Reflection N° 19 - Quality of Life

In the Report 2001 about world population, the United Nations forecast an increase that would be the double of the present one, with all its consequences (between 7,900 and 10,900 million people in 2050). In fact, we are clearly reaching the limits of some resources: water, electric power, and food. Problems are tremendously severe. We face a world crisis”. (See Internet site: www.fnuap.gov.) We’ll try to understand this universal phenomenon on the light of Master Santiago’s Teachings, since this phenomenon is beyond any control. Attempts made by the United Nations and conservationist organizations have failed one after another, and just a despairing resignation remains. Covetousness, will-to-power and money power have overcome the defenders of life; the result of this is now a catastrophe that we can see on pages of newspapers, TV images and by the streets.

Many are the ways to approach the subject about destruction of the environment and of essential resources for life, and we shall develop them by means of disciplines offered by the Teachings. We should consider that a lack of natural resources is only one of the factors of this catastrophe, which strike more heavily. Also there are other terrible factors: degradation of the human condition to levels of beasts, analphabetism, growing atomic threat, drugs, AIDS, sexual depravation, civil violence, and others. There are no guides, or Teachers, or liberating currents: the Aryan Teutonic Sub-Race is ending. Now the tremendous movement comes, which in Alchemy, the second stage, is called putrefaction: dissolution of compounds to the elemental depuration/recycling state. How long will this disintegrating process take? As long as a complete regeneration may demand it. The transit from the fourth sub-race to the fifth had the duration of the 1500-year war, until the extinction of the last Atlantean Black Magi. How long will take to forget formulae and procedures of the sinister atomic power, to reforest again, to clean rivers, to regenerate the different species, and to form a new Aquarian man able to live in harmony with Nature? Many centuries.
Sociologists assess the quality of life according to a momentary interest, which at present is the economic capacity to consume, devour and enjoy. Scandinavian countries are on the top, although they have the higher suicide rate. If Saint Francis of Assisi or Mahatma Gandhi lived, surely they would be comparatively different as to higher ideals; quality of life would not be materialistic but spiritual.

a. Definitions

Master Santiago writes, “The man needs two breads at the same time, material bread and spiritual bread”. He comments on Jesus’s prayer, and remarks, “give us this day our daily bread”; this means: perversity is any excessive accumulation of economic goods by some few, to detriment of the starving majority. But not only basic resources to sustain life are lacking; all the spiritual food lacks in rich and poor persons, in good people and criminals, in healthy and sick individuals. So, where is the quality of life? In the King of Arab and his seven private B.747-planes to move and vacation in Spain along with his family at a cost of five million dollars a day? Only very few individuals in this world can do the same. To buy a Van Gogh for eighty million dollars, so that an individual may look at it alone? In short, is quality of life called to exclude others from something that one possesses? This situation is against those messages of universal fraternity that the Teachings of all times have given to Humanity.

The rule used to determine layers of quality of life is competitiveness, comparison among statistic groups –collective, regional and national– for bureaucratic groups of public official institutions, not for persons. But life should be experienced individually, although you live in family or in the middle of a multitude, because the soul feeling this life is one and untransferable. Life is ours, along with millions of neighbours populating this overwhelmed planet; it is a falseness and lie to consider life on an statistical way, because every individual being has his particular, incomparable and irreducible style; he determines it by means of his own patterns, if and when he has them visible and conscious as his own guide. The Teachings describe the Doctrine of Renunciation, and offer patterns of a qualified way.
This is as personal matter according to society, economy, health, family and vocation conditions, and other factors. Upon this basis, internally and externally, one can build the best level by laying statistics aside. You may widen this concept by reading the complete Teachings of Book XXI, “The Good Way”, and Book XXIX, “Discursive Meditation”. Its understanding is within the reach of everybody. Happiness is an inner state, a transmutation of bad conditions of being into other better conditions, which come up from Renunciation; it is the search of higher values. “After a loss of economic goods, a raise of spiritual goods follows”, Master Santiago says.

b. A Personal Work

The concept about quality of life was elaborated in the past century by technicians of international institutions, and the purpose was to explain about the economic-social inequality. Soon it was politically used to remark the superiority of some nations over others, by taking the economic production as a basis, including the results of the financial speculation that nothing has to do with the matter. They hold that the best revenue in a nation indicates social, political and military superiority over other weaker nations, although the bloody experience in Vietnam indicated otherwise. Hegemonic and aggressive arguments still are used at present, in spite of the above-mentioned report 2001 of the United Nations.
What can do the individual beings on this terrible stage of putrefaction experienced by a globalized civilization, sinking everybody into the same athanor? No place to seek refuge. The King of Arab is a tourist in Spain, guarded by hundreds of security agents. The Japanese individual looks at his Van Gogh locked in an iron bunker. Those Argentines who kept their dollars in banks not to be stolen, have lost their savings. The Pope is seriously ill. In Africa, AID and starvation are devastating entire peoples. Where is the quality of life?
This is, in few words, what a meditator on the Master Jesus asks in the recommended Chapter 13, Book XXIX, “Master, remove me from this whirlpool in which I live. The noise of the world deafens me. I am continuously in search of a peaceful place, a quiet moment, and I find only disorder about me!”. And the answer is, “In your house, in your job, in the noise of the city, and in the confusion of men you can find Me if and when you look for Me”.

Every one builds his happiness with Renunciation, not with money. Read biographies of saints and masters who taught Humanity how to get a harmonious peace, and you can see that they were poor because they loved poverty adapting their necessities to this situation. Buddha was born as a prince, but renounced the kingdom in order to find his own liberation; he made himself a beggar and asked food from door to door, and delivered his own heritage in order to live poor like Jesus; he taught Humanity the gifts of poverty. Saint Therese of Jesus belonged to a well-to-do family, but she made herself a Carmelite at the age of fifteen and transmitted the wonderful mystical doctrine of the spiritual childhood. Anywhere one can find the best of lives if and when we tread on the Spiritual Path: in Manhattan, in Calcutta, in a slum, in the Sahara. God is everywhere beside the heart of a man who looks for Him with humility.

c. The Globalized Athanor

Let us resume the initial subject of this Reflection, the report 2001: the highest achievement of this civilization in the twentieth century, the full occupation of Earth, through its whole, homogeneous and instantaneous globalization, reversibly became an inescapable prison. Surmised freedom, achievement and wellbeing became oppression. And like in the hermetic athanor of the alchemists, men have to be transformed by sublimating their own matter. The new man will come up from ashes of the dying old man. By the word athanor the alchemists named the furnace where they prepared the elixir, contained in an ovoid glass, sealed and wrapped by a layer of ash, and heated by fire beneath. No choice, no escape; the Work is being realized in the planetary melting-pot, closely watched by the Great Alchemist, Michael, the Sun that illuminates us all days. Just as the transformation of metals into gold is a real analogy, so one can understand the human destiny by transmuting the present social disorder into a higher model. The Emerald Table, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, says. “As below, so above, and as above, so below, so that the miracle of the unity may be fulfilled”.

The Teachings explaining the Renunciation are addressed to men individually; exercises of meditation, prayers, consciousness clarification, and advices are addressed to persons, not to collective groups. Therefore, they are effective if and when every man accepts them, according to his own wishes and intensity. A person is the active and free protagonist, and results obtained will be variable according to admittance or refusal, even counting on a good spiritual guide and expert in the doctrine. The change of Races that we are experiencing also takes place according to the Law of Renunciation, which however is consequent, karmic and fatal. Here Humanity is not free and has not any alternatives; it is subject to the plan of evolution that comes from the bottom of the times under the direction of the Great Solar Initiate. In “Commentaries” of this Internet site the reader may find information given by Master Santiago Bovisio about Maitreya and his mission.

Which are the chances of a lone man willing to survive in this globalized planet, permeated by calamities, burning on a low flame in the cosmic athanor, and sentenced to be transformed at any cost, or to disappear forever? The pilgrim must tread on the way of Renunciation, laying aside delusions of the old world, which are ashes now, and seeking refuge and cultivating the inner life. A better quality of life ever is the one offered by the Redeemer. A early as Jesus said to the rich young man, more than 2000 years ago, “Leave everything and follow me”, with no result, and now he repeats it again.