NEWS FEATURE: A channeler’s quest for credibility yields few answers

c. 1997 Religion News Service YELM, Wash. – The road to the abode of New Age spiritualist JZ Knight snakes up the foothills above Olympia _ through a semi-rural tangle of horse pastures, house trailers and gas stations _ criss-crossed with the tracks of military tanks bound for war games at nearby Fort Lewis. From […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

YELM, Wash. – The road to the abode of New Age spiritualist JZ Knight snakes up the foothills above Olympia _ through a semi-rural tangle of horse pastures, house trailers and gas stations _ criss-crossed with the tracks of military tanks bound for war games at nearby Fort Lewis.

From this scarred patch of wilderness rises a sprawling estate more suited to Malibu than to the rainswept slopes of the Cascade range: a French-style chateau protected by high stucco walls, a spiked metal gate and a platoon of guard dogs to ward off the curious.


But the gate swung open last weekend (Feb. 8-9) to receive an elite corps of the curious _ 14 scholars invited here to assess the latest incarnation of Knight, who for the past 20 years has made her reputation and a modest fortune”channeling”a entity she says is Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior and spiritual adept from the lost continent of Atlantis.

A staple on the New Age workshop circuit, Knight withdrew from public view in 1988 amid a barrage of negative press and allegations that she had pressured some students to purchase horses raised on her ranch. There were also criticisms within the movement that Ramtha _ a warm, if not exactly cuddly entity whose quirky syntax and nasal, slightly British inflections evoked the”Star Wars”character Yoda _ had darkened his message with predictions of international conspiracies and imminent disasters.

Since then, more than 1,000 of Knight’s followers have moved to this mountain community to attend her Ramtha School of Enlightenment; 2,000 others reportedly descend on Yelm to attend twice-yearly retreats in a large, converted horse barn on the property.

Students pay a minimum of $1,350 per year to encounter Ramtha, who purportedly speaks through Knight, and learn a blend of yoga, quantum physics and mental exercises they claim enhance spiritual awareness and psychic abilities; achieve spontaneous healings of everything from corns to cancer; and impart the power to”manifest”or transform thought into reality.”In this school, seeing is not believing; believing is seeing,”said Joseph Dispenza, a 34-year-old chiropracter who moved here from LaJolla, Calif., and treats patients in nearby Rainier. He frequently participates in exercises in which students venture blindfolded for hours in pastures, searching for cards on which they have drawn images of what they want to achieve.”You have to believe that your internal picture is more real than your external environment. And freeing up the energy of the body allows you to do anything you want,”he said.

The academics were assembled at the request of J. Gordon Melton, a religion researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara and chronicler of New Age religions. Is Knight’s school offering just another New Age vacation from reality? wondered Melton, who is writing a book on the Ramtha phenomenon.”I wanted the consultation of colleagues who could tell me if Ramtha was creating a legitimate synthesis or simply using some hip jargon,”he said.

Knight paid the scholars’ expenses to attend the conference and, in some cases, provided modest stipends to subsidize their work, which they discussed in the humid air of the mansion’s chandelier-hung solarium, heavy with the scent of blooming hyacinths.

Sociologist Constance Jones, who conducted a demographic survey of Knight’s students, reported that middle-aged women are particularly drawn to the school _ 80 percent of the 540 students surveyed were well-educated women who had left successful careers in search of spiritual fulfillment.


Typical of them is Michelle Marie, 50, a Canadian-born computer specialist and self-described spiritual seeker, who encountered Ramtha in California in 1985 and later moved to Yelm.”Ramtha calls us the `forgotten gods.’ We’ve come here to learn the way home,”she explained.

Religion scholar Gail Harley of the University of South Tampa, Fla., likened Knight, who says she grew up impoverished and unloved, to 19th-century spiritualists Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; Theosophist Madame Helene Blavatsky; and Emma Curtis Hopkins, who established the New Thought movement. All were women who emerged from abusive relationships with men to found religious sects that blended science and spirituality.

But exactly who and how legitimate Ramtha and JZ Knight really are remain a mystery, not only to scholars, but to critics both outside and within the New Age movement.”I don’t know who you are, JZ, but I do know you are not a fraud,”said parapsychologist Stanley Krippner of the Saybrook Institute, an independent graduate school in San Francisco.

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Krippner and neurophysiologist Ian Wickram, also of Saybrook, had earlier visited Knight’s ranch to measure physiological changes that occurred during channeling. They charted increases in heart rate, muscle tension and skin moisture and decreases in blood volume, pulse and skin temperature that they contend cannot be faked.

Krippner’s findings elicited a dazzling smile and a sense of vindication from the 50-year-old Knight, who did not channel Ramtha at the conference but remained in her own rather glamorous persona.”Through the years I’ve been described as a disassociative psychopath, a multi-personality disorder,”she said, with a toss of cascading blonde tresses.”It’s so refreshing after all these years to have someone look at me and say, `I know you are not a fraud.'” But even if physiological tests ruled out the possibility of conscious fraud, Robert Moore, professor of Jungian psychology at the University of Chicago Theological School, who has conducted 15 hours of interviews with Knight, indicated he had more questions than answers.

Is Ramtha, Moore asked, the product of Knight’s own dysfunctional psyche? Is Knight’s experience of Ramtha a”benign close encounter”with the collective unconscious, which Jungian psychologists regard as the psycho-spiritual reservoir of human experience? If so, Moore wondered, is Ramtha a benevolent spiritual influence on Knight and her students, or a malevolent one?”I’m sure (Ramtha) is a spirit complex … an organization of the ego that is not part of her personality,”Moore said.”They’re a dime a dozen, we see them all the time in therapy.” But, he said, more inquiry was necessary into the effect of Ramtha on Knight and her students.”There is no better principle of discernment here than the biblical assertion, `You shall know them by their fruits.'” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)


News that scholars were devoting serious attention to the fruits of Ramtha’s teachings drew the expected hoots from critics of New Age religion and those who consider Knight’s school a dangerous cult. Among them is Joe Szimhart, an anti-cult specialist in Philadelphia who counsels disaffected former members of New Age groups.”Encouraging people to think they can gain psychic powers is fanciful _ something out of science fiction rather than human experience. There’s nothing illegal about it, but it certainly has social consequences if people get too deeply involved. People will spend all sorts of money to hang out there, close to Ramtha’s energy,”said Szimhart, who did not attend the conference.”People who go for this kind of group are well educated, looking for change,”said Szimhart, who often testifies as an expert witness in court cases involving new religions.”They read Shirley Maclaine. They watch `The X-Files.’ They read `The Celestine Prophecies.’ It doesn’t surprise me that women are drawn to the group. Unconsciously, they see her as a woman who controls a male god, the most powerful male god available on earth.” Szimhart served as an expert witness in the messy, 1992 divorce settlement trial in which Knight’s ex-husband, Jeffrey Knight, accused her of promoting a cult-like atmosphere at the ranch and of using her spiritual powers to force him to accept an unfair settlement. Jeffrey Knight won an $800,000 settlement from his ex-wife, which was later reversed on appeal. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1994.

But criticism of JZ Knight also comes from within the New Age movement itself. Joe Crutcher, editor of Common Ground, a feisty alternative monthly magazine in Seattle that takes a consumer-oriented approach to New Age religions, wrote critically of Knight’s tactics in 1995, after he attended part of a seminar for new students. He was not among the media invited to observe the scholarly conference.”I was deeply disturbed by an exercise they conducted to help students `manifest’ material reality,”he said, recalling a session in which students were told to scream as the music of the New Age musician Yanni was played at ear-splitting levels.”There were maybe 1,000 people there, perhaps two-thirds of whom were regular students. You were encouraged to hold a picture in your mind, scream and do breathing exercises as you listened to this loud, loud music,”Crutcher recalled.”We were surrounded by this mass of wailing, screaming craziness. I was sitting next to this very vulnerable young woman who was new and it really disturbed me to think she may have felt, freaky as it was, that we had been through something meaningful.” Longtime student Pavel Mikoloski, 40, affirmed that such exercises do take place, but that Crutcher, who only attended a portion of the weeklong retreat, completely missed the point.”One of the disciplines we do involves loud music for a vibrational frequency to occur that supports the work of going inward _ and we play everything from Beethoven to Yanni,”said Mikoloski, a former actor.”When you hear Handel’s `Messiah’ blasted over a state-of-the-art sound system as you work on your own spiritual inspiration, there is nothing like it.”This might sound like screaming to an observer,”Mikoloski added.”But this is a very personal and sensitive moment of release of energy that occurs in some people. It’s a beautiful thing to be released, spiritually. It is primal, but primal from the soul.” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM – STORY MAY END HERE)

Crutcher said he believes channeling is a legitimate spiritual principle. But the reported events of the weekend conference left him unconvinced that JZ Knight is anything but a canny spiritual entrepreneur in the burgeoning New Age marketplace.”What really does it for me is that she’s copyrighted Ramtha _ no one else legally is able to do so. To me that says it’s a fiction. Ramtha is not this spiritual thing pouring through her, but something she turns on and off at will. She owns a part of god in some sense. And to me, that’s a major problem.” Mikoloski passes off Crutcher’s objections as the inevitable criticism any charismatic leader receives.”And as far as the copyright is concerned, Ramtha told JZ to do it,”he said.”She didn’t understand why, but it has preserved the integrity of Ramtha. And it’s his words that are copyrighted, not his being. God doesn’t have an image; you can’t copyright that.”

MJP END CONNELL

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