Reflection N° 141 - The Lonely Road
Religions are collective, leading millions people of all categories and capacities. Saint Peter’s Square is filled with tourists and Roman visitors, and the Pope, through a sense of mass spectacle that is coldly calculated, addresses to them in diverse languages, and blesses them. Sometimes, he gets down to the pavement and strolls in grand procession along with his Cardinals and the Swiss Guard. Other times he officiates in the splendid Basilica before thousands, with lights and music chorus. The masses, all of them, need shows of great dimensions for their own satisfaction, in Rome, Benares, Mecca or Olympiads, football stadiums, auto racing. Three million Moslem believers gathered last time in Mecca and went round the Kaaba. Such spectacle, filmed and broadcasted all over the world, was impressive. Likewise, people rambling en masse through streets of Delhi, Shanghai and Mexico become a powerful multitude beyond any control by army forces or common sense. Masses and their irrational mechanisms, like bees of a hive, do not admit any change. They can only be destroyed, not belonging to an individual order, but to the artifice of civilizations when the latter are reaching the end of their achievements. Great civilizations like present, ecumenical and planetary ones or those little civilizations like the Maya and Inca, collectively express themselves, but do not solve problems of men.
Problems of life are not explained or solved by the masses, much less problems of civilizations at certain time of History, at their end, like the last time in an old sick man of deteriorated physical and mental system. For instance, look at such religions ruled by elders in our days. Jesus, Siddharta, Krishna, Rama, Saint Francis of Assisi, Little Therese, Saint Paul of the Cross, et cetera, were certainly young founders of a new way of living. At the end of Religions, their followers are not spiritual searchers.
Those roads of life teaching men to find a style are lonely, invisible and silent. In spite of being dark, they are indispensable for the progress of Mankind, and all, young and old persons, peasants and saints, illiterate people and prizewinners, rulers and state employees are traveling through such roads. What is the road of a man but a life that he should live? The dead do not count, no matter how famous they may be. The lonely road is the human being since he is born weeping until his death sighing because all is over and he cannot come back. Again, the reincarnation shall be another lonely road.
So far, religions are dealing with life and human destiny; all of them, ancient and modern religions, from East and West, monotheistic and polytheistic ones, have moved away from the human road, far from the reality, imagining artificial worlds and hells, where their promises offered as a reward to fidelity and service might be fulfilled, but after being dead. Rewards when one is alive are in religions like in any financial corporation –safety, promotions, riches and prestige.
Human achievement, one’s inborn aim at certain circumstance, our first notions about the existence, which last like foundations of life, birth and death, and great experiences at crucial moments are ever lonely, individually pointing out the destiny of a man. Jesus dies alone. When Fleming discovered the penicillin, he was alone. When Master Santiago was ruling the Holy Order, he stated to his friend Plus: “Carlos, I am entirely alone”.
If one reads the Perpetual Regulation of Cafh, we can see the faithful are called Sons, and the Master has explained this meaning through the Teaching 5, “About the Sons”, Course Commentaries on the Regulation of Cafh: “The Divine Mother wished for the members of Cafh an original name; they are called Sons by the Regulation. While other orders have named their members brothers, making prevail the link of those who are united by the same faith or ideal, Cafh makes prevail, not a link among members –which might give rise to the word brothers– but to the link between members and the Divine Mother: Sons and Mother, Sparks and Fire, River and Sea”. This regulation underlines the lonely road of a Son of Cafh. The Holy Order of Knights of the Astral Fire, which has been created by the Masters in the beginning of the Aryan Race, is ruled by a feminine being, The Holy Mother Abhumi, likely described by the Teaching 2, “The Veiled Woman in the desert”, Course History of the Esoteric Orders, has brought the mind into line with the feeling.
When Master Santiago’s followers changed the Teachings and Regulation, they deleted the name of Sons for the words members and companions, reinforcing the massive feature of the new materialistic society of Cafh Foundation.
The Spiritual Road is lonely because the souls, no matter how loving and fraternal they may be, remain ever alone; there is an abyss between souls that certain times remain united –love between man and woman, or between a mother and her child, or the mystical body when a being reaches the liberation and does not incarnate again. Renunciation is lonely, and as is liberating a being from all ties, it gets close to other similar souls. The Mystical Body is of those Great Initiates who do not give rise to karma any more and are leading the Humankind through its evolutionary stages. The Renunciation Doctrine calls it Divine Mother and all prayers are meant to Her. If one wants to understand this mystery, we should meditate on the Hymn to the Divine Mother Ahehia ote Hes, which is written in Arypal and Spanish on the Canon.
We all have a road, regardless of J. M. Serrat’s opinion about the road that is made as you are walking. We do not see the road because it is potentially hidden in our soul, and we know little or nothing about our own soul. The Renunciation mystique leading us into our soul, reveals signs of that secret road, in the darkness. The point is not an aimless wandering from place to place; the ignorant that are falling time and again act in this way; they are those who are going around in circles, filling routes with innumerable masses and ending in nothing.
The Canon Teachings are meant to lonely souls, even to those who are living in Community groups, Gatherings and Retirements. Likewise, to those who are not living a Road and find themselves alone in the world, when such loneliness is more intense, because who is free of moments of sorrow and sadness? These moments are secret and intimate, and incommunicable. One can share joy and affection, but does not share sorrow. So, the Teaching itself, the Road, the identity of a soul, and a rapprochement to the Divine Mother are revealed. This is why the Divine Mother says to Pablo Daniel in the Teaching on Mystique of Ash: “Pablo, not only I want for you to wear mourning clothes, but even to take part in sorrows of Jesus, My Son, which have been entirely forgotten by men”. One cannot share sorrows; we experience them as a whole; so, the soul, in loneliness, learns to live.
Sorrow –like love– is a mystery of God. That love that led Romeo and Juliette to a final sacrifice, and even the Passion of Jesus Christ on the Cross has not been entirely clarified. One admits them, they are there, moving the sensitive souls, but are not part of life, like two reins of a horse carrying us, to the right and left, until we reach our unknown destination. Shall we know when eventually we arrive? Yes, because the end is integral knowledge. We all suffer to a greater or lesser extent. An entirely happy man does not exist. Even the paradise on higher worlds does not exist, but alternative states of sorrow and happiness certainly do with no attachments or attractions. At the end of the Road we will reach peace and stop walking any more. Meanwhile, we must walk keeping our minds immerse in whirlpools of this hard present civilization. Recalling Pompey the Great, we shall say: “It is not necessary to live, you need to navigate”.
In our days, men strive for living in any way according to highest material chances, paying attention to mass offers, from those that are taken for free to the most costly of TV offers that take over the minds of children and adults and immerse them in the competition, violence, luxury travels, and sophisticated meals, –offers for those who buy what they want to cling to a seemingly unbridled consumerism that gives them happiness, or rather, the pleasure of doing it. Few days ago came the news that a son of Bernard Madoff, the American swindler who lived for pleasure, hanged himself in his apartment along with his son of two years, being unable to withstand life any longer. If one inquires about the customs of all capitalist and communist societies, Moslem and Hindu, Christian and atheist societies, one is informed that all, nearly 7 billion, to a lesser or greater extent, are seeking the pleasure of money. This is the actual hell of the devil and the end of civilization.
Finally, even the Road is lonely for the mass man, and every one chooses what he wants. There is sufficient information everywhere and in every language showing such reality, luxuries and pleasures of powerful minorities, from massacres in Near East to splendors in modern China, degeneration of TV proposals, and hunger and slums all over the world. Everybody has choices; everybody chooses and is responsible for each choice. Even mistakes should be paid with sorrow. We all have a Road.
In these crucial moments of Race change, one Race disappearing and another Race beginning with original ideas and grand Proposals of spiritual development, Master Santiago’s Teachings point out the Renunciation Road that all men should walk through and continue their spiritual improvement according to their chances, in order to evolve and perfect themselves, by stages, one incarnation after another, until they reach their liberation.
José González Muñoz
February 2011