This group of perfected men is known by many names: the Masters of Wisdom and the Lords of Compassion, the Great White Brotherhood, the Society of Il… - Benjamin Creme

To come to grips with glamour, humanity must recognize its mechanism, by which means the central heresy — that we are separate — is created and maintained. All that tends to reinforce the sense of separateness is the result of the action of glamour, and all that seeks to undermine that heresy works for its destruction. Glamour resides in the notion that man’s desires are real, that they have their own intrinsic validity and purpose, whereas, in truth, they are the cause of all unhappiness; no more real, no less transient, than the mirage of the desert.

He (Maitreya, the World Teacher) comes to help humanity see life realistically – not through rose-coloured spectacles of [money-making] schemes of gambling on the stock-markets and fantasy working which they all are. All that we have been witnessing – the financial world – is the result of fantasy. Maitreya sees the stock exchanges of the world as the gambling casinos of the world – which they are. They are nothing to do with the real world and the real economy. They are about gambling, mainly with price or value of currencies. And that is what has to go. Humanity’s main illness, it is a major disease, is this need to make more money out of the money they already have and then go on making more and more.

Maitreya calls market forces “the forces of evil”. They have inequality built in them, and benefit the few at the expense of the many. Market forces are based on a great deception: that every nation is trading on a ‘level playing field’, that all the nations are starting from the same point. Obviously, they are not. We cannot compare America, the European states, or Japan, with Tanzania, Zaire or any of the Third-World countries. And yet, through the pre-eminence of market forces, Third-World countries are forced to compete in the world’s markets with countries like Japan, America, Germany and France. Maitreya calls commercialization, which is the tool, the agency, of market forces, more dangerous to the world than an atomic bomb... Commercialization — running life as if it were a business, whether in education or health care, for example — will bring this present civilization to the verge of disaster.