BEWILDERED AUTHOR VOWS HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH By Bobbie Johnson SMH March 22, 2010
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/bewildered-author-vows-hes-not-the -messiah-20100321-qo0i.html A religious group bizarrely believes a writer has come to save the world. The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing. The San Francisco-based author, 37, thought his slot on comedy talk show The Colbert Report went well enough: the host made a few jokes, Patel talked about his work and then, job done, he went home. Shortly afterwards, however, things took a strange turn. Over the course of a couple of days, cryptic messages started filling his inbox. "I started getting emails saying, 'Have you heard of Benjamin Creme?' and 'Are you the world teacher?' " he said. "Then all of a sudden it wasn't just random internet folk, but also friends saying, 'Have you seen this?' " What he had written off as gobbledygook suddenly turned into something altogether more bizarre: he was being lauded by members of an obscure religious group who had decided that Patel -- a food activist who grew up in a corner shop in Golders Green in north-west London -- was the messiah. Their reasoning? Patel's background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group called Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or "the world teacher". His job? To save the world, and everyone on it. "It was just really weird," he said. "Clearly a case of mistaken identity and clearly a case of people on the internet getting things wrong." What started as an oddity kept snowballing until suddenly, in the middle of his book tour and awaiting the arrival of his first child, Patel was inundated by questions, messages of support and even threats. The influx was so heavy that he put a statement on his website referencing Monty Python's Life of Brian and categorically stating that he was not Maitreya. Instead of settling the issue, his denial merely fanned the flames for some believers. Patel's career -- spent at Oxford University, the London School of Economics, the World Bank and think tank Food First -- has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free-market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world. His first book, Stuffed and Starved, rips through the problems in global food production and examines how the free market has kept millions hungry. The Value of Nothing, meanwhile, draws on the economic collapse to look at how we might improve the lives of billions around the globe. Unravelling exactly what it is that Share International's followers believe is tricky. Their creed is based on an amalgam of various religions, spiritualism and metaphysics. Creme -- who joined a UFO cult in the 1950s before starting Share -- says that Maitreya represents a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers. This 18-million-year-old saviour, he says, has been resting somewhere in the Himalayas for 2,000 years and -- as a figure who combines messianism for Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims alike -- is due to return any time now. While Patel struggles with this unwanted anointment, his friends and family are tickled. "They think it's hilarious," he said. "My parents came to visit recently, and they brought clothes that said 'he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy'. To them, it's just amusing." ------------ NHNE Wavemaker News List: Send Some Green Love To NHNE: http://www.nhne.org/DONATE/tabid/398/Default.aspx To subscribe, send a message to: nhnenews-subscr...@yahoogroups.com <mailto:nhnenews-subscribe%40yahoogroups.com> To unsubscribe, send a message to: nhnenews-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <mailto:nhnenews-unsubscribe%40yahoogroups.com> To review current posts: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/messages http://www.nhne.org/tabid/1044/Default.aspx NHNE's Mother Ship: http://www.nhne.org/ NHNE on Facebook: http://bit.ly/afCLPo NHNE Pulse: http://nhne-pulse.org/ Integral NHNE: http://integralnhne.ning.com/ Published by David Sunfellow NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE) eMail: n...@nhne.org <mailto:nhne%40nhne.org> Phone: (928) 257-3200 Fax: (815) 642-0117 P.O. Box 2242 Sedona, AZ 86339
