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…
One of the most underappreciated figures in the history of evolutionary spirituality is the German philosopher and linguist Jean Gebser. His masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin (1949), outlines his unique vision of the emergence of human consciousness. Gebser tracks human history through a series of “mutations,” or structures of consciousness, from the archaic mind of our ancestors to the more contemporary stage of mental focused awareness. In one particularly evocative passage, Gebser reflects on the beginnings of this mental awareness, as represented by the myth of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom who was born from the head of Zeus. To Gebser, such powerful imagery captures the heroic struggle of human development: 
Last week, EnlightenNext’s founder and editor in chief, Andrew Cohen, traveled to Europe for a whirlwind tour of talks and dialogues about his teachings of 
Imagine what it must be like for Caster Semenya, the top South African female runner who was in the news recently because her sex has recently been challenged. By “sex” I am not referring to her sexuality, but to the physical, biological characteristics that determine whether one is male or female. That basically comes down to whether one has testes or ovaries. Her fantastically impressive victory in the 800 meters in Berlin recently raised questions about her sex—questions that she herself shrugged off as “a joke.” Semenya has no penis; all of her life, she has thought she is a girl—a very athletic girl who loves to run and compete. Actually, to say that she “thinks she is a girl” probably misrepresents that unthinking sense of simply being who you are, living the life that you have, in the context of the roles and values that are given to you as a male or female within your culture. That’s gender: the sociocultural expectations based on sex, usually related to different roles in sexual reproduction, related to normative notions of masculinity (for males) and femininity (for females). 
