OLD MAN - NEW MAN

The text below is from a greeting made to Professor Huberto Rohden by Dr Jamil Feres, in the closing ceremony of the courses on Cosmic Philosophy and Philosophy of the Gospel, in 1960, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Since he voluntarily abandoned the Roman clergy, for diverging from how it conducts its gospel and not the Gospel of Christ Jesus, Huberto Rohden, polyglot, professor at the American University of Washington, with a scholarship at the Theological Seminary of the Princeton University, where he did spend two years with the conviviality of Albert Einstein and a doctorate in Theology and Comparative Religions by European universities, he travelled throughout Brazil and part of the world giving lectures, conferences, participating in seminars and congresses.

In the midst of this journey, he established the Fundação Beneficente Alvorada which maintains his spiritual legacy, in promoting his books, courses and meditations; wrote about 100 books, 65 of which were published, all aimed at a new Christian consciousness, and tirelessly for the ideal of a new Christian social order until the end of his days, at the age of 87, in 1981, leaving as a legacy, in addition to his works, his farewell statement in his last moment in a conscious state: “I came to serve humanity”.

The theme refers to the Adamic man of the old humanity, the man of the wild times in which he still lives today; of wars and armistice, of the materialist race, whose values and attitudes, are being relegated to actions and reactions, in absolute contempt for the spiritual origin of his nature. And to the man of the new humanity, the Christlike man, who left the old arid plains of mediocrity and reached the top of the highest peaks of his wisdom, whose motto is the experience of divine mystics and the ethical experience with all beings of nature.

“Old Man and New Man, this is the key to all problems, the synthesis of all doctrine! “You will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free.”

Yes, Truth redeems, Truth sets you free! It frees us from the tyrannies and limits imposed by the ego.

Old Man, who must integrate and definitively submit to spiritual rebirth, to the deep and Christlike Self;

New Man, referred to by the apostle of the divine ideal, Paul of Tarsus;

Old man, self-centred, slave to instincts, given over to laziness, greed, lust;

New, Theocentric Man, turned to Christ, who goes beyond the barriers created by the mind, who overcame himself, who broke his handcuffs, with his tendencies to leisure, who got rid of greed - and dominated the attraction of comforts and pleasures;

Old Man, fascinated only by the five senses, an inveterate sensual, incapable of other concerns than those of his immediate interests;

New Man, who integrates his thoughts and his mind in the great divine Self and who dares to live his ideas and die for his ideals, for a man without an ideal is not a complete man, is not an integral man!

Old Man, which expresses horror to a life of sacrifice, bound and dominated by the “deadly bodies”, mentioned by the Apostle to the Gentiles, saturated with sins and vices;

New Man, who despite facing sacrifices, still struggles for an ideal, the mysterious pleasure of the spirit that vivifies, illuminating him with indescribable intimate joy, awakening the positive values of his individuality!

Old Man, fatalistic, with an aversion to everything new and to all transformation, sick of the lack of will, who surrenders to the movement of the waves like a doll that rolls in the sea of events;

New Man, who freed himself from the asphyxiating waves of all circumstances that come together to annihilate him and dominates the ego's tyrannical attacks, and fights the good fight, not only to win but for the delightful enchantment of the battle itself;

Old Man, the one who was left behind, handcuffed, prisoner of a dead past;

New Man, who goes forward, in search of the future;

Old Man, who lives a prosaic life, a slave to routine and daily life, a prisoner of comfort and selfish and subordinate interests;

New Man, who overcame all this and knows the Heroic Life, that wonderful life that is a gift from Heaven, but that must be conquered by ourselves, by our attitude, by our experiences, by our effort in the search for new ethical values, moral and spiritual;

Old Man, avid for all pleasures, exhausted and unrepentant joker, in search of maximum external stimuli, to achieve a minimum of happiness;

New Man, the poor by the spirit, who freed himself from material objects and to whom minimal stimuli are enough for maximum happiness!

Destroy the Old Man, mould him into the New Man and say ... use me, Lord!

Let us cooperate with the eminent Master. Let us integrate the Old Man into the New Man and we will have realized the Cosmic Man, the Christlike Man, the Integral Man: body, mind and spirit, in a perfect hierarchy of values, in perfect harmony with the Infinite and the closest communion with God!