Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
... of live, and a culture of life
in which the fear of death does not exist.
And a culture in which the fear of death
does not exist, ceases to be a culture
of fear, of blackmail. It becomes a
real culture, a culture of love,
in the poetic sense.
A culture of solidarity and brotherhood.
But what if we were to suddenly acknowledge
that the guerrillas, the paramilitaries,
those on top, those at the bottom,
those to the left, those to the right,
the country people, those to the north,
those to the south, are all of us sons of
one and the same Father?
Neither left nor right,
neither cousins nor brothers and sisters,
neither uncles nor grandparents;
all of us a brotherhood.
Sons and daughters of One Father?
And we were then to enter into that real dimension
of brotherhood? And if we believed
that the assassin is also your brother?
And if we were able to see in the assassin
someone who's been killed a thousand times?
I'll tell you a real life story.
I met an assassin. A notorious assassin.
A man who had killed a lot of people.
He was a member of an addiction recovery group.
Everybody was scared to death of him.
He was condemned to loneliness.
An infinite loneliness.
He comes to consult me concerning
a matter of pain and addiction.
And I looked him straight in the eyes,
and saw in that cold blooded assassin,
behind his eyes, a spark of innocence.
I also saw the scared child.
And my heart felt pain.
For the child, not the assassin.
For the light being that was hid underneath
and that he had dressed up in rags.
And my heart hurt so much,
that tears came flowing to my eyes.
And of a sudden it shamed me, though not
so much anymore. I'm no longer so ashamed to cry.
But back then it did make me ashamed.
So I tried to hide my tears.
I looked at him and his eyes were teary.
A pitiless assassin with teary eyes.
But I haven't told him a word!
I felt that no one had looked him in the eyes.
That no one had allowed him to make bare
what was hidden behind the mask of terror.
The mask of a terrorist that he used. Because
behind terrorism there's nothing more than terror.
And behind the terror there's fear.
And behind fear there's the absence of love.
And I embraced him and I melt,
and he melted also. And
we wet each other's shoulders.
And we cried till we're sobbing.
And I felt that I died and that he died.
Not physically. Rather we died to not being.
And I found there a brother. An innocent man.
Innocent in essence. And after that I heard
a dreadful story. Son of a ***.
That's a first death. A dreadful death.
Possibly more violent than all the
other ways of dying.
Second, two or three tries at aborting him.
Third, he's born and no one loves him.
His mother abandons him.
And he goes from hospice to hospice
and from street to street.
This man, who's been killed a thousand times
by us and abruptly we point at him and say:
There's the assassin. But we haven't
thought how many times we killed him.
And so in this way we become aware of
another dimension of life and death.
And it can happen intentionally or unintentionally.
We're condemning a lot of people to death.
But there are other forms of death
that are more terrible than daily death.
Just recently, we were visiting Palma de Mayorca
and people were alarmed because of
a virus epidemic that killed some children.
How many times have we died in epidemics?
But there are other more violent, more terrible
epidemics that are silent
epidemics that extinguish life.
And we wonder, How many millions of
persons live in this city?
There are more or less a million and a half.
Can you imagine if there was a Tsunami
that swept across Palma de Mayorca,
four times a year, destroying a city
with a million and a half residents?
That would be dreadful.
But that Tsunami does take place.
And it is real. And it is the Tsunami of insolidarity,
It is the Tsunami that bespeaks of our dehumanization.
Of our not having accessed our humanity.
That we don't feel we're part of the fabric of the earth.
We don't feel that we are a part of that
mystical body of the Christ, of that Body of Love.
Of that sap that circulates through us
and that makes of each one of us
leaves that belong to the same tree.
When we look at statistics, we find that
there are six million children
who die of starvation.
Each and every year, in this planet.
They die of physical hunger.
And there are two million children
who go blind caused by something very basic:
They're not getting vitamin A, and perhaps a little zinc.
And when there are six million children
who die of hunger, then there are eighteen million
who are condemned to the slow death
of being unable to develop their brains
and thus live in dignity their humanization process.
And most likely they'll end up in violence
because they won't have an instrument that
allows them to play the music of the spirit.
The music of the Creator.
When we look at death on a grand scale,
the greater death, and when we see,
because of the planetary warming effect,
all the flooding, all the drownings, all of these
processes that are taking place,
then we have to look at the process of life and death
from a grander perspective. One that goes beyond
the individual spot to look at it within the
planetary context. Within the context of social responsibility.
Of human responsibility. And once and for all
learn the laws of consciousness. That are
also the laws of life, of brotherhood, of connectivity.
And know that we are all responsible for
all of us. For our lives as well as our deaths.
But not only our deaths, also of our neighbor's death,
of war, of the future. So we could learn right now
to sow again the seeds and to fertilize the earth
in the fertile ground of our hearts,
which is the only ground in which a human seed
can really sprout.
We can all learn that all this pain makes sense.
We could also learn that darkness makes sense.
So now let's look at it in the plant kingdom.
Let's leave the seed and look at the stem.
To live is to grow.
We grow until the very moment of death,
Even synaptically.
From a human perspective, we grow
until the very moment of death.
We die, from a human perspective,
when we stop growing.
How does the stem grow?
When the source of light of the stem
is to the east, the stem grows on its west side.
and thus it is that it bends towards the light.
In other words, the plant hormones,
those growth factors that get activated,
get activated not on the side of the light
that the stem is to bend to,
but on the shadow side.
So this area of the stem grows much less
than the area behind it.
So the little stem bends toward the light.
To live is to learn. To learn is to be
internally aware of our light.
But we become aware of the light
from the shadow side.
The shadow is our main growth factor.
When death approaches, we get close to dying,
and we grow. We learn more about life
when nearing death.
Sickness visits us, and we learn and grow
much more from sickness than
from any other circumstance.
All these shadows are demanding teachers...