the past, which gives us so much of our comfort and our identity, then it can become very difficult.
MC: Would you say then that is a shift, too, to move out of a paradigm of pain and suffering - that Jesus suffered so we have to suffer if we are going to change and all that old thinking? And then you get beyond that and you start to shake it out of yourself, so to speak, that in the teaching of the Neighborhood™, in fact, really there are two ways. One is you just change NeighborhoodsM, or the other one is you process the stuff until you are done with it. But technically you can just change NeighborhoodSM and not deal with processing it.
MICEAL: Yes.
MC: And that is owning it.
MICEAL: Processing is unfortunate. I don’t know where that word came out of but it is a most unfortunate idea.
MC: I think our psychotherapy generation.
MICEAL: Probably, yes. You know that is absolutely futile, because processing is only focusing and empowering it. The Neighborhood WalkSM as taught by JZ is the quintessential way to do it, but obviously that is not something that can be discussed here. You have to go to the School for that. “Believe it is already yours,” as Jesus said. I have to be it absolutely. No, processing is not the way to go unless you want to continue as a victim. Victims love processing.
MC: There’s that fine line of denial versus occupying the new NeighborhoodSM
MICEAL: Occupying the new NeighborhoodSM.
MC: Right, because otherwise it’s denial. You are still living in the old Neighborhood™ and just shoving stuff under the carpet.
MICEAL: Yes, it was like I said in the What the Bleep movie, and had said for years before that. What we are talking about here is totally different from positive thinking and the shift that we need. Positive thinking, I feel, is, you know, this little thin smear on the surface of a huge boiling cauldron of negative thinking. And you say, “Ooooh, my God, this is who I am! But you are at the same time terrified by the opposite! That is not really accomplishing any shifts worth talking about.
MC: So then where does the ownership come in? Ramtha® says we have to own it. Does that then translate into, if you are in the new NeighborhoodSM occupying it, then you are not even needing to own it, because it no longer is an issue?
MICEAL: Well, you know, if you truly move to a different way of being then isn’t the issue already owned by that very fact?
The reason I quote that saying of Jesus so often is that this it not something new, but has probably been at the heart of every major system of teaching down the ages. But we need to be reminded of it time and time again, and in different ways, because otherwise people just won’t click on what it really means. They think it’s some sort of pious statement. We all say, “Oh, that’s wonderful,” and then just let it float away over our heads. He said “Believe it is already yours.” That is the shift, and it’s way beyond positive thinking, and if we really made it, then it would be so.
But if you contemplate these words of Jesus you realize that you have to accept it is there before it actually becomes there, otherwise it can never come to pass. Why? Because you are sending out vibes that will kill the manifestation. The old analogy I used to give was focused on the demand we often heard, “I’ll believe it if you can prove it to me; I’ll believe it if I can see it.” However, in this sort of prayer you cannot see the evidence until you first accept matters to be so, without the evidence. Only then can you see the evidence. This demand for proof in advance is typical of our current mindset on these matters. It’s like trying to jump across a chasm in two stages.
We all know what the result would be if we stopped half way through our jump to check on how we were doing!
MC: Exactly.
MICEAL: So if I want to be happy in my everyday life, or win the Lotto, I have to be it. If I want to be radiantly healthy, I must feel it. I must walk, talk, eat, and smell radiant health. I can never entertain any other state within me, and then, as the New Age would say, “from the Universe,” or as the quantum physicist would say, “from the quantum field,” as the religious would say, “from Jesus, or God, or some angel,“ and of course we would express it differently still in our School, then all that stuff will come to me.
MC: Yes.
MICEAL: And nothing else. You know the trouble is that when some disaster befalls us we say,
“Oh my God, how could they do this to me after all I did for them. I did all this and yet they betrayed me, and I feel wretched, and I want to go and take a warm bath in my suffering.” And I know the only way to stop that is to step out of it entirely and say, “I am filled with the power, glory, the joy and freedom of the living God,” and be it absolutely. And then, and only then, can it stop. It is so hard to learn that. It’s so different from the mindset of most of humanity, and having learned that brute fact, to put it into practice.
I first found that technique expressed in works I came across in the mid to late 1970’s probably, by a man called Neville Goddard. He wrote The Power of Awareness, Awakened Imagination, and Your Faith is Your Fortune, and many more books and articles. He was an expert in the Kabbalah and in what he called “real Christianity.” His works on the power of imagination as necessary for creation of what we want, was the most powerful and eloquent expression of that same message from several sources that I had come across up to that time, but it was such a strange and difficult method to put into practice, given the background from which all of us at that time had come. We were all behind the eight ball.
MC: You said something about subjects for later DVDs, your next one and so on.
MICEAL: My next one is going to be either on the relationship of Jesus and Mary Magdalene or on the question of the corruption of the scripture texts. That second topic is one of the biggest problems that we have today, especially with fundamentalist types of religion that are abroad in so much of the world, especially here. People speak to you about “the inspired written word of God.” Now there are I think, about 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in existence today. Some of those are tiny fragments that will fit in the palm of my hand. Some of them are documents like the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, which contain most of the present-day Bible. There are only ten of these manuscripts from before the 10th Century and only four of them date from before the 5th Century.
But when you imagine that Christianity was a fugitive movement for a long time before it became respectable under Constantine, which was in the 4th Century, then you realize better, in what unfavorable conditions those copies of the scripture texts were made in the beginning.
Paul wrote fourteen letters that have survived into the present New Testament as we have it today. More than half the New Testament came from his hand. Imagine we are back in the time of Paul and a letter of Paul arrived, say in Rainier or Tenino, Washington, and I was impressed to hear it read and want to have a copy for myself. What do I do? I borrow the letter and I copy it myself or hire somebody to do it. You know, it is probably 10,000 words long. And then someone else borrows my copy from me and someone else borrows it from him, and we have to do it at night maybe, and in poor conditions. And perhaps we are liable to be hunted and persecuted if we have these documents. Most people couldn’t read and write so what we have are enormous errors in copying, especially as all of the writing was done in the Greek of those days without a break between the words. I often cite a great example that Biblical people always used to illustrate how this can cause errors in interpretation.
Let’s take the sentence: “I-saw-abundance-on-the-table.” If you write that sentence with the spacing that we use, “I, space, saw, space, abundance, space, on, space, the table,” etc. of course we know the meaning. We are speaking of a plentiful feast laid out before us.
But if we were to write that same sentence without any breaks between the words, you could possibly read it a different way, such as “I-saw-a-bun-dance-on-the-table.” you know what a bun is, a queen cake?
“I saw a bun dance on the table.” Now we are not talking any longer about a bountiful feast, but of a paranormal event, and the meaning of the sentence has been utterly changed because we broke the letters up into different groups! That sort of thing has happened a lot in later transcriptions of the text of the New Testament, less often with the Old.
MC: Oh, my God.
MICEAL: This is just an example of relatively minor ways in which the New Testament text could be corrupted and be read differently.
So put it in a nutshell. In those 5,700 pieces of the Greek text of the New Testament that exist, there are some enormous contradictions, and some incidents that are in the New Testament as we have it today, that are not in those fourth or fifth century manuscripts. If you buy a copy in Barnes and Noble that passage is there, but it is not in the original New Testament. Take a famous instance, in the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 8, when Jesus rescued the woman who was about to be stoned for adultery - whom a lot of people identify with Mary Magdalene - that account is not in the early gospels at all. It is not part of the text in the fifth century codices and presumably then was not part of the original New Testament either.
So in the 5,700 manuscripts we have, some scholars would say that there are 400,000 places where the readings disagree with each other. In other words, there are more places where the readings disagree with each other than there are words in the New Testament. So when someone stands up to me and says, “But we have the inspired written words of God,” I say, “please show them to me”, because we don’t. We often don’t know for sure what the precise words or terms were in the original autographs. There are no originals of the letters of Paul or of the Gospels or of the other Epistles in existence. All we have are multiple generations of error-infested copies of those originals.
MC: Which keeps us in a place of naiveté and disempowerment.
MICEAL: Absolutely. It is all toward disempowerment because we said “this is the inspired word of God.” You must agree to it to be reckoned a faithful Christian. But ponder these facts before you demand that. St. Paul wrote fourteen Letters of the present New Testament. He wrote many more that we know of but they haven’t survived. That’s not just a throw away statement or a guess. We have indisputable evidence of the existence of other Letters of Paul that have not survived. Whether a letter survived depended a lot on circumstances, such as how careful the original community that received the letter was. What about those other Letters that did not survive? Did the God of the Hamburger Universe plan to have a New Testament? Were those Letters that are now missing intended to be part of it? If they are not, then people who hold those views will have to ask, why was God so careless that he allowed those Letters to get lost? Or in what sense are those documents that remain the inspired written words of God since God also apparently allowed multiple mistakes to be made in the copying of the texts down the centuries?
There are many marvelous, uplifting and inspirational passages in the New Testament, which have brought encouragement and strength to countless generations. Please don’t imagine I am contesting that. That goes without question. (There are of course some not quite so happy passages there as well). What we are dealing with here now is a different aspect of the question, about how the status of those wonderful passages is to be accurately assessed. I mean, this is a huge subject, a bottomless pit really. I am only scratching the surface here now with some questions that you must look at if you want to claim to be informed about how the text of the present day New Testament came to be formed, how it was transmitted, and how it acquired its present status.
MC: And yet who hasn’t known of someone with a bible saying this is the truth.
MICEAL: “This is the truth,” yes, and that is usually said in a literalist, fundamentalist understanding of God’s direct inspiration of every word in those texts.
MC: Beautiful, beautiful, so that will be your next one.
MICEAL: And after that –
MC: And after that?
MICEAL: You know, as far as my time goes , I could be ready to move on it with a few days notice, but, you know, I have literally spent a year on this present DVD. It is of major importance. It is a huge work, totally different in professional presentation from the first one. It’s a double disk and it is dubbed in Italian, German, French and Spanish at the same time. So it has been a big work.
MC: What would be after that?
MICEAL: After that would probably come “The Enigma of Mary Magdalene.” Because that is a tradition in Christianity that is still alive today and very secret. It is much closer to the real tradition of Jesus. Now as I said, my interest in talking about Peter the Apostle, or Mary Magdalene, or Judas, or anyone else, indeed even Jesus himself, is not to talk about the dusty past but to alert us to what the traits and characteristics and neuronets in human nature can do to any message, however exalted. And if we are not alert to that, we will do the same with every message that comes our way, to our detriment. I mean we are just buying into our own doom here. So that is what the purpose of the DVDs are and they are basically to introduce some of the main things of my forthcoming book to be titled Forbidden Truth which will appear when at least five units of the DVD series have been published.
MC: Okay, that was the other question.
MICEAL: That book will be in three parts and the first one is on Jesus the Christ. It is a three-part book. The title is Forbidden Truth.
MC: And that is coming out next week, eh? (Laughs)
MICEAL: Before you leave this room –
MICEAL: And the first part is on Jesus the Christ. There will be a lot more in it than in the DVD even though the DVD is already the size of three DVDs. But I didn’t want to put out the information without at least an outline of the proof of the facts that are in it.
MC: And the timeline of the book?
MICEAL: I don’t know. Once I have this present DVD out, I will be continuing work on that first part of the book. Quite a lot of all three parts of the book is already well advanced. I don’t know how long the entire work will be in the end. Neither am I quite sure any longer about the relative importance of a book compared to a more visual and auditory medium conveying the same material, like a DVD. In North America I think a medium like a DVD can reach a wider audience. It would be different elsewhere. “What the Bleep” reached a very wide audience for a movie of that kind, perhaps somewhere between 100,000–150,000 people. It’s impossible to estimate accurately, and I may be way off, and who knows how many may eventually see it. But large though that undoubtedly is, we have a population in the United States now of 300,000,000.
In the last analysis, I think a book cannot be surpassed in terms of being of service to serious people who want to read, ponder, reflect, and re-read again, and go into more and more detail and see, for instance, where the material can be backed up from sources. That can be done much more effectively in printed form than it could ever be done in a movie, however long.
MC: How are people going to be able to order this DVD?
MICEAL: You can order it through the Ramtha® website www.ramtha.com. You can also order it through my own website www.hamburgeruniverse.com or you can order it direct from www.amazon.com. If on my own website, you click on it, it goes to Amazon. RSE is the distributor of the DVD. They are the ones that supply Amazon. If my preference were to be asked, I would say order through RSE at www.ramtha.com or just by clicking on the order icon in this article below.
MC: Is there anything you want to say that I haven’t asked, or it hasn’t come up?
MICEAL: Well, first of all, thank you, because I obviously see that you have so very carefully read the stuff that I sent you, which is very rare to find!
MC: (laughter) It is all underlined and questioned. I could have gone on for days.
MICEAL: Yes, this is a very big field indeed, but thank you for taking the trouble to do that. But, no, I think you covered everything that I would have liked. If I had been asked in advance what would I like to talk about, it would be the material we have already covered.
MC: So, Stephany (of MastersConnection), do you have any questions?
STEPHANY: Yes, I do. If I could ask you, Miceal, your perspective on the timing of The Da Vinci Code book and your references as historian and theologian, of the misstated, or lack of complete accuracy, that it bases itself on, and if you would address beyond that, the effect that that book has had and is having on the world as far as people’s attitudes about Mary Magdalene, about Christianity, and so forth.
MICEAL: Well, I think it is a wonderful book and I think that its timing is impeccable. While it’s a novel it is nevertheless raising all these non-fictitious issues that need to be raised today and it does it superbly well. It’s a magnificent work of art. As I said to someone once just after I had first read it, I wished that Dan Brown would have sat down with me or someone else like me, for thirty minutes or so before he published it, because there are so many basic, simple errors of fact in it, unfortunately. They are not important errors in the context of the book’s entire message, but when they are there, the people who are hostile to the whole idea will fix on those relatively minor mistakes and try to discredit the book as a whole in that way.
For instance, I think he says that there were eighty Gnostic gospels found. In fact, there were a few found at Nag Hammadi in December 1945, and there were some others also who were outside of that find. And then you can argue that some of these ancient works that didn’t actually have the word “Gospel” in their title probably nevertheless deserved to be called “Gospels,” and you could also argue further that many of those Gospels were not “Gnostic.” All in all you might stretch it to say that we now have recovered sixteen to eighteen early Christian Gospels that are outside of the New Testament, but that’s the limit. Saying there were eighty Gnostic Gospels is not just pushing it, it is leaving yourself wide open for hostile people to take potshots at you.
MC: And take it all down.
MICEAL: And take it all down with it, which is of course, completely impossible because the book can’t be taken down on the basis of those things. He says in the Preface, that it is a fact that all descriptions of the documents in the book are accurate They are not. But that is a very small matter that does not take away from the main case.
I think it is a superb book and it does open up people to discussing these things. Even Mel Gibson’s latest movie does that. I have had a great regard for Mel Gibson’s earlier movies, but not for this one, The Passion of the Christ, because when you think of the enormous amount of energy and time, and the money that went into that production, and then to have got it all so completely wrong about what Jesus really was, why I think that is a real tragedy. He could have done a much greater service to Jesus, if that is what he wished, by getting it right, and with half the effort. But nevertheless, movies like that, movies like Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as The Da Vinci Code, they are all making it possible for people who would normally have no way of getting to be knowledgeable or interested in topics of the distant past like this, they’re making it possible for them to talk intelligently about these matters today. That is a marvelous thing to have happened.
So would I advise people to read The Da Vinci Code? Absolutely. I think it is a fabulously well crafted book and its timing is impeccable. It is opening people up to new and important questions, and people do want answers now to these questions about Jesus, about the relationship to Mary Magdalene, and above all, about what he really was here to accomplish in that life 2,000 years ago.
Now on the cover of my DVD, it says, Way beyond the Issues of The Da Vinci Code. Why? Because in my mind there are three main questions about Jesus that are of central importance today and only two are touched on in that novel.
One, obviously, is his relationship to Mary Magdalene; were they married, etc? This brings up the issue of the bloodline of the Merovingian Frankish kings. Did they descend from his daughter, Sara, who would then be the ancestress of the major royal houses of Europe?
Secondly, we have the matter of the secret teachings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, his twin brother – horror of horrors! Blatant heresy!
And the third issue is how did he become a Christ? Because you know, if he had not become a Christ no one would give two hoots whether he was married or not to Mary Magdalene or whether he had fifty twins. These questions only became important because he became a Christ, so that has to be the main issue for us to day, and that is not dealt with in The Da Vinci Code. This is why I said on my DVD that it deals with issues that are way beyond what The Da Vinci Code set out to deal with. The issues in The Da Vinci Code in the last analysis are not as relevant to you and me today as these issues I discuss in the DVD are.
STEPHANY: That’s right, that’s right.
MICEAL: So the issues of The Da Vinci Code are dealing with aspects of Jesus that are very interesting and important, but they are of lesser importance than the main issue, that is, how did Jesus become a Christ? Because if we know the answer to that, then we know that we can imitate the process for ourselves. That is the real issue. While that is not in The Da Vinci Code at all, yet The Da Vinci Code is an introduction to these issues and it makes them alive for us nowadays.
MC: In other words, it doesn’t go anywhere for people to take the next step.
MICEAL: No. There is no next step there. But at least what the book does, Louise, is that it breaks up the solid, concrete of the rigid mindset that was there, and says that Jesus is not this guy on the top of the dung hill before whom we must all bow down and adore, and say, “Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins.” It breaks that mindset into shreds.
Once that is done we begin to see Jesus in his true magnificence: a great being who came with an extraordinary message, and who brought it into realization in his own life, so that he could blaze a trail for you and me to follow. That is a far more magnificent thing than anything about dying on the cross for my sins could ever hope to be, and those who claim to love Jesus and follow him would do well to ponder that deeply.
His message and example were hijacked right from the early years, so that nowadays it has almost become impossible to think of Jesus, or of Christianity, except in terms of the suffering savior who crawled up the hill of Calvary to die in agony for my sins in order to appease the vengeance of what must in the last analysis, be recognized as a savage God if that is what he demanded. Of course this is not what God demanded, nor has it anything much to do with what Jesus was really about. This is why I decided to produce this new DVD.
MC: Yes, mea culpa, mea culpa.
MICEAL: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxissima culpa!
Once we realize all that, then we can see that Jesus is not at all a figure of the remote past whose relevance today is what he accomplished for you or me long ago. Rather he is someone who has everything to do with the future of this race, and the glorious destiny of every individual in it.
SO BE IT!
END OF INTERVIEW
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©2006 MastersConnection, LLC. All Rights Reserved
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