Hitler and his God

Fallen Angels

For centuries “the devil” was one of the most feared presences in European civilization. Learned studies describe how this anti-divine being from the nether worlds originated in Chaldean Mesopotamia. The European imagination represented it as a repulsive replica of the great god Pan. The childishness of this representation was one of the main reasons of the devil’s disappearance from the modern religious scene. He looked too ridiculous to be taken seriously by a mentality which now rated itself as scientific. As a result evil became unexplainable, and the boundless evil committed in the Second World War seemed no longer sufficiently substantial to be worthy of serious consideration by some leading historians, while its extreme forms left the theologians tongue-tied.

“The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and the Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times”, wrote Sri Aurobindo. 988 Yogic experience composed a much more detailed and complete repertory of the forces which have established their domain on earth and attack any aspiration in the human soul towards a goal that surpasses them and attempts to eliminate them. According to the Indian tradition there are in descending order the asuras, the great hostiles of the vital-mental plane, sometimes compared to the Titans of Greek mythology; then there are the rakshasas, the ugly ogres of the vital plane, which are nevertheless perfectly capable of taking on the most seductive appearance; and on the lowest level there are the pishachas, the little beings which revel in causing the greatest possible mischief and making life miserable for everybody. Why are these hostile forces there in the cosmos – in a world which after all is fully and totally Brahman?

To explain how the hostile forces had come about, the Mother told a story to the children of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram School, insisting that it was no more than a parable to clarify realities which transcend human understanding.² The Supreme Being is sat-chit-ananda³, in other words Existence-Consciousness-Bliss in eternity, she said. As everything imaginable is contained in it, at one (eternal) moment there arose in it also the urge to manifest its being, and this urge was sufficient to manifest or “create” the whole scale of the worlds, because what the Divine “sees” instantly becomes reality. Thus the supercosmic tower of worlds was built, from the lowest to the highest, like a huge staircase of universes all peopled with countless beings. This tower of worlds exists in eternity, for there is never an end to the creative urge in the Divine, although in a simultaneous state He remains withdrawn and detached, self-existent in sempiternal self-contemplation and bliss. These worlds do not change, they do not evolve, and all beings in them are perfectly happy in the state in which they exist.

But as all possibilities are contained in the Divine, there was also the possibility of creating an evolutionary world, a world of total freedom. And because of this freedom it happened that the essential attributes or personalities of the Divine, in a supernal act of ego-centredness, saw themselves as the Supreme, each of them, and turned away from their one Origin. The Truth (sat) became Falsehood; Consciousness (chit) became Darkness and Ignorance; Life (tapas, the power of chit) turned into Death; Bliss and Love (ananda) changed into Suffering. They are the four great asuras, the Lords of Falsehood, Darkness, Death and Suffering – the four powers at the basis of our evolutionary universe, capable of multiplying themselves in cascades of lesser emanations, of lesser demons. They are “The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath, / Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance, / High sovereign Lords of suffering and death”, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in a sonnet titled “The Iron Dictators”. 989 They are also the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four powers of hell.

Obviously something had gone wrong with this creation: the Supreme Being had turned into its contrary. And as asuras are absolute, implacable egos, this creation would remain forever a world of falsehood, ignorance, suffering and death. Who was responsible for the “accident”? The creative Power of the Supreme Being, in other words the Universal Mother, the female Principle of all existence. Therefore she turned towards the Supreme Being for the permission to put forth a second wave of creation following on the first one, and she created the gods, as great as the asuras but less independent-minded. Because of the gods the original state of stagnation could begin to evolve again in a long-term movement which would lead back to the Divine Truth, Light, Life and Love. But the “iron dictators” do not let go of their power over our universe easily. This is why evolution is a continuous battle between the divine and the asuric forces, as narrated in the traditional stories of all peoples, in their myths.

In the great Fall “the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light” of the divine Consciousness, which is a consciousness of unity and therefore of essential, infallible Truth. “As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half-truth, half-error.” Falsehood is an extreme result of this Ignorance. “It is created by an Asuric power which intervenes in the creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power … puts forward its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge and its wilful distortions or reversals of the Truth as the verity of things.” 990

It was this Power, the Lord of Falsehood who calls himself “the Lord of the Nations”, by whom Hitler was possessed. At the time the nations were undergoing a decisive change towards a new, higher consciousness of truth and harmony, this asuric Power fought with all its might to conserve the status quo of its dominion over the earth. It was, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the initiator of the twentieth century wars, and prompted not only Hitler but all those who through falsehood and violence acted against the progressive movement of the world and the unification of humanity. It was also the Power by which Hitler was protected.