Reflection N° 11 - The Empire and Man

We have said the EMPIRE can do everything, and wants everything: our lives, our families, nations, planetary economy, morality and traditions, social establishment, churches, personal intimacy and earthly wealth. This Empire has no identity; a protean face –white, black, yellow, bearded or not, with moustaches, which we see day by day on the summit of local powers– belongs to its servants. However strong a person may be, can he change certain deep-rooted situation? Doubtlessly, no. Individual and collective misfortune many times commented, and suffered by all of us, are swiftly running downward to a bottomless abyss, to the vast and insatiable belly of the EMPIRE. This Jewish-Palestinian tragedy, as a hopeless fatality, is prototype of modern Humanity and cruel anticipation of certain time to come. We can see (other) frightful samples on Twin Towers (destroyed) in New York, on Afghanistan bombardments, (and) by the streets of Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Mexico when the night falls.
In our precedent Reflection we talked about the EMPIRE, and MAITREYA who is a man, and also a God, a Great Solar Initiate incarnated to build a new being, and to start the Sixth American Sub-Race. This EMPIRE is collapsing over its own waste until a moment when there is no trace or memory of what it was. MAITREYA is patiently fulfilling his work, in close touch with his faithful disciples; he is the strongest being because the future belongs to him. These Teachings are announcing his work; Master Santiago is the Forerunner of the Redeemer of Humanity; he has proclaimed this, and his words are in all nations.
Humanity, the great victim of this killing madness, is made of lonely and defenseless men. What can they individually do to survive in the middle of this tempest? How to defend themselves from this general misery, from the International Monetary Fund’s spoliation, from official corruption, from garbage (day by day distributed) through television, from transportation and school strikes, from snatchers, and from medicine prices? Also agents are disposable victims: a formerly powerful Boris Yeltsin is now a lonely man –fragile and idiot (I would erase idiot), happy with his liquor; the Iron Lady (Thatcher?), without power, is an old sclerotic (and) defenseless woman: former President Clinton wanders here and there not knowing what to do, unprotected and immersed in his own banality.

a. A Dangerous World

In his 1948 Full Moon Message (Book XIX, 2) Santiago Bovisio says, “Be Souls! Live in the world as if you were not of the world! Be foreigners! Language of men is not your language, and their likes and aspirations are not yours; and their mental forms are not yours either”.
Master Santiago not only announced and described this age of destruction and death, the end of the Fifth Teutonic Sub-Race, because he would live and understand it (from the First World War to the space conquest in 1962) but also he left the most thorough spiritual system of our times in the middle of the storm, from creation of the worlds, history of the times, updated meditation methods, providential economy, multiple states of being, and what one needs to have inner peace. In this Reflection we are going to consider some special concepts which help pass through this crisis as if this world were not ours.
Several Courses deal directly with this situation of the human being struggling in the middle of aggressions from modern society, and we recommend particularly these Courses: “Sacrifice”, “Discursive Meditation” and “Renunciation in the World and Souls”. The world familiar to Master Santiago in Buenos Aires, where he lived forty years ago, is basically like today, although these accelerated times have increased the collective psychosis. So his Teachings are perfectly valid in our days and at any place of this globalized planet. The EMPIRE is an agent, and the man is a victim. This agent is sentenced to death, and we do not deal with him; we deal with its victims because they have means to be saved if and when they wish and make efforts.
The crucial problem lies on man, not on things, as always occurred. Updated Buddha’s Teachings and Jesus’ Gospel could be today in force. They taught how attachment, eagerness for possessions, confrontation among neighbors, and desire for more pleasure, possessions and security are the cause of suffering, dissatisfaction and soul disease. Today, like yesterday, the man suffers because he cannot possess what he desires, and in the event he does, he trembles and fears to lose, and aspires to more and more. Is not this the course of institutions and nations (and human beings): to grow, to compete, to progress, to overcome adversaries, to win the World Cup, to be a Nobel Prize, to conquer the Academy’s Oscar, to make the most successful movie-picture, or to be the most beautiful woman, the wealthiest man…?

b. Nonparticipation

If a man wants to live, he should avoid any soul participation in actions of this perverse society, and in the event he acts because of his family, job, profession, or open and daily activities, he should be sufficiently apart not to risk his stability; he should be detached, to work for the sake of work, and to stay still within in front of (outer) pleasant or painful things pressing him. In Argentina people suffer a lot (these days) from lack of money, –not only the jobless but also those who have more than enough to live but want more and more. They fall ill and commit outrages; destitute persons attack supermarkets and turn over garbage bags; the middle class walks by the streets banging pails and pans. They get only one thing: more rage, more psychosis and more fear. The powerful laugh at all this, and the International Monetary Fund hardens its demands. “But we have to do something”, the desperate shout. And it is this what occurs in the country (during) half past century; strikes, demonstrations, military coups, repression, torture and missing persons, and every day we feel worse. Exactly, (to avoid this destruction) we should do nothing, to stay quiet and detached, motionless in our existential space, and to remain in “nonaction”. In the event we add hysteria, dissatisfaction, class hatred and eagerness for possessions to serious outer problems, the end of all this will be an Argentine society exterminated. Nobody can solve this socioeconomic crisis; but this inner and private despair, which causes so much suffering, can certainly be healed at once by separating one’s soul from things: nonparticipation, immobility and detached action.
Any man has a place in the world and is in the world. The majority is not conscious of the situation, but the one who says, “This is my place and here I stay”, whoever he may be, begins to become the owner of his destiny. His own actions have taken every one to certain position, and wherever he may be, over there his place is. In the event he adopts it with no motive, because he decided so, this site is the starting point in a Way of realizations. He should not decide any more, and dislikes other things, or adventures, or changes; he only aspires to permanence, routine, perseverance and responsibility. It is a vocation. It is what God wants from him because he has chosen him freely forever. It is the Way of Renunciation in the world: to discard covetous fantasies, to refuse any eagerness for possessions not worrying about what has no solution, in order to focus his own life cultivated with detachment.

c. Meditation

As the subject about negative virtues in nonaction (if possible, widening this concept in the text, over and above regarding “negative virtues”) cannot be easily elucidated in few words (Teachings of Book XXXV, “Renunciation in the World and Souls”, Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are recommended), we’ll trace an schema about affective meditation regarding detachment (see Book XV, 10). It is a normal paterfamilias (with an ordinary job and all problems of an Argentine family); he is meditating.
Invocation: The meditator beseeches the Redeemer Maitreya help solve both his own and family problems, and describes them clearly in detail, quite honestly, even material and economic things he needs.
Imaginary Picture: He imagines to be trapped in the center of a multitude banging pails and pans, with shouts, kicks, tear gasses and police truncheons; he wants to escape but cannot because is surrounded by this crowd. Suddenly he is shot and falls hurt on ground. He thinks about his children and wife.
Sensitive Picture: He is seated in his room, but imagines to lie on the street, and rejects intensely this dangerous pell-mell; he wants to move away from this nonsense and madness, and to be far away, untouchable, detached, unattainable, as if he did not belong to that world.
Purposes: Still on this imaginary ground, and furious by his nonsensical actions, he decides to move away from social passions and to be detached from what before he felt indispensable; now understands all this to be (accessory) ties by which he and his family are in bondage. Purposes have to be simple, obvious, and easy to fulfill. For example: to discard at home any violent, porno and immoral TV show. Not to participate in multitudinous brutalizing events, particularly harmful to children’s minds: football matches, rock festivals and night discos. Not to waste more (money) buying frivolous vogue magazines, (pernicious) books, pools coupons and other things like that.
Consequences: There are many consequences –inner and outer– according to the matter chosen. The meditator should bear in mind that his experience intensely lived is life of every day, whose culmination may be an extreme and irreversible situation: death.

Meditation (every day) helps survive (in these days of great transition), sustained by Master Santiago Bovisio’s Teachings.