Maitreya Friend Interview
From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)
Contents |
Transcript of the Maitreya Friend Interview
Book of THoTH Podcast November 6th, 2007
Transcript by Book of THoTH member Nebula
JV Intro
Welcome to the Book of Thoth podcast. I'm your host Jeremy Vaeni.Today's show is going to be interesting. I've sort of always wanted to speak to somebody who is starting a cult or a religious movement, and just sort of get in their heads. I don't know how familiar anyone out there is with people like Adi Da, a.k.a. Da Free John, or Jiddu Krishnamurti with the Theosophical Society, or Jesus . . . you know, anybody who claims to be a god-man, although Krishnamurti actually denied that title and shirked the whole religious thing. But he spent the rest of his life talking all things spirituality anyway, so I really think that shirking the title is about something else; but anyway, that's another show for another time.
Today's show is concerning itself with a man named Maitreya Friend, who can be found on the web at http://www.thefriendsway.com, and there's lots of material there for you.
I first got into contact with Maitreya through one of his followers who listened to my other podcast, The Culture of Contact, and had emailed me saying they'd had problems getting on Coast to Coast with George Noory; they were promised to get on, and then the producer ended up doing a bunch of sort of, you know, cruel things, so they ultimately didn't get on, and would I like to have them on and I said, yeah, you know, why not come on our show, I'll put you on the Book of Thoth. We like to have all kinds of, all range of experience on here. So that's how I sort of found out about him. And, well, I won't editorialize anything. You can listen to the interview and you can make up your own mind. Is he the real deal? What does that even mean? And then I'll editorialize after the show, 'cause that's what I do: I editorialize after the show.
Now I'm babbling, goodbye!
Interview
JV: Welcome to the program, Reverend, correct? Maitreya Friend. I think I would like to start just by getting from you how it is that you came to the name Maitreya Friend, what happened there?
MF: Well, it's a bit of a long story, it started when I was eight years old. When I was eight years old I was living in Iowa, and my little brother and I were playing on a set of stairs in the basement, or over the basement, and he grabbed me and we went off the stairs, and I put myself beneath him and ended up falling on the concrete and died for a few moments. A few moments to this world was very long time in the world beyond this, and when my body died, or my heart stopped, I woke up spiritually and went through a number of astounding events: the fading away of the body, the fading away of what I can only describe as different pseudo-bodies or imaginary bodies. And then eventually I came to a place where I was met by and initiated, you might say, or baptized by many, many different, what do you call them, we don't call them angels or spirits, but turned out later that although I didn't recognize them at eight years old, they were the mercies that God had sent to humanity, such as Jesus and Moses and Abraham, Buddha, even Mohammed, and others.
When that was finished, then I began to expand; that's the only way I can put it, just to diffuse. And I went through stages of what would seem like expanding thorough the physical universe. And suddenly I reached a threshold. And I stepped over this threshold into what I call perfect final union with God. The only was I can describe it in physical terms is it's a bit like as if I was a drop of water and was I falling out of the sky and I fell into the sea and became one with the sea.
Well, that's Stage One of the story. At that point, God ---
JV: This is all, I'm sorry to interrupt, this is all within the timespan of your heart having stopped at eight years old?
MF: A couple of minutes, yeah. As I say, worldly time and non-worldly events really don't have much correlation, because there's no time or space beyond this particular life, for a spiritual person.
And then God said to me, and when I say "God said to me" I don't mean that he spoke to me in words, but he said to me, "I want you to go back to do a great work for me."
Well, I was eight years old and I was where I came from, I didn't want to go back. And so I more or less refused; it was a choice, not a command. And then God showed me something that was astounding; he showed me all the suffering in this world. Not the way you would see it on a TV screen, but the way he experiences it, firsthand. And it really rocked my total being. And I said, "Yes, I'll go back." And God said, "Well, if you go back, then you're going to have to forget everything that has happened here except a small thread that will guide you, and then you're going to have to find you way back to me by your own works." The first time is by grace, the second time has to be by works. And I said OK.
And suddenly I woke up in my bed with a terrible migraine headache that lasted for weeks, really, and I had been resuscitated, and it had only been a few minutes, I suppose, that I was actually what you would call dead. But then it was some time before I regained consciousness in the body. I don't know how far you want me to go with this, that's . . .
JV: Oh yeah, no, this is fascinating. When you say that God didn't speak to you but then you say things that are very specific, how were those things transmitted to you?
MF: The only way I can describe it is in contradictions. They were soundless words, much in the way you think things to yourself, I suppose.
JV: Like a telepathy kind of. . .
MF: Well, not telepathy. I mean, he was there. I was in him, he was in me, we were at one. Like I say, the same way a drop of water falling into the ocean. He's just to be a drop of water and becomes the ocean. And yet at the same there was a distinct separateness, because otherwise I couldn't come back. It's a very difficult thing to describe. I always marvel when people describe these things in simplistic terms, because the difference between this world and the total reality of existence, which is God, it really a contradiction. It's not a contradiction that doesn't exist in harmony; it exists in harmony, but it's very different.
There's an old saying that what is day to the unenlightened is darkest night to the enlightened, and what is night to the unenlightened is day to the enlightened. And I understand phrase, or that saying, very well from this and the other experience that I had. Should I go on?
JV: Did you --- yeah, let's take this step by step here. So you were eight years old when this happened, and then, you know, puberty hits, school, all of that fun stuff. Do you forget about it, does it just recede in your mind, or, how does that work?
MF: Well, when I woke up I had no recollection of this entire event, and yet I was a good Methodist kid in Des Moines Iowa, and I went to my Methodist Sunday school as usual. But suddenly I found myself asking different questions, such as if God is omnipresent, why isn't he here in this room? Or why isn't he in you and me? Why aren't we him, if he's omnipresent? How can we be separate from him? And it got me thrown out of Methodist Sunday school, actually [laughs]. They told my folks to take me home and not bring me back. So I really didn't have any recollection at that point. Except as I say, well, and I just grew up as a normal kid, afraid of things and interested in things.
We moved to California in 1954, December of 1954. There was one thing that hung on: I kept having sort of a reocurrent vision of a man's face, and I didn't know who it was. I poked around, I got into psychic matters, trying to find out what was bugging me and what I was being drawn towards. That didn't really do it, so I took up the study of Eastern philosophy because I wasn't getting anywhere with Western fundamentalist religion, anyway. And I began to practice yoga, I did a 15-day fast to the consternation of my folks, and practiced meditation about four hours, five hours a day during my summer vacation, things like that.
Well, I ran across a woman by a strange coincidence. I was part of a, sort of junior member of a car club. I couldn't drive but I was sort of a mascot. And a woman by the name of Virginia Sites, who lived in Playa Del Rey California, was a bit of a, interested in psychic things. So we talked while I was at their house where they had the meetings. The guys were at the meeting, I talked to her. Finally she said, "You know, I can't really help you anymore. There's a fellow I want you to go see. He's an engineer, his name's Henry Frazier. And he's kind of strange but I'd like you to go talk to him." So I called the number and I made an arrangement with Henry Frazier to go over and see him, and I got a ride over to Henry's house. I lived in Westchester California.
And I knocked on the door, and when he came to the door I just about fell off of the porch, because there was the man's face I had been getting glimpses of ever since I was eight years old. And he looked at me and said, "What took you so long to get here?" Well now, to this very day I don't know whether he meant that I was late getting there (I was on time), or he knew something that I didn't.
At any rate, we talked until about two in the morning. My folks were used to me not showing up when I was supposed to because I would go on adventures. And then I went on home, and over the years we became very, very good --- first of all he was more my mentor as far as worldly matters went, and then we became very good friends, and eventually we became very inseparable buddies in a very fraternal way.
At any rate, I went through, well, from the time I was eight until 1977, I alternatively went through various periods where I was running towards this destiny, whatever it was, and running away from it. I tried alcohol, I tried drugs, anything that I could do to just be normal. I even tried to get addicted to drugs at one point because I thought that maybe that would relieve this tremendous pull that was dragging me through life. But I couldn't get addicted to anything and it didn't work, so I gave it all up and went back to my yoga.
And then in 1976, late in '76, my mentor and my good friend and sort of my mainstay in the world passed away and . . . it's not as romantic as the Buddha under the bo tree, believe me. I had an old house here in Redondo Beach where we live now, and I pulled into the back yard in my old Volkswagen bus, backed it in and sat there and . . . I'd practiced enough yoga that I could actually stop my heart, and so I said I'm going to sit here and find out what this is all about or I'm going to die, right here.
And suddenly, as I was sitting in the bus, a monarch butterfly, a beautiful butterfly, flew past the windshield. And I could feel "butterfly," I was, it was if I were the butterfly, moving my wings up and down. I could actually tactilely feel this. And I thought, what is this, is this, you know, a drug flashback or something?
And then there was a little girl named Bridey, who was a next-door neighbor, bouncing a ball in the yard next door, and suddenly I was both a butterfly and I could feel myself bouncing this ball. And this whole thing began to expand, and it just expanded and expanded and expanded, and, essentially, I died again. My heart didn't stop this time, but I died in spirit, and I went through some similar things to what happened the first time. I regained the complete experience of what had happened the first time. And there I was . . . leaving out a lot of detail here, it's in a book that I'm writing called the Holy Book of Destiny. I'll leave most of the particulars out, but I ended up back the drop of water falling into the sea and becoming one with the sea. And there I was home again.
And as things would happen, God more or less said, and again, when I say "said," it was far beyond mere words, said, "Now I want you to go back again and finish the job that you've begun." And I said, "I don't want to go back." And we went through a kind of a replay of the scenario of experiencing all the suffering and misery and sorrow and horrors that go on in this world. Nobody can imagine the debauchery, the viciousness, that goes on around the world every day; we just don't see it. But I experienced that, and I said, "OK, you've got me, I will go back, I'll go back." And then I did something kind of radical. I said, in a moment of absolute compassion and devoid of a body to limit me, I said, "I will never again enter into perfect final union with you until I have seen every last soul home into perfect final union with you before me."
JV: So what does that mean for you when you body dies?
MF: That means that I will live out the rest of this life in this world, and when I pass away from this world I will remain more or less halfway between here and perfect final union with God, living within the hearts of all people, guiding them ever closer home to perfect final union with him.
And then God said, "Because of this sacrifice, whoever will receive the enlightenment of your holy initiation, or receive your holy initiation and follow you home to me to the end of this life, I will give them what you have sacrificed for their sakes. In other words, I will give them perfect final union with me."
And he said, "You are to spread this promise to all of the people of the Earth." And I said, and again "saying" is a kind of a metaphor in this case, I responded, "How shall I do that?" And he said, "When you have given this promise to enough people and enough people are following you home to me, I will spontaneously spread this promise into the heart of every soul, and every soul will have it."
Well, I've come to call that "divine critical mass." That's the point that my life is geared around, and the purpose and the mission that I have in this world is to give that promise to enough souls, to give that new covenant that God made with souls because of my self-sacrifice, to enough souls that we can attain this divine critical mass, and every soul will spontaneously receive this new covenant and this promise, and the changes in the world that will come with that. I'm not a vegetarian, I don't demand any particular vegetarian lifestyle, I'm not anti-war, I'm not pro-war, it's not a political thing. It's purely a spiritual thing. And so . . .
JV: Well, although, part of it's political, because I was looking on your website and some of your videos, and you do seem to say that you think the Constitution was divinely inspired and talk about America and freedom sort of in the same breath as spirituality.
MF: You're quite right. I have come to believe, and be convinced that there's no other country on the face of this earth in this time that I could do the work that I'm doing, and have been doing for the last 30-some years, without having martyrs and bloodshed and all of the like. I do believe the Constitution --- I believe the country was divinely inspired. Now, we're not always right and we don't always go the right way and we make mistakes, but I think the fundamental basis of this country is a divinely-inspired experiment that is unique in humanity's history. And therefore I do protect it, I defend it, I stand up for it in an intelligent way that recognizes that even good people can do bad things from time to time. But that ---
JV: I know it sounds like a petty sort of quibble, but you don't think you could be doing this in Canada?
MF: You could probably be doing it in Canada, that's a possibility. But all I know is that for whatever reason, and I'm not one who questions God intensely, a lot of people do, but having been in perfect final union with him twice I don't question him at all. I don't take, you know, I don't hear voices coming out of radios and spaceships don't communicate with me, or whatever people say. I'm probably way too rational for this kind of a work, but I think I could probably do it in Canada. But for whatever reason God awakened within a little kid here in the United States, and I don't know . . . I could conjecture about why he would do that, but I just accept it kind of at face value that this is probably the . . . where he wanted me to be, otherwise I wouldn't be here.
JV: So when you talk about God as a "he," as somebody outside of yourself, is that just a language convenience, or do you believe that? I'm asking that because you talk about Buddhism, and I think the two are sort of incompatible, aren't they?
MF: Not really. In my searches, I studied a lot. One of the interesting things that I've found is that Buddha never denied the existence of God. He simply said how do you expect to find God if you can't even control your own mind? So let's do first things first. It's an interesting and probably little-known side of Buddha. He never denied God. In fact, what he was doing was rebelling against a decadent Hinduism that had fallen into almost debauchery, and trying to restore enlightenment rather than people paying for mindless and witless ceremonies.
But, no, I don't think it's incompatible at all. God to me is both imminent and transcendent, personal and impersonal. If we try to anthropomorphize God in our own image, we do a disservice to ourselves and to God. And yet, you're right, it's a convenience of language, because we're never really separate from God, any more than our thoughts are separate from us or the dance is separate from the dancer, or the drop of water in the sea is separate from the sea, or the wave on the ocean is separate from the sea. But we have to talk in human terms, otherwise people don't understand you, they just think you're babbling [laughs].
JV: Yeah, well, I get that all the time! [laughs]
MF: I understand! [laughs]
JV: Well okay, so, we started off by you saying don't have to believe in you . . .
MF: Right.
JV: . . . but it sounds like DO have to believe in you.
MF: Belief is a funny thing. Belief can be a road to liberation. It can also be the chains of slavery. Ordinarily, it becomes chains of slavery. Our beliefs are our prison as well as anything else. No, a person wouldn't have to believe in me, they don't have to believe in my story. All they have to do is what God said. All they have to do is accept my holy initiation and follow me home to him.
Now, you notice I emphasize "follow me home to him." I'm not saying they have to follow me to the beach or that they have to believe in the same politics that I follow, or that they have to support the Constitution necessarily as I do, or anything else, but "follow me home to him." I'm a very ordinary person with a very extraordinary experience and a very extraordinary mission to accomplish. But I am an ordinary person. And, you know, I like to say that God really loves ordinary people because he made so darned many of us. [laughs] Didn't make a lot of Galileos or a lot of Einsteins, be he made a lot of us ordinary people. And part of my message is that you don't have to be special to have God, you know, that ordinary people have God. The king on the throne and the bum in the gutter are both manifestations of God. And the bum in the gutter may actually know it more than the king on his throne.
JV: Do you think it's possible that it's the act of giving oneself over to whatever . . . its just the act itself that triggers the sort of spiritual awakening?
MF: You know, I used to think that when I was taking my journey, and I do believe that can happen. People often ask, you know, do you believe that you are the only way? And I have a strange sense of humor, I like to say no, I just believe we are the only other way . . . which is good enough.
JV: [chuckles]
MF: I used to think that it was just the act of giving yourself over, and surrender has a lot to do with it. The last thing I guess I did before I had my second perfect final union with God is I surrendered. I gave up. I said I can't go any further. I'm exhausted. There's nothing I can do. It's in your hands now. And of course this is what Jesus did on the cross, and basically what Buddha did when he attained nirvana. There is that element of total exhaustion, total effort, followed by complete surrender that does seem to play a big part in this. But I have to be uncomfortably specific about it. In this particular case, God made a definite new covenant with humanity and gave a definite promise, and that promise is very specific. And there may be a thousand other ways for people to get to God; I won't say there isn't. All I can say is that I know that this way is certain, and I know that it's true and I know that it's not going to fail anyone.
JV: So how do you keep from turning this into a religion or from getting your words mangled in the future?
MF: Well, first of all it is a religion. I don't like that, because I don't like the way people have handled religion in the world very much. It's done a lot of good, but we have to recognize that none of the originators of religion did a lot of evil, if they did any evil. Some people argue about Mohammed; I won't go into all of the pluses and minuses. They say he had a lot of wives; that was custom for the area. They say the Koran is evil, and it does have some pretty gnarly stuff in it. But the founders of religion rarely are the culprits. It's the followers of religion that scare me. And I've been very particular up until now about who I reached out to and who I gave this initiation to, which is contrary to what God sent me back here to do. But now that I'm 64 years old and I'm fighting prostate cancer, and my future is somewhat uncertain . . . I told you I'm an ordinary person. I'm subject to the same ills anybody else is. Now I find that I've gotta really get busy and get this promise out to people. And my words will get twisted, I'm certain they will. I'm absolutely certain they will. The only thing I can do is write down as much as I can and say as much as I can as clearly as I can, and try to correct the errancy when it arises while I'm in this world. I kind of liken it to shooting an arrow out of a bow: everything depends upon what the situation is before the arrow leaves the bow, because once the arrow's in flight, there's little of anything that you can do about it. Launching a religion, to me, is like that. It has to be aimed right. It has to be true and it has to be good and it has to be aimed right, because once it gets out into the world and begins to roll . . . well, Martin Luther, when he wrote his thesis and tacked it onto the door of the Catholic Church never intended for there to be a bloodbath in Germany that killed almost 100,000 people. And he was appalled at it. I've tried to take lessons from all of those folks and be very careful about how I move in setting this loose on the world.
JV: Do you believe that there is some sort of spiritual war going on, good and evil?
MF: I'm absolutely certain that there is. I have never found a devil, I've never found anything that resembles a devil. What I have found is that there's only one place that evil can exist, because God is all good. There's nothing but goodness there. And there's only one place that evil can exist, and it's between the ears of human beings. It's what I would call devil-mind. And as with anything else, there is always a group spirit that surrounds any two people or more that are gathered together. And I call that the zeitgeist, or the temper, of the group spirit. And there's a group spirit for humanity. And when people have gravitated towards darkness, then we create a dark group spirit, or a dark zeitgeist. And that thing, even though it's not a person, it has the force of acting like a person. And it influences humanity further and further towards darkness.
JV: Like a Jungian archetype kind of thing?
MF: Yeah, kind of like that. Mmm-hmm. I'm not that familiar with the Jungian concept, but I'm vaguely familiar with it, and I'd say yeah, that'd probably be a safe guess. So we have two ways to change this. We can change this in the zeitgeist itself by going in and doing combat with the force of darkness in the zeitgeist. And we do that in our meditations. But we can also change it by making ourselves points of light in this world by trying to better ourselves and trying to resist our darker urges and live lives of honor and integrity and principle. And to me, that's, you know, the word "hip." I don't mean to play on words, but that's what hip means to me, is a person of honor, integrity and principle. And if we can do that, we weaken the force of darkness in our own minds and in the minds of others, and therefore weaken it in the zeitgeist. And then if we can actually do battle with the force of darkness, so to speak, in the zeitgeist, we can weaken it there. And when the scale tips, or when the balance tips, and the light dawns in the zeitgeist, then everything is urging humanity on towards the good side instead of the dark side. And that's what we're working for, in part. And I believe that that's very closely tied in with this divine critical mass. When divine critical mass is reached, I'm absolutely certain that that is the point at which the scale tips in the favor of goodness and light and away from evil and darkness.
JV: And then what happens, some sort of human evolution into some other . . .
MF: . . .lurches forward in a quantum leap. And I think that we can actually see a time when there is peace and goodness and brotherhood on this planet. We won't, in our time, although we probably could, I don't think we will. I think that many generations forward, if what I'm doing is true, as I know it is, but if it succeeds, as I'm not sure that it will, because God left it in human hands, it's inevitable eventually, but whether it will succeed in our time or in any time soon, I don't know. But when it does, there will be a major spiritual revolution among the people of the Earth, and therefore a major quantum leap in evolution.
JV: Have you ever spoken with any, like Adi Da, or, you know, sort of, I don't know; is there some sort of peer review group for something like this that you go to?
MF: No, no, I pretty much have just kept to myself.
JV: You must have read books by these other guys. Have you ever thought ---
MF: No.
JV: No? OK.
MF: No, I haven't. You know, I have read a lot of books. I've read the Upanishads, I've read the Bible, I've read the Koran, I've read, you know, the Torah, the Pentateuch. I've read extensively, but I haven't really read much that's been going on in what's commonly referred to as the New Age culture, not for at least the last, oh, 30 years, since my second awakening and perfect final union.
JV: Because I'm trying to figure out you don't sound like an egotistical person at all, and so I'm wondering if ultimately are you trying to create peers? Do you want peers? I mean, if someone in your religion were to have the big epiphany, would they be able to lay claim to the same sort of thing, or would they still have to believe in you to get to, you know, the next destination . . .
MF: Certainly anybody. I believe that anybody can attain perfect final union with God. I don't know that any particular person can, and the chances are pretty slim. I kind of liken it to if you're sitting outside in a cafe having a cup of coffee and somebody goes over and throws a quarter out of an airplane, the chance of any single person attaining that is about the same as the chance of that quarter landing in your cup of coffee. It's not impossible, but it's pretty hard to do. Anybody could do that. Now, there's only one person, I guess, I would have to say, only one person who has done the job that I've done and that God has given a new Covenant and a promise through that one person, very much like there's only one Jesus, there's only one Buddha, there's only one Moses, there's only one Rama, one Krishna, doesn't mean that other people won't come along eventually that have other jobs to do, but I've done this job. And all it cost me was dying twice to do it.
[mutual chuckling]
JV: That's a small price to pay, really!
MF: So anyone else who comes along doesn't have to pay that price. It's a hard thing to explain because what I should be saying to you is yes, I'm the only way, there's no other way. But I can't say that because I'm an honest person. I believe in truthfulness. There are other ways. But the one thing I know is that this way is true and it's certain. The other ways, I can't vouch for them and I can't deny them.
JV: OK, maybe I should ask it this way: it's true in certain that in the next life you go to heaven, you merge with God, or is it . . . well I guess you should say merge with God, become one with Godhead, or is it certain that in this life that will happen?
MF: One thing is certain, that beyond this world if a person receives my holy initiation and fulfills that holy initiation by following God's instruction to follow me home to him to the end of his life, that person will enter into perfect final union with God and that's the end, game over, that's it, that's the end, that's home.
JV: But that's after bodily death, right?
MF: After bodily death. Now, we all ---
JV: So essentially, Earth is hell, right now, is what you're saying. [laughs]
MF: In a very interesting way, it is at least halfway between heaven and hell. It has the yin and the yang, it has the heaven and hell aspect. What I've found is that we all go through hell. When I died, I didn't fill in all the details, but when I died the first time, the first thing I did was go through what I would call hell. Hell was eternal, but it expired. [laughs] A very difficult concept to get a grip on. But it was eternal while I was there, but then it expired and I went through heaven. And heaven was eternal, but it also expired. And then following those two things I entered into perfect final union with God like the drop of water entering into the sea. And in essence, when one enters into perfect final union with God, one becomes God. Not THE God, you know, not the egotistical approach, but the drop of water ceases to be the drop of water and becomes the sea. And the individual soul ceases to be an individual soul and becomes God. It's where we come from, it's a full circle. That's where we come from, and it's the end of the journey when we enter back into there.
Now, if you don't enter into there, then . . . well, in the old days they used to say that there's the path of the sun and the path of the moon. And the moon represents woman, the sun represents God. So if you go home to God, then that's the end of the journey. If you don't go home into perfect final union with God following your journey through heaven, then you return through the path of the moon and are born again of a woman into this world. Now, this is where the saying comes from, in the general sense, that no man comes to the father except through the sun. It's a very interesting understanding of that statement. And it's very interesting that Jesus would say no man comes to the father except through the son.
So you go through this cycle, and we all go through this cycle, and we come around it time and time again, and to me the real hell is having to be born back into this world to go through the cycle again and again and again eternally. So, what God's new covenant offers, and what his promise offers, is eternal freedom from having to go through the process of being, through birth, life, suffering, sickness, sorrow, fear of pain, old age, death, and rebirth, again and again.
JV: So, OK. So, but you're denying yourself that final union until all souls are saved, right? So what happened to you? Are you then stuck in a purgatory-type state? Do you get to feel something of heaven, of God? How does that work for you?
MF: Yeah, it's going to be pretty tough. Like I say, I made this vow out of a moment of what I would call supreme divine compassion for the suffering of all people. And what it comes out to mean is that after this life I will enter into the spiritual realm, which is almost but not quite at one with God, which is going to be kind of tortuous for me, and I will remain there until the last soul steps over the threshold into perfect final union with God. And then I get to go home.
JV: Yeah, sucker's bet, there, Maitreya! [chuckles]
MF: Yep! Yeah, it is. Well, you know, if I had made that vow to another man, I might break it. But I made it while I was in perfect union with God, and it's not a vow that I would break, or that I could break, at this point. I'm on for the duration. But it's worth it to me if I can save others from the suffering of having to eternally come back and go through the meat grinder of this world. It's not always so. Sometimes I wish I hadn't made the vow, frankly. But it's what I've done, I'm on for it, so at least it won a new covenant and a promise from God that is beautiful, and it's wonderful. And that's what I live for, is to get other people home to what I don't get to go home to for quite some time.
JV: Well, I hope for all of our sakes, including yours, that you're right, and that this works out. [laughs] Because the alternative, of course, is not heaven! Nobody wants that!
MF: The alternative is pretty difficult. But you know, we're in a time now where it's critical. The survival of humanity is on the table. A thousand years ago it wouldn't have been a problem. But now we have, in our genius, developed the ability to totally annihilate ourselves. And so part of this is getting souls home into perfect final union with God. The other part of it is doing everything that we can to fight this force of darkness and secure the continued survival of humanity, so that we don't destroy ourselves and have to start from square one and do this whole evolving thing all over again. A lot of people argue over the supposed conflict between evolution and divine creation. The answer, to me, is very simple: God created evolution and created this universe, and give it the first commandment, which was "evolve." And we've been doing it ever since. Unfortunately we're evolving in a very dangerous direction right now.
JV: Yup, we are. But something tells me we're going to pull through it okay. Maitreya, where can we find your books? You said you were working on a book, or is it available now?
MF: I've been working on it for a long time, a lot of people urging me to finish it. I'm very resistant. Holy books have very dangerous consequences. But I'm going to have to, at this stage of my life I'm going to have to finish it. We do have a small summary version of it called just simply "Destiny." In fact it's an all-metal book, one of the first all-metal books in the world, apparently. It's ended up in the Smithsonian Institute, I think it's in the American history rare book collection.
JV: Oh, wow.
MF: But we have a paper copy of that that we can send people. And I have a little pamphlet called "The Soldiers of the Light," which has to do with fighting the force of darkness that we can send folks. The best way to get a handle on this is probably to go to the website, take a look there, and kind of savor the character of myself and what's going on, and see if it rings true, see if it rings right. I always tell people the only way to know whether I'm right and true is to turn within in your own heart and ask God for guidance. If God says you're not right for this or I'm not right for you, then that's the way it should be, and if he says I am, then please get in touch. It's important. It's critically important.
JV: Maitreya, thank you very much for coming on the show.
MF: Well, thank you very much for interviewing me. I hope your show does very well, and God bless you very much.
JV: Thank you. Take care.
MF: Bye-bye.
Jeremy Vaeni Conclusion
That'll about do it for the Book of Thoth. If you'd like to learn more about Maitreya Friend, again, his website is http://www.thefriendsway.com. And of course, Book of THoth is book-hyphen-of-hyphen-thoth dot com. Thoth is spelled thoth.
So, what did you think? Go to the forums, give us some feedback. Is Maitreya the real deal? Is he the new covenant, is he the new pact with God? Is he the new Jesus? Do you believe him, do you believe his story? I do believe his story. I believe it happened to him, those two events that he's talking about. Whether he interpreted them correctly or not . . . part of me really wanted to tell him yeah, I buy all of this; I just think God's messing with you. But, you know, it probably wouldn't have gone over too well!
I know that I have had, and I've spoken about this on the forums a little bit, the big "I am awakening" experience of seeing and being the universe, from nothingness, then the big bang, then all of creation, and identifying with it on a macro and micro level, and being aware of myself in my body, and thinking that I was dying. All at the same time. So it's I'm seeing this, I am this. It's the big "I am" identity experience, and as a result thinking oh God, I'm dying. Or, oh me, I'm dying. And actually, if my voice is a little froggy it's because I'm under the weather right now, so I may be dying. But, what are you going to do?
In any event. So, I've had this experience, and I've not had any sort of God figure, you know, tell me, or anything even resembling communication in that sense, that I am "the one," or, you know . . . and I don't think I would believe it. I think that's the difference between my experience and Maitreya's or people like Maitreya, is that I would not believe it if I heard that. And so, to me he's interesting personally, because I feel like he might be what I would be would I were told that, and not scoffed. [laughs] There but for the grace of God go I.
On the other hand, Maitreya did say that he was told that the first time he would have this experience was through grace, and then the second time would be through his acts. And so maybe that's the difference is that I've not done the acts. I came back from my experience and I decided to stay me. I decided not to try to recreate it, I decided not to chase it, because I think that's a mistake. I think people get caught up, people have even a small psychic episode, and they suddenly explore psychic abilities and things of that nature, and they plateau. They explore their level, you know, as Ken Wilber would say, states and stages. So they would explore their state, their horizontal plane, but they wouldn't move on to the next stage, and therefore deny themselves their own personal evolution. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to explore something horizontally, I want to know what the whole deal is, if there is a whole deal to know, or to be. And I certainly got a taste of that. So I feel like I can relate to Maitreya in that sense. I can't relate to thinking that whatever it is that you're saying is the guaranteed way to God. I would never tell anybody that. Then again, God never told me that.
So here we are at that crossroads; what do you make of it? http://www.book-of-thoth.com. Let's talk about this. And I'll see you at the next episode.
