A remote outpost on the foothills of Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain of the Andes Range near the Argentinean/Chilean border has been for several years, at the beginning of January, the site for an encounter of Silo’s Message, attended by people from the most distant corners of the world, from different cultures, speaking different languages, and yet managing to communicate at a very deep level. Because the visitors are the makers of a revolution, albeit a nonviolent one. A revolution of the spirit, a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of society towards a world of equal rights and equal opportunities for all.
In a dehumanised and dehumanising society like ours, where everything is fragmented outside and inside the human being, where the highest value is money, or the power that money can buy, where love and compassion are recommended only for the victims of the economic system so that they may soften the blow for other victims, making them more acquiescent and leaving the monstrous structures of predatory neoliberalism free to exercise its concentration of wealth and resources in fewer and fewer hands, this humble breath of fresh air coming from Punta de Vacas may not look like much.
But something great and meaningful is growing in the hearts of these Messengers of a new spirituality which does not oppose the eternal to the mundane, which is practiced by both believers and non believers, which is not based on dogma but on experience and which proclaims the right to free interpretation, be it cultural or personal, for all such experiences.
The amazing landscape of the place invites to strengthen one’s contemplation. Away from the domestic and mechanical everyday life the mind focuses of the more fundamental questions humans have been asking themselves for millennia. Who am I? Where am I going? What is the meaning of human life? How can we surpass pain and suffering in ourselves and those around us? What is the Purpose of my life? And sometimes an answer arrives, like a soft breeze, from deep within oneself, but awakened by the co-presence of the affection from so many friends, whether in Punta de Vacas or in any of the other many Parks of Study and Reflection in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The experience of the Force (yes my Jedi friends, the Force is real! It may not lift spacecrafts out of swamps or draw light sabres into one’s hand, but it can certainly help redirect one’s life away from contradiction and towards internal coherence and nonviolence) is shared in simple ceremonies, or awakened in solitary meditations, preparing these pilgrims to return to daily life charged with positive energy and clear images to work towards a humanised world.
How would a society be in which people feel no fear, because they make contact with something transcendental? Manipulation of our fears in the biggest tool of a violent system to trap everyone in a vicious circle of discrimination, hatred and inequality. Fear is the worst enemy of compassion (I repeat) and so the compulsion to and illusory satisfaction of instilling fear in our worst enemies is the root of our self destruction. Liberation means liberation for me, for my loved ones and for my so-called enemies. This year people arrived again to Punta de Vacas, to strengthen their path towards liberation.
Like the first hominids who surpassed their fear of fire and, unlike all animals, walked towards fire and domesticated it, allowing on the way later the development of ceramics, smelting metals and marvelling us with inspired stained glass cathedral windows, those who have taken the path of liberation choose not to escape fear through drugs and alcohol, dreaming about becoming rich or celebrity worship, but walk towards their fears to overcome them, their enemies to reconcile with them and their contradictions to find a life of internal unity. The nonviolent revolution is alive and well and thriving in this new encounter of Silo’s Message in the humble little outpost of Punta de Vacas Park.
