Wake Up

Avatars Among Us: Divine Teachers in Chaotic Times

• Douglas James Cottrell PhD • Season 2 • Episode 20

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Who are the great spiritual avatars that appear throughout human history, and why do they come when they do? Dr. Douglas James Cottrell takes us on a profound exploration of divine consciousness made manifest in physical form.

These awakened beings—Buddha, Christ, Sai Baba, and others—embody what Sai Baba himself described perfectly: "The only difference between you, the seeker, and me, the teacher, is that I know who I am. God is inside of me." Understanding this single statement illuminates the entire purpose of avatars in our world.

Dr. Douglas reveals why these spiritual "crossing guards" appear at critical junctures when humanity has drifted from its divine path. Like cosmic traffic officers stopping us before we rush headlong into spiritual disaster, they redirect us toward love, integrity, and awareness through example rather than force. Their miraculous abilities—from Christ's transmutation of water to wine to Sai Baba materializing objects from thin air—serve not as mere spectacle but as awakeners of faith.

Most fascinating is Dr. Douglas's explanation of the three prophesied incarnations of Sai Baba, with the final avatar now appearing as a young man destined to guide world leaders through our planet's current "renovation time." The signs of this transformation surround us: biblical prophecies fulfilling as the Euphrates dries up, climate shifts accelerating, and social structures destabilizing—all part of Earth's necessary rebalancing.

Yet within this challenging transition lies hope. By 2035-2040, Dr. Douglas foresees humanity emerging transformed, with future generations barely remembering the upheavals of our current time. His message is clear: stay on the path of love and service, for "if you're living the right things and trying to help, you cannot go wrong." A timely reminder that even as the world transforms around us, our spiritual compass remains our surest guide.

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Announcer:

Welcome to Wake Up with Dr Douglas James Cottrell, your source for helpful information, advice and tips to live your life in a mindful way in this increasingly chaotic world. For over four decades, Dr Douglas has been teaching people how to develop their intuition and live their lives in a conscious way. His news and views of the world tomorrow, today, are always informative and revealing. And now here's your host, Dr Douglas James Cottrell.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Hey, welcome everybody. We have another exciting show here for you today. I can hardly wait to get to this topic. It's one that's close to me. Welcome, here we are, les. What are we going to talk about today? I think I've already kind of given the cat out of the bag about this one that I'm looking forward to talking about.

Les Hubert:

It's a good one. It's concerning avatars such as Sai Baba. We know that the Buddha was an avatar, the Christ was an avatar, but why are the avatars coming in now? Why have they been around recently and why are they still coming in?

Douglas James Cottrell:

Well, let's step back just a second and tell our friends out there that the term avatar means a spiritually awakened person, fully aware, fully awake, has the God consciousness in their everyday life. They are at the height of a spiritual experience while in a physical form or life, and so the word avatar means godlike, or a godlike being, or a person that has risen in their spiritual consciousness to really being close to God. In the Bhagwan Shirdi, sathya Sai Baba instance, he was asked a few times about his spiritual ability and his accomplishments and he would always say the only difference between you, the seeker, and me, the teacher or master, is that I know who I am. God is inside of me. So if we look at that about these avatars that you're referring to and there are many they are spiritually-minded people who have arrived at spiritual understanding at the highest possible level, so we assign them the term avatar. But there are also other names that are known, like the Son of God, the one who has the great prophet Yahshua, the great Savior, the Messiah and, again, the prophets, the Buddha you know, muhammad peace be upon him and different entities, including the Christ that we refer to in our Christian religious teachings as the Most High.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So the point being is why are they here? Well, they're always here. They're always here. The great promise from God Almighty was I'm not going to leave you alone, I'll be with you always. And so we can listen to God's word in scriptures or through the teachings of the prophets or the disciples or the avatars, and we can say well, that's really nice, you know God's with us always. Well, how about I say it? God is with us always. Wow, sounds a little more important when you amplify it, and that's how the word of God should be taken. Now. God doesn't speak in any particular language English, french, german, chinese, african, whatever God talks in thoughts, god talks by inspiration. God provides solutions and circumstances in a thought-like world.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So another way of saying that it just occurs to me to say you're masterful of your thoughts. You understand the thought world or dimension. Oh my God, what is that like? What's it like to be surrounded by thoughts? What would it be like if everybody could know your thoughts and you didn't have any privacy of thoughts? It would be like standing on the corner with a loudspeaker talking all about yourself, what's in your mind and what's going on at all moments in time, and then everybody doing it at the same time. Oh my gosh, what a roar that would be.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So the idea that an avatar has achieved this great consciousness, this masterfulness of the world of thoughts, let's call it from thoughts to consciousness and from consciousness to super consciousness, supernatural super consciousness, if you will. Okay, now we can get in our teeny, tiny, finite minds some understanding of the power of this place this I'll call it a place but this dimension of thoughts. And so they've always been here. They have watchers, we have angels, we have divine beings who are at different levels of the different heavens. Everybody, in every religion, has different heavens. The Mormons have five, the Christians have three you know heaven, hell and purgatory.

Douglas James Cottrell:

The reference in Hindu is 108. Anyway, you know not that I'm masterful of the world's great religions. I just know a teeny, tiny little bit. But one thing is constant there are spiritual beings in all of the world's great religions and there are heavens or dimensions referred to in all the world's great religions. And so logic says if all the world's great religions have the same concepts, chances are, it's true. It's just a matter of defining, understanding, educating, experiencing, etc. So who better than teachers to come and teach us?

Douglas James Cottrell:

Rabbis, prophets, disciples, spiritually aware people, modern-day prophets, the same as old-day prophets, are still in the same place. They're still bringing forth spiritual knowledge, being inspired from God Almighty, or the universal consciousness, the universal mind, the cosmos, whatever term we want to put on it. We're not even getting close to identifying it, but these terms I'm using are somewhat consistent with describing the indescribable. You know, we're attempting to find the great beyond Beyond what, beyond what we know. And so as we attempt to seek out and understand which is our natural spiritual curiosity, there has to be a teacher, a way-shower, a master, a more experienced, more benevolent soul who is a little bit further down that path of awareness than you or I and our audience, and that spiritual being is there over here. This is the way, and that's what we call an avatar, a way shower. Somebody who's been down the path to the end has come back and said hey, everybody over this way, stop falling off the path does every religious discipline have an avatar?

Douglas James Cottrell:

Of course, An avatar is a spiritually aware person, fully aware, self-realized, fully realized, fully aware, close to the consciousness of God. Close because I don't think anybody can have the same consciousness as God, because God's consciousness is perfect. However, we can aspire to get close, and the ones who get closer and closer and closer are those advanced beings that are on the path, you know, flagging us over here, blinking lights, showing off rockets or signals or whatever, over here, over here. But they can't do it for us. They can only show us the way, they can indicate a better way, and we have to be wise enough to say oh, that's the way, that's the way of love, that's the way I want to go.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And so, as we do that, what do we shed? Our negativity, our unloving selves, or we peel away that onion layer, one by one, to get down to the core of our spiritual being that we've been wrapped up with, all our negativity and selfishness and the activities that have separated us, cocooned us, if you will, into oblivion. And now we're attempting to find our way back to the cosmos, and one layer at a time, but again, every method of attempting to find God throughout history and throughout the places in the world where the prophets have appeared or the avatars have appeared. They have appeared to the population in history, to those circumstances, environments, political, social, etc. Worlds to guide that particular part of the world, their population, back on the path, all of them.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Okay, what about our friends in Australia, the natives? They have their own religious practices and their communication with the heavens above, do they not? Of course they do. From ancient times, our friends in some of the more ancient religions in central america, the mayans, the kahuna in hawaii right, the ottoman empire in its day, all of these world's great religions had awareness of something greater and that something greater gave evidence of itself Mathematics through chemistry, through understanding physics, and on and on it goes. The sciences are a way to approach God Almighty. To be an engineer is to take an engineer's life and approach God through the consciousness of being an engineer, not just a specific religious practice of being, you know from Father Abraham, a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew.

Les Hubert:

So when the avatars show up, Doug, is it a sign that we have drifted off the path? Is that the reason why they're here?

Douglas James Cottrell:

That's exactly why their crossing guard is at the street during traffic time Stop, go, you know. Stopping the traffic so the people can cross. Stopping the people so the people can cross. Stopping the people so the traffic can go. Yeah, they are. I call them spiritual policemen. They're there to correct, they're there to demonstrate, to teach and to show those who want to see what they need to see.

Douglas James Cottrell:

In other words, if we just sit there and vegetate in our cocoon and say, no, I'm just happy having fights with the local tribes, I don't want to do anything else, I want to have a physical life and then I die and I'm happy, okay, but somewhere along the line people find that they're not happy. And then a growing mass of people find they're not happy. And then the environment and society in which the people exist, it's unjust. They're not happy. And so what do they do? They reach out and they pray and pray and pray, and the divine sends an example into the world.

Douglas James Cottrell:

The first one that, in our religious view the Christians, is Yeshua, whose birth was announced as Emmanuel by angels to his teenage mommy, mary, who once, when she was told by Gabriel, the angel, that she was going to be the mother of the Christ said I'm afraid, but I obey, my faith is that I will obey. In other words, she was willing to fulfill the vehicle being the mother, to provide the vehicle for the avatar, the Christ, to come into the world. And think about it, you know. I mean we all heard the stories of Christmas and we heard the Holy Family and the Star of Bethlehem and all that. And I don't mean to dismiss it, I'm saying those were all important, but those were all stages of announcements that this special being was coming into the Jewish community in poverty, in the middle of an occupation of roman um military force right, yeah just think about that.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You know they go. That's pretty tough. Who would have thought that that's exactly when and where god decided, the cosmos decided, or the people's prayer was being answered for an example to come into the world through peace. Remember, there was no violence, there was no armies raised, there was no horse. It was a humble life that this person that Gabriel announced as Emmanuel often called Younger Joseph because that was his father's name, and then later on he became Yeshua as his Jewish name, and that represents the one that was the most I call it aware, but that he was the Savior. He showed us the way to salvation.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Okay, and so where does that take us? Well, the way to get ahead is not to be violent. The way to be aware and enlightened is to be loving and to not run away. Because first thing you're going to do when you stand out and you say, hey, I want to be different, I want to be loving, those things you're doing are not just Well, his cousin John the Baptist lost his head over that when he went to the king at the time and said, hey, what you're doing is not right, and so there's going to be difficulty, because this is the way it is, generally speaking, a bunch of people don't want anybody coming along and upsetting the apple cart and saying, no, no, we like it the way it is. We like our lustful, greedy, you know, earthbound appetites. We want, we love that.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And everybody else is like you know. It's like having stuffing yourself full of candy the next day you're going oh this is terrible. Or you have a hangover from drinking too much alcohol oh, this is terrible. Well, that's the time when somebody comes along and says have I got a pill for you? Follow me, don't drink too much, don't eat too much, don't lust too much, be honest and have integrity, take care of each other, et cetera, et cetera, to the spiritual teachings, and you will become a just and upright person. And then you will become an aware person, and then you get to be in contact with the great knowledge of the universe, and then you become enlightened, and then you too take your place along the path, as a way shower hey, everybody over here. And then we, eventually, we all, find our way back to heaven.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And that's the one question is were all the souls ever produced at one time, or does God keep producing souls? You know how many people are born in the world and you know like can it keep on keeping on kind of thing? And we say, no, all the souls were created at once. It says so in creation. The heavens and the earth were created all at once, and so the souls coming into the world are here and they're going through this process and they're trying to get back from where they left, which is where we had it really good at home. So the Tars and saints and way-showers and watchers and divine beings above are attempting to encourage us and to show us the way.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now I'm going to add there are also other heavenly beings that are trying to dissuade us. They want to keep us away for their own aggrandizement. They create false heavens, if you will. This is where the deceivers and the beings who are in the dark side, the astral plane entities and whatever they don't know any better. They're just looking for the pleasing effect of having followers or having people pray to them. They're seeking power over the heavens, and that's their problem. They haven't quite got it yet that you're on the wrong team, friends. Join the A team and get to the light, instead of being on the B team and finding yourself in darkness.

Les Hubert:

Is there a specific path to becoming an avatar? Can anyone become an avatar?

Douglas James Cottrell:

or are they chosen? Well, that's an age many of us are called to be prophets or way showers or watchers or helpers. The few that are chosen are the ones that are the most perfect. So let's say everybody wants to be on the local high school football team. Okay, so the call goes out everybody wants to be on a football team? Well, a hundred people show up. However, we only need to choose a dozen or so.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So of all the ones that are called to play, god picks the most perfect or able or capable or willing to be a way, shore, an avatar and to put up with the difficulty. So anybody can be an avatar. We all will become avatars in our spiritual journey and by that, at some point in the future, you and I and everyone else listening to this podcast on the wake-up, will become a perfect, fully aware spiritual being in a physical body. That's our ultimate destiny to have that wonderful, amazing experience. Some are going to get there a little sooner than others, others Okay. So it's how tenacious one is and how fortunate one is and how able and capable one is and how committed they are to obey. And when you obey, you are seeking to have perfection and to follow your calling, whatever that might be, to fulfill your destiny.

Les Hubert:

I remember previously you mentioned that somebody like Sai Baba, he had been repeatedly reincarnated. Was it because he wanted to continue helping, or was he improving as he went on? Or was he on the path to becoming an avatar, like lifetimes back?

Douglas James Cottrell:

he went on, or was he on the path to becoming an avatar like lifetimes back? Okay? Well, I'm going to say pulling the rug out from that thought is that there's no willy-nilly plan. This isn't my chance okay okay.

Douglas James Cottrell:

But intellectually and attempting to understand from a finite perspective the passage of time, we see in a linear way that there is a process. We assume it's by chance. We don't understand that it's a divine plan, one that's perfect, one that is set up in mortal time so that mortals can experience in linear ways, so that mortals can experience in linear ways infinite and the divine. So it was predicted from the great prophets in the East that there would be three incarnations of the Saiyababas. Forgive me, my friends out there in the East, if I'm shortening the names, but there was Shirdi Saiy Sai Baba, who was the first. He was a Christ-like figure for those people, one of our parallels. He was a prophet that went around all over the country and he did good works and he helped people and he was a very modest man. The second and the most powerful of the three incarnations from Shirdi Sai Baba being the first, was the Sathya Sai Baba, who recently passed, a few years ago 10 years ago, perhaps longer, pardon me again for not being specific and he had his ashram in Bangalore, in India, in Pune, and he also dealt with politicians and world leaders and he was very well respected and had universities and hospitals, if I say his ashrams were of substance and he had VIPs from all over the world coming, so he was very powerful. He's passed away. I think he lived into his mid 80s. And now the third one and I'm going to not say the name correctly, pardon me, I call it Purdi Sayababa is now a young man. I've had visions of him and he is now in the world starting his mission and he will be one of world-class leaders, very affluent people and, of course, helping everybody else through the assets of these people, again, from the little bit I know. So you have these three incarnations of.

Douglas James Cottrell:

I've managed to mention a few details of them that are in the East, helping India and India under Sathya Sai Baba, pakistan and Indian relationships. I won't go into detail, but there were changes, prospered, fantastic transformation under the same time that Sathya Sai Baba was there. Bhagwan Shirdi, sathya Sai Baba was there. Bhagwan Shirdi, sathya Sai Baba the proper title.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And now the next one coming along is going to have to deal with world leaders. You know, like the stock market crash that happened here in the last couple of days, in the first of April, affected the entire world on the same day or days. Well, the same influence that is happening now in the religious spiritual awareness sense is happening now worldwide. It will happen in very short periods of time. So there's a destined perspective of these three avatars coming into the world, each for its own purpose, each during its own time. Why? Because people don't change quickly and it needed these three steps from my personal limited understanding to get to India and the spiritual awareness in India and surrounding areas to the level that it's at and in the future India will be a very desirable place to be a spiritual Mecca for the entire world.

Les Hubert:

A little bit down the road from here, so when avatars such as Sai Baba, when they perform miracles, is it to convince us that they are real or is there a deeper purpose behind their miracles?

Douglas James Cottrell:

Well, let's look at all the world's religions who have spontaneous healings and miracles, but I think what you're referring to is the transmutation of items.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Yes, and the ability to appear and disappear, and such as If you look and you compare the Christ to the Sathya Sai Baba's, they're exactly the same. I mean the transmutation of water to wine, fishes and loaves to multiplying more fishes and more loaves, that there were more scraps left and there were in the beginning of the, of the whole fishes, of those things. They fed multitude of people, to the point of sasuke saibawa between his fingertips producing a white powder called Vurbudi that had miraculous healing properties for people who would take it Right To the ability to wave his hand and produce things little keepsakes on chains or rings or food in his hand, and also beads. I saw a video where he was with his hand flat out, shaking his hand, and a big, long ring of beads about three or four feet long came out from his hand, to the point that he had this ceremony once a year and I forget the name where he would, out of his throat, pull a golden orb out of his throat. Didn't do that when he was older, but when he was younger he would do that and there was an annual thing. It was a demonstration of this event and spiritual significance.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now, going back to the question why did he do that? Wow, got my attention. Yeah, sure would mine. How did you do that? And then, of course, the what can we call it? The masterful consciousness or the master over being masterful over material things, demonstrate their masterful spiritual qualities. I mean, god creates everything, and so we in human form should be able to co-create things, which we can do limited perspectives. But in the instance of these masterful beings like Satya Sai Baba and the Trinity of the Babas, ias, the ability to materialize things has its purpose, the same as the Christ healing people who were crippled, who were blind, and raising those who had passed away, bringing them back to life. Lazarus I'm talking about Satya Sai Baba did the same to a New York businessman who reported to me he was an eyewitness to a medical doctor who had passed away at an event, and he too was resurrected. His color came back, he was clinically dead because the other doctors there were testing him and said he had passed away. And then Satya Sai Baba was called over and he commanded the man to awaken, and he did so.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Again, consistency in all these world's great religions of these abilities and these phenomena. They're there, they're evidenced, they're not made up, it's not propaganda. It happened and people believe. And so, as people see with their own eyes that there are these amazing spiritual events happening. It tends to promote one to really earnestly seek and attempt to ask questions as to how did that happen, or to believe or to see a miraculous thing, and it stores in them their own faith. So the process thereafter is, the person develops faith based on what they've seen or witnessed or experienced, and then they too come to a closer understanding of that consciousness. They awaken, if you will.

Les Hubert:

Now, in wrapping this up, you've said that they've come in. This is the third incarnation for Sai Baba, his full name. Excuse me, it seems to be you're hinting at the fact that we're on the verge and we can go into this in future. Reading on future shows. Of course, little hint there is. You seem to be hinting at the fact that we are on the verge of a great change. Does that seem to be something that you can touch upon as we wrap this up?

Douglas James Cottrell:

All you have to do is to read the news every day, and the world changes every single day. And so if the world was, you know, on vacation, you know the palm trees blowing in the wind, you know the ocean waves lapping up on the beaches and everybody having their little cutie pie drinks with the umbrellas and basking in the sun would there be any change?

Douglas James Cottrell:

No'd be the same. Be paradise, but it would be the same. So the world is changing every day, with gigantic let's call them difficulties, hardships, indif, unloving acts, selfish acts, destructive acts, acts of war, violence, taking of life. The planet is reacting likewise, with flooding, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, weather changes, flooding In the oceans. The temperature is rising I predicted this years ago up to four degrees Celsius. It's happening.

Douglas James Cottrell:

The Euphrates River, which was a sign in the Bible that the end times are coming. The Euphrates River, which was a sign in the Bible that the end times are coming. When the Euphrates River would dry up, the end times were coming. It's drying up Oceans and water is appearing in the deserts, which was another sign of the changes of the end times. The planet, our planet, is wobbling on its axis. It's tilting back. The weather patterns, the jet stream in the north is coming further south. All the time the Inuit and the people in Norway were saying the stars are going south, Right, the planet's tilting. So all these things are signs that the Earth is rebelling. Maybe it's just trying to. As I once said on a radio show, it's like we're fleas on the back of a dog and the dog is shaking us off.

Les Hubert:

Right, yeah, that's an analogy I've used frequently, yeah.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So this is why the world is going through these times of change and unfortunately, unfortunately, there's going to be a lot less of us in the world in this renovation time, but we will prosper. We will come back. The world will renew itself and by 2035 or 2040, people are going to be asking whatever happened back there in 2024, 2020, what went wrong? They'll have no memory in 50 years from now. I've got a vision of that. So this time, this renovation time is is at hand. The world is going through changes.

Douglas James Cottrell:

The spiritual leaders are here. The wake up podcast is out there saying wake up, let's help one another. Let's learn to be, you know, loving to one another. Let's try to live the right life, because if you're on the right path and you're living the right things and you're trying to help, you cannot go wrong. You cannot be misled, and that's why a lot of comments sign up and listen to the podcast on the wake up, getting that little commercial elbow in there. But it's why we're here. We are doing this to help people, so they will have a better understanding of the spiritual world and they'll wake up.

Les Hubert:

Well, thanks again for another great podcast, Doug. If you'd like to support the show, please go to DouglasJamesCottrell. com. Click on that big blue banner and subscribe, and you can always contribute anywhere from $2 to $20 a month, whatever you feel you can afford. Thank you again, Doug.

Douglas James Cottrell:

It was a pleasure, always great to be with you, Les, have a good one. Peace and prosperity.

Announcer:

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