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
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
