c. 1997 Religion News Service

YELM, Wash. _ Whether she’s channeling the spirit of the ancient warrior Ramtha or whether she’s not, JZ Knight is a nonstop talker, given to the occasional malapropism. She is a whip-smart woman who takes a particular pride that her lack of formal education has made her a suitable vehicle for the ancient spiritual adept she calls Ramtha.”I am a country girl, a simple woman,”the unpunctuated JZ is fond of saying. (Her given name is Judith and”Z”is a for”Zebra,”a nickname she acquired because of her tendency to see life in black-and-white.) “Ramtha is not a Fig Newton of my imagination, I see him as clearly as I see you, only he’s lit up and bigger,”she told a gathering of scholars here recently.”The past 20 years, since Ramtha first appeared to me in my kitchen, have been a lonely and private journey. And the greatest mystery of all has been Ramtha and his relationship to me.” Knight recounted her spiritual odyssey, which began 50 years ago in Artesia, N.M. The eighth of nine children in a family of migrant workers, Knight said she grew up poor and unloved.

Her mother, she said, picked cotton; her father was a drunk. Assaulted and almost raped by a relative as a young girl and ostracized in her teen years by a stepfather who loathed her, Knight said she”fell in love with God”at an early age and talked to him incessantly. In time, she said, God began to talk back to her.”I wanted to be something wonderful in life,”said Knight, who married young, gave birth to two sons, never went to college and has been divorced four times. That”something”didn’t happen until 1978 when, she said, Ramtha appeared to her in her Tacoma kitchen and launched her lucrative and controversial career as a New Age channeler.

Since Knight built a mansion valued at $3 million in the rural enclave of Yelm and established a school here about nine years ago, she said she has endured her neighbors’ contempt.”People would put their hands on the gate and in the name of Jesus pray that God would strike the animals dead. People threw rocks. They shot at me as I gardened,”she said.

But despite criticism of her methods in this small town, in some quarters of the New Age movement and in the media, she remains committed to her 20-year relationship with the entity known as Ramtha and the”moral impeccability”his teaching demands.

While she holds a copyright on Ramtha’s message and has engaged in fierce legal battles with others who claim to channel Ramtha, Knight also has been a benefactress, giving more than $1 million in college scholarships over the past several years to graduates of Yelm High School, which her sons attended. She also remains committed to using the ancient principles of Gnosticism and discoveries in quantum physics to explain Ramtha’s teachings.”Ramtha says God is a mind composed of consciousness and energy, birthed from the void. God is not a person, but a potential from which all potentials come into being”she said.”At this school we see energy as waves. And the power of God is to transform that energy into particles of experience. We’ll make a New Age of superconsciousness possible, in which new kinds of energy co-exist with the old.”

MJP END CONNELL