An interview with JZ Knight by Edie Weinstein-Moser

Imagine what it would be like to be going about your business as a working-class woman, raised as the daughter of someone who picked cotton in a field, with little religious background, and then one day being told you were to be the vehicle of communication for a 35,000 year old entity. In one instant, your life would be transformed. In 1977 exactly that occurred in the life of JZ Knight. For 28 years, she has channeled the entity known as Ramtha whose message is quite simple: "You Are God."  

I had the opportunity to interview JZ on a lovely autumn morning, and then later that afternoon witness Ramtha at work at the Yoga Research Society conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . A very different affect about them, and yet the warmth and love that they each exuded was of the same essence. I offer you the opportunity to get to know this extraordinary woman in a more intimate way in this interview.  

Edie - Do you feel you were born to take on the role of channeling Ramtha, that it was part of your destiny?  

JZ - I do. Ramtha's the one who coined the term 'channeling'. It was not a term that was used. He was the one who defined what difference I was and how our work together would be different than a medium or however many adjectives you want to add to it. The fact that I leave my body and go down that tunnel, and I've been doing that since 1978, warranted a different description. He started that with the press in the early '80's, so everybody became a channel, not understanding the difference between being a medium and a channel. Thirty years of my life, it's been a good chunk of my destiny.  

Edie - So is that how you differentiate between being a medium and a channel, that you leave your body and your awareness of JZ goes?  

JZ - Today you'll see graphs and reports from a scientific conference which actually tested me. There were eighteen scholars in total who came over a two year period to study Ramtha's school and the different persuasions of information they represented that he teaches, and the last would have been a psychological and then physical exam. There were nine channels and my body was wired to give me a baseline and then the extraordinary moment when I left my body and Ramtha appeared is shockingly different. After many years, it was actually able to be told by science that I'm not a fraud and that I'm not a medium and in fact, a whole different being was in the body at the blink of an eye.   I didn't know what mediums were. I had no idea who Edgar Cayce was. I had not been part of any new age/old age community in any period of my life. I absolutely did not have a definition of who he was and I was and what I would be doing. It wasn't until I had read a book of Edgar Cayce called There Is a River that I thought, "My goodness, am I a sleeping prophet, am I a medium?" Ramtha said, "You're not asleep, are you?" No I wasn't. That's when he said I was a channel, because it's my body and my brain that's the channel and I, the owner of this body, had already gone down that tunnel, being quanticized toward the light. So that's the difference between being a medium and a channel. It became sort of fashionable, so everyone who was a medium took down their shingle and said they were a channel and it got shmoozed and blended with anyone who thought they were hearing any voice whatsoever. You can't be a channel and be present. You're gone, you're out of your body, you're having a near death experience. That's how we've been doing it for thirty years.  

Edie - Do you have any recollection of where the consciousness of JZ goes when Ramtha appears?  

JZ - It's so interesting that you should ask that. You're asking me who is the consciousness of JZ, the "I" that I am that occupies my brain and my body. I am the person who is lifted out of my body in a small ball. I go through a tunnel and I hit this wall of light. It would take more than this interview to explain the tunnel. I endeavor to do that in my book A State of Mind and I've been doing it in my talks. I go down this tunnel and I am traveling at 186,000 miles per second, going to that wall of light. That's the speed that you become and you become infinitely tiny. I have just left my body which normally would have died, and is held together by Ramtha. He's not in the body, but his mind is utilizing my brain, my lower cerebellum. He activates and keeps the body alive while I'm going. I've been going down the tunnel since 1978, the very tunnel that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote about in the late 70's and the near death experiences of children. I didn't know anyone else who knew where I was going. It's my body that's left and it's “I” that's in the tunnel.  

Edie - Was there ever fear involved?  

JZ - No. Fear is an emotion that the body has. You, as a transcendental being, have no fear because the body that has the emotion has just been left behind. The peace that we talk about is what happens when you get disconnected from your brain and its explanations on people, places, things, times and events and its emotional response to that recognition. I have watched my brain track me as I've gone into the tunnel and actually see my brain light up and go further and further and further into the back of my head. The fear would have only come as a possibility of being back in my body and remembering what I have done and where I had gone. My body's emotions would have reacted to that.  

Edie - Can you separate out your identity as JZ and the integration that you experience as a channel for Ramtha? Do you think of yourself as a solo being?  

JZ - He isn't another personality in my brain and we proved that with the exhaustive testing we did for a year. We proved that I'm not a split personality or having a grand mal seizure. This is a unique mind that just simply uses my body. That we share a body is confusing to people, but it's also brilliant and wonderful that Ramtha teaches that "You are God." Ramtha teaches people that you're not your body and that it is genetically engineered in the womb, from bliss, by you, to create a body and a neuro-net in your body that pre-disposes you to certain emotions that you haven't owned. Wisdom doesn't have emotions. It is the finalization of an emotional experience. We are predisposed genetically and intentionally to our emotions as well as all of the other beautiful aspects and gifts that we made per putting together that genetic preparation. The channeling of Ramtha is a wonderful observation about us as a self and the observer in quantum physics for example.   We ourselves are utilizing our bodies in much the same way and we could move at any point in our brain to actually light up a different neuro-net and have a different resource or mapping that would create a reality that would be slightly changed or completely changed from the reality that we just came into.

The obvious un-obvious of the channeling is that it's also to show us that we are distinctive from our body and we do not have to bear the burden of that neuro-net all of our lives. We can move around and light up different areas of our brain that we share with six billion other people. Any point that has been accomplished by human-kind can be accomplished if we understand how to ask the right questions. It's beautiful, because when 'The Ram' says that we are God, and then we begin to see ourselves as a continuation, and that we made this body from genetic material and that we are manifesting through this body. Ultimately, we are the creators of it. We are in this body as 'The Ram' is using my body, and I like that as a representation. It goes a lot further than some other icon of religion, whether it's Jesus on the cross or elephants as a representation of Hinduism. It's more visible and more powerful. It's shouting to who we are.  

Edie - I imagine that this is a pretty grand departure from what you were raised to believe, and that this concept of God is different from what you learned over the last thirty years.  

JZ - I was raised in a cotton field. My mother was a cotton picker up until I was four years old. I was I raised in cotton fields along with black people and Mexicans, and I was 'white trash.’ But the people who had nothing had the greatest connection to themselves, because they knew how to cure themselves because they didn't have access or funds for doctors or hospitals. They knew how to access their dreams and were able to make wise and prudent decisions without education.   Up until I was four years old, I had the richest education of my entire life - up until the Ram came. That formulated a basis of having no prejudice toward people and understanding that what is beautiful and experiential about a person - what we are inside of ourselves - is what illuminates what we see. It wasn't until we moved to New Mexico and my mother worked in a drug store from 4:30 ‘til 3:30 in the afternoon and then a hamburger stand from 5:00 until 10:00 in the evening and it was the people who owned the hamburger stand; a retired couple who took us to the Assembly of God Church. It was my first introduction to religion and it was an interesting ride until I was 13 and I left the church. I always prayed to God and always heard a voice in my head and my prayers were always answered. I always wondered why more people didn't do it. Whatever name I put to it was really trivial. It was that I engaged a desire that I wanted without confliction. When I engaged that, it all happened. I always prayed to God, always. Church is not about God. It's the study of the mystery in God. We don't find God in church. Where we find God is in us. Ramtha's appearance to me had wonderful ground for being there, than the person who didn't recognize what was happening to them, because they think they're going crazy or they think they are hearing voices or it's the devil or a myriad of pre-programmed responses. It was a bit of a different response with me.  

Edie - Do you feel you have a choice to continue to do this work?  

JZ - I find it such an ironic question, because it's almost posed as if I'm being possessed. I'm not being possessed.  

Edie - Oh no, I wasn't implying that.  

JZ - There's no forcing upon me. I have free will to do this and to stop at any time. It's not something I'm burdened with doing. I must tell you that being out of my body and where I go is beautiful and every time I understand more about what we are, and I return and make changes in my own life. I would never want to not be with Ramtha; never would want to not know where he's at. And the people who have learned a grand teaching, that it's not God, in the sense that we have been taught God, it's something about the nature of ourselves and how our brains work and our emotions and why do we have this life vs. the life of the person down the street? We are so beautiful, and Ramtha's people have learned that, and learned to do incredible and marvelous things. They can hardly wait to get back to hear what wonderful event has occurred in a person's life and what they've manifested and how they've changed. It's a contribution to the world, although it has been difficult for a long time. It made its mark and liberated people from fear and anxiety of not having a spiritual life and not having some deity to belong to for goodness sake.   There's a haunting in people that we are empty. The more materialistic and physical the world becomes, the emptier a person begins to feel inside, as if some sacred place has been emptied out. It's a need to understand who we belong to and what is the purpose of that belonging. When it gets really empty, people turn back to faith and religion. Even though it doesn't make sense, historically or scientifically they do. The contribution in the work with Ramtha is fulfilling and enriching, because I see people get filled up and not with history; not with what happened 2000 years ago or 5000 years ago or that we can't live as human beings, that somehow the Earth is scorched with sin and fire and materialism. Life is a gift and it's here for us to make known the unknown. That has been an incredible accomplishment in my life. I go to bed at night, so glad that I was able to add a difference to the world.  

Edie - I was thinking in terms of the toll it sometimes takes on the human. Right now, I hear your voice sounding strained and I don't want to tax it in any way.  

JZ - I'm tired, that's true, but I'm happy to talk to you.  

Edie - How do you handle detractors who say that this isn't real, that it’s of the devil....  

JZ - First off, you're never going to convince people. You're not going to convince a religious fanatic who sees Satan in everything, [who thinks] that life is not worth living unless it's with Jesus. You're not going to convince them, because their job is to change you. You're not going to change the minds of people who politically have it to enslave people and enforce laws. You're not going to change the mind of someone who wants their life to be taken care of by some guru so they're not responsible for anything in their life.   If you're a divine being, then you have to be held accountable for your life. You share in the glory as well as in the experience and it is only relative to how you created it. There are people who get mad and say, "I wanted something else." No baby sitters here. I count in a long life of thirty years experiences of being out of my body, losing a lot of life and then having to contend with people who one moment say they are open-minded and the next moment threatened by the liberty that's facing them.   There's scientific evidence, if a person wishes not to speak out of the corner of their mouth, but with more wise and prudent investigation, to go and simply say "She's not a fraud and what is she saying? What is Ramtha? This is what we found out." Most people don't want to do that, because it fractures in their mind, their supposition of what they want it to be. That's not all people. There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who love his teachings and have for thirty years. It's just the people who say "There's only one God and only one way and that just isn't the way." They sort of get in the way of that.