BOOK “THE REAPPEARANCE OF THE CHRIST” ANALYZED BY VICTOR ENDERSBY

This book by Mrs. Bailey was first published in 1948 and reprinted three times later, the last being in 1962. We could write a number of comments on every page of the 190, but will have to content ourselves with a few samples. In general the gross anthropomorphism becomes more and more evident; the evolution [of her writings] since the ’20’s is tending more and more toward a kind of materialistic pseudo-Christianity of a sort which even the churches are outgrowing.

Note the pretentious claims of intimate personal knowledge indicated by the Table of Contents.

Chapter I
The Doctrine of the Coming One ..... 5
Chapter II
Christ’s Unique Occasion ………... 15
Chapter III
The Reappearance of the Christ .... 36
Chapter IV
The Work of the Christ ………...…. 61
Chapter V
The Teachings of the Christ …..…. 102
Chapter VI
The New World Religion …........… 137
Chapter VII
Preparation for the Christ …….….. 160

p. 5. “When men feel that they have exhausted all their own resources and have come to an end of all their own innate possibilities and that the problems and conditions confronting them are beyond their solving or handling, they are apt to look for a divine Intermediary and for the Mediator Who will plead their cause with God and bring about a rescue. They look for a Saviour. This doctrine of Mediators, of Messiahs, of Christs and of Avatars can be found running like a golden thread through all the world faiths and Scriptures and relating these world Scriptures to some central source of emanation, they are found in rich abundance everywhere. Even the human soul is regarded as an intermediary between man and God; Christ is believed by countless millions to act as the divine mediator between humanity and divinity.

“The whole system of spiritual revelation is based (and has always been based) on this doctrine of interdependence, of a planned and arranged conscious linking and of the transmission of energy from one aspect of divine manifestation to another – from God in the ‘secret Place of the Most High’ to the humblest human being, living and struggling and sorrowing on earth. Everywhere this transmission is to be found;

“’I am come that they may have life’ says the Christ, and the Scriptures of the world are full of the intervention of some Being, originating from some source higher than the strictly human. Always the appropriate mechanism is found through which divinity can reach and communicate with humanity, and it is with this communication and these Instruments of divine energy that the doctrine of Avatars or of divine ‘Coming Ones’ has to do.”

The “Great Heresy” as it is held to be by all true esoteric philosophy! – a transmission from God (Capital He) to man, the great external to the little internal; from the Creator to the Creature! The same old separation, the same loss of the Oneness of all life and spirit of the Universe, the same helpless dependence upon a boon from on high, to be administered as always by a board of “Servers”, intermediaries and interpreters!

It goes on –

“An Avatar is one Who has a peculiar capacity (besides a self-initiated task and a pre-ordained destiny) to transmit energy or divine power. This is necessarily a deep mystery and was demonstrated in a peculiar manner and in relation to cosmic energy by the Christ Who – for the first time in planetary history, as far as we know – transmitted the divine energy of love directly to our planet and in a most definite sense to humanity. Always too these Avatars or divine Messengers are linked with the concept of some subjective spiritual Order or Hierarchy of spiritual Lives, Who are concerned with the developing welfare of humanity. All we really know is that, down the ages, great and divine Representatives of God embody divine purpose, and affect the entire world in such a manner that Their names and Their influence are known and felt thousands of years after They no longer walk among men. Again and again, They have come and have left a changed world and some new world religion behind Them; we know also that prophecy and faith have ever held out to mankind the promise of Their coming again amongst us in an hour of need. These statements are statements of fact, historically proven. Beyond this we know relatively few details.”

More of the same – and this time, of course, Jesus the Christ is the one who alone in the course of the planetary history has transmitted the divine energy of love to our planet. There is no mistaking this. This is a personal God with a personal representative and a unique mission from and to. No Catholic or other priest could go farther and make it clearer. We even have here the Vicarious Atonement in the form of something mystic which can be transmitted only by unique beings. No recognition whatever of karma, of the teaching inherent in all law, that all the powers are potential in man himself and must be developed by himself, without outer aid other than teaching and example. Where does the Buddha stand in this, please?

Further. . . “All the world Avatars or Saviors, however, express two basic incentives: the need of God to contact humanity and to have relationship with men and the need of humanity for divine contact, help and understanding. Subject to those incentives, all true Avatars are therefore divine Intermediaries.

They can act in this fashion because They have completely divorced Themselves from every limitation, from all sense of selfhood and separativeness and are no longer – by ordinary human standards – the dramatic centre of Their lives, as are most of us. When They have reached that stage of spiritual decentralization, They Themselves can then become events in the life of our planet; toward Them every eye can look and all men can be affected.”

The need of “God” to “contact” humanity! Then note the subtle welding of truth with falsehood; the true Avatar is described – aside from the capitalized pronoun which none of them ever claimed – rather correctly; thus the infiltrating proponent of the Arcane School can point out that it “teaches the same thing” as Theosophy. This slyness is evident throughout.

Then, the “relatively few details” are gone into in great detail and with apparent intimate knowledge of the inmost workings of the soul of “the Christ”.

p.10. She then almost equates the Buddha with the Christ. “The Avatars most easily known and recognized are the Buddha in the East and the Christ in the West. Their messages are familiar to all, and the fruits of Their lives and words have conditioned the thinking and civilizations of both hemispheres. Because They are human-divine Avatars, They represent what humanity can easily understand; because they are of like nature to Us, ‘flesh of our flesh and spirit of our spirit,’ we know and trust Them and They mean more to us than other divine Emergences. They are known, trusted and loved by countless millions”.

p.11. But not quite – “The Christ, that great human-divine Messenger, because of His stupendous achievement – along the line of understanding – transmitted to humanity an aspect and a potency of the nature of God Himself, the love Principle of Deity. Light, aspiration, and the recognition of God Transcendent had been the flickering expression of the human attitude to God, prior to the advent of the Buddha, the Avatar of Illumination. Then the Buddha came and demonstrated in His Own life the fact of God Immanent as well as God Transcendent, of God in the universe and of God within humanity. The Selfhood of Deity and the Self in the heart of individual man became a factor in human consciousness. It was a relatively new truth to man.

“However, until Christ came and lived a life of love and service and gave men the new command to love one another, there had been very little emphasis upon God as Love in any of the world Scriptures. After he had come as the Avatar of love, then God became known as love supernal, love as the goal and objective of creation, love as the basic principle of relationship and love as working throughout all manifestation towards a Plan motivated by love. This divine quality, Christ revealed and emphasized and thus altered all human living, goals and values.”

Thus is the reverence of Theosophists for the Buddha placated while Christian prejudice in favor of the Christ as the One is also appealed to. The Buddha becomes the junior Avatar, a sort of fore-runner teaching a partial doctrine. We don’t know of a greater exhibition of combined disdain for the teachings of the Mahatmas and dismal ignorance of what the Buddha really taught and what his effect upon mankind was. It is all well for Christians who are carefully guarded by their shepherd from the historical truth about the religions, to be ignorant about the Buddha and Buddhism. But it does not even require Theosophy to tell the true relationship. Word for Word the ethical teachings of the Buddha are the same as those of the Christ, minus any of the destruction to the unbeliever which has been inserted even into the Testament; more comprehensively and philosophically expressed, and expressed five hundred years previously.

Then there are the innumerable legendary details of the Buddha found in Mahayana Buddhism, correctly though poetically expressed in The Light of Asia, even to the Virgin Birth! Surely the origin of Christianity as a compound of Buddhism, Mithraism, Platonism and a few other things is evident enough even to secular scholars, let alone to accredited agents of the Mahatmas!

But as to these Mahatmas – the payoff comes on p.15 – “The world to which He will come is a new world, if not yet a better world; new ideas are occupying people’s minds and new problems await solution. Let us look at this uniqueness and gain some knowledge of the situation into which the Christ will be precipitated. Let us be realistic in our approach to this theme and avoid mystical and vague thinking. If it is true that He plans to reappear, if it is a fact that He will bring His disciples, the Masters of the Wisdom, with Him, and if this coming is imminent, what are some of the factors which he and they must take into consideration.”

So here we have it. The Mahatmas are Christ’s disciples. What an unholy wedding of utterly opposed systems! And when is this to be?

“It is not for us yet to know the date or the hour of the reappearance of the Christ. His coming is dependent upon the appeal (the often voiceless appeal) of all who stand with massed intent; it is dependent also upon the better establishment of right human relations and upon certain work being done at this time by senior Members of the Kingdom of God, the Church Invisible, the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet; it is dependent also upon the steadfastness of the Christ’s disciples in the world at this time and His initiate-workers – all working in the many groups, religious, political and economic. To the above must be added what Christians like to call ‘the inscrutable Will of God’, that unrecognized purpose of the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days (as He is called in The Old Testament) Who knows His own Mind, radiates the highest quality of love and focuses His Will in His Own High Place within the centre where the Will of God is known.”

This is very wise indeed; warned perhaps by some study of the sad fate of previous prophesied “Avatars” rashly dated too closely, (including that of Mr. Krishnamurti, who decided at the last moment that he didn’t wish to be Jesus) Mrs. Bailey backs up on her previous dating of 1980. This leaves the field open. The “Avatar” can come when, as, and if some suitable personage able to play the part plausibly, turns up, and the Servers – and the “Served” – can be strung along indefinitely otherwise. But we doubt that it can go on for the millions of years necessary for the real Maitreya Buddha.

Even faith in Mrs. Bailey’s “Tibetan”, fervent as it obviously is, could then become over-strained. Anyway, in case of undue delay, she has a scapegoat ready; in fact she has two, one behind the other. The reason why the Christ has not reappeared already is the failure of the churches to live up to their obligations. But this hour is now come. (Followed in the next sentence by the above quoted remark that we do not yet know the date or hour.) The other scapegoat – come to think of it, there are three – the other two are the public which may fail to put up sufficient cash to insure the coming, and impliedly; the “elect” who may fail to seize the opportunity of joining the “Servers”; or having joined, may fail to be sufficiently diligent and cash-worthy in the raising of funds and propagating the faith.

There seems a quite childlike incomprehension of public reactions among these people; the combination of a “Second Coming” with all this emphasis on money – in one publication Mrs. Bailey pleaded for at least $30,000 to insure the “Great Event” – necessarily gives the impression of arrant fraud to the average citizen. But these people themselves, though no doubt like most other money-raising groups involving a grafter or two, do seem to be honest hard-core fanatics. There probably lies the most serious public danger. The Fascists, Nazis, and the Birchers, all show the explosive dangers resident in any pseudo-mystical power-hungry group imbued with this sort of emotional fervor.

p. 16. Here we find a bit of professional jealousy…. “Even if there is no general recognition of His spiritual status and His message, there must necessarily be an universal interest, for today even the many false Christs and Messengers are finding this universal curiosity and cannot be hidden. This creates an unique condition in which to work, and one which no salvaging, energizing Son of God has ever before had to face.”

Well, while legally quotation is almost unlimited in a refutation, it can also get very boring when the repetition is unlimited also; we will briefly skim through a few other points, since the general anatomy should be clear enough.

We learn that while the churches will be an important agency, the Christ will also use any other channel which may be handy.

And here is another quote not to be missed. It is the biggest and reddest danger signal of a theocratic nature that we have ever seen: …. “The common people are today awakening to the importance and responsibility of government; it is, therefore, realised by the Hierarchy that before the cycle of true democracy (as it essentially exists and will eventually demonstrate), can come into being, the education of the masses in cooperative statesmanship, in economic stabilization through right sharing, and in clean, political interplay is imperatively necessary. The long divorce between religion and politics must be ended and this can now come about because of the high level of the human mass intelligence and the fact that science has made all men so close that what happens in some remote area of the earth’s surface is a matter of general interest within a few minutes. This makes it uniquely possible for Him to work in the future.”

To end the divorce between religion and politics – which “divorce”, engineered by the Founders of our Republic, was the first great liberation of the human soul from religious tyranny since the Buddha – is precisely what the Catholic Hierarchy continuously strives for. As to what happens whenever the divorce is cancelled or non-existent, let us look at Latin America and Spain; and at South Vietnam, where a Buddhist priest found it necessary to burn himself to death to call the attention of the world to the oppression of eight million Buddhists by two million Catholics.

Nobody knows what race or religion the Christ will appear in, or whether in any religion. Thank heavens for at least this confession of ignorance.

A factor which will distinguish the Coming is that people everywhere are now habituated to the idea of the Masters of Wisdom, etc. For this she credits “the occultists and esotericists”, and also the spiritualists, all of whom are working together under direction and with their forces closely synchronized. (That “Hierarchical” business-like efficiency again.) No word of Theosophy, of Madame Blavatsky who used up the fires of prejudice in her own burning, to the extent that such as Mrs. Bailey could hold forth with impunity.

Although we don’t know when he will come or what he will be like, “the unique conditions which the Christ faced during the years of war forced Him to decide to hasten His coming.” He was, it seems, faced with a decision which he could not avoid. This is very interesting. Nothing about the wars of this century – not even atomic energy – was any surprise to real students of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. She must then have been in on something unforeseen by Christ himself.

Wonder of wonders, we find that it was in the year 1945 that the Christ made the painful decision to come again; and at that time gave to the world the oldest prayer known, hitherto not permitted to be used except by the most exalted beings. It may eventually, says Mrs. Bailey, become the world prayer. And guess what? It is that ineffable doggerel with which the “World Goodwill” announcement is terminated.

She actually spends pages on the great potency and power of this preposterous prayer, claiming that after 18 months (1947) hundreds of thousands of people were using it day by day and many times a day; that it is used in 18 different languages; it is being used in the jungles of Africa and is seen on the desks of great executives, and there is no country or island in the world where its use is unknown. It can, she says, be to the new world religion what the Lord’s Prayer has been to Christians and the 23rd Psalm to the Jews. There is, it seems, not a day when Christ himself “does not sound it forth.” We will need a lot of convincing about all this! Somehow all this tremendous accomplishment seems to be strangely missing from any journalistic records but those of Bailey.

And here, God help us, we are still only at the 35th page of this farrago. The construction of this book throws some light on how Mrs. Bailey managed such a large “literary output”. It takes a minimum of mental effort to write the same thing over and over and over. Anyone who can read this all through in detail must have a masochistic passion for boredom, or be moved by a grim sense of duty. (The latter is our misfortune.) The repetitive fascination with an obsessing idea is rather characteristic of psychic states isolated from the real world. Each time Mrs. Bailey repeats herself, she seems to feel that it is a new theme.

For some curious reason, Mrs. Bailey does better on the symbolism of the Bible than on other subjects; this seems to lend credence to the Cleather-Crump contention that some concealed ecclesiastic influence is behind it. It does not seem on the usual Bailey level of intelligence; and there is only one body of ecclesiastics whose leading lights are likely to be really learned in such matters. [Note: This is referring to the Jesuits.]

She cites a legend that the Buddha, on contemplating his mission, left behind him certain “vestures” of a metaphysical nature, to be used by others. We know where she got that. It was from no Tibetan – unless you call H.P.B. a Tibetan. It is from MSS left unpublished by her, later published by Besant and Mead in the falsely titled “Third Volume” of the Secret Doctrine.

But there is a typical Bailey twist to it. The “vestures”, of course, were left for the use of “the Christ”, whose reappearance will thus be a sort of compound of himself and what is left of the Buddha. Naturally, she does not mention H.P.B. in connection with this legend. The nearest she comes to mentioning her is in the general reference to the “occultists and esotericists”, who are coupled with the Spiritualists on the same level; and a remark that the existence of the Mahatmas was first made known to the world in 1875. By whom, she does not say.

There is quite a bit about the difficulties to be encountered by the Christ in announcing himself; the gem in this is “If he preached and taught, He would attract primarily those who think in unison with His message, or the gullible and the credulous would flock to Him, as they do to all new teachers – no matter what they teach.” (Italics ours.)

The handling of reincarnation is most interesting. Beginning with a quite competent general presentation, she pays respects to the Theosophical teachings as follows: “The presentation to the world of thought by the average occult or theosophical exponent has been, on the whole, deplorable. It has been deplorable because it has been so unintelligently presented.” Well, we can’t quarrel too much with that.

The following is a curious mixture of a deep fact and a failure to grasp its true relationship:

“It should be remembered that practically all the occult groups and writings have foolishly laid the emphasis upon past incarnations and upon their recovery; this recovery is incapable of any reasonable checking – anyone can say and claim anything they like; the teaching has been laid upon imaginary rules, supposed to govern the time equation and the interval between lives, forgetting that time is a faculty of the brain-consciousness and that divorced from the brain, time is non-existent; the emphasis has always been laid upon a fictional presentation of relationships. The teaching (hitherto given out on reincarnation) has done more harm than good. Only one factor remains of value: the existence of a Law of Rebirth is now discussed by many and accepted by thousands.

“Beyond the fact that there is such a law, we know little and those who know from experience the factual nature of this return reject earnestly the foolish and improbable details, given out as fact by the theosophical and occult bodies. The Law exists; of the details of its working we know as yet nothing.”

[Note: And this confession of total ignorance regarding the working of the Law of Rebirth is purportedly made by the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul, one of the Adepts of the Great Brotherhood, as Bailey attributed the true authorship of “The Reappearance of the Christ” to him! From what they themselves have written, we can see that the real Masters do not claim to “know little” or to “know as yet nothing” about it, but just the opposite.]

Now the curious thing is that time as a function of the lower consciousness is one of the most fundamental and frequently adduced tenets of Theosophists; it is definitely stated over and over that time as we know it does not exist in the Bardo between incarnations – for the subject himself; and also that time itself as a cosmic matter is an illusion. (A tenet practically accepted scientifically since Einstein.) What Mrs. Bailey misses so egregiously and irrationally is that on our plane of physical consciousness the illusion of time is a governing fact that we have to meet.

A man dies and vanishes from sight. He returns, and there is an interval of what we call “time” between for us, but not for him. He has enjoyed himself in dreams for centuries, but never thought of time in connection with it; to him it was an ever-present now. A man sleeps, and goes into the dreamless state. He wakes without consciousness of time having passed. But he has to recognize the existence of his passage on our plane, or he is not going to get to the job on time. If he does not get to the job on time, he is likely to stop eating. This, we think, should be a practical enough proposition to appeal to Mrs. Bailey, who is constantly harping on the “practicality” of the “Hierarchy.”

Then she straightway continues with the remark, that only a few things can be said with accuracy about reincarnation and these warrant no contradiction. These few things turn out to be thirteen propositions which could have been taken from Judge’s Aphorisms on Karma or any one of a few dozen other Theosophical textbooks, except that the “Kingdom of God” is used for the state of final liberation. (Which is what the phrase actually means in the Biblical symbolism).

The last chapter, “Preparation for the Christ” is largely devoted to money and the manipulation of money, finance, and economics – the material aspects of which seem to obsess this cult. (The obsession is especially evident in Foster Bailey’s Changing Esoteric Values.)

(Theosophical Notes, September 1963, p.31-38)

OBSERVATION

We notice only one error in Victor Endersby’s article, namely that he seems not to have realized that in the Alice Bailey teachings there is a distinction between Christ and Jesus. And to make matters worse, when Alice Bailey talks about "Christ," she is not referring to the Divine Consciousness, but to the fictional character invented by Leadbeater, as I demonstrate it in this other article (link).