Theos-Talk Archives (February 2003 Message tt00217)

Hi all,

While we are on the subject of world war II, this may be of interest. 
In his diary One Taste, Ken Wilber (who I suppose is a theosophist 
even in the sense of being a theosophical society member as he 
publishes at Quest) writes:

>> What happened in Germany is, among a million other causes, a 
classic case of the pre/trans fallacy>> 
see 
http://www.soultospirit.com/teachers/book_excerpts/teachers/wilber/ess
ential_ken3.asp
He goes on to say:
>> In fact, the entire German tradition is a study in the pre/trans 
fallacy, producing now a Hegel, now a Hitler. Precisely because the 
German tradition strove so nobly and so mightily for Geist and Spirit 
(which is to its everlasting credit), it was open more intensely to 
confusing prerational bodily and emotional enthusiasms with 
transrational insight and awareness. Blood and soil, return to 
nature, and noble savages flourished under the banner of a Romantic 
return to spirit, a recapture of the lost Ground, a return of the 
hidden God, a revelation written in blood and etched in the flesh of 
those who would stand in the way of this ethnic-blood purity, and the 
gas chambers waited as the silent womb of the Great Mother, who 
always rules over such proceedings, to receive all of those who 
corrupted this purity. It was not the rationality or the 
transrationality of Germany that undid her, but her reactivated 
prerational impulses that brought the fortress tumbling down. >>

Or in other words: seek God (or inner purity) and ye will be tempted. 
in this case, the temptation was too much. 

Katinka Hesselink