Reflection N° 150 - Decision
I am not concerned about my future. At the age of 83, I am at the brink of two worlds and two times: tangible Earth and astral Universe, present and future. I have no problems of choice for I am done, like a well-cooked pottery vase. I only expect for it to be broken at any moment, with its content spread on the floor exhaling its last aroma. I have no decisions that cause me concern because I have made them throughout my years and now I am the result of my good or bad head. I always have chosen, and despite continuous failures, or perhaps for such reason, I am calm at the end of race. I do not walk any more. I do a long retrospective review, and from the result of my thoughts I write these reflections for me and for my friends, though perhaps I do not know them.
It is the man who has to decide and not religion, neighbors, economic interest or communication media. Most people are carried away by customs and commercial advertising, even in the choice of a professional career. In youth, when he has to decide what to do with his life –single, married, worker, professional, dealer or employee– there are no reliable guides to help him for a good choice. Here in Mendoza, where there is an unrestricted admittance as in the rest of the country, after their secondary school, those who had ended apply to easy careers, but many of them are rejected by lack of preparation, and immediately they accede to the working reserve with low incomes as city hall employees, stock boys in supermarkets, car mechanics, policemen, or whatever comes. They have not decided anything; the establishment has done for them. A few get a degree or a profession to support their families with dignity. Shortly afterwards you can see them staying at slums around the big city, without basic services, electricity, paved streets, security and what a family needs for the protection and care of its children. Likewise in Buenos Aires and outskirts, Córdoba, Rosario, Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and the rest of cities in the world.
At the same time, walled bunkers are growing with watchtowers and private police –Dalvian, Palmares, Palmares II, or Valley, which are near commercial areas of high level, Falabella, Carrefour, or Walmart, all this repeated in buildings of Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, private clubs in Tigre, and so on, in Argentina and the rest of the world. Private secondary colleges whose teaching is for the high class and high middle class are also protected by policemen under contract.
For a modern society that is as structured as ours, a choice comes to be difficult outside of rails tended by great corporations in every area of economic, political or intellectual activities. What can mean electronic correspondence and its huge dimension and speed outside of the business world? Nothing more than superficiality. A farmer produces grapes, fruits, vegetables, soy and wheat, and must accept a price set up by gatherers, and such price is never the result of its production cost. It is the same to follow a career than another one because when one gets the degree, we must adjust ourselves so as to work. There is no vocational proposal permitting a young person to develop his individual qualities. It is like driving on a highway where one is to adjust himself to a massive vehicle movement. For instance, a truck that makes a sudden maneuver may cause chain crashes. So, if there are not reasonable choices, loopholes proliferate: football stadiums, drugs, nightclubs of psychedelic lights and sounds, crowds in summer beaches, festivals, and perversion.
Adolescence becomes the best age of decisions, when the teenager moves away from his family and enters the human scene. According to an old concept, a child belongs to his mother the first seven years, to his father from seven to fourteen years old; henceforward he belongs to himself and becomes responsible for whatever he does right or wrong. According to a Hindu tradition, the Full Moon feast of astral and earthly May is under Sanat Kumara, the Regent ruling the evolution of the Planetary System –who is Michael, the Archangel, for us– becoming visible to people like a resplendent donzel of about sixteen years, and blessing Humanity. In the Canon of Teachings, the Messages reproduce sixteen Blessings received by Master Santiago, during Assemblies, for the Sons of Cafh.
At that age, a vocational choice is not easy. A teenager has no experience and his mind begins to develop with setbacks. Thenceforward, his days are unknown, and unfortunately he finds himself pressed by commercial advertising, family, and friends, fake political and religious ideologies, mass hallucinations and easy ways out. He has no people to consult, and his parents are busy with their family and job problems. But that unknown thing and ignorance, which very few can solve alone, becomes a guaranteed good or bad decision, which belongs to him.
In one incarnation, a person has a chance to make one fundamental decision, but not many decisions. A vocational decision that we are regarding here unites the individual and his destiny, his idiosyncrasy, that is to say his mission for which he is born. All those other decisions that he must take throughout years shall perfect such only movement until carrying it to a happy end. After a wrong decision or after no decision, the student shall jump from a proposal to another, and shall ever be dissatisfied and embittered –a failure. To follow many paths is counteracting, and his deformation shall be proportionately bigger and bigger in regard to those many paths that the student can experience. One can see it in spiritual searchers who claim to participate in all groups known to them; they seem Harlequins wearing robes of sewn patches. Only one path and one right decision. This has been said by realized mystics of different currents: “I am the path that was within me”.
Vocation is not an end-of-the-year lottery with a big prize where thousands gamble, but chance says the last word. Vocation is searching and finding. Saint Therese of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church, sought the Pope Leo XIII and after a personal meeting, got permission to join the cloistered Carmelite community at the age of 15. She died at the age of 23 in that Convent and was canonized, renovating until our days the mystique of the Barefoot Carmelites. On the other side of Europe, in Georgia, by the Black Sea, Joseph Dzhugashvili, forced by his father, entered an Orthodox Seminary and, rebelling against the Church, he was expelled at the age of 15. He went to Saint Petersburg, turmoil of revolutionary lefty ideas in those days and, in the Communist Party, acted outstandingly on the October Revolution under the name of Stalin. He was General Secretary of the Party until his death and, as the leader of the Soviet Union, won the Second World War against Germany. He helped his country become a superpower until today. In both two different examples, there was only one decision and its protagonists were faithful to themselves until the end.
On the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Initiates one can notice how they practice human activities fostering the races to evolve, ones in religions, others in sciences, and others in economic corporations and arts. Without such Great Initiates, progress would be non existent and Humanity would remain stranded as big masses repeating the same state and finally falling and degrading their faculties, as it occurs these days. It is the end. There are few Great Initiates to guide multitudes by the right path. Those few are waiting on the Astral or silently working here until the time for the American Race. Also we are waiting; meanwhile we must make a decision.
What is the role of men in the human comedy? Old men have worked for years and now they have nothing to decide; each is made in his own way and only has to end that life he has started. The grownups are fully active on whatever high, meaningless, unknown or popular task, and only can change by an exceptional event. I have known several men and women that at 50 years or more, certain factor has caused in their minds a commotion that, after perfecting their usual tasks in a transcendent mission, a good work spread through regions and souls, and of course, through themselves. But it is on youth when definitive decisions are made, even though many years are to pass so as to assess their goodness and, in some cases and the verdict of History after death.
The modern society is strongly in the wasp and weft of commerce and communications, and a hectic competition is steady despite world disasters of every physical, political and economic kind. Notwithstanding the down hill is irreversible and if a sudden nuclear war does not occur, degradation can last centuries downward and downward to abysses as it has taken place in some already commented areas –torture of prisoners, pedophilia, rampant poverty, drug addiction, and so on. We as men are playing a role on this difficult Humanity, some of these roles are modest like those of city-hall workers collecting garbage by the streets, of a farmer tilling the earth, of a man in a spinning factory, or very important, like a Secretary of the Treasury in the United States. But none is indispensable. A protagonist dies and another one is chosen. An official is fired and another one is appointed. Likewise in regard to actors of the Human Comedy. The Ecclesiastics says: “Generations are passing by, but the Earth remains”.
Teenagers have a chance to play a leading role in the drama of the modern times, when a Race decays for the new Race to come up, the American Race, with attractive proposals as Humanity never has previously known and that have been clearly expressed by the Teachings of Master Bovisio. For a young person, firstly it is a search, later a choice, and finally, a decision of life.
José González Muñoz
March 2011