POLITICS

Political regimes which best have adapted to a non-evolved state of the consciousness of humanity may be incompatible with the ideals of a more evolved one. Thus, the monarchical or monocratic political model was certainly the normal form for humankind of those times. Simultaneously, the democratic regime matches the present state of a large part of politically adolescent humanity. However, it cannot be said that democracy is simply the best form of government.

There will come a time when humankind will modify, according to its superior evolution at a mature age, the regimes called democratic nowadays.

The purpose of the State is not to fulfil what is lacking in the human personality, but to create an atmosphere of peace and security in which the personality can normally develop all its latent potentialities. Power does not mean violence, nor absolutism or dictatorship and a police state. Still, at the moment, power is necessary to promote social harmony between all parts since always guided by reason until the individual itself can become self-orientated. The State is a means, not an end in itself and should not replace or limit the personality. It must aid it in all that is necessary for the person to attain its potential dynamically so that the perfection of each individual results in the perfection of society.

Baruch Spinoza, a famous 17th-century philosopher and thinker, son of Portuguese Jews who, fleeing Catholic persecution to live in a more open-minded society in Amsterdam implicitly defends the ideal of “Cosmocracy”, a political regime in which each individual is fully evolved in himself, be guided safely by the inner voice of his conscience, without any need for external laws. This “Cosmocracy” (government by the Cosmos) would be a kind of “anarchy”, but not anarchy due to the lack of laws, but anarchy which dispenses any external law for each citizen, has the internal law within, to which it would obey spontaneously, not for fear of reprisals or the hope of a prize, but because of a rational comprehension that made it love the law as a friend, benefiting the entire society.

Many men disobey the law because they hate it.

Others obey the law, even if they hate it.

Some, however, obey the law because they love it, and this third group would represent the Cosmocracy.

However, for man to be able to love the law, accept the law and fulfil it spontaneously - to do good for the sake of good - it is essential that he has attained a high degree of inner evolution, that he has come to “know the truth”, the truth which sets him free. Thus, the cosmocratic regime would represent the state of “freedom through the knowledge of the truth”.

According to Spinoza, the purpose of the state “is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by imposition, terror, but to liberate, so that they may live and act in complete safety and without danger to themselves and their fellows. The purpose of the State is not to transform rational beings into brutes or machines, but to enable the body and the spirit of the citizens to integrate better and accordingly; it is to lead men to live by and for a free reason so that they do not waste their strength in hatred and fraud or to behave disloyally, so that the true purpose of the State is to lead man to be free.”

However, it is important that those who are in charge of the State be themselves fully conscious of their functions and live among themselves in the same degree of honesty, truth, justice and freedom that they want from their citizens. At first, there is nothing wrong with politics because man is a political being by nature and has in his free will, his cause, his truth, but also his judge, his conscience. Wrong is the oligarchic way in which politics are conducted to benefit privileged classes to impose and survive at the expense of others, a practice that has become endemic in so-called modern societies. The politics of oligarchies established political parties with the same purpose of power based on divisions, since the very etymology of the term means division, and therefore the division of interests, and not a union for the benefit of the whole collectivity.

Democracy - which was already created by an elite and consequently controversial - would have as a principle, the representation and participation of the people in the government, and that should be exercised by the representatives elected by the people; a government of the people, for the people and by the people is like the experience of life itself, always changing, infinite in its varieties, always depending on the degree of evolution of cultures. But today, this principle cannot be compared with what is happening with the vast majority of countries on the planet. In some, the voice of its people is still heard. Still, in the rest, democracy is only valid for a few groups of power that influence and benefit from decisions or compel decisions to be made without the participation of the people, who are the citizens who work the most and who have the least right to decide, and who least benefit. It is a democracy of labels only, a farce. True democracy, born 2500 years ago in ancient Greece, it was short-lived, only for two hundred years, showing the reality that humanity still lives today in its primitive state of consciousness.

Therefore, no political regime at the current level of humanity's conscience, still crawling along the barren plains of mediocrity, not even those of force, for violence, generates equal force, at the same intensity in the opposite direction - according to the third law, Newton's physics - which in metaphysics corresponds to the law of Cause and Effect - will solve the problems generated by the injustice of men against their fellow men. Only a radical change in moral and ethical conscience, of the knowledge of the truth about oneself, can liberate the man from the mud where he wallows in chaos today to a level of harmony and peace in the future.

Humanity is based on the principle of solidarity, fraternity, altruism; however, this sense of universal human brotherhood is impossible without the experience of divine universal fatherhood. The ethics of everyday life must be solidified in the mystique of permanent communion with God. In reality, humanity is nothing less than a cluster of concrete human beings, aiming at their own selfish interests; consequently, all selfishness is fragmented, which does not integrate, is centrifugal and chaotic. Every selfish person wants to be a sun for itself and cannot tolerate being a planet in company with other planets. The altruist, the worshiper of love and solidarity, knows and recognizes the centrality of the great divine Sun and is happy to be able to gravitate towards the central star in the company of other planets.

The law of the selfish man is chaos, disorder, which is expressed in the political systems of the 21st-century man.

The law of the altruist, of the integral man of the future, is Cosmos, order, harmony.

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Paul Brunton, in his book A MESSAGE FROM ARUNACHALA, in the chapter on Politics, writes: “Politicians try to forget the existence of God, and the fact of the great messages of guidance and warning given to men by the Prophets. There is something about it that embarrasses them and therefore silences them, for according to them, God is too far from Earth for his presence to be felt. They “regret” that society cannot be based on divine laws, and that is why it is better to base it on the laws they created for the different systems. Yet government without God has not succeeded in making man happy, despite its plentiful promises. It has, however, succeeded in producing nations of spiritual paupers. For the politician, carefully shutting his eyes to the deeper realities of life, juggles with externals. He must believe either that life has a political purpose or a divine one. If he accepts the first, then he must give his strength to support political partisanship; if the later, then he may pay tribute in time and energy to the deathless spirit.”