There’s nothing new about Corporate greed. Businesses amassing fortunes at the expense of workers. Frustrated, disgruntled masses. Protests, strikes, and violence. Does this sound eerily like a description of Occupy Wall Street? No it’s describing the height of the Industrial Revolution last century. This is a replay of a Dickensian Great Britain with horrible work conditions: 14-hour workdays and six day work weeks, children laboring in factories, unhealthy and unsafe work conditions, and low pay. They were the poor disillusioned majority of the 19th century.
There are many parallels between 1924 Germany and the present-day. Though the U.S. has not yet reached the depths to which Germany descended in that era, few can look at the constant depreciation of the dollar since the early 1970’s without seeing that Greed is at the route of it all.
India too was impoverished under the yoke of British rule and Sri Aurondo was the first Indian freedom fighter even though he’d though he was educated at Cambridge University. Whether calling for India’s independence, supporting the Allies in WW2, or urging acceptance of Stafford Cripps’ proposal, for Indian Independence even though he was the main antagonist to British rule, Sri Aurobindo practiced what he called “spiritual realism.” It is India’s misfortune that he was not heard as corruption is rampant there today too.
While Aurobindo was creating propaganda against British rule Hitler turned against Christianity as he was probably unaware of the Church’s pagan roots. In Hitler’s words, “Christianity added the seeds of decadence such as forgiveness, weakness, false humility and the very denial of the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest [social Darwinism].” Christianity would obviously be an impediment for the new superhuman he believed he was commissioned to create by the “masters”. Although Hitler had studied the Bhagavad Gita he never spoke about surrendering to Krishna, so he became an agent of millions of people’s bad karma.
Hitler was also deeply influenced by the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Karl Haushofer, Bulwer Lytton, Rudolph Hess and others studied Eastern Mysticism which they interpreted as a reason to cleanse the Germanic race of impurities and perverted the essential teachings of the Bhagavad Gita to create a warrior nation with himself playing the role of Krishna.
The Nazi hierarchy embraced those teachings, and together built a state guided by the same occult principles and goals continued in today’s New Age. Few scholars have understood this key to understanding the Nazi mentality? Nearly all historians have missed the “militant neo-Paganism” and “Gnostic racism” in Nazism “because they are ignorant of comparative religion.
Sri Aurobindo’s teachings are broader than the Bhagavad Gita. To quote him, “I regard the spiritual history of mankind and especially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose, not a book that is closed the lines of which have to be constantly repeated. Even the Upanishads and the Gita were not final though everything may be there in seed… He believed a new human was needed not a Nazi superhuman.
In late 1922 Rudolph Steiner, Europe’s greatest mystic and spiritual teacher, was forced to leave Munich and the school of spiritual philosophy he had built there (which had just been burnt down because the new head of the National Socialist Party, Adolph Hitler, had issued a death warrant. As a practitioner of the black spiritual arts, Hitler knew that Steiner had the spiritual power to stop his progress and plans. With Steiner went the light that might have saved the German people from the destiny that awaited them as being the pawns of evil.
Fortunately long before Hitler’s invasion of Poland Sri Aurobindo had seen this dark Asuric Power rising in Germany and conquering Europe, making Hitler its demoniac instrument who would repeat the Kurukshetra war of the Mahabharata. Therefore he supported the Allies and warned India of the forthcoming peril, much to the chagrin of anti-British Indians. Aurobindo and the Mother’s yogic powers assisted the British to escape from Dunkirk and turn the tide of the war to Russia which was his downfall.
Hitler’s vision of returning to “pure” pagan religion was anticipated, by psychoanalyst Carl Jung in 1923: “We [Germans] need new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God.”
The Vril was another secret occult group that many of the Nazi leadership belonged to. Hitler also was a member of the Theosophical Society, which has strong Satanic and Masonic ties. Both Alice Bailey and Hitler were influenced by Tibetan, Hindu teachings. They also both studied the Gnostics, and every major Pagan/Occult religious system. The Swastika was an ancient sacred symbol in the East thousand’s of years before Hitler desecrated its image.
This hybrid philosophy of mysticism and science of Nazism is being resuscitated by early new age philosophers. During WW11 Hitler purged Germany of Masonic and Theosophical societies and Winston Churchill forbid any reference to the occult practices of the Allies and the Axis at the Nuremberg Trials of the war criminals. The media trivializes any attempt to discuss this rationally and dismisses the subject as conspiratorial. This makes it more urgent than ever to recognize that Nazism is alive and well as a “kinder, gentler” version of the same philosophy, sprouted from the same roots with the same priorities.
Let’s put the Bhagavad Gita in the perspective of Sri Aurobindo. Though he drew strength from the Gita, he did not see it like Hitler as a gospel of war and heroic action. During his year-long solitary imprisonment in the Alipore jail, he intensively practiced the yoga taught by Sri Krishna. He did not consider the Gita as “religious” or even a “Hindu” scripture as it belongs to all humanity and its text repeatedly makes this universality clear: “I am the path and the goal,” says Sri Krishna, “I am the imperishable seed of all and their eternal resting-place…. I am the silence of things secret and the knowledge of the knower…. Nothing moving or unmoving, animate or inanimate in the world can be without me.”
Aurobindo said, “Krishna placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the Sadhana (Duty) of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realize what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do his work. The Gita is about dharma (right action by which knowledge and realization of self (soul) as well as Universal Soul (God) is gained). The Gita is about ethics not religion.
Modern education prepares children for getting jobs and has nothing to do with making them better human beings. The Gita gives a practical purpose to life; it gives strength, it gives self-confidence, a broader view of life, a deeper understanding of human nature, and those are all practical things. Aurobindo foresaw that India and the West would decline morally and spiritually as the Gita has not been an integral part of their education. How much longer can the ‘Masters of the Universe’ keep control of the masses? If there is to be Greed in the World make it Greed to experience God in every part of our being.