20 April 2008

A NEW ROOT CONSCIOUSNESS?

There are people who make the preposterous assertion that Hitler was Christian. He might have cynically offered a few statements early in his career saying he had Christian intentions, but the German Nazi Party was anti-Christian to its core, and its subsequent nightmarish governance bears this out.

But there are other people who curiously associate Hitler and Nazism, with their racialist agendas, to early 20th-century Theosophist thinking concerning its view of a new consciousness emerging among humanity. Madam Blavatsky was writing during a time when there was a great deal of racialist/eugenicist thought, but as I skimmed a Website of one of her speeches, given nearly a century past, I see that she did NOT categorize any "race" as inferior (in fact she does the opposite, praising the "Red race" and the "Japanese race" as being superior in some ways to the "Aryan race" ). On the contrary, she stated that a new "root race," in terms of consciousness, was already forming in America. In no way is she advocating any racialist program; she is simply and benignly observing, and, of course, desiring to aid the emergence of a new human consciousness of spirituality and peace. The Theosophist program had nothing to do with a eugenicist program of physically altering the genetic pool of humanity. Madam Blavatsky and Theosophy were solely interested in the spiritual realm.

I find it disingenuous to equate that project of spiritual thinking--with which many Christians could at least partly agree--with racism and Nazism. I understand that some people's personal project is to lump together any non-Christian New Age thinking with the worst of humanity--even the Holocaust. Would it not be a better use of mental power to find common ground among all peoples of good will?

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