NZ Skeptics Articles

Visiting Share International

Mark Honeychurch - 6 January 2025

Share International is an organisation that I’ve been interested in for quite a few years now. Whenever I see their stands at wellness events and local fairs, I make a beeline for them and have a chat about aliens, UFOs, crop circles and more. It’s always seemed a little weird that their membership is predominantly retirees - I tend to associate UFO belief with younger people who have a passion for science and technology, but without the critical mindset or understanding of the complexities involved with interstellar travel to understand that their beliefs are implausible.

After years of procrastinating, Tim, Bronwyn and I finally organised to visit a local Share International meeting one Sunday evening a few months ago - a talk about UFOs and their Spiritual Mission. Despite being an event run by Share International, on MeetUp the group had called themselves “Wellington Heart & Spiritual New Zealand”. This could be a perfectly innocent decision, but I have my suspicions that the group may be trying to avoid losing potential new members who might use Google to search for their name before committing to a visit.

The event was being hosted at Trinity Union Church in Newtown, which seemed like an odd venue for a spiritual group whose message is inconsistent with Christianity. I guess maybe this particular church has fallen on hard times, and any money made from renting out their space - even during the prime time church hours of Sunday evening - might be seen as a lifeline.

Nobody Home

We arrived at the church a few minutes before the talk was due to start, and were greeted with a locked front door. Looking around the church, the lights were all off and it appeared that nobody was inside. Damn! We decamped to a local curry house (and being Newtown, we were spoiled for choice), and looked online to see if the event (advertised on MeetUp) had been cancelled. Nope, it was still scheduled, but curiously there were three other talks booked by the same group at the same time and venue

It seemed pretty unlikely that this small group was running four simultaneous events, so we assumed that someone had created one-off talks at different times and accidentally set them to repeat every week - an assumption that we were able to confirm later in the evening. As well as these talks, there was also a regular meditation session at 7pm, titled “Transmission Meditation - A World Service”. We figured that we could wait around for a while and see if this event was actually happening.

Transmission Meditation

After a quick drink in a local bar, we walked up the hill back to Trinity Union church just before 7pm, and found to our delight that the door of the church was now open. Heading inside, it was still dark, but in a room to our left we could just make out two rows of chairs facing each other, and a single throne-like wooden chair at the end of the two rows, facing towards us. This throne looked a lot more comfortable than the rest of the chairs, with a padded red seat and back, and it was illuminated by a spotlight from above. My first thought was that this chair might be reserved for the group’s deceased leader, awaiting his eventual earthly return - much like how Scientology’s Ideal Orgs all have an office for L. Ron Hubbard.

When we entered the room, we were greeted by a few people who appeared to be regulars - Sophia, Wendy, Gunda and Steven. Steven asked us to sit in one of the rows of chairs - men on the left, and women on the right. He went on to explain that masculine and feminine energies are different and complementary, and that when channeling energy it helped to keep the energies separate. He then told us that our job during this session was to be receivers, guiding the energy from above and transforming it, but that it was important not to transmit the energy anywhere - despite the name of the event being “Transmission Meditation”. Apparently as conduits we weren’t able to make the important decision of where the energy needed to be transmitted to, which could be anywhere in the world in need such as Russia, Ukraine or Israel, but there are senior masters around the world who would be able to transmit the energy to where it’s most needed.

Although receiving and transforming energy from the cosmos sounds like a complex job, it turns out it’s pretty simple in practice. All you need to do is focus on your Ajna, a point between your eyebrows. And, if your focus drops (literally, in a sense, as we were told that our focus may drop down to the lower chakras), have no fear - all you need to do is chant inwardly (meaning silently, inside your head) the word Om, until the focus is back to the point between your eyebrows. Simple! Or at least it would sound.

In the midst of this, another member of the group entered and walked past us straight to the throne at the end of the rows of chairs, sitting herself down on the throne. At the time, given that in my head I’d decided this seat was probably reserved for someone deceased, it seemed presumptuous, but we think we eventually figured out what was going on. This new member was trans, and it would make sense that someone with both masculine and feminine energies would be expected to sit between the two rows. In this respect at least, it was nice to see this group treat a trans person much better than most churches would do.

After Steven had finished attempting to explain the reasoning behind this energy meditation, an explanation that included Atlantis, Lemuria, Hercules, UFOs, ancient masters, chakras, and a claim that we could be healed of our physical ailments, the remaining lights were turned off and we started the session.

This was my favourite part of the evening. Behind us, in the dark, there was a familiar click from my youth of a tape machine’s play button being pressed, followed by the whirring noise of the tape moving. We then heard the voice of Benjamin Creme, as he channeled Maitreya - a recording from August 1978, titled Message No. 39. The voice was slow and confident, which seems to be a pretty normal way that channelers speak when they’re being used as a conduit for an Ancient Master.

My dear friends, I am with you once more, and happy I am to be so.

My Teaching goes forth. My words resound on all planes, and act to bring Light to Mankind. Soon, in My Centre, men will awake to find among them the Son of Man, for, My friends, My Mission proceeds and My Steps are sounding the New Time.

Your brothers know Me, accept Me for one of themselves and make Me at home in the world. When you see Me you will find a Brother and Friend, a Teacher and Guide, a Refuge and Shield. Look for My Emergence soon and be prepared to work for Me, to show your brothers the way forward, the way into the Light, the way to know the Secrets of God.

To show you these have I come.

To teach you the simple Truths am I here.

To lead you into the Blessed Country of Love have I returned.

Make it your task to find Me quickly, to light the lamp of your brother, to send My Words into the world to reach your brother’s heart.

May you be among those who quickly find and recognise Me, for, if you do, you may become My Warriors.

My Task begins. It is a task for which I have waited long, but one which I shoulder with joy.

My Army is now on the move and soon the clash of battle will be heard.

The outcome of this battle is assured, for at My side are True Sons of God.

Take your places in the ranks of My Army, My friends, and create the New Time, the Time of God.

May the Divine Light and Love and Power of the One Most Holy God be now manifest within your hearts and minds.

May this manifestation lead you to be ever mindful that you are, now and forever, Children of God.

After the audio finished, there was a loud click of the stop button being pressed on the tape player and we settled down for our meditation. This, we had been told, was to last until 9pm. Given that we’d arrived at 7pm, and the intro and tape were both pretty short, this was going to be nearly 2 hours of sitting there silently, focusing on our eyebrows. Now, I’ve never been one for meditating - my mind goes in all sorts of directions, rather than staying in one place. And I’m not even sure there’s any utility in training myself to be able to quieten my mind and clear it of thoughts - despite what thousands of gurus keep telling us. I’m happy with the idea that my mind is always active, and presume that this is what most people’s brains do and it’s perfectly normal.

After a while, organiser Steven next to me was showing the tell-tale signs that he was falling asleep every few minutes and then suddenly jerking awake. And at least one of the regulars on the other side of the divide looked like they’d wrapped themselves in a blanket and fully gone to sleep. While I was sitting there as if in a fever dream, my thoughts jumping all over the place, Bronwyn was not enjoying the experience, and Tim was thoroughly unimpressed with having to do this. The last time I sat in a room with Tim meditating, he lasted about 3 minutes before he walked out to get some fresh air. This time he lasted until just before 8pm, which was pretty good going all things considered. And when he stood up to leave, both Bronwyn and I decided it would be a good time to quietly slip out as well.

After we left the church, we headed back to the bar we’d come from - a meeting like that requires a proper debrief over a pint. There was lots to talk about, but although Tim had attended a Share International event years ago and sat in a circle with others talking about their UFO close encounters, Bronwyn and I still wanted to have the pleasure of hearing an actual UFO talk rather than just a little pre-recorded channeling and a lot of silence. And so, we committed to turning up to the next actual UFO talk, which was about an hour’s drive from central Wellington out on the Kapiti coast and titled “UFOs and the Masters of Wisdom - what do we know about them?”

Turned Away

The next month the three of us drove an hour out to the meeting venue at Kapiti College, and were met by Steven and Gunda outside the college library. It was hard to work out exactly what they said at first, but it sounded like they mentioned that we were part of a Skeptics group - something that’s relatively easy for groups like Share International to find out, as we usually RSVP to MeetUp.com meetings with the same accounts we use for our local Skeptics in the Pub group. They then told us that the meeting had been cancelled, due to a death in the family. We weren’t sure if we were just being fobbed off, but it seemed believable, so we jumped in the car and headed to the nearest pub for a quick pint before going home empty handed.

UFOs and the Masters of Wisdom

Three months later Bronwyn and I set out again, hoping that this time the Kapiti event wouldn’t be cancelled on us. Thankfully when we arrived the doors were open, and a few chairs were set out for us. Steven and Gunda had also put out a set of large posters that we were familiar with, having seen them at multiple events in the past where Share International have turned up - mind, body and spirit festivals, psychic fairs, town fetes and the like.

We sat down for the talk, along with about half a dozen other attendees - a couple of whom appeared to be regulars. Steven took the lead, talking without notes or prompts (I think he’s been giving this or a similar talk for a decade or more) on a variety of topics.

He started off giving a potted history of Share International - from Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophy Society, via Alice Bailey and Helena Roerich to Benjamin Creme. Then he talked about how ancient civilisations around the world have pictures and carvings of spacecraft, and that today we have alien visitations and crop circles. There was a bunch of nonsense about energy levels, dark matter, density, vibration and aetheric travel. Apparently there’s life on all the planets in our solar system, but we can’t see it because we’re in the “dense physical” level, and the species on all the other planets are in the “finer physical” level. Spaceships are apparently visiting us to clean up our nuclear waste, and the aliens have been working with US and Russian scientists on new clean power technologies that will be released to us once we’ve learned to have peace.

This was just the first 10 minutes or so of a nearly hour and a half talk. Steven managed to cover a lot of ground in that time, pulling in ideas from popular culture and science fiction as he went. It really felt like we were hearing from someone with a lack of a critical thinking filter who had spent far too long on the internet, watching crazy YouTube videos about aliens

We were able to ask questions during the talk, and there were some interesting questions asked that helped to figure out who the other people in the room were. A middle-aged pair of women seemed to be obsessed with Nikola Tesla, and brought up his suppressed free energy inventions more than once. An elderly gentleman asked about what happens to our pets when they die, hoping that they would be able to join us. And when I heard Steven talk about the importance of the year 1977, I asked about whether it was a coincidence that Star Wars was released in the same year.

At the end of the talk we were told that the next hour would be silent meditation, like we had taken part in a few months earlier. I looked across at Bronwyn and it was obvious she was not keen to be put through this torture a second time, so we gave our apologies and scarpered.

I’ve had my fill

I’m glad I finally managed to visit this group, and get more of an idea what they’re all about. But, sadly, their message is just a boring hodge-podge of pop-culture memes - conspiracy theories that the truth about alien visitors and new technologies is being kept from us. I’m impressed that our local Share International ambassadors, Steven and Gunda, have had the passion to have been at this relentlessly for so long, despite an obvious lack of traction their message is receiving. But, at the same time, I worry about how much money the two of them must have pumped into the group, paying for stalls at events and hiring out rooms for their talks and meditation sessions. If only their passion had been directed at something more worthy, like skepticism lor science communication.