Francis Younghusband - Spiritual Life

Spiritual Life

Biographer Patrick French describes Younghusband as one who was

brought up an Evangelical Christian, read his way into Tolstoyan simplicity, experienced a revelatory vision in the mountains of Tibet, toyed with telepathy in Kashmir, proposed a new faith based on virile racial theory, then transformed it into what Bertrand Russell called 'a religion of atheism.'

Ultimately he became what French calls a "premature hippy" who "had great faith in the power of cosmic rays, and claimed that there are extraterrestrials with translucent flesh on the planet Altair."

During his 1904 retreat from Tibet, Younghusband had a mystical experience which suffused him with "love for the whole world" and convinced him that "men at heart are divine." This conviction led him to regret his invasion of Tibet, and eventually, in 1936, to found the World Congress of Faiths (in imitation of the World Parliament of Religions).

Younghusband published a number of books with what we might call New Age themes, with titles like The Gleam: Being an account of the life of Nija Svabhava, pseud. (1920); Mother World (in Travail for the Christ that is to be) (1924); and Life in the Stars: An Exposition of the View that on some Planets of some Stars exist Beings higher than Ourselves, and on one a World-Leader, the Supreme Embodiment of the Eternal Spirit which animates the Whole (1927). (This last was admired by Lord Baden-Powell, the Boy Scouts founder.) Key concepts include what would come to be known as the Gaia hypothesis, pantheism, and a Christlike "world leader" living on the planet "Altair" (or "Stellair"), who radiates spiritual guidance by means of telepathy.

Younghusband also came to believe in free love ("freedom to unite when and how a man and a woman please"), marriage laws being a matter of "outdated custom." He wrote to his friend Madeline, Lady Lees that "I have made the discovery that bodily union does not impair soul union but heightens and tightens it."

One of Younghusband's domestic servants, Gladys Aylward, became a Christian missionary to China. The Ingrid Bergman film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness is based on her life, with an actor portraying Younghusband.