Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby American Dream » Fri Jan 21, 2011 6:05 pm

nathan28 wrote:
American Dream wrote:
Also both have/had lady gurus who take ample sexual advantage of their male followers. Strictly anecdotal I know, but a friend told me she once saw JZ Knight (aka Ramtha) at a local movie theatre with a boy on each side, necking with each in turn...


Don't hold it against her that she knows how to party.

Image

If JZ gave away her millions to the poor, set her followers free, let go of trying to control other human beings and- most importantly- told the CIA to shove it, I think a few boyfriends shouldn't be a problem at all.

Same would hold true of her "spiritual" sister Elizabeth Clare Prophet, if she were still incarnated on this plane of existence...
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby alwyn » Sat Jan 22, 2011 3:11 am

I'm ashamed to say I hung out at the cult for awhile in the 80's....I was at one of the big events in Yelm, I got to ask a question, and she gave me some really bogus answer...so I told her that what she said wasn't true. She said how do you know? I said personal experience....so I got left in the dust, as she likes to say....I like to say I left right then, because the bullshit was piled high and quite obvious, by that point :oops:
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 22, 2011 2:14 pm


Insider lifts lid on ‘deep paranoia’

January 22 2011 at 11:24am
By Helen Bamford


Image
Judy Zebra Knight started the Ramtha School of Enlightenment,
which has attacted celebrities, such as actress Salma Hayek.




American Judy Zebra Knight, the woman who started the Ramtha School of Enightenment, is smart, super-wealthy, lives in a huge French chateau-style home and persuades her followers to part with their money before the end of days.

Members are urged to build underground bunkers and stockpile food and weapons to prepare for a global catastrophe – even the end of the world.

This is according to a former member who spent seven years in Yelm in the US, where Knight runs her school, purportedly guided by the spirit of Ramtha, a 35 000-year-old disembodied entity from an ancient civilisation, who first appeared to her in the kitchen of her husband’s trailer in Tacoma.

Robair Barbeau, 64, of Las Vegas, who spent seven years in Yelm, described the Ramtha School of Enlightenment – whose members included slain French fugitive couple Philippe Pierre Meniere, 60, and Agnes Jeanne Jardel, 55 – as a “mind and soul-raping cult”.

He and former member David McCarthy, who still lives in Yelm, have formed a group called Life After Ramtha School of Enlightenment, or Larse, to warn people of what they believe are brainwashing and cult-like activities.

Hollywood actresses Salma Hayek, Shirley MacLaine and Linda Evans have been linked to Knight.

Barbeau told the Saturday Star that he and his wife had joined Ramtha in 1981.

“We sold all our possessions to go and prepare for the end.”

He said he personally built more than 40 underground bunkers. Some of the wealthier members spent anything from $100 000 to $1 million on the elaborate structures.

Barbeau said they were supposed to be secret, but everyone in Yelm knew about them.

He said Knight used fear to keep her “paying customers”.

“I had supplies for about three years – long-lasting food in airtight containers.”

Everyone stockpiled weapons “I’m not sure if people would go to the extent of shooting a policeman but they would definitely protect themselves.”

He said about 1 800 members lived near the school, paying about $1 000 a week to attend courses.

Barbeau described how Knight gathered her followers.

“First she attracts them with the carrot of spirituality, targeting those searching for answers about God, by also promising to teach them the secret of many things, including how to live 200 years.”

A South African who spent time in Yelm, but asked not to be identified, said many of the families in the rural town had bunkers in which they stored tins of lentils, beans and peas. They also had bicycles and kept guns. “These are apparently to ward off the starving hordes at Armageddon.



Members practised “deep focus and visualisation” to generate capacity to influence reality via their consciousness.

“Every sort of New Age lunacy is encouraged.”



“There is deep paranoia about government control. The idea is to lead a sovereign existence by being independent, but they are dependant on Knight.”

He said people came to “The School” to practise creating wealth – but most were impoverished.



The Ramtha School of Enlightenment has distanced itself from the couple and Knight said in a statement she had never met the couple.

“This school does not condone violence in any form… The choices made by the couple do not reflect an understanding of the school’s philosophy,” she said.

Knight said Ramtha students were not survivalists.

“We are sovereignists. We have always been taught to be prepared for anything, to be able to provide and care for ourselves and our families.



She said that the school was not a cult and that the couple had had no contact with them for more than seven years since they attended a seminar in Joburg in January 2004.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 22, 2011 2:33 pm

"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Sat Jan 22, 2011 4:07 pm

I remember JZ from the old S. MacLaine "docudrama" 'Out On A Limb'.

Seriously weird nite I saw that, dragged to SF in search of weed, winding up in this haven of very odd people who were seriously debating ad nauseum the macrobiotic properties of butterfish (the only protien they could apparently afford...). We didn't score, but I wound up having to sit around the Teevee watching them eat macrobiotic butterfish while they watched the show. JZ came off fake and weird as hell. I'd been working (in restaurants) with a bunch of people who were attending dueling 'psychic schools' in the area (the only difference seemed to be what lengths they would go to be prepared for the end of the world) and even they didn't give off such a seriously weird vibe.

I do like the 'What the bleep' movie, because it shows some basics of rather universal metaphysical thought. Many of the people featured in the movie, from what I can discern, have no tie to Knight. However, it does not delve into the less sexy underpinnings of the apocalyptic death wish that seems to run under certain new age organizations.

PS: An observation, Many of the apocalyptic new age 'cults' have female leaders who take sexual advantage of their followers. When I lived in the Sierras, I worked with several people who belonged to one that had already 'gone to ground'. They all had matching International 4-wheel drives and couldn't have sex unless the cult leader OK'ed it. However, she could have any male of the group she wanted. I think of them as the flip side of The Fundamentalist Mormons and other patriarchal cults.

One of the things that disturbed me about the people I met involved in such things was their insistence that there was still time to avert 'apocalypse' if only people could be persuaded to envision a different future. However, they spent their time navel-gazing in past lives, storing up dried food, buying land in the mountains and recruiting new members. This still pisses me off, I knew them in the eighties, perhaps if they hadn't been such self-absorbed narcissists theis place might be different now...or not... :shrug:
Last edited by Twyla LaSarc on Sat Jan 22, 2011 4:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby justdrew » Sat Jan 22, 2011 4:29 pm

the 'What the bleep' movie is just the candy they hand out to attract new candidates. All new members probably go through an indoctrination phase for a few months, then have some test which is passed off to them as a meeting with the leader who gives them some kinda crap sandwich. If they don't love the crap, it's time to separate that recruit because they're too skeptical and will only cause problems if they stick around; so this culling moment always comes in these groups. As alwyn's experience demonstrates.

they start out giving a bowl of blueberries, but then start mixing in more and more rabbit-berries. Some people just never learn to complain that the brown berries just don't taste right :P
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Sat Jan 22, 2011 4:39 pm

Good analogy, JustDrew.
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 02, 2011 2:06 pm

http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/ar ... s-in-Karoo

Knight blindness in Karoo?
Julia Beffon looks at the woman behind the New Age Ramtha School of Enlightenment
Jan 23, 2011 11:45 PM | By Julia Beffon



The manhunt for French couple Philippe Meniere and Agnes Jardel, which ended in a hail of bullets on Thursday, brought Ramtha's School of Enlightenment to the attention of the South African public.

RSE is based in the small town of Yelm, Washington state, but the school and its leader, JZ Knight, followed the events in Sutherland closely.

Within two hours of sending some questions via e-mail to a South African representative of RSE, a reply was e-mailed from Yelm.

It offered condolences to relatives of the victims, eschewed violence and reiterated an earlier press release: "The school has had no contact with [Meniere and Jardel] since they last attended a seminar in Johannesburg in January 2004. As reported by the Du Plessis family to the media already, their change in behaviour happened only within the last year, so their recent actions are unrelated to RSE or its teachings."

So what is RSE and its teachings?

The school started in 1988 after Knight began spreading the teachings of Ramtha, who "lived as a human being on Earth 35000 years ago.

"In that lifetime, he discovered the true nature of the human person, the power of the mind, and the malleable nature of physical reality."

Ramtha was no simple Pleistocene-era philosopher, living in a cave with his Cro Magnon family.

He was a warrior in the fabled city of Atlantis, part of an evolved civilisation that came to Earth to impart knowledge to its backward inhabitants - and then disappeared.

Atlantis was on the continent of Lemuria, which has also disappeared.

Ramtha waited patiently through the millennia to choose Knight - an attractive blonde - to be his medium.

He first appeared to her in the kitchen of her trailer home in 1977.

According to the Skeptic's Dictionary (skepdic.com), Ramtha is also a feminist. It quotes Knight: "So women have been abused by men, and herded by men through religion to perform according to those religious doctrines, and in fact, women were despised by Jehovah.

"So, he said: 'It is important that when the teachings come through, they come through the body of a woman.'"

The RSE denies it is a cult - and has gone to court over the issue - particularly not a survivalist or doomsday cult. That appears to be true. JZ Knight is much more L Ron Hubbard than Jim Jones.

She was born Judith Darlene Hampton in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1946 to a poor family, though she completed high school and dropped out of business college.

She was married to Jeff Knight at the time Ramtha first contacted her, but they went through a messy divorce in 1989. She has had at least four husbands since.

Jeff Knight died of Aids in 1995, still engaged in a bitter court battle with JZ.

Colleagues apparently nicknamed her "Zebra" for her black-and-white decision-making ability, and when she rose to fame she took the initials JZ - Judy Zebra - for her name.

The RSE has about 50 formal employees and holds seminars (what it calls "events") for about 5000 people a year. The events cost at least $1000 to attend.

The organisation is registered in the US as a corporation and derives a lot of its income from DVDs and book sales.

According to Wikipedia, JZ Knight made more than $2.6-million in sales alone in 2007. She also owns a shop in Yelm that sells ordinary items, such as kitchen utensils.

A UFO allegedly carrying aliens crashed at area 51, on a secretive defence force base near Roswell a year after she was born, though Knight has claimed no credit for this.

She does claim credit for the way the blue people are depicted in Avatar (that's just how Ramtha described the northern Lemurians); the modern interpretation of the term "channelling"; and medical breakthroughs (her concept of the body's physical and spiritual "housekeeper", who she calls Gladys, is similar to Nobel prize-winning work done on telomeres - but without the science).

Knight has copyrighted the name Ramtha and many other things.

As follower and "distance healer" Carol Hathor says on her website: "I also beseech you to not re-teach the Ramtha teachings, when you begin to 'turn on' to fabulous Knowledge.

"Not only is it a copyright violation, which it should be, but you'd be doing a disservice to people . Be a righteous Runner: advocate Ramtha materials and his fabulous School." (Auric Clearing $85. Karmic Sessions $120.)

Meniere and Jardel were apparently penniless during most of their time in Sutherland, so it's doubtful whether they could have afforded to maintain their links with RSE.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
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Re: Ramtha cult members die in SA shootout

Postby stefano » Wed Jul 23, 2014 4:05 am

New Age leader sues ex-students over leaked video of her drunken racist anti-gay rant
By Tom Boggioni
Monday, July 21, 2014 14:58 EDT

The leader of a New Age consciousness and enlightenment school, who channels the voice of a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior when speaking to her followers, is suing two former students after they posted a drunken rant by her saying Jews have enough money to “have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” and Mexicans breed “like rabbits,” among other slurs.

JZ Knight, a 65-year-old former rodeo queen and cable TV saleswoman who heads the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE) in Yelm, Washington, is suing ex-students Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy for uploading live-streamed video from a 2011 Ramtha ’channeling’ that turned into a drunken bigoted diatribe, according to Susy Buchanan of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” Knight told her students in the released video. Knight explained “I’m telling you this, every goddamn Mexican family is a Catholic—they’re breeding like fucking rabbits,” before adding that “all gay men were once Catholic women.”
[...]
Recently followers have become disenchanted with Knight’s drunken rambling, feeling this is not the enlightenment they are seeking.
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