THE COSMIC MAN

At the highest point of his cosmic experience, the man lives the supreme Reality of the Universe, in all its fullness and integrity; the Creator and all creation live in harmony within its diversity; thus, perceiving the extinction of his individuality, this transcendent state in which suffering no longer exists, away from the play of the temporary illusions of profane life.

And for this reason, the cosmic man can sincerely love all finite existences in the Infinite Essence, because he perceives the Creator in all creatures.

The aversion of the world that the mystic experiences culminated in the conversion to the world lived by the cosmic man. After the penultimate evolutionary stage, which is the escape from the world, the cosmic man reaches the ultimate evolutionary stage, which is the coexistence with the world - no longer the coexistence of the profane, which is defeat, but the coexistence of the initiate, who is victory, for the antepenultimate stage of the profane slave, and the penultimate stage of the mystical deserter merged into the ultimate stage of the cosmic winner.

Thus, this cosmic man sees the sacredness of the Infinite in all finite profanities, and with that, all the profanities of the past are sacralized by the knowledge of the Liberating Truth, the Truth that the Infinite is in all finite, and vice-versa.

To reach this vision of cosmic transparency, seeing the Infinite in all finite, man must first contemplate the Light of the Infinite in himself, far away from the opaque things of the finite world; only after fully identifying with this isolated, transcendent Light and living intensely this mystical experience can a man see this Light as immanent in all things of the objective and profane world - the opacity of yesterday has become today's transparency.

Only the man accustomed to being lonely with God can be in solidarity with the world – this loneliness gives him the necessary invulnerability to be in solidarity with God's world. A merely social and sociable man who knows nothing of happy mystical solitude alone with God cannot be in solidarity with the world without renouncing solitude with God.

This loneliness in God must have become in man, a second nature, a home, a paradise in which he could dwell forever.

But ... this intense verticality of loneliness calls for a vast horizontality of action. Meditation and contemplation must manifest in action. Man of genuine meditation and contemplation is of irresistible action and activity.

From the man who expects something from the world, nothing can the world expect! Only the man freed from the world by the experience of Truth can affirm without danger and sincerely love all things in the world because he has ceased to be a slave and has become master of the world.

Says Albert Schweitzer: "Christianity is an affirmation of the world, which has gone through the negation of the world."

Gandhi: "Man! Renounce the world, give it to God! And then receive it back, purified, from the hands of God!"

Jesus: "He who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple ... He who loses his life will gain it, but he who wants to save his life will lose it."

Paul of Tarsus: "I die every day, and that is why I live - but I no longer live, but the Christ lives in me."

This is, therefore, the strange paradox of Integral Truth: He who has never internally denied the profane world cannot without danger affirm the world; the aversion of the world by denial must precede conversion to the world by affirmation of the world - that is liberation, equidistant from the slavery of the profane and the desertion of the mystic.

With this, it cannot be denied that mystical desertion is better than profane slavery; on the contrary, mystical desertion is a necessary means to achieve final liberation. All spiritual masters insist on the need for denial by the mystique so that man can achieve total liberation by affirming the Truth.

All things in the objective world deceive and enslave man who has not experienced the Truth of his inner world; only after this real encounter with the Truth of his Divine Self can the things of the human ego be accepted without danger - and even as aids to self-realization - because, after this experience of Truth, the joy of the past (or the pseudo joy of the profane) became the immunity of now, of the normal and natural acceptance of the true Reality. Only then can this experience in the world, without being in the world, be savoured in all its forms of illusion, without danger, without remorse and hesitation.

In his deepest, even unconscious intuition, profane man is convinced that no being in God's world is evil in itself or contrary to the God of the world, for an inner voice, tells him that all finite exist by virtue of the Infinite; that the eternal Transcendent is Immanent in all temporary things; that the temporary is only a partial and transient manifestation of the integral and eternal Reality.

And this return to the unconscious intuition of the inner voice can become conscious and Christlike to all things in God's world, and it is in this sense that Tertullian asserts that the human soul is Christlike by its very nature.

Man, though he may seem to be in exile on planet Earth, knows deep within that he can find here a temporary home, which is not necessarily in conflict with the eternal one, but which may be a compatible prelude to life in a more favourable existence. He wants to be able to make sure of the earthly existence without bitterness, without remorse, without any sense of guilt. He knows that it is he, and he alone, who can and must free his nature from the corruptibility that so far moans and suffers childbirth, longing for the glorious freedom of the children of God, who have received the "first joys of the spirit."

But while the things of the world are opaque to him, mere profane objects, man cannot rest without inner restlessness, without future conversion; only when he sees in all external things so many finite forms and existences of the Infinite Reality; it is that he can be definitively reconciled with the world of the finite without renouncing the Infinite.

It is then when the man enters the great Cosmic Family, which is the living experience in a kingdom in all its Integrity and Fullness.

When the profane experience becomes the mystical vision, and when the mystical vision culminates in the cosmic experience, it is when the Word becomes flesh and dwells in man full of grace and Truth, and then, the man who lives the diversities of the profane world unites with the unitary man of mystical solitude - and from this union, offspring of the cosmic man, the Christlike man, the Light of the world is born.