by Garry Gilfoy
Firstly, I want to make the claim that the evolution of consciousness is central to humanity's task, which, by the way, is the development of freedom -- refer to our creation myth with its starting point of eating from "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and being denied eternal life and turned from the face of God. We were cut off, as it were, but not needlessly. The journey is long and it's slow and it's often a painful thing to witness, but we have an eternity to create freedom for a cosmic order where it doesn't otherwise exist. (For the whole of the BIG picture you'll just have to get my book.)
So, some recent historical perspective. When Jiddu Krishnamurti repudiated the claims of the theosophists that he was the new messiah, we assume that this assertion and the course of history prove him correct. With the aid of hindsight, however, we might consider that he has played a unique role in the advancement of our global spiritual consciousness.
In the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th, Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Society was a highly respected form of spiritualism embraced by many of Europe's intellectual elite. Krishnamurti was spotted by Charles Leadbetter, a Society leader and clairvoyant, who claimed him as a World Teacher and vehicle for the Maitreya. This was quite a claim. Among other things it caused Rudolf Steiner, the great mystic, scientist and pedagogue and at that time head of the German and Austrian branch of the Theosophical Society, to leave it and form The Anthroposophical Society. There would be only the one capital-I Incarnation, he asserted.
From the dim-witted boy he was purported to be, Krishnamurti received a good education both intellectually and spiritually. Although he went on to deny Theosophy's claims of him, he became a spiritual teacher of great renown in the West, taking up residence in California. Events would conspire to give him a central role in momentous societal shifts. Read More
