Reflection N° 152 - Living Better

You can live better, whatever be the condition of a person –being healthy, sick, very poor, old, with a big family, or alone– all can improve their whole situation when and if they find a suitable form for their way of being and practice. My mom was old and alone, after having cared a big family. After leaving her house clean and in order, while watching soap operas, all days she used to weave light-blue and pink clothes for babies with soft wool that she bought downtown. After piling a dozen of clothes and enveloping them individually for gifts, she walked to the Church of Murialdo and left it in a basket by the door, but not getting into. Her garden was large and beautiful, which she watered all days and exchanged plants and flowers with her neighbors. There were flowers in the rooms. Every month, she took fifty pesos of her pension and gave it to the needy. She had found a happy way of achieving what she ever dreamt: to give.

If you have a house, safeguarded health, gratuitous education and stable job, why to collect up things? Certain persons like to buy clothes, shoes and electrical appliances. You should buy them but giving all those which you stopped using. In the city there are many philanthropic institutions that distribute donations in slums, where there are not containers for water. Hospitals and rest houses for old persons without family welcome those generous persons that accompany them with good conversation and listen at their sorrows. I have known people visiting blind persons and reading them the newspaper news, even commenting them. All are needy of all, and one does not give or receive, both parties suffer by selfishness. How may a lady waste her time in front of her wardrobe that is full of models of all kinds but does not choose any of them? As a person asked Cristina Fernández, the President of Argentina, how many pairs of shoes she had for every day because she wore a new brand pair every day, her reply was that she did not know. In Buenos Aires slums, many persons, especially children walk barefoot because they do not have shoes. She has institutions of the State covering, with money from contributors, needs of the people, but she does not give anything: she accumulates. She is a very unhappy woman.

In Africa, Asia and America, human groups still remain that did not lose contact with the natural wellbeing and that one has watched on documentaries and accounts of travelers. With his oceanic journeys, Cousteau has made us know island villages of Oceania their old and young inhabitants did not lose their joie du vivre. Also you can find them on plateaus of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador with their picturesque suits dyed and woven by them with wool of alpacas and llamas, being busy with maize, potatoes and pumpkins plantations, and assembled at the square of the town to talk, get information and exchange products. The technological civilization has not occupied the entire Planet; small groups of survivors remain on remote corners; they are the hope of the American Race, like the dream of Padre Perrault, from Lost Horizon, the Great Lama of the Blue Moon –hidden valley of the Kuen Lun. Also, in the Himalayas there are secret monasteries outside of international tourism routes, where the Buddha’s doctrine is cultivated and by direct agreement with Mao had wide freedom to practice their doctrine of survival.

Also in great cities there are secret places, hidden in the intimacy of predestined souls, which only they know and patiently keep on the Flame of the Spiritual Fire. These days we are witnessing the brutal destruction of a small African nation by allied armies from France and America, for a handful of oil dollars, on those deserts where thousands years ago, and still with no civilizations, the Mother Abhumi was watching over the Doctrine of Renunciation for posterity. The current civilization will disappear soon by the fire of its passions, Nature will slowly return to its millenary state, and those faithful persons who have guarded the Teachings of Life will begin the reconstruction of the new Mankind. We all can take part on that work since now, rejecting vicious habits of the big city and beginning to live better. The Renunciation Mystique is not only a library of books and treaties; practices that are lived upon the doctrine are more operative. Those who have access to the doctrine explained on Master Santiago’s Teachings are few, but those who spontaneously practice Renunciation are many all over the world, even in the maelstrom of big cities. On this Reflection we wish to explain how the spiritual life may be on those ambits.

On “The Way to Renunciation”, that was meant to Ordained Sons of Community, there are four Teachings about special aspects: “Mystique of Ash in Saint Paul of the Cross”, “Mystical Death of De Rancé”, “The Tibetan Disciples” and “Saint Francesca Romana”. Ideas therein expressed, as in the entire Course, cannot be applied by an ordinary man of the street, however the vocation he may have, but by men and women of a Cloistered Community, because only over there they can find discipline, rigor and indispensable separation to apply the necessary method of life and achieve their vocation.

But the survival of man and destiny of the Races do nor depend upon these exceptional situations but upon the whole reality in all parts, with the participation of Nature, Humanity, Holy Masters and whose who stay on the intermediate worlds. We all take part because we live –the good and the bad, victims and inquisitors, chiefs of State and children, the perverted and saints. Master Santiago has written that the spiritual life consists in embellishing simple things of life, and this intimate disposition is in all. A baby laughs embellishing those who are near. An old man is quiet and his presence raises a meeting. Roses in a flower pot fill the hall with aroma and color. So we can have happiness in an apartment of Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires or in a little tin house of a slum. Happiness is a right and possibility for all men even when they are far from reaching it in one incarnation. The sorrow teaches and through the path of suffering, primitive men slowly are coming near the desired goal. Those who suffer are many, hardly all, in every social class and economic resources. I have known wealthy persons who were continuously living in state of moral and bodily suffering. In Community, also I have known persons who had nothing; they were humble and very poor, continuously expressing happiness even in hard moments.

There are few Saints, and Little Therese of Lisieux, Ramakrishna, the Russian Pilgrim and so many unknown persons travel through the world by secret paths of the nations –they teach us the way to peace. They are heroes and we are unable to imitate them in our own way and with our own forces. They are teachers and we are the pupils that have to learn. It is Humankind who has to raise the level of daily living in all its activities and such task is slow with the participation of everybody. Much has been achieved with the school of free and compulsory education, but also much has been lost by degradation of habits. Communication technology, radio, movies, TV and so on, which in the beginning have aroused so many progress expectations, are in the clutches of money advertising and today became the biggest enemy of the human condition. How to escape from the empire of TV and its programs? It is impossible. Even when a family excludes such box that is not idiot, you find it everywhere, in schools, commerce and pockets of the users. Hitler used TV for the first time during the 1936 Olympiads, and since then TV has grown and is currently controlling the soul of the people. Hitler would be satisfied in case of being alive and the master. But there are other worse masters with much power covering the Planet with their instruments. It is the end of the civilization that will end like an opera of Wagner with the apotheosis of Twilight of the Gods.

Throughout years I have experienced many forms of living, in family, as a loner, in renunciation community, in prosperity of a big city, as an hermit of the mountains, and traveling, and I can state that the best form to reach spiritual peace is community life if and when it is practiced complying with its regulations, of whatever accepted type, whether Christian, Buddhist, Tibetan, Sufi, or Brahmanic, and so many other groups, being some of them very ancient and still perseverant. They all are subject to rules of Esoteric Orders, and those from the West are following objectives of the Order of the Astral Fire, which is transmutation of matter into spirit and vice versa. The Chief is Mother Abhumi, who has been revealed by the Teaching “The Veiled Woman of the Desert”, and vulgarized by Haggard on the novel “She”.

In the Renunciation Community, you live a little better every day because attachments, habits acquired on the world, influences from society, and karma of former lives are left behind, and newspapers, TV, strange persons and money are forbidden. What an Ordained Son needs is exactly available to him and nothing else, food, readings, prayer, manual works and joys. Fantasy disappears. Also ambitions do. A helpful instrument remains to perform the Will of God and reach peace.

In Community, vocations of offering are few, whatever be the society in which one lives. To enter even does not mean success but after living years of perseverance and sacrifice. After ten or twenty years many leave those cloisters behind and come back to the world. But those who persevere until the end are models, hope of change, and archetypes of the future man, and they teach us to live. They are living standards still in these days of darkness and unbelief. Who does not know about Mother Therese of Calcutta and would want to be like her, like Vivekananda, Charbel, Blavatsky or Yogananda?

Most models are unknown but those who are known to us become enough to encourage our expectation. Fleming discovered a marvel in a plate of laboratory: penicillin. He was experiencing for long time and eventually was able to put in the service of the Humankind a remedy spread throughout the world helping millions live better.

José González Muñoz
April 2011