I'm not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him
Members of religious group believe London-born author has come to save the world
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Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 March 2010 22.08 GMT
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Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing. Photograph: Eliot Khuner
The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing.

The London-born author, 37, thought his slot on comedy talkshow The Colbert Report went well enough: the host made a few jokes, Patel talked a little about his work and then, job done, he went back to his home in San Francisco.

Shortly afterwards, however, things took a strange turn. Over the course of a couple of days, cryptic messages started filling his inbox.

"I started getting emails saying 'have you heard of Benjamin Creme?' and 'are you the world teacher?'" he said. "Then all of a sudden it wasn't just random internet folk, but also friends saying, 'Have you seen this?'"

What he had written off as gobbledygook suddenly turned into something altogether more bizarre: he was being lauded by members of an obscure religious group who had decided that Patel – a food activist who grew up in a corner shop in Golders Green in north-west London – was, in fact, the messiah.

Their reasoning? Patel's background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or "the world teacher".

His job? To save the world, and everyone on it.

"It was just really weird," he said. "Clearly a case of mistaken identity and clearly a case of people on the internet getting things wrong."

What started as an oddity kept snowballing until suddenly, in the middle of his book tour and awaiting the arrival of his first child, Patel was inundated by questions, messages of support and even threats. The influx was so heavy, in fact, that he put up a statement on his website referencing Monty Python's Life of Brian and categorically stating that he was not Maitreya.

Instead of settling the issue, however, his denial merely fanned the flames for some believers. In a twist ripped straight from the script of the comedy classic, they said that this disavowal, too, had been prophesied. It seemed like there was nothing to convince them.

"It's the kind of paradox that's inescapable," he said, with a grim humour. "There's very little chance or point trying to dig out of it."

There are many elements of his life that tick the prophetic checklist of his worshippers: a flight from India to the UK as a child, growing up in London, a slight stutter, and appearances on TV. But it is his work that puts him most directly in the frame and causes him the most anguish – the very things the followers of Share believe will indicate that their new messiah has arrived.

Patel's career – spent at Oxford, LSE, the World Bank and with thinktank Food First – has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world.

His first book, Stuffed and Starved, rips through the problems in global food production and examines how the free market has worked to keep millions hungry (Naomi Klein called it dazzling, while the Guardian's Felicity Lawrence said it was "an impassioned call to action"). The Value of Nothing, meanwhile, draws on the economic collapse to look at how we might fix the system and improve life for billions of people around the globe.

While his goal appears to match Share's vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.

"What I'm arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works," he said.

"I don't think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I'm talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it."

To say Patel – with his academic air, stammer and grey-flecked hair – is a reluctant saviour is an understatement. In fact, he rejects the entire notion of saviours. If there is one thing he has learned from his work as an activist in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, it is that there are no easy answers.

"People are very ready to abdicate responsibility and have it shovelled on to someone else's shoulders," he said. "You saw that with Obama most spectacularly, but whenever there's going to be someone who's just going to fix it for you, it's a very attractive story. It's in every mythological structure."

Unravelling exactly what it is that Share International's followers believe, however, is tricky.

The group is an offshoot of the Victorian Theosophy movement founded by Madame Blavatsky that developed a belief system out of an amalgam of various religions, spiritualism and metaphysics.

Creme – who joined a UFO cult in the 1950s before starting Share – has added a cosmic take to the whole concept: he says that Maitreya represents a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers.

This 18m-year-old saviour, he says, has been resting somewhere in the Himalayas for 2,000 years and – as a figure who combines messianism for Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims alike – is due to return any time now, uniting humanity and making life better for everybody on earth.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that Creme refuses to categorically state whether or not he believes that Patel and Maitreya are one and the same. He suggests that it is not up to him to rule either way, instead blaming media coverage, rather than his own mystical predictions, for making people "hysterical".

"It is not my place," Creme told the writer Scott James, a friend of Patel, recently. "People are looking to Mr Patel because they are looking for the fulfilment of a story which I've been making around the world for the last 35 years."

It is not the first time that Creme, an inscrutable guru with a mop of curly white hair, has courted publicity with his wild pronouncements of a messiah. In 1985 he made another prophecy: that Maitreya would reveal himself to the press in London.

A gaggle of journalists gathered in a Brick Lane curry house for the main event. In the end, the promised saviour failed to materialise. (One candidate, "a man in old robes and a faraway look in his eye", turned out to be a tramp begging for cigarettes, our correspondent wrote at the time).

Patel's rejection of his status as a deity does not seem to have killed off interest from Share's members. Indeed, the situation has invaded his everyday life, such as when two devotees travelled from Detroit – some 2,400 miles away – just to hear him give a short public talk.

"They were really nice people, not in your face, really straightforward – these people do not look like fanatics," he says. "I gave the talk, and they hung around at the end and we had a chat."

It was only then that the pair revealed that they were followers of Creme's teachings.

Patel said: "They said they thought I was the Maitreya … they also said I had appeared in their dreams. I said: 'I'm really flattered that you came all the way here, but it breaks my heart that you came all this way and spent all this money to meet someone who isn't who you think he is.'

"It made me really depressed, actually. That evening I was really down."

While he struggles to cope with this unwanted anointment, his friends and family are more tickled by the situation.

"They think it's hilarious," he said. "My parents came to visit recently, and they brought clothes that said 'he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy'. To them, it's just amusing."

There have been similar cases in the past, including Steve Cooper, an unemployed man from Tooting, south London, who was identified by a Hindu sect as the reincarnation of a goddess and now lives in a temple in Gujurat with scores of followers.

Unlike some who have the greatness thrust upon them, though, Patel's greatest hope is that Share will leave him alone so that he can get back to normal life.

Raj Patel’s desk sits in a dusty, cement-floored nook in his garage, just beyond a parked gray Prius, near the washer and dryer. They are humble surroundings for a god.

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Andrea Ismert
Followers of Share International, a New Age religious sect, claim Raj Patel is the messiah Maitreya. He denies the claim, but he cannot persuade them.

This article is part of our expanded Bay Area coverage.
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“It is absurd to be put in this position, when I’m just some bloke,” Mr. Patel said.

A native of London now living on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, Mr. Patel suddenly finds himself an unlikely object of worship, proclaimed the messiah Maitreya by followers of the New Age religious sect Share International.

He was raised as a Hindu and had never heard of the group. He has no desire for deification. But he may not have a choice.

Mr. Patel’s journey from ordinary person to unwilling lord is a case of having the wrong résumé at the wrong moment in history. For this is a time when human yearning to find a magical cure for the world’s woes can be harnessed to the digital age’s instant access to a vast treasure-trove of personal information.

I have known Mr. Patel for four years — he keeps an office down the hall from mine. He is charming, and as a graduate of Oxford, Cornell University and the London School of Economics, he is considered brilliant, although he is self-effacing. He readily admits to being imperfectly human.

People began to believe otherwise on Jan. 14 in London when Benjamin Creme, the leader of Share International, who is also known as the Master, proclaimed the arrival of Maitreya. The name of the deity has Buddhist roots, but in 1972, Mr. Creme prophesied the coming Maitreya as a messiah for all faiths called the World Teacher.

Mr. Creme did not name the messiah, but he revealed clues that led his devotees to fire up their search engines on a digital scavenger hunt that would lead them to The One.

About this time Mr. Patel was publicizing his new economics book, “The Value of Nothing.” With blogging, biographies and talk show appearances, the details of his life and views permeated the Internet ether. Crowds packed his readings, his book debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, and he appeared on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.

The Maitreya clues — his age (supposed to be born in 1972; Mr. Patel was), life experiences (supposed to have traveled from India to London in 1977; Mr. Patel was taken on a vacation there with his parents that year) race (supposed to be dark-skinned; Mr. Patel is Indian) and philosophies — all pointed to him. Some believe Maitreya will have a stutter. When Mr. Patel tripped over a few words when talking with Mr. Colbert, it was the final sign.

“It became a flood,” said Mr. Patel, referring to a torrent of e-mail messages that asked: “Are you The One?” He removed the contact information from his Web site, but dozens of pages, discussion groups and videos have emerged online proclaiming his holiness.

Mr. Patel has emphatically and publicly denied being Maitreya. Bad move. According to the predictions, “Maitreya will neither confirm, or will fail to confirm, he is Maitreya,” said Cher Gilmore, a spokeswoman for Share International.

Ms. Gilmore said Mr. Creme would not say if he believed Mr. Patel was the messiah.

Ben Shoucair, 24, a college student from Detroit, does not need more convincing. He said he saw Mr. Patel in a dream, and then was stunned to find a YouTube video and discover his vision was real. Last week, Mr. Shoucair and his father spent $990 on last-minute tickets to fly to San Francisco to be in Mr. Patel’s presence at a book promotion.

Reached by phone this week, Mr. Shoucair said meeting Mr. Patel had made him “happy.” He said the Maitreya evidence was irrefutable. “It puts it all on Raj Patel at this time in history.”

Mr. Shoucair seemed amazed when told that Mr. Patel did not believe he was the messiah and had never heard of Mr. Creme. “See how deep the spiritual world is,” Mr. Shoucair said.

Mr. Patel said of their pilgrimage: “It broke my heart. They’d flown all the way from Detroit.”

Share International’s beliefs are rooted in the Theosophical movement popular in Britain in the late-19th century; it later evolved into New Age beliefs, said Ted F. Peters of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Messiahs have been declared before, only to disappoint.

“It’s incredibly flattering, just for an instant,” Mr. Patel said of his unwanted status. “And then you realize what it means. People are looking for better times. Almost anything now will qualify as a portent of different times.”

Raj Patel has met his maker, so to speak.

Mr. Patel, a San Francisco author and economist, woke up one day earlier this year to discover that he had unwillingly been declared the messiah by followers of the New Age group Share International, founded by Benjamin Creme, a London mystic. It was a revelation that made Mr. Patel the focus of unwanted attention by thousands of worshipers and thrust him into a surreal international news media frenzy.

Last week Mr. Creme visited the Bay Area, and the two men met for the first time, over cookies in a private home in Berkeley, a possible finale in the timely tale of a mortal mistaken for a god.

After the meeting, both men have decided to call the events of the past several months “a case of mistaken identity.” They seemed impressed with each other, with Mr. Creme saying he found Mr. Patel quite intelligent and charming.

Mr. Patel had a different impression of Mr. Creme: “Bonkers.”

In January, devotees of Mr. Creme’s decades-old prophesies concluded — based on a series of clues and unverified information on the Internet — that Mr. Patel was the earthly manifestation of Maitreya, The World Teacher.

Mr. Creme, who said he received telepathic messages from the immortal Maitreya to share with followers, did not endorse the claim. But he did not forcefully deny it either. The story first appeared in this column, then London tabloids devoured the tale mercilessly, and Stephen Colbert, the comedian, devoted an entire segment of his “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central to ridiculing the deification.

Although Mr. Creme has finally released Mr. Patel from his divine burden, it doesn’t mean that he has given up on the idea of a messiah for these troubling times. In fact, his meeting with Mr. Patel was just part of an extended visit to the Bay Area to recruit new believers.

A crowd of more than 600 gathered at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on a recent Sunday afternoon to hear Mr. Creme. Looking his 87 years, he was gently assisted to center stage and then sat stoically as an audio recording played his voice, in a slow Boris Karloff cadence, purportedly channeling the words of Maitreya. “My plan is to show you that the way out of your problems is to listen again to the true voice of god within your hearts, to share,” he said.

When the recording ended, Mr. Creme spoke about the various crises in the world, including the growing imbalance between rich and poor that he ascribed to “an outmoded way of living” — a message that seemed to resonate with the mostly white crowd, some of whom had arrived in Mercedeses and BMWs.

Mr. Creme went on to explain that invisible “brothers” from other inhabited planets in our solar system had been on Earth to help mankind escape its problems and usher in a new age.

J. Gordon Melton, a religious scholar who has studied Share International and Mr. Creme since the 1970s, described the group as “small and harmless.”

The group’s messianic message — that a compassionate savior will come and teach the world better ways — “in hard economic times and war has an appeal,” Mr. Melton said. But, he added, non-Christian messiahs tend to face fierce opposition in the United States.

That became clear at Mr. Creme’s appearance when a man in the audience disrupted the event by pointing and shouting, “Don’t believe these lies! This man is the devil!”

Mr. Creme said later that he had faced such acrimony in the past, although it was rare. He said he had brought his message to San Francisco more than 30 times and generally felt welcomed.

During his Bay Area visit, Mr. Creme was asked about the news of the day, a federal court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in California. Was this a sign of the compassionate new age?

Mr. Creme explained that while he personally supported same-sex nuptials, Maitreya did not approve of gay and lesbian couples’ raising children — the new age promoted by Share International should not include same-sex parents.

In addition to the private meeting in Berkeley, Mr. Patel attended the Sunday lecture for three hours, and concluded that Mr. Creme was “a sweet, pleasant old man” who ultimately “was like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who said she could believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”

But Mr. Patel was inspired in one sense. As the author of best-selling books about big ideas — the first two were about food and economics — he is now considering writing about the whole notion of saviors.

He will certainly have a unique perspective.