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George Catlin, Ph.D., was a long-term member of the Findhorn Community in Scotland and a founding director of the School of Spiritual Science in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. He has taught and lectured on the Ageless Wisdom Teachings for over 25 years. Holding a doctorate in psychology, he has taught in liberal arts colleges for the last twelve years. Articles by Dr. Catlin have appeared in several scholarly and spiritual publications, including Share International magazine, Social Cognition, and the Journal of Social Psychology. Presently, he is writing a book on the six steps to lasting peace and happiness. In his lectures and media interviews, he welcomes questions and open discussion on topics such as Christianity and the New Age, Miracles and their Meaning, Signs of the Second Coming, and Predictions for a Positive Future.

 Guy Spiro: George, please talk about the evolution of your work.

 George Catlin: Well, of course my story beings long before I incarnated. I think that really matters because I think every one of us comes into life with certain purposes which we’re actually alive trying to realize. The process of life is trying to remember what we’re all about, and realizing our dharma. My dharma first came to me in the clearest sense when I came across an amazing series of books called, The Life Teachings of the Masters of the Far East. These are the travel diaries of a group of western anthropologists. For three years they had the incredible good fortune to experience directly a group of great enlightened spiritual teachers. These teachers took them into their confidence and brought them around Southern Asia and showed them their teachings and their abilities. It’s an amazing story that opened my eyes to the reality that life is much more than it appeared to be.

 GS: What came next?

 GC: After that, I found my way to Findhorn in Scotland which was tremendous for me. My work there was concerned with the fundamental question that I think life is all about. You have a spiritual understanding of life, and believe life has certain steps in consciousness but what do you actually do when you wake up in the morning? How do your inner beliefs affect your outer activities? Findhorn is a wonderful example of people taking their highest inner spiritual ideals and trying to use them to establish civilization. It was four wonderful years for me there. Coming back to the United States, as you can imagine, was quite a difficult transition.

 GS: When were you there?

 GC: That was 1975–1978. Then I got involved with the movement back into society of a great group of enlightened teachers. I first came across these ideas in a series of books by Alice Bailey. She had the good fortune to have direct contact of one of these enlightened masters and he dictated to her a series of books which to my eyes present the best single set of teachings about the world as it is today. They’re not easy reading, but some of the books are more approachable than others. The book I’d really highlight right at the start is a book called The Reappearance of the Christ. It’s an amazing book and it’s not about Christ just for Christians. It’s about the Christ as the anointed one, the Christ as the true principle of love and realization in all humanity, and as was perfectly derived by a great individual who is, in fact, the world teacher we will see come in time.

     Those books were amazing to me, real eye openers. Then I met a man in London in 1975 named Benjamin Creme who also was in contact with these teachers and who’s specific work was to make known to the world that these teachers were in fact emerging sometime between 1975 and 2025. So there is about a fifty year window. Of course, we’re right in the middle of that window now and these teachers are in fact coming into the world today.

 GS: Are any of them identified yet?

 GC: Not as “Joe,” or “Jane,” here or there. There are of course great teachers in the world right now. Sai Baba is a fantastic teacher, a spiritual practitioner who is doing tremendous work for all of humanity as well as blessing thousands of people who come day after day to just be near this great man. But the ones I’m talking about, who are more specifically associated with an ongoing process with humanity, are not yet public figures. They will become public figures, I believe, in the next very few years.

 GS: Have they all realized who they are?

 GC: Oh, absolutely. They are completely conscious of who they are. They didn’t, in most cases, come into incarnation in the usual way. Most of these individuals have been fully realized truly for centuries. They’ve been living in perfected bodies for millennia, doing all that they could to guide and stimulate the spiritual evolution of humanity from behind the scenes. The main way they do that is through their mediations. Most people don’t realize that we live in a great energetic environment. A fantastic stimulating, divine energy which also contains all the additions that we put into the soup ourselves.

 GS: Additions. Nicely put.

 [laughter]

 GC: Of course, some of those additions are dark indeed. I had a friend, much older than myself, who as a young child had an amazing out-of-body experience one time when she was very ill. She was brought up above the earth and looked back at the earth and saw it surrounded by this terrible, ugly, greenish-brown, awful goop. She said to the guide or consciousness that seemed to be with her, “What in the world is that?” He said, “That is the accumulated greed and selfishness from all of humanity.” She said, “Yuck. I can’t bear to go back to that.” He said, “You must, your time isn’t yet.” And she did. In fact, she came back into her body and lived a life of tremendous service and help to the world, but all the time was very aware of the kind of environment she was operating within.

     We live in that environment but don’t know it, in just the same way that fish aren’t familiar with the fact that they live in water. When you’re completely immersed in something, you don’t realize it’s there. It’s only when you leap out of it, as my friend did, and get a quick look at it from a detached perspective that you see that you actually are in a certain kind of environment. And we indeed live within this energetic environment, and these teachers, sometimes referred to “masters of the wisdom,” have as one of their primary functions to draw into our world energies that maximally stimulate positive spiritual development. We owe them a great debt of gratitude for the incredible work that they do—completely silently, completely unrecognized by humanity.

 GS: Whether or not these people that you’re talking about exist, it’s still falls upon us as individuals to illumine and to add our light to the world.

 GC: One of the things that people sometimes ask me is, “What is so new about this new age that makes it really different from the last 2000 years?” The main response that I have is that in this new age we will in fact implement the ideals which we’ve always had. That implementation isn’t something that a group of teachers can do for us. They can point the way, stimulate and inspire, but every single step in building a new civilization is our responsibility. Humanity has tremendous free will and has to make in every single moment of the day what kind of civilization we want to create. The key in terms of what these teachers can offer at this point is leadership. If you look around the world today, you can see that we have leaders who are actually calling to the worst in humanity. In this country we have an administration that is calling to all of our fears. That’s what brings up all of our nationalistic self interest.

 GS: There is nothing new about that.

 GC: No. Absolutely, but the other can be done as well. If you look back just fifty years ago to Gandhi in India, you see that a single individual can call to the best in humanity. Think of what Gandhi achieved. He got the British to leave their most lucrative colony without firing a single shot, simply because he called to the consciousness of the Indian people and the British people, and indeed to the whole world community. So great individuals can call out what is best in us.

 GS: To that question about what’s new about the new age, one of my answers is that the perennial wisdom remains the same in any age, what’s different is the approach to it, the context it’s put in.

 GC: I think that’s completely true. And the thing that is different today about humanity is we’ve developed way beyond 2,000, or 4,000, or 6,000 years ago. Today humanity is actually learning to think and this is a tremendous step forward. Of course we all think that we all think all the time, but actually our thought is primarily in service of our desires. We hope for this, we fear that, and we use our minds and our ability to think in order to try to get the things that we desire. But a very different step in consciousness, and one that we’re just on the verge of collectively today, is to actually to run our lives from this level of thought. And thought is really the first step toward genuine love because when we think, we’re able to objectively look at a situation and understand another’s perspective about it. When we act from our desires and emotions, all we’re feeling is our own self. I was this, I’m afraid of that, I hope for this—but when we think, we can understand how the world looks from other perspectives. Then we’re able to solve problems relatively objectively.

 GS: Well, when you say, “We think,” who are “we?” Who or what are we relative to our thoughts? Most people have never thought about thinking.

 GC: Of course not, and that’s a further step ahead on the path. After one develops the ability to think and actually encounters the world in a relatively objective way, which is a tremendous step in consciousness, then there is a next step which is to think about thinking. As one does that, one moves beyond thought to this next state in consciousness, sometimes referred to the “Buddha Plain of Awareness,” where one actually is the soul; where one is in that state of unity with all things. From that perspective, thought just becomes a tool and no longer the guiding light in our lives.

 GS: There are so many ways that it’s put. You can say the I am, Buddha mind, hearing the still small voice ... so many different ways.

 GC: The great point is that people have experienced it somewhat differently, and of course they phrased it somewhat differently from the particular cultures in which they had their realization and were trying to teach. The wonderful thing about the world today is that we have access to all of these realizations and breakthroughs in consciousness that different individuals have had throughout the planet. We can put them all on the table together and say, “Oh, you guys were all talking about the same thing.”

 GS: That’s one of the hallmarks of the new age.

 GC: Absolutely, access to that awareness and that it is all about the same thing. Hopefully we’ll soon begin to really behave that way. One of the great tragedies of the last 2000 years, and it still runs on today, is that religious groups are behaving as if they each have the one and only truth. It is high time that they grow beyond such narrow, selfish, limited views of reality and embrace the truth. They all have a different piece of the mosaic and all the pieces need to be put together.

 GS: I think that we’re called upon to transcend religion to spirituality.

 GC: Well, that would be fine. I really hope that will happen. But in the interim, it seems to me that lots of people really do take real value from and have a real need for a specific path. The only way to get up the mountain is to choose a path and go. But if you think that your path is the only path, you’re making a big mistake. If you think that your path is a good enough path and it’s a path that makes sense to you in the present time, then that’s fine. As long as you realize that other people have other ways of trying to get to the same pinnacle.

 GS: What do you see as the most important thing to communicate now?

 GC: I think that the most important thing today is for humanity to be aware that we have a tremendous opportunity to literally remake the world. Every one of us has the responsibility to take a stand on that. Complacency is the biggest problem within humanity. It’s a huge problem right here in the United States. As the teachers come forward, they will call to humanity in somewhat the same terms that I am calling, but in a much stronger, more pointed way. They will ask us to make a choice, to decide what kind of future, what kind of civilization we want. Do we want to continue in the greedy, selfish, outworn ways of the past or are we willing to go forward on the basis of sharing right relationship to one another? That will be a huge and difficult decision for humanity, especially for the most privileged nation that we in the west represent. But that’s the choice before us. Are we going to go forward as one humanity or literally destroy ourselves as separate nation states?

 GS: I like to think that our ability to think has finally led us to a point where we’re going to see the non-sustainability in that.

 GC: If we genuinely do think about it, I’m positive that we will go forward on the basis of what really is best for all of us. The problem is that those who are the greediest and the most selfish and at present who are the most powerful in the world will encourage us to react to our fears. They will say that you have everything to lose at this time. Hunker down America, hunker down rich west, and defend what you have earned. Pretend that you’ve earned all of this. Of course we haven’t earned all of this. It’s given to us by the great gift of life itself. We’ve happened to incarnate this wonderful nation and we need to use this great gift for the good of all humanity. That’s our destiny. America has a great, great gift to give to the world. We just need to be about giving it.

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George Catlin will present two free talks on ”The New World Beckons” at 9am and 11am, and a workshop at 1pm on Sunday, May 29th, at Unity Northwest, 259 East Central Road, Des Plaines, Illinois. For more information on these events, call 847-297-0997; for information about Dr. Catlin, call 888-242-8272 or visit www.share-international.org.

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