No More Messiahs (Part II)
by Carter Phipps
In my last post, “Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style,” I spoke about both the messianic tendencies that arise in traditional religious cultures the world over and the surprisingly similar tendencies toward eschatological thinking that we see even in progressive culture. I asked how we can find our way to a legitimate idealism about the development of human culture without falling prey to the mind-trap of messianic thinking.
A few years ago, I was doing research on an article on messianic thinking, and I came across a fascinating historical tidbit from the nineteenth century about Anne Besant, who had been a women’s rights activist in London before joining the Theosophical Society and eventually becoming its president. Besant was an interesting character for many reasons, but she is perhaps best known for her efforts to find the young boy who was supposed to grow up to be the World Teacher of the Theosophical Society. That boy was Jiddu Krishnamurti, the great twentieth-century teacher who rejected his association with Theosophy along with any sort of messianic titles and became a powerful independent philosopher/teacher in his own right.
It’s a fascinating story in many respects, but what struck me at the time was the reason for Besant’s messianic turn. It seems that she was incredibly passionate about progressive causes at the time, and amidst difficult conditions of the poor, and the squalor and poverty of an industrializing London, she began to lose faith in the modernizing forces at work in the economics of the day. After a flirtation with Marxism she met Helen Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, and became interested in those esoteric teachings.
I’m sure there were many reasons for Besant’s interest in Theosophy, not the least being her own longtime spiritual interests, but one reason struck me as important: she was losing faith in the capacity of progressive causes to make a difference in the rapidly industrializing homeland. Continue reading…
In spiritual evolution, there are no guarantees. Life is unpredictable. So this path requires both an unconditional commitment to victory and enormous patience. If we are very serious about this endeavor, we have to become the exemplars ourselves. It has to start with our own unconditional commitment to victory, knowing that there are no guarantees. The very fact that there are no guarantees underlines how urgent our commitment is, because we don’t know how much time we each have to do this. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here. So the worst thing we can do is to waste time. Traditional enlightenment is about going beyond time, but Evolutionary Enlightenment is about doing something in time, because evolution can only happen in time. Therefore, don’t waste time. From the perspective of evolution, time is the most precious commodity. Time is all we have to develop. Many of us have been culturally trained to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about our psychological needs and desires, our ego’s fears and concerns. And this is understandable, but the problem is that it robs us of time that could be used to participate in life in a much deeper way. If you have the strength and clarity to look at your own life from this perspective, you won’t want to allow yourself to waste time, because you will realize you are wasting the precious chance you actually have to evolve.
I’m sure that more than a few of us, when we ponder the actions of different world leaders, may wonder, “Why don’t they just _________?” Fill in the blank. And some of us may even, half-jokingly, have thought that we could do a better job than so-and-so in running the world.
The winner of the 2003 Templeton Prize, Holmes Ralston III has blazed a long and distinguished career exploring the relationship between nature, science, and religious inspiration. As one of the brightest lights in the dialogue between science and religion, he has fused his deep ecological concerns, his passion for philosophy, and a strong religious sensibility into a career exploring the significance of what it means to be human at this unique moment in history. 
