transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
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Speaker 1:
[01:32] Imagine this. A 35,000 year old enlightened being shows up in your kitchen. He appears in a flood of gold and light. Very heavenly. At first, it's so beautifully bright, your eyes can barely take him in. God, he's so majestic. But then you definitely make out his glowing purple skin. So cool. He also has luscious flowing locks of dark hair. Think of romance novel cover model. If that romance novel was written for Dungeons and Dragons campaign, cater to horny housewives. He looks like the mythical warrior that he will in fact tell you that he is. And he speaks in a deep baritone voice with a thick Indian-ish kind of accent and says shit like indeed. And it is so a lot. He tells you, you better be sitting down. That you have a great destiny waiting for you. Hell yeah. How exciting. That you will become a light to all of mankind. Wowee. So what do you do? Do you tell a trusted person that you are definitely struggling with your mental health and probably need a little staycation in your local psychiatric facility? Do you hope that the psychotic break that you've just experienced can be healed? Do you maybe check your stash of magic mushrooms or LSD to make sure that you didn't accidentally take an extra strong dose? Or do you accept this is real and you let this entity take over your body? Do you give over your life to becoming a holy channel, a sort of psychic conduit to the divine, a spiritual link between your world and the world of whatever this purple being of light came from? Judith Hampton, better known as JZ Knight, chose the latter option. Or at least that's what she has claimed for about a half century now. I'm strongly assuming that she made it all up, but she has insisted that one day in February of 1977, she was in her kitchen, minding her own damn business, having a perfectly normal day when an ancient figure appeared to her announcing, I am Ramtha, the enlightened one. And then as JZ stood there, stunned, Ramtha continued, for you will indeed, beloved woman, become a light unto the world, know that you are greatly loved, for the Father in heaven knows of you and loves you greatly. Indeed.

Speaker 4:
[03:44] Indeed.

Speaker 1:
[03:46] JZ is so special. JZ always felt like she knew something other people didn't. She believed she'd had experiences with aliens early on in life out in the desert in New Mexico. And then as she got older, she began to believe that something was guiding her, a powerful spirit of some kind, whispering that she was on the right path, telling her that there were important choices she had to make if she wanted to fulfill her true destiny. And now she wondered, was this her destiny? Not to just transmit Ramtha's words, but to become him. Over the next several decades, JZ would build a highly profitable business entirely based on the supposed teachings of an ancient master. Teachings learned and shared when she slipped out of herself and Ramtha slipped in. From her body, Ramtha professed his great wisdom. 35,000 years ago, back when he had lived in Lemuria, he had nearly conquered the entire world, succeeding in pillaging cities on the lost continent of Atlantis and elsewhere, leading his army of over 2.5 million warriors strong. Oh, fuck yeah, bro. And he was so much more than a warrior. In between all that fighting, he had done soul searching, a lot of it, and managed to ascend his astral body past the trappings of this earthly realm where all of us dumb peasants are stuck and into the next realm and into a whole bunch more realms, so many realms. He was a real realm master. No one has ever realm quite like Ramtha. Eventually, thanks to all this reelming, Ramtha reached the very center of our universe where the first entities emerged out of pure thought. And he just like chilled there for a while. He soaked up a lot of metaphysical mastery and shit. But now, now he was back, baby, back in his kind of earthly form to guide humankind to the rest of the 20th century and into a new age of human consciousness, an age where people, if they discipline themselves correctly, could manifest literally whatever they wanted into reality. Positive energy! And Ramtha's altruistic mission to help humanity would just happen almost coincidentally really to make JZ a very, very rich woman. At first, she lectured living rooms, but that quickly grew to lecture halls, hotel conference centers, small theaters, and other locales where soul seekers would pack in to see the tall, attractive, self-assured, mystical blonde woman speak in a baritone voice, her posture suddenly turning masculine, and then eventually these lectures became a school. Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Who needs a degree in psychology when you can level up and get enlightened? The school was built on an isolated compound in JZ's former horse ranch in the then one-stoplight town of Yelm, Washington, about 20 miles from Olympia, 30 miles from Tacoma, where it remains today. Population was just 1,300 or so at the time of the school's founding. Throughout the late 80s and 90s, Ramtha's School of Enlightenment would teach eager people, many of them middle-aged and lost, looking for meaning that they hadn't been able to find in families and careers. As word of Ramtha spread thanks to tapes and film lectures that JZ sold for, nice old profit, more and more came to Yelm to not just learn from Ramtha, but to worship JZ narcissistic knight. I meant to say Ramtha. Some would live nearby, others would live practically on the compound, working there. Some students who studied for years became teachers, living by the ways of the mysterious deity of sorts for decades. A quasi deity who has never ever proven to exist, like literally all the rest of the deities ever worship by anyone. But you knew that, just like you knew that this is another Cult, Cult, Cult, New Age edition of Timesuck.

Speaker 5:
[07:20] This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to Timesuck.

Speaker 1:
[07:37] Well, happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to the Cult of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins, Eddie Cole's exhausted parole officer, Shohei Otani's pitching coach. Let's go Dodgers! And you are listening to Timesuck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lusifena, praise be to good boy Bojangles, and glory be to Triple M. Very excited to share so much bat shit and sanity with you today. And did I tell you that thanks to our Patreon contributors from our fantastic, or our fantastic space lizards, we were able to donate over $10,000 to Basic Needs in February, the Birthday Box Foundation in March, and Freedom Reads this month, over 10,000 each. Basic Needs, and you can go to basicneedsmn.org to learn more, was established in 1996 in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, to aid individuals and families in need within their community. They opened a community-based thrift store, where donations helped support programs to help the community and offered affordable shopping. They created a voucher system so that people experiencing poverty could receive emergency access to needed supplies. And in 2023, Basic Needs began providing barrier-free access to food in the community at the Basic Needs food market. Very cool. And Birthday Box, to learn more, you can go to birthdayboxfoundation.org. Well, they create and deliver custom birthday boxes to kids in need, bringing hope and happiness and a sense of belonging to the one in six kids at risk of not being celebrated this year. And Freedom Reads, focused on creating libraries in prisons to help prisoners actually get rehabilitated through education. And you can go to freedomreads.org to learn more about them. So hail Nimrod. And you can keep listening to this podcast to learn more about JZ Knight and Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. So mediums, channels, I'm not opposed to their genuine existence, truly not. There are so many things, spiritual type things, that I'm not opposed to possibly being true. I believe in a higher creative power. I know I can't prove it. I'm not gonna try and tell you or sell you on what it is, does or wants. And unfortunately, damn near every time I come across someone claiming to have special connection with the divine, claiming to know the will of the divine, or claiming some powerful mastery of the dark arts, or magical abilities of any kind, they quickly set my bullshell arm off despite a big part of me wanting to believe them. Whether you're convinced that some people can truly speak with unseen forces or certain that they can't, you've probably at the very least directly encountered this concept before. Maybe at some church, maybe when you walk past a storefront in a slightly sketchy part of town with crusty battered signs advertising psychic readings for $10. What a great deal. Or what a waste of time. Maybe you follow someone who's into this stuff online, like one of the so-called energy or light workers who have been on shows like Gwyneth Paltrow's The Goop Lab. There are a lot of names for this kind of figure. Medium, of course, but also psychic, fortune teller, clairvoyant amongst others. In New Age thought, there's a broader term, a conduit. A conduit doesn't have to be a person. It can also be an object, a place, even a process like a seance that facilitates contact between the physical and the spiritual. When it is a person, New Agers often label these people channels. Channeling refers to the idea that humans can act, quote, as a channel of information from sources other than their normal selves. According to the book, New Age Religion in Western Culture, Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. The first modern American channels were two teenage girls, actually, that we've talked about here before. I think it's been a while. We've talked about them several times on Scared to Death. In 1848, 14-year-old Maggie and 11-year-old Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported hearing strange rapping noises coming from the floorboards and walls in their house. The girls claimed that these jarring sounds, which were also heard by their parents and curious neighbors, were produced by the ghost of a murdered peddler buried in the cellar. And they claimed that they had figured out how to talk to him. And then they would go on to claim that they could speak to other spirits, many, many spirits. The Fox sisters were soon giving public demonstrations in nearby Rochester and beyond, and all of that would fuel the American Spiritualist Movement. In 1888, Maggie would confess that their wrappings had been a hoax. She even publicly demonstrated their method. Despite this confession, which she would later retract, the Spiritualism Movement continued to grow in popularity. By the time Maggie went on record, millions of Americans already resonated with different aspects of Spiritualism. Its anti-hierarchical access to divine forces, for example, was appealing to people who didn't trust monolithic religious authorities like priests. The movement also lent its support to progressive causes like abolition and women's rights by suggesting that we meet sex are all fundamentally made up of the same life force. And it gave a sense of closure to the hundreds of thousands of families who had lost loved ones in the American Civil War. Also provided opportunities for women to gain influence and social clout. You know, in a very male-dominated society. But there was another factor at work that we don't discuss as often when it comes to alternative movements. And that factor is simpler than what you might think. Spiritualism was just fucking fun. I mean, how exciting would it have been to be in a dark candlelit room feeling a rush of inexplicably cold air entering the room and then watch some medium be taken by what they claim to be someone else's spirit, a spirit of the person you've lost or really care about or fascinated by. Or any spirit to suddenly feel what you believe to be a spirit reaching out and touching you, talking to you, somebody endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of the paranormal. I would love that. I would very, very much want to believe that I was having a genuine spiritual encounter. All kinds of fun were being had by spiritualists, was being had. Six years after the Rochester Rappings, teenage brothers, Ira and William Davenport developed a traveling ghost communication performance called the Public Cabinet Seance. After someone delivered a brief sermon about spiritualism, the brothers will be bound by their hands and feet, then seated inside an oversized armoire with three doors filled with musical instruments. When the doors were closed, the audience would hear those instruments being played and see objects flying out from the box and hands emerging. But when the cabinet was opened, the brothers were still tied up. Ta-da, cue gasps, cheers, applause, cue people leaving the performance and genuinely believing they had witnessed up close and personal the actions of the undead. This emphasis on what we might call an early version of prop work was not unusual when it came to spiritualism. In fact, it was a big part, if not the main part of the allure. As historian Simone Natali argues in Supernatural Entertainment, Victorian spiritualism and the rise of modern media culture, events like seances and lectures were not just spiritual practices or the opportunity to learn more about a fledgling science, they were also forms of spectacular entertainment with theatrical effects like darkened rooms, flashes of color or smoke, performers that jumped up, fell over, fainted or gesticulated wildly. And as time went on and crowds got bigger, the techniques got more exciting, right? There was more people doing it, you know, the competition spurs innovation, objects that reportedly showed the living dead evolved from painted and posthumous portraits into altered photographs that showed the departed or unnamed spirits hovering, comforting or floating above a sitter. Meanwhile, in performances, disembodied wooden hands tapped out answers to questions and blank canvases brought forth images of the deceased. In some cases, ghosts appeared before spectators' very eyes in full form or as a spectral essence, ectoplasm oozing from the medium's mouth. Ectoplasm, by the way, was defined by the psychical researcher, Gustav Zele, as being very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads or a membrane with swellings or fringes or a fine fabric-like tissue. Many mediums came up with methods of swallowing and regurgitating cheesecloth, textile products smoothed with potato starch, or a mixture of paper, cloth, and egg whites to produce this ectoplasm. Some serious commitment to the craft. Thanks to these captivating techniques by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spiritualism would merge with the growing entertainment culture, one that included theater, vaudeville, and eventually film and radio. One example of this was Howard Thurston. Despite being primarily a magician, something which didn't necessarily have to include a spiritual element, in his act in 1929 in his advertising campaign, Thurston leaned fully into the visual language of the occult with a striking poster that asked, in bold type, Do the spirits come back? Beneath the question, his painted figure holds a skull, like an actor playing Hamlet would in the famous To Be or Not To Be scene. Ethereal green smoke pours from the skull's eye sockets, forming the upper body of a spectral woman. Around him float disembodied limbs clutching tambourines and bells alongside a ghostly head blowing a trumpet. Even small devilish figures appear at his shoulder, layering the image with a bunch of supernatural symbolism. And now what, you might be wondering, does all of this have to do with our episode today? Here on Timesuck, we often focus on the more self-help oriented side of New Age thought. How spiritualist thinkers, like the recently covered Rudolf Steiner, framed access to the other side as a path towards knowledge, healing and personal transformation. And that element is absolutely real. And for many audiences is the primary draw. But running alongside into something just as important and often overlooked. Many people were drawn to spiritualism and later towards various New Age movements, not only because they were looking for meaning, but also because they were looking to be entertained, engaged, captivated, wow, titillated, astonished. However, the entertainment aspect of all this eventually became a problem for spiritualism. Because the more theatrical the performance, the more it invited scrutiny. As spiritualism became entangled with vaudeville stagecraft marketing, more and more skeptics, like previous Suck subject Harry Houdini, began asking the obvious question, was any of this real? Indeed, figures like Harry Houdini spent decades meticulously debunking and exposing fraudulent mediums, arguing that many so-called miraculous feats relied on misdirection, trickery, or psychological manipulation, rather than spirits. The rise of mass media only amplified both the allure and the suspicion of mediums. Audiences might be impressed, but critics would dissect the act in print, radio, and later television. And so, eventually, mediums needed to make a pivot. External tricks and flashy stagecraft alone were no longer enough to convince skeptical observers, or to avoid the kind of critical investigations that could potentially permanently tank a career. To captivate and retain audiences, mediums began to make the performances more immersive and more embodied. In other words, they became the entity that they were communicating with. A woman named Dorothy Jane Roberts, primarily known as Jane Roberts, would set the blueprint for how this new type of channeling would take place. Born on May 8th, 1929, Roberts was raised by an emotionally abusive mother in Saratoga Springs, New York. Though she received some stability and support from local religious figures, Roberts would ultimately abandon Catholicism after the death of her beloved grandfather when she was 19. Then she found solace in writing, something that she had loved ever since she was a little kid. She was good at it. In fact, she was awarded a prestigious poetry scholarship to Skidmore College. But she would drop out and head to the West Coast where she would meet and marry a commercial artist named Robert Butts. Bobby fucking Butts, hell yeah. The two eventually moved back east to Elmira, New York in 1960, where they both held a series of odd jobs in the arts. It was decent work, but nothing that would give them any fame or credibility until December 2nd, 1963. That night, Jane and Bobby fucking Butts were playing around with the Ouija board when they were introduced to an entity called Seth. Seriously, Seth. I love it. If you gave me a thousand chances to guess the name of some ancient mystical entity, there is not a chance in hell I would throw out the name of Seth. No offense to any Seths out there, but it's not exactly a fancy or powerful name. I mean, Dan would also not be what I would guess, or Daryl, or Timmy, or Clifford, but Seth it was. From that day on, Seth and Jane were a package deal, just like JZ and Ramtha would be years later. Seth spoke through Jane and used her as his host. Or Jane was making all this shit up, of course. And when Seth would possess Jane, it wasn't just to walk around and take a look at what modern life had to offer. It was to spread his teachings. Enlightenment, the gospel of Seth. Through Jane, Seth dictated to Bobby fucking Butts. I love this combination so much. And Bobby took down every, I love it. I love this. Jane, Seth and Bobby Butts. And Bobby would take down everything Seth had to say. These texts would eventually become known as the Seth material. And soon people wanted to hear Jane, but really Seth, speak in person. Glorious. Jane would channel Seth hundreds, if not thousands of times over the course of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, delivering speeches with the commanding masculine energy, kind of, that differed remarkably from her normal speaking habits. Kind of like what JZ Knight has been doing. This included Seth's accent. He spoke in a tone that, I don't know, I don't know what it is. Sounded kind of like a mix of West Indian and South African, maybe with touches of Italian and British, maybe some Irish, maybe some brain damage. He spoke almost like, well, me, when I try and do an accent. Whatever country I'm trying to imitate, it doesn't stay there for long. It just wanders around through a variety of accents and some half-assed attempt to sound foreign. Could Jane have been doing what I've been doing, just being silly? What's this big deal with Seth? Who was Seth supposed to be? I have been conscious before your earth was formed, Jane Roberts, as Seth writes in Seth Speaks, The Eternal Validity of the Soul, the best-selling book from all of the Seth material. I hate that this book sold so well. To write this book and in many of my communications with Robert, Seth referred to Bobby Butts as, oh, excuse me, Rupert, R-U-B-U-R-T. In my many communications with Rupert, I adopt from my own bank of past personalities characteristics that seem appropriate. I am primarily a personality with a message. You create the world you know. You have been given perhaps the most awesome gift of all, the ability to project your thoughts outward into physical form. Fucking Seth seemed to have had a past life, perhaps multiple past lives. In a session dictated in May 1971, he described his time with the Pope. Oh, I am sorry, as the Pope, not with, as the Pope. I was a Pope in AD 300. I was not a very good Pope. I had two illegitimate children, a mistress that sneaked into my private study, a magician that I kept in case I did not do too well on my own, a housekeeper who was pregnant every year that I had her, and three daughters who joined a nunnery because I would not have them. My name was not Clement, although Clement is a lovely name. It doesn't sound like James put a whole lot of effort into Seth's backstory. And yet the bad local improv class bullshit worked. When Bobby fucking Butts ultimately transcribed the session, he noticed that Seth mentioned being a Pope in both 300 AD and paradoxically, the third century, which spans from 200 and 180 to 300 AD. At this moment, we did not know which Pope Seth referred to, Butts wrote in a footnote following the transcription. Of course, not because it's nonsense. Why did this work? Because even if Seth's origins or his identity or his accent were a bit questionable, Jane Roberts was always or she always made an experience with Seth in entertaining performance. Here's some footage of Jane speaking. This fucking kills me how bad this is. Here's Jane.

Speaker 6:
[24:18] My consciousness was just gone and it wasn't in outer body, in the respect that I had another body or thought I did. My consciousness went through like the window and then into the leaves and into everything.

Speaker 1:
[24:35] Okay, so her consciousness is in everything. Cool, cool, cool. And now here is Jane speaking as Seth.

Speaker 6:
[24:43] And understand your responses to our friend here. For when he speaks, you fear the vocabulary. Because you fear the belief that you still are afraid of it.

Speaker 1:
[25:18] You still are afraid to operate. You fear the vocabulary. Why couldn't you find a better spirit that spoke a little more clearly? He talks pretty slow, and when he does talk, pretty fucking weird. Other channels would soon follow Seth's suit, like Jack Purcell. Jack spelled J-A-C-H, which makes me already question him. Jack has been channeling a rather likable spirit named Lazarus, spelled more like Lazarus since 1974. Lazarus describes himself as a spark of consciousness beyond our physical and casual planes. Causal, excuse me, I don't want to fuck up the right, I gotta get my planes right. He exists beyond our physical and causal planes. He's working with people on this planet to reach the next evolutionary step, or to make Jack money. Indeed, indeed, Purcell and his two partners run a multi-million dollar business, Me, based in Orlando, Florida, called Concept Synergy, which markets Lizard's quote unquote wisdom in the forms of tapes and seminars sold to the desperate. Fun. Here is a quick clip of Jack talking as Jack now.

Speaker 7:
[26:32] Hi, I'm Jack.

Speaker 1:
[26:33] Hey Jack.

Speaker 7:
[26:34] It's my body you see in these short video recordings. Oh, cool. But it's not me talking.

Speaker 1:
[26:39] No, of course not.

Speaker 7:
[26:40] I have had the honor of channeling Lizard for more than 45 years. Actually, since 1974. Wow. Familiar or not with Lazarus, most of you are familiar with channeling.

Speaker 1:
[26:52] Uh-huh. Okay, so that was Jack's voice. And here is Lazarus using Jack's body.

Speaker 7:
[26:59] We have been asked so many times why we're here, why we communicate.

Speaker 1:
[27:03] Okay, better accent. Why do we channel through? Why do we do it?

Speaker 7:
[27:08] And we've said, well, clearly it's not to save the world. And it's not to save humanity. No, we respect you and we love you far too much. What?

Speaker 1:
[27:17] Huh?

Speaker 7:
[27:19] To tell you that lie.

Speaker 1:
[27:20] Oh, that's a bummer.

Speaker 7:
[27:23] For you are more than capable of saving yourselves.

Speaker 1:
[27:26] But-

Speaker 7:
[27:27] Saving your own planet.

Speaker 8:
[27:28] But are we, are we?

Speaker 1:
[27:30] Lazarus, I feel like we could use some help right now. Are we capable of saving ourselves and the planet? Come on, help us out, you lazy fuck. Oh man, millions of dollars off of that. Off of just being like, just saying vague, not helpful shit with a fucking British accent. Hello, I'm Lazarus. I would help you. Of course, I could fix everything here on this planet, but I would not insult you with that. Now, I'm very confident in your capabilities to heal yourselves, so I will just talk, hollow platitudes, word salad. On a lesser scale, there are channelers like Hoska Harrison, aka Jonah, living out in Boulder, Colorado, or Paul Tuttle, aka Raj, up in Bellingham, Washington, who make a comfortable living through private and group consultations with mystical masters. There's Esther Hicks, who channels Abraham, a non-physical consciousness described as pure positive energy. Abraham Hicks.

Speaker 2:
[28:29] Do you believe that buttons are important to create?

Speaker 1:
[28:31] You and your buttons. I loved her from the Secret Suck. Or my favorite and a Space Lizard favorite from the days of the Secret Suck podcast, the mother daughter channel combo of Lynn and Jamie McGonagall. Oh, so good. So called certified light workers. They channel a variety of quote higher dimension healing beans. Or they used to. I feel like they're still, they're apart right now. They've been on and off. The band, I don't think is currently together. But for many years they did. They would channel high dimension avatars. These speakings would primarily take place through Lynne. They apparently make her move her arms up and down in weird fucking ways. This crazy rhythm above her head. And also would make her daughter Jamie move her arms in a very similar fashion. But then sometimes one hand would do a lot of circular motions across her belly. Lynne would do the primary speaking. And then Jamie would just kind of be her spiritual toady. Mostly chiming in with, that's true, every once in a while. Highly recommend finding a video of theirs for entertainment purposes. Here's a little taste of the audio.

Speaker 9:
[29:37] Hi friends, in Planet Earth, dating it's Sunday, November 6th, 2016, in the Lynne life and the Jamie body mind, the authorized souls continue to be only child souls from the smaller subatomic. And the intrusions from above continue.

Speaker 7:
[29:54] That's true. That's true.

Speaker 1:
[29:56] I fucking love it so much. Nobody has been as successful with this particular kind of grift. I mean gift as JZ Knight.

Speaker 9:
[30:04] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[30:06] Knight would take this idea that the channel embodies a spirit or entity instead of just communicating and run with it like no other, developing an immersive world around the figure of Ramtha, this 35,000 year old Lemurian warrior. Instead of targeting the small devoted audience in living rooms and small lecture halls like Jane Roberts, Knight would end up lecturing to hundreds of attendees in auditoriums and later to tens of thousands, maybe more, on video and DVDs. This would lead her to found a group known as Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a place that promises meaning seekers that they too can become godlike entities if they focus their attention in the right way. We can all be ventriloquists that use ourselves as puppets if we just follow this wing nuts teachings and if we pay the right price. What people have found when attending Ramtha's School of Enlightenment is unsurprisingly really fucking weird and interesting. Some things like running around a maze seem more appropriate for summer camp than for learning how to channel an ancient master. Other things like the content delivered in JZ's lectures can be less wholesome. There have been grim warnings about future catastrophes, commands to find a place to live off the land and become entirely self-sufficient, predictions about fucking lizard people, yes, lizard people today, and students are warned that these reptilian bastards will arrive in a spaceship ready to gobble up anybody who has not attained enlightenment. And the way all this shit has been taught has led some people like JZ's ex-husband Jeff Knight to refer to Ramtha's School of Enlightenment as a cult. So how did one woman take a niche practice, turn it into such a huge empire of rituals, predictions, mind-bending exercises that have kept ardent followers hooked for decades? Let's find out in today's Timesuck Timeline. Right after today's first of two Mitchell sponsor breaks. 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Speaker 7:
[37:12] Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a Timesuck timeline.

Speaker 1:
[37:23] Judith Darlene Hampton was born in Roswell, New Mexico, March 16th, 1946. And yes, she was not born with a middle name that begins with the letter Z. We'll address how she came to arrive at that letter later. Her parents named her after the heroine from the biblical book of Judith. And apparently, just like the biblical figure, Judith would behead an enemy general after getting him drunk and horny. I actually don't think there were ever any parallels between JZ and biblical Judith. JZ's mother would later tell her, according to JZ and no one else, of course, of a yaki Indian woman who held the two-week-old Judith in her— and in her broken English said, Helen, this little girl of yours will see what no one else see. Her destiny. Important. I'm a thousand percent going to call bullshit on that, but that's what JZ has claimed. As a baby, though, Judith's life was not all that special. She had three older brothers, Charles Jr., Gail and Donnie. Fucking Donnie! Dirty fucking Donnie. I don't know if he's dirty. She also had a sister named Wanda, and another sister had also died before she was born. She would later be joined by younger brother, Lloyd Jean. Not Leroy, Lloyd Jean. Never heard of that name before. Her dad, Charles, was a tenant farmer who struggled with alcoholism and frequently abandoned the family, leading Helen to divorce him when Judith was in elementary school. Not shocked. Serial killers and cult leaders. They almost never have a decent childhood full of two loving parents. Helen later remarried and according to Judith's biography, her stepfather provided for her but was emotionally distant. In her autobiography, A State of Mind, My Story, Knight would also claim that she was raped by an uncle when she was only four. Obviously, horrific if true, but I do have a hard time just taking anything she ever says at face value. Unlike many 1950s childhoods, Judith's parents would not impose religion on her to provide a sense of top down order. So Judith founded herself. When Helen was a preteen, she claimed she started teaching neighborhood kids about the Bible. When they got rowdy or asked her hostile questions, she was more likely to answer with her fists apparently. Clearly she was an Old Testament fan. She liked the angry God. Maybe she felt Jesus from the Gospels was some equivalent of being woke. Right? No turning the other cheek for little Judy. Too soft. Soon she enrolled herself in Sunday school because she had some questions too. Why, for instance, did God seem to encourage God's rape of his own daughters, a proof of Abraham's giving Sarah to other men to save his life, justify Jacob's defrauding of Esau of his birthright? Weren't all those things like pretty fucking immoral? The teacher basically told her to shut up. A young Judith would not. A couple of months later during the preacher's sermon, another incident apparently occurred. Judith's much older half-brother Marion and Marion's wife Tommy walked into church and sat down. And yes, her name was Tommy, okay? Marion had apparently asked Tommy to wear lipstick because he was a dirty, lust-whore, pervert, booper. And that was something that the preacher considered a sin, the right call, amen. When the preacher saw Tommy's red lips, he stopped his sermon, reminded everyone that wearing makeup was a sin that would lead to illicit sex. Not just sex, you guys, illicit sex. You put on fucking makeup? Well, blowjobs are next. Or maybe cunnilingus, or maybe even poop-hole-loop-holing or salad-tossing, all right? Tommy burst into tears, went to the altar rail where the preacher began to pray for her because he was a great man. Marion, that walking pile of sin, meanwhile walked out. Judith was confused. She wondered how God could have approved all sorts of horrible stuff in the Old Testament. Rape, murder, all kinds of violence. But he got his panties all bunched up over some lipstick. Who was God? Some kind of silly little bitch? Judith decided, and again, we have no idea if any of this actually ever happened, to stand up for her sister-in-law. She rose up and shouted, I love my own good God. The God of my soul would not judge his own child like this. I no longer belong here. And then she walked out of church and she never went back. Okay, Judy, I don't buy that. That's a cool story. What Judith didn't know, what she had an inkling about, what we wouldn't learn until later, was that her mom was having different kinds of religious experiences around this time. Apparently Mama Helen regularly had pre-cognitive dreams and made choices based on the info she received. So Mama Bear, probably mentally ill. Judith found out about these dreams when one day she got home from majorette tryouts at school, found her bedroom redone, new bedspread, sat and throws on the pillows, new lace curtains, along with brand new collection of make up. Make up's back. She ran to thank her mom for the presents, and Helen told her that she knew Judith was going to make the majorette squad because she had seen it in a dream. And it was true. Judith had gotten in. That proves it. And so Judith's early life would now be shaped by two vastly different forces. The status quo suburban life where boys took you to drive in movies and felt up your shirt or down your skirt, and you cheered for them at football games. And another life that felt more invisible. Present, but just beyond perception. Sometimes these two worlds would collide. Couple months after she got into the majorettes, she was at a slumber party with the other girls when, around one in the morning, she saw blinding red flashes of light to the windows. Judith immediately thought that the end of the world had arrived, remembering a prophecy from the Book of Revelation. That in the last days, the moon would turn to blood and Jesus would return to rapture the saints to heaven. But then those lights just disappeared. Almost like it was a cop car outside. Or, you know, and it just drove away after a normal, you know, little stop somewhere. Judith didn't think so, though, and this would haunt her. Four years later, she was a senior in high school talking to Kelly, who had hosted the fateful or completely normal uneventful slumber party. And in the middle of their conversation, Judith's vision faded and she saw a flash of red light. Then she saw herself walking into that light, blending with it. She tried to ask Kelly about why the girls had never talked about it, and Kelly shut down and acted like she was a fucking weirdo. Hampton, just drop it, okay? She snapped. Hampton is in Judy's maiden name.

Speaker 4:
[43:30] Judith was confused.

Speaker 1:
[43:31] What had happened? Why didn't anyone else want to talk about it? Had some outside force been at work on them? Or was Judith just fucking crazy and being shunned for good reason? Meanwhile, school marched on. Judith was looking forward to college, but her stepdad didn't have the money for it in his budget. Fortunately, her mom, Helen, loaned her a small amount and sent her off to Texas Tech in 1964 when she was 18 down in Lubbock. Still, tuition was too much, so Judith settled for the Lubbock Business College and picked up some side jobs at the local supermarket to pay her way through. She had two roommates to split rent with, but the pressure was still too much, and she wound up in the hospital with severe case of malnutrition. But soon after that, she moved home and met Chris Hensley. Well, remet him. She'd known him in high school, but now she discovered they had mutual interests, including shooting rifles. They dated for a bit, soon eloped to Mexico, back when people eloped more often than they do now because so many people lost their minds over pre-marital sex, their marriage would be a rocky one. Like Judith's father, Chris struggled with alcohol abuse. He was unfaithful as well. She would also later recall how Chris and his mother bullied her into dyeing her eye-catching blonde hair a dull black, trying to ugly her up, leaving her two-toned as it grew out. Judith stuck around to her first pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Brandon. But after their second son, Christopher, was about a year old. She was out. She left him. She went back to go live with her mom, now in Hobbs, New Mexico. Judith then soon returned to Roswell, about 115 miles from Hobbs, in the late 60s, took a job as a salesperson for a new cable TV company. Roswell was a town of about 35,000 people in the late 60s, still largely known for the Roswell UFO incident from 1947. A lot of alien talk in Roswell back then. I'm guessing in the late 60s especially, that veered a lot into new agey, theosophical, starseed, Atlantean, Lemurian, ancient alien kind of talk. I'm sure Judy heard it all between her childhood there and her time there as a young adult. And now Judy started to think about her name. Her friends had always called her Judy. At work, she was now known as Ms. Hensley. But neither of those seemed quite right for an upwardly mobile, deal-closing, corporate, cable boss fucking bitch. She allegedly was crushing it at work. Her boss, Ben Matson, wondered if she had any nicknames. Maybe those would work. Judith told him that she used to get called Zebra because she frequently wore black and white outfits. They played around with some ideas and they eventually settled on JZ. Judith Zebra. She legally took Zebra as her middle name. I love that JZ is built from that. It's a little weird, right? To adopt a supposed old nickname that nobody calls you anymore is a middle name, and then want to be called by the initials of your first name and the fake middle name. I mean, it's not that weird, I guess, but it's a little weird, and it points to her willingness to change her identity in a way most people wouldn't. Soon, JZ would move to Manhattan Beach, California. A beautiful place. I can only imagine how cool it was in the early 70s when JZ moved there. And in Manhattan Beach, she claimed she had an interesting experience. JZ would talk about it to her biographer, American religious scholar and lawyer, Jay Gordon Melton. He studied her for five years and interestingly, came away thinking that she was not faking her Ramtha possessions. He also never said Ramtha was real, but he believed in the end that JZ thought Ramtha was real. Anyway, Melton wrote that it all started like this. The young successful businesswoman had no reason to visit a fortune teller. However, JZ's friend, a woman supposedly named Twila, she wanted to visit one, so she agreed to go with Twila. Then to Twila's great surprise, the fortune teller focused almost exclusively on JZ. This focus got to be so intense that Twila reminded the fortune teller, hey, I scheduled the appointment, not JZ, I'm paying you. At which point, the fortune teller just smiled mysteriously, focused back on JZ and said, I've been waiting for you. Twila again was like, I don't think so, again, this is my appointment, like I made it. And then this time, the fortune teller didn't even bother to answer. She just ignored her, allegedly said, I've been waiting for this one. And then she led only JZ into the room where she gave her readings. Go fuck yourself, Twila, there can be only one Highlander and you are not the chosen one. Now, do you believe that any of this happened? I don't. This supposed friend Twila not interviewed for the biography. I guess this could have happened, but no part of me believes this. Cool origin story, though. JZ told Melton she was pretty confused by all this. She insisted she didn't need to know anything, but the old woman who probably had like one cloudy eye cut her off, telling her to make a fist and hold it over her head. Then the fortune teller took JZ's palm and said, I will first tell you something about your past. You are an uncertain woman. You married a man you did not love. You had two children from this marriage, two boys. You left the man. You are not from here. You are from where the coyotes howl. You are in television, communications. You market this. You are very good. Now JZ's blown away. And then the woman went straight into her future. Very soon you will leave this place. You will go where it is hot. Very hot. You will have fire on your back. Only your back will burn. You will be in the place of heat for three weeks. Then you will have two offers of work. One will be where the sky is dark with business. The other will be a place with great mountains, tall pines, lakes that shine like mirrors. If you go to the mountains and pines, you will meet the one. Do you understand? JZ said that she did not understand. And then the all-knowing oracle continued with, are you fucking stupid? I made it very clear. Go to the fucking mountains and pines, you dumb bitch. That's where the one is. No, she said, you will. If you meet the one, you will have great influence, great destiny. I have waited for you. Now I've told you, it is done. Confused. She said she asked what she should pay the woman. And then the woman said, you owe only to yourself. Now I really don't believe this. No fucking way that oracle is working this griff for free. JZ said she didn't know what to make of all this. But to JZ's astonishment, the next day, her boss called her and asked her if she wanted to move to Waco, Texas, to set up a cable TV system there. Three days later, she was off to where it was hot. Waco, where the pre-David Koresh branch Davidians were already growing a cult. In Waco, JZ began training sales and maintenance divisions, which had her working for three weeks straight. And one day on her day off, she decided to take her sons, Brandon and Christopher, to the apartment complex's pool. And when the boys were napping that afternoon, she laid down on her stomach and fell asleep. And when she woke up, her back was very red. Almost like it was on fire, exactly as the Oracle had seen with her gift of future sight. That's true. A few days later, JZ's boss called her to announce that Waco was done, and he wanted to send her to one of two places. She could go to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or Bremerton, Washington. And he said that Bremerton was around lots of trees and mountains and lakes. Holy shit. It's almost like the Oracle fucking nailed all this. Or that JZ reverse engineered her Oracle story to predict things she did like a normal person outside of any fake Oracle visit. JZ apparently now wasted no time in telling her boss that she felt like her life was being guided by supernatural forces. Ben did not understand that. But he now allegedly delivered a message from the person who had taken her to see that fortune teller, her friend Twila. And how did her boss from Roswell even fucking know her friend Twila from Manhattan Beach? That is never explained. But allegedly, Ben the boss said, Twila told me to tell you something about the old woman dying. Sorry, let me restart. Twila told me to tell you something about some old woman dying, and something about how she never found out anything. I hope you can figure that one out. And then, JZ Supples, she told Ben, please tell Twila that I think I'm going to meet the one. Get the fuck out of here. Now I'm positive this never happened. Why don't you tell Twila that you're going to meet the one, JZ? She's your friend. You have her phone number. If Twila wanted to tell you something about an old woman dying, she would have called you directly. Not used to your boss, who doesn't even live in the same fucking state as an unnecessary intermediary. This is absurd. You know, it's one thing when a good grifter with a great story cons a bunch of people. That does piss me off a lot, but it pisses me off so much more when a lazily written bunch of bullshit cons a bunch of people. Oh, so much conning. So much conning in the world is fucking constant right now. Ben, for his part, supposedly told JZ that she sounded weird and that she needed to get out of Waco. Soon that would happen. As JZ and her son flew into the Seattle Tacoma Airport, she looked down and saw the fortune tellers' words come true. Lakes reflecting like mirrors. The glowing sunlight. The tall pines and great mountains. But her first year in Tacoma would not bring her much. But then, in 1973, this unnamed cable company JZ worked for suddenly collapsed, leaving her without a job. No problem. JZ didn't need them anymore. She formed her own cable company, Man Communications and Marketing, which was apparently very successful according to only her. Apparently, success was not just due to her knack for business, but a knack for something supernatural as well. Also according to her, her staff was amazed by her ability to know exactly where and when to send salespeople. Totally. That is exactly how someone with powerful psychic abilities is going to use them. Regional sales, running a business with a lot of employees and tons of corresponding paperwork. I mean, you definitely wouldn't use those abilities to say, pick stocks that were about to explode on Wall Street and not bother with the headache of managing a ton of people. I mean, you definitely wouldn't just easily set up your own brokerage accounts and then, I don't know, buy low, sell high over and over, make the most money anyone has ever fucking made in history all by yourself. No, too easy. Why not make things infinitely harder for yourself? Unfortunately, working so hard, so psychically hard, took its toll. That same year, JZ wound up in the hospital, as I'm sure she saw, with degenerative mononucleosis. And one of the drugs she was given to treat it made her hair fall out, which she probably knew was going to happen. And then when she was finally sent home, she was mostly bedbound, as was ordained. Then a few weeks later, her colleague, Frank Smith, stopped by and he told her that he and his fiance were going to a tent revival, put on by a healing evangelist. Did she want to come? At first, JZ resisted. She remembered how closed-minded her childhood church had been, and she didn't want to repeat experience. But Frank insisted, and she went. And again, surprise, she didn't already know about all this, psychically. As she settled into the revival tent, she was flooded with pain, the pain of her illness, the emotional pain of being back in her hometown church, like in her mind. But then the preacher called for people to come up for a healing prayer. And despite reservations, she did go up in front of everyone. And before he could lay hands on her, she announced, quote, I want to tell you something. I love God more than you can conceive of and more than you can preach. I denounced Satan a long time ago because he does not exist. He never did. When you understand the love of God, there is no room for evil or sin. Now I am dying. When you lay your hands on me, you pray for the one who loves God. Don't even mention the name of Satan. He has no place here. He never has. And supposedly the preacher listened to her and was not offended in the slightest by her telling him that Satan, one of the kind of big guys in his story, was not real. Gotta say, I am surprised. For Evangelical tent revival style preachers, Satan's trickery, pretty big foundational cornerstone of their core belief system. This preacher suppose he prayed, Oh God, our father, look upon this child and lift her life so that she may be healed. Oh God, oh God. And then something miraculous happened, allegedly. A sudden flash of blue light came from the top of the tent, striking JZ, blasting the preacher as well and a woman standing next to him. And the congregation gassed. This is like out of a movie. And when JZ opened her eyes after getting struck by this magical bolt of blue lightning, she felt fucking awesome, completely pain free. The lightning just zapped her fucking illness out of her. According to JZ, this miraculous healing was confirmed by medical tests. And to JZ, this was a huge insight. Now, has she posted these medical tests online anywhere so investigative journalists could access them, contact medical professionals involved and verify them? Fuck no. That would take too much of the fun and exciting mystery out of all this. JZ wondered why the godlike being that had attached itself to her destiny would allow her to be ill. But now she understood that before she could be healed, she had to cooperate with God. In other words, her words, she had been open to the idea of God but hadn't been ready to embrace the fact that God needed her specifically. And now she started thinking that she, JZ, was her own sister, the one who had died before she was born, the one who had been miscarried. Are we all following this? That JZ has a godlike presence attached to her spiritually and she is her own unborn sister, reincarnated. And why had she been reincarnated into her own sister's body? Why, for a very special purpose, of course. JZ soon met Jeremy Wilder, a local dentist who had similar beliefs. And the two of them would get married in 1977. Yes, her special reincarnated destiny was to get married to a dentist in the Pacific Northwest. 100%. This is all lining up very nicely. Together, the two of these weirdos quickly became obsessed with pyramids. Stay with me. In the 1970s, pyramids were all the rage within new age communities. There was even a very, very popular book, 1973's Pyramid Power, The Science of the Cosmos, by Dr. Gillis Patrick Flanagan, that discussed the mysterious properties of properly aligned pyramids. And what exactly was Dr. Flanagan a doctor of? Bullshit, it seems. His 2019 obituary, after he died in Ecuador at the age of 75, claims that Dr. Flanagan gained international scientific fame from a very young age, that at the age of 11, he developed and sold a guided missile detector to the US military after being discovered at his school's science fair. Uh-huh. An 11-year-old sold a guided fucking missile detector to the US military, which there was no documentation of. He actually was featured, though, in a WizKids edition of Life magazine in September of 1962 for his Neurophone, his most famous invention, which he made allegedly by himself at the age of 14. It purportedly allows people to hear through their skin and their bones by bypassing their ears with an extremely low-current, high-voltage ultrasonic signal. It can also somehow boost your brain signals and help you learn much faster than if you had to take a lesson, you know, via your ears, like a normal plebe. Its results have never been scientifically verified. It has been tested many times, and its claims seem to consistently land squarely in the realm of junk science and grift. He also sold shit called Crystal Energy, part of his Flanagan Microclusters line of poorly regulated supplements. It was a liquid silica-based supplement designed to increase water hydration and simulate the properties of glacial milk. It aimed to decrease surface tension, supposedly allowing better nutrient absorption for your health. And what is glacial milk? It's the cloudy white or turquoise colored meltwater flowing from glaciers, filled with finely ground rock particles known as rock flour or glacial flour, forms when moving glaciers crush bedrock into a fine silt, creating a high mineral content. And why do we need to drink it? We don't actually. We truly don't. None of this shit has been scientifically proven to do fucking anything at all. Search Dr. Flanagan enough and you will find all sorts of articles with words like snake oil and quackery. And what medical school, circling back to his doctorate, did he get his doctorate from? None. He was not a medical doctor. So what PhD program did he complete to get his doctorate then? None. He was an honorary doctor. And who gave him this honor? Himself. And again, this motherfucker is who wrote the pyramid book, The JZ Went Nuts Over. It's just fucking grifters writing books read by future grifters and fucking, it's just a cycle of grift that just keeps rolling forward. According to who, not Dr. Flanagan, there was not much a pyramid could not do. Right? They could preserve food. Dull razor blades put inside a pyramid would just become very sharp, just without being touched. The pyramids themselves actually mummified bodies via pyramid magic, not through post-mortem preservation rituals. That's why the Egyptians buried their dead within them. The craze reached JZ and Jeremy via a dinner party, where they met a man named George, no last name given because he probably is not real. George supposedly decided to experiment with putting a bottle of wine in a pyramid, a pyramid tent, excuse me. He's got a tent shaped like a pyramid. He put the wine in there and he wanted to see if the tent pyramid magic would make it taste better. And it did. Oh, hell yeah. Yep, he just stuck a fucking bottle of cheap wine in a tent. The pyramid shape just really enhances the flavor. Incredible. It's incredible anyone could make it through an entire dinner with George. I think I might have had to walk out once he wouldn't shut the fuck up out his tent wine. After this dinner, Jeremy got obsessed with pyramids, making one after the other. And I got to just, you know, like whatever, a blanket or whatever. Soon the house was full of them, pyramids housing everything from shoes to bananas. Jeremy, he sounds unwell. One day in February of 1977, JZ was joking around near one of these pyramids announcing to Jeremy, Attention, attention, you are now about to witness a miracle. We are about to place our new brain machine upon the willing victim, upon whom nature did not smile with great intelligence. In moments, gentlemen, you will witness a truly magnificent transformation. Sounds like they were high as fuck. So she's saying all this weird shit in their house full of pyramid shapes. And then the magic happened. And JZ saw light at the end of the kitchen. How much fucking acid are mushrooms were they on? Now she's being very serious. It's the one, the one that the great Oracle of Manhattan Beach had foretold of. And the one was a giant of a man whose head touched the ceiling. He was also glowing and purple. Fuck yeah. He was also apparently gorgeous and his dazzling appearance calm, JZ, who felt a sense of peacefulness immediately entered the room. I have come to help you over the ditch. Beloved woman, the greatest things are achieved with a light heart. It is the ditch of limitation and fear I will help you over. For you will, indeed, beloved woman, become a light unto the world. Know that you are greatly loved, for the Father in heaven knows of you and loves you greatly, indeed. Beloved woman, I desire you to know that you and your beloved family are in danger within this house. I desire you to be out of this place within five days, in your counting and in number. Your children will dream a dream of what is to come. Heed the dream. I have prepared for you your new hovel. Indeed, there is a noble runner, entity, that will help you find it. You will know who he is. Indeed, beloved woman, there are many changes coming. Prepare yourself. Know that you are greatly loved. I am Ramtha, the enlightened one. And then he disappeared. I got to be honest. I expected a more powerful opening from Ramtha. I felt like he started with too much ditch talk. I didn't like the ditch reference. And he said indeed too much. And I don't like how he opened and closed his little appearance with referring to himself as the enlightened one. I just feel like if you were truly enlightened, you wouldn't need to keep telling people that you were enlightened. Your enlightenment would do all the enlightenment talking. So now you might be asking, who the fuck is Ramtha? Oh, it's so good. By his own account, Ramtha lived on earth 35,000 years ago in a time today known only through archaeological remains and myths, but not really. The actual archaeological remains we have from 35,000 years ago, pretty sparse, some very rudimentary cave paintings, roughly carved figurines, crude bone and stone tools, not much. Nothing at all that suggests any civilization we would now consider even remotely civilized. Mostly we have skeletons from cave people who were living in small nomadic bands. Humanity was thousands and thousands of years away from anything resembling a city. But this motherfucker, Ramtha, said he was a Lemurian from Lemuria, tracks, which formed the northern part of the ancient continent of Atlatia, better known as Atlantis. More this Helena Blavatsky, right? Rudolph Steiner, Charles, you know, Leadbeater, theosophical, whack-a-doodle-bullshit, stuff for which we have literally no archaeological evidence of whatsoever. But according to Ramtha and the New Age pioneer theosophists, Atlantis was very real. And the last civilization of Atlantis focused on building incredible technology they had learned about when they made contact with aliens, divine non-physical beings from Venus and shit, and from these alien teachers, they developed flying machines, flying saucers, and their scientists learned how to transform light into pure energy. Fucking awesome, bro. Incredible story. Wild and no evidence proving this shit in literally any way has ever been discovered. Like not a single thing, anywhere in the world by anyone. But anyway, after the magical Atlanteans transformed light into pure energy, this technology ended up ripping a hole in the cloud cover that surrounded Earth, and then a great flood submerged the northern half of Atlantis, completely covering Lemuria. God damn it. Many Lemurians fled south, and Ramtha's family began living in the slums of Oni, a great port city I'm sure you've heard of, the remains of which magically evaporated apparently. But Ramtha and Fam lived there, along with the rest of the Lemurians from northern Atlantis, which led to like a pretty bad refugee crisis, and a whole fucking feudal system developed, where the Lemurians occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. Dang it. Apparently Ramtha and his family were literally spat and pissed on, and quote, allowed to wash it away only with tears. God, people were literally pissing on Ramtha and his family, and then they were allowed to only rinse the piss off with their own tears. That is hard times. That's the hardest times. God dang, they must have either been able to cry so much to get all that piss rinsed off, or I guess they were just always covered in piss, or this is not a very good story. Anyway, in addition to being constantly spit and pissed on, Ramtha's mom was repeatedly raped for years, and impregnated and gave birth to Ramtha's younger brother and sister. Then, when his mom and sister died, he cremated their bodies to keep them from being literally eaten by desert scavengers. What in the fucking Mad Max fever dream is going on here? Then, at his mother and sister's towering funeral pyre, Ramtha swore off Atlantis and their quote unknown God. Soon after, he set out for a nearby mountain range to confront God, but instead found a woman who gave him a sword. This feels like it was written by a barely literate eighth grader, experiencing a very serious mental health crisis. She told him, take this sword and conquer yourself. Okay. Giant purple guy goes to a mountain to talk to God, but instead finds a sword lady who speaks and riddles. Ramtha went back to Oni and other people joined him. By the time he reached the port city, he was effectively leading an army, I guess because he had his cool magic sword, and just people wanted to be part of whatever he was up to. When Ramtha and his army made it back, because the Atlanteans who were just very recently pissing and spitting on him and spitting on his mom all the time, in this time that he was gone, they literally all forgot how to fight and they just didn't resist. And now Ramtha and his army proceeded to kill everyone and burn the city except for the food store houses, which he gave to the Lemurians. Hip hip hooray, for he's a jolly good fellow. This is truly the boneheaded drivel that JZ Knight has shared, and she is worth so many tens of millions of dollars. Over the next decade, Ramtha became a true warrior, leading a barbarian army that he was already leading, and he was already a warrior, but don't even worry about it. Apparently, Ramtha actually wanted to die to join his mom and sister, but he was too good at battle to be killed. He was very good at killing other people, but very bad at figuring out how to kill himself, okay? Knight claims Ramtha was so good at battle, he ended up leading an army of over 2.5 million warriors, which is actually more than twice the estimated world's population when he supposed to do this, whatever, he led them for 63 years, which is a long time, and he conquered three-fourths of the known world, while the world, which was allegedly going through cat... while the world, excuse me, was allegedly going through cataclysmic geological changes. And then finally, after many years of warfare, he was led into a trap where an assassin stabbed him, leaving a gaping, bleeding hole in his body. I guess it was like a weirdly big knife, and no one knew how to fix it, because in addition to a lot of people forgetting how to fight recently, a bunch of people who had recently had all kinds of flying ships and built a society of great cities from energy that ran on only light also forgot how to doctor. But fear not, Ramtha didn't die. Instead, he heard a voice yelling, Stand up, stand up. So he did, and his wound was just like going away now and stuff. His enemies didn't understand what had happened. They thought he must be immortal, so they got the fuck on out of there. And now Ramtha was left to contemplate who had healed him. Could it possibly be Godda? Ramtha thought about it for a while during his lengthy healing process, and he eventually decided that the mythological gods were only the symbols of human fears and desires. The unknown God, on the other hand, was the ongoing essence that permitted humans to create and live. And now Ramtha lost his death wish. He instead focused on becoming like the wind, adaptable, powerful, but not resistant to change in currents. He spent six years, six fucking years in a row, quote, becoming like the wind. Wow. Damn. I mean, that feels like the right amount of time, you know? Feels like it'd be hard to become like the wind. After those six years of wind channeling, Ramtha had his first out of body experience, his consciousness separate from his body, and he felt himself flying on the wind. Wind training, complete check. He's astral projecting now. Astral projection, another concept JZ stole from the Theosophists. This caused his bodily vibration to change, and he became lighter and started glowing for some reason. And by the way, if I didn't add it before, JZ in interviews has said that her stuff is not theosophical. She tries to act like this, she came up with this shit, which she definitely did not. I mean, she came up with it, but it's all built on theosophy. Anyway, so now he's a dude who glows, and then after more than 60 out of body experiences, he concludes that his work on earth is complete. He then taught some of his soldiers everything he knew for exactly 120 days. Then he told them that they had to put their faith in God. He made them farewell, rose up into the air, and in a bright flash of light ascended before them to become a God himself. Then 35,000 years later, he reappears to the chosen one, JZ Knight. He had been waiting all that time for a small time psychic grifter, killing it in cable TV installations. Actually, the reason he chose JZ Knight is because 35,000 years ago, she was Ramtha's daughter, right? Daddy never forgot baby girl. The morning after this very important Lemurian visit, JZ's son Chris reported a vivid dream in which hippies, fucking hippies, broke into their house, pry on drugs, killed his stepdad and brother. Sounds like the Manson murders. Within a few days, the family moved into another home. And when they returned to grab more of their stuff, they found that their house had indeed been broken into and ransacked just as the Oracle foretold. Excuse me, not Oracle, fucking Ramtha foretold. Also, I'm calling bullshit on this, who moves into a house that fast? What, their kid has a bad dream a few days later? Already living in a new house? After JZ and her family moved, Ramtha now returned to share some basic info about himself. But it was difficult, because he didn't speak English very well. Motherfucker learned how to become the wind. But for some reason, didn't take the time to learn English, before bestowing his spiritual wisdom to someone who only spoke English. The story just keeps getting better. Despite her initial enthusiasm, JZ was concerned. At first, she thought she might be demonically possessed or oppressed, and she went to a priest for help. When that didn't help, she sought help elsewhere, and eventually found her way to the Reverend Lorraine Graham, a medium at a local spiritualist church. And during their meeting, JZ went into a trance where her posture changed, so it must be real, and her whole body, especially her neck, seemed to expand, and she smiled in a weird way. And then Ramtha began to speak through her instead of, you know, just appearing to everyone else the way he appeared to JZ. This shit kills me every time it comes up in spiritual context, whether it's a wacky New Age cult or an established religion. Really? God is only going to speak to one person at a time, only to Moses, or to Joseph Smith, or to the Pope, or to insert cult leader and or prophet name here. That is the biggest bullshit red flag of all. A deity so powerful, they can create worlds, they can become the wind, but they only like to talk to one person through visions or dreams at a time, or speak through their body. They say never say never, but I will never follow a spiritual ideology that has a VIP section in it, where direct access to leadership is restricted from the plebes. If I can't talk directly to the dude or lady or non-gender entity in charge, I'm not buying it. I'm not basing my entire spiritual life on teachings. I have to just trust some motherfucker that they didn't pull out of their asses. Ramtha told the group speaking through JZ Knight, and her husband Jeremy was there for this too, that JZ would become a great light into the world. When she came out of the trance, Reverend Lorraine said that JZ was an extraordinarily powerful medium, and that Ramtha was an exceptionally powerful being as well. But then in a later interview, Reverend Lorraine suggested that JZ wasn't actually a medium, she was more of a channel. As I understand it, she said, a channel leaves her body as in death and allows the entity to express his own personality. A medium only serves as a bridge between dimensions, but does not entirely leave her body. It is a rare phenomenon for one to allow herself to be used like that. So cool. So next level. JZ came around to the idea of Ramtha being able to use her body, but she knew she'd also need help to reach the kinds of communities that would accept this strange arrangement. Okay, before we move forward, let me take a moment to let you hear this entity, so you can picture how truly absurd this shit is. To start with, I'll let you hear JZ speaking as JZ. So here's JZ.

Speaker 6:
[75:08] If you having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son.

Speaker 1:
[75:18] I mean, pretty fucking cool. No, of course that's JZ the artist. I wish that was how she talked. Here is JZ Knight, speaking as JZ Knight.

Speaker 5:
[75:29] About everything. Then finally one day introducing what I was supposed to do about this. Everything, the wall went out, I saw all kinds of, the wall disappeared. Here was the future rushing like a locomotive into my living room. Things I'd never seen, people I never met. And the Ram and me. And when the Ram finally took me out of my body for the first time, I was scared to death. Many says, are you going to stay in your body and avoid death, or you want to leave it and see that you've conquered it?

Speaker 1:
[76:06] She'll say like the Ram and she'll also say Ramtha. Here is Ramtha now. So you can see the difference in the voice.

Speaker 8:
[76:13] I'm sick of all these witches and warlocks. All of it's locked.

Speaker 1:
[76:25] That's why. That was Alex Jones. That was a different Grifter. That was Alex Jones song. Here for real now is Ramtha appearing on the Merv Griffin show in 1985.

Speaker 10:
[76:36] That which is turned is that why indeed Holocaust is not war. Know you what war is. Your country prepares to do battle with another country and they prepare to do battle for you or with you. It shan't ever be war that will ever destroy. That is not the great Holocaust entity. It is called the war of value life, which is called nature. Know you what that which is called nature is. Diseasements indeed, that is already here, and yet it will grow even more vast. It is greater than any bomb.

Speaker 1:
[77:18] Okay, so that was 1985. Now check out how Ramtha's accent has changed over the years. This next clip comes from sometime around 2016.

Speaker 11:
[77:26] That maybe, just maybe, that the greatest gift of life and our day really is contained within us in this magical field that doesn't exist, you know, is something other than ourself. It is quintessential part and parcel of ourself. It is us. So pretty soon, you will graduate God from being that mean old, fearful, dreadful creature to something that's sublime.

Speaker 1:
[78:00] You would think that the accent would say the same. I feel like it was more Indian back in 1985 and more British now. Part and parcel.

Speaker 9:
[78:09] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[78:10] Thank you, Jamie. And now before continuing to learn more about the early days of JZ Ramtha's grift, time for today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks.

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Speaker 1:
[80:46] Thanks for listening to the sponsors. Hope you heard some deals that you liked and used our codes and landing pages so that they know we sent you. And now let's return to early 1977 and learn more about how JZ changed her life when she made up her Ramtha bullshit. Within a few weeks of JZ meeting Ramtha, she met Mary Redhead, described in her biography as a person who was unknowledgeable of the psychic scene in the Pacific Northwest. Apparently, Mary Redhead took immediate liking to JZ and offered to be her guide through this psychic subculture. Mary Redhead. She put almost no effort into making up this particular fake person's name. Have you ever met a Mary Redhead? When I searched for Mary Redhead, almost every single result was a porn website, thinking, I guess, that I wanted to find porn that had to involve a lady named Mary with red hair, which apparently there's an abundance of. When I asked the Internet, has there ever been a real woman named Mary Redhead? I got five women from the UK, most of whom lived in the 1700s or 1800s, and one First Nations Cree woman from Canada who's still alive. Technically, they do exist, but I do not believe there was a big wig in the Pacific Northwest psychic subculture in the 70s named Mary Redhead. But fucking whatever. Mary Redhead allegedly began booking JZ's lessons. Within a few months, JZ was a full-time unpaid psychic, but there was a problem. After working with many of these people, according to JZ, her phone was ringing off the hook day and night. JZ came to the conclusion that most of the people who wanted time with Ramtha were vampires. Psychic vampires who wanted to drain her energy and life force and didn't actually want to solve their problems.

Speaker 4:
[82:25] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[82:27] JZ was running herself ragged trying to give them spiritual advice, and it was seeming like it was all for nothing. Soon though, Ramtha appeared and offered her a solution. You are to ask for a tally of gold when, indeed, they come to learn.

Speaker 4:
[82:41] Uh, what?

Speaker 1:
[82:43] This was apparently Ramtha's way of telling her that she needed to start charging people money. Kill me. This ancient entity waited 35,000 years to help a crazy lady in the Northwest make selling his teachings profitable? Okay. Mary Redhead was apparently all too happy to help with the bookkeeping and vetting potential clients now. Right? She wanted to make some coin too. So now, JZ introduced Ramtha to the public. At her first session, details about where it happened are not given in sources. She'd assemble a small group of, let's call them idiots, I mean, seekers. Ramtha appeared, his presence somehow ruining the tape recorders that had been set up to capture the audio. And he gave personalized advice to everyone gathered there. Right? That's the claim. Then on December 18th, JZ held the first of what would become called the Ramtha Dialogues in Mary Redhead's Seattle home. Dialogues consisted of Ramtha making a presentation followed by a Q&A. Over the next year, word of Ramtha spread, and JZ started to make trips to the East Coast for dialogue sessions. Started to dress the part too, wearing loose-fitting suits, Indian-style tunics. She tied her hair back in a ponytail just like Ramtha supposedly wore his. Journalist Fawn Brazzo, a long-time reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, would describe her this way. A youngish woman of medium height with pale blonde hair and dark roots. She is dressed in a deep blue velvet robe covered with gold braiding. She has an all-American cuteness about her, vaguely resembling Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Montgomery. Before 1979 was up, JZ was giving Ramtha dialogues across the country. Then after two years of that, in 1981, she and Jeremy Wilder got divorced. The strain of touring so much proved to be too much for their marriage is one story. I'm guessing there's another. Maybe JZ finally got too crazy for him with all her Ramtha bullshit. Maybe he refused to believe that his wife was a chosen one. After her divorce, JZ decided that she needed to incorporate her new business somehow, and she founded the Church I Am Non-Profit Religious Corporation. Interesting choice of name. It feels like it was 100% definitely chosen to appeal to new age types because there was a US-based theosophical religious group called the I Am Activity founded in the 1930s by Guy and Edna Ballard. They peaked in 1938 with claims of nearly a million members. I don't think they had that many. They were also lunatics. They were big into a combo belief in ascended masters and reincarnation, were ascended masters who had reincarnated until perfection and had become immortal light beings, right? Think the light workers of Lynn and Jamie McGonigal. That's true. Right? They could speak through specially chosen trained messengers, that is channels like Guy and Edna. Guy died in 1939. His wife and son were then convicted of fraud a few years later on brand. They were very into Lemurians, specifically thinking that a bunch of them lived around Mount Shasta in California. Clearly, JZ was very familiar with their teachings. She would have some trouble getting financial matters straightened out though. So in the early 1980s, the Church IM dissolved. Weird. She must not have been listening close enough to Ramtha's financial advice. Or maybe financial responsibility wasn't really this thing. Although he was the guy who wanted her to start charging for his teachings. Surprisingly, he didn't step in earlier and help her budget her money better. JZ replaced her Church IM non-profit corporation with a simple LLC. In 1983, she would release the first two volumes of what would be a series of books based on Ramtha's teachings. That same year, Schultz got married for the third time to Jeffrey Knight. That's how she got the JZ Knight name. She met him back in 1980 and soon after divorced Jeremy. Ramtha let her know that the two of them were soulmates. Yay, soulmates. Okay, coincidentally in 1984, author Jess Stern wrote a chapter on Ramtha for his book Soulmates, which would show how JZ's influence or Ramtha's influence was spreading. Stern described the time Ramtha met the actress Joan Hackett and told her that she'd have an upswing in her career. You will make more movies and you will win high honors in your profession. I will send you three offers in three days. And in one, you will play a woman who is very like you. I have no fear, I will manifest it. So all will happen as I say. And Ramtha also had an influence on the career of the legendary Shirley MacLean. MacLean would describe her searching for spiritual understanding in her book, Out on a Limb, which Ramtha had encouraged her to write. Yeah, for sake, Shirley MacLean was in on this. Six time Academy Award nominee. She won once, won an Emmy, two BAFTAs, six Golden Globes, legendary actress, a huge star for decades. And she went in hard on this ridiculous bullshit. She claimed that in a previous life back in Atlantis, she was Ramtha's brother. During her first meeting with Ramtha, she said he picked her up in his arms, carried her around the room, literally carried her. And then in subsequent meetings, he told her that she had been, you know, she had been his brother while he was living in Atlantis, and told her stories about all the things that used to do together. Whatever shit she was on, when Ramtha carried her around the room, I want to try it. In a following book, Shirley wrote Dancing in the Light. She wrote that, quote, One accredited medium was more profound than any of the others. His name was Ramtha. He humorously predicted personal events in my life that always evolved to be true. I asked questions related to everything from the personal life of Jesus Christ, to whether I would ever meet my soulmate in this incarnation. What I learned from Ramtha would fill another book. But no matter how much I learned from him, it continually reminded me that I already knew all the answers. Ramtha also advised her to turn down two movie offers, and I wait for a third, predicting that you will not only win the highest award for this coming picture, but you will bring great enlightenment to the world with your writings. The movie she accepted was Terms of Endearment, still one of her most acclaimed performances. Shirley's writings would help push the group to get even more publicity. I'm sure that's why fucking JZ was telling her all this kind of crazy shit like she was Ramtha's brother playing with her ego to get this big star to spread their word more. It works. She gets more converts. United Airline executive Steve Klein read her book in the Tucson Arizona airport on his way to spend Thanksgiving with his family. After that, he sought out videos of Knight's channeling on VHS, then started to attend presentations of hers around the world, started helping her with tips and tricks about optimizing business travel to earn fucking mileage rewards, OK? He was eventually hired to work in community outreach for JZ's group. This is my frequency, he would say almost four decades later in 2022. All right, so he had a psychotic break. But some other press came from less desirable sources. Backing up a little bit to May 24th, 1983, that week's Weekly World News informed its readers that a 35,000 year old spirit from a lost civilization lives again within the body of an ordinary American housewife. Weekly World News was a tabloid whose recurring stories included ones about Batboy, who was featured first in a 1992 issue after being found in a cave in West Virginia. Batboy would go on to fight in the War on Terror. He would lead troops to capture Saddam Hussein. He'd bite Santa Claus and he would travel to outer space in certain issues. That shit used to get my great-grandma still all kinds of worked up. They presented Batboy as a real half bat, half human cryptid and my grandma 100% believed in him and feared him. Another recurring weekly world news segment was the occasional alive cover in which the magazine would present evidence that a mummy or a prehistoric creature or a human who had been frozen in a block of ice or a notable dead celebrity like Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Hitler or Elvis Presley was still alive. So not exactly the best company for Ramtha to keep but also perfectly fitting company. This didn't hurt JZ's business though. She didn't need the whole world to see her as legit. Mostly she just needed a few ideally wealthy people like Shirley MacLaine and she would get others. Over 1984, the Ramtha dialogues would evolve into weekend intensives and retreats in the desert of Yucca Valley, California. Several attendees while not famous were wealthy. By 1985, JZ was appearing on the Merv Griffin show as I played a clip of earlier. Wearing a long sort of tunic looking tan trench coat, he bowed multiple times so cringey to Merv and kissed him before announcing his Ramtha. This is what is called television, to capture a moment in time forever. You're my first 35,000 year old guest, the host says, jovially playing along. Ramtha replies, you are well this day, in your time. When they sit down on the couch, she kind of looms over him, stretching out her neck and smiling in a very fucking cringey way. As he asks her slash him if it was hard to wake up, Ramtha insists that he doesn't slumber. When Merv asks him where he is when he's not here, i.e. on earth, Ramtha asks, would you like to see? Merv says, no. Cue a bunch of laughter from the audience. Later in the conversation, Merv says that it's interesting that Ramtha is talking so well in modern English. It's great to know that somebody 35,000 years ago has such a great command of the language. Then Ramtha replies, even before my time, they did so. Wait a minute. I thought he had trouble with English. That's what JZ said earlier. Hmm. Later, Ramtha says that scientists haven't found great civilizations yet. Little later still, Merv says, what is your message? What is your most important message? Ramtha says something that's kind of hard to make out, but seems to be something along the lines of, God has been misunderstood. And then, that which is called Christ is within your being. That which is called life is the grand experience, which is where the kingdom of heaven is located. This bean, excuse me, the mid-80s, Merv Griffin asked her for a prediction, if the planet is headed for a nuclear holocaust. Are we in danger on this planet of any major catastrophe? He says, and Ramtha replied, It shan't ever be war that we'll destroy. That is not the great holocaust entity. It is nature, diseasements indeed. That is already here, and yet it will grow even more vast. It is greater than any bomb they could conceive have been dropped. No, you, who created the diseas, mankind. For they have the power within them to do that. It is from their attitude. Now that is no holocaust. They have done these things and manifested these things for learning, to gain wisdom. The earth will never be destroyed. It will not rotate on its axis. No one is going to drop bombs on it. It will go on and on, but the greater consciousness is coming. Still doesn't seem like he's master English. JZ or rather Ramtha would beat the self-empowerment drum more than the imminent apocalypse drum in the months to come. To his students, he said that they had forgotten their heritage and needed to stand up, throw off their bonds of limitations and reclaim their lives as divine beings. In one lecture he said, I am not here to be worshipped or to be idolized or to be sought after. I am to be lived. I wish none to sit at my feet but to look at me in the eye. I wish to exalt all men as I have been exalted. I wish no followers, only leaders. And I will not free you. But you will buy your own conviction that you are. And that be better indeed. I am not a sage. I am not a fortune teller. I am not a priest. I am but a teacher, servant, brother unto you. Oh, Ramtha, man for the people. For equality, for equity, for everyone. And everyone can learn about Ramtha if they just buy enough of JZ's books and attend her very expensive retreats. Ramtha also critiqued a lot of other belief systems, such as Christianity, claiming that it had seriously aired in its ideas of sin, hell and damnation, and through its teachings kept people in poverty. He would say, the church has been a form of great tyranny because it has suppressed people and kept them ignorant for many centuries. Through its dogma, it has taught that to find God, you cannot be a rich man. This teaching has been a very clever design to give great power to the church. If you keep a man suppressed by removing his treasury, giving him a little ground to work, and then forcing him to give the best of his yield to the church, you will always have dominion over him, always. I mean, I don't disagree, but I mean, that's what these people do, right? Does anybody trying to win religious converts to their religion is always going to be like, the rest are bad, not always, but oftentimes, everybody else is wrong, I'm right. His harshest words were reserved for the church's use of manipulation and fear as tools of social control. I'll tell you a great truth. Man has created images of God that he would use to control his brothers. Religions were created to control people and nations when armies failed, and fear was the tool that kept them in line. If you take divinity out of any man, take God out of him, then you can easily rule and control him. God wasn't here to punish us or make us obey him, Ramtha said. God wasn't even an entity in the way that Christianity thinks about him. Instead, God was, quote, An all-consuming force that is everything. God is not a singular character who sits upon a throne and judges the whole of life. God is the whole of life, every pulsating moment. I mean, again, I don't necessarily disagree, but that doesn't mean I think that Ramtha is legit. But how did Ramtha square this with the idea, seen in almost every religion, that God created the universe? After all, don't you have to be an entity of some kind to do something like that? This was how Ramtha said our universe was created. In the beginning, all that existed was the, quote, infinity of thought. And where did this thought come from? You might wonder. Well, don't worry about it. Just turn your brain off when you get to that part and skip it. God was thought without form, capital T, Ramtha said. But thought then contemplated itself. And when thought with a capital T contemplated thought with a lowercase t, God expanded into a unique form of himself. And what does any of that really mean? Don't even fucking worry about it. Ramtha said this thought slash thought, uppercase lowercase, happens all the time. According to Ramtha, anytime thought capital T is contemplated, the action of pure reasoning expands the thought lowercase t. In other words, the thought becomes more or greater. Uh-huh. Word salad. And when that happens, the idea expands into very high-frequency light, of course, which is then lowered or slowed first to become something called electron, i.e. existence in an electromagnetic field with a positive-negative polarity, which in turn coagulates into gross matter, obviously. So much word salad. So much shit that sounds like the script of a low-budget sci-fi movie. See what you need to do to fuel the quantum overdrive is to load it with enough coarse light fractals to power up the astral defibrillator so it can hit the wormhole at the proper fifth reality matrix vibrational cycle. And then you can make it to the starseed galaxy realm where they have that 1-7-11 that has the best chili dogs. Anyway, Ramtha's Theosophical Madlib, gibberish session, continued with, In the beginning, thought, capital T, via contemplation of itself expanded into the principle of thought termed light, capital L, and humanity originated in the birthing of this light uppercase L. Light came into existence as a multitude of something called particums, and each of these particums became an individual, a son of God, or in other terms, a light being. Everyone was created at the same time as a light form, and the soul was created to capture and hold thought and love, which was created out of God's desire to find expression in the on-going-ness of creation, obviously. And then these little light guys, they contemplated themselves, which created matter, and that created billions of stars. Okay, don't worry about it. Matter in turn coagulated into molecular and cellular structures' basic forms. That's true. According to Ramtha, these light guys are like mirror gods with the lowercase G, but God capital G is the universe itself, and we, lowercase gods, created all the things in the universe by thought and contemplation. Get it? Do you get it? It's not complicated. If all of that didn't make perfect sense to you, congrats. You're dumber than dog shit. You're the stupidest person alive. Sorry, that's probably too much. That's true. Anyway, in essence, all of that means, according to Ramtha, that what we now know as the geologic record is actually a presentation of the evolutions of thoughts, bacteria to simple plants and animals and finally more complex life forms. But as life evolved, light beams decided to create a vehicle through which they could both directly experience creation and continue to express their creativity. In other words, they wanted physical bodies and that is how humans were created. How cool. We create our own reality. And so if your life is trash right now, get to manifesting motherfucker, get off your lazy ass and manifest something. Get make your goddamn castles and buttons and shit.

Speaker 10:
[99:45] Do you believe that you can create buttons?

Speaker 2:
[99:48] Do you believe that you can create castles?

Speaker 11:
[99:50] Do you believe that you can create buttons?

Speaker 1:
[99:52] Castles. That's Abraham Hicks again. Oh, in Ramtha's words, quote, the essence that you are is that which is ongoing, ever evolving, ever changing, ever being. You are thought, you are light, you are electrum, you are form. You are pure energy. Awesome. I just picture people getting so pumped hearing this. You are pure energy. Oh, yes, we are. Awesome power. Oh, fuck yeah. Pulsating emotion, sublime thought. That which you have perceived to be the highest level of intelligence, of power, dignity, holiness, and grace is that which is you. Who are you? You are the identifiable God.

Speaker 8:
[100:31] By the power of Grayskull.

Speaker 1:
[100:42] You're a true master of the universe. You're just like He-Man. So how would Ramtha deal with Christianity's problem of sin? After all, even if you don't have a religious framework to go by, there are still actions that are clearly good and bad, giving to charity versus committing murder, for example. Indeed, his own story had a lot which he identified as bad, the Murians spitting and pissing on him and his family, for instance. Why didn't all of the first light forms just be good and stay good? Well, at first they did, Ramtha has said, but as they played with new sensations, they began to forget that they were divine. So much forgetting with these beings, people forgetting how to fight, people forgetting how to be good, people forgetting they're divine. Yeah, they forgot all those sorts of shit. And now they encountered jealousy, survival and possessiveness. And from there, it was a nasty downward spiral. And while they had first been immortal, these negative feelings degraded their life forces within their bodies and their bodies began to fail now, leading them to suffer from illness and later death. Yeah, people didn't use to die, but they got negative and shit. And so how like medically speaking, could negative feelings have degraded their immortality? Well, let's file that under, don't worry about it. All of this very helpful information was laid out in Ramtha's many retreats. At JZ's peak in the 80s, large groups, usually somewhere around 300 to 700 people, attended events around the country. They were so successful that JZ decided to spread Ramtha's message further through the videotaped lecture series Audience with Ramtha. Throughout 1986 and 87, Ramtha publications, including JZ's 87 book, a state of mind, My Story, increased and sold well. All of this started to get people more interested, not always in a way that was positive for JZ though. As Ramtha's star rose, producers for ABC's 2020 started to pay attention, growing increasingly curious about the attractive blonde woman who now had access to large sums of money based on a very outlandish claim. So ABC started digging. All the previous media coverage had been, if skeptical, generally positive, or at least light-hearted mockery, but now that would change. ABC's first source would be an interesting one. They found a philosophy professor, a philosophy professor, I cannot fucking talk today, named Carl Raschke, who worked at the University of Denver and had spent many years thinking about New Age groups. He'd been a part of some groups in the 1960s. Carl had watched how many of these groups were originally claiming to be about enlightenment and better living quickly spiraled into cults or something like a cult. He first criticized JZ back in 1986, calling her, quote, either disturbed or self-deluded. Then in an article for Omni Magazine, he said that, quote, most channels after considerable study in metaphysical speculation and meditation techniques attain a heightened sensitivity to their own unconscious minds. This hard-won internal receptiveness, this new voice, may then simply be interpreted as the voice of a god or spirit or ancestor or alien being by those emotionally predisposed to do so. So that's an interesting claim. I had not heard that before. That some of these people may have gotten so deep into certain types of meditation that they start to hear their own unconscious thoughts floating up so clearly they start to think that they are a separate entity altogether. Carl was worried that JZ was brainwashing her students. He had talked to a former student, Carol Bowen, who seemed to indicate as much. But Carl, maybe not the best source on all this. Unfortunately, he was also one of the architects of the 1980s satanic panic. And he has been spitting satanic panic bullshit again recently online in recent years on various obscure podcast interviews. Back during the 80s and 90s, Carl regularly commented to the media on how Satanism could be found in everything from rock and roll to music to video games, right? He's one of those dipshits. In his 1990 book, Painted Black, mm-hm, fuck you, Rolling Stones, he argued that Satanism appealed to American youth because of a culture of despair and eventually led kids to drug abuse. He would blame the entire drug trade, several murders, and even neo-Nazism on Satanism, specifically writing, quote, Satanism is a sophisticated and highly effective motivational system for the spread of violence and cultural terrorism, all the while hiding behind the cloak of the First Amendment. It is an ideology that has found a strategic application in the criminal underworld even if it was not invented there. He would go on to say that America was facing an epidemic of satanic crime that the cult apologists organizations like the FBI, scholars and police refuse to take seriously. His book about all this was thankfully widely ridiculed by the press as it should have been. I mean, I read about fucking wackadoodle fringe Christians fucking doing rapey, pedophilic shit all the time, not finding Satanists doing all that stuff. I mean, I'm sure they do. There are a few out there but not in numbers. Needless to say, this wackadoodle critique and another wackadoodle did not hurt her movement. Now back to JZ and a critique by actual journalists. When the ABC special aired in January of 87, it made six essential allegations. One, JZ was a fraud. A former staff member testified that he had initially become disillusioned when he saw JZ put on and take off the Ramtha persona in a way like she was practicing. She didn't think anybody was looking. It seemed very clear to him that she's just acting. Yeah, he watched her. He said, practice Ramtha's gestures. Sounds about right, right? Maybe she was not interpreting certain thoughts as the voice of a separate entity. Maybe this was always an intentional grift. Number two, JZ had defrauded her followers financially. ABC charged that JZ, as her Ramtha persona, had told her followers to invest in shit like an Arabian horse business, her business. And they did. Three, JZ falsified details of her life in her autobiography. For example, people who were supposedly there when she saw this flying saucer she said she saw, did not remember that happening. Four, JZ was getting rich directly from her channeled teachings. She had built large sums of money out of her followers by charging excessive sums to see Ramtha's performances. Five, Ramtha was a cult leader who caught students at vulnerable moments in their lives and told them to make irreversible decisions such as moving to Washington to live near her, possibly on land that she owned, which was starting to feel pretty compounding. She encouraged people to get divorced, to cut ties with family members who opposed her enlightenment teachings, et cetera. And six, Ramtha's teachings were dangerous because they taught students that they were divine and didn't need to pay attention to the difference between right and wrong. So were any or all of these true, these claims? Obviously, it's hard to adjudicate on number six. It would be easier to prove that Ramtha destroyed students' morality if there was a murder associated with the group, which there has never been to my knowledge. Although stay tuned for later sexual abuse controversy that Ramtha slash JZ handled in a strange way. Did she defraud her students though? Did she get them involved in a failing horse business, for example? Well, we do know that JZ had moved to a ranch in a little under 1500 person town of, at that time of Yom, Washington, in 1982. We also know she bought a horse for herself and each of her sons and that she did invest in a then thriving Arabian horse trade. We know she started inviting Ramtha's students to also invest in Arabian horses with her, but the students didn't realize that she was not Ramtha in those moments and that they didn't have to do that for their spiritual enlightenment. And then when the bottom dropped out of that market, we know that she lost the money and can infer that the people around her did as well. She would later claim that she made good on everyone else's losses, but we have no proof of that. ABC's 2020 episode led to increased coverage of JZ, including more televised news segments and newspaper and magazine articles. Some of them seem to raise legit criticisms, others not so much. One article in USA Today said that Ramtha was a demon who preached anti-Christian ideology. Okay, faced with all this, JZ decided to take Ramtha on a big international tour to generate her own, hopefully positive press. In November of 1987, she held a Ramtha session in Sydney, Australia, the first intensive ever held outside the US. Ramtha made his first appearance in England in November of 1988 and appeared in Munich, Germany, December of 1989. But then JZ in her early 40s now grew tired of touring. The Siren Song of Home was calling. So how could JZ continue to expand Ramtha's reach from home? Well, by starting a school. Informal sessions around her pool would soon become the foundation for Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, which was officially inaugurated during a retreat in Snow Mountain, Colorado over the week of May 22nd to May 28th, 1988. But the school would actually be located in Yelm at JZ's ranch. Apparently the location had huge significance within Ramtha's teachings. This region was actually part of ancient Lemuria during Ramtha's lifetime, back before he migrated to Atlantis and freed his people from tyranny at the age of 14. Did I mention he freed his people from tyranny at the age of only 14? Yeah, he did. He totally did. And why would someone who freed his family from tyranny except getting spit and pissed on by people who had forgot how to fight many years later? Why would he stand to let his mom get raped for years? Because he didn't have a magic sword yet, okay? He didn't have his magic mountain lady sword. Fuck. Anyway, JZ's ranch was no longer Lemuria, of course. And as such, it required some renovation. A 1989 remodel would turn the stalls and breeding facilities into offices, whereas the writing ring became Ramtha's cavernous auditorium. Today, it's decorated with symbols and banners. On one end, a reproduction of Michelangelo's, the creation of Adam Fresco from the Sistine Chapel, next to the blue figure of Hindu Gatsheba. Diagrams outline seven sections of the light spectrum, not just X-ray and infrared, but the infinite unknown of past gamma rays. A painting of Knight proclaims, you can do anything. The keys focus. Taped rectangles on the astroturf floor, each big enough for one yoga mat, surround the stage where Knight as Ramtha appears. On the opposite wall, a Nike Just Do It banner hangs over the booth where sound engineers record every lecture. Yeah, why not? Work some Nike marketing into all this. JZ would claim that two events in particular made her found this Yelm Bay school. Apparently one involved some staff in New York City who had canceled her original booking and set her up in a tent in an adjacent lot, which is not cool. It's humiliating. And the other involved a retreat in Colorado that was canceled when someone called in a bomb threat. Not sure if either of those things actually happened. And of course, she was tired of touring. Her desire to start a school was probably based mostly in making more money. Sources indicate that JZ was actually in a bad financial position. Tax collectors wanted their cut of the money that she had been making. Bill collectors were breathing down her neck after she still made more bad decisions. So she's not paying taxes, she's spending too much money. She was making a lot, but spending more. And she was dealing with another divorce, her third. Things had sour between her and her soulmate. Jeffrey Knight, Ramtha said that Jeff was her soulmate. What the fuck? That enlightened being just can't keep a story straight. Jeffrey took $120,000 from her in a divorce settlement, which we'll talk more about later. She needed to make more money fast. Or she was risking losing her fledgling knockoff, the esophageal empire. Ramtha had given her a platform, even a vague outline of how the universe worked. But now she needed to enshrine his wisdom in a more teachable framework. And she would find this framework in the realm of quantum physics. Uh-huh. She had already experimented a little bit with that in Ramtha's story about the creation of the universe. But now she adapted this into a slightly more scientific sounding framework. It's not scientific, but it sounds more scientific. Ramtha's first lesson would thus start with the concept of the void. You know, what there was before there was matter. The void contemplated itself and created consciousness with a capital C, which is tied to energy with a capital E. Consciousness is a thought. Energy is the active ingredient of that thought. And together they produced an idea with a capital I. As a result of that contemplation, a point of awareness appeared in the void called point zero. Point zero contested itself and a second point emerged because of that and so on. Because point zero and the other points was a flux, an energized atmosphere, this all became space. Stay with me! And don't worry about the details because this is nonsense. Anyway, in Ramtha's system, there were also seven levels of awareness, and the point zero exists at the top of the seventh level, but the area between those levels, as they pulled away from each other, created particles of energy that lived in a new atmosphere of ultrafrequency energy. So much fucking energy. So some of this energy, these energy entities, they migrated to create the lower levels, leaving their bodies behind when they did so, though they could return to use them when they wanted. And this mirrors in some way how humans can look today. A human at the seventh level has no body, but the fifth level body was gold and had the outline of a general human form. The fourth level body is blue and recognizable human, although androgynous. Okay. The third level is a level of visible light. And as the entities travel there, it triggered what became known as the Big Bang. All right. The particles that were pulled through the curtain, indeed dividing the fourth and indeed third levels erupted and split into polar opposites. Negative and positive, push and pull, darkness and light. Even time itself split. The entities that made it into the third level had brilliant, shiny, non-corporeal bodies. And the human world just shows up in situations where people who have had near-death experiences describe seeing a human form filled with light. Perhaps they interpret it as an angel. In any case, when the entities moved to the second level, they entered the shadow realm. Oh, fucking shadow realm time. This is where light slowed and the world moved at the infrared rate of vibration. According to Ramtha, this was where extrasensory perception ESP occurred. The final descent to the first realm occurred when entities moved to the slowest realm, the realm of matter. As entities began life on this level, prehistory began. Here the entities were able to dream up anything they wanted, flowers, rocks, animals, etc. But they couldn't make a hominid unless they returned to the fourth realm, for some unexplained reason. And so they did that. And then they returned to create the images of bodies with gender. Since they had observed that animal life tended to fall in line with the dual sex model, for sake. They made it back to Earth, about, I don't know, 10.5 million years ago, and that opened the door to getting down and dirty with it, i.e. fucking. And what did this all mean for students? It meant they were supposed to understand that they were the primal creations of the void, not the end product. Since humans were supposed to be a fun little experiment, they were supposed to understand that they didn't have to be passive reactors to outside forces, but could be the creative active force in the world. Yay! When we die, we immediately go to level two, the astral world. There, they act as ghosts. We act as ghosts, occasionally picked up on film, perceived by people who are especially sensitive or capable of all kinds of other ghostly encounters. Some people, Ramtha has said, haven't even realized that they're dead, and they keep going to work and going home like they're still alive. And that's why we see ghosts trapped in loops, but we don't stick around there forever. We then move up to the third realm, where we encounter our light bodies and forget our past lives, which is kind of a bummer, and we wait to get reincarnated. But, excuse me, both of those realms, pretty easy for our souls to reach. We can actually access level two without dying in our normal day-to-day lives with astral projection. We can access the third realm during near death or other visionary experiences, right? Hallucinogens. Makes sense. That's where I've been going on DMT trips, the fucking third realm, obviously. The Ramtha school would teach students how to access all these levels. During the course of their study, students would ideally have astral, light and blue body experiences, each of which would imprint on them different lessons. All of this was called doing the great work. The first aspect of the great work would be attending lectures by Ramtha in the auditorium. Once you had attended some lectures, you could move on to the hard work of imagining shit, literally just holding images in your mind and allowing your consciousness to manifest them. This would be called consciousness and energy or CNE, a method of concentrated dreaming combined with intense breathing offered to beginner students. Part of manifesting your reality had to do with your seven seals, which were basically the concept of chakras. You apparently have seven seals across your body, probably one in your wiener, I'm not positive. They're like wax seals on letters, and three of them are already open. The first deals with sexuality, the second with pain or survival, and the third with power. When the seals are opened, potent energy freely pours out, sounds like you come. If your energy primarily comes to one seal specifically, that kind of shapes the reality you're living in. If energy is pouring out of your sexual seal, you're coming a lot. Images of sex dominate your mental energy, and you're magnetic and attractive. Fuck yeah. But if it pours out of your second seal, well, you have diarrhea, or you're overly focused on pain and suffering. You're like a hypochondriac. In most people, the fourth through seven seals are all closed. And as the fourth opens, somewhere around your heart, spiritual transformation begins. Your heart starts to come is what I'm taking away from that. So part of the great work is learning how to come out of different seals, right? If you don't understand this, that's the point. Part of the great work is never understanding what the great work is. And yet another exercise, students will write down the traits they want to have. And then they'll choose a word to represent each item on their wish list and focus on these words, holding them in their frontal lobes according to Ramtha. Then they do some kind of breathing exercise to drive their words into their subconscious, where manifestation can begin naturally. And then they're done. Their subconscious takes the request and sees what it can do about it. And according to Ramtha, it works. It totally works. Just manifested. Just build it and they will come. It's that easy, you weak-minded fuck, to slap on a Thrive Dermal Fusion Technology Reality Manifestation Patch and make your thoughts, your life, if you're not thriving and also manifesting, you're dying. After doing this, students should expect positive changes in their lives, maybe even foundational changes to their bodies. Indeed, in fucking deed. Ramtha suggests that C&E actually changes body chemistry, quote, raising blood levels of protein and brain chemicals, which improve the body by overwhelming its normally acid-base environment. Another exercise would find students in a large field surrounded by a chest-high fence while blindfolded. The students would look for index cards on which they had drawn pictures of something they deeply desired, that the instructors had placed face down on the fence earlier that day. Students would be told to stand up, turn around a couple of times, keep the mental image of the card in their minds, then find the card dummy. And that is called fieldwork, right? Makes sense. It is work and it happens in a field. Other exercises would take place in groups, with students divided into two teams. One would be tasked with sending mental images to the other. If both groups had been successful at C&E, the picture would be transmitted. Of course, Ramtha suggests there are some limits. Like that the mental image should be an animal or even just a color. After initial sessions, it lasted for a couple of hours. Students would be expected to take on full day sessions in rain, heat, snow or whatever weather happened to hit Yom, Washington that day. But that's nothing compared to the tank. The tank is only for advanced students. You can't just skip straight to the tank, plebe. Don't be foolish. You have to rigorously prepare your mind and body for the tank. Oh man, tank shit. That's where the real work begins.

Speaker 2:
[120:38] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[120:40] Apparently, shortly after the school was founded, Ramtha said that JZ needed to build a large labyrinth, a structure whose outside walls would form a circle 120 feet in diameter. The inside walls were mobile, so the pattern of the labyrinth could be altered. All of the walls would be eight feet high and strong enough for several staff to walk on top of and observe the exercises taking place down below. Think a corn maze or a non-corn maze. Think any maze. Think a maze you might find on a diner kid's menu. But pretend it's magical and you have the tank. The tank first opened in March of 1990. The object of the tank is simple. Find the void, aka the middle, aka the end, so basically complete the maze. Students have to focus on point zero to guide them to obstacles like narrow passageways that force them to crawl on their hands and knees, or bridge like ramps or ladders that could send you outside of the tank, at which point you do have to start over. Apparently students are sent into the tank in a big horde. So you have this, you know, if you have claustrophobia issues, you know, you better get over it. And of course, you know, you're blindfolded. Not only are you blindfolded inside the tank, outside the tank, trying to find the tank, students would actually have to put the blindfold on around 200 yards away from the entrance to the tank. Some students would just simply end up walking around the woods, right, far from the tank, spend most of the session just out there. One of the tank's biggest fans, another celebrated actress, Linda Evans. Linda got her start acting on sitcoms in the 1960s before appearing in her first regular role in 1965 as the main character's daughter in The Big Valley. She would go on to appear in The Rockford Files, Manics, Harry O, Banasic, MacLeod, Macmillan and Wife throughout the 70s. And in 1981, she scored a role as Crystal Carrington in ABC's new flashy primetime soap opera Dynasty, the number one show in America in 1984 and 1985. She won Golden Globe in 1981, got nominated for a primetime Emmy Award in 1983, got her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But life seemed to get hard for Linda when she left Dynasty in 1989. She was struggling with weight fluctuations, fluid retention, other health problems. She did some soul searching, wound up in the tank and yelm. As a newly advanced Ramtha student, she missed the entrance, wound up in the woods. At first, she's worried about hurting herself. There are a lot of thorns and branches, dangerous branches. She didn't want to indirectly damage her career if she got some kind of appearance altering injury. What if a branch scratched her face? But then she decided to trust Ramtha and she took her hands away from her face. And gosh dang it, she made it free and clear to the tank's entrance. Un-fucking-real, miraculous. Hail Ramtha, hail Linda Hamilton. How did she ever pull that off? Did she pull it off by maybe listening to other students fumbling around nearby that she could definitely hear? People trying to find their way to the tank perhaps? Did she do that by not being both blind and deaf? It's hard to say. Linda fell in love with Ramtha, so much so that she moved to the town of Rainier, Washington, five miles from Yale, still lives there today at the age of 83, still all about that Ramtha grind. There are also other practices at Ramtha school, like something called Tohumo. Not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but who fucking cares because they made that word up. According to JZ, Tohumo is a practice where students test their ability to withstand the cold by creating their own internal body heat, by manifesting it. And if you get through this, you might proceed to one of the most advanced practices, getting from the third to the fourth levels. Whoa. When you reach both the second and third levels, you still retain your imperfections in physical body, but in the fourth level, you don't. Fuck yeah, bro. You're just an agender blue body that, quote, houses all the potential of human existence, including the potential for healing. Right? That's what JZ says in her biography. Apparently, students have been able to access this and have healed everything from bee stings to cancer. They've even regrown lost teeth. And that doesn't sound scammy or dangerous at all. No one has ever manifested new chompers. Get the fuck out of here. So many people just can't accept reality. They just can't accept basic reality. And they make themselves such easy grift targets. I've been dealing with a fucked up crown on a molar for years now. It's annoying, right? Food gets trapped under it, inflames my gum, makes my jaw ache. I don't floss after literally every single meal. Very annoying. I need to finally take care of it. I would love just to meditate and just do mazes and go to the tank and think positively and just grow myself a better tooth. But that's not how teeth work. If I want it fixed, I'm going to have to go to a dentist, right? And it's going to suck for a little while. You know, I'm going to have to go to several appointments, get a little dental surgery, but then it'll be fixed. There are no magic bullets out there for most of what ails us. And it's just a waste of time and money to think otherwise. In 1992, something else weird happened in now 46-year-old JZ's life, because of course it did. 36-year-old Jeffrey Knight sued his ex-wife with an interesting claim. This soulmate of JZ's, who she divorced, claimed that he had been under Ramtha's influence when he agreed to his $120,000 settlement. That damn ancient enlightened one had duped him. He'd used his Lemurian trickery to get him to agree to a bullshit settlement. Apparently, Ramtha had dictated all of his and JZ's life together. But of course, Jeffrey Knight alleged in court documents, Ramtha counseled and controlled almost every decision that we made, including such things as which horses we should buy or breed for our horse business. I'm picturing the most ridiculous marital moments now. Oh my god, baby, that's so fucking hot. Oh yes, I want to explode in your mouth. No, Jeffrey, indeed, that will not be happening. JZ will not have her mouth defiled in this way. Indeed, you must go down on her right now. And indeed, when she has climaxed, you are then to go into the bathroom. You are to put on the fan for some white noise. And you are to quietly finish off yourself. Indeed. And then go sleep in the guest room.

Speaker 2:
[126:56] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[126:58] Making this all weirder still. JZ would testify at a trial that began on September 8th, that there was also apparently a British spirit named Charles that would show up in her and make some of their marital decisions. she is crazy. Holy shit. No wonder she's still single today. Can you imagine being with somebody who falls into trances and takes on different voices of supposed entities? And these entities are involved heavily in your marital decisions. He understood a little more, Charles, the British spirit, he understood a little more about horse flesh than we did, JZ said, adding that Ramtha generally deferred to Charles in the area of horse business. Fuck me in the face. How is this real life? I hate that she's rich. I hate her. I hate it so much. Why would Ramtha, who once led an army of 2.5 million warriors, an army that had so many horses, an enlightened one who supposedly knew almost everything, need to defer to fucking Chuck in the realm of horse investment? There was more than horses at stake here. In 1985, Jeffrey found out that he had AIDS, but Ramtha told him not to worry about it. Don't get conventional treatment for it. So apparently, Ramtha wanted him dead. In court, Knight would testify that he originally asked for $10,000 in monthly spousal support. He would go on to testify that he met JZ at the Tacoma home of actress Linda Evans, and was told that JZ was at that point $7,000,000 in debt, which is wild. Conveniently, that is around the time she decided to found her school. Wanting Ramtha's protection from AIDS, what a statement. I need Ramtha's protection from AIDS. Jeffrey agreed to the single payment. This information caused quite a stir in the local press. The September 1992 hearing drew standing room only crowds to the Pierce County Superior Court. They watched as JZ said she would not allow photographs taken of her on the witness stand Funnily enough, the judge ruled the ban did not apply to Ramtha though. The judge actually said, if Ramtha appears, then you've got my permission to take his picture. That's fucking awesome. The judge was like, I see you, you grifty bitch. Your move. I would never ever channel Ramtha in the courtroom, JZ then said. Jeffrey Knight ended up winning an $800,000 settlement from JZ, but that was sadly later reversed on an appeal and then he would die of an age-related illness in 1994. The drama of his divorce would not end with his death. In 1995, JZ hired defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, one of the infamous defense attorneys for OJ. Simpson during his murder trial, and one of the Boston Stranglers' attorney in addition to other high-profile cases. JZ hired him to sue her ex-husband's attorney for extortion. JZ claimed that the late Jeffrey Knight's attorney, Mary Gaudio, threatened her with adverse publicity to try to force her to modify her original divorce agreement. And what was this adverse publicity? Well, the suit alleged that Gaudio threatened to expose JZ Knight as having committed income tax evasion, which it sounds like she did. This suit eventually was settled privately behind closed doors. There is not any, as far as I know, additional information on it. Meanwhile, Ramtha's School of Enlightenment marches onward. By 1995, Ramtha had established both a standard curriculum and optional classes. Good for his silly purple ass. All new students now needed to attend a two-day level one beginning C&E workshop. C&E as in again, consciousness and energy, capital C, capital E. Next, they attended a one-week level two beginning C&E retreat. And finally, the three-day level three beginning C&E follow-up. Hard to find information on exactly how much this stuff cost, but it seems that retreats averaged about $1,350 a person back then. After completing the three-day level three beginning C&E follow-up, students could then join an advanced group which had two mandatory events, a seven-day retreat in the spring and a three-day follow-up retreat in the fall. As each class progressed through its work, it would be given a name. The first group in 1988 was named Elohim, the Hebrew word for God. Subsequent groups were named Akhmen Ra, Yoropa Akhmen Ra, excuse me, Am Akkad, Tat Alif, Elohim Ka Men Ra. Cool. There were also optional events students could pay to attend like a Seiz. A Seiz provided lengthy periods, a week to 10 days, typically for intensive discipline practice of mind over matter and space. Wow. There were parties on Halloween for fun and over the winter holidays, as well as a special month-long retreat called Baktau. All for a price, of course. To fill your time with even more enlightenment, you could buy a variety of books in the bookstore. You could get magazines with names like Awakenings, Focus, The Golden Thread. These were mostly community-built magazines with short personal essays, reflections on contemporary events, discussions about the community. All very profitable. Instead of reading, some students would spend their time making art, music or a giant reproduction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. That was made, I mentioned it earlier, by two long-term students named Don Marshall and Gary Craig. Still stands in the main lecture hall today apparently. Donny and Gary, who were these students? Well, in the 90s, the average age for these students was apparently mid-30s to early 40s. Broadly, these people followed a certain type. People who had worked hard at high-level careers like in tech or business, but then ultimately found themselves disappointed and unfulfilled. Money and career success had not left them feeling the happiness they'd craved. Some were women who had put aside their own career ambitions to raise families. Then once the kids were out of the house, decided to radically change their lives. A sociological survey of the school students would find that the majority of them were indeed female. Almost 40% had finished college. For many of them, this was not their first go-around with new age ideas. More than 40% had been a part of other new age movements. A good portion of them, crucially for JZ's income, very excited to uproot their entire lives for Ramtha. In the 90s, it's estimated that around 500 people moved to the Yelm area to be closer to the community and this ridiculous bullshit. And many of them would take part-time menial labor jobs to give them the flexibility they needed to attend as many classes as possible. And they would keep attending classes for workshops and retreats, etc. for years, sometimes for decades. And what kept them there? After all, doesn't sitting around imagining shit get a little boring after a while? Well, along with these skills to unlock new spiritual levels, Ramtha would give them a villain as well. International bankers. Here we go. Back to one of the oldest villains in the books. One of the easiest villains thanks to centuries of conspiracy lore, medieval Christian usury laws, and two millennia of outsider status and a reputation with Christians as being a savior killer. The secretive, almost always Jewish, nefarious international banker. Ramtha would argue that humans' capacity for self-sufficiency was blocked by a global conspiracy that began in France during the Napoleonic era. This is JZ's little twist on old school Illuminati lore here. The leaders of this conspiracy were gray men. And the first gray man was the banker who supplied Napoleon with the resources needed to conquer much of Europe. Meyer, Anselm, Rothschild. Of course, the fucking Rothschilds. I have debunked this shit so many times before. Not gonna go into a lot of detail now, but a real quick summary is that Jewish people in Europe, thanks to centuries of intense Christian Church-sponsored governmentally enforced anti-Semitism, were literally not allowed to work in almost any field. One of the very few areas that it was legal for them to work in that actually also paid well was to be a banker, a money lender for a royal court. The Christian nobles were not allowed to lend money and charge interest themselves directly due to biblical interpretation regarding lending. There was no Joel Osteen or, how do you say his name, Kenneth Copeland, Prosperity Gospel grift hitting back then. The Jewish money lender position was a work around where a rich Christian could hire a Jewish person to handle the lending since they were according to Christian beliefs destined to go to hell anyways for not recognizing Christ as savior. So who cares if they're violating usury laws on top of that? So some baron or lord or prince or king, titan of industry, et cetera, sitting on a big old pile of gold coins, they would make money off their money by hiring a Jewish banker to do the actual lending. Even though they were really doing the lending themselves since it was their money, but that's not how the church saw it. In short, families like the Rothschilds made a lot of money thanks to this weird loophole combined with financial acumen and hustle, not because they were in league with the devil and secretly controlling the world. That's about as concise of a summary as I can give, and it is one verified, I assure you, by loads of historical evidence. Anyway, in Ramtha's telling, Rothschild financed both sides of the war, and when he figured out that this made him money, he started generating new conflicts, pulling the strings, right? The puppet master, from which he could profit further. And over the centuries, the gray men expanded to include other families, always with the aim of influencing governments and starting wars. And obviously right now, with the Israeli government trying to fucking continually start shit, this plays further into this conspiracy lore. But just remember, just like a lot of people in this country don't like our leadership and aren't bound to it, a lot of people in Israel don't like Netanyahu. So please don't fall for the, they're doing it, it's all true, the Jews control the world. Okay, so the gray men took over the media as well, according to JZ, to sway public opinion. Essentially, JZ just replaced the word Jews with the word gray men, stole from tons of existing conspiracy lore, just like JZ stole from existing theosophical lore to share her wisdom. It took a lot to get this country into the First World War because no one wanted to get into it. And so, the gray men, owning most of the media, do you know what the media is? I have learned that term, wrote JZ, I mean Ramtha, in 1999's Ramtha, the White Book. The gray men owned them all. You know the papers you read, the box you watch, the magazines you thumb through, the radio waves you listen to. Right, this is just literally her saying, the Jews control the media, they control everything. The gray men also created paper money to replace gold, which will someday help them create a one world order embodied in a world bank, she wrote. For the average person, this would show up in the form of a universal debit card that accepted money anywhere. Ramtha argued that this dehumanized individuals by replacing them with numbers in a system. And then Ramtha, but really JZ, took these fringe beliefs even further. David McCarthy, a student of the RSE between 1988 and 1996, would call Knight a spiritual predator and say that she taught that unless students remain faithful to Ramtha, they would become the prey of the intergalactic lizard people. Oh, fuck yeah. That's true. Jewish bankers and lizard people, on top of all the Lemurian wackadoodle new age shit, oh, Ramtha playing the hits. And the whole lizard people conspiracy, covered in the very first two short episode of Timesuck and popularized by David Icke, can actually be traced back to HP. Lovecraft, contemporary Robert Howard, the dude who invented the cone in the barbarian fictional universe. In his 1929 fantasy novelette, The Shadow Kingdom, he drew heavily from theosophical teachings with his settings of the lost worlds of Atlantis and Muria and references to evil dragon men. Versions of these dragon men would make their way into mid-20th century occult and new age writings. David Icke would draw from many of these writings when making up his own reptilian lizard people conspiracy bullshit in the early aughts from which he has profited a lot. Back to David McCarthy, he'd come to the group in 1988 when his life was falling apart, right? That's when they get you. When times are tough and you're feeling lost and desperate and at your lowest. A musician and cabinet maker living in New Zealand, he was stretched to the breaking point by the pressure of raising two daughters, paying a mortgage and the recent suicide of his best friend. It felt like if I stopped for a day, everything would fall apart, he would later say. I had to find some answers. Then he stumbled across a book by JZ Knight, but really written by Ramtha and that was that. Soon, he's flying out to Yelm. Then year after year, McCarthy returned to the compound for more classes and more classes, working at his discipline, seduced by the promise that his new powers of manifestation just ride around the corner. One day, McCarthy and some other masters were working on creating a physical object out of nothing but focusing on a mental image, right? Like a gold coin, a rose, a blue feather, working on that medieval alchemy grind, trying to pull off some old Castle Dungeon wizard shit. After several days, though, still hadn't made anything, neither had anyone else, and neither had anyone who had ever fucking tried this before because it's impossible. But then, during this class, across the Great Hall, he suddenly heard people shouting excitedly. He saw a woman walking to the crowd, holding a blue feather over her head. Pandemonium broke out. My God, she did it. She manifested a blue feather. Over roars of appreciation, the woman took her place next to McCarthy. He leaned over and he asked her, how did you do it? She quietly told him, I bought it at a store.

Speaker 2:
[139:57] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[139:58] Of course. But then, even crazier when McCarthy pointed out that that was not manifesting something, she was like, yeah, it is. She had drank so much of the Cult's Kool-Aid that she actually convinced herself that Ramtha helped her thought manifest a blue feather when she fucking knew she bought it at a store. Unreal. There is no fucking depth to people's level to be duped. After McCarthy suppressed his common sense enough to also believe that, Jesus Christ, he said believing in Ramtha's conspiracy theories like all the lizard people was easy. Quote, at one point, I was running around scared I was going to literally get eaten by the lizard people. He'd been taught that these lizard people would come to earth on a spaceship, of course, accompanied by Jehovah himself. Right? A doomsday prophecy. Again, Ramtha playing the hits. Apparently, some Ramtha teachings began to involve these so-called days to come in the 90s. And students were now instructed to flee the world cities, the sinful cities, find a place in the country, a place like, I don't know, Yom, grow their own food, and build underground shelters. Right? Y2K motherfuckers. By 1997, teachings like this had created a thriving lifestyle for JZ Knight. An article from the Religion News Service described the entrance to her estate at this time. The road snaked up the foothills above Olympia through a semi-rural tangle of horse pastures, house trailers and gas stations before the spiraling French-style chateau appeared over high stucco walls, framed by a spiked metal gate guarded by a bunch of guard dogs. By this time, more than 1,000 of Knight's followers live nearby. My God! With 2,000 additional followers making a twice-yearly pilgrimage, all of them paying a minimum of $1,350. That is just over $4 million a year at minimum in 1997 money, around $8 million a year today. Same article described some of these students, including Joseph Dispenza, a 34-year-old chiropractor who moved to the area from La Jolla, California, treated patients nearby Rainier. In this school, seeing is not believing, believing is seeing, he'd say. Oh, fuck me. You have to believe that your internal picture is more real than your external environment. Holy cult speak, and freeing up the energy of your body allows you to do anything you want. But not all students came away satisfied. I was deeply disturbed by an exercise they conducted to help students manifest material reality, a man named Joe Crutcher said. Recalling a session in which students were told to scream as the music of New Age superstar musician Yanni was being played at ear-splitting volume. Fucking even Yanni got worked into this bullshit. If you don't know Yanni, listen to this masterpiece. He should collaborate with Yoko Ono. If that kind of music was the only kind of music that existed, God, I'd fucking hate music. But he is wildly successful. Sold tens of millions of albums, performed in front of literally millions of people in total worldwide. He doesn't need me to love him. So back when Yanni was blasted at Ramtha School of Bullshit, Joe Crutcher said, There were maybe a thousand people there, perhaps two thirds of whom are regular students. You were encouraged to hold a picture in your mind, scream and do breathing exercises as you listen to this loud, loud music. 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 that she may have felt freaky as it was that we had been through something meaningful. Meanwhile, in addition to becoming fabulously wealthy, JZ is still busy fighting her enemies. That same year, 1997, she brought a suit against a woman from Berlin named Julie Ravel. And what did Julie do? She stole Ramtha. Apparently for five years, Ravel claimed that she could also channel Ramtha, and that disturbed JZ's psychic state and left her hanging quote in spiritual limbo. The case, which lasted five years, would make it all the way to the Supreme Court in Vienna. What a waste of time for everybody. In the end, Austria's Supreme Court awarded copyright tonight as the sole channeler of Ramtha. Fuck! And Ravel was required to pay $800 in damages tonight. But that wasn't all that JZ was up to. That same year, she would host a conference of scholars to study her and the school. The year before, J. Gordon Melton, her lawyer, you know, the guy who also wrote her biography, no conflict of interest there, had connected the group to Stanley Kripner, a parapsychology researcher on states of consciousness and hypnosis who held a Ph.D. from Northwestern. Kripner came to RS to study Knight during her channeling sessions. He performed psychological tests to measure her disassociation, then attached electrodes to measure her skin temperature, muscle tension and brain waves as she began to speak as Ramtha. The latter didn't work. She moved around too much as the warrior spirit to get brain readings, convenient. But he did see notable changes in the skin and muscle tests, bolstered by this, quote, success. In 1997, the school hosted a conference of psychologists and psychiatrists and sociologists and press who all said there was nothing they could do to disprove JZ's methods. What wasn't said publicly was that JZ paid all these people. The year 2000 brought more controversy. This time JZ not at the center of it. In fact, she refused to be at the center of it, even though she probably should have been. Started when a 15-year-old girl wrote a letter to JZ mentioning that 55-year-old Wayne Allen Geis, her dancing and acting teacher at Ramtha School, and his wife Ruth Beverly Martin, both RSE students, had raped her from 1995 to 1997. Sorry, I misspoke. Wayne did not teach dancing and acting at the school. He just taught that outside of the school, but also was at the school. They had told her that sex would help her relax and she would become a better actor. When the girl told JZ about this, JZ invited her to a retreat at the school in November of 1999. At the retreat, Ramtha, not JZ, questioned the girl, her father, Geis, and Martin. And this was not a private investigation. It happened on stage, in front of an audience of over 800 people, for an hour. So fucking gross. Geis and Martin confessed to molesting the girl. This made its way back to the police, who then charged them with 10 counts of first-degree sexual misconduct minor and then they pled not guilty. But the prosecution would not call JZ as a witness because they did not want to invite a circus-like atmosphere. And it seems Geis and Martin walked free. Also seems that JZ did not insist on trying to help. At least those guys were dismissed from the school, though. Now the school decides it's time for some more good press. And in 2004, RSC students William Arntz, Betsy Chass and Mark Vincente produced a documentary called What the Bleep Do We Know? Filmed in Portland, Oregon, the movie is about… fucking who knows. But here are some of the main ideas. 1. The universe's best scene is constructed from thought and idea, rather than from matter. Empty space is not empty. 3. Matter is not solid. Electrons are able to pop in and out of existence. We have no idea where they go. Beliefs about who one is and what is real are a direct cause of oneself and of one's own realities. Peptides produced by the brain cause a bodily reaction to emotion. All of this is hodgepodged into a plot involving a photographer named Amanda. In between scenes with Amanda, experts, well, quasi-experts or just bullshitters, give their perspectives about these metaphysical ideas. As Amanda learns about how discoveries from metaphysics prove that she can create her own reality, it helps her deal with anxiety attacks, body image issues, and even sex addiction.

Speaker 4:
[148:03] Do you believe that you can create buttons? Do you believe that you can create castles? Do you believe that you can create buttons?

Speaker 1:
[148:10] Castles? Just create your buttons and castles. The message is clear. Confronting the mysterious nature of the universe can help you in your daily life so much. It can do anything. This is reinforced when later in the film, a scientist, quote unquote, explains that meditating monks have lowered the crime rate in Washington DC. Well, why aren't those fucking monks doing more shit? Why aren't they fixing more of the world's problems? Of course, Knight would make an appearance in this trash production in the movie. The 58-year-old Knight makes the boldest statements pronounced with long, rolling Rs about particles and gods. We have great technology. Her accent changes again for this. But we still have this ugly, superstitious, backwards concept of God, she says, adding that the height of arrogance is the belief of those who would see God in their own image. Musing on the unity of consciousness and matter, she reminds the viewer that it only takes a fantasy for a man to have a hard on. To think is to boner.

Speaker 2:
[149:06] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[149:07] And if you can manifest a boner, well, then obviously, you can manifest literally anything else because that's how life works. If any method works in one area, well, then that method works in every area. All of the so-called experts, except two in this shit show, were either new age thinkers who had taught at RSC or others connected in some way to the group. Dr. Joe Dispenza, the chiropractor we heard of earlier, spoke in the film along with a man identified only as Dr. Michael Ledwith. And who was that? Well, Ledwith was a former Monsignor in the Catholic Church, advisor to the Pope, president in St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, an Irish seminary dating back to 1518. Ledwith resigned abruptly in 1994. You know why? Well, because people said he was a pedophile. And allegations of pedophilia against him were settled out of court. He was defrocked by the Vatican over this in 2005, so he fucking did it. The non-Ramtha experts were David Albert, a professor at the Columbia University Physics Department, who later accused the filmmakers of manipulating his words to fit their spiritual agenda. I don't think it's quite right to say I was tricked into appearing, he said in a statement reposted by a critic on What the Bleep's internet forum, but it is certainly the case that I was edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am indeed profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that at great length on camera to the producers of the film. Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed. The other one was Dr. Jeffrey Santenova, or Satenova, psychiatrist, physicist, author of several books including Homosexuality in the Politics of Truth, described this way, psychiatrist Jeffrey Satenova examines recent research reported in medical journals and the popular press. He finds many of these studies flawed and writes evidence that homosexuality is indeed changeable. Oh, fuck. He explains how psychology, biology, choice and habit all interweave to produce deeply imbedded patterns of sexual behavior. The model Dr. Satenova develops is based on modern science and psychological understandings of habit, compulsion and addiction. Homosexuality, he writes, is one of the many forms of soul sickness that is innate to our fallen nature. Oh, fuck off. When a fucking psychiatrist says terms like soul sickness, fallen nature, I'm like, oh, you're dumb. Okay, fuck off. A conversion therapist, one of those fucking shitheads. More about an interesting connection to this film later on, but for now, let's keep going. 2008 brought another lawsuit. JZ accused White Wind Weaver, a Thurston County, Washington citizen, hell of a name, of stealing her ideas and using her and Ramtha's teachings as workshops, so fucking White Wind has workshops now. A trial began on March 10th, 2008 in Thurston County Superior Court. At the end of it, Knight was awarded about $10,000 when the court ruled in her favor. Still, for most of that decade, things in Yom would be relatively calm with a balance struck between the locals and the community. The only thing that really raised any eyebrows for locals was when paramedics had to come to the RSC campus to help students who had overdosed on red wine, a practice called the wine purge by some. Though the school insisted that it was just a little bit of laid back fun. JZ helped the community's low key image by funding scholarships for local high school students and giving substantial donations to local political candidates, many of whom were Democrats. But her chill image was about to change. In March of 2011, hundreds of people packed into the converted horse arena to hear Ramtha lecture, just as they had so many times before. But something was different about this one. During the 16 or so hours the students spent in this spiritual drinking game, at this point, it was a requirement that students drink every time Ramtha did, which doesn't sound very fun and laid back at all. Knight started disparaging Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, Jews and more. At one point, she said as members of the audience snickered, Fuck God's chosen people. I think they have earned enough cash to have paid the way out of the goddamn gas chambers by now. Yee! Also do laughs when she declared Mexicans breed like rabbits and are poison. She also said all gay men were once Catholic priests and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene. I mean, that one does, you know, not all of them, but you know, okay. No. Led with that defrocked pedophile priest was also there. He took the stage with Knight. That's cool. Just get this pedo up on stage. About seven hours in, propped himself up on Ramtha's ornate throne. Fuck Jehovah, Knight proclaimed. Speaking in Ramtha's voice and outing Jesus as a fellow alien who came to this planet to teach Ramtha's teachings but wasn't good enough at it. Oh man, Jesus is a poor man's Ramtha now. Led with and denounced the biblical god as fickle, capricious, psychotic, neurotic and insecure. And we are supposed to believe that he's the creator god? Knight added that god was a psychotic insecure son of a bitch. And that drew chuckles from the audience and the former priest. And then, well, then they danced. JZ had no reason to think this would get out of the community if she didn't want it to. After all, she figured she controlled the distributions of all of Ramtha's recordings, but it would still make its way out into the world. In 2012, videos of Ramtha's hateful speech were posted to the web, first by ex-students Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, then by a libertarian leaning think tank called the Freedom Foundation. For her part, Knight blamed Virginia Coverdale, who had apparently slept with Knight's boyfriend, saying that she was just jealous that she hadn't been able to keep him. Ooh, catty. And students claimed that Knight employed former Catholics, former Jews, a lesbian and a Mexican-born man as part of the inner circle, meaning she couldn't possibly be prejudiced. Virginia would have other claims. Among them would be the revelation that JZ was forcing members to drink a concoction of dead seawater and red devil lye, according to one source, which JZ claimed would help them attain enlightenment. Virginia would say that rather than reaching enlightenment, members were becoming sick and losing their hair from that shit. Virginia said, this wasn't just one time thing. They were taking it for years and being told to chug it. This was not just a teaspoon in the morning and the evening. All of this, but especially the videos, embarrassed Democratic candidates, who had taken a total of 70 grand in campaign donations from Knight, probably fucking bribes, and by extension Ramtha. I am appalled by Ms. Knight's outrageous anti-Mexican, anti-Catholic raging, said Thurston County Commissioner Sandra Romero. These vile, racist, and divisive comments against responsible and hearing people of no place in Thurston County or anywhere else. Romero ended up giving Knight's donation to nonprofits benefiting Latinos. Okay, so that's good. US Representative Denny Heck and Legislative Candidate Bruce Lackney also returned donations from Knight. Seems JZ was eventually able to scrub that video from the Internet as well. I have found articles from 2012 that reference the video, that have links for it, but the links go nowhere. That exposure, though, had another inadvertent effect. People in Yelm, Washington now started to wonder, what the fuck is really going on at this school? Melissa and Steve Jensen, local farmers and restauranteurs who also operated an online newspaper, were equally outraged, and Melissa, a CPA and fraud investigator by training, began an intense investigation into activities at RSE. JZ Knight shrieks abuse and ridicule at her followers and hate speech against Catholics, Jews, gays, and others. All welcome with audience cheers, Melissa wrote in one of a series of critical articles on RSE for the South Thurston Journal. That led to more lawsuits. 2014, JZ filed suit against the Freedom Foundation, that Olympia-based concern of, my God, libertarian leaning think tank and the former students who had released the videos. Knight also made a $50,000 contribution to democratic political campaigns on February 25th, donated another 15 grand on March 24th. Also tried to prove again that she was Ramtha in an interesting way. Matthew Martinez, a follower and chiropractor who owned the Absolute Health Clinic, seems to be a correlation between chiropractors and the stuff, who owned an Absolute Health Clinic in Olympia, Washington, apparently took DNA swabs from her to prove that her DNA changed when she channeled Ramtha. When asked how people knew both DNA results were taken from Knight's cheeks and not someone else, Ramtha School of Enlightenment spokesman Mike Wright said, the short answer is they're not going to know because they were not there. People that don't believe a licensed physician in the state of Washington who is staking a license about these claims about his patient, they're not going to believe anybody anyhow. Well, journalists would uncover that Martinez had been sanctioned for two years previously by the state's chiropractic commission for improperly charging a client's insurance and misrepresenting his status as a licensed massage practitioner in Washington. Washington Department of Labor and Industries also issued Matthew an assessment in September of 2014 for nearly $15,000 in unpaid wages. So maybe he wasn't the best choice, maybe not the best integrity there. Still, the school sent out a press release claiming that Knight's samples, while not channeling, came back with gene markers of R1BY DNA and QM242 with a DNA sequence of TACT, GAT, CG, indicating a person of French-European descent. The Ramtha DNA results came back dramatically different from Knight's. The release claims, with R1BY DNA with CM217, with a sequence of ACC, AGC, TGC, indicating a person of American, Indian and Viking descent. Very interesting. But it's not, Jamie. Now the vibe of the school shifted. In 2016, RSC released a video of Ramtha praising newly elected President Trump. What? One grifter loves another. Also referenced UFOs heralding his rise to power, of course. Fucking crazy people love Trump. I'm not saying all people who love Trump are crazy, but goddamn, out of the people who are crazy, he commands that fucking demographic. During the pandemic, the compound's front gate would feature printed signs denouncing vaccination mandates, of course. Asking about the vaccination status of anyone on this property will be met with civil litigation. Now get off my property, they said. But that's not the only concerning thing to come out of RSC in recent times. During the pandemic, a giant Q briefly appeared on the school's gate. Uh-huh. It is challenging the entire world and the evil network in every country, every country, and taking them down. An RSC statement praising QAnon would read. Oh yeah, Ramtha's a QAnon-er. How enlightened. JZ made merchandise based on the QAnon conspiracy theory, selling hats and t-shirts with Q branding. Also tried to use QAnon to sell copies of her book, claiming that QAnon clues were actually signs that people should read her books. And that worked. A group of QAnon promoters would start making regular visits to the Yelm property for what one news source described as QAnon-intensive events now. The Griff don't quit. Can't stop, won't stop. One of them would be JT Wilde, this fucking pathetic half-ass singer who wrote some QAnon-themed songs. God, they're fucking terrible. Wilde appeared at Knight's Genesis retreat, performing his QAnon songs at events with names like The Orb Session. Few months later, QAnon promoters In The Matrix and Shady Groove, who had more than 110,000 Twitter followers between them, were scheduled to appear in June at the ranch to discuss their QAnon theories. Of course, we know how all this turned out. The storm they were looking for never materialized. Well, actually did it, just wasn't the Libs primarily behind it, maybe Clinton. But pretty funny how the QAnoners got real fucking quiet. Now that there's all this Epstein fucking shit out there, like, oh, that's not the people we wanted, so we're gonna ignore it. Many of the QAnoners got absorbed into broader anti-vaccine, anti-globalist, Christian nationalist movements. So what would JZ do next? What would the 2020s bring for Ramtha's School of Enlightenment? Apparently, the vibe is the same as it ever was, although things have downshifted a bit. The school and by extension, JZ, will be profiled again in 2022 for the magazine Seattle Met, which gives us our most recent view of how things are going. Ramtha appears less these days. The school hosts fewer events and Knight's kind of semi-retired, which makes sense. She's 80 years old now. Her grift work, she will die rich. And Ramtha, Ramtha's got to be tired. He's 35,000 years old. The school announced she will have no successor, no alternate channel for Ramtha. After her death, her thousands of hours of recorded teachings will underpin the school's continued educational mission. Oh, fun. The school still has many ardent supporters, some of them who have been there for decades. Science explains God here, claims 61-year-old Debbie Christie, as she takes the article's writer through the grounds. Christie was only 24 years old when she moved from Arkansas to learn from Ramtha. Nearly 40 years later, one of only four teachers of the school. When a gate slammed shut without anyone touching it, something that could be explained by the wind, Christie released a quick smile and said into the empty air, Hiya, Ram. Oh boy. Besides occasionally hearing from Ramtha, today's attendees do mental exercises meant to strengthen their minds, the ones we talked about before, but also some new ones, like shooting a bow and arrow while blindfolded, big on blindfolds. Many of them go on to test their new found focus at the local reservation casinos, trying to manifest slot machine winds or scratch ticket winds. No one has gotten rich doing that, it seems. Pre-pandemic, prices for the classes ranged around $450 each. Class 101 Online now runs for $720. A one-day lecture from Ramtha cost just $150, so they discounted some stuff. And of course, the group still draws controversy. More and more, it seems to be labeled a cult, including by the Southern Poverty Law Center and an organization called Enlighten Me Free, a website founded by a former student named David McCarthy. That guy who was afraid he was going to be literally eaten by lizard people. David and others took the school's legal involvements and record complaints about JZ and Ramtha, with the main complaint being that it's a cult. But is it a cult? Maybe. Anthony Stolesky, a Central Washington University lecturer of psychology, had not heard of RSE in his studies on cults until recently. When he did and took a glance, he saw some red flags. They generally feature a strong degree of in-group out-group us versus them thinking, he said, which definitely fits RSE as far as cult being a cult. But Stolesky pointed out RSE members do not live communally, which lends more credence to its status as an educational institution of sorts. But others, particularly ex-members, say it is a cult. As we look at the winding down of operations at the compound in Yelm, brings up an interesting question. Can a cult come to an end peacefully? Does a peaceful end prove it was never a cult? Or at least isn't one any longer? Will another leader step to the forefront of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment following JZ's death and lead it in a different, perhaps more overtly dangerous, direction? I guess time will tell. And now let's head to the recap.

Speaker 2:
[163:57] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[163:59] Thank you, Jamie.

Speaker 8:
[164:02] Good job, soldier. You made it back.

Speaker 2:
[164:06] Barely.

Speaker 1:
[164:13] JZ Knight, born Judith Darley in Hampton in 1946 in Roswell, New Mexico. JZ built one of the most commercially successful and longest lasting channeling movements in the US. Ramtha kicked the shit out of Seth. By her own account, she had a series of difficult early relationships, struggled financially before her eventual rise to prominence. But there was always something guiding her, a voice in her ear, a spiritual tug, something telling her she was destined for something great. And then he appeared, Ramtha. Through JZ, Ramtha taught ideas about consciousness, personal empowerment and the nature of reality, with the ultimate message that individuals could achieve godlike awareness through discipline and belief. And they could manifest anything into reality with enough focus and knowledge. Over the 1980s, JZ and Ramtha attracted a growing audience and established what would become the Ramtha School of Enlightenment in Yom, Washington. Ever since, the school had offered retreats, workshops and long-term programs. The students had practiced blindfolded exercises, drawn mental transmissions from other students, but not really navigated mazes, searched for hidden objects, all of which is supposed to help them develop their minds, incredible magical untapped manifestation powers. Ramtha's message of a peaceful enlightenment began to shift sometime in the 90s, when JZ started to tell people that gray men, meaning Jewish people, were controlling everything, the economy, the banks, the media, staging wars to make themselves richer. And you know what? Are some Jewish people doing that? Yes. Are other non-Jewish people also doing that? Yes. People of all kinds do that. In the 2000s, as JZ waged multiple lawsuits against anyone who dared to claim that they were also channels for Ramtha, the school would keep chugging along, mostly invisible to the outside world, until suddenly they were very visible. A 2012 video would capture Knight allegedly channeling Ramtha, launched into a tirade of inflammatory remarks about various religious and social groups, contradicting the image of a universal acceptance that Ramtha had previously promoted for years. More reports from 2016 to the pandemic would show how many conspiratorial narratives were accepted by those inside the school, even partnering up with the fucking dumbest of dumb, the QAnon promoters, which it seems like the school has since abandoned, as it winds down some of its operations. So how did this happen? Well, it happened through the performance, how it grew and got more complicated over time. At first, JZ was following a blueprint. She started a channeling practice at a time when individual channelers claimed to be the hosts of single entities, like Jane Roberts and Seth, when they were already starting to gain influence and money. Then when she was in deep financial trouble, thanks to her divorce and outstanding taxes, she decided to start her school. And she would continue to draw people in and keep them there by folding conspiratorial thinking and doomsday preaching into Ramtha's teachings. Over the course of it all, she embraced different forms of technology to get her message out, adapting with the times to draw the biggest audience possible, right? Grift and grift and grift. First audio recordings and videos, magazines, books, ultimately live streams that would bring her public facing image down, which would then lead her to pivot in another direction that bridged performance in a kind of theology, cue and on. And all this begs an interesting question. Should everything be entertainment? It might seem hypocritical for somebody like myself, you know, to talk about not everything should be entertaining. I'm trying to make an entertaining podcast, but it feels more and more applicable to the world at large right now to talk about this. For people in the 19th century, spiritualism was a way of interrogating life's mysteries, but also fun, a distraction, a way of immersing yourself in a different realm than the tedium of your day in day out life. That continued with the New Age movement, which, though it made its self-help-oriented promises, also served as a powerful way of distracting people from the things that made their lives feel small and uninteresting, unfulfilling jobs, unfulfilling marriages. And that tendency to make soul-searching with entertainment has only intensified and spread to other places, right? Mega churches with rock and roll bands and the fucking prosperity gospel and pyrotechnics, gurus on Instagram and TikTok who make energy work into consumable content. All of these have to compete, not just with all of these people, not just with other belief systems, but with Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, an endless scroll of things vying for the same people's limited attention. But what if we stop looking for entertainment in everything? What if we were good with the boring shit, right, in certain areas? The be nice to others because you want them to be nice to you kind of stuff. What is shit like spirituality and politics? What if it wasn't jazzed up? What if a lot of that stuff is supposed to be toned down and supposed to be kind of boring? What if we accepted the boring proposition that nobody knows was waiting for us in the afterlife and is best just to be the best person we can be right now in this life and not worry too much about what might come next? JZ, for her part, seems to know that she can't keep up with that rat race anymore. Even the best performers eventually have to exit the stage. Time for the takeaways.

Speaker 8:
[169:11] Timesuck, Top 5 Takeaways.

Speaker 1:
[169:17] Number one, for decades, JZ Knight has channeled Ramtha, a mysterious entity that appeared to her in her kitchen, or didn't, in February of 1977, announcing to her that she had a great destiny ahead of her. That she would help mankind get over the ditch and push human consciousness to its greatest form, but she hasn't done that. How did Ramtha know about all this? Well, because he had been raised in war-torn Lemuria, of course, and after a horrible child in which he was literally spit on and pissed on and had to watch his mom get raped a whole bunch of times over a couple of years, he ended up becoming a fierce warrior with a magical sword, who led an army of fucking millions. And then, for some reason, he decided to give up all that and study the ways of an unknown god and ascend to a higher realm of pure light, naturally. Number two, at the end of Ramtha's teachings is the idea that thought and awareness can directly shape physical reality. Manifest, as taught by RSE, humans are not passive observers, instead, they're active creators. And by mastering focus, belief and intent, individuals can influence not only their own lives, but the broader world around them. In our reality, though, this manifest is a bunch of weird fucking excuses like trying to keep a or trying to get through a maze blindfolded, or trying to find a card in a field on a fence post or some shit, or sitting and imagining something that you want. Students even try to hit a bullseye with a bow and arrow while blindfolded, which sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Number three, JZ Knight has dipped her toes in all kinds of conspiracy theories, from the Grey Men, aka the Rothschilds, to QAnon, to the World Bank. Students from the 90s have reported that they were told to get off the grid, buy land, become self-sufficient before the fucking lizard people ate them. These ideas were not present in Ramtha's philosophy in the early years. Indeed, for a long time, Ramtha focused on happier, more wholesome spiritual messaging, that God was not a distinct entity, but an energy that ran through everything. But then the culture changed and so did the grift. Number four, JZ has been in numerous controversies over the course of her career. She's been in multiple lawsuits with others who claimed to channel Ramtha as well, a case involving the sexual abuse of a 15-year-old girl, and of course, her lengthy divorce from Jeffrey Knight, her soulmate supposedly, which Knight would claim Ramtha told him not to seek medical treatment when Knight was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite this, there's never been any legal action that would point to Ramtha being a cult, like a trial where someone would claim that they were brainwashed. Experts are divided on whether the group could truly be considered a cult or just has cult-like tendencies. And number five, new info, remember, what the Bleep do we know? As we mentioned, Bleep was conceived in a production funded by William Arntz, who served as co-director along with Betsy Chase or Chas and Mark Vicenti. The three of them were students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, and then years later, Mark Vicenti graduated to another cult-like group we've covered, NXIVM. He would describe his introduction to NXIVM in the HBO documentary, The Vow, saying that he was introduced to it via its leadership seminars. He eventually even rose to the rank of board member, according to the New York Times, although he's reportedly not involved in the sexual slavery aspects. He did, however, contribute to the group's propaganda. He made a documentary called Ignite the Heart that praised Ranieri's work in Mexico. That fucking guy just loves to make movies for cults. In 2017, word reached Vicente and his wife about the secret sex slavery in her society, and Vicente and his wife left the group soon afterwards. Looks like they live in Portugal now. Let's hope there are no cults there for them to get involved with and promote.

Speaker 8:
[172:45] Timesuck, top five takeaways.

Speaker 1:
[172:51] Lemurian's Lizard People and Lies, Ramtha's School Exposed has been sucked. What a ride. That was a lot. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all their help in making Timesuck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsey Cummins. Thanks also to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode and designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her research. Killed it again. Thanks to the All Seen Eyes moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page and the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth and the people over on the Timesuck and Bad Magic subreddits. And now let's head over to this week's Timesucker Updates.

Speaker 8:
[173:31] Updates. Get your Timesucker Updates.

Speaker 1:
[173:37] Keeping these updates light and silly today. And they're all about the same thing. Silly sucker Peyton Johnson sent in an email to Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com with a subject line of female free balling equivalent. And she wrote, Hey Dan, I was listening to the Ant Hill Kids episode where you were talking about everyone in the cult wearing tunics with no underwear, free balling or free pussing. And it absolutely cracked me up. It instantly reminded me of something from a couple years ago. My husband randomly came up with the term free lippin. And I figured you might get a kick out of it too. It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Anyway, just wanted to share that because it genuinely made my day connecting those two moments. Thanks for all the laughs and the awesome content. Not sorry for the length of this email. Three out of five stars and keep on sucking. Hail Nimrod Payton. Well, Payton, free lippin. That is not bad at all. That's a great start. I like how this brainstorm is beginning. Hail Nimrod to you and your husband. And next up, another silly sucker, Joey Wessinger, sent in a message with the subject line of female free ballin. And Joey wrote, Hello, Dan, Suckmaster Supreme. I'm a longtime listener, first time caller. Discovered you, Chad Daniels and Kyle Kanane. Oh, man, Chad and Kyle so funny. Back in 2008 ish on Pandora, I have been hooked on stand up comedy ever since. Started the podcast in 2017 ish, when I found out you started one. I was a Space Lizard for quite a while, back before you prioritized sleeping. I'm still subscribing and I love that you continue to donate to so many lesser known organizations. If when you decide to tour again, please consider Wichita as a stop. I know the old clubs that were there sucked, but new management has helped. I'll drive to Kansas City if I need to, but Wichita, not that bad. I have even seen some suckers in the wild around here. Anyways, you mentioned a couple weeks ago about needing a female equivalent for free balling, and here you go, free flapping. I like when words give a natural visual aspect to what's being described. Three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing. Not apologizing for Link. This seems like an average email. Joey. Joey, you're right. It wasn't too long. And free flapping, that's powerful, and also a bit disturbing. That vagina sounds dangerous, predatory even, but maybe also exciting. Well done. Hail Nimrod, to you. The brainstorm is building, and it's going to peak now with our final silly sucker, Lucas Proctor, who sent in a message with the subject line of, I want to discuss something from episode 501, Ant Hill Gang. And he wrote, glory be to good boy Bojangles. In the most recent episode, at around the one hour, four minute mark, the Suckmaster General mentioned free pussin as a good and fair alternative to free balling. But what about, dun dun dun, open boxing. Fucking boom, Lucas. Open boxing. That's got to be the winner. Open boxing. I really like that. It's classy in a weird way. It's glorious, majestic.

Speaker 2:
[176:25] That's true.

Speaker 1:
[176:26] Free balling and open boxing. That's it. I can't think of anything better. What a time to be alive.

Speaker 8:
[176:39] Thanks, Timesuckers. I needed that.

Speaker 4:
[176:42] We all did.

Speaker 1:
[176:44] Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review Timesuck if you haven't already. Please do not enroll in any classes at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment this week. Unless you plan on disrupting them in a very funny way, capturing video of said disruption, then sending that video to me to share online. If that's the case, oh, by all means, disrupt away and keep on sucking.

Speaker 3:
[177:16] MadMagic Productions.

Speaker 4:
[177:27] Indeed, I have been asked to teach to you what it means to create your day. That's true. It seems that that one little teaching has become the rage. Well, it should be, it should have always been the rage. Waking up every single morning is a gift, don't you know? Life is a gift. Create your day, what does that mean?

Speaker 2:
[177:55] And who is creating it?

Speaker 4:
[177:58] Did it ever occur to you that all the times you give permission for life to do to you what you complain about or are overjoyed with at the end of the day? Creating. Well, creating is a privilege. It goes along with being a divine person. Divinity gets to create. And that's why you want to know how to do it, because you want a divine entity.

Speaker 2:
[178:25] So, how would the day be without you?

Speaker 4:
[178:29] What do you think? How would the day be if you had the knowledge that you knew that what you said mattered? That didn't you believe that you can create buttons? It literally was the framework of how reality would conclude this.

Speaker 2:
[178:44] So what would you do if you knew how to do that to me? Well, so is it work?

Speaker 4:
[178:52] When was the last time you tried it?

Speaker 2:
[178:54] How about tomorrow morning?

Speaker 4:
[178:57] How about instead of just getting up?

Speaker 2:
[179:01] You got up and you paused and you said, what do I want this day to be like? And indeed, you voiced something. That's true.

Speaker 3:
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