Saturday, March 26, 2016

ATHEISM IS AN ENEMY OF HUMAN LIBERATION


ATHEISM IS AN ENEMY OF HUMAN LIBERATION

Erle Frayne Argonza

I was once invited by a group of Sunday coffee drinkers who called themselves Freethinkers’ Society. I thought all the while that they were the balanced, Seeker-type of freethinkers. To my shock, they were atheists, and they had envisioned an atheistic Philippine society in the long run.

I noticed that they were largely from the middle-aged section of the urban boheme. They were the idle petite bourgeois who got nothing much to do on weekends, and so they decided to gather together every Sunday morning to configure courses of action about their supposed mission to destroy ‘religionism’ or ‘spiritism’. After having observed closely the cognitive operations and patterns of the group, I decided to pull out, having acquired my empirical data about the atheists of the present.

What I made known to the group, and ditto for other sectors of society, is that I am no atheist, that atheism and freethought are not identical, that atheism is vulgar materialism and I got nothing to do with its dissemination nor with that of its advocacies. However, there are instances when, together with some atheists within the academe, I did join them in coalition to demand for greater justice for state laborers, overseas workers, youth & students, and related sectors.

In my book Libertosophy and Freethought, I re-echoed the contention of HP Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, that the danger to humanity today comes from the two extremes: on the one side is Vulgar Spiritism, represented by religion and quasi-religion, that had mired people in superstition, dogma, and fanaticism; on the other side is Vulgar Materialism, represented by the atheists, who deny the existence of the Spirit and the other ontological domains (dimensions, planes).

In the same book, what I advocated for was the Integrated Man, who had synthesized the material and spiritual towards his/her own liberation (nirvana, salvation). By Man I don’t mean the male gender, but rather the human being, man having been derived from manu or ‘thinking being’. The Integrated Man has none of the characteristics of contemporary humans who are, in the main, drifters in life, who had compartmentalized life into ‘material life’ and ‘spiritual life’, who are like zombies (in Marcuse’s language) whose life orbits around a one-dimensional pursuit for the hedonistic and crass materialistic things, and who suffer from incurable alienation precisely due to the tension between the material and spiritual within them.

In no way will I say Hallelujah to the Atheist who had denied and continues to deny the Spirit. Any force that denies the Spirit, and who delimits reality therefore to the 3-dimensional world of the bio-physical, commits a terrible error of reductionism. The spread of a highly materialist weltanschauung (world outlook) largely by the atheistic sections of the population, notably the Western intellectuals, had created new traps for the human soul. By reducing reality to the 3-dimensional, mankind confronts a new blindness of sorts, or is made to believe in the illusion that life is only the 3-dimensional reality.

Having been castrated of the impulse to know further the other possible life domains, the beings inherent in them and the purpose for their existence and missions, the atheist therefore drifts in the lower life domain like any animal or ‘zombie’. The one-dimensional man (to borrow from Herbert Marcuse) of today, who had reduced life to money making-buying-accumulating-consuming hedonism, is the classic case of the somnambulist or the sleepwalker.

Per my own enquiries, there are a total of seven (7) major ontological domains, or seven (7) planes of existence. There are dimensions of life that are invisible to the physical eye, but since within us we also have bodies that correspond to the other domains, then such bodies, possessing their own corresponding ‘eyes’, can be activated to observe and move in those other dimensions.

During the sleeping state, for instance, the physical body sleeps together with the physical eyes. And as the body sleeps, the 2nd body, called Astral Body by the mystics & masters, awakens. Even before the body had slept, the Astral Body already wakens up, floats around nine (9) feet above the physical body, and than stands up in wakened state, and simply walks along the avenues of life in its natural domain: the Astral Plane. The sceneries where the Astral Body moves are then registered in the memory and visuals of the physical body as dream scene. The Astral Plane is, in fact, the ‘dream plane’, the ‘plane of illusion’, where we can practice engaging in materializing objects using our thoughts, including houses, that we cannot do in the physical plane.

Various academic researches on Out-Of-Body-Experience or OBE had documented very well the prevalence of another body. In Manila, among the top experts on the matter is the Jesuit professor, Fr. Bulatao, who is based in the Ateneo De Manila University. Wherever Fr. Bulatao goes to deliver lectures on the paranormal, he demonstrates the factuality of OBE, and therefore of the existence of subtle bodies other than the bio-physical body, by making the audience participate in the experiment. After each workshop or seminar talk, the awe-struck participants have openly expressed the amazing experience they just went through, of their instantaneous presence in some areas thousands of miles away.

Note that in this instance, the professor used scientific method to let people realize that there are other aspects to reality that the ordinary state of consciousness cannot reveal to us. Well, to the atheists, they would simply label this method as ‘pseudo-science’ and dismiss the results as merely illusory games. And that’s the problem with the reality reductionists, the atheists, for having created new superstitions in place of old ones that they have themselves so militantly come to demolish.

So be it that there are atheists in life. For as long as the atheists would respect the reality paradigms of other people, that they would come to appreciate difference, then no one would accost them. This is no longer the time to persecute people such as atheists, and so the atheists should likewise reciprocate this by tolerating competing paradigms.

But as one can see, this hasn’t been the case. When the situation arrives that atheists come to dominate the public sphere, such as what happened to Communist states, the atheists resorted to mass witch-hunting by exterminating people who strongly believe in the Spirit and the other dimensions of life. This is a case where atheism celebrates the mass mind, the Herd Mind, the cult of the Party Cadre and the State, and has nothing to do with freethought whatsoever.

Not only that, the Communists also resorted to the extermination of freethinkers, including many spiritual Seekers (freemasons, anthroposophists, etc) whose competing weltanschauung is incompatible with the worship of the State and the party cadres. For even within the Communist Party, there are also freethinker-Seekers who are silently conducting their own duties, missions, and tasks toward their inner transformation. Being free spirits, they tend to be highly authentic in their views, manifest thoughts that contravene with the accepted dogmas. They are the equivalent of free spirit clergy whose ideas contravened against the dogma of the Church during the medieval period, and who were burnt at stake for their free thought. So is it with the Communist Party and other ideological movements of the extremists.

Look at the mainland Chinese today, after decades of official atheism. We wonder what happens to the souls of the Chinese of the present generations when they depart from the physical plane, without any spiritual engagement whatsoever. And I don’t mean the devotional engagements, which they had demonstrated aplenty by showing filial piety, devotion to the Chinese nation and to the Communist leadership. I mean the life of a spiritual Seeker, which at least is accorded the devotees in those states where spiritual life is considered a fact of life and sacrosanct for existence and transcendence.

That is, without the spiritual moorings, without the profound virtues that are immanent from the higher spheres and well anchored in the conscience and unconscious, the person concerned will simply be an agglomeration of vices, to note: lying, deceiving, conceit, manipulating, divisiveness, obstructionism, and so on. Atheism reduces people to the level of the ‘reptile’ which signifies everything that is cold-blooded and Machiavellian. Lucky enough if virtues will permeate an atheist, and finding a virtuous atheist is like searching for a needle in the hay stack.

I’ve had atheist friends before, among university professors, and I stayed with them so closely for almost two (2) decades. As my own yoga practice progressed, I noticed that I became weakened by the incessant resort of these former pals to deceit and slandering of their competitor groups in the academe. My aura was practically bombarded with negative vibes by their talks and their dense auras, and so finally I had to decide to pull away from these friends. They were fellow free spirits, but they were no Lightworker types, and the demarcation between them and me was so marked. Their lifestyle was vulgarly hedonistic which I had nothing to do with.

So, fellow free spirits/freethinkers, this is my position and proxemics: deconstruct atheism and keep a distance with the atheists. I shall give my respect to the atheists as fellow humans, even as the walls between us shall remain here and in the other domains.

[Writ 21 November 2007, Quezon City, MetroManila]

 

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

POST-CHURCH SPIRITUALITY


POST-CHURCH SPIRITUALITY
Erle Frayne D. Argonza
Here comes the Aquarian Age! Welcome the post-Piscean Age! Hail the Post-Church Era!
Planet Earth is now at the ascending arc of her evolution. Ascension holds true for humanity, whose evolution in the dense spheres is now ending and the entry to the higher dimensions accelerating. It takes 555 million years for the entire human race to devolve & evolve—to devolve into the dense spheres, and go back to the divine spheres as evolved beings. The midpoint of the 555-million year period was reached on the 21st of September of 1934 yet (see revelations of Guru Roerick, Guru R.K.K)
The ascendant route in our evolution is now way up since 1934. So cheer up, Noble Seekers! This route will see the emergence of greater individuation in the human psyche, a development that was anticipated many decades ago by the H.P. Blvavatsky, Carl Jung and Tailhard De Chardin. As mankind individuates all the more, so will the bond with the collective mind get fractured. All those institutions that sought to control humans and reduced them to automatons that lack autonomy are now crumbling. That includes Religion with the capital R.
Institutional behavior is largely effective for those with the strongest ‘herd instinct’, even as it harnesses the folk spirit or folkgeist to secure individual loyalty to society and institutions. For the highly individuated souls, institutional behavior or mass behavior is sickening and misplaced, and will seek every way to express their autonomy as ‘free spirits’ rather than dance to the sway of the folkgeist. Those high risk takers will not take second thoughts in leaving their churches, peers, kinship circles, old neighborhoods if to prove the toxic nuisance of the old ways and the highest value of their freedoms.
Sadly for the devotees, religions will end in violent upheavals over the next few decades. In many European countries, the church-going impulse had died, many have left their churches and are seeking new modalities of adaptation that will see the greater expression of individuality and autonomy. Many of the Europeans have fallen into the atheistic path, but many are Seekers who aspire for alternative spiritual programs that are of the individualized platforms rather than institutional (churchly) types.
 
One must understand that Europe had enormous traumas with religious life, passed through many Dark Ages that were reinforced by religious precepts, and went through bloody genocides and wars due to religion. And so, when the most open society—the postmodern society with a post-industrial economy—began galvanizing in their countries, Europeans at last found the environment they needed to throw away the garbage institutions that have enchained their souls for centuries and millennia.
Institutions are crumbling. The postmodern thinkers have already pronounced the ‘implosion of the social’, the ‘end of meta-narratives’ and ‘rise of micro-narratives’, the ‘end of ideology’, and every kind of terminal phases of old worlds that have for so long enchained the human psyche in the fiery hells of Dostoevskian existence. Go through the works of Jean Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Daniel Bell, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jurgen Habermas, Alvin Toffler and Kenichi Ohmae, and you’ll find their thoughts converge on the observation about the rise of the new context marked by collapse of institutions.
In the emerging context, old modalities and platforms of adaptation won’t work as they are ineffective. It would be futile to revive them, reconstruct them into hip-hop type things for they are largely meant for the ‘herd mind’ or ‘collective mind’. In the emerging contexts, the herd mind of the Laggard is out and the individuated mind of the Free Spirit-Seeker is in. The mighty waves of the new context are now here with us, dealing catastrophic blows on old societies & cultures, economies, polities, religions, kinships, world outlooks, educational systems, health institutions and other behavioral morphs that tend to retard or obstruct soul ascent to the divine spheres.
The new world is rising with so much birth pangs, as it violently pushes its way up and disgorges itself from the wombs of the old world. We are in the transition phase, as we witness the representatives of the old world working so hard to assert their remaining powers so as not to let go of their largesse and privileges derived from controlling and manipulating people. We witness the clash of religious tolerance versus religious fundamentalism, and the clash of religious fundamentalist groups that have so far resulted to countless deaths.
 
The next twenty-five (25) years will see the further intensification of religious conflicts. We now see another world war shaping up from out of the revived age-old conflict between Sunni and Shiite Islam. While the war shapes up, the old war between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland hasn’t totally died out. The Moslem-Christian conflict in the Balkans and Africa haven’t extinguished too. The ancient hatreds between Arabs and Jews are still around, though in the coming world war the Sunni-Jewish alliance will galvanize in a tenuous coalition versus Shiite aggression.
It is now certain that tens of millions will die in the ensuing wars. It seems like we’re back to the 30-Years War (1618-1648) which began along the Catholic-Protestant cleavage, but which later ended up differently as alliances changed. In this new 30-Years War shaping up, the Shiite-Sunni cleavage will just be the trigger towards a bigger war scene as the world powers enter the war fronts and declare their alliances accordingly. The conflicts could spread to all continents, unless that the madness be stopped before the globe will catch up fire in the process.
One thing is certain should the religious cleavages result to enormous deaths in warm bodies: a global shock for humanity, a shock that will rapidly see the esteem of Great Religions diminish radically. Past the year 2030, it is most likely that the survivors of the wars will lose respect for their religious elders, and would rather choose the path of the freethinker. Religious participation will decline to insignificant levels thereafter, as the shockwaves of the carnage will refuse to die out many decades after the last embers of the battles have extinguished.
And this will be the explicit message of the forthcoming global experience of religious madness: it does not pay to sustain and reinforce religion as a modality of expressing and meeting the spiritual needs of an individuating populace. If it will take this bitter path to take us all out of the old world life and celebrate later a post-religious spirituality, then let it happen. And the sooner that the catastrophic events will happen, the better will it be for us all.
What I’ve been prophesying all along will come forth: the birthing of the post-religious society. There’s no way that herd-mind institutions can survive a new world that will be dominated by the life modalities for the individuated minds or free spirits. Humanity is rapidly moving towards the noosphere and there will be no turning back to the herd mind of the Stone Age. Teilhard De Chardin, whom the church badly demonized for his unorthodox futuristic vision about the coming of the noosphere, will be vindicated.
But most of all, you Noble Seekers will be vindicated. You who have to hide in the shadows for fear of persecution, you who have silently deconstructed in thought and action the destructive ways of your churches and priesthoods, will be vindicated. You whose figures were vilified by pals, kins, and every fanatical devotee you may have encountered, will be vindicated. And you will exhibit the last laugh, as you will witness before your own eyes the violent collapse of churches. Islam will go, then Judaism, then Christianity, then Hinduism, and all those that have resorted to mass slaughters of perceived ‘infidels’.
No more will inquisitions work. Even if global tyranny will be established today in the name of God, by religious zealots of the most fundamentalist groups coalescing to save their crumbling powers and privileges, this tyranny won’t hold. Every church group that has been resorting to inquisitions such as the jihadists and Christian terrorists will be humiliated. No draconian measure whatsoever that will shackle the free mind will ever succeed again, more so in the sphere of the sacred.
The Age of Dogma had already faded away in social life and is more markedly a part of historical analects as narratives of the damned. The Age of Interpretation had long superseded dogma, with the new context leaving it up to the individual reader or learner to interpret texts, lessons, archetypes. But the defenders of dogma refuse to accept their fated defeat, and they seem to have a window of opportunity to unleash their powers via religious fundamentalism and televangelism. But their days are numbered, and as soon as humanity will witness the full horrors of the religious holocausts now shaping up and intensifying, the compass of the day will point to more lay people leaving their churches more so among the younger generations.
Dear Seeker, what then should be your attitude towards your church? You really need not leave your church as you ascend the Path, you can still make use of it as a vehicle for your bhakti (devotion) practices. But if you’re tired and sick of your church and you’ve left it for good, very well then, welcome to the world of freethinkers. You can still do your bhakti at home, include it in your prayers, or set special occasions for around 10-15 minutes or more in a week to focus on chanting the name of God, as well as the Avatar (e.g. Christ, Krishna, Maitreya, Buddha, Ahura Mazda) and Divine Mothers (e.g. Quan Yin, Mary, Portia, Vesta, Liberty) that attract you most.
 
So, Noble Seeker, if you’re so disturbed by the surge of fundamentalism and other fascistic religious movements, this will only be for a temporary phase. Past 2030 they will be residual, clumsy, ridiculously spent out forces. Seekers and freethinkers will be the victors of the day. So please show more patience and love to the fanatical devotees, for many of them will leave their churches yet and go the Path of the Seeker. Hail the Age of Post-Church Spirituality!
[Writ 27 September 2007, Quezon City, MetroManila]

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

MASTERS’ SITE


MASTERS’ SITES

 

Erle Frayne D. Argonza / Guru Ra

 

Fellows, Brothers and Sisters, here are some information about internet sites where you can find the reads & services of teachers &/or masters.

 

Happy surfing!

 

***************

 

Erle Frayne Argonza Sites

 




http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com



 

Teachers & Masters’ Sites

 

Ascended Masters archives:


 

Drunvalo Melchizedek, Teacher and Melchizedek priest:


 

Gems of the Hermits lessons’ archives: http://www.gemsofthehermits.org

 

Guriji Krishnananda, Master based in India, of the Saptarishis line:


 

Helena Blavatsky, tasked to spread Divine Wisdom or theos sophia: http://www.theosophy.ph, http://www.blavatsky.net

 

Joe Lyons Kicheloe, innovator of higher mysteries integrated into ‘critical pedagogy’ for classroom teachers: http://www.joelyonskincheloe.info/

 

Kriya Yoga, system taught by Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yutekswar Giri, Paramahansa Yogananda: http://www.kriyayoga.com

 

Light Ascension site: http://www.lightascension.com

 

Lighthouse Summit, dedicated to the works of the late Masters Mark and Elizabeth Claire Prophet: http://www.tsl.org

 

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, late Asian Master: http://www.maharishi.org

 

Mahatma Gandhi’s service group: http://www.gandhiserve.org

 

Radha Soami Satsang Beas: http://www.rssb.org

 

Rajesh Ananda, an Asian Guru: http://www.fisu.org

 

Sai Baba, the late Indian Master, and his mission group:


 

Sal Rachele, Teacher and Melchizedek priest: http://www.salrachele.com

 

Self–Realization Fellowship, founded and mentored by the late Master Paramahansa Yogananda: http://www.yogananda.srf.org

 

Sri Aurobindo Society, practitioner of the teachings of the Master Sri Aurobindo: http://www.sriaurobindosociety.org