This past November I flew to Yelm, Washington, outside of Seattle, to deliver a lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.  When I had been invited to give the talk the year before, I frankly had never heard of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.  In fact, when I was invited, I was told that the school was called The Gnostic School of America — and so I naturally thought that it was some kind of college made up of west-coast-modern-day-Gnostics who saw themselves standing in line with the ancient Gnostics.  Such people do exist!

But that is not what this school is.  The School of Enlightenment was founded by a woman named JZ Knight, and it is named, obviously, after Ramtha.  In case you don’t remember who that was, let me tell you.  Ramtha was a philosopher-warrior who lived 35,000 years ago, who, with his 2.5 million soldier army, conquered most of the known world at the time, including the island of Atlantis.   JZ  channels him.  (In one of her many former lives she was Ramtha’s daughter, who wanted to lead the troops into battle; women weren’t allowed to do such things back then; but now that they have been liberated, Ramtha has returned and is communicating through her to give his message to those who are open to receiving the truth.)

The school is not an accredited institution of higher education, but is more like a retreat center where people who are followers of the teachings of Ramtha, as channeled by JZ, come together for multi-day retreats to learn from Ramtha and from other teachers in the school who have been advanced in their enlightenment.   These retreats are well attended; there were probably 700 people there for my talk, each of whom paid $500 for the four days they would be there.  Other retreats are better attended and charge more.  They hold them periodically throughout the year.

The retreats are held in a large facility that looks like a large auditorium, but with no seats.  Everyone sits on the floor (with pads they bring usually), to be close to the earth.   And for several days they participate in learning more about Ramtha’s teaching, including an appearance by JZ who lives in a very elegant house next to the facility, and speaks for an hour and a half or two hours, chanelling Ramtha.

For more on JZ and Ramtha, see http://www.ramtha.com/content/faq.aspx

In any event, they wanted me to speak about the Gospel of Judas, since they are interested in the idea that humans are themselves divine and need to learn how to get their minds and bodies out of the way to reveal the true divinity within.   They find Gnostic texts amenable to that point of view.

I should say that it was a terrific audience.  From what I could tell, they were largely middle to upper-middle-class folk.  Extremely kind and interested and (enthusiastically) receptive, and not at all non-plussed by the fact that I personally have a very, very different view of the world.  Opposite view of the world, actually.

The following is the lecture I gave.  Afterwards I had a long question and answer session which, for me at least, was more interesting than the lecture.  I’ll post that second part of the video soon.  The video was made, obviously, by the staff at the school, which has given me permission to post it here.

 

 

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