What he has written follows: "The Next Evolutionary Step" offers the promise of undoing the damage, overcoming the imposed limitations and allowing the infinite capacities of the inner person to emerge and take charge of ones destiny.
Natasha is holding out the possibility of escaping the limitations of this world and realising our true potential. And that potential is limitless.
Her evaluation of human beings is... we are extremely powerful entities, probably the most powerful in the Universe... The Members of Scientology, A Course in Miracles, Forum and Natasha Lakaev are highly focused and energised to achieve success in a world which is proving more and more traumatic for the Western middle classes.
Although the details of their teaching vary there are great coincidences in their philosophical presuppositions. In ways Natasha provides the most accessible. But she is in a crowded field these days. But perhaps she is different - repeatedly she offers the world the opportunity to examine her claims.
The claims of psychic renewal, physical healing, the arrival of financial security and the discovery of loving relationships are the public claims which can be tested. So the decision is ours. As for the others, they are large organisations whose founders are either dead or no longer have dealings with them.
They are taking on the character of organisations with the disadvantage of impersonality which results. There is much at stake in these teachings. They will not disappear.
They can no longer be dismissed as the products of a passing stage in human culture. They are here to stay, and it is time that they were brought into the middle of the contemporary discussion in Australia. It may come as a surprise that I have included Natasha Lakaev in company with the groups mentioned above.
She may not appear to have the same weight or profile as the others, but I have done this for three reasons.
First she is Australian which in itself is significant if we are going to understand the new dimensions which are emerging within the national discussion. Second, she has stood the test of controversy and time. It is characteristic of groups such as this that they all find themselves the subject of concerted scrutiny and opposition. No new religion enters the world without a battle. I know of no major religious movement which has come to prominence without surviving the skepticism and opposition of the world. This has been the case with Natasha Lakaev. The third reason I have included her in this collection is because I met with her following participating in an introductory lecture she gave in Sydney.
I understand that my encounter with her was brief and even superficial but it was sufficient for me to recognise that she is a person of passionate commitment who has given her life to the propagation of her teachings.
She has the resolution ad clarity of purpose of a person who has personal experience of what she speaks. She does not have the silky voice of a new Age guru. Nor does she have the blinding hype and high pressre which carries you along against your will... but the claims she makes are none the less remarkable and if true, offer a means to changing the character of this world in ways no less radical than the other groups described.
Natasha Lakaev claims to have taught more than 10000 people in the various courses which are built on the introductory five days, The Next Evolutionary Step. She has a center North of Byron Bay but conducts courses in Brisbane, Sydney and in the past South Africa. She claims that the response to her teachings in South Africa were overwhelming.
She told me that her first visit to South Africa came about following a meeting in a hotel lobby in Australia with a South African who said he recognised her from a prophecy which he had heard of a white woman who would come and bring a revelation in the country. He paid for her to travel to South Africa and claims that her first meeting resulted in a near riot.
Lakaev is not nibbling at the edges of wisdom or philosophical thought. She addresses questions which have perplexed the philosophers, visionaries and saints from the beginning of time. And yet she is at first an ordinary looking person. She is not a great beauty, she does not come with a set of esoteric understandings, which only the brilliant can understand. She is a small neat woman with intense dark eyes. Her voice has a reassuring Aussie sound and she presents herself directly and without apology. DAVID MILLIKAN