Wake up

I'm pretty sure all of you have heard this piece in history. Approximately 6 million Jews and social outcasts in the Reich perished during the Holocaust. To say that the victims suffered during this period is an understatement. Men, women and children were dehumanized, slaughtered onsite, gassed in concentration camps, and became guinea pigs of the Nazis' horrendous and inhumane experiments. You all know the madman who started it all -- Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler is so far one of the most hated men in history, if not, THE most hated man in history. What gave this title away? It's probably his twisted notion of a "master race" and his propaganda fueling the destruction of everyone and anyone who he deemed "inferior" (non-Aryans, Jews, homosexuals, traitors to the movement etc.) and everyone who disagreed with him. The surviving victims of that dark period are still traumatized of what happened until now, 70 years later.

However, let's not start asking the question of, "How can a man be driven by hatred so much that he would be driven to destroy everyone who he thinks is below him?". For most of us now, it's pretty clear that what he did was by far, the most concrete definition of evil. Many people agree to that but this is not what this article is all about. Instead, we start by asking the question, "Why would people (the Germans) allow and support the propaganda of a man driven by so much hatred in the first place?"

Wounded and sick survivors, Russians, Poles, and Jews sitting on a bench inside barracks in Buchenwald concentration camp

It's easy to point fingers as long as we have someone to point it to. After the war, nobody in his country even gave him a proper burial to display their disgust on what turned out to be the most gruesome event that made a lot of people lose faith in humanity. While it's true that Adolf Hitler was the mastermind of spreading a lie which almost annihilated a certain race, who allowed it? His followers then are as just as guilty as he is.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis"

-Bertrand Zobrist-

If the concept of good and evil is innate and concrete to each person, then there would have been no problem in that aspect. Hitler would not have risen to power but we all know that's not true. We could sense that it had something to do with how he motivated people, how he lured them with his grandiose ideas of a "master race" in the guise of nationalism in his speeches, tapping into their ugly desires of power and human greed,

"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."

-Adolf Hitler-

but that's not what this article is all about.


This article is all about a new way of looking at Hitler as one of the most spiritually unevolved figures in history. Why do I say so? To answer that, we need to know what a spiritually evolved being is in the first place.

To start, we need to align ourselves with spirituality. While spirituality maybe open to interpretation for everyone, and I do am aware that not everyone believes it, spirituality generally includes our connection to something greater and grander than ourselves. Thus, it follows that we are all spiritual beings. However, some beings are more evolved spiritually than others, because basically they chose to.

To name a few, there are some who have made marks on human history as teachers: Jesus the Christ, Gautama Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and so on. Based on their teachings and reflecting on their character, the way they move with grace in the midst of adversity, they speak of a transcended level of awareness. The same level of awareness that we need so much in the world in this very moment. This awareness is something we all need in our current world and it's also something that we all can achieve if we're only willing to put on the effort.

Dr. Pran Rangan listed the characteristics of a spiritually awakened person (Rangan, 2016). If you are interested in learning more about it, the link is highlighted.

The following are a couple of points describing a spiritually evolved person taken from Dr. Rangan's article:

• A spiritually evolved person identifies with the soul, he or she has completely lost the sense of ‘I, Me and Mine’. Although he or she performs all the activities of the body, such a person is totally unaffected by them. All actions are performed by the person without attachment to their outcomes.

The last part means that a spiritually awakened person does not take personally failures, shortcomings, frustrations, and disappointments they experience whether they were self-caused or caused by others. This also means that while the person fully enjoys worldly possessions like wealth, material assets, name, fame, and relations, if the person happens to lose any one of them, such a person is not affected at all by the loss. He or she is never fearful of losing anything in life since he or she realized that all worldly things are impermanent.

• Despite experiencing emotions, one is not affected by them since the person is filled with love, kindness and compassion for all humanity.

Clearly, this is something Hitler didn't have, or else, he wouldn't have ordered the execution of who he called Untermenschen (subhumans), or basically anyone he deemed socially undesirable. The scary part, as I've mentioned earlier, is not really Adolf Hitler himself but the people who supported his racially motivated ideology, who put him into power, who did the actual process of executing and torturing other human beings during the Holocaust.

Compare this to the actions of a spiritually awakened person. Take Jesus for example. He was a Jew and was considered a holy man, but he mingled and washed hands with tax collectors, cheaters, beggars, disabled people, adulterers, prostitutes, people who the religious Jewish society at that time deemed unwanted outcasts. Why so? Was it because of favoritism? No. Basing on cultural differences, he didn't favor any group of people above others. He invited everyone around him to walk with him, but the ones who usually responded happily to the invitation weren't Jews, but Gentiles, the bottom caste members of the religious Jewish social pyramid. The Jews were disappointed that Jesus wasn't the king they thought he would be, and the high Jewish religious leaders only kept getting envious for Jesus' increasing popularity and kept getting butt hurt when Jesus called out their corrupt ways. This also supports the following point that:

• A spiritual person does not have wasteful negative thoughts about other people and himself or herself because the true nature of the soul is divine. A spiritually illuminated individual is free from all negativity of thoughts, words and actions. His or her thoughts are always elevated and so, words and actions of such a person is also elevated and inspires others to emulate them.

Aside from Jesus the Christ, Mahatma Gandhi also follows these teachings. Gandhi in the late stages of his life pursued Satya or the truth and called his movement as satyagraha or the "appeal to, insistence on, reliance on the truth". Take note, that unlike Jesus, he didn't start his life awakened, he was a soldier prior his decision to pursue the truth. And his campaign on violence led him to failure and disappointment as not many Indian leaders at that time supported his campaign against the British war.

His pursuit of the truth and being the founder of his movement led him to be one of the greatest story shapers in all of human history. He based satyagraha on self-realization, ahimsa (non-violence), vegetarianism, and universal love and not only that, but he was the first to apply these ideals on the political field on a grander scale. Just like the teachers before him, he preached about love, peace, unification of all things, breaking the social barriers between different cultures, breaking the caste system in his time and such.

• Fear, jealousy, hatred, animosity, greed or any other negative force has no place in the life of such a spiritually illumined person.

Even when a lot of people criticized him for refusing to protest the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdevm Udham Singh and Rajguru, he didn't act rashly and still stood his ground on the principle of ahimsa. He told the British people in 1940 when the Holocaust was revealed:

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you a passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman and child to be slaughtered but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them"

-Mahatma Ganhi-

The weapons, as he said, won't save our sense of morality, because if we respond violence with violence, we'd be no different than Herr Hitler himself. 

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If you think about it, these were teachers who lived humble lives. They weren't anything special, and didn't coast on their publicity, their properties, but rather used it and whatever they have to spread the message of love they carried. While the rest of the world might be seen as sheep for following them and their ideals, the only real basis is how they allow these ideals to affect and shape their lives, whether it brings them to a higher awareness and transform into the grandest version of themselves or it leads them to blindly follow their faith and not really experience true joy. 

Because the truth is, we all have a Hitler within us, but we also have a Jesus or a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa, it's up to us to choose which of these people we are willing to emulate. 

Hitler is the representation of a lower sense of awareness, a person so reactive by the injustices he and his countrymen experienced, a person so driven by the sense of victim-hood, that he would be willing to exterminate a certain group of human beings to prove superiority in the guise of nationalism (Does this sound like anyone familiar to you? Then don't focus on that person and look at yourself instead.). He is a person who chose his life to be driven by fear, paranoia, and hate instead of love, peace, kindness and unity (which in all honesty, were taught to us as children), and cultivated these within the rest of his countrymen who also have a low sense of awareness. This snowballed into an event which made millions lose their hope for humanity and that is probably one of the greatest tragedies to date.

But what is more tragic is that while we are living in the prime of socio-economic progress, we don't take care of ourselves spiritually anymore. We keep putting it off, and the more we put it off, the more things will snowball. The more things will snowball, the more it cannot be ignored and basically everything will push us to seek awareness. And you'll see, that the more you become self-aware, you'll realize that you've turned into the person you said that you were so sure that you didn't want to be. Maybe you might start seeing yourself as a Hitler, or as a Cersei Lannister, or a Bloody Mary or a Regina George. Instead of making whatever excuses or defense mechanisms with that thought, embrace it, accept it as it is at the moment, but instead of pitying yourself and just being complacent, start working on it, because that's the time you'll start to truly evolve, to start being truly awake.

Wake up my dear. It's your time to.