COSMIC PHILOSOPHY

The content of the pages which follows below is not intended for noisy crowds but for restless souls. It only aims at interested readers to explore and seek solutions to their dramas and dilemmas related to the spirit.

The vast majority of human beings are not concerned with these issues; they waste their lives intoxicated by what the tyrannical ego and the senses have to offer. They live and die and leave the world almost as limited in spirit as they entered it. Therefore, these pages should not be read:

1 - By readers accustomed to blindly accepting other people's opinions, unable of personal, autonomous criteria;

2 - For those prejudiced and shortsighted people who condemn as false or immoral everything that exceeds the limitation of their knowledge;

3 - And for those with a narrow vision, in the face of so many philosophical schools; who are reluctant to embrace consciousness in the sense of exploring and assimilating something new in the context of knowledge.

The representatives of these three categories would lose, with this study, the tranquillity of their consciences for it would demand from them, their integration into the Cosmos, tuning their lives with the God of the world into the world of God.

The philosopher Huberto Rohden trained in some disciplines of the exact sciences, humanities and Philosophy, about truth, existence, reality, causality and freedom created a particular branch in this area: The Cosmic Philosophy, which covers some aspects and values of each thought of this human science within one. Rohden does not understand Philosophy as a purely intellectual, analytical, horizontal process; but an essentially rational-spiritual attitude; not a peripheral intelligence of appearances, but a central experience of the essence itself. The intellectual part that inevitably accompanies this intuitive attitude is nothing more than the body, the outer shell, but it is essentially the spirit, the divine manifestation in the soul of man; it is like a shadow that inevitably follows the light.

 

UNITY IN DIVERSITY

The Alvorada Self-Realization Centre aims to initiate man in the awareness of his internal and eternal Reality. This initiation of man in the truth about himself, which is self-knowledge, aims to realise the self-realisation of the integral man.

To this end, the Alvorada centre does not adopt any kind of philosophy based on people, schools or systems of thought, ancient or modern. Still, it is guided by the Cosmic Constitution of the Universe itself. The laws of the macrocosm are the same as the laws of the microcosm in man. To know one is to know the other; self-knowledge is Cosmos-knowledge.

In the last decades before his passing in 1981, in books, classes and speeches, Rohden often used the word Cosmic Philosophy to give a collective response to all interested parties, and at the same time a brief explanation of this expanding movement, and with that, he published this summary.

After spending more than a year with Albert Einstein at Princeton University, after teaching Philosophy to thousands of young people and adults at The American University in Washington DC for 6 years, he concluded, in the middle of the Atomic and Cosmonautic Ages, that Philosophy can no longer be presented traditionally.

Science, in the last decades, has assumed a monist character; its former heterogeneous pluralism culminated in a homogeneous monism, which focuses on the apparent diversity of the Cosmos in a fascinating unity. This unification of plurality is due, above all, to the fact that Einstein's mathematics and the science of physicists have demonstrated that the elements of chemistry, of which all things are made, are essentially light, frozen light, almost passive, manifesting as matter or energy. Today we know analytically what Moses knew 3,500 years ago intuitively: that everything in the Cosmos originates from light, and for this reason, that luminous energy can also, be condensed.

This truth, which fills the inexperienced with astonishment and sceptics with doubts were the supreme achievements of 20th-century human intelligence.

This physical monism of science could not fail to parallel the metaphysical monism of wisdom or philosophy. The heterogeneity of philosophical systems was asking for a homogeneity complemented by the eternal Creator, the ephemeral creatures of the Cosmos.

It was no longer possible to take schools, systems and people as the basis of eternal Philosophy. It was necessary to start from a more solid foundation that was not the variable human mentality.

Russian physician A. Salmanoff (1875-1964) claimed that he found no less than 75 philosophical systems in Europe, none of which has ever benefited humanity. It is possible that Salmanoff was right about the “philosophical systems”, products of the human brain.

Cosmic Philosophy, however, is not about any philosophical system mentally investigated or researched - it is about the eternal and the indestructible reality of the Cosmos. The Cosmos as the basis and guideline of human thought and life - the Universe that, in its unchanging essence, manifests itself without ceasing in every new existence: the Universe, Alpha and Omega of human life.

Since the Cosmos is infinite and finite, eternal and temporary - the indestructible reality of the sidereal macrocosm cannot fail to be also the law that governs the human microcosm; man must become free like the Cosmos; he must make himself the same harmony that inhabits the Cosmos. The Cosmic or Integral man is a harmony created by his free will.

The Greeks called the Universe kosmos, whose radical means beauty.

The Romans gave the Universe the name mundus, which means pure.

When a man becomes universal, he becomes beautiful and pure.

If there were only unity without diversity in the macrocosm or microcosm, a centripetal force without the centrifugal one, we would have an unbearable monotony and eternal stagnation. If there were only diversity without unity, a centrifugal force without the centripetal, everything would end in immense chaos.

But, as the Cosmos is what its name says, unity in diversity, the result is this stupendous harmony, which is the perfect balance between two opposite but complementary poles: the Cause, which is the unity, disseminated in the plurality of effects, the creatures.

The man unified with the Cosmos can and must do, by the power of free will, what the Cosmos is according to the thoughts of its Creator.

This is the quintessence of Cosmic Philosophy, the Alpha and Omega of human life.

 

THE BIPOLARITY OF THE WORLD AND MAN

Atoms and stars move in bicentric ellipses - there is no single monocentric circle in the Cosmos.

Electricity manifests itself only as light, heat and strength, thanks to its positive and negative bipolarity.

All the superior life on the Earth is based on the bipolarity of the male and female elements.

These two poles of nature are rigorously balanced and work in perfect harmony.

Similarly, the universe in man is governed by the bipolarity of human nature, which modern Philosophy and Psychology call the Self and the ego.

The sacred books of Christianity use the terms Soul or divine spirit to designate the central Self of man, and the expression body or world to mean the peripheries of human nature.

“What does it profit a man to win the whole world if he gets to suffer damage in his soul?” (the Christ, Self)

“I will give you all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if you fall on the ground and worship me.” (the Antichrist, ego)

The perfect and fully realized man has established a complete balance between his Self and his ego.

The profane man only cultivates his ego, atrophying the Self. The mystic tries to realize only the Self without the ego.

The cosmic man, however, realizes his Self through his ego, for he knows that the Self is the source, and the ego is the channel through which the living waters of the spring flow and benefit his life.

Science has as its object the laws of nature. Philosophy aims at the knowledge and the realization of man.

Science is Cosmocentric.

Philosophy is anthropocentric.

The perfecting of the Self or the human soul is the ultimate purpose of life - and this realization is done through the ego, whose elements are the body, the mind and the emotions.

Since the evolution of man begins at the periphery and goes towards the centre, the great Masters of humanity insist above all on the development of the Self or the human soul, to avoid the hypertrophy of the ego and the atrophy of the Self.

The perfect man is the cosmic man, who has established complete balance and harmony between the two inner and outer poles. This is the supreme aim of all true education.

The educator must extract from within the student and develop its Self to balance it with its ego.

 

THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN HAPPINESS

“Life is never unbearable due to circumstances, but only due to a lack of meaning and an ideal.” Viktor Frankl

The world's greatest doctors and psychiatrists confess that most modern humanity is neurotic, frustrated or schizophrenic. In several of his books, Dr Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) brings alarming statistics about this calamity of the man called civilized today. And it also gives the diagnosis of evil: the lack of awareness of unity. Modern man, hypertrophied in his diversity (ego) and stunted in his unity (Self), results from this separation that he thinks he has between himself and the Creator. Therefore, in the chaos in which man lives, in which the world of dispersion defeated centrality.

Frustrating is the Latin word for shattering, fragmenting, disintegrating. The frustrated man feels disintegrated within, which produces a sense of deep unhappiness. Ultimately, all happiness comes from an awareness of cohesion and integrity. Man is unhappy because he has lost consciousness of his integrity and unity; he may be a personality, a mask, but he is no longer an individuality. Unity, integrity, and happiness are synonymous.

Many frustrated humans end up schizophrenic. The word schizophrenic means, in Greek, a broken mind. The mentally fragmented man is disunited.

Where there is no existential realization, there is necessarily an existential frustration, which is the reason for the unhappiness of billions of humans.

The man who has ceased to be cosmic by unity ends, sooner or later, in chaos due to disunity with himself. The laws that govern the entire Universe also govern the universe in man.

The Masters who have ascended in life, who have undergone a series of spiritual transformations or initiations, in addition to the diagnosis of the disease, also indicate its cure. Viktor Frankl healed his frustrated patients with Logotherapy, showing them how to restore their existential integrity, awakening the consciousness of their internal Logos, their Selves, their soul. And those who manage to make their ego gravitate towards the centre of their Selves restore the harmony and happiness of their existence.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna claims that the ego is the Self's worst enemy but that the Self is the ego's greatest friend. And Einstein, in the light of his metaphysical mathematics, shows that from the world of facts (ego), it does not lead any path to the world of values (Self).

What is all this but Cosmic Philosophy, expressed differently? To have harmony and happiness, man must have a centre where he gravitates fixed and immutable, and on which he must affirm the sovereignty of his divine substance over all the tyrannies of human circumstances. He must become universalized.

In almost all of Rohden's books, he placed great importance on this cosmic character of human life. But none of this is possible if a man spends the 24 hours of the day dispersing in his ego and does not give time to the realization of the Self. Cosmic laws are inexorable and immutable, and to obey these laws is harmony and happiness - to disobey it – is chaos and unhappiness to them.

Rohden was not an advocate of contemplative passivity but of harmony and balance between activity and passivity, introversion and extroversion, concentration and expansion, implosion and explosion, which are the characteristics of all nature sectors. As long as man does not join the Cosmos, he will always be frustrated and unhappy. A bit of deep Cosmo-meditation can give man the right balance for the rest of the day. The morning sun floods the Earth with light, and may that light dispel the darkness of the mundane path in man.

He did not recommend meditation in the form of analytical thoughts, which is inefficient, but the deep attunement to the soul of the Cosmos, to the emptying of all ego-consciousness, so that the Cosmo-consciousness plenitude can be filled with the living waters of the divine source the vacuity of human channels. While ego-fullness (egocentrism, egolatry) works, Theo-plenitude cannot work. It is a cosmic law: fullness only fills the emptiness, or in the language of sacred books, “God resists the proud (the ones plenty of egos) but gives grace to the humble (the ones empty of ego)”.

During Cosmo-meditation, man must empty himself of all the contents of his human-ego - feelings, thoughts and desires - keeping, however, fully alert to his spiritual conscience; he must maintain 100% of Theo-consciousness (Self) and reduce ego-consciousness to 0%.

The purpose of Cosmic Philosophy is, therefore, to establish in man the same harmony that exists in the Universe, with the difference that in man, this harmony is voluntary and free, while in the Cosmos is automatic, guided by the laws of the Creator.

The initial effort of this harmonization is worth the subsequent happiness of human life.

In the beginning, the aspirant of this technique of integrating into the Cosmos needs determined periods and the right place for this integration; later it can maintain inner concentration amid all external dispersions; it can unite its mystical implosion with all dynamic explosions; it can live simultaneously in the God of the world and the worlds of God.

 

EVOLUTION TOWARDS THE COSMIC MAN

Paradoxical as it may seem, in the face of the present chaos, the centripetal evolution of humanity is increasingly accentuated in all sectors: scientific, philosophical and religious, as there is still a portion of humans dedicated to the evolution of their condition, not only in its material aspect but above all in its metaphysical aspect. And this centripetal evolution tends to culminate in the evolution of the cosmic and Christlike man.

Man feels more and more like a self-acting factor and less and less as a simple externally acted fact.

Man feels more and more like someone and less and less like something. More and more as the central subject, less and less as a peripheral object.

Today's man is aware of his character of being presently active and self-determining, overcoming his externally determined past.

The man says more and more like the English poet, William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) in the poem Invictus: “I am the master of my destiny - I am the captain of my soul”.

It has been some time since the most spiritually evolved portion of humanity has surpassed its childhood, entered adolescence, and is waking up to independent maturity.

In childhood, man is externally determined by his parents and other factors outside his being.

In adolescence, he tries to be self-determining for his intellectual personality.

With the entry into maturity, becomes self-determined under the protection of his spiritual individuality.

From the unconsciousness of childhood, through the semi-consciousness of adolescence, man rises to the heights of full consciousness of his adulthood.

This ascensional process is, above all, visible in the philosophical-religious sector.

For many centuries, the spiritually childlike man was convinced - or rather persuaded - that he was evil by an alien, negative factor, such a devil, Satan or the Antichrist. To a large extent, today's humanity still firmly believes that someone made man a sinner, against his own will; he is essentially bad, negative, sinful; that every man is born and conceived in sin, thanks to a factor foreign to his conscience and will. All so-called Christian churches profess this ideology of heteronomous evil: man was made evil by someone; he inherited evil unknowingly.

Once, Jesus' disciples asked him whether the man born blind had inherited the cause of the blindness of his sinful ancestors or his sinful pre-existence; they wanted to know whether the blind man had received the evil from the blindness of evildoers or his evildoer in a previous incarnation.

Jesus, however, denies both suggested alternatives and moves on to a third solution, which to this day is an enigma for many. What is certain is that he denies evil by external circumstances to explain the evil of that suffering.

If there was the possibility of wickedness inherited by man, there should also be the possibility of kindness that man could receive from a foreign factor; if someone has made me evil and a sinner, it stands to the reason that someone can make me good and holy; if the Antichrist can lose me, a Christ must be able to save me. And, as all Christian churches accepted the first, they could not help accepting the second: redemption by external factors neutralizing perdition by external factors.

Fortunately, Jesus knows nothing of these conditions. For him, man will reap what he or mankind has sown. There is no perdition or redemption by external factors for humanity's greatest spiritual genius, but only ego-perdition and Self-redemption.

This reveals the highest logic and rationality of Jesus and the greatest apotheosis of man's free will. He could say like the poet-philosopher: Man is the master of his destiny, negative and positive; man is the master of his life as a sinner and righteous.

When medieval humanity partly emerged from its long spiritual childhood, characterized by the idea of subjection to evil and good, of perdition and redemption by external factors - the Renaissance man partly awoke to the consciousness of his independent power; he realized that he, and not someone other than him was the author of his wickedness and his goodness. But, like the man of the Renaissance, after leaving his medieval childhood, but not yet fully grown, he discovered only part of his nature; he discovered the personality of his mental ego, but not yet the individuality of his spiritual-Self.

And the man-ego from the Renaissance appealed to his ego to redeem himself from his wickedness and his evils. For more than four centuries, this man promised that by the power of his ego's intelligence, he was going to create heaven on earth; he promised, and in part continues to believe, that science and technology, the result of his intelligence can abolish the evil; the ego, according to him, has the magical power to close penitentiaries, hospitals and hospices, as long as it opens up many schools and laboratories. It turns out that this thought is childishly naive since the greatest malefactors of humanity are men of knowledge and diplomas.

But, these centuries of promises of heaven on Earth have not kept their word, and above all the current humanity, which has gone through two world wars, and is on the eve of a possible world conflagration, can no longer believe in the redemptive power of civilization and culture created by the ego.

The great mistake of the Renaissance was the confusion between the ego factor and the Self factor - or rather, it was the deplorable ignorance or contempt of man's spiritual Self - and this ignorance or contempt continues to this day.

Nowadays, finally, part of humanity is beginning to understand, or perhaps to glimpse that the ego is a factor of perdition, but not a factor of redemption. And many are beginning to comprehend that for the fully redeemed man to emerge, we must add the positive factor of the Self to the negative of the ego.

Now, another problem arises: how to awaken the Self factor in man, to complement the integral man with the ego.

The ego factor, when isolated, is pernicious because it distorts its function as a servant and attributes itself to the role of master of man.

The wisdom of Krishna's Bhagavad Gita says, “The ego is a terrible lord, but it is a great servant.”

And the wisdom of the Gospel of Jesus commands the antichrist ego to place itself at the rearguard of the Christlike Self as a servant and not at the vanguard as a lord.

It is written: “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.”

The integral man is not an ego without the Self, nor the Self without an ego - but a master at the vanguard and a servant at the rearguard.

In the physical Universe, there is no substitution of one pole for the other. And how could the metaphysical universe be different? The whole sidereal and human cosmos is a great synthesis of complementary poles perfectly balanced and harmonized.

Humanity, through many struggles, is beginning to envision this integration of human nature: Self-redemption by the divine Self, compensating the ego-perdition coming from the human ego.

Cosmic Philosophy, when fully conscious and experienced, unfailingly leads to self-realization, creating the Integral Man, the Cosmic Man, the Universal Man, the Christlike Man.

 

FROM THE MENTAL EGO TOWARDS THE SPIRITUAL SELF

When a man goes beyond the boundary of his mental ego and overcomes the mind towards his spiritual Self without losing contact with the mental zone, that's when the Integral Man, the Cosmic Man, appears.

The mental ego is not destroyed by the spiritual Self; it is integrated into it.

With a mathematical illustration, the reader will be able to better understand this process; giving the mental ego the number 10 and to the spiritual Self the symbol 100.

We can destroy 10 in two ways: either by removing the signal 1 or by adding 0. In the first case, instead of 10, we have 0, that is, annulment, destruction. In the second case, we have 100. This 100 practically annulled the 10, but it did not destroy it by decrease, but by increase; it did not destroy it negatively, but positively: that is, it destroyed it by building it. At 100 the essence or soul of 10 remained; only its existence or body disappeared. 10 was integrated into 100; the part was completed by the whole.

In Cosmo-meditation, the second case occurs. When the mental ego integrates with the spiritual Self, happens the same when the 10 integrates into the 100: it does not die, but lives more intensely; it does not die to death, but dies to life, for a more intense life; disappears its pseudo-life, transformed into true life.

It is what spiritual Masters call ego suicide, that is, dying spontaneously before being compulsorily killed, or a kind of voluntary metaphysical death.

In this sense, Paul of Tarsus writes: “I die every day, and that is why I live; I no longer live, but Christ lives in me”. And Jesus said, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

This is the purpose of Cosmo-meditation: the integration of the illusory mental ego into the true spiritual Self; that is, self-realization through self-knowledge: the creation of Integral Man, of Cosmic Man.

Whoever lives the Cosmic Philosophy accomplishes in itself the Cosmic Man.

The Cosmic Man is the happy man.