Silo – The Master of Our Times

By Pía Figueroa E. Contents Prologue...... 3 The Little Postcard...... 4 The Great Leap ...... 5 Dispersions...... 6 Corfu...... 7 The Chamber of Silence...... 9 The Canary Islands...... 10 The European Seminars ...... 11 The Public Rallies...... 14 In Flight...... 15 The Journal...... 16 Convergence...... 17 The Media...... 19 Plaza de Mayo...... 20 The Russians...... 22 Plastic Money...... 23 An Uncomfortable Chair...... 24 Processes...... 25 The Host...... 26 The Movement...... 27 Without Limits...... 28 The Iraq War...... 29 Who am I?...... 31 The Hermitage...... 33 2010: The Year We Make Contact...... 36 The Agency...... 38 Parks, Squares and Gardens...... 39 The Historian...... 40 Reconciliation...... 41 Italian Journey...... 43 Active Nonviolence...... 45 The School...... 46 The Centre of Studies...... 48 The Popol Vuh...... 49 Fire...... 50 Salvation cults...... 51 The Void...... 52 Raspaditas and Croissants ...... 53 The Last Time We Ate Together...... 55 His Death...... 56 Dreams...... 58 Prologue

There have been few great Masters in human history. They have arisen in special times and their contemporaries haven’t always appreciated whose company they were in. Furthermore, it has usually been the case that those contemporaries found it difficult to appreciate their teachings or they degraded them. Given that such teachings put in doubt the beliefs of the times in order to spur the spirit, the defenders of the system challenge them and generate a strong reaction of rejection towards their proposals. Maybe one of the indicators of the greatness of a Master is precisely this very hostility. There are also few whose fortune has allowed them to opt to follow a Master from early on. For this to happen, the coordinates of time and space have at least to coincide thereby creating the conditions for the possibilities of an encounter. Certainly recognition is also necessary. When this extraordinary circumstance occurs, each individual has the choice to establish the kind of relationship with their Master that better becomes the comprehension of their teachings. In my case, I started to study Silo when I was fifteen years old and I met him shortly afterwards. If I were to define myself in a single word, I would say that I’m Siloist. As a disciple, many times I took notes and made annotations of what I could understand in his doctrine. However, every time I compared what I wrote with others, I realised that everyone was filtering the Master’s words through their own look. These handwritten journals are the origin of these short stories. They are nothing more than my own interpretation of what I lived. Stories, memories and impressions told from my perspective. I’m not trying to explain what Silo taught. These lines are for those who don’t know what it was like to be by his side, for those who wonder what he spoke about in different situations, how he was, and how he orientated and showed a path. It is dedicated to those for whom a Master’s style matters, to those who maybe in the future will want to understand the experience of having shared his space and time. The faithful work of Silo is available to anyone at www.silo.net and has also been translated and printed in several languages. There is also a vast collection of videos for those who prefer an audio-visual format

Parks of Study and Reflection Punta de Vacas – 2013 The Little Postcard

We were living the sixties; the time of Vietnam, the Beatles and Che Guevara. These were times in which there was no indifference because commitment lurked in every corner. The aroma of patchouli oil and marijuana mingled in the air with the pungent smell of mimeograph ink, while Bob Dylan’s voice was blowing in the wind. Printed T-shirts were worn with berets, mini-skirts and sandals. Slogans were daubed on the walls. In this decade nobody mentioned any of the words that people so like to use today: security, fitness, credit, domestic appliances, digital, fast-food, parking meter, control…, because what moved us was in the social soul or within oneself. It was a culture that demanded freedom. In this atmosphere of phosphorescent colours the lifestyle in which we’d been formed felt too constrained. The calm of eternal evenings spent helping to make home-made marmalade, shelling kidney beans, embroidering tablecloths, weaving blankets or doing puzzles was over. We started shaking with the twist before moving on to raise our fists to the sound of ‘The Internationale’ and of course our aged aunts were astonished to see us barefoot, adorned with flowers, proclaiming that all we needed was love. Marcuse and Hesse fought for our passions with Antonioni, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. On the colourful walls painted by everyone’s hands appeared a light scrawl written in white chalk. It said Silo is good. Some magazine dedicated an article to the phenomenon that had started to grow in Latin America. We were in my grandmother’s apartment telling each other secrets, laughing at so many things in the intimacy of our complicit relationship, when suddenly, under the door came a small paper, no thicker than thin card and no bigger than a third of a post card. We saw it appear, we looked at each other and I instinctively went to open the door to surprise the furtive postman or whoever was there. I was too late, they’d disappeared. The silhouette of a head was printed on the card, a slim man in very contrasting grey tones, followed by a phrase, ‘My teaching is not for the triumphant, but for those who carry failure in their hearts.’ It finished with the word ‘Silo’, by way of signature. I immediately recognised this sentiment. Nothing that the system offered me gave me comfort, the need for a new world was burning within me, the failure of expectations had left me in a situation of search and the options that I had to hand ranged from drugs to armed terrorism, via a trip to Kathmandu, psychoanalysis or liberation theology. In those convulsed and radical sixties, while new TV screens were broadcasting the weightless steps of the first man to walk on the moon, a simple man wearing white overalls, at the foot of Mount Aconcagua gave his first public speech in front of hundreds of followers who converged to listen to him despite the wind and the snow, defying the batteries of machine-guns that were manned by the border guards of Ongania’s Argentine government. It was the speech known as ‘The Healing of Suffering’1 which Silo gave on the 4th of May 1969. Among those present was a Chilean, Antonio Carvallo, who created the first groups in my city and through whom it was easy for me to join in. So began the adventure of a path of profound personal and social transformations that I would travel over the following decades, reaching to the confines of the mind and also the most remote places of our planet.

1 Silo, Collected Works, Volume 1. “Silo Speaks”, page 557. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. The Great Leap

He made his entrance dressed in jeans, striding quickly along one of the aisles of the ‘La Reforma’ auditorium at the University of Chile, Faculty of Arts located in Calle Compañia, right in the centre of Santiago. He got to within a few steps of the stage from below, standing in the orchestra pit. The cherry red wall in front of him was at least my height, if not higher. On this occasion, on the stage normally reserved for dance or theatre, there was only one revolving chair, a heavy table and the traditional glass of water. The hall was full of people; they were even sitting in the aisles, standing on the stairs, everywhere. Expectations of seeing him were increasing, seeing his face and his gestures, hearing the tone of his voice. He was due to speak for four consecutive days in three-hour sessions with open question and answer sessions. It was the middle of October 1972 and it was the first time that he was speaking in Chile. ‘Transcendental Meditation’ was the title of the series of four conferences which described a form of meditation: a process of surpassing perceptions, images, representations and tendencies of the structure of consciousness. This public event was taking place in a moment of growing superstition in a global historical context full of fetishes and different forms of hypnosis; offers for fanciful ways of meditation abounded. Silo would therefore have to establish very clear distinctions in order to separate his proposal from all the nonsense that was circulating. I noticed that the steps leading to the stage were already full of people. It was clear that the subject, and above all the person, had brought people in. The media had spread a deplorable image of Silo and his doctrine: the journalists who only reported on the omega brand of his watch, his shoe size, his height and weight, without articulating even a paragraph on his thought and his contributions in diverse fields, were a disgrace to their profession. They gave even less space to quoting his own words. In fact the speech he gave in the mountain heights three years earlier was known publically because its typescript text had passed from hand to hand, from country to country, and not because ‘The Healing of Suffering’ had been broadcast by the nascent TV stations or printed in the pseudo-intellectual weekly newspapers. There were a few radio stations that broadcast live on the occasion, but they covered the phenomenon with a clearly derogatory tone. Yet, the hostile attitude, which could be read between the lines, produced exactly the opposite effect and here we were, filling the hall to the rafters with expectant young people. It was then that, having stopped momentarily in front of the stage whose access paths were impassable, Silo simply took a leap and jumped on to the stage. The shock left us open-mouthed. It produced a total silence that then started to break, hesitantly at first, ending in sustained applause. I didn’t know if we were in the presence of an acrobat, but for sure this was someone endowed with the impeccable skills of an artistic gymnast, a being with tremendous daring, capable of pushing human limits. His extraordinary corporal control overwhelmed me. And then came the intellectual development: great conceptual precision, interspersed with irony, humour and phenomenal histrionics that allowed us access to an experience of comprehension of even the most complex developments on the structure of the consciousness and that which transcends it, while we followed his pedagogical explanations. That jump, that gesture which in one instant implicated his entire physical structure constituted, for me and from that moment, a sort of synthesis image of the purpose that gave life to his proposal. To stand in front of an obstacle and, without any doubts, rise above it; rapidly considering the conditions one is subject to and finding the way to avoid them; putting himself completely at risk in order to carry out his mission. The spectacular freedom that he deployed, for me, remained ever associated with his words: As a final reduction, we observe that the world and consequently the consciousness and each thing, are in their roots—and independently of the particular phenomena that separate the consciousness of things and the things from themselves—the same. It’s as if we were to say that the substance of the entire universe, of the mind, of the atom and galaxies were the same. Or that everything was built with the same substance, regardless of the diversity of phenomena, the accidental characteristics that the phenomena experience in their evolution. I suddenly felt that the substance that he was describing was being expressed in every one of his movements, passing through his words towards us and radically modifying our lives. I experienced that it was here, in the auditorium, and also beyond it, in every person present and in everything that exists. That lanky man, informally dressed in jeans, made me imagine how Ananda could have felt in front of the Buddha, conscious of being before the Master of his own time and comprehending profoundly what it meant to take the option of following him. It was to learn to make the qualitative leap that he was showing us with his body and soul. It signified extraordinary audacity. Was there anything more important, more fascinating than this? After the second conference that was given the following afternoon, the cycle was suspended by order of the Communist Party, and specifically by a member of the Central Committee who argued that there could be vandalism. His attitude wasn’t very different to that of the armed border guards who threatened the historical speech of Punta de Vacas. The only difference being that on that occasion the measure had been pushed forward by the fascist Right in power and now it was the reformist bureaucracy. In both cases, the same authoritarian and stupid attitude was present. Ultimately, the other conferences couldn’t be held. The money paid to hire the venue was returned and the Siloists gave it to the Communist Party Central Committee ‘in recognition of their efforts to promote the free presentation of ideas’. The contra was also advancing in their way, seeking to put a spoke in the wheel, without realising that when you force something towards an end, you produce the contrary. Dispersions

The nascent movement suffered public onslaughts from both right and left-wing governments, the media at the service of the system and the Catholic Church and it also suffered attacks from those closest to the people who were joining this new current. The first to ban and defame Silo was the Argentine dictator, Juan Carlos Onganía. His most tenacious persecutors were José Lopez Rega, responsible for the ‘Triple A’ para-military gang, and Ramón J. Camps, a convicted genocidal killer. These were hard times in Argentina and there was no other possibility than to toughen up in the face of permanent harassment. At the beginning of the seventies there wasn’t a single Chilean newspaper that wasn’t slandering Silo and attributing the most perverse intentions to him, filling their headlines with inconsistencies. The much vaunted journalistic objectivity was nowhere to be seen and their bad faith rapidly became explicit. The greater the abundance of tabloid headlines, the greater the growth of spontaneous groups who —inspired by the writing of Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos, Silo’s name—organised themselves to carry out a triple and simultaneous social, cultural and personal revolution. In Argentina and Chile there were persecutions, arrests and incarcerations. The dictatorships picked on members of Poder Joven [Young Power] by torturing and sending them to detention camps, and in the city of La Plata they even assassinated known Siloists, Eduardo Lascano and Ricardo Carreras, right in the street in plain sight of everyone. After Pinochet’s military coup, many were held in the National Stadium and many more transferred to prisons by the intelligence services. In the Pisagua concentration camp, five friends were held for several months. Silo himself was arrested and they attempted to silence him by banning his speeches. He replied, “If what has been said until now is false, it will soon disappear. If it’s true, there’ll be no power capable of stopping it. In either case, why continue speaking?” For those of us who were already participating, the explosive environment, the journalistic degradation and the sustained criticism, without doubt, undermined us in the family environment, at work, with friends and neighbours. In one way or another, all of us faced exclusion, jokes, discrimination, prosecution and even imprisonment. It’s true that we responded with arrogance, refusing to play the game of endless debates. Some managed to rescue their situation after a short time, while others took years to reconcile with their immediate environment. But it was from these adverse conditions that a spirit of openness towards new horizons was formed; a planetary diaspora, dispersions to take the new ideas that were germinating in South America to the four corners of the planet. So, before the end of 1974 we’d distributed ourselves in small groups in some forty different countries, simultaneously spread throughout our continent and located in many nations of the old Europe and in some points of Africa and Asia. We took a map, we marked the places, and in just one afternoon we’d distributed them between us and over a short space of time and without further ado we left with just a one way ticket and a small suitcase, sometimes without knowing much of the language spoken at our destination. The resolution that drove these geographical openings overcame all the different hurdles that presented themselves with enormous speed. Everything seemed easy faced with the tremendous brutality unleashed by the military in our places of origin. In every new place we translated and published the books. Establishing the first contacts with local young people, we organised groups that started to work at great speed to multiply the proposal in different latitudes. In the space of two years the movement had become international, polyglot and made up of increasingly broad cadres, impregnated with a singular mysticism. From the moment I left Latin America a long time passed before I saw Silo again. The mail service that we used back then brought letters from fellow émigrés recounting how ‘The Inner Look’2 was passing from hand to hand among Californian youth; how it was being read out loud to Romans sitting around the monument to Giordano Bruno in Campo di Fiori and how it was being printed in Caracas by students who’d just set up their own small print shop. In Madrid and Barcelona the groups were expanding and the first Spaniards were travelling to Argentina, keen to know Silo personally even though they might be arrested. But without doubt the funniest anecdotes came from England where they were even spreading the word at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. The centrifugal impulse had opened up in a thousand directions and passed, unstoppably, from one place to another. It wasn’t a linear progression; it sought unforeseen paths without now responding to the original design, but rather opening its own way. From the Philippines it led to Canada, from Brazil to Paris and from there to the heart of India. ‘Silo is Good’ and ‘Peace is Strength’ ended up as international slogans written in graffiti with white chalk anywhere on our planet.

2 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “The Inner Look”, page 3. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. Corfu

An island in the Mediterranean, one of the many Greek isles, ended up being the place finally chosen for our research and works. I was living at the time in Paris and as soon as I received the invitation, I quit my little loft apartment in Trocadero to move to Ypsos beach for the rest of the year. The possibility of doing our studies while sailing on board a boat had been toyed with previously—a yacht or something like that—taking in provisions from port to port and maybe changing the participants. But it would have turned out to be expensive, difficult, uncomfortable and even a distraction from our primary goals. We stayed in a white, three-storey house located at the end of a dirt track between ancient olive trees. It had workshops on the ground floor and was crowned by an enormous terrace, plus it had a wide space with leafy trees in the back garden that could be used for eating all together in the open air. In addition we also rented the adjacent bungalows. This was where for six months in the year of 1975 we sought to define our psychology, describing every one of its mechanisms and experimenting every day. Once a fortnight we bought provisions in Kerkira, the closest town, filling the larders of all the houses. We went by car with shopping list in hand and got all the imperishable stuff that we needed for our previously defined menu. Vegetables, fruit, fish and meat we could buy fresh in the neighbourhood. So, shopping wasn’t a concern, just like the food itself or its preparation. One by one we took turns in the different domestic functions, organised by living quarters: cleaning, cooking, washing, taking out the rubbish…, and no one took more time than was strictly necessary. So, even though everything went like clockwork, these were matters that kept no one awake. The beach on the other hand, the narrow wooden quay, the burning sun and the intense azure blue sea did constitute an important source of entertainment where we could all relax and rest. It was a meeting point and a place for games, sports and laughter. I remember swimming for ages in the sea there like in no other place. From time to time we used an inflatable dinghy and went rowing. On one occasion we rented a sailing boat and for a whole day we meandered around the island, diving into the transparent waters. Or we would rent scooters and go sunbathing on the sands of other beaches. This is how I struck up a friendship with Salvatore Puledda, an Italian guy who frequently took me on the back of his motorbike and with whom I shared some tremendous laughs. Right on the corner of the road leading to our set up, there was a kind of shop where they sold cigarettes and served coffee at the little tables on the big terrace under the shade. Here we spent hours in conversation, spending the few drachmas that we had. For me the thick Greek yoghurt, so characteristic of the place, was the best option. The fact is that after waking up—at whatever time this would generally happen—until dinner, everyone did what they felt like and then we’d meet to eat together in our houses, on the whole quite early. There was no lack of opportunity for me to dedicate myself entirely to learning some of the Crafts: perfumery, natural medicine, iconography and the craft of games, iconography being my preferred activity in the workshop which had a magnificent view of the silver olive trees. We worked with the golden ratio in the creation of small sculptures in stone, metal, wood, clay and even wax, learning to shape our forms while exercising care, permanence and a good tone of attention. From nine o’clock at night, we all gathered in the three-storey house to advance in the works. Silo would outline the subjects, fix the interest and the point of view from which to tackle them, the way in which we’d do it and the procedures to use. He also gathered the opinions and reports of experiences, ever attentive to any question or comment, and night after night he stitched together the advances and discoveries in order to incorporate them into the detailed descriptions of the way in which the human psychism works. From the chats over all these months, the research that followed them years later in the works carried out in the Canary Islands and the developments that Silo would later present in 2006 in La Reja Park, Buenos Aires, came ‘Psychology Notes’3 which was published all together in a single volume. What was extraordinary about those times is that we were very conscious that we were venturing beyond the frontiers of official psychology and navigating uncharted territory barely touched by science even though it constituted our own mental structure. We did it experimentally and with a high level of self-observation that would later allow us to discover with precision the different acts of consciousness detected. I remember well the night when Silo appeared on the balcony of the large meeting room and, after looking at the luminous constellations of stars populating the sky, following them assiduously through a telescope, he asked us why we were unable to pay attention to something for a long time without being distracted or digressing. And we started to observe what took us out of the flow of attention and took notes every time it happened until we detected in ourselves the existence of physical tensions as well as emotional climates. A tension experienced as pain, irritation, an uncomfortable body posture, stiffness, muscle contraction and a long etcetera, unleashed images that were precisely what impeded an attentive mental attitude. We noticed the same thing with what we called climates: residual emotions, tones of affection, sensitivities and internal states that trap the consciousness and impede the ability to have an alert mind. Attracted by the possibility of a state of vigil— wakefulness—without noise or distractions, we all spent the day taking brief notes of the internal mechanisms that we discovered. Then we went on unhurried scooter rides, exploring the different corners of the island, while the consciousness investigated its own procedures. Once the observations were collected, summarised and synthesised, Silo went on to ask how we could get rid of these tensions and overcome negative climates. This is how he ended up defining a complete system of physical, internal and mental relaxation to the point of designing a unified relaxation technique and in the process we described the relationship between tensions and images. He also outlined an operative system capable of producing discharges of intense climates with a tool called ‘catharsis’ and another technique that we called ‘transference’ which was useful for unblocking fixed climates, destabilising their charges and alleviating them by transferring them onto new images. Of course I experienced a great decompression after doing the first catharsis! I improved my attention considerably and it didn’t go unnoticed that we were taking practices from the ancient Greeks that they’d used in their Mysteries. We retook a

3 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 2. “Psychology Notes”. Currently unpublished in English. The text can be found online at: http://www.silo.net/collected_works/psychology_notes fragile historical thread that had become tangled up at some point among the strands of therapy, psychoanalysis and adaptive psychology at the service of the system. We recovered ancient wisdom and continued to advance, comprehending the psychism as a function of life and in relationship to its environment, describing its memory apparatus, the senses and consciousness. Likewise we also managed to give precision to why one suffers; what the origin of human suffering is. We detected only three causes: sensation, imagination and memory. In reality these are the three pathways of human experience: sensation, image and memory. Many times confused, the fears of the past are mixed up and projected into the future by the imagination, sensation knitted into the memory as illusions that aren’t easy to differentiate. Nevertheless, once these three possibilities were ruled out, no other source of suffering remained. We observed it, confirming it in each one of us. We were friends from very diverse places, speaking several languages and having to translate between ourselves. We were formed in extremely different cultures and yet despite this, it turned out that we all had one factor in common: the experience of suffering was the same and it had its three illusory pathways. Once a month we celebrated a ceremony called the Service and then we’d share dinner together. There were those who presented some interesting development, usually inspired by one of the Principles of Valid Action from the book ‘The Inner Look’4. Sometimes we’d conclude the evening by dancing, playing the guitar or singing together in a climate of pure camaraderie. My friend, Puledda the Roman, surprised us greatly with his gifts as a singer when he crooned in full voice ‘Una lacrima sul viso’ by Bobby Solo, imitating his gestures to perfection. Everyone contributed the things they were good at, their talents and capabilities. Those of the Master were always surprising. I was impressed by his agility to move and his boundless energy, capable both of feats of physical prowess and extraordinary changes in his emotional tone. One night he was giving a serious talk about the fundamentals of thinking—dry philosophy—and in the next minute he made fun of himself for talking about things that are so difficult to digest and so, picking up a big bag of rubbish to fulfil his domestic functions, he walked off, lost to sight in the old olive grove. Ever interested by the latest technology, he interconnected the different buildings in which we’d installed ourselves, setting up a closed circuit TV system that allowed us to expand the number of participants in the nightly meetings by using the different spaces. There was certainly no lack of measuring equipment for gathering statistical data which could be compared to the descriptions of the different levels of consciousness, the cycles of the psychism and the responses it gives through its different specialised centres. I was certain that I was in the presence of one of the most intelligent people, but I’d not been familiar with his versatility until then. Thanks to the raw material collected in meeting after meeting from the transferential practices that we did, he outlined the psychology of impulses, the way they’re translated into allegories, signs and symbols, and subsequently he moved on to describe the space of representation. I was fascinated by the work of allegorical interpretation, as much in my own transferences and dreams, as in legends, myths

4 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “The Inner Look”, page 18. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. and stories. It was as if we were opening a whole new universe of contents that could suddenly be deciphered: a new language, a method for revealing meanings. I understood that everything that we perceive constitutes an impulse that the consciousness translates into images and hoards in the memory; it’s these images that manage to mobilise the different centres of response which shape our conduct in the world. The importance of images and their location in a three-dimensional mental space became evident to me. I discovered that according to whether they’re located more internally or externally, the representations predispose me to action or favour self-absorption. So what happened with my images wasn’t a matter of indifference to me! And we continued opening new roads. We experimented with tests of a paranormal nature that gave us no results that we could trust and we even set up a sensory deprivation chamber. We advanced in the comprehension of the psychism and each one of its mechanisms, until noticing that the action of every human being in the world constitutes a transferential form of expression towards the outside of what one feels and thinks on the inside. With the rigour with which Silo liked to base every concept, he asked those of us who wanted if we could study in parallel the physiological bases of the different drafts that were already beginning to take shape. Together with several of my friends who worked on the craft of iconography, I applied myself to study the sense of sight with its corresponding organ, the working mechanism it has, its nervous pathways and location in the brain. Other than from my school days, I knew nothing of physiology and nonetheless I noticed how rapidly one can learn about everything if there’s no noise in the circuits of the consciousness and that it’s possible to simply pay attention to what one is doing. Comprehension results, the memory retains, the data is coherently related and one learns keenly. Everything changes when we regulate the state of vigil. The three pathways of suffering stop having their heavy charge and turn into forms of experience, open to learning. The work on the physiology of the sense of sight was finished towards the end of those months when I also saw that a new psychological condition had been established in me that would allow me to continue advancing. Finally we had the map of our internal functioning and the corresponding well-defined registers. Now it was down to us to confront the task of applying ourselves to the world, for each one of us to carry out that empirical transference in our own surroundings, helping others to surpass their suffering. We went to the port of Kerkira, from where the ferryboats set off that would carry us back to the continent. We all travelled to Italy apart from Silo who, together with his partner and a couple of friends, went in another boat heading to Asia Minor. I remember his image waving from the deck, while our ferry moved through deep waters in the opposite direction. I can recall the memory of the sensation of the fresh air together with the joy, the gratitude and the affection that completely filled me; his image drifting away and my eyes rapt on this agile figure that, even from afar, gave me an immense need to return something of what I’d learned to the world. The Chamber of Silence

I was floating in the darkness in water the same temperature as my skin. There was a total blackness and the sounds were completely muted so that there were no sensory stimuli. This warmth of the liquid that sustained me was indistinguishable from the tactile limits of my body and I’d lost all sense of where my body ended and everything else began. Chewing and spitting out tea leaves previously had eliminated all residue of taste from my mouth. Even the most tenuous of noises had been minimised as well as all sources of smell. My senses of taste and smell could give no signals, the latter thanks to the complete deodorisation of the environment with chlorophyll. In my weightless floating, the recent images of the preparations to transform one of the bathrooms of the Greek house into a chamber of silence came to my memory. The installation of the thermostat to keep the water temperature at 36.5 degrees centigrade; the intercom with the control room located outside; two rubber straps supporting the lumbar region and the neck to keep the subject floating in the bath; the electroencephalogram terminals to measure brain waves, and the electrocardiogram and electromyography terminals, the contacts of instruments capable of measuring the galvanic resistance of skin; the location of sound insulation panels on every wall; the way we closed the only window in the room; the piece of tape that was used to seal the door crack so that not even a fine haze of light could enter; the electrical heating equipment that kept the entire environment at body temperature, identical to the water… We worked for several days to set up our sensory deprivation chamber. It was one of the experiments that we carried out during the months spent in Corfu. In the living room of the rented house we’d organised the control room: on the table was the equipment with its different indicators for recording the whole process; the intercom that not only allowed any stimulus coming from the bathroom to be heard but could also broadcast the only signals detectable from within; note paper; large sheets of drawing paper and coloured pencils to be used in the tests for any eventual telepathic transmission of visual images; other materials such as plasticine, modelling clay and wax for three- dimensional tests; a few reference books; a clock; and several flasks of coffee. We’d overcome the difficulties with ingenuity. We didn’t aspire to scientific rigour, but rather to understand for ourselves what happens when the consciousness cannot count on the reception of sensory data for carrying out its work. Our investigative attitude was above all experiential. The only problem that complicated the tests was the size of the bath; an insurmountable dimension that meant that the guinea pigs had to be petite with bodies that floated without touching the sides of the tub. Cecilia Benítez and I were the only ones to meet such criteria and thus were entered automatically into the category of subjects. She did two experiments and there were three for me. Every one of those times we observed the same pattern of development: floating in the darkness, we began to remember. As it was impossible for any stimulus to come from outside, the consciousness appealed to memory. The destabilisation we registered on having no sensory stimuli, led us to resort to memories: a succession of images, details from a long time ago. A dog is chasing me, it’s running behind me. I smell its closeness while I’m barely able to use my unstable legs. Its mouth is dribbling close to my shoulder. I hear its bark. It pushes me against the tree: a eucalyptus whose rugged trunk scratches my face. The smell of its bark is overpowering, my cheek is bleeding and I scream. The dog has its paws on my head… They were memories from my infancy, from my first years. The memory was feeding the insatiable consciousness, deprived as it was of other sources of stimuli. It went back in time and recovered sensations with phenomenal precision. It was like this in the first and second test I did. The chamber of silence always left me confronting precise memories that emerged from my remote childhood. Afterwards, the consciousness would escape and fly off in search of other stimuli in any way possible, like a radar investigating images, detecting sounds and intuiting words. It needed to feed off impressions… This is where we introduced our paranormal experiments, to see if we could, in fact, detect something of what our friends were trying to transmit. Daniel lit his cigarette with a turquoise lighter. It was as if I saw him do it and I said it out loud. The intercom relayed these words back to the control room where everyone was observing the aforementioned Daniel who was happily inhaling his recently lit fag, playing with the turquoise lighter in his hands… There’s a boat with sails unfurled navigating on quite an intense surf… Where? Who’s transmitting that? In the control room they looked at one another. Salvatore was drawing it on graph paper: the sailing boat, painted on a dark blue sea with its rolling waves. By the third test, having already passed the phase in which the sequence of images from ancient memory presented itself, I knew that the next stage was beginning. I saw a faint red mist and I could describe it: a halo is filling the room; a gentle light, orangey, reddish, gaseous. Remaining through the subtle inertia of things perceived out of the corner of one’s eye and acting copresently, we were able to work out later what the stimulus was: it was the light emitted by the electric heater to warm up the environment in the moments prior to the experiment. Besides, the apparent successes achieved with the lighter and the sailing boat painted on a turbulent sea, we could also detect the mechanism that corresponds to what could be called ‘associative convergences’, in other words, those ways of associating that are similar to what happens so frequently between friends, couples or family members who share a deep affection and are on the same wavelength. Copresences and convergences that are usually studied very little nevertheless contribute a wealth of material that, for sure, obliges us to discount more colourful paranormal hypotheses. The phenomenon, in fact, could not be captured. At the base of many apparent successes the translations of impulses were observable, giving a signal from the intrabody and translated into visual images, almost hallucinations. These diffuse sensations that are rarely studied and which come from the coenaesthesia also obliged us to employ a rigour that implied the discounting of any supposed experience outside of the limits of the work of one’s own psychism: I feel the reddish, warm and vaporous luminosity. Here it is also, it arrives, what’s here fuses into it. It loses consistency, melts away, dilutes, diffuses, evaporates. Everything fuses in the light, in that luminous vapour. There’s nothing else. That which is Light, breathes of its own nature. It’s the only thing that exists. There’s nothing else and yet it’s everything. It’s the Being. The Being encompasses everything; it’s what exists and it’s eternal. Right then, through the intercom I heard a voice saying, “What do you think I should do with my head while I’m in this third test, should I stay in a state of vigil without noise, attentive but passive, or should I try to perceive what they’re transmitting like we did in the previous experiments?” It was Pía’s voice, a voice that I recognised as mine, the Pía that was asking me questions there in the control room. So where is Pía then? If she’s there talking, then who’s here? Is someone here? Someone experienced the fusion with this eternal luminosity. Who was it? Maybe there is someone watching now? Or it’s fused with everything and just Is? I shouted out, “Pía, where are you?!” and in the control room everyone looked at Silo. He had melted a feminine figure made from red wax and nothing more remained other than a pool of candlewax. Then, into the bathroom, he broadcast through the intercom the sound recording of the question that I had done for him before starting the third test. “Where are you, Pía?” “I don’t know who you are…” I insisted. Mario burst into the bathroom, he stopped the test, turned on the lights, and spoke while helping me out of the bath and wrapping me in a big blue towel. He hugged me firmly and insisted that I react, he said we were out of the experiment, and told me to hear, see and feel my body. He told me that I’m me, Pía, and that I was here, in this place, here… He brought me hot coffee and we reviewed the experience. Over the following days he gave me just one recommendation: to dedicate myself only to what I most wanted to do, without even minimal effort. I went sunbathing on Ypsos beach and I floated. I floated for a long time, this time in the transparent sea. The Canary Islands

More than five hundred people met in the Canary Islands. I arrived there from Italy. We were meeting for the first time since the prolonged gathering in the Greek island of Corfu. Twice we concentrated together in those Spanish outposts in the Atlantic. The first time was for one month, with the participation of one or two friends coming from each place, while in 1978 without limited quotas all of us came who could travel, staying for just over a week in Hotel Tamarindos. On these semi-desert islands of coarse ochre-coloured sand, our communication centre had been established a while before, founded by a stable team capable of keeping us all in contact and circulating information of general interest to different latitudes. It was the time of the telephone, the telegram and mail services, even before the use of the fax. Networking was vitally important for us. Throughout our history, we always gave priority to learning, to opening up to new ambits and to communicating with each other. And so it was during the whole of the foundational stage which we considered to be over with this gathering on the Canary Islands. From here we launched the formation of cadres with resolution. We sought out the best mechanisms for qualification, reproduction and contact, perfecting them over time until after many years we’d organised three specialised networks specifically for the transmission of teaching, the growth of groups and the administrative means to facilitate circulation of information. But this would come after being able to count on a broad base of members around us. In every phase of the process we experimented with ways that seemed appropriate for advancing towards better conditions. A permanent tropism to surpass ourselves and reach goals that were more than difficult, led us to transform the organisation periodically in order to continue forward, gaining momentum with new forms. A kind of organisational game of reiterated morphological mutations; it was a constant that allowed us to survive the most intense crises and changes that took place in the variable times in which we happened to emerge. As if our movement were a living being, capable of increasingly adapting its behaviour of interaction with its environment, in every stage it mutated its expressions in order to assemble and move better in the world. The confluence of five hundred participants in the meetings we held on the sunny Spanish island inaugurated a change of cycle—which, in turn, would conclude by giving way to the subsequent stage of masses—creating, moreover, the ambit of international relationships that from here on we would sustain thanks to physical gatherings every six months, alternating between some point of the Southern Hemisphere and some point in the North. Every morning, bright and early, we’d meet in the big hall at Tamarindos to take part in the different conferences that took place and then go for lunch together, served by the poolside. The afternoons brought the opportunity to work in decentralised groups according to specific interests, as well as giving time for long walks, gatherings and chatting. Interchanges, laughter, developing friendships, shared questions, new connections. With three more friends we spoke at length about the possibility of moving to Milan. We were living in Rome and our groups there were rooted and numerous; there were also groups in Naples and several places on the Amalfi coast, but in other points on the Italian peninsula no one knew about us. There’d been no dissemination towards the north and it was precisely there where the publishing companies that we wanted to publish our books were located. We consulted the Master about the convenience of continuing to extend ourselves, in a capillary fashion, towards cities within the same country, unfurling the strength from the dispersions but now in closer radii. He immediately encouraged us, basing this on the fact that it is precisely in differentiation and opening when we achieve the greatest growth. Afterwards come the moments of complementation in which the teams become settled and a synthesis is finally produced that consolidates what has been formed. So it was, under the shade of the parasols, by the sky blue of the swimming pool and over a lunch of gazpacho that we resolved that before the end of that very year the four of us would head to Milan where I remained until the beginning of the eighties. Aiming to settle in Lombardy, I shared our Self-liberation5 exercises with my feminist friends in Librería delle Donne, as well as with the incipient ecologists who were just starting to appear in the heart of Europe. In the Canary’s gathering, Silo took the microphone in the big morning meetings and several of his chats were collected and incorporated into the book ‘Silo Speaks’ 6, published in many languages. What especially resonated in me were his magnificent explanations about what defines a valid action and what distinguishes them from contradictory acts or those that are simply every day ones. He fundamentally differentiated the value judgements that come from outside—from positions of morality, religion, the law and ideology—from those judgements made of an action thanks to the register that human beings have of it. These definitions, based on what one experiences, helped me comprehend that what I do with my life goes in one direction or another, building unity or contradiction. Just as it became clear to me that actions always have consequences for others and so it matters how we treat other people. Taking the Golden Rule that’s been around for millennia and has stood the test of time as a universal principle in different regions and cultures, the Master formulated it by saying, “Treat others the way you would like others to treat you.” On another occasion he talked brilliantly about the riddle of perception from the field of mental phenomena. He also developed the central themes to do with meaning of life. In addition he officiated several ceremonies. Even if all of them were meaningful, to me the most significant was the Laying-on-of-Hands with us arranged in concentric circles around a central point. Silo projected the Force, communicating it to those around him, who in turn passed it to those closest to them and so it went on until reaching those at the back of the hall. On that occasion I received the impact of an exceptional, vibrant, diaphanous, moving and joyful internal luminosity that I could communicate to several friends close by while feeling like an energetic wave was growing in strength within me and outside of me. It was almost as if it were a sea in which together we all formed a part; like an original substance, a luminous magma that gave us existence. Every time the Master officiated a Laying-on-of-Hands ceremony, it seemed to me that an enormous energy flowed like amalgam among those present, touching us

5 Luis Ammann, “Self-liberation”. Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine, US, 1981 6 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Silo Speaks”, page 553. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. internally with strong emotion. Everyone reached their own meanings with which to endow that tremendous luminosity, but in all of us, our hearts opened to hope, joy and peace. These experiences marked us profoundly. Our community was nourished and achieved an intense connection that brought us cohesion, while giving origin to a new wave in our development. The European Seminars

Wearing a thin, white, woollen sweater draped over his shoulders and tied informally around his neck, he went to Madrid, Rome and Copenhagen, preparing us with a meticulously planned seminar. With a lock of hair drooped over his forehead, he exuded an energy that characterised him. Even though he developed the same themes and guided us through the same previously-established points, in each venue he adjusted his gestures, voice and attitudes in response to those in front of him. Daring in Spain, nice and joyful in Italy, he became almost shy, careful and gentle in Denmark, tremendously respectful of the forms where ever he was. Supported by extremely rational explanations regarding the book ‘The Inner Look’ 7, written in poetic prose, he tried to transmit his teaching about behaviour and what lies within human beings with reference to the meaning in life. To mention an ‘inner look’ is to imply someone who looks and a something that’s looked at. This is what the book’s about, and its title foreshadows an unexpected confrontation with what is naively accepted. The title of the book summarises these ideas. Ladies and Gentlemen, there are other things that are seen with other eyes, and there’s an observer within you that’s different to the one you believe is there. We must now make a small distinction before going on. When I say that I see something, I’m announcing that I have a passive attitude with respect to a phenomenon that reaches my eyes. When, however, I say that I look at something, I’m announcing that I’m orientating my eyes in a certain direction. Almost in the same sense, I can speak of inner seeing, of witnessing internal visions such as those of digression or daydreams, distinguishing it from inner looking as an active direction of my consciousness. In this way, I can even remember my dreams or my life in the past, or my fantasies, and look at them actively, illuminating them in their apparent absurdity, seeking to endow them with meaning. The inner look is an active direction of the consciousness. It’s a direction that seeks significance and meaning in the apparently confusing and chaotic inner world. What is the meaning that this look seeks to find? This meaning is prior to the look because the meaning drives it. It’s this meaning that permits the activity of inner looking. And if you manage to grasp that the inner look is necessary to reveal the meaning pushing it, you’ll understand that in some moment the one who looks will have to see themselves. This ‘self’ is not the look or even the consciousness. This self is what gives meaning to the look and the operations of the consciousness. It’s previous and transcendent to the consciousness. Broadly speaking we’ll call this self, ‘Mind,’ in order to not confuse it with the operations of the consciousness, or with the consciousness itself. But when someone tries to capture the Mind as though it were simply one more phenomenon of the mechanical consciousness, it will escape them, for it admits neither representation nor comprehension, regardless of whether it’s considering an object or an act. The inner look will have to collide with the meaning that the Mind gives to all phenomena, even one’s own consciousness and one’s own life, and the collision with this meaning will illuminate the consciousness and life. This is what the book deals with in its deepest essence.

7 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “The Inner Look”, page 3. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. Repeatedly Silo went back over the same concepts, trying to make them comprehensible, helping us to become aware of the Meaning that precedes the look. In the seminars he gave at the start of the eighties in Europe, in the public events held in several cities of the old continent and also in Asia, as well as during the book presentations he gave in the nineties, he always spoke about it—the Mind—looking for how to communicate it even in the different meetings of spiritual inspiration that, now in the new century, took place in the open air in the Andes or when he went to inaugurate any of the Parks of Study and Reflection in different countries. It was as if the collision of his own internalised look in its encounter with the meaning bestowed by the Mind had illuminated and guided his steps through all those decades. Somehow, I always thought that in ‘The Inner Look’ he managed to write the substance of the experience he wanted to transmit. Despite the fact that the start of the eighties was not so long ago, the psychological environment of that moment was much more rational than today. Things had to be explained and understood, because a veiled self-censorship covered the emotions. So the seminar form, similar to training courses that are currently given to university students or to employees in an organisation or business with the style of working in tables, studying, thinking and exchanging, was the way that he chose to put us in the frequency of what he thought fundamental to communicate. And so he explained, There’s no meaning in life if everything ends with death. This statement is the axis of our doctrine. Of course it may be presented in other ways. First proposition: If everything ends with death, there is no meaning in life: Everything ends with death, so there is no meaning in life. This proposition is very well-known in logic as ‘Modus ponendo ponens’ and consists of affirming the first term of a condition so that the second condition is affirmed. Second proposition: If everything ends with death, there is no meaning in life: Not everything ends with death, therefore there is meaning in life. This proposition, similar to the previous one, is almost the same except that by denying the first term of the condition, we also deny the second term. The fact that the second term is expressed as a negative should not lead to confusion, because by denying the first term, the second term is affirmed. It’s the same as saying: If everything ends with death, there is no meaning in life: Not everything ends with death, so it’s not true that there’s no meaning in life. And so, with the two propositions formally stated, whether or not life, in fact, ends with death, on the one hand, and whether or not life has meaning as a result of the fact of death, on the other hand, remains to be demonstrated. These double questions now escape the field of formal logic. They’re questions that one resolves in terms of existence. While he continued with his logical explanations, I felt that it’s not the same to ask oneself these things in the morning or at night, before or after having rested, while joyful or sad. How the fragility of our sensations conditions us! And how easily we avoid the fundamental issues of existence! However, he continued, we should not let a third way of presenting the problem in a logical form pass by. We’ll formulate it like this: If everything ends with death, there is no meaning in life: There is meaning in life, so not everything ends with death. This proposition consists of denying the second term of a condition in order to also deny the first part. The fact that we affirm what was a negative should not lead to mistakes due to grammatical construction, because we could use the following equivalent formulation: If everything ends with death, there is no meaning in life: As it’s not true that there is no meaning in life, so not everything ends with death, This, as we see, corresponds to the previous proposition but with a literary heaviness that’s difficult to swallow. So, this is framed in the logical proposition known as ‘tollendo tollens’. Just as with the two previous propositions, this third proposition which demands demonstration of its terms for existence is, nevertheless, very interesting as it orientates directly towards meaning in life and denies the possibility of death, if it’s in fact the case that the aforementioned life has meaning.’ Years later, presenting his Message in Nataniel Stadium in Santiago, Chile in front of hundreds of people, in one of the situations that was most extraordinary for me due to the simplicity with which he talked about these topics, he sought a direct and colloquial language to refer to the theme of transcendence, indicating that in conversations with different friends he’d consulted them on what immortality was for them: ‘What, for you, is immortality?’ And they replied in different ways. Some said, ‘For me immortality is something that doesn’t end in death, I die but something continues in my children’. Interesting! Others said, ‘I set actions in motion and the actions continue after my death.’ This is also very interesting! And so how can it be said that everything ends with death! If not even your rental contract comes to an end! Things continue, many things continue! For good, and unfortunately, for bad. How many things do we experience and suffer that started a long time ago and still haunt us? It’s a bit more serious than what we think of as human actions simply stopping with death. Someone said to me, ‘They continue in my child.’ Someone else said to me, ‘They continue in the things I’ve done.’ Another said to me, ‘They continue in the memory of people.’ Interesting. I remain in the memory of people. And there was someone who said to me, ‘I continue personally, with my soul, my spirit, whatever you call it.’ ‘And what do you say?’ they asked me. I say that everything that people think about this is legitimate and I simply highlight the importance of the theme. And in this we’re all in agreement; the theme is important. But you resolve it one way and someone else resolves it another way and we freely interpret this and, freely, we give our opinion about this matter. It’s important for life, once and for all, to decide what one thinks about these things because according to whether one thinks one thing or another, one’s life is orientated in a different way. If I think that everything ends with death, everything is relative, everything is the same, I can do anything and you can do anything to me. If I think that my actions continue in the memory, in my children, in different objects that I’ve produced, that I’ve affected and so on, what I do with my life is not a matter of indifference; one thing isn’t the same as anything else. It was towards the end of his time that he resorted to a much more poetic, testimonial form organised on the basis of heart-felt and aesthetic words of profound significance to urge people in the direction of the search for Meaning. In 2004, standing at the feet of the immense dark rocks that surround the spectacular mountain outpost of Punta de Vacas, with condors circling overhead in the blue sky, he said about this theme: Friends, I’d like to share with all of you this profound certainty that says: ‘The Sacred is within us and nothing bad can happen in this profound search for the Unnameable.’ I believe that something very good will happen when human beings find the Meaning, so many times lost and so many times found again in the twists and turns of History. Friends, I’d like this message of the Profound to be heard. It’s not a strident message; it’s a very quiet message that cannot be heard if you try to trap it. Friends, I’d like to transmit the certainty of immortality. But, how could something mortal generate something immortal? Perhaps we should rather ask ourselves, how is it possible for something immortal to generate the illusion of mortality? And among the many present were also to be found European friends who’d been there in the seminars given in the eighties, just like so many Latin Americans had been in Madrid, Rome and Copenhagen back then. We followed him where ever he made himself available to speak, decade after decade, trying to assimilate his teachings just as someone thirsty absorbs a liquid, taking his words as a source of hope, givers of meaning illuminating transcendence. The Public Rallies

A great deal of work went into every milestone. We always liked to be volunteers, to put our heart into everything, to get our hands dirty, to personally take care of the most minimal details and to put in all the time necessary to organise what had to be done, for months or years before any activity that had been fixed in the calendar. Once we’d talked over the objectives and established a strategy to develop, having agreed on the tactics to carry it out in every place we would fix a joint calendar that would then acquire an immoveable quality whose activities were capable of sucking in a countless number of coordinated actions operating from the future. This organisational passion gave us the capacity to do anything, great odysseys and small contributions, which were all joined together in the same direction. Everyone in their own measure, and in accordance with their possibilities, knew that they were sharing a common work, participating in a vaster ‘us’. The capacity to work turned into one of our main values. With greater application came greater responsibility. The democracy of work was established. At the beginning of the eighties, with our movement having already extended into more than fifty countries on five continents, we gave ourselves a period of two years to prepare the public rallies that ‘The Community for Human Development’ organised massively in different cities. In every team, we put ourselves in this wavelength, building a resonance box that could multiply our voices to launch our message publicly and reach even the remotest place on Earth. A small questionnaire facilitated contact with millions of people who were consulted about the meaning of their lives, inviting them to leave behind the individualism and nihilism that was visibly abundant. Faced with the nuclear threat of that period of the Cold War, we distributed a beautiful leaflet in copious quantities that advertised: ‘There is still a future, embrace a dignified cause’. In every city we rented several centres open to the street where the informative meetings for The Community took place with all those interested in participating in weekly working groups. Above each one was the sign of a triangle within a circle drawn on an orange background. In these meetings, apart from advancing in ourselves thanks to the study of formative themes and the practice of guided experiences8, we sought a way to communicate with our immediate environment about the need to Humanise the Earth and we took charge of the different functions that the complicated organisation of massive rallies entailed. In the meantime, in a small locality on the steep coast south of Naples, an international team was preparing itself to do the complete tour of events in which they’d speak publicly. There was Silo, the only Latin American; Salvatore Puledda, my Italian friend; Petur Gudjonsson from Iceland; Nicole Myers from the United States; the Canadian, Daniel Zuckerbrot and two Asians, Bittiandra Aiyyappa from India and Saki Binudin from The Philippines. Formed in very different landscapes and cultures, from Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and secular families, from both comfortable and marginalised social backgrounds, speaking different languages, with faces of very different races and a spectrum of skin colours from dark olive to

8 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Guided Experiences”, page 99. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. the most delicate white, in some way this small group of people constituted the melting pot of the new planetary civilisation. They coordinated between themselves so that they could respond to the questions asked by the journalists. They translated between themselves into the different languages and gave different responses that were always full of remarkable wit and a great sense of humour. Of course they also prepared themselves so that the testimony that each one gave would be very coherent and meaningful, and capable moreover of being assembled into a sort of common thread that made it possible to string them together as a single experience. As the dates approached and with the biggest capacity stadia or theatres hired in the different cities, we stuck posters on the walls, put our slogans on the radio, hung orange banners over the main roads and went to the squares to arrive by foot in different columns, accompanied by the music of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, songs, and orange flags fluttering joyfully while approaching the meeting points in Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Madrid. Every city was filled with enthusiasm and the halls of the different spaces thronged with an expectant public. The place where the most people met was without doubt in India. For the event in Mumbai, the construction of the stage had to be done on the sand of Chowpatty Beach which was chosen because there would be room for the thousands of expected participants. With everything ready and just before the agreed time, a storm broke with winds so intense that the fabrics, the banners and even some of the boards of the stage on the beach were swept away. Nevertheless, this was no obstacle for the massive gathering to take place anyway; the people listened attentively before overflowing with affection and gratitude for Silo’s words. What he said, with differences in tone from event to event, was the same in that after recounting how human life bloomed on this planet, he asked: What energy has moved all this activity, what motor has propelled human beings through history, if not rebellion against death? Because since ancient times, death has dogged humankind’s footsteps like a shadow. And since ancient times, death has found its way into the human heart and tried to conquer it. What was at first an unrelenting struggle driven by the necessities of life became a struggle driven by fear and desire. And two paths opened: the path of Yes and the path of No. At that point, all thought, all feeling, and all action became torn by doubt over whether to choose the Yes or the No. ‘Yes’ created everything that allowed suffering to be surpassed. ‘No’ added pain to suffering. There was no person, no relationship, no organisation free of their internal Yes and their internal No. Then the separate peoples and nations began to connect one to another, until at last, civilisations came together, and the Yes and the No of every language simultaneously invaded the farthest corners of the planet. How will human beings ever triumph over their shadow? By fleeing it? By confronting it in incoherent struggle? If the motor of history is rebellion against death, rebel now against frustration and revenge! For the first time in history, stop looking for people to blame. Everyone is responsible for what they have done, but no one is to blame for what has happened. Let’s hope that this universal judgment allows us to declare: ‘No one is to blame,’ and with this establish a moral obligation that every human being reconciles with their own past. This would begin here today in you, and you would be responsible to see that it continues, reaching those around you until it’s spread to the last corner of the Earth. If the direction of your life hasn’t changed, you need to change it. And if it’s already changed, then you need to strengthen it. So that all this may be possible, accompany me in a free, courageous, and profound act that’s also a commitment to reconciliation. Go to your parents, your partner, your companions; go to your friends and your enemies, and tell them with an open heart, ‘Something great and new has happened in me today,’ and explain this message of reconciliation to them. Let me repeat this: Go to your parents, your partner, your companions; go to your friends and your enemies, and tell them with an open heart, ‘Something great and new has happened in me today,’ and explain this message of reconciliation to them.” Standing up, completely moved, registering a powerful intention that was unrolling like a force capable of reconciling, of opening the future, of allowing every individual and our entire species to advance, we resonated together in unison with his exhortation. “Humanise, humanise the Earth! Humanise, humanise the Earth!” we repeatedly chanted, raising our hands with the salute of “Peace, Force and Joy!” Long hugs, chants, applause, marches moving with their orange colouring the central streets of the different cities, dancing on bridges or in the squares, and in India, thousands of hands coming forward to greet Silo, to touch him, lifting their children over the heads of the multitude with the goal of reaching him and asking for his blessing, thanking him for the hope in his message. In Flight

Many were the tremendously moving milestones in which his presence amazed me. It wasn’t just his words and the content they communicated; it was also his vibrant attitude, his open and expressive gestures capable of translating certainty. Likewise, there were several, every day, simple situations in which I could also be surprised, noticing the wisdom dwelling within him and operating in a quiet way, without being strident. Human beings normally change according to whether they feel under pressure, relaxed, pushed or when situations require responses different to everyday ones. Obviously we don’t behave in the same way we would at a football match in a stadium as we do at the dentist surgery and we adjust as best we can to the situation we happen to be in. I never ceased to be amazed by the changes of roles and the capacity for mimicry that Silo developed as adaptive behaviour in front of different situations. His ample palette of movements, the enormous gamut of characters that he was capable of representing, the way he controlled his voice, his gestures so varied and multiple and a capacity for histrionics allowed him to employ the most diverse ways of expression. In general he was an amiable and cordial man with a big laugh. But in certain situations he was capable of reining himself in, making his personality almost completely disappear in order to pass unnoticed. He resorted to this especially when he was in aeroplanes. I don’t think he experienced any fear, nor was he ever in a hurry to arrive. On the contrary, he took his time, he arrived at airports well ahead of the recommended time, he went through the formalities totally calm and allowed himself to enjoy the last moments with the friends who normally went to see him off. Once in the long waiting line for the security checks, he seemed to fade into the crowd as if he were gently blending in. His voice turned practically inaudible, his gestures became muted, his walk, slow and silent. He’d pass through the waiting areas and present his documentation to enter into the departure lounge as if he were someone rather sleepy. Once inside a plane, he’d find his seat and comply strictly with the instructions for stowing hand luggage, fastening his seat belt and other suggestions that passengers are given. So discrete was he that those in the seats next to him almost didn’t notice the presence of their travelling companion. He blended into the background to the extent that he became almost invisible for the cabin crew who, on more than one occasion, even forgot to give him a tray for lunch or offer him refreshments like they did with everyone else. It was as if in that seat there were no passenger; he passed unnoticed. Furthermore, having boarded with him and being sure that we were travelling together to the same destination it sometimes occurred to me, mid-flight, that I should go and check that he was on the same plane because it would cross my mind that he could have missed the opportunity to board. I would go to where he was seated and there he’d be, quietly reading some newspaper without disturbing anyone. On landing, all the passengers usually get up quickly, urgently look for their things and anxiously push to be among the first to disembark. A gentle elbow, a treading on toes or an accidental push are all employed as if this would ensure that it’ll get them into the city they were going to a few minutes ahead of schedule. It’s a chaos in which respect counts for little and impatience reigns, despite the forced gestures of false friendliness. In contrast to this collective state of alteration, Silo always let his neighbours out first; reaching for his luggage when there was no danger that he could hinder anyone or fall on some unwary person. Without noise or forcing anything, he never tried to get out before anyone else, giving way to the point of ending up at the back of the line. Silent and blending into the crowds, we’d find him again in the baggage collection area. He usually travelled with only a small piece of hand luggage so that he didn’t even have to disturb anyone to reclaim a suitcase. His behaviour—such a contrast to the majority of passengers—made me question many times the impulses that compel people to do things at any cost, to push to be first in line, to demand attention of the staff, to seek to have their own desires dealt with as a priority. They don’t consider in the slightest that there are others around, they never realise that they’re part of a crowd which includes many people who’re all getting on and off together at the same place. For a period of time they’re part of the same situation in which it’s very easy to be a nuisance and so difficult to treat others with consideration. Furthermore, he never failed to arrive where he was going; he was never a minute late unless the flight suffered an incident that of course no passenger was in a condition to resolve. Nothing changed that was already in the travel plans. In this kind of blending in, lowering the voltage of his own way of being, I thought I noticed an important practical teaching of the Golden Rule, which he formulated as, “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” The Journal

No one understood very well the reason I had for writing down everything in my journal when I was a Humanist Party candidate for the Chilean Senate. I’d also done so during the previous election for the Chamber of Deputies and I continued with the same habit. Rather than talk, better than making declarations or presenting proposals and programmes, what I did was listen, pay attention and take notes. Almost as if I were a social worker, I enquired about people’s real problems, the different ways they were affected, how they thought to organise themselves to resolve their problems collectively and what they expected their representatives in Parliament to do in order to be with them in the same struggle, supporting the objective that their needs dictated. In reality, the ‘door-to-door’ campaigns were ‘person-to-person’; a long, extensive conversation with each person. Many times I was invited inside someone’s house to sit comfortably, without hurry; otherwise I’d take notes on the doorstep itself. I’d finish the day classifying the various problems detected, grouping them together with the intention of being able to understand what they were talking about, what was the feeling, the clamour of the people and what was it they really wanted. Unlike the other candidates who visited the marketplaces and the squares, announcing their presence in advance with music played through megaphones, almost as if a circus performer were about to make an appearance, then arriving in person to make a show of handing out full colour leaflets, I’d go to the local market to stay and chat with a couple of live-in maids and so become aware that a basket of shopping had gone up in price because what the same money bought a few weeks before now no longer stretched as far. My case wasn’t the only one of a political campaign carried out without great fuss. All of us Humanists walked a lot, we listened tirelessly, we took notes and we deciphered the expectations of those who’d lived a long time in a district, wishing that the new democracy had resolved some of their conflicts better. We’d worked like this since the dictatorship. We organised party affiliations and a complete list of agents for the NO campaign in the plebiscite to oust Pinochet. Tomás Hirsch traversed the entire country as a presidential candidate and later on he would do so a second time. The anguish, frustration, disappointments, demands, criticism, everything came to light in the measure that the neighbours spoke. What they yearned for and their weak hopes also came up. It’s the style of our party. Our way was to relate directly, to really try to understand others and to obtain the proposals to be presented in the heart of Parliament from them. Silo had given us little, but very useful, advice when we asked him about how to carry out these real odysseys. He told us to do it without intermediaries, in a direct way, trusting that the voice of the voiceless would express what society as a whole needed. The actions proposed in the most immediate environment, on the basis of concrete conflict, are those that can build real representation. He said we should learn to discuss all the economic and social problems with the neighbours: problems of healthcare, education and quality of life, giving priority to the neighbourhood ahead of the municipality or the district. In reality, long before countries were formed there were people congregated into human groups who, on settling down, became neighbours. Later, and in the measure that administrative superstructures were mounted, these groups’ autonomy and power were taken away from them. The legitimacy of any given order derives from those residents, from the neighbours, and it’s from there that representation in a real democracy must arise. From the most humble people we gathered advice, recommendations, opinions and we noticed the enormous gap there was already between those in positions of representation and those they represented. The interests of the former did not correspond with what the latter lacked; the time taken to discuss laws was eternal compared to the vital urgency of those who didn’t feel they had a future. Learning to listen to them was difficult; carrying their voice into the public arena, even more so. This had already been done during the first democratic government by the only Humanist deputy that we had: Laura Rodríguez. She had arrived at the Chamber, journal in hand, to prepare the proposals for laws of: political responsibility; people’s legislative initiatives; optional military service; divorce; recognition for children born outside of marriage; social laws for domestic workers and several other projects for laws that had been maturing from those lines written hurriedly during a conversation, notes from the street. Once a year, Laura gave a public account to her constituents. They met in the district and reviewed the notes that had mutated into proposals for the Chamber. She’d recount the debates that each proposal had led to and the possibilities that each one had to be implemented. Then she let the people speak and asked them to express themselves once more in order to be able to measure the advances or setbacks in her performance from what they said. It was the people who pondered if they were well represented; they were responsible for establishing the margins of negotiation and demanded the urgent things that were considered indispensable. Silo didn’t tell us what to do in the politics of our country, but rather how to do it, as the context was only well-known by those people from the place. More important was the style, the treatment of people, the rapport to establish with them, the real rooting in their neighbourhoods. If the position was that of Mayor, the house in which the Mayor lived ended up as an extension of the Town Hall and the doors were open to any neighbour. They were invited to cook together, to eat together, to be heard, to play table-tennis and to laugh together. The municipal programme acquired depth and took volume from the faces of the residents of the community, their names, they were the source of inspiration. Healthcare wasn’t dealt with in an abstract way, but rather by considering the illnesses that really affected children and the elderly in the winter; the waiting times that they had to endure in the doctor’s surgery, the quality of attention given to alleviate the pain that real people were suffering. It wasn’t an education strategy thought up in isolation, but rather a municipal plan that arose from detecting the criticism of the terrible quality of teaching which demanded improvements in facilities and the ability to provide pupils with all the tools that would allow them to learn rapidly, with motivation and enthusiasm. Our mayors consulted year after year about their programmes with the neighbours, with a popular interactive consultation that was implemented directly thanks to computer networks—a great technological novelty in those days—installed in all the neighbourhood centres. They always sought to evaluate together the way things were being run, to listen to the contributions of each district and the complaints that arose with the aim of being able to move ahead in the most decentralised way possible. For those appointed to public office in the Executive, we did two very simple things: we elaborated our own script, defining the purpose that led us to carry out such a function, fixing indicators of advances or failure in order to be able to evaluate and make amendments on the way if necessary; and a daily logbook in which to record everything that allowed this script to be fulfilled. In other words, once the reason to undertake a public function was defined, you had to discover day by day how to do it and keep notes of the experience in order to learn from it. Those note-filled journals, whether they were points written while in an official position, or in the development of electoral campaigns, in some way operated as a reversibility mechanism, a self-criticism and vigilance of oneself, preventing in any great measure the belief that we were different, that we belonged to the privileged political class, the mafia who govern with such corruption and who feel—in error and under an illusion—that they own the country. Still today, Humanist candidates use their notes as resources; not only in Chile, but I’ve also seen it in Argentina, in the work of those in positions of public office that our friends currently hold in the Front for Victory9, in the last elections in Brazil, even in European candidates. One’s own words, written on a daily basis constitute the best antidote against what Silo called ‘heights virus’, somehow similar to the words of the Roman General’s slave who walked by his side, whispering frequently into his ear the phrase, “Remember your mortality!” These journals gave us the map and the routes for moving ahead together in parity of conditions, with a style as close as possible to the people, with the most direct treatment that we were capable of.

9 The Front for Victory (Spanish: Frente para la Victoria, FPV) is a political party and electoral alliance in Argentina. Convergence

The notes I took in biannual international meetings were copious because thanks to those words recording the strategic analysis given, the vision of the world that emerged and the way in which we resolved to continue advancing, later on I could transmit the atmosphere of what I experienced to the team I coordinated, ensuring that all the context was passed on in order to achieve good tactical implementation. I became an expert in taking notes of the Master, respecting his ways of presentation and transcribing his words almost verbatim, as he generally spoke repeating concepts, like spirals that turn around an ever-wider radius without hurrying to reach a destination. I preferred to not synthesise, I avoided summarising, my hand ran in clear letters on the paper, while I watched and followed his gestures, because—as I discovered—in this effort to pay attention I managed to retain what he tried to transmit better. Independently of whether there were formal minutes of these meetings which built a memory of our process, I always preferred to continue to take notes of the extensive analyses that gave origin to our strategies: “We are now in the time of accelerations and a globalisation that cannot be stopped. It will happen with everything. What will happen if it continues like this? What will happen? If everything goes with increasing velocity and simultaneously across the planet, then we’ll try our best to adapt according to our possibilities. It’s nothing strange. Since the first moments we’ve thought of our project more in planetary terms than something local. From the beginning, we never imagined that this would be a phenomenon that would start in one point and expand like an oil slick while reinforcing it. In no way was it proposed like this, but rather as a diaspora of dispersion to distant points, there wherever we could reach. Right from the start it was proposed like this. “Over time the experience was translated into internationalist ideas. It’s very interesting, only it’s not the case that external phenomena in the world accelerate without the same thing also happening within an individual consciousness, at a personal level. People are also being affected by this growing rhythm in their daily lives. Problems of the present moment are of such a nature and magnitude, that they don’t impact only on interpersonal relationships. This doubtless occurs, but it also influences people’s internal mechanisms themselves. So it is that if unemployment rises, one starts to feel an increasing fear of being jobless; if every day there’s more direct and indirect control of people’s activities, one starts to feel a growing asphyxia. Every day there’s a progressive destructuring of institutions and we start to see that everything around us is falling into disarray. As values fall, so certain social parameters also break down, we experience enormous disorientation. It’s something a lot more profound that touches all of us. “Progressive planetarisation allows one to come into contact with different structural codes. Not only because we wear clothes that are produced in different latitudes, but also because we’re modifying our language; if we don’t adapt and incorporate signs that are used in other places there could come a time when we’ll be unable to understand anyone, as the signs of language are also becoming planetary. Diets, fashion, customs, everything changes and it doesn’t stop there. We start to think, to order our thinking in a particular sequence, in a certain way. We start to prioritise what we consider important in a more or less specific way and, logically, we reason in this way, we organise our ideas, and also our way of feeling starts to have more affinity with certain things and less with others. “The sensibility is changing with the variations of the times. The concept of happiness is likewise affected by this process. A way of thinking is being touched. The way in which we manage our images is being modified. It’s said that everything is destructuring, but it’s not that this is happening and we continue on with our lives in the same way, perfectly ok… Everything is destructuring and the same thing happens to one’s own thinking, our sensibility, our way of moving. “Those who’ve been accompanying us in a project of change, those who understand it beyond the slogan of social and personal transformation should bear in mind the fact that something must be done with one’s own consciousness; with the images that one has, one’s own values, orientations, mental directions and the system of life’s imponderables that each one of us has. Something must be done in front of this situation which affects us within, in our most profound interior. “The accelerations that we’re observing are for better and for worse. Everyday reality is pushing us somehow to use our tools and techniques of personal work. We’re concerned with our internal order, seeking to achieve coherence between what we think, feel and do, channelling our inner energy and avoiding the personal disintegration that’s currently knocking on the door. It becomes necessary to put order in our inner force and give it direction. “In this fast process we’re witnessing, every day people experience more clearly that they’re losing strength. It’s very difficult to define this force we’re talking about. People say they’re losing energy, not only through their fears and concerns, they claim to feel devitalised, tremendously tired. Whatever this inner energy may be, for sure it has to do with what’s happening to every individual with their own contents, with how they feel they’re functioning. “Usually we’ve spoken about the Movement as if it were a tool. That’s why we also invite those friends who want to give direction to events and who apply themselves to the social field to work internally, to look for solidity, direction, strength. We won’t content ourselves simply with understanding explanations of what’s currently happening within people’s heads, we’re also going to try to modify what’s happening, just as we put our social activities in motion. Because both aspects have the same degree of coherence and, furthermore, we understand that they’re not separate things, but rather they form a situational structure, in front of which we feel we should do something. “We cannot carry it out in a complicated way, because there’s no time for that. It’ll have to be according to the velocities of the moment. Everyone will make contact with their inner force and on so doing will find themselves with other people. They’ll be able to count on the help of those who’re aiming in the same direction. In our groups not only will there be the possibility of working with a few internal work techniques that’ll allow people to organise their lives, but also an ambit of people who’re pushing in the same direction. “It’s because these are urgent themes and matters of great acceleration. Not only the transformation of social structures, but rather what’s going to happen with people even inside them. All of these events, all of these things that we’re seeing and those to come, all of this also ends up in each one of us, inside everyone. “This theme of the big power blocks, the process of planetarisation, of the acceleration of time and even brought to the personal field, in which one sees oneself affected by what’s happening, this reaches much further. It leads us to the matter of how one organises one’s own psychism. It’s not just that we’re influenced by things that are happening. If this wasn’t affecting us, if there wasn’t such acceleration, if there were no breakdown around us, then we’d be happy. It’s not quite like that! There are people who have a very good economic situation, there are a few who’re very well in this regard, but many of them jump out of the window. Their objective conditions are fantastic, and yet… we hope that this doesn’t start to spread! “It’s time that we pick up our paces with the greatest possible simplification. If we take charge of what we’re describing, we’ll also be able to point the human organisations that we’re setting up in the direction of action, instead of starting to be compressed. This is an important aspect in this stage. For sure we must build things even though institutions and powers are crumbling around us because change is going to accelerate even more, even if it doesn’t depend on us that the social structures fall or stop collapsing, the direction that this change goes in does. So it’s the case of discovering the possibility that each one of us has to orientate these transformations in our lives and in the environment in which we move. “Our movement has become increasingly complex and counts on a quantity of tools and functions that have been added over time. Today we’re talking about opening new channels for participation to different kinds of people, and moreover, we ourselves need to connect better with the environment around us, surroundings that are complex and increasingly diverse. We count on our centres and the neighbourhood newspapers that we produce; some also make video programmes and there’s no lack of those who’ve developed community radios. Apparatuses such as radio, TV and book publishers generate dissemination and influence. The organisms are more institutional: The Community for Human Development and the Humanist Party, in addition to the clubs that are occasionally formed and the action fronts that act in specific conflicts, each one applied to its own field. The action fronts do not tend to gather individuals but rather put different human groups in contact. The coordination bodies of a country are ambits of relationships between different organisms, apparatuses, fronts and lines in order to prepare common actions, common materials and official representation in front of the press, through their spokespersons. “The Centres of Cultures that are appearing little by little are organisations targeted to diverse collectives and are principally for immigrants based on the issues of antidiscrimination, relationships between diversity and the possibility of forming clubs in the places of origin of their members. Thanks to the fact that the participants of this new organism come from a remote place from where they’ve emigrated, we’re already starting to reach the heart of Africa, the remote populations of the Asian mountains and the indigenous populations of America through contacts that they themselves have abroad, their family members and friends and thanks to the fact that they send texts translated into their own languages. “In this way we’re targeting cultures, not countries. Cultures are broader, more real. Countries are something accidental, very recent and in many cases they don’t respond to the framework of peoples. Whereas cultures have to do with regions and this is precisely the stage of building regions. One of the strong components of cultures is their religions. Currently we’re seeing a strengthening of cultures, religions and regions. All of this forms part of the times. It’s part of the accelerating planetarisation that peoples compensate through seeking affirmation of their culture, the region they belong to, what they consider very much theirs, what has a sacred quality and what gives them their identity. “From Marseilles, Milan, Barcelona, New York and Madrid we’re producing openings of diverse places in Africa and Asia, reaching cultures that have been impenetrable until now. The same is happening from Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo with the indigenous peoples of our continent. In turn, as a movement, we’re becoming more complex and opening possibilities for participation that are not exclusively in the political, social or cultural fields. The Movement is international and culturally it’s open to different forms that exist in the world. It’s a Universalist Humanism. Cultures are currently standing out greatly and clashing with the concept of Nation state. They are cultures, not nations. So we open up a whole wealth of possibilities, a spectrum of diverse, yet convergent expressions that become very interesting in a historical moment such as the present. The tendency that we observe is towards the development of regions. When regions become destructured, planetarisation will be produced. We’re interested in the human process and the advance in the direction of a Universal Human Nation. “Maybe if we consider the situation in detail, if we seek to re-gather our inner strength and act in the world with resolution, we could help things to change in a positive direction. If we take charge of the growing complexity and develop this wide spectrum of possibilities to participate that we already have available in our movement, with our so diverse, yet convergent forms, the process could gather great momentum. There’s room for everyone, everyone can do their part as best they like, in order to advance towards an increasingly multiple and interesting world.” The Media

In the middle of 1999 we went to our house in Tunquén for a few days together with several friends. We walked along the extensive beach of soft sand breathing in the maritime air, weaving conversations regarding the new tendencies at work in the world and the determinisms of social phenomena. Tomás Hirsch invited us for lunch and in his dining room a long and leisurely conversation took place regarding the situation that we were experiencing in that moment. With the characteristic gestures that Negro—as we affectionately called Mario—had of touching the tablecloth gently and gathering any crumbs that could’ve remained scattered on the table, he described the way he saw things. I took out pen and paper and started to take notes. “Everything that’s false has fallen. Politicians, who are nothing more than businessmen, have become evident… Beliefs have rapidly come tumbling down. People no longer have confidence in their governments. The only thing that still remains relatively upright, although it’s starting to wobble, is the Fourth Estate. However this power has been badly diminished. Moreover, there remains a relatively small percentage of people who still believe in the system, but no more than that. “No one believes The Press anymore either, The Media are making mistakes… and they’ll continue to do so. This Fourth Estate has tropism towards domination, the same as happens with the power of money. “We’re not talking about a diffuse and disperse power, The Media is a structure. This compact force fights against everything that’s organised, because they occupy the space that The Media are disputing. Likewise, we can notice on a daily basis that journalism favours things that have no organic structure, because it’s precisely these matters that end up being the easiest for it to manage. Media phenomena happen on the basis of those characters who don’t respond to the consolidated powers, those who seem to be independent. Insubstantial things fit perfectly with the interests of the press. On the other hand, political parties with popular rooting, churches, the armed forces and things which are well organised are complicated for them. The Fourth Estate is starting to fight against everything monolithic. “The Media work with the ruins of what used to be solid. They take characters who can be catapulted; they push them up the ratings and bring them down again as they feel fit, according to the audience figures they achieve. “This power that’s called ‘The Press’, today tends to be made up of large organisations, media conglomerates and interest groups and they’re very similar to the multi-nationals. They absorb everything around them seeking concentration in a few hands, they’re growing in a centripetal manner. Let’s not be fooled by what appears today to be diversified, because tomorrow it’ll be compacted and fused into uniformity. “The Media work in a mechanical way and there’s nothing more for it to do than to compete for what it needs with other organisations, it has no other possibility than to dismantle them. It’s a very important agent that contributes to disintegration. But, fatally, the Media themselves are also going in this direction, as if it were an unavoidable vortex. “If they had to choose, the Media would currently choose things that have no organic structure. Surely because they’re easier to blackmail, easily manipulated, they can be lifted up and brought down. It’s a mechanical problem of struggle between forms of power. They won’t give space to, disseminate or publicise anything that forms part of a compact body. They don’t interview people who’re militant because they consider that this is giving them propaganda, whereas they give airtime to the opinions of one character or another, hopefully the most independent one. But to a social movement with cadres and organised people at the grassroots, never! “This way of looking with which we sometimes interpret the intentions of journalism, this analysis that the Right does such and such because it serves their purposes, that the Left on the other hand strengthens another aspect in the newspapers…, this way of thinking, so characteristic of the turn of the 20 th century, we shouldn’t be deceived, it no longer works. “Ideologies that in the past could count on a certain amount of space on the TV channels or on the radio are now losing it. The Press do their business; they go in search of power and clearing the way. “The pamphlets of yesteryear allowed everyone to find out what was going on. Let’s remember the Theses of Luther, written on a single large piece of paper and pinned to the door of the church in front of which people gathered to read them in the public square. But this way of communication was surpassed by the intermediary form, since the times of Gutenberg, through printed newspapers and the mass media. In those other historical times, they fulfilled the function of connecting, of informing, of making widely known; it was an interesting process. “In all latitudes the same thing is happening. Mass communication today is driven by the intention of marginalising everything else. There’s nowhere where this phenomenon of concentration isn’t taking place, absorbing the different communication media in a single packet, one multimedia and one multinational, international media complexes. “With or without The Press, the global process appears to be orientated towards destructuring in all fields. The Media do not depend on the nation state; they’re an increasingly multinational power. Make no mistake: it’s not that we’re confronting a Media conspiracy, it’s just the way in which its mechanism operates. “Above the Press is Big Capital. They’re powers that aren’t antagonistic. Capital has always worked to try and control what is concrete, stuff, things, the means of production. Now it also needs to control subjective factors, what people think, what they believe and for this there’s the so-called Fourth Estate. It’s not that the Media truly manage human consciousness. Rather they misinform, they highlight secondary matters, and they emphasise non-transcendent things in such a way that people can’t understand what’s happening, even less, agree on it. “Today there’s a big global power, an enormous Empire that’s increasingly concentrating its economic power and running the world, using the Media and everything it can in its favour. This power catapults media leaders and uses them, for as long as they’re useful. “The soap operas, the TV series, mass amusement, the entertaining of large human collectives… with such passion that there is for them, one would say that people believe in it. But no, for people it’s just a novel. It’s not that they really believe what goes on there, it’s just a pastime. With sport the same thing happens. We can’t say that it’s information or misinformation. Sport is broadcast live, and therefore has credibility. Because what happens here is real, it’s not manipulated by editors or producers, it happens in real time and this bestows prestige on the media. A goal is a concrete fact and if they show it to me live on television and it entertains me, I believe the Press… But the Media and entertainment are different things. Entertainment isn’t news.” I took notes up to here of what Silo was saying, because I wanted to participate in the conversation with the others while the afternoon was advancing. At that time there were neither social networks nor the immediacy of news that anyone can broadcast today from their own mobile phone and that, without doubt, has greater credibility than the images of the media. We were just in 1999, the century hadn’t ended. Plaza de Mayo

I arrived on the back of a motorbike with the wind in my face, holding on to the waist of Maxi Garcia, one of my young friends from Buenos Aires. All morning we’d been visiting several of his friends, reminding them not to forget the flags and banners, and that the drums so characteristics of Buenos Aires marches and even the flasks of mate10 were indispensable. They were the finishing touches to an event we’d been working on for months. The Humanist Party had been deployed and sought to fill the most politically meaningful square of the capital and the mobilisation of people was really overwhelming. On the surrounding streets of Plaza de Mayo, we saw the parked buses that had come from the different neighbourhoods, unloading their contingent with headbands tied around their foreheads, flags and colourful orange t-shirts. A veritable festival of militancy. There I met many old friends of mine, companions of the same path. We were happy to see each other in these circumstances and expectant, of course, as Silo had never participated in person in a public event of a political nature as he would do that afternoon. He would speak at the end after the speech given by the presidential candidate, Lía Méndez. It was the 14th of May 1999. It was also the end of Carlos Menem’s second term as president and the economic asphyxiation was as strong as the social discontent. Jorge Pompei, the doctor, was Lía’s running mate and he would also speak this afternoon, and like everyone else he would do so with his back to Casa Rosada11. For me the event turned out to be very novel; the Argentinean forms of popular expression are closer to those of the fans at a football match than to the combative marches that happen in my country. Silo’s intervention in person, taking on an absolutely political role, made clear to me the precarious situation in the neighbouring country, a crisis that could be felt approaching and that would shortly afterwards lead Argentina to collapse. I knew him to be political and of great proficiency, both in his analysis and in his understanding of the forces in play and of the possible future outcomes that every scenario presented. I trusted in his wit; in his fantastic histrionics capable of saying a thousand words with a single gesture; in his whispering voice that captured the attention, very clear in the phrases charged with irony and with thunder when denouncing injustice and I trusted in that voice that never became monotonous, because he gave every word its meaning, letting the rhythms flow without overcharging them. I counted on it being a magnificent afternoon, even so, the atmosphere was tense with expectation, like waiting for a surprise. Lía spoke even better than she usually does. She explained all the proposals of her candidacy for president and set out a truly convincing programme of government. She was interrupted many times by the acclamation of the people. The fingers and thumbs of thousands of hands were repeatedly raised to salute her, with shouts of peace, force and joy! The drums sustained the shouting of the slogans by many throats, the flags fluttered orange like flames.

10 Argentinean tea 11 The Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires The same thing happened when Silo spoke. He unleashed a passion, an intense excitement; as if the square had been suddenly infected with an enormous energy and everyone had been immersed in a current of unstoppable euphoria. From the podium located on the high stage, he said: Friends, Lía Méndez has set out the key points that are part of the humanist platform. Lía Méndez has told us about the fraud suffered by pensioners; about the emptying of the pension funds; about insecurity—not just physical insecurity in the streets— but insecurity as a lifestyle due to growing unemployment, due to increasingly inadequate education, due to the poverty and social exclusion for which an increasingly non-existent State is unable to take responsibility, leaving everything to be defined by market dynamics. Physical insecurity, which is the most spectacular, will start to be corrected only when the role of the security forces is correctly redefined, when their programmes of study and training are reformed and when the direct election of police commissioners is promoted. Similarly, an important advance should be made with the judiciary and the direct election of judges, whereby decent judges—who today are overwhelmed by so many corrupt colleagues—are rescued. She also spoke about the immunity of government officials who safeguard their own Pinochet-esque impunity, moving from one post to another. The Law of Political Responsibility should serve to make any government official accountable for their actions, while introducing disqualification and impeachment for all elected candidates who don’t fulfil their promises and commitments. By calling for ecological crime to be made a punishable offence, Lía Méndez made it clear that the concept where a company can contaminate in exchange for a simple fine should be eliminated. On currency convertibility, foreign debt and dollarisation things were very clearly presented. Convertibility has served to allow short-term investment capital to flee the country, foreign debt to increase and our industry to be destroyed generating unemployment and poverty. Stability now depends on the influx of foreign capital and continuously increasing debt. Convertibility should be abolished, guaranteeing that people's debt stays at the same value in pesos. The exchange rate must be modified to stop the destruction of industry and employment sources. Monetary stability should be guaranteed through a fiscal surplus to be achieved through non-payment of interest on foreign debt and through collection of more taxes from those who have more. Foreign debt, originated during the military government and which doubled during Menem's government, is the chain that makes us dependent on a usurious banking system and the IMF which dictates the economic and employment policies of our country. We’re paying more and more, we have less and less, and our debts grow and grow. And people are increasingly worse off. No more interest—already 15% of the budget—should be paid. We’ve already paid too much, and we cannot continue sacrificing people in favour of the banking system. A commission should be formed to study the origin of each item of debt, because there has been a lot of corruption during its accumulation, and we won’t pay what isn’t genuinely owed. And for those who say that things will go bad for us if we don't pay, let them explain to us how things are going well for us now, and how things will end up if they continue this way. The dollarisation project implies the total surrender of our monetary policy to the US Federal Reserve who will then decide which banks will work and to whom they will and won’t lend. If with convertibility we already depend on foreign capital, with dollarisation it will be the USA, along with foreign banks, who decide directly how much money should circulate in Argentina and who should have it. The stability of our own currency should be strengthened through a fiscal surplus. The economy should be de-dollarised, and agreements should be made with countries of the region to create a Latin American currency that enables international trade, thereby dispensing with the dollar. This set of ideas should be implemented urgently. Not much margin for continuing this way remains, mainly because of these crises that are being precipitated and marking an important change in the general situation. Many think that it’s not possible to change this state of affairs given the regional and worldwide situation in which globalisation is deciding situations. First of all, so-called globalisation is nothing more than the extension of the influence of the Yankee Empire that day by day continues to impose its parameters. It’s a directed globalisation, and not a process resulting from the simple development of history as happens, instead, with planetarisation which is developing in all directions and latitudes, and in which the influences of some places on others, of some cultures on others, of some religions, of some lifestyles, are reciprocal and contribute to interchange in the direction of a total civilisation and, ultimately, towards a Universal Human Nation... This Universal Human Nation, this plurality of peoples, this diversity within human unity is tending to develop despite the uniformity that empires—in their moment of maximum expansion—have sought to establish. We’re now entering a moment in which an empire is achieving its maximum might, in which it’s overpowering the lifestyles of peoples and sweeping away national and cultural entities. It’s doing all this with money and bayonets and, certainly, that doesn't augur well for a civilised end, either of the empire itself or for the people who have fallen under its influence. All of the aforementioned is accompanied by an enormous decomposition that irradiates from that centre towards the most remote places. It’s an empire that has started to rot inside; where rates of crime, alcoholism, drug-addiction, suicide and depression are escalating out of control, where children are starting to kill each other, where the life of adults has lost meaning, where the lives of old people are a long memory of frustration. It’s an empire that’s started to be the model for the privileged minorities of dependent peoples; an empire worshipped by the decadent of all latitudes. Little by little its decline is starting, but this isn’t so easy to understand in its times of apparent splendour. In such a situation, when the crises of the system happen, new ideas and a new impulse for freedom will also begin to develop. What on Earth can we say when they speak to us about globalised economics or globalised international law? For us they’re just imperial practices of domination and, as such, the pretext could be anything. For instance, let's take the criminal economic blockade imposed on Cuba for decades; let’s take the latest crisis into which the people of Europe have been thrown... Through a military alliance, the USA is intervening in other continents, bombing the Balkans, and bypassing the United Nations—which is supposed to be the international forum for discussion and solution of conflicts. None of this allows for second-rate excuses, because ultimately, suffice is to say that whatever the USA does in any place of the world is justified by the ‘defence of her interests’. So there’s no more need for discussion. Our country and the Latin American region should look for their own path to liberation and development, a path that surely won't be one imposed on us under the pretext of ‘globalisation’. The Humanist Party proposes its own action path and, logically, it’s opposed to the scheme presently imposed. The present moment is especially appropriate for advancing in proposals and action... The government is teetering and criticisms are being voiced from all social sectors. It’s evident, Carlitos [President Carlos Menem], that your luck is over! What we’ve been saying for a long time, is now evident: this model has been exhausted. It’s only that many people are a little slow to understand, and they believe that Menem is just starting his term. Now it’s quite possible that this government official could resign and enjoy the benefits of retirement—as we’ve said before. Moreover, we’ve gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures throughout the country requesting this resignation. We’ve been demanding this resignation for a long time. But something has changed, because the former conformists—those who disdainfully looked down at us from above—now pull their hair out at our exhortation and shout that it’s unconstitutional to request the resignation of this government official. Now that this possibility is glimpsed, fearful people say that this would be a catastrophe, that a new Alfonsín-style resignation—one before the constitutional period finishes—would be very serious. Actually, this would not be a catastrophe, just an embarrassment. This wouldn’t be a tragedy, it would simply be a confirmation that this scheme doesn't work, and that the alternations between Radicals and Justicialists are, as musicians would say, 'variations on a theme.’ Perhaps, if this resignation were to happen, we’d have to thank the President for clearing the way, for showing the whole country that what should be changed is the system, that it’s no longer about a ridiculous alternating between two parties, but rather the beginning of the creation of a new scheme in which we can start to reconstruct the country... But the President won't want to resign despite the situation deteriorating day by day, and despite having to hold back on some of his intentions, as has just happened with the education budget cuts. The analysis of this case is very interesting, because it shows that there are conditions for deepening a struggle in which we can glimpse the possibility of generalising the conflict, a conflict in which tractor demonstrations, road blocks and blockades across the country have been elements that can channel a great Federal March in which the demands of agricultural and industrial workers as well as the unemployed can be expressed, today with students joining the struggle within a mass movement capable of being part of the active vanguard of the future general strike. However, the fragmented labour movement seems to despair of its possibilities, and there are undoubtedly stances that should be revised. This is the case of certain stances that are considering the transformation of industry labour unions into company labour unions, stances that plot directly against the unity of the labour movement. Similarly, the so-called political ‘neutrality’ of some labour union groups should be revised. In reality, they’re committed either to the ruling party or to the Alliance, thus serving the interests of employers. These groups must define political positions and make a commitment to the proposal for a change of the country’s structures and favour the introduction of the Workers’ Ownership Law, as outlined by humanism in its basic proposal document, that is to say in its ‘Orange Book’ that has reached the hands of economists and leaders within the labour movement. But while the crisis deepens, also pushed by the world crisis in the system, the president won't be able to resign because that would endanger the general situation. His supposed successors, either of his party or of the fake opposition, are conceiving a governability pact, a pact that isn’t for guaranteeing a third term, but simply the conclusion of this second term of mistakes. This ‘court of miracles’ is preparing to continue with the circus in which there’s no lack of tightrope walkers, acrobats and midgets—above all midgets. They’re thinking about the succession, they’re thinking about how to sustain the government and, at the same time, how to demonstrate to public opinion that they haven’t shared power, but rather, always been its victims. How could they try to make us believe that they have nothing to do with this government when they’ve been part and parcel of it since 1989? One as vice-president and then as governor of Buenos Aires, another as vice-president and now as candidate for governor of Buenos Aires, a third one as candidate for vice- president in a ticket alongside Duhalde after having been Menem's heir and after having governed Tucumán and left it in such ruins and disorder that ‘Bussi the Repressor’ ended up running the province... But the acrobats are also there; those who, having won a Peronist seat, have been inspired to take the leap and now associate themselves with the Radicals in an unsubstantial Alliance that began to be conceived when a Peronist governor formed a shadow of a party and obtained five million votes. Of course, that adventure finished in shame, and now he’s begging for a government post in Duhalde's (his former enemy) supposed future government. We’re not simply speaking about the midgets and acrobats because they amuse us with this grotesque show, but because we’re obliged to remember the continuous mistake of an electorate that has been deceived with notable ease by the corrupt and the traitors. We should ask ourselves again if millions of Argentineans in good faith will once again repeat their errors, in a wheel that brings to mind a certain Greek tragedy. As we now start to understand, the old saying according to which peoples don't make mistakes has stopped being a dogma of faith, because just as happens to individuals, so it happens to an entire people where sometimes they guess right and sometimes they get it wrong. It’s high time to change behaviour and follow a method of mental and political hygiene. That method consists of not supporting again anyone who’s ever betrayed or defaulted on their promises to people's hopes. An easy task to begin to change direction: don’t support the traitors again! This way, probably we won’t have to repeat what we’re used to saying in successive campaigns: "You’ll get it wrong again!" Now, what should we do? In our opinion it’s time to begin to build the option seriously. To do this, all progressive forces from the social base upwards, should be summoned, so that by recognising themselves in the diversity of conceptions and language, they begin to walk towards concrete actions of opposition to this model. Unity of action is the only possible road. Because, the other attitude: the classic one, the usual one, that of looking for irreconcilable differences instead of what we agree on, has already been explored too much and we know quite well how it finishes. The Humanist Party clearly states that this is not about forming electoral fronts, but of making unitary action grow within a system of co-ordination of progressive forces. And this will have to be developed in front of the incomprehension of some who’ll inevitably be excluded from this new process that history offers. Unity in diversity! Unity in action! Unity in the struggle against this model! Coordinated unity of all progressive forces! In this day of reaffirmation of the humanist spirit, a strong hug for all! Hearing the applause and the slogans shouted at full voice, after hugging so many friends, still hearing the rhythmic fervour of the drums, the chants and the waving of flags, in this overflowing energy that the end of the event produced, I grabbed hold of my friend’s waist to get away from the square on his motorbike, while I felt with increasing clarity that Silo had signalled the alarm bells for this catastrophe. Like the lifeguard’s whistle or the sounding of the emergency vehicle siren, his words resonated and indicated where to go to avoid total collapse. Of course we all know how things turned out and what happened in Argentina. We also know the measures that had to be implemented to get out of the crisis. As for Silo, he never again took the stand in a political event. This was the first and last time he did so. The Russians

It was an extremely hot January afternoon in Buenos Aires, absolutely sweltering, humid and heavy. We were walking from Hotel Bauen where we’d been meeting for several days protected by its pleasant air conditioning. But now we were heading to an apartment located in the central streets, walking along Corrientes Avenue towards Congress Square. I’d dressed for the occasion and my high heel sandals were making me feel uncomfortable. Mario, like all the other men in the small group, was wearing a tie. Russians are formal and were expecting us at four o’clock in the afternoon. I remembered when I met them in the times of Perestroika, having gone to Moscow for an interview with Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev’s then Foreign Minister, to whom we presented the proposal of the Humanist International: to form the Party in Russia and use it as an electoral vehicle for the current of restructuring. They were passing through a historical dilemma and disarmament had already started. The New Thinking was looking for a way out from the critical crossroads in which humanity found itself. Gorbachev himself had indicated that, beyond certain secondary differences, the Humanist Movement and the current headed by him had reached tremendously coinciding conclusions. He said that in history coincidences aren’t so frequent, but that they can be found, that the necessary path towards the future passed through addressing human beings as the central reference, as the main objective of social development. He’d defined the moment of contemporary civilisation as facing a blind alley, clarifying that its external manifestations were evidenced by the ecological paroxysm and problems related to it; the crisis of social life, an accumulation of contradictions between humankind and society; the evident sickness in global relations because having emerged from the ‘Cold War’ humanity couldn’t now find the door towards a truly peaceful world order; growing complexity in the functioning of the economy; a crisis of morality and, at the same time, of ideas, because none of the recognised schools of thought had been capable of explaining what had happened, or of showing the paths to overcome the situation we were living in. This is why the thinking and proposal of Silo was interesting. Every time they could, the Russians came to consult, to interchange and reflect about the ideology of New Humanism with the one they’d distinguished in October 1993 with an Honorary Degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Silo had been present in Moscow at the time to thank the members of the Scientific Council of the Latin American Institute for such a distinction and he gave a talk there known as ‘The Conditions of Dialogue’12. In it he said that dialogue, a decisive factor in the human construction, did not remain reduced to the rigours of logic or linguistics: Dialogue is a living thing in which the exchange of ideas, affections, and experiences is tinged with the irrationality of existence. This human life—with its beliefs, fears, and hopes, with its hatreds, aspirations, and ideals of the age—is what acts as the foundation for all dialogue.

12 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Silo Speaks”, page 750. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. He concluded by saying, We will see no full dialogue on the fundamental questions of today’s civilisation until we, as a society, begin to lose our belief in the innumerable illusions fed by the enticements of the current system. While heading to that central apartment, I could do no more than consider that the democratising attempts of the then Soviet Union had led it fatally and precisely to the dazzling direction of Westernisation and its life system. Fortunately the closed blinds of the Buenos Aires apartment were keeping the rooms in which the meeting would take place relatively fresh. A half-light reigned, but despite that we could make out, and were happy to see, the presence of the Russian friends. Serguei Semenov, dressed as always with his double-breasted blue suit, narrow tie and white shirt, hugged Silo at length. The affection between them was very deep. He spent long visits in Latin America and when he was in Chile for several months, his scientific rigour kept him cloistered in the libraries every day, from where he’d return walking and thinking until reaching the house in which our friends were housing him, to then dedicate himself to completing the data in his notebooks, continuing his line of research without the advancing night forcing him to rest. Behind Serguei also coming to greet us with strong hugs were the jovial Boris Koval, Akop Nazeretyan, more reserved, and Emil Davayan, the latter being tremendously warm. On the opportunity to be presented to Silo he said in his modulated way of speaking Spanish, “My heart was prepared for you.” This time, Vadim Zagladin from the Gorbachev Foundation was unable to be present in Buenos Aires, neither could Ivan Frolov come, the director of Pravda with whom we’d discussed at length in Russia, nor any of the cosmonauts so interested in comparing the experiences of mysticism and religious feeling that they’d had when travelling through interstellar space. We were invited to sit in a lounge with comfortable leather chairs where the ceiling fan moved the air with its slowly rotating blades. The small coffee table was rapidly covered with glasses, bottles of vodka and cups for hot drinks. Their customs were like that, many liquids and few solids. Nevertheless, they never lost lucidity. The whole afternoon passed by talking and in my case, listening. Maybe the heat had gotten to me. The fact is that I was impressed by the smoothness and transparency of Serguei’s skin which didn’t suit his already balding head. This together with his keen, oriental eyes and his strange pointy ears made me think that I was facing an ageless being and I couldn’t stop scrutinising him. They spoke about the different articles that were being published in the Humanist Movement’s Electronic Magazine and in the Yearbooks of the World Centre of Humanist Studies with which Russian scientists were collaborating. A long and fruitful interchange between specialists was taking place that, more than a simple meeting of friends, seemed to me as if I were witnessing a heated debate that was bringing to light new concerns in the fields of the natural physical sciences and philosophy. They moved with ease from the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology and Physics, towards certain topics of Humanist Psychology. The focal points were multiple and interdisciplinary. Nazaretyan, olive-skinned, with his dark beard and a serious, elongated face, had done research recently on the environmental crisis which led to a long discussion that, even taking place in our language spoken perfectly by everyone, had more than one altercation in Russian because they didn’t manage to agree among themselves in their vision of the contemporary ecological crisis. I especially remember Semenov, with his cold reasoning that seemed to dispense with all personal identification, maintaining that we should concentrate attention on the fact that nearly 800 million human beings were currently suffering from hunger and that this is a direct consequence of militarism and the arms race. The governments of Asia, Africa and Latin America whose people suffer hunger, are spending much more resources on weapons than on the eradication of this evil. By redirecting as little as ten per cent of global military spending on the campaign against poverty, we’d have vanquished hunger from the Earth, he assured us. So this immediate question was a priority for him and he insisted that it should be considered as an integral part of the ecological problem. Everyone was looking at Silo, hoping he would find how to get round the differences between the biocentrism maintained by Akop and Serguei’s humanist position. It was a veritable discussion, with a high level, well founded and informed, in which effectively the Master ended up presenting his points of view and comparing them in parity of conditions with those who, it seemed to me, were more capable of following his thought in these themes than many of us who usually surrounded him. In this interaction with the Russians, and the World Centre of Humanist Studies that they founded, emerged the idea of defining the ideological terms that we used and gave form to a Dictionary of New Humanism, a task which Silo took charge of and which he later included in his Collected Works13. We were already publishing the subject Yearbooks with the various monographs produced by these thinkers about questions of economics, humanism in diverse cultures, perspectives and different contributions to humanist culture. Reflection was generated in a moment in which there were few people who were outlining the future in this way, a moment in which mostly what was manifesting was inconsistency. When night began to fall we said goodbye and returned by foot through the streets of a still humid Buenos Aires with a completely star-filled sky. Several of the Russian friends gave us gifts and we carried in our hands beautiful ladles of multi-coloured wood, together with other handicrafts. I don’t remember if it was Antonio Carvallo or Salvatore Puledda who broke the silence as we walked. The thing is that Silo laughed and confessed that if he could have chosen who to be, if he’d had the opportunity to live another life, he would’ve without doubt chosen the life of Serguei.

13 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 2. “Dictionary of New Humanism”. Currently unpublished in English. The text can be found online at: http://www.silo.net/en/collected_works/dictionary_new_humanism Plastic Money

“Do you think that consumerism doesn’t affect you at all? Maybe for your consciousness objects don’t have codes, they don’t have meanings? Is it the same for you to use a landline or a mobile phone? If you think it is, you’re wrong and not only because of its functionality, surely you can realise that you don’t feel the same? Everything has its own attributes that are transferred through contiguity. You possess something beautiful and you start to experience sensations that you didn’t suspect yourself capable of before. It’s true! “Otherwise, how do you explain that in this second half of the nineties, consumption has increased so much in the world? We’ve seen that the most varied products are being mass produced and distributed by capillary action, reaching the most recondite places of the planet. These products receive an enormous propaganda effort which transforms even the most superfluous things into necessity, stimulating desire. “As people don’t have money to buy the latest technology, fashionable real-estate, the latest models of cars, trips to exotic places and all the objects that are currently available on the market, they get credit. In other words they take in advance what they want to consume and then repay this advanced money month by month together with the interest accrued. In this way the common citizen does well at work, behaves like a model employee and pays rigorously for the temptations incurred. “Have you realised that no one carries cash now? People have put their notes in the banks—who surely charge them for it—and they spend this money with their different cards, if they’re allowed to have them… People don’t think, they don’t understand that they’re the ones generating the enormous profits for the banks and they continue to keep them as the administrators of their scarce income instead of withdrawing it and managing what they earn by themselves without the intervention of usury. The banks already take a lot, but then what happens is that they then give out loans and so people go through life with their plastic cards which have replaced money. Today any human being, even the most humble, presents their card to pay for something they don’t know how to repay later. They drive a car that isn’t theirs, they live in houses belonging to the bank, they watch the news on a television from one of the big shops and they’re even dressed in clothes that they’ve borrowed while trying to pay for them. Nothing is theirs. They live in a tremendous illusion! “All of this so that they can seem to be something they aren’t, borrowing the attributes of these objects. “This wouldn’t be a problem if they could manage to sleep easily at night… because debts and their repayments have left people around the whole world with problems of digestion and difficulties to get to sleep. Of course the pharmacies have done great business over the years and here too you can pay with plastic money. Health has been suffering and the poor citizens, who go around cheerfully by day, showing the strength that they get from the four wheels that they move around in, are unable to emerge from the insomnia of having their heads filled with calculations of amounts, dates and interest that they’re accumulating. “Well, it’s the life they’ve chosen! They want to live in an ‘as if’’. As if they were owners of what they use, as if they had the status they try to have, as if objects could speak about how their owners are. People try to incorporate the attributes of things and, evidently, all of these artefacts that surround them very clearly express what people are: suffering beings, more and more unbalanced every day, incapable of thinking about anything other than numbers in red. “If you haven’t noticed, observe those who drive the newest vehicles, this year’s cars at the traffic lights. Look at the bags around the eyes of the faces who drive, their lost gaze, the sour tone of their distant attitudes, tremendously individualistic.” All of this conversation was taking place one winter’s evening in my house. María de la Luz Cerda was also present and laughing out loud at the different ‘as ifs’ with which Negro was illustrating what he wanted to tell us. Citing various cases, we continued in the theme, mentioning so many people we knew who were drowning in debt but living off unstoppable credit. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he went on, “in these years, it’s also happened that the different proposals for changing the world have come to an end. We no longer see a development of ideological thought; it occurs to no one to present the ways in which a revolution could take shape. Today it’s said that the Left has failed, that we’re witnessing the end of utopias and paradigms; that no one aspires to transform society; that globalisation has been imposed around the world and that the interesting things now are the markets. Where are the comrades, with their journey of a whole life dedicated to the social struggle? Where are their fists, the barricades, the ideas inflamed by the need to achieve rights for the marginalised? Where is the rebellion that fanned the drive for solidarity? “Now, what in yesteryear prisons and police repression couldn’t do, what the spying of the security services couldn’t extract and the deactivation that torture couldn’t achieve, plastic money has been able to do effortlessly. “As debts mount up and interest accrues the militant works from sunrise to sunset and now no longer meets with his cell or distributes leaflets, because in the evening he’s exhausted. He just arrives home to collapse on the bed and turn on the television, allowing himself to be seduced by the images of advertisements which reinsert stimuli into the cycle of consumerism. The social fighter, today, cannot lose her job because if she’s fired, she has no way to make her monthly mortgage repayments, the loan for the washing machine and her children’s bicycles. She’s also become disconnected from the committee, from the other activist women, because she hopes that once the repayments are finished, she can take out another loan so that her eldest child can go to university. “The party structures have been emptied and social organisations, which in our Latin America could even bring down dictators, have currently lost their strength. While there was a common enemy to fight against, everyone came together putting their shoulder to the wheel and finding strength in weakness. Now that democracy seems to have become irreversible, credit has managed to deactivate even the clearest people. Subjugation and extortion have created white-collar slaves who cannot free themselves from the system. Plastic money has managed to disarticulate the little that remained of revolutionary movements.” It was late at night and the three of us were hungry. Negro proposed to invite us to dinner and we went out in search of any restaurant that would still be open at this time. People go to bed early in my city, they work a lot and rarely go out on work days. I remember thinking that with all the payments due, it would be difficult for them to have much more fun. But this time there was a good place still serving and we continued talking about the subject, while eating barbequed meat with chips. We were finishing the ice creams that we’d ordered for dessert and there were no other customers besides us in the restaurant when the waiter approached us with the bill, apologising because they had to close the till. With all his kindness and a trace of gallantry towards us, Silo took the bill and got up to pay. To our surprise, he lifted his leg and placed his foot on the chair. As the waiter stood there open-mouthed, Silo pulled his trouser leg up and pushed his sock down to take out a roll of well organised notes by his ankle. He paid for this dinner in cash, just as he always did his whole life when he had to pay for anything. An Uncomfortable Chair

Winter was drawing to a close. As on previous occasions, Mario had come to Santiago for a few days. On this occasion he was presenting a special collection prepared by Editorial Planeta that had just published four of his books: Humanise the Earth, Guided Experiences, Universal Root Myths and Contributions to Thought 14 in what used to be the Gran Palace cinema located in the city centre. Every detail had turned out very well; the hall had been full, with people even sitting on the floor of the long aisles, and his conference, a true master class, had been widely covered by the national press, this time in an admiring and good tone. Over the course of the following days several other journalists came to interview him in more depth for magazine features and television programmes. He’d also been in meetings with humanist friends and appeared in different places. The morning on which he’d take his plane back to Mendoza around midday was still cold when he got up relaxed and smiling with nothing else to do. With his coffee cup in hand he came to join me in the lounge, looking at the mountains that could be made out in the distance, covered in snow. He sat on an old, reupholstered mahogany chair that had been my mother’s and before that, my grandfather’s. I knew it was weak and uncomfortable, but I thought it was pretty; more decorative than functional. I warned him that it could collapse and offered him an armchair to sit in. “No thanks,” he said to me. “In soft seats or plush velvet sofas, you can’t think. A semi-uncomfortable place, in which you have to be attentive to your body posture in order to maintain your balance well, helps a lot with your mental disposition. Reclining chairs, soft to the touch, do nothing more than diffuse the sensations, extending tactile perception. They dilute the limits of one’s own body into the surroundings and prevent the mind from being able to concentrate. In order to count on energy for thinking it’s necessary that one’s own images gain brightness, that they can be fixed or allowed to run, that they can be managed: an alert, awake mind. “What’s more,” he went on, “If you want some advice, my friend, I recommend that you always keep an uncomfortable chair like this one in your house. I cannot comprehend how governments for example try to lead their people politically from elegant rooms in which everything is soft, smooth and padded. Ideas do not arise from opulence, and new proposals even less. “To think, one needs to adopt appropriate body postures,” he reiterated. “But not only does this affect the activity of thinking… If you want to understand others well, in order to put yourself in their position, you need to adopt [moving in imitation] their body postures. Try to follow the physical gestures and attitudes of another person and you’ll see how quickly you manage to understand the direction of their mental acts. “So, the location and the positions of this sort of ‘vehicle’ that we have, and thanks to which we operate in the world, the postures of one’s own body, very strongly condition our mental directions and way of thinking.

14 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Silo Speaks”, page 694. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. “Try to keep this pretty chair—something quite uncomfortable—here in your house and you’ll see that on it you’ll find it easier to think, even managing to understand others better,” he insisted. “Adopt somewhat uncomfortable body positions and you’ll end up noticing that for new things to arise, something unstable is always better than something apparently more secure.” Processes

We were spending several days in Mendoza, this peaceful city with an almost rural rhythm, taking distance from the effervescence with which global events were unfolding and able to observe what was happening from afar. It was in this context of detachment and without pressure when the question about processes arose. “When we’re setting in motion a social movement, a political organism or orientating human structures and being references for some people, what is it useful to pay attention to as a priority?” I asked. “To things and to facts. It’s useful to pay attention to what’s concrete, to what’s happening. Attend to the process of events. Not to the anecdotal, but rather to the process. This flashy event we encounter: is it dynamic or is it striking a false note? The anecdotes are not the processes. The flashy details are usually a distraction from the direction that processes go in. “It’s useful to attend to uses15 and customs when looking over a longer term. Weak uses get replaced in the short term. Fashions are always changing, they last a short time and they usually wear themselves out. On the other hand you can discover a process in continuity, in the more permanent tendency. The same element is transported through different fashions; it resists the passage of time. “Weak uses impact strongly, they burst onto the scene, become established, and then decline and stop happening. Strong uses have a different dynamic. They’re profound customs, established, with roots. If you observe the objects, things and the directions that events go in, you’ll see the dynamic that they acquire. Notice what detaches from fanfare, try to understand the meanings that processes have. Pay attention to what’s modifying social consciousness, the uses and the customs. Look beyond a specific event, notice the meaning of such an occurrence. Processes depend on more powerful matters that are beneath the social consciousness. We must learn to observe them. It’s not enough to be up to date with what’s occurring. “In general people are behind events. Things happen and people follow them, they react. We’re interested in being ahead of events, anticipating what’s going to happen or at least to be moving hand in hand with events. The majority of people are behind events, looking at what’s already happened, surprised by the unexpected. It requires much more effort to understand the directions that events are taking and try to be ahead of them. It needs intelligence, the ability to establish coherent relationships between the factors being observed. This is a lot better than going at the same rhythm as events, simply understanding what’s happening. “It’s interesting to try to comprehend the dynamic beyond the fashions; to anticipate events and achieve a common intelligence; to set in motion actions; creating certain conditions of origin so that this common intelligence may unfold. Things don’t necessarily happen like clockwork, events don’t go in one direction by themselves. If they’re ascending processes, if it’s about human evolution, they require a lot of intelligence. “We need a broadly vigilant, awake attitude one that keeps watch over the human process. To keep watch is to not be asleep, it’s to be attentive. You keep watch over

15 ‘Uses’ is a specific word adopted here, in contrast to abuses. Usually people rebel when they experience abuses, but they do not question uses. When abuses stop, violence disappears. When uses change, a whole culture disappears and a new one emerges. the dead, you keep watch over weapons: you don’t sleep. They say that the flesh is weak but the spirit keeps watch. All of this means that we need to pay attention, to keep our eyes open. We’re interested in the direction that history and human events are going in, this is why we keep watch. “If you don’t pay any attention to processes, what makes you believe that they’ll develop themselves? They aren’t mechanical actions. They advance because human intentions accumulate in the same direction, they’re built, it’s not that they move by themselves. “In dialogue we all win. This is the first condition. If you keep watch, others will see what you’re doing and they’ll join in. And the more you keep watch over the whole, the better for everyone. “We’re talking about setting in motion joint activities, collective processes and not specific matters or interests. “We should pay a lot of attention to young people; they’re the future that’s coming. They’re starting with what’s new, that’s for sure. Because generations don’t succeed one another meekly, they always succeed one another with generational clashes and dialectics. The values that are established in older generations don’t interest them. Generations don’t succeed one another peacefully. We can already see this and it’s not difficult to understand. What’s happening is that they don’t have the same values. “Don’t be surprised if this time it’s in reverse! It may be that the others, the adults, now turn out to be very superficial while young people achieve profundity. Young people are now appearing. They’re something else; they’re what we’ve been expecting for decades. They’re fulfilling our expectations. The others, those over thirty years old, they’ve had their chance, and what have they done other than get themselves comfortably established? They don’t seem to have substantially changed anything. They’ve done nothing more than find their comfortable little place in the system. The youngest are seeking references, not in the mass media or among those in collar and tie. All you have to do is put yourself in tune with young people and you’ll perceive it. “People in general move with preconceived ideas based on interests that condition them; pre-dialogue conditions. For our part, we’ve been waiting for them, for young people for so long! We see that they’re criticised, that they’re spoken of as an ‘at risk group’, like ‘The Vulnerables’16, almost as if they were sick with AIDS or something! With this attitude of mistrust towards them and repression of their behaviour, they’re going to provoke catastrophes. It seems that adults don’t have even the most minimal self-criticism. They don’t even remember their own youth. Young people are appearing on the public scene in all latitudes, they’re a global phenomenon, very disordered, without references, all very messy, but with new impulses, they’re creative, rebellious. There they are, waiting. They’re around seventeen or eighteen years old. This new generational layer is appearing. Young people don’t want to participate in anything that’s contradictory for them, they don’t want to be complicit in the disgusting things they see. How else could they be other than disorientated with the pressures they face? “We aren’t talking about adulating the ephebes, we’re not admiring youth only because they’re young. We’re noticing the presence of a new generation that’s

16 Argentine TV show from 1999 about a group of people in therapy. already in motion on the historical scene and that doubtlessly will seek its manifestations. This is really a clash of times embodied in people. “Are you interested in anticipating processes? Start by paying attention to facts. What kind of things? To political, social, cultural occurrences. Don’t be dazzled by what politicians say. It’s not enough to know what they’re up to. Think about everything that happens below political events. Don’t be guided only by what the press says, there are many issues that don’t appear in any of the media, there are things that never make the headlines. And these things don’t exist? Let’s pay attention to what the press says, but many things go beyond what appears in the press, they’re very interesting but don’t constitute news. Let’s also be alert to the development of new artistic styles. History and human processes are a structure in which some phenomena are more advanced than others and normally they’re in the vanguard, those events that anticipate what’s to come can be observed in artistic production. Artists are people who’re very sensitive, they immediately detect the tendencies, they’re able to intuit them, they manage to feel them and anticipate what’ll come. It’s as if they had special radar. “So, if we’re interested in comprehending which tendencies will open up in the future, let’s pay attention to the changes in music styles, to new ways of ornamentation, to fashions that aren’t yet massive and to what’s behind the fashion. Let’s ask ourselves, what’s continuing to grow? What’s the new poetry, what is there in literature, let’s interest ourselves with the more obscure books that aren’t published, the ones that publishing houses discard because they won’t make it to best-seller list, let’s seek out new literature. There is a world beneath which is opening up and will occupy the time of the future. This is difficult to do because you need a lot of information, you have to have access to this new data. Therefore it could be good to track it between several people, with a small team of studious ones. Let’s remember that the age when one single human head was able to count on all the available information of the time came to an end with Pico della Mirandola. Then came the encyclopaedists: Diderot and D’Alambert who came and classified knowledge. If today you try to understand the world fully, if you want to observe its tendencies, it’s not enough to simply make an inventory. The best thing is to study it with a team of people who can track different aspects and comprehend the form that processes will take.” The Host

On arrival in Mendoza you could be certain that he’d be waiting for us, whether it was at Plumerillo airport or at the bus terminal. He made it a priority to come and meet us, to be with us, and he would dedicate all his time to us while we were in his city. Occasionally, on some of the many journeys that we made by car from Chile, there would be a fortunate coincidence where, before taking the turning to Chacras de Coria where Silo resided, the friend driving our vehicle would become aware that right then, on the motorway, the person driving the car in front of ours was Silo. He’d come to get us and accommodate us in the apartment that he used as an office right in the centre of the city. A small ritual would then precede our installation on the second floor: we’d go up the stairs by foot; he’d talk in detail about which keys the doors open with and we’d receive the full key ring from his hands. Then we’d visit the kitchen where he’d report that in the fridge there were provisions in case of any emergency and in the cupboard there was sufficient coffee, tea and sugar. He’d make sure that everything was connected and ready, clean and in perfect condition. We’d go into the living room and he would turn on the computer to show us the available programmes and the printer, ready to go; he’d explain how to turn the heater on and off, then the lights. In the wardrobe in the hallway we could choose towels, sheets for the beds and blankets, if necessary; a complete set for every guest. He did these tasks with such calmness that time would slow down and all vestige of hurry that came with the inertia of the visitors on arrival would be left behind to give way to an increasing relaxation, a feeling of being in a nice, ready and known space. Then we’d follow him to the bedrooms, he’d indicate the blinds that he recommended closing in the evening to mute the sounds that could emanate from the Mendoza night given that the apartment was so centrally located. Finally he’d show us the bathroom, with black tiles and a large bath, and give us the corresponding explanation of how to get hot or warm water for the shower, depending on one’s preference. We’d return to the living room, sit on the wooden chairs covered in a red and white Scottish tartan, and wait there for him to finish preparing the first coffee. Because, for sure, for the second one we’d go to a nearby bar on San Martin Avenue or on one of the streets running perpendicular such as the one owned by the gringos, those Italians, such good people who had the homemade bread snacks called raspaditas, prepared just like they used to make them in the olden days. Here we’d start to enter fully into theme. He always asked us on arrival how much time we had and he’d check on our return flights, if we had the tickets or if we needed to go to the bus terminal, or—if we’d come by car—when we were thinking to return in order to remove any concern we had about the immediate future, leaving the mind open to the present and the themes we had to deal with. Then we’d move through his city from one place to another, according to how the different conversations were going. In each place, a different subject, a sequence of ideas that would vary and be easy to remember later on because the themes were associated with the different places, to particular corners, to tables. We’d walk towards the broad Mendoza pedestrian street and look for a place to sit detached from the surroundings and we’d converse extensively about whatever it was that had led us to visit him on that occasion. We’d order ice creams, he usually ordered strawberry; we’d buy chocolates, he’d give us gifts of ‘cabsha’ chocolates and later, we’d go back to his car so that he could drive us to one of the restaurants in which he’d animatedly retake the thread of the argument. Always with his fantastic humour, his expansive gestures, he’d laugh out loud at the unusual descriptions with which he painted even the most complex developments, while time would pass from one course to the next, then to the dessert and the umpteenth coffee. Whether I was alone with him or with a group of friends, the whole of Mendoza was susceptible to being visited in the course of a trip: the centre and its bars, the beautiful old park, the hill, back to the centre and then to his house in Chacras by road. There the friendliness and wit of his wife, the affection of their sons and the playful relationship with his dog in the garden would make us feel more than comfortable, welcome, and extraordinarily well looked after. Then he’d drive us back while we continued in conversation, stopping once more at the local ice-cream shop to try the homemade produce, concluding with a synthesis of everything we’d talked about. Then he’d drop us off, very late at night for us to rest well in the apartment, the keys to which he’d already given us. This capacity of his to be so hospitable reduced any resistances, erased all reservations, awakened an enormous joy, allowed for the most genuine questions to flourish, gave rise to the open request for clarification that one needed, but above all it generated—at least in me—a very profound gratitude for the subtle destiny that had crossed his existence with mine and made it possible for me to learn something of his wisdom, to touch other realities and to comprehend the apparently incomprehensible. The Movement

“What is the Humanist Movement today?” Silo asked in one of the meetings that we had every six months in different places in order to agree on our actions. I remember that on this occasion we were in Buenos Aires, having to meet in Obras Sanitarias stadium because, being so many of us, there were no conference rooms or hotels where we could all fit. Thirty three times we’d met and every six months there was greater participation. Alongside me were Ricardo Jullian, who’d come from Rio de Janeiro, and Mónica Mena with whom I’d travelled from Santiago. In the stands there was translation to many languages because whoever took the microphone spoke in their own language. Sitting between Franco di Nitto, one of the Neapolitans, and José Caballero from Madrid, Silo tried to respond to this question regarding what this thing of ours really is: what is the Humanist Movement now? For me it was perhaps one of the most beautiful definitions that he gave and one that, in my opinion, still remains very valid: What is the Humanist Movement today? Is it perhaps a refuge in the face of the general crisis of the system in which we live? Is it a sustained critique of a world that is becoming more dehumanised day by day? Is it a new language and a new paradigm, a new interpretation of the world and a new landscape? Does it represent an ideological or political current, a new aesthetic, a new scale of values? Is it a new spirituality, destined to redeem subjectivity and diversity through concrete action? Is the Movement perhaps the expression of a struggle in support of the dispossessed, the abandoned and the persecuted? Or is it a manifestation of those who feel the monstrosity inherent in human beings not having the same rights and the same opportunities? The Movement is all of this and much more. It’s the practical expression of the ideal to Humanise the Earth and the aspiration of moving towards a Universal Human Nation. It’s the seed of a new culture in this civilisation that’s becoming planetary and which will have to change its course, accepting and valuing diversity and giving equal rights and identical opportunities to all human beings because of the dignity that they deserve by the simple fact of having been born. The Humanist Movement is the external manifestation of the profound changes that are taking place within human beings and that are history itself: tragic, disconcerting, but always growing. It’s a weak voice which announces, ahead of time, what’s to come beyond the human beings that we’ve known. It’s poetry and a rainbow of diverse colours. It’s a David facing an insolent Goliath. It’s the softness of water against the hardness of rock. It’s the strength of weakness: a paradox and a Destiny. My friends, even when we don’t immediately achieve the results that we’ve hoped for, this seed already exists and awaits the arrival of the times that are to come. To all and from heart to heart, the fervent desire for this approaching social change and the hope for this silent transformation which, beyond all compulsion, beyond all impatience, beyond all violent aspiration, beyond all guilt and all feelings of failure, is already nestling in the intimate depths of many humanists. Without Limits

Silo was someone of very rapid reactions, he evaluated events on the move, always looking for how to improve and give a new impulse to the process. The same night a planned milestone was concluded, he‘d meet with those who’d organised it, re-watch the videos, look at the photos that gave account of what took place, relive each one of the moments, and attentively consider details, successes and errors with a great sense of humour. He’d reach conclusions and perfectly integrate the events in order to immediately give life to new images and launch more actions into the future. He held that the future is what has priority in the consciousness and he attributed the capacity to attract human behaviour in a certain direction to images disposed towards the future. He’d say that the representation of a possible and better tomorrow is what allows the modification of the present and facilitates every new attempt. He affirmed that the pressure of external conditions wasn’t enough for one to venture out, seeking to drive forward transformations but rather it was necessary to notice that such changes can become possible and that they depend on human action. I wasn’t surprised that he immediately wanted to review and evaluate one of the works that we’d done at the beginning of the new century—the ‘Retreat of the Force’—which Karen Rohn had given in Chile with people invited from several countries. He wanted to be personally informed about how we’d lived it, what experiences we’d had, how intense, if it could be eventually improved, he was looking to determine whether or not it would be convenient to reproduce the same situation in other places. In fact, we’d taken several days to intensely concentrate on ourselves in an old house outside the city, going increasingly deeper within ourselves, combining a level of consciousness of full vigil and attention with a poetic opening. This we did thanks to studying and meditating on his book, ‘The Look Within’17 as well as repeated practices of the Experience of Force, following the explanations literally as described in the different chapters. All of us reached states of greater lucidity, new comprehensions, a mental amplitude and important reconciliations. When we met resistances or problems, we’d develop an attitude of detachment, investigation and interest in the difficulty detected. We even learnt to give thanks, because without defining those impediments, it would be impossible to advance. How can we overcome an obstacle if we don’t know what it is? This form of working became very useful in daily life too; a very friendly way of not identifying with ourselves or our compulsions which allowed us to overcome the limits we encountered. I gave him my testimony and my impressions with total sincerity. In the measure that the conversation unfolded, being just the two of us seated at a small table in a pavement café on one of Santiago’s busiest avenues, I felt that such an intimacy had been established that it was possible to express my thoughts with total freedom, without any kind of inhibition or self-censorship. We spoke about the Experience of Force, the intense register of the psychophysical energy, the mental energy that accompanies certain images and which could be led

17 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Humanise the Earth”, page 3. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. to certain internal spaces with an associated evident change in the level of consciousness. We talked about the inner transformation that never stops, that has no confines, but which is something that needs foundation. We chatted about how to give a meaning, a transcendent direction to one’s own life and how over time the management of the energy can contribute to orientating oneself in this direction. He said to me that effectively all our work is intentional. He highlighted the interest in broadening knowledge of the different regions of the space of representation. Normally, we only pass through the inner areas and dwellings that are already known to us although they aren’t the only ones that exist. We live in the psychological states that become the most familiar instead of exploring new regions, more elevated spaces, places of greater breadth, comprehension and luminosity. As the afternoon wore on, the pedestrians passed by and the bustling traffic of the city intensified. Disregarding everything happening around us, we talked about how such a strong energy can be communicated from person to person, alluding to the previous occasions in which Silo had passed the Force to large numbers of people. I said something about how I wasn’t surprised about his capacities given that he was an ‘unusual’ being; that surely he’d been born already someone ‘different’, a very remarkable and ‘special’ man… He stopped me sharply and looking directly at me he immediately replied, “I’d like to clarify that I was born with the same conditions that you or anyone else have. I don’t know what beliefs you may have formed for yourself, but nothing in me is different to other people. It’s just that, since the moment I could use reason, maybe since the age of four or five, I haven’t let a day go by without paying attention to myself, without trying to do something to develop myself, without seeking to improve myself. Every day of my life I’ve worked internally and also, since I was somewhat older, I’ve applied myself intensely to the attempt to make a contribution so that the world may advance, contributing so that dignified conditions may exist for the lives of everyone, pushing to see if we can have equal opportunities. There are no differences of a natural order between us. We’re both human beings. Only in my case I’ve searched every day for that perfection, whereas, from what you’re telling me, it seems that you’ve passed through life sideways, often forgetting about yourself.” He felt that I was somewhat bewildered and made his words gentler. “What I said has disturbed you. Maybe you’d prefer to attribute to me the characteristics that you seek within; to project onto me what you yearn for. But it’s interesting to comprehend that we can all go much further than the merely natural, if we count on more energy we’re going to reach new spaces. There are no limits to what makes us human. We’re interested in liberating energy from where it’s been trapped in order to project it much further. “If we’re attempting an intentional, simultaneous social and personal change, we need to be able to count on the greatest possible strength. There are regions of consciousness that are pressing us and normally we aren’t capable of capturing the translations that come from them because energy doesn’t reach there. But if we mobilise the Force, the consciousness can integrate those contents from new zones, thereby accessing another vision about the world. We aren’t talking about changing what we’re doing, but rather incorporating new elements and expanding ourselves towards previously unknown spaces, without necessarily going directly to the point, but rather in a roundabout way, opening other regions of the mind. “But I tell you,” he insisted, “with all the sincerity that we’ve been talking, an occasional retreat is not enough, anecdotes aren’t sufficient to achieve a transformation in oneself. Daily dedication is necessary, of course without forcing, with a lot of liking, in a friendly way, an application to oneself and to others, inside and outside, inner spaces and the social world. The direction of consciousness is towards integration and towards permanent growth. It’s towards the achievement of inner plenitude and completion in the world. The human consciousness has no limits.” Why not try it seriously and steadily? Was there anything to lose other than one’s own habits, one’s already known emotions, and the restricted, bounded and superficial way of living? I felt a strong intention vibrate in me, a purpose like a compass that would drive me to reveal these infinite spaces, crossing the threshold of the apparently impassable. The Iraq War

After the fall of the Twin Towers resulting from the attacks on New York, we went out in our multitudes—London, Santiago, Montreal, Rome, Madrid and Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Mexico City, the majority of the largest cities. We filled avenues, parks, streets and squares to demand a response that wouldn’t result in war, trying to avoid Bush’s bellicose response in Iraq. Maybe there had never been demonstrations bringing together more people. Millions of people raised their voice in chorus. Perhaps never before were there so many pacifists registering the enormous failure of their actions. The story is known by all and moreover the war was broadcast on TV in real time. Despite the huge campaign to avoid the invasion of Baghdad, with so many people going to the streets calling on their governments not to intervene, even when the British and Italians demanded the immediate withdrawal of their own occupying troops, nothing changed. It was a very powerful mobilisation but nevertheless we were unable to avoid the disaster. In those days, the outlook for the future was very bleak. “The dyke has burst,” Silo said. “It happened a long time ago but only now are we seeing the effects. The system of containment and regulation has broken down; this framework in which everything fits, the one capable of containing beliefs, of tacitly regulating social organisation and giving foundation to what people consider to be good as well as what they think is bad. It’s a large construction that has accumulated from one historical moment to the next, a moral culture that regulates human beings and societies, the limits within which events take place. All of this has ended. “Why has it burst? Maybe simply because the material had deteriorated, it’s suffered from exhaustion. It was a very ancient form that silently lost its validity and we’ve only recently realised it.” He urged us to value the national campaigns calling for peace carried out in different cities with strong visibility. Governments may, or may not, listen to the people, they have the opportunity to follow them or turn their backs on them, in any case it’s very important to carry out these demonstrations, raise one’s voice, express the massive synchronicity that demands a nonviolent response from their leaders. “More fundamentally, what we’re witnessing,” he continued, “is a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. They—the United States—don’t realise the enormous hatred they’ve generated in the world. They’ve imposed their business culture, ransacked natural resources and invaded territories but the Islamic world doesn’t want to be defrauded, it’s fed up and the moment has come in which what they feel is that they want to kill! The West has committed many atrocities, too many. They’ve reached everywhere on the planet doing what they want, without any consideration, without respect for local cultures, their customs, ideas and feelings. Now the people are starting to react. “The period of impunity has come to an end and we’re witnessing an era in which reciprocity is appearing as a response. For centuries, they’ve plundered without punishment, established their colonies as they wanted, unleashed tremendous wars, famines, pillaged and robbed people blind… Now the reciprocity has begun and these people have started to react: ‘You’ve stung me so much, that I’ll attack you in return and I’ll kill you.’ This situation is neither light nor simple, it’s not a capricious or transient reaction, nor is it just one more trick; we’re observing a veritable clash of civilisations. The Yankees don’t understand why others are reacting now when they didn’t before. It seems that an out of control phenomenon of hatred has been unleashed. “The United States was surprised by the attacks on them, on those two ‘kiosks’ that were sent flying in Manhattan. They should know perfectly well what we all know: many countries, Islamic among others, have atomic weapons and aren’t exactly aligned to the West. The aggression has been enormous and sustained over a long time, so even if in the Arab World there have been revolutions, even if nationalism has existed, etc., until now this has been mainly anti-colonialist, without the strength of a religious element in its engine. But today the impact of the West has strengthened and the response that’s emerging is supported by the force of beliefs and faith. “What’s giving identity to peoples is religion in its most fanatical aspect. It’s happening with Islam, but we’ve also seen fundamentalism roaming in Israel and in the declarations recently made by the Catholic Pope. The fundamentalist tendency is being expressed in the three great monotheistic religions. “Religious beliefs have much more strength than national identities. What are nations? What are states? Very recent organisations that cannot be compared to the roots of religions. Fundamentalism arises because the stronger you feel about your religion, the more you defend it. Radicalised responses are emerging capable of giving an identity to populations. Islam, Judaism, Christianity are becoming radicalised. What you consider sacred you defend at all costs, so be careful if they attack it! “It seemed that recently we were advancing towards a dialogue between different cultures. We’ve been working for this convergence, but with this war in Iraq that possibility has come to an end. Also in Europe the war on terror is wielded today as an excuse to develop a great battle between religious identities. “It seems like this is only about Iraq, but the issue is much deeper. Hatred has been unleashed—the end of impunity—between the different believers’ looks. Identity is given by the most fanatical aspect of religion. “Everything has become worn out in people, their connections, values and beliefs and the destroyed social fabric and this favours something dangerous occurring. It doesn’t seem that anything now can be born that’s capable of changing what’s happening. Powers emerge in order to dispute what others have: the territory they occupy, the economy and their available resources. Islam is disputing economic power. A power going in the opposite direction to the one already established cannot emerge. “The process is showing us a growing decomposition. Everything is being rapidly dismantled, even religiosity and what will come after, in the future, will be very different to what we know now. “The world’s evolution is going very fast, we’re all aware of the acceleration with which things are mutating, but people don’t recognise that in this very rhythm their own inner situation is also changing. “The dyke burst a while ago. It had the function of channelling flows and energies. It served as a structure to contain phenomena of culture, morality, values and beliefs. Now we’re starting to see the effects. “Historical phenomena have a certain degree of inertia. Until recently we thought that we were living in a normal world and we didn’t notice new things. Now the worldwide landscape has changed and in front of these events we realise the long process of dragging, of carrying a burden, of deterioration that’s been taking place. The framework has broken because the material has worn out; it’s become exhausted having fulfilled its function for a long time. “In front of the historical resistances that we’re experiencing, these enormous difficulties, many people try to hold on to or reconstruct what was there before, but this is impossible. Conservatism is blowing up in its own face. Nothing is functioning normally. The catastrophe is already here! “In urban areas we’re currently on the edge of something dangerous, any small thing that happens will be very strong. Nevertheless, there’s an inertia in the look that we have, it’s difficult for us to assimilate what’s happening. The dyke has burst and the water is taking everything with it: people, machines, cities. We’re also immersed in this. What can we do in the face of this tremendous crisis that’s taking everything in the direction of destruction? We’re part of this moment and the only thing we can do is try to make our signal visible, to accompany it. And it’ll be the people themselves who tell us where to go. “We can continue to give a signal where ever we are, in every place where we can be found. This is not to give direction to this process of growing destructuring, but rather just to make a point of view seen. People will show us where to go. Let’s give a strong reference. The direction that this will take is not defined. “Every power wants the same thing. And it seems that populations aren’t yet sufficiently beaten up enough. In the year 1500 of our era if you organised a referendum about whether the Earth was flat or round, 99% would say that it was flat! Today the same is happening. It seems that we need a great destabilisation for human beings to change, a strong shock that perhaps makes it possible to truly want something else. Failure is what may lead to something more profound, to feel a need for real transformation. “In reality we don’t have to invent anything else, the historical moment—seen from another perspective—is very favourable for change. We already have everything we need in terms of ideas, proposals and doctrine, a basis for the change of direction, but we need to achieve visibility, to make our signal seen very highly and clearly. “Events are going at increasing speed, with increasing acceleration. We can make ourselves listen and accompany this difficult moment. But also, let’s be clear that anything could happen in an instant. This isn’t a game! We’re in a historical process that’s accelerating and is without direction. We can’t put the brakes on anything on this scale, much less orientate it. Today everything could end up anywhere. For now we can only go out with strength, with a lot of force and resolution. To do so is urgent. “This isn’t about disheartening our friends. Don’t misunderstand. The moment is complex and it’s become necessary to comprehend that in these times a social dimension isn’t enough, rather it’s also important to consider the psychic aspect of historical processes. Populations are clamouring for attention and we should be able to listen to them very well before doing anything: our humanist friends in Rome, Italians in general, are expressing their fear that now a bomb will be put in their city. As happened in Atocha station in Madrid, like in London, now the Italians are scared by what could happen to them. “The panorama could become heavy and there haven’t been any explosions yet. When an entire city is blown up, how will the ground beneath you feel? More than destabilised. Those two buildings came tumbling down and look at the mess it caused. And if an entire city is blown up? It’s possible. With the disorder they have and the quantity of variables, it’s possible and uncontrollable. If something like that happens, how will the ground beneath you feel? “It’s useful to listen to this fear, because it arises in brave men and women, nonviolent people. It’s worthwhile to comprehend that what we’re witnessing is a very profound cultural clash. The power being disputed has its roots in what populations consider to be most sacred. It’s not only with social proposals that this mess will be fixed, this is something serious that has to lead to the revealing of a nonviolent sacredness within one’s consciousness, a spirituality capable of resisting violence. “Let’s get ready because there are still many difficulties! Let’s reinforce in ourselves this psychic dimension, let’s make ourselves strong in this inner dimension of depth. Let’s develop our own spirituality, without dogma, without tablets, without fundamentalism, without violence. Let’s continue to favour convergence and dialogue between cultures, between religions. Let’s keep our voices raised, clamouring for social change, but let’s also call urgently for inner change. Let’s give a strong, very loud, signal so that it may be discernible! “These are times of urgency. There’s nothing to wait for!” Who am I?

Silo’s Message18 has a few phrases that especially invite us to daily meditation: Do not let your life pass by without asking yourself, ‘Who am I?’ Do not let a day pass by without giving an answer to yourself about who you are. We talked many times about this. If someone were to practice this with permanence, they’d soon start to make quite unusual discoveries. It turns out that we find ourselves to be someone else. ‘Who I am’ gets a different answer every time. “And doesn’t this tell you something?” Negro asked. “Through some paths, such as this one of asking yourself a few little questions, you can reach an understanding that the ‘I’ is totally illusory: a simple composite of memories, sensations and representations which, if we vary a few memories for example, becomes destabilised and starts to feel that it’s someone else. If we modify a few sensations, it becomes odd and the ‘I’ becomes altered. Or isn’t this what happens in sickness, with fever and pain? A few minimally different sensations and everything changes. “This very useful thing, the ‘I’, turns out to be very variable. But we only realise its variability when we ask ourselves who we are every day. “Usually we’re under the illusion that the ‘I’ is something permanent and it’s precisely this rigidity which is illusory. “Should we surpass the ‘I’, transcend the ego? “That isn’t possible. The ‘I’ is what operates in the intersection of life experiences and if through some procedure you manage to disarticulate it, you can’t do anything, not even cross the road. “It’s what allows you to insert yourself in this time and this space that we’re in and within which life’s activities develop. You can function, do things and relate to others thanks to the sensors of the different senses that are open to the world and the taking of data from memory while you’re living. “But don’t even think about a permanent ‘I’! You die and it’s all over. “What can you do? Nothing. “The only thing you can do, if there’s an interest, is discover that what you believe is illusory. “In very rare situations, very provisionally and for especially brief instants, like a spark, one can emerge from the stream of the ‘I’ and enter into another space and time, a profound mental space that isn’t the usual one that perception delivers to us. There’s a different space in the human consciousness and I can find myself in a time that isn’t sequential with the one I live in. This other space-time is The Profound. It’s possible to pass rapidly to this different dimension. Fortunately we come out of it again and we become connected to things once again. “These levels of deepening exist, inner spaces in which phenomena can become interesting. “This is the mental state that different mystical currents access. For example, if you work with the yantras, you’ll be brought to the interiority of their spaces. When a

18 Silo, “Silo’s Message”. The text may be found online at: http://www.silo.net/system/documents/2/original/Mensaje_en.doc monk on Mount Athos repeats the Prayer to the Heart in his cell for years and years, he enters special internal states. “A dervish dances and twirls around like a spinning top, a shaman advances with their drum, and the Indians of Puebla reproduce the exotic figures of the mantras in the fabrics they make. The ingestion of substances such as mescaline led them to access extraordinary experiences. “The ‘Myths’19 describe the gods and beings that inhabit profound spaces. The ‘Guided Experiences’20 open an interesting field of investigation for whoever wishes to explore. “When historical spaces and times become altered, these kinds of underground layers break and you go to profound levels. “You could advance with the question, who am I? You stay there quietly, you meditate on it and you get confused. Or instead it makes new questions arise that allow you to achieve a different mental dimension. We have references in these fields. There’s Buddha sitting under the tree. What was he doing? What was he thinking about? Maybe that human beings are perishable compounds, constantly changeable, illusory and he was working by a process of elimination, rather than accumulation. He was removing illusions, emptying, getting rid of them. “He was removing elements of memory and nullifying perception and future images. Get out! He was going into his mental world until reaching illumination and entering Nirvana. It’s a world of illumination, different. He did it by going to the empty spaces. “In all civilisations we can trace these techniques to be able to enter into the depths. They always happen through trance situations which horrify ordinary, average people. They’re states in which a disconnection from the world of phenomena is produced. You enter into trance and what do you do? In every civilisation practices exist that make it possible to pass through this trance and go into other worlds. “If you ask, ‘who am I?’ you can discover the provisional nature of your ‘I’, as well as the illusion of everything you believe in that moment. I mean by this that asking yourself this question, day by day, allows you to perhaps continue to grow internally. And it’s from there that you can advance towards the more profound regions of the mind. “Who am I? Where am I going? If I’m not even ‘I’ with permanence, where am I going? “If I deepen this simple meditation then I can discover the expression of energetic phenomena with manifestations of the Force, the circulation of energy in living beings and people, the form in which this energy acts to structure inner spaces. “Everything begins with the Who am I? If I can draw consequences about these questions, then it’s from there that I’ll advance in this path. “Maybe in these complex times, the way to enter into these depths of consciousness is through this little path.

19 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Universal Root Myths”, page 243. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003 20 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Guided Experiences”, page 99. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003 “The different elements that constitute Silo’s Message and are formalised there, come from those spaces, they emerge from within, they’re given form and organised in The Message. They’re timeless, a-historical, and they have nothing to do with this space. Like myths. Factors converge in a historical moment and produce an emergence of this type, coming from distant times and spaces. They’re ancient things. “With these simple questions we appeal to The Profound in human beings and if people are orientated in this direction, if they really search with sincerity then they’ll find support within themselves. If this is working in human beings and if there’s an increasing current in people, in societies, then this will take off. If there are conditions for this to occur, who could help it, speed it up or hold it back? They’re profound conditions. And this will either go on because this is its moment, or it won’t go on because it isn’t. “This long journey around the inner spaces, mystical events and the confluence of factors prove to us that we’re in the field of myths, we’re in serious things, not in the ridiculous.” ‘Who am I?’ is not just any old question. The Hermitage

The temperate autumn sun of early May was filtering through the leaves that hadn’t yet fallen from the vines overhanging the terrace of our house. This is where we were sitting, looking at the garden and spending time with friends who’d come from Florence to participate in the inauguration of the Park of Study and Reflection, Los Manantiales, the previous day. Everything had been very inspiring and they were as happy as children. They wanted to see some books and talk briefly before continuing their journey to Argentina. They had some concerns about the Parks and were asking questions but were confident that they’d be resolved in the measure that the construction process of their own place, located in Umbria, advanced. Then, from the room where he was staying and surely hearing the hubbub, Silo came out to greet them. We widened the circle of chairs on the terrace and brought out drinks; I knew how special this encounter could be for the Italians. The Master was also radiant, very satisfied with the celebrations of the previous day. Like many times before, after having concluded what was planned and in the tranquillity of not having anything to do other than to share with friends, relaxed and with time, he started to recount old stories, anecdotes from the times in which he built and lived in the stone house known as the Hermitage in the middle of the mountains. “Those peaks aren’t like the ones in the Alps,” he told them. “There everything’s very civilised with their tall pine trees ready for taking photos, with public telephones and flowers on the side of the road… The Andes, on the other hand, are the most dehumanised! They’re rocky, hard mountains without vegetation in a semi-desert zone, quite monstrous. They’re places where rivers spring forth and obliterate everything they find in their path: mud, stones, sticks. Mount Aconcagua reaches 7,000 metres high and Tupungato, a volcano, is 5,800m. In our Park we’re almost at 3,000 metres and exposed to blasts of intense winds. It’s on a different scale to the European mountains. Sometimes you have to walk with support, holding onto walking sticks so that the wind doesn’t blow you over. If you walk slowly, you can go very far, without distress. You rise slowly. The eight hectares that make up our place are part of the mountain.” While I served more drinks, I thought I noticed in my friends a growing feeling of jubilation in front of such challenges imposed by nature. Everything was an adventure for them to reach these southern summits which were also very meaningful. “Down there, just on the land adjacent to Punta de Vacas Park, there are some mules. Those animals live for a long time and among them is a mule called Mouse. What a funny name, no? That’s the old mule that helped us to bring the timber that we took to the other side of the river when the hermitage was built. It was the one used by the old man, Vergara, a local who helped us a lot. When, years later, the old man died the mule went off, becoming lost in the hills. Recently it returned, it was seen for the first time in the place known as Puente del Inca, very close to Aconcagua and from there it came towards Curva del Tiempo21, where our land begins. It happened when we were preparing for the 30th anniversary celebration

21 A place where the road curves right at the entrance to Punta de Vacas Park, named Curva del Tiempo (the Weather Bend) as there are usually different weather conditions on either side.. when we put the Monolith in the same place where the speech took place in 1969. Yes, in May ‘99 was right when we saw the mule return. You’d still be able to recognise Mouse, the mule, even today. It came to live there.” The Tuscan friends were laughing a lot at this story, imagining a mule whose name referred to such a different animal. They asked why it would’ve returned thirty years later, whether maybe it had come back to die there, maybe it felt somehow that it belonged to those slopes, as if it continued to be linked to what we did after such a space of time… For my part, I offered a few snacks to eat so that the moment could be prolonged, going back to the stories of those first times when Silo lived alone in his stone house, still before the time when he made his first public appearance. As the Italians were ready to go up to the mountains, he recommended that once there they stop to drink hot chocolate at Carlitos Toconá’s place. “He’s always there,” Silo told them “He’s like the stones. He has lived in the high mountains since he was a little boy and he came to visit the hermitage to drink good hot chocolate with me. Of course, I prepared the drink very thick and since then it became his custom. Now he serves it to those who visit him in the hamlet of Punta de Vacas. Because now it’s no longer a village like it used to be, with a train line, a post office and an active little school with a teacher and pupils. This settlement is now dying out like a candle, there are very few survivors left; one of them is Carlitos, who serves soup and good, thick chocolate.” “And you, how did you live at such tremendous altitude? How did you manage in your stone house?” asked Francesca Lucchesi. “The climate was very difficult, not to mention the blizzards! Gusts of wind filtered through everywhere, through the holes between the stones that the walls of the house were made from. It had a single square room, with galvanised iron sheets for a roof and on them were placed some heavy stones to stop them flying away. The wind whistled… I’d taken a dark red, metal trunk where I kept dried biscuits. One day I heard a noise, and bang! A fox ran away with some of them. The foxes went in looking for something to eat. I spent all day fighting with the foxes. It was a war against the wind, the foxes and the intense cold of the place. Not to mention the border guards… A disaster! I’d come to think in peace, I didn’t want any problems. I was seeking to dedicate myself to my things; in return I got all these inconveniences. Even reading was difficult. I had a light, a Soviet lamp with a thermocouple. You can imagine how it looked to the soldiers who came there and turned everything upside down and found a Soviet lamp! It disturbed them that it was Soviet. Ridiculous! “How was the lamp?” enquired Tiziana Santinelli “Tell us the details.” “Well, it was a thing that had various flaps that allowed it to be turned and inserted over a kerosene lamp of the type that are used for camping nowadays. The little kerosene lamp gave a very weak light, but its heat rose through the thermocouple tube and there were some terminals, it had a positive and negative terminal, and could produce a continuous current that could feed—from the small kerosene lamp— an electric light bulb of 25 watts. Ingenious, right? “I went there to not disturb anyone and so that no one would come and interrupt me. But you see, the foxes, the winds… it wasn’t exactly peaceful. One day, very early, the sun had just risen and I looked out, towards the valley, and what do I see? Many dark spots. I observe that the spots are moving. They aren’t foxes, they seem to be somewhat bigger. I counted seventy-two spots moving towards the hermitage. They were armed with machine guns! This was 1969. They’d even come to the solitude where I lived and the soldier in charge came forward. “‘Good day,’ I say. “‘Good day,’ he replies. “‘Put your hands up!’ “‘Of course,’ and I put my hands up. “‘You have to come with us.’ Of I course I will accompany you… “Here there will be problems, I said to myself. Because everything was completely surreal, imagine! “I went inside to look for my backpack and I took out a small paper to show them. It was the deed of ownership. Because there was an owner of the twenty thousand hectares that make up the property. This is something from way back, since the Spaniards who assigned these remote and uncultivable places and the deeds were passed from the great-grandparents to the grandparents, to the sons and grandsons, from generation to generation, until the current owner with whom we went to speak and asked him to rent us a patch of 100 by 100 metres, there where the water-chute spurts out of the ground. The gentleman thought it was so funny that I wanted to set up a place there that he said that he’d only accept a few coins in return. It was a symbolic sum. We made him a pretty, little wooden box, and on the lid we stuck thirty coins, a quite interesting object. In return, he gave us a rental contract for ninety-nine years, signed and everything, which we had copies of, one of which I kept in my backpack. When the guards came to arrest me, I showed them the papers saying, ‘Be careful, you’re on private property.’” All the Italians erupted in laughter, imagining the scene and eating biscuits under the vines, maybe thinking about the fox. “‘Private property? What did you say? Put your hands up and let’s be having you!’” “I always obediently went along with the formalities,” he pointed out with irony. “So we started to descend, seventy-two plus one. We crossed the river. There wasn’t much water. We all crossed. Even in those days, once on the other side, there was a path between the mountains that led to the village of Punta de Vacas. In this outpost were parked trucks and motorbikes. Then a ridiculous situation occurred. One truck set off, the first vehicle, full of soldiers, surrounded by motorbikes in front and at the sides. This was followed by a second truck, in which only I was standing in the back. There was a guard driving, another one who accompanied in the passenger seat and in the back of the uncovered truck, in the empty storage space, I stood alone. Other trucks followed full of guards armed with machine guns in a convoy, one after the other. A convoy of trucks on absolutely deserted roads. Motorbikes in front, motorbikes behind, motorbikes on either side, driving until finally reaching the village that at that time had life as it was still inhabited. Of course all the old people came out to watch, being curious, they wanted to see what was going on. I looked at those on one side, then those appearing on the other side, I recognised them and greeted the people, waving to my right and left. We reached the station. “‘Get down!’ I get down. “‘Go inside!’ I go inside. “‘Sit down!’ I sit, surrounded by so many guys who could have killed each other. “‘Wait here!’ and, well, I wait. Half an hour passed by. “‘The Commander wants to see you.’ “A few soldiers go in front, others behind, me in the middle… walking a few steps. In the office they say to him, ‘Sir, we have brought him! The delinquent.’ “‘Very good. Dismissed!’ Everyone leaves and I remain in front of a large table; at the other end, the Commander. “‘Very nice to meet you,’ he says to me, ‘I’d like you to do me the honour of having lunch with me.’ “‘Of course!’ I say to him. “If he wants me to get up, I get up, to get down, I get down, to eat lunch, I’ll eat lunch. We both sit down at either end of the table and a few guys come to serve the courses. Both of us eat what we’re given. He didn’t say a word and neither did I. He finished his plate, and I finished mine. They served a second course and both of us eat it. He remains silent and me too. They bring him a piece of fruit and one for me. Lunch was coming to an end and nothing was happening. Then suddenly he broke the silence throwing his cutlery onto the plate. Plaff! “‘So,’ he said. And the dialogue started. “‘I know, I have found out, that there will be a rally here.’ “We were at the end of April, some fifteen days from the public rally that we’d prepared. “‘It will be a meeting,’ I said to him. “‘Ok, and how many people are going to come?’ He asked. “‘There will be around fifty to one hundred people.’ “‘No, no, no… The information we have is that some eighty thousand people are going to come. If eighty thousand people come, I’m going to have to arrest them. You know there can be no meetings; the military are in charge. If eighty thousand people come, I’m going to have to arrest them. And if I arrest them, what am I going to feed them, eh?’ “He stood up and started to pace across the room. “‘What am I going to feed them?’ “‘Commander, there’s no problem. We’ll be around fifty people,’ I said. “And in reality, no more than two hundred came. That’s how it was. There weren’t eighty thousand, but they filled the place with batteries of machine guns. They closed the road to Chile so that people couldn’t come from there, they intimidated the people from Mendoza. What didn’t they do so that eighty thousand people wouldn’t arrive, because what was he going to feed them, eh? “‘You’ll see what to do, Commander,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be there on the 4th of May.’ “‘We’ll have to take measures,’ he said, raising his hand in gesture of dismissal and bringing the lunch to an end. “I left. They weren’t polite enough to give me a lift back by truck. I had to walk. I’d arrived at the village with a tremendous show and I departed alone, walking slowly. The people of the village were scrutinising me, no one said anything. Of course they didn’t approach, looking from behind the curtains of their windows… Toc, toc, toc… toc, toc, toc… went the sound of my footsteps, while the wind howled. Totally out of proportion! All wrong!” Simone Ciapelli, Tiziana Santinelli, Paolo Vecchi, Paola Poggi, Francesca Lucchesi and the other friends from Florence sitting on the terrace, were laughing so much that surely they believed that this was just a story, a fable, elaborate fiction in the solitude in which oxygen is thinner and everything is rarefied due to the altitude. However, many times I heard the same story of the foxes, the thermocouple, the guards, and the Commander desperately concerned with what he’d feed the people in the case that eighty thousand people would come to listen to Silo. The stories experienced by Silo in his stone hermitage were all consistent. They were the events themselves that bordered on mythical, on the surreal. 2010: The Year We Make Contact

When Silo called inviting us to dinner it was several weeks after Rafa Edwards had circulated a message saying that Carmen Gloria Ayala, an avid reader and devourer of books, had seen the following paragraphs in one of the stories in Ena Ruitort’s book, ‘Water of a Thousand Colours’22: The great steel monolith was many metres high so it would be visible from all sides and to make sure the wind would never blow it over. Nor would it ever be covered by snow, erected as it was in the highest part of the Andes so that it could even be seen from the Moon. As I looked at it in this glorious month of August, along with all my friends, I felt I was at peace with myself, that everything had a meaning, and thanks to it I could now live that moment. There were thousands of people swirling around, coming from all parts of the Earth. There’d been a really crazy time in the province since the hotels couldn’t cope. But as everything was being done with great enthusiasm and it had been well planned, things were turning out marvellously. We estimated that more than a hundred thousand people had come for the celebration. Many came with very luxurious and well-equipped caravans which solved the accommodation problem for many who hadn’t found places in hotels. To all intents and purposes a new and mobile town arose in less than a week. We installed canteens in inflatable tents that could hold four thousand people where meals from all cultures were served: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Chilean, etc. On the day in question we gathered in the large outdoor amphitheatre to listen to the authorities, who were unable to hide their astonishment at seeing such a flood of happy people and had decided to join the event, even daring to suggest that it was something organised by them. Finally, Luis got up and was received by an ovation that lasted several minutes. ‘There’ll be an echo and the echo will multiply and there’ll be so many of us that they won’t be able to count us,’ were his first words. And he said something that only I heard, ‘I once told you that it would be possible for you to see me again, someday.’ During that time Rafa’s circular had been passing from person to person, as a growing rumour. As it was spreading it carried the idea that perhaps Ena had anticipated events that later took place and had put them in writing. Almost as if she had Edgar Allan Poe’s ability23, she could’ve anticipated events that at that time we were just beginning to plan but hadn’t yet taken place. We were preparing the final rally of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence that, starting in New Zealand and passing through all the continents, would conclude at an altitude of 2,800 metres in the Andes. We were expecting that more than one

22 Ena Ruitort, ‘Agua de Mil Colores’, (Water of a thousand colours), page 187, Editorial Virtual, Santiago, Chile 23 Silo, Collected Works, Volume I. “Day of the Winged Lion”, “The Case of Poe”, page 385. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003 hundred thousand people from all latitudes would be able to come. Some would be accommodated in the Park of Study and Reflection, others in hotels in the area, young people in the campsites of Uspallata Valley, several wanted to bring caravans and the vast majority would go to the mountain just for the day, which already implied a significant traffic jam at customs, border controls, airports and roads. We sought the support of the government and local authorities, but eventually we had to arrange everything ourselves without support from anyone else as has always been the case in our history. But in those months we were still looking for ways to get through the difficulties that the organisation of such an event involved. The fact is that Rafa sent that message around, and the issue of Ena apparently predicting what would happen and astonishing her readers returned once more. When Silo phoned, we agreed to meet directly in ‘La Casa Vieja’, the restaurant in Ñuñoa where we usually met. Upon arrival I noticed that Pepe, my husband, had brought Ena Ruitort’s book. As the publisher, he’d noticed an increase in sales of ‘Agua de Mil Colores’ in recent weeks and the growing curiosity produced in our friends by these texts written more than a decade before. Silo wanted to get his hands on a copy of the one issue that had been published with a prologue written by him and published in April 1997. While waiting for the conger chowder that he’d later devour with gusto, he carefully reviewed the book, reread the paragraph identified by Carmen Gloria and went back again and again to the first page, where the publishing details are: number of copies printed, place, etc. He ended up by touching the book cover gently with his fingers, and stroking it slowly. “Negro, we erected the monolith in 1999,” Pepe said. "In fact, you went to see those tall iron cylinders on the corner of Paseo Ahumada and Alameda when you came to Santiago in January of that year for the Latin American Humanist Regional gathering we had and you ruled out any metal other than stainless steel. Do you remember that after the presentation in the hall of honour of the former National Congress, you went to inspect those cylinders because you were looking for ways to make the monolith for Punta de Vacas?" "Yes, of course, I remember very well. We were in that theme, looking at how to solve that problem," he replied, "and later that same night, we had a very nice dinner outside in Plaza Brazil with so many people. In May that same year we inaugurated the monolith after fabricating and installing it in the months before. So, in early January we were looking at various construction alternatives. It was upon our return to Mendoza that Benenati and I went squarely into that topic. We had the stainless steel tube made, the date was inscribed on it and we installed it in a concrete block." "So, two years earlier, in 1997 it hadn’t even been imagined. To publish the book in April, we had to get the text from Ena at the end of 1996 and you attached the prologue in mid-January 1997, when those objects were not yet among our ideas...” "The Monolith? No! Absolutely not, it was not in our head." I’d ordered crab cakes and they were brought in a black clay pot. They sat steaming in front of me when the conversation suddenly changed. We were no longer speaking of metals or monoliths, dates, meetings or milestones in the Andes. We stopped speaking about Ena and her book. As if that conversation hadn’t taken place, we turned our attention to movies, the importance of movies in shaping the sensibilities of an era, the cultural landscape that fits with that of a generation. We talked about how there is, in some images, music, scenes, themes and environments the ability to produce a deep resonance with the intangible values of the viewers, contributing to the psychological bonding of those who share the same moment. In the past, proposals from literature could promote this common identity, but at least for us and those of our time it has clearly been films that have contributed most to the sensation of belonging to a particular historical time. There were some movies we saw when we were very young that definitively marked us, imprinting us with an emotional tone that even now feels like a kind of background climate that connects us. In their basic tensions we can detect our own tensions, emotional charges and aspirations. We recognise in them the motivations, tastes, aesthetics and generational landscape that belong to us. They’re images that are left operating in a diffuse way and without us being fully aware, like a sort of emotional substrate with which we identify, like the particular sensitivity that characterises us. Then, greatly inspired, Silo began to talk about Stanley Kubrick as one of the filmmakers most skilled in producing extraordinary emotions based on contrasting tensions, supported on powerful opposites; strong differences between auditory and visual images. He referred to the music from the movie ‘The Shining’ whose somewhat dissonant and almost naive chords are precisely those that succeed—through contrast—in sending shivers of terror down one’s spine. He mentioned that a sort of children’s rhyme, in an unrecognisable language which sounds almost oriental, was the one he’d chosen for the title sequence of the videos transmitted from the Punta de Vacas Centre of Studies. "Nothing better than a few chords with unintelligible voices of innocent nursery rhymes," he said, "to make our broadcasts." But we continued with Kubrick, remembering various masterly scenes from ‘A Clockwork Orange’, where the tension is extreme thanks to the contrast between the visual images of Alex’s evils and the harmonious sounds of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In all his films the characters undergo an internal struggle whilst the external circumstances allow the conflict to be emphasised to the viewers. Good and evil. Love and hate. Sex and violence. Desire and fear. Faithfulness and betrayal. In ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Alex is a brutal and heartless young man who’s mad about sex and violence, but he’s also crazy about the Ninth Symphony. Then the conversation led to the music of Aram Khachaturian, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss for the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ which takes a tremendous emotional dimension when contrasted with the visual poem about human evolution. Again, Kubrick used music to induce a specific mood, based on the compositions of the two Strauss’s. "Choosing that music makes you think that the film is dealing with contiguous generations. It seems as if he were using them in order to point out the continuity to be found in evolution itself, while showing us images of the qualitative leaps of the species," said Silo. “Continuity and rupture, evolutionary accumulation and change in quality. And the script was Arthur C. Clarke’s. Remember? ‘Childhood’s End’...," he said. Of course! It was one of the books of the late sixties that had most struck us: the story of an alien race that helped humanity in its origins to ascend in the evolutionary scale. We were fully into the aspirations configured in our youth: a formidable internal change. And of course, they’d been forever associated with Kubrick’s steel monolith located on the plateau of the lunar excavation. In addition it was precisely in those years when we were absorbed by the televised images of the Moon landing; events that intertwined creating a shared landscape. The spaceships of the future society were suddenly in our present. The monolith appears on the Moon in A Space Odyssey in which Americans and Russians collaborate on a mission to Jupiter to discover the source of the signal they’re receiving. “Arthur C. Clarke is also the author of the second novel of the sci-fi saga, Space Odyssey, which two decades later was made into the script for the film directed by Peter Hyams, "2010: The Year We Make Contact." "You saw it, didn’t you?" he asked. "Unlike ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the novel and the screenplay for this second film were not written simultaneously. The film was made after the novel and it isn’t a simple adaptation. Although it was made much later, it's a series. This is the year in which contact is made with Jupiter. Looking through the telescope, the monolith is seen there multiplying rapidly and in geometrical proportion, there are more and more monoliths, it’s filled with monoliths! This increases the density of the planet Jupiter until it starts a process of nuclear fusion, becoming a star after the big explosion; a sort of second Sun." Hyams's film tried to be a continuation of Kubrick’s film and subtly left that intangible floating as something possible in the sensibilities... to make contact in 2010. That year, to do such a feat. "The year in which we’re planning our closing ceremony of the World March in Punta de Vacas around the monolith," I said. "Precisely, and for which we’ve also been preparing several other interesting things!... We have all our batteries ready to make contact in the year 2010," he said. We laughed, understanding the power that images which are so emotionally charged can drive, operating copresently and forming a whole landscape; aspirations arising from common intangibles. A whole generation—without even noticing it—makes use of the same climates and tensions of the mental environment established during its formation stage. They are sensibilities, affectivities and tones specific to certain times that diffusely orientate in precise directions. We were dipping our spoons into the chestnuts in syrup served for dessert, when Silo stroked Ena’s book very gently with his fingers once more. He opened it and looked at the cover flap where her picture and biography appear. As if winking to her in affection, he said: "We were born the same year, in 1938. All is well!" The Agency

The bus snaked upwards, climbing the steep curves of the hills and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was that Negro wanted to talk to me about tonight. Why had he sent me a message that I should try to come to Punta de Vacas to have dinner together while the others were deliberating? The power of the defiantly erected peaks moved me once more, but this time my look went back and forth, caught up as I was in my own musings. It was the first International Symposium organised in the Park of Study and Reflection by the World Centre of Humanist Studies. Many people had been invited, coming from the four points of the compass to participate in its working groups with the most varied presentations. In this context, Rafael de la Rubia had come from Spain to present the proposal to carry out a World March for Peace and Nonviolence that would go around the world and conclude in this very place in January 2010. It would be an odyssey never done before in which all Siloists would participate. It would demand great coordination and the greatest possible synchronisation. I was looking through the window at those colossal, violet, stone mountains, while feeling a tremendous disposition grow within me, an enormous ‘yes’ operating as a precondition in front of the Master’s proposals. He knew that whatever he asked me, he could count on me to carry it out. It was a tacit complicity. But equally my curiosity had been roused. Finally we met on the other side of the Andes, late on in the afternoon, at twilight. Hugs, laughter, the joy of meeting; his presence alone made me feel the best emotions. “Have you seen how it’s going? The papers that have been presented, so many interesting things! Our initiatives are gaining in level! You saw what happened in the Latin American Forum in Bolivia, also in this Symposium it’s great!” he said with a lot of enthusiasm. I’d arrived late, I hadn’t participated in the previous days, but because of the atmosphere I realised that we were in a melting-pot of ideas. Specialists in many subjects, ex-presidents, parliamentarians from different places in continental America, scientists and artists, academics, students, religious representatives and philosophers had all come to these peaks with their proposals, ideas and productions. People were talking so passionately that I was sorry I hadn’t come earlier. If I hadn’t received his message, I’d have passed the opportunity by, feeling that I had nothing to contribute in an environment of such expert people. “We’re not taking advantage of these events,” Silo said to me while we settled down to eat together with Loredana Cici who’d travelled from Italy. “No one knows. There’s no press or dissemination”. And he started to argue that, “If there’s no dissemination, we aren’t raising awareness. You realise that those who participate in person in these encounters, those who come here, they’ve already established their positions. Why do we make such an important effort to inform only those who come, those who already think like this? One picture published in a newspaper creates more awareness than two thousand people meeting in an event that no one else knows about. Many people see a picture! With an image the milestone exists. Without dissemination, there’s no consciousness. That’s the way it is. If we don’t get people to know about it, it’s useless to do this March. Why should we go for a walk, this little walk all around the planet if no one finds out?” To go for a walk, to journey from continent to continent going unnoticed, without anyone realising, looked funny to me. The only ones who’d know that we were marching would be those of us doing it. “We can’t continue dealing with the subject of dissemination as it’s been done till now with small teams of differentiated people, humanists located in their own countries moving at a national level. Nor can we make a new press team for every event, organising everything from zero every time. It won’t work like that. Looking at the World March, we have to think about a work of dissemination which is also on a global scale, with professionals dedicated exclusively to the subject and able to give it continuity. We need to form an international news agency trained to produce articles, videos and photographic images that can reach the public through other agencies and media channels. We’re very late, many things are happening now that people haven’t been informed about and which should’ve been disseminated, like for example, the endorsement of this World without Wars initiative by numerous public figures. Why should we be interested in their endorsements if we’re the only ones who know? It’s ridiculous!” he finished. I thought about the photos I’d seen of so many diverse faces of renowned people who were supporting the proposal. They seemed to me like the stickers collected by children trying to fill an album; a series of photos that we secretly treasure without anyone else seeing. What was the meaning of all this? Suddenly I started to experience a tremendous urgency, almost a desperation that this stupendous discourse taking place in the Symposium would not remain only words rolling down the mountain, sounds carried on the morning wind… I started to be enormously concerned about our incapacity to inform people. Down there in the cities no one knew that there was a living Master whose message modifies the provisional meaning of our existence. In big conurbations there wasn’t even a suspicion that around Silo existed a conglomeration of extraordinarily intelligent people who were causing the greatest political, social and cultural feats to take place, questioning the establishment, capable of imagining a new world, loving it and ready to build it. No one would be able to believe that we were about to start to travel around the whole world seeking to generate awareness about the urgent need for nuclear disarmament; the withdrawal of invading troops from occupied territories; the progressive and proportional reduction in conventional weapons; and the proposal that governments should renounce the use of wars as a means to resolve conflicts. How could it be that such a fascinating adventure would take place without anyone around us finding out about it? The disproportion between our project and our reach became evident to me. Then, Silo changed the subject and started to talk about our position regarding Obama. He held that the new US President would have to immediately pull back and withdraw the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Given that he’d recently been elected and the people still believed in him, he was in a position to be able to finally do something interesting. There was no time to lose. How could he not look to advance in that direction! I was listening to him while thinking that our positions in front of world events were also unknown by even our neighbours. Even if we were to never organise another action ever again, we have a look which explains human existence and history in a unique way, a look which establishes relationships that few can see and which understands phenomena, always looking for new ways out of the crossroads. It’s this way of observing things as a structure, the special relationship that we establish between social spaces and inner worlds which without doubt places us in a situation to act against violence, oppression and exploitation. Coherent, exemplary actions, as well as our points of view with regard to the times in which we live: who knew about them? “It must be possible that our opinion reaches people,” he said as if he could hear my reflections, “our analysis, thoughts and the proposals we elaborate, everything being debated here, right now, in the Symposium. Information and opinions that we have must travel fast,” he said on saying goodbye that night. I couldn’t sleep. On arrival in Santiago, I devoted myself to shape our news agency of peace and nonviolence, humanism and non-discrimination24. I work every day in all the languages I know and I coordinate with people who publish in other languages, with photographers and video-makers, graphic artists, columnists and translators. It’s an ample international team that’s been weaving a web with more than 80 media outlets and agencies which value diversity and place the value of human life as the central concern in order to help produce the necessary transformation in these times of crisis and conflict in all latitudes. We’re trying to make all of this known, we’re seeking to create awareness.

24 Pressenza, International Press Agency www.pressenza.com Parks, Squares and Gardens

We were walking around Mendoza’s General San Martin Park waiting for time to pass before going to meet up with other friends. The majestic trees were sheltering us in their shadows, while still letting through the last reddish light of late afternoon. The atmosphere had a growing magic and I made some comment about it… “Parks, squares and even gardens have their roots back in the mists of time, in a kind of ancestral memory common to all cultures. They’re reminiscent of the countryside which is our common environment. We all originate from there,” Mario asserted. “Our species was nomadic and became sedentary. We domesticated plants, animals and even metals. We organised ourselves in settlements, buried our dead and learned through observing nature. If we left a few seeds lying on the ground and continued on our way, when we came back we found that they’d germinated and we understood that we could sow them and see them grow in the future. We noticed the cycles and rhythms, the different seasons were put into allegories and there was always a rebirth. The new spring, a hope, emerges once more from the ice; from the darkness, the cycle continues and opens towards evolution,” he continued. “What are we doing today to project the future? Don’t you think that cities today oppress people? In urban life, a particular sensibility is developing in which it becomes very difficult to raise one’s look and visualise the long term. City mentalities pay no attention to either processes or cycles. They’re hostile to the consideration of dynamic elements such as birth, the power to develop oneself and create, dying and the possibility of rebirth. They experience even greater difficulties with transcendence. Profound processes of transformation aren’t thought about in an urban setting. The configuration of cities isn’t suitable for noticing them, only for seeing things in fragments. People of the city see moments of the present as a sequence of photos seen one after the other, without managing to pay attention to the course of events. Those deferred actions that allow us to sow today what we intuit could end up taking shape beyond our own time is not the most characteristic aspect of urban behaviour which is instead generally based on reflex, immediate and opportunist attitudes that seek to distance themselves from processes. The way of living in today’s settlements is fragmented and increasingly distant from the experience of time in life itself, the cyclical flow of existence.” “That’s why we feel so well when we take a bit of perspective and get out of the daily rhythm and, in the atmosphere of parks, breathe that old memory of cycles that we all have, that old memory of the complete renovation of everything that exists, even our own nature. “Look how many people come to this park! Even in the late afternoon they come to relax, to be in silence, to feel themselves as they are. How many families visit the squares on Sundays in every city? Children run about, old people talk, there’s no hurry. Lovers cuddle against the trunk of a good tree and from there they plan their future… a tomorrow with new shoots, accompanied by new beings that they’ll bring into the world. The garden is the countryside in its minimal expression, the return to the Earth, the sowing and the harvesting. It’s a flower that opens to our astonishment. “When people in the cities are able to intimately connect with those in the countryside, everything advances because our roots and those of all cultures are located in the countryside and not in urban areas. Our origins, our common heritage from those ancient times is rural. “Human beings, nomadic as they were, have always migrated. Since they settled and formed the first hamlets, their migrations had the objective of reaching inhabited places. From rural areas they moved on until reaching places where other human beings organised themselves to live. Migrations are just that. People always go from the countryside to the city. Poverty drives thousands to search for better horizons in large cities. From a situation of enormous, general poverty, people of the countryside migrate to urban centres. But today’s settlements are hostile to those coming from outside. Here outsiders are discriminated against and integration is difficult. They can get work—in the most humble jobs, of course—but they continue to live outside, on the borders, in the urban margins located on the sprawling city outskirts. There’s no city today whose periphery isn’t growing. Here discriminated people settle who’ve come from ‘outside’, the poor, while those ‘within’ scorn their beliefs, their culture and their behaviour. There’s no city that doesn’t insist that delinquency comes from the periphery, that doesn’t repress, that isn’t suspicious, that isn’t violent towards and that doesn’t discriminate against those from ‘outside’. If they bring their music, rhythm and dance, clothes, colours and their forms of expression then they’ll be an underrated culture that’ll only infiltrate the youthful vanguard when new hosts of rural immigrants come to populate the next wave of growing marginalisation. “In all extensive cities of this planet you find a large, central park in which to go for a walk. If you observe well, here converge, without so much distinction, citizens walking their animals and those who’ve recently left theirs behind because they’ve just migrated from the countryside. In parks we meet everyone, in the squares we are once again a collective memory, beings from an agricultural and cyclical world capable of rebirth from time to time. The parks, squares and gardens renew hope.” The Historian

I have in my hands the elegant, blue book published in November 2006, in other words when Patrick was thirty-six years old; young for one whose articles had already been published in The Hispanic American Historical Review. Nor was this his first publication. He already had under his belt a couple of other research papers published by a US university. This young historian graduated with his PhD from California University in Berkeley and went on to teach history as an Associate Professor at Ohio University. Perhaps I’d never have known him; his world is so different to mine. The last time I saw him was when I accompanied him to the car in the parking bay of our house in Tunquén to say goodbye. It was getting late and had rained a lot. The grassy ground was wet and in order to not slip I held onto his arm and within the confidence established I said something about our age difference… With a look of mischief on his face he confessed his date of birth to me: the 4th of May 1969. While Silo was making his voice heard publicly in the world for the first time from the snowy peaks of the Andes, in some US hospital this boy who was now holding me up was being born. It did not seem like an accident. Just as it hadn’t seemed to me a pure accident to see his head among those of so, so many people—thousands—who were present on the day that the Park of Study and Reflection, Los Manantiales was being inaugurated in May 2006, precisely in the moments when Silo was officiating the ceremony of Recognition, with Francisco Granella and myself in the role of assistants. There was a veritable multitude participating and filling the wide esplanade that extends from the Monolith to the Hall, to which we had our backs turned. We were slightly elevated thanks to a small wooden platform on which the three of us could just about fit and which gave us a certain amount of visibility over the crowd. Then, when Silo said, “Good knowledge leads to justice. Good knowledge leads to reconciliation…,” I had a sudden awareness of seeing the historian among so many other friends and acquaintances with whom, on this sunny day, we’d converged in joyful celebration. “Great that he’s come!” I said to myself as if it were the most normal thing that a North American professor would participate in a public event taking place in the open air, in the district of Llaillay, to officially launch one of the places where Siloism had been established. With him nothing was like how things were with other people. Things happened in special ways, quite singular in reality. We were always accustomed to our movement being at the receiving end of the contra’s darts or, in the best of cases, being given relative invisibility. We never experienced positive interest, even less being valued and flattered by those who didn’t endorse our positions. So much so that I’d spent many months looking through the basement archives of the National Library for all the stories published by the Chilean press over the last thirty-five years in order to reconstruct, on this basis, our tense relationship with national journalism. In the whole days spent there, several times I interrupted my task to take a break in the big hall on the first floor in which on more than one occasion I spoke with the librarians and friends who worked there or those who were doing their own research in the old building. One of them, a member of the Clotario Blest Foundation, was the person who passed my phone number to the gringo who was going around investigating the times of Allende. “I’m going back home to the United States tomorrow,” said a voice with a slight accent down my mobile phone. “I need to see you today.” But it was one of those complicated days, with lots of activities. Among others, I couldn’t let a photographer friend down at the inauguration of his exhibition. That’s why it occurred to me that we could talk in a cafeteria located right in front of the gallery, minutes before the event. I thought that all he’d want would be a couple of pieces of information which I could rapidly despatch. Now that I review this blue book in an elegant academic style, I comprehend that I had little awareness then of being in front of a serious and professional person; someone completely resolved to research our history in its foundations; someone who, within the complex events of Unidad Popular [Popular Unity]25 which he’d come to study here, had been able to discover for himself the interesting phenomenon of Poder Joven [Young Power]26, unravelling the strings so that remaining in his hands was the thread that led him to Silo and our proposal. I didn’t know that I was facing a real scholar, in front of someone for whom our doctrine wasn’t just really interesting, but moreover someone for whom Silo’s books were going to give rise to an infinite number of questions about the context of the times in which his thought originated, questions about his philosophical proposal and the social design of his ideas. “Remarkably, however, historians of Chile have not paused to examine Siloísmo and what Poder Joven was, what it stood for, what it did, and what it meant in the context of tremendous social discord, acute political strife, and the radicalization of a great many young people. Speaking to this omission, in this article I will examine Siloísmo and pinpoint Poder Joven’s unique and contested position in the social, cultural, and political conflicts taking place in Chile during the early 1970s. I would like to address five interrelated questions: What were the essential ideas and practices of the Siloístas? How did those ideas and practices relate to social, cultural, political, generational, transcendental, and existential matters? Why did many Chileans see Siloísmo as a threat to society? In what ways did Popular Unity and Poder Joven advance different and irreconcilable definitions of liberation, revolution, and socialism? And what was the relationship between class struggle and generational struggle during the Allende years?” the paper by Barr-Melej, the North American, starts by explaining. I quickly found him looking for a place to sit in the cafeteria while noticing that outside were passing two friends of mine who were also coming for the inauguration in the gallery opposite. With these typical Latin American attitudes, I couldn’t contain the impulse and so I invited Julian Burgos and María Eliana Astaburuaga to come and accompany me in the conversation with Patrick and then go together to see the photographs. Squeezed in as we were around a small table, I soon realised through one of the questions he asked us, that it hadn’t been completely by accident that it was the three of us sitting here with him. It was precisely the three of us who, together with the two Palma brothers, had gone to the Philippines in 1973 a few months before the coup d’état was unleashed. This was exactly what he was

25 Unidad Popular (English: "Popular Unity" or "People's Unity") was a coalition of left wing, socialist and communist political parties in Chile that stood behind the successful candidacy of Salvador Allende for the 1970 Chilean presidential election. 26 An early expression of organised Siloism. interested in and ended up publishing as follows: Although they faced considerable adversity, highlighted by the arrest and imprisonment of prominent members during the Allende years and under the military regime that followed, Poder Joven spread beyond Chile and the Southern Cone. Young Chileans took Silo’s teachings abroad during the Popular Unity era, and some escaped the violence of Chile’s 1973 coup by virtue of their peregrination. Of course his study extends considerably over the thirty-eight pages in which he references every phrase that he writes under the title, “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, ‘Total Revolution,’ and the Roots of the Humanist Movement” What surprised me that afternoon was the fortunate coincidence that allowed him to have the three of us in an improvised interview in which we could tell him about our globetrotting adventures and the first years of the international development of our movement, which were surely treasured words in his eyes that gave volume to all the data he’d already gathered. Patrick was the first historian to publish about Siloism and the first to present his hypotheses. He let them be known at the highest level of the academic world and disseminated his studies from there. Not only that. After doing so, he wanted to go more deeply and interview Silo directly. These were days in which Silo no longer received journalists, nor was he seen with more than a very few people and then only for specific issues. He didn’t make declarations and photos weren’t taken in the meetings in which he participated. He said that the situations had to be lived and couldn’t be ‘posed’ for the cameras. Silo had lowered his public profile and was concentrating on very precise research and developments. Except on the handful of occasions in which he participated in some general event or encounter, he wasn’t accessible. Even in those massive circumstances he didn’t give interviews to the press. Precisely for this reason and to seek maximum privacy, a very small group of us had met in our house in Tunquén in the middle of a rainy autumn, although the rain hadn’t stopped us from toiling in the fabrication of ceramic pieces made without an oven but rather cooked directly in the fire and then later subjected, Raku-style, to a process of oxidation reduction through submersion in sawdust and then tempering in cold water. This is what we were up to when Julian called, asking if Barr-Melej could come to interview Silo. The Master didn’t know him but nevertheless assented immediately. As soon as he arrived, he was invited to roll up his sleeves, go out into the rain and—like the rest of us—start to shape red clay mixed with firesand into bowls that we set to fire in a bonfire: no conversation, just getting wet and hands full of clay. But Patrick’s face was a picture of happiness. Something extraordinary was happening and it managed to take shape also within him; something that was surely very new for the intellectual and that allowed him to experience a state that he marvelled at, leaving him almost ecstatic. When he took his completely black, ceramic bowl out of the cold water, Silo invited him to come into the house and sit and drink tea. They talked for around two hours. At a certain distance, several of us also sought shelter from the rain while continuing to observe copious amounts of water falling between the trees through the windows. Little could we capture of the conversation that was taking place in the dining room. I remember the gringo’s voice asking him about his relationship to Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, the anarchists, Marx and Freud. They spoke at length about Sartre and Mohandas Gandhi, about active nonviolence and about Tolstoy. I also remember hearing them talk about Erich Fromm, Gurdjieff, Plato and Buddha. Patrick enquired about the way in which Silo formulated his thought. He wanted to know what influences he’d gathered, how he’d reached conceptions so radically new and complete, and how he’d structured his thought. Almost as an analogy, he was interested to know about the ‘firesand’ that he put in his clay and the shape that he’d given to his ideas in order to obtain the impeccable finish achieved. Silo spoke to him also about our times, the fire to which these proposals had been subjected, about how it’s impossible to think in abstract, but rather that in every historical moment there correspond set formulations and there are no ideas that can be unravelled from their time. He departed very happy and still somewhat wet when he got into the car that would take him directly to the airport. He was flying that night back to his country. Reconciliation

Accompanied by my husband and two sons, I went up to the mountain for three days in May 2007, to stay in the Uspallata Valley, which was already golden thanks to the autumnal poplar trees, and to participate with thousands of others in the Days of Spiritual Inspiration. A radiant sun protected us, allowing us to congregate in the open air. It’s different to go on a pilgrimage in search of inspiration and try to open the path to the development of one’s own spirituality, than to reach remote places with a different objective, perhaps related to tourism, an excursion or leisure. Many people later asked themselves what happened on that occasion in the Andes, if it was the altitude, the mood, the special beauty of the place or something else that allowed what happened there to unfold. For me, the motivation prior to the journey, the intention that gave rise to the desire to converge there, had been working since much earlier for a favourable disposition to an inner encounter with oneself and an emotional opening towards others, independently of who they were, their age, their social or cultural condition or their nationality. What happened is that people made contact with themselves and with other extraordinary people, they demonstrated affectionate behaviour, they felt a harmony, and they participated in a common synergy. It was a massive encounter with those who’re different, every one centred in their search, warm, open, with love and a very deferential way of interchanging with others. The marvellous atmosphere transformed people, as if new symptoms of humanity were suddenly emerging. Every one brought out the best of themselves, they expressed it in their way and this translated into a very singular atmosphere. We all breathed in this synergy and experienced a great joy. I dare say that collectively we entered a sacred region, separated from the moment, located in another space, as if we’d entered a mythical time. In that mental state where the passage of time is suspended and nothing we experience is usual; a state of high, diaphanous frequency and remarkable profundity. Doubtless, everyone made prior preparations. Long before starting the pilgrimage we started to resonate with the purpose that motivated the search and we arrived with a certain disposition. Then all of us who participated in this environment suffered a sort of positive and tremendously moving contamination. When Silo came to speak on the third day, he made an extraordinary and interesting proposal and he put reconciliation as the central theme and characterised it as something unreciprocal. Forgiveness is doubtless something more evolved than vengeance, but reconciliation is more than forgiveness. Maybe it was, for me, one of the most fundamental teachings that he gave us, something new, he proposed a reconciliation that doesn’t need the other party in order to be undertaken, a reconciliation which simply aspires to one’s own freedom. This is what he said standing in front of the dark rocks, completely surrounded by the crowd: Dear friends, pilgrims, and visitors to Punta de Vacas Park: I’d like to talk about the central theme of these Days of Spiritual Inspiration—Reconciliation as a profound spiritual experience. But I know that you’ll forgive me if I postpone this theme for a few minutes in order to set out some context for this quite extraordinary situation that we’re in the midst of. Only four times in nearly forty years have we spoken publicly from here, from this desolate mountain outpost. The first time was in 1969. And today we see scattered about here a number of engraved steles that record what was said on that occasion in different languages. On them we find the synthesis of a system of thought and action that has expressed itself in various ways, in various moments and in various parts of the world. At that time, we spoke of the differences between physical pain and mental suffering and we considered Justice and Science, wholeheartedly turned toward social progress, as the only paths that can alleviate the pain of our bodies and make it recede. But unlike physical pain, mental suffering cannot be made to disappear thanks to Justice and Science alone. The best of causes have been dignified by the sustained effort to make Science and Justice progress in human societies. And the effort to overcome mental suffering has been as equally important as the efforts applied to the overcoming of pain. Since that time we’ve preached that these efforts to overcome pain and suffering are the most worthy endeavours of human enterprise. Together with hundreds of thousands of friends working closely together we’ve applied ourselves to the task of humanising the Earth. And what has it meant for us to ‘Humanise the Earth’? It has been to place human liberty as the highest value and non-discrimination and nonviolence as the highest social practice. In our efforts to humanise the Earth we did not exclude ourselves from the obligations that we demanded of others. Indeed, we set ourselves as a standard of behaviour the requirement of treating others as we want to be treated. Now we’ve proposed a brief pause on the path of humanisation in order to reflect on the meaning of our existence and our actions. We’ve made the pilgrimage to this desolate outpost searching for the Force that nourishes our lives, seeking Joy in doing and the mental Peace needed to move forward in this altered and violent world. During these Days we’re reviewing our lives, our hopes, and also our failures, with the aim of cleansing our minds of all falseness and contradiction. Taking the opportunity to review our aspirations and frustrations is a practice that, even if done only once in life, should be carried out by every one of us who seek to advance in their personal development and their action in the world. These are days of inspiration and reflection. These are days of Reconciliation, sincere Reconciliation with ourselves and those who’ve harmed us. Regarding those painful relationships that we’ve endured, we aren’t trying to forgive or be forgiven. To forgive implies that one of the parties is placed in a superior moral position and the other humbles themselves before the one who forgives. And while it’s clear that forgiveness is an advance over vengeance, it isn’t as advanced as reconciliation. Nor are we trying to forget the wrongs that have occurred. This isn’t about trying to falsify the memory. It’s about trying to comprehend what happened in order to begin the superior step of reconciliation. Nothing good is achieved, either personally or socially, by forgetting or forgiving. Neither forgetting nor forgiving! The mind should remain fresh and attentive, without pretence or falsehood. We’re now considering the key point of Reconciliation, something that does not admit adulteration. If we’re searching for sincere reconciliation with ourselves and with those who’ve hurt us deeply, it’s because we desire a profound transformation of our lives. A transformation that takes us out of resentment in which no one reconciles with anyone, not even with themselves. When we’re able to understand that no enemy resides within us, but rather a being filled with hopes and failures, a being in whom, in a short sequence of images, we can see beautiful moments of fulfilment as well as moments of frustration and resentment. When we’re able to understand that our enemy is a being who has also lived with hopes and failures, a being in whom there’ve been beautiful moments of fulfilment as well as moments of frustration and resentment, then it’s a humanising look that we cast over the skin of monstrosity. This path towards reconciliation doesn’t arise spontaneously, just as the path towards nonviolence doesn’t arise spontaneously, because both require great comprehension as well as the formation of a physical repugnance to violence. It won’t be us who judge errors, neither our own nor those of others. For that there is human retribution and human justice, and it’ll be the measure of the times which exercises its dominion. I don't want to judge myself or judge others....I want to understand deeply in order to cleanse my mind of all resentment. To reconcile is neither to forget nor to forgive, it is to acknowledge all that’s happened and to propose breaking out of the circle of resentment. It’s to look at the situation, recognising one’s own errors and those of others. To reconcile within oneself is to propose to not take the same road twice, but rather to be ready to make amends twice-over for the wrongs one has done. But it’s clear that we cannot ask those that have offended us to make amends twice-over for the harm they’ve done us. However, it’s good to let them see the chain of harm that they’re dragging through their lives. In doing this we reconcile with someone we previously felt was an enemy—even if this person doesn’t reconcile with us. But that’s now part of the destiny of their actions over which we have no control. We’re saying that reconciliation is not reciprocal between people, and also that reconciliation with oneself does not necessarily have as a consequence that others leave behind their vicious circle, even when they might recognise the social benefit of this individual stance. The theme of reconciliation has been central in these days of ours, but surely we’ve achieved many other advances by making this physical pilgrimage to an unknown landscape that will have awakened profound landscapes. And this will always be possible if the Purpose that has motivated our pilgrimage is a disposition towards renewal, or better still, a disposition towards the transformation of our own lives. During these days we’ve reviewed what we consider to be the most important situations in our lives. If we’ve located such moments and reconciled with them, cleaning away the resentments that have bound us to the past, then we’ll have had a good pilgrimage towards the source of renewal and transformation. Let’s not forget those brief phrases that have emerged from our interior, let’s not forget those things that have suddenly occurred to us, let’s not forget to write down those truths that we’ve managed to divine as we’ve seen them briefly dance before us as we walk here, or perhaps because we’ve seen them in those nightly restorative dreams that follow our pilgrimage. These phrases, these things that occur to us, these dancing truths, are inspirations for which we’re ready to be thankful. They’re inspirations that invite us to go further in our experiences, not only of reconciliation but also of overcoming contradictions, weaknesses and fears. It’s my sincere hope that these searches and encounters will ignite in us a profound motivation. In ending I should add that I recognise here a situation that I want to share with all of you, a situation similar to what we’ve described in one of our Guided Experiences…“I return to the world with my forehead and hands luminous. And so I accept my destiny. Here is the path and I, a humble pilgrim returning to my people. Filled with light, I return to the hours of daily routine, to the pain of humanity, and to their simple joys. I, who give with my hands what I can, who receive both insults and the warmest of greetings, sing to the heart that from the darkest abyss is reborn in the light of longed-for Meaning.” Italian Journey

I know Italy well. I lived there for six years, three in Rome and the rest in Milan. I travelled to all the regions. I went to the coasts, the mountains and to the hilltop villages. I especially visited the museums. But when Silo advised us to make another trip to the peninsula, his directions surprised me because they targeted a journey from a perspective that was very new to me. He proposed that we observe the Alexandrian and Neo-platonic framework, paying attention to the enormous influences they generated. He recommended that we start in Sicily, more precisely the city of Syracuse, a kind of little Alexandria organised by the coast; a place of interchange and a meeting point for the many scholars who passed through the city in the centuries before our era. It was the geographical point from where Plato tried to develop the city-state project led by governors inspired by the practice of philosophy and the experience of the reminiscences of Good and Beauty and where, conversely, he was taken to prison on the two occasions in which he tried and his friends had to pay a ransom in order to liberate him, as well as finance his journeys back to Athens. Syracuse: the place where the fresh water current coming from the Aegean Sea emerges as the spring known as Arethusa, alluding to the myth of the nymph who escaped to freedom from Alpheios who was in love with her, like an emancipated woman of the second half of the twentieth century. In this refined city, the Doric market was then transformed into a Christian temple and the ancient theatre, framed by cypress trees behind which you can make out the sea in the distance, even today maintains its acoustic shell of impeccable sonority. This theatre could hold twenty thousand spectators in the century of Pericles; tragedies and comedies were staged for a most vibrant public. It has a magisterial architecture which assumed an advanced knowledge of sound and a mastering of the laws of acoustics and geometry, in addition to construction methods with materials that have extraordinarily resisted all the inclemency that the theatre’s been exposed to. It’s true that on the island there are several theatres that had their apogee in the moments of Magna Graecia and in which even today it’s possible to see wonderful productions. The same occurs with the archaeological sites that conserve columns and temples despite the centuries. In Syracuse these works were established in the middle of the city that grew around it, co-existing with times almost immemorial. Here we also find the concept of ‘eternal return’, represented by the Trinacria, the woman with the head of Medusa and serpents entwined in her hair, whose three legs bend the same way while her wings flutter in flight: an allegory that also represents the geography of the island with its three points. Palermo, situated to the north with its magnificent port, allows you to deepen the practice of tolerance and respect towards those who think and live differently, through a succession of overlapping cultures that have learned to value each other’s contribution, multiplying knowledge in order to achieve important changes. Such is the case of the court of Frederick II who reigned over Sicily towards the year 1300, in the midst of the medieval period and during which there was a very typically Alexandrian religious tolerance based on Hellenistic thought. This is the meeting point between the Latin and Germanic West and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. Palermo is multiculturalism and welcomes the diverse. This comes from the Normans who disembarked here around the 11th century and whose sovereigns counted on Muslim and Greek advisors. From the courts of the Norman kings a multicultural atmosphere was inherited that reached its peak with the court of Frederick II, composed of savants such as Michael Scot who moved from Toledo having translated mathematical works and treatises by Aristotle. He contributes in Sicily with his enormous erudition and becomes an imperial astrologer, connecting the Palermo court with Toledo. Likewise, Theodore of Antioch, the philosopher, served as nexus with the North of Africa and the Orient. Their names remain associated with translations and commentaries on the Aristotelian books: On the soul, On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption. The atmosphere created included Jews and Muslims, with their dedicated contribution to common inspiration and to development. The Arabs had translated a large part of the Greek texts putting them within reach of the Latin World which started to assimilate the first versions. Other texts were done; philosophical, scholastic and medical. In the times of Frederick II an enlightened class emerges precisely the fruit of all this interesting mixture of cultures. Palermo was at that time the meeting point between Byzantium and Greece. Moreover, it received the contributions of wise Jews who had so often been intermediaries between Arabs and Latins through the knowledge that they had of both languages and through being versed in the different sciences. Frederick II personified, as a real figure, the fruitful encounter that took place in that era between different cultures and also the curiosity that was common to them. In the streets of Palermo, among the orange blossom that perfumes the air, life today bustles with the coming and going of craftsmen, traders, the industrious and countless students. Near to the University, in one of those neighbourhoods without footpaths, through the narrow alleyways and twisted cobbled streets, we reach the Vicolo del Conte di Cagliostro. In that small place was born and lived the alchemist count, 18th century physician, Rosicrucian and Freemason who travelled tirelessly throughout Europe encountering friends and enemies as his fame connected him to magic, the Kabbalah and the different rites of Freemasonry. It’s said that Cagliostro carried out the first experiments in hypnosis using his assistant, trying to lead him into a sleep-like state and preventing reversibility through the use of a large water vessel and a candle. Upon putting him into a sort of artificial dream, he would give orders that had to be obeyed once awake, like going to Palermo and taking messages to his girlfriend. This type of experiment our count did with his collaborators in this strange atmosphere that subsequently became so attractive for occultists. Of course we also ventured into the market between the central avenues, we climbed the wonderful steps of Teatro Massimo, we went to see the second-hand book stalls, we admired the cathedral and the Norman palace, we even reached the famous Quattro Canti in the most baroque part of the city but there was no time to admire the Monreale mosaics. We had to make another journey, years later, to take a look in greater detail at the Greek colonies, not this time on the island but rather on the Italian peninsula, and to appreciate the different archaeological excavations better; magnificent places located by the sea, chosen more than 25 centuries before to found the main cities settled by Greeks outside their lands. They chose coastlines with a peaceful cove where they could disembark, a place with a good look out point that gave complete visibility right to the edge of the horizon and the possibility to dominate the territory; places from where a river would flow, in many cases navigable, which favoured inland transportation as well as an exit to the sea, a bit similar to our motorways today. With these access ways trade became possible, transporting building materials, all kinds of stones, woods brought from afar, food, oils, animals, wine and spices, a coming and going of goods by water ways. Up, on the high rocks of the promontories, they built their temples to the cults of their different gods, magnificent Doric constructions of precise proportions, stone stairways and portentous columns. They also had a stele and an altar for offerings. Already back then they were building urban spaces, designing first the perimeter of the city, defining where best to put the entrance gates that were the points of permanent vigilance because of their vulnerability. They traced out the main avenues, they established the most appropriate places for all the temples, the location of the theatre, gymnasia, the agora in which the market would be, every public building and finally they got down to the planning of the residential areas. Everything was very well thought out before hands were put to work and foundations laid; nothing like today’s cities that stretch out where they can and end up a tangled mess. In this second opportunity we travelled from Paestum going south. We passed through Elea, where Parmenides and Zeno lived; we visited Crotone, a city in which Pythagoras established his school and from which, after the fire used to intimidate them, they had to escape to the East, to the city of Metaponto where the very old Master of Forms died. In this journey, following the directions of our Master and moreover with few days available, we well appreciated this environment of the odd and very ingenious people capable of great invention who lived in Palermo, as well as the great irradiation that was produced from Syracuse, the elegant city that—on a different scale—somehow reminds us of Alexandria. From here we hopped straight to Florence. We’d poked around parts of the ancient world in order to be able to feel its influence. Putting ourselves in the shoes of the pre-Renaissance humanists, we could comprehend their enormous curiosity for classical Greece and the inexhaustible source of inspiration that it meant for them to bring the manuscripts conserved in Byzantium for deciphering. There couldn’t have been many who in that moment questioned the beliefs of medieval obscurantism. In total around some three hundred people, but all interconnected in different ways and trained to generate true prodigies in their respective fields. Florence is a place in which many of them converged, the main city of gathering and interchange, where new values were nurtured and a tremendous motivation for the development of knowledge matured. It’s right in Tuscany where the conception of the world achieved by the neo-Pythagorean and neo-Platonic schools is reborn and irradiates strongly towards the West. The clash between a worn-out Christianity and the novel ideas can be clearly appreciated in the mosaics that adorn the inside of the Florence Baptistery. Here the medieval beliefs of the world that was coming to an end are represented with its allegories of devils, doves and demons. There’s also the new horizon that emerges, with its hopeful lights and colours. Obscurantism coexists with Humanism. The sages of Byzantium arrived in Florence on the occasion of the Council of Florence, bringing with them not only an interesting cargo of parchment, but also a wealth of aides, secretaries, craftsmen and assistants who knew different trades. They’re welcomed, feted and hosted by the city: the ceramicist is looked after by the ceramicists, the weaver goes to the tapestry-makers, the jeweller is accommodated by others of his guild, in such a way that, without being proposed, the knowledge of the use of cobalt in the preparation of blue glaze which is so characteristic of Byzantium is passed on to Florentine ceramicists, for example. Their mode of production thereby changes. Objects are modelled by the new ideas. The visitors have to remain in Tuscany because the Turks invade their own city and the Eastern Empire comes tumbling down. Then in Florence the scholarly and the erudite are formed, they translate from Greek to Latin and libraries are organised. Marsilio Ficino, at the head of the Platonic Academy and under the protection of the Medici family, sends his emissaries to Byzantium to recover all the manuscripts possible from the hands of the Turkish invaders, while a thinking generation, whose maximum exponent is Pico della Mirandola, prepares itself. It’s said that he was the last human being to know everything there was to know. After him, it became necessary to specialise and divide into fields because for our species the complexity of the vast accumulated knowledge was too much to take in. In this context we went to visit the Academy of Fine Arts where sculptures by Michelangelo are exhibited. Besides ‘David’, there are ‘The Slaves’—tremendous marble rocks from which a knee is escaping here and an arm or forearm there, as if humans captured in stone were starting to free themselves. They seemed to us a wonderful allegory of the awakening in which the era was enveloped when it could glimpse new horizons. Everything changed. Ancient pagan myths invaded the imagination and nature was observed in order to represent it in its maximum splendour. Leon Battista Alberti, polymath and distinguished architect, gives form to spaces with new proportions: loggias, vaults and palaces where Renaissance humanist thought could unfold. The new philosophical conceptions inspire Botticelli in his ‘Primavera’ and ‘The Birth of Venus’. Did Sandro paint them in the Medici family’s Villa di Castello? Even if this wasn’t the place provided by his patrons for him to set up his easels, brushes and oils, his spirit still prevails in the dark wood that can be found behind the magnificent Grotto of the Animals. Or can’t the three Dancing Graces and Flora arriving with her perfumed skirt be insinuated among the dense foliage? Just like the awakening of scientific interest of the times can be marvelled at in the Limonaia, where a tree still today produces the fruit so celebrated by Cosimo de’ Medici: the bizzaria, a graft between orange and lemon, whose segments alternate without losing their characteristic flavours. It seems that Renaissance humanists were fully aware of the new historical moment they were inaugurating. Not in vane was the term ‘Festina Lente’ coined [make haste slowly], referring to the calm necessary to drive sizeable change forward. We went to see the sculpture of a jester straddling a turtle at the entrance of the Palazzo Pitti gardens. The little fat man in question detains whoever approaches with a raised hand, inviting you to reflect before continuing. Study, reflection, inspiration, creativity, multiplication of the new in very few decades to manage to shake off the tremendous weight of the long medieval slumber. Silo insisted that we journey without any hurry through the gardens of Boboli as well as the different Medici villas located in the hills outside the city. They were places of rest, built for relaxation for this handful of Humanists. It’s in leisure when one can partake in restful fun and pursuits, moments dedicated to ingenuity, games, sport. It’s free time that favours creativity. Each one of the Medici villas has something special, a rationally organised garden and also a completely wild wood. There are water fountains, plant labyrinths, a few pergolas, the medicinal garden and one other, the gastronomic garden, a greenhouse filled with ceramic pots of flowers and fruits, and workshops. There’s a cave with water and animals that hint at the beginnings of life; figures of different pagan gods, each one applied to their own activity. Not to mention the spaces built in magnificent proportions, terraces, lounges, multiple rooms, kitchens, games rooms and libraries, chimneys for colder evenings, painted walls and ceilings, furniture and objects ranging from astrolabes to telescopes. The atmosphere of the Renaissance is more easily captured in the shadows of the woods with stone sculptures on which moss grows, while the sound of nightingale song is discernible between the sounds of the water in the fountains, maybe because in this relaxed state you can put order to so many impressions that have remained scattered and you can reach an understanding of how it happened, from ancient times, this thread of inspiration that connects one era to another, reappearing to formulate the organisation of society, the sciences and arts, always taking human beings as central. Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ gained a different depth and acquired new meaning after comprehending the golden proportion defined by Luca Pacioli, just as it was almost a compulsion to go back over the pages of Francesco Colonna’s, ‘Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream’ and venture into the new knowledge that took shape in classical antiquity, to observe the ‘Gates of Paradise’ by Ghiberti and return once more to the Baptistery, precisely where our journey through Florence had started. “Festina Lente!” we said because we found ourselves in a state of inspired consciousness. Active Nonviolence

Sitting in the Centre of Studies in Punta de Vacas Park, Silo told us that he’d received an invitation to speak to the Nobel Peace Prize winners who were going to meet in their tenth world summit on the 11th of November 2009 in the city of Berlin. It was his last public speaking engagement. Just as in the first, the historic speech known as ‘The Healing of Suffering’ which he gave forty years previously, he took this opportunity to speak about one of his dearest themes: active nonviolence. All his life he explained that violence isn’t only the armed act of war or physical aggression; that several other forms exist: economic, racial, religious, gender, psychological and moral violence. It was a life’s work spent proposing the overcoming of every kind of violence; the application of the methodology of active nonviolence to social transformation. “We’re in a very complicated situation,” he said slowly, “and we’re concerned about doing the right thing. It’s from what we consider that should be said and from what we can contribute, that we’ll try to speak to those attending the Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Berlin. We’ll try to contribute our grain of sand to the creation of a planetary skin of worldwide consciousness about nonviolence. “Nonviolence comes from ancient times. It’s formalised in Ahimsa 2,500 years ago but it comes from much further back, maybe 100,000 years ago. It’s part of what human beings bring with them and something that hasn’t yet been able to take shape; perhaps it’s something that was already lodged there in the hominid consciousness very long ago. Nonviolence emerges with the beginnings of human beings. It’s related to the Yes and the No that are mixed within the interior of each person as we explained years ago in the public rallies that we did in several cities in the eighties. Sometimes one direction gains strength and at other times the other prevails; the human process is debated between the Yes and the No. “To create this consciousness is something positive that we can do. It’ll be good for us, good for others and right for this world. However, we believe that this kind of action also serves other matters that are not exactly of this world. There’s something that comes with human beings from their beginnings, something that we don’t notice in other species, but which is there in every person and unfolding. They’re processes, with their highs and their lows, their cycles. Suddenly it appears with strength and manifests itself; on other occasions it seems to be hidden. But maybe with perspective one can notice that it’s advancing and growing, despite the moments of obscurity. “Now we can planetarise this proposal of an active nonviolent consciousness in this direction. Back then in India it was expressed as a moral position. When have you ever seen a moral force put a whole system in check? Gandhi came to England to speak to the textile unions, to explain to them why Indians had decided to not use the clothes coming from their cloth factories and were instead making their own… and the English understood. “In this kind of action you can’t be guided by success, nor can you be orientated by applause, these things don’t move that way. We’re talking about processes that advance by proving what is correct, what has to be done. The conviction that you’re right becomes a centre of gravity from where you can act. You affirm the certainty of what you experience and from there you project your behaviour; you manifest yourself from there independently of the results of the actions that you undertake. It could happen that the conditions suddenly favour you and active nonviolence becomes stronger, it’s manifested around the world and this direction opens up and advances. But if these possibilities aren’t there, these things won’t move ahead. They’re not topics that move from success. You drive them from an orientation of action which is coherent for you, which is valid and here you strengthen yourself. Human beings have the equipment to fly very far, every one of us has it. There’s no one who can’t be inspired but we need the right conditions to do it. “In these moments of great acceleration, to do what you have to do, you can only be guided by what’s right. The time of the pragmatists has gone and look where it’s left us. Active nonviolence can end up being something worldwide in this moment, because the times have the sign of planetarisation. “What’s concerning in the present moment is not States; what’s complicated today are the small groups of power located in different ambits which are out of control and capable of unchaining a conflict of huge proportions. The destructuring of the system and its institutions, the acceleration in which we find ourselves, all of this is interesting for a new layer of nonviolent consciousness to appear. But if a serious conflict arises, in the case where a nuclear firework explodes, it will be an enormous setback. Those small powerful groups are capable of unleashing something that harms us all, them included. This could end up very badly. In the old days people rebelled against their feudal lords and they shot a few arrows, poisoned and everything, but only a few people died. Today the power of destruction is incommensurable, very big. There could be a gigantic disaster which generates enormous damage, not only in terms of lives, but even making us lose all the technology we currently have. Today the urgent theme is nuclear disarmament. “Things are bad and we have to advance in creating awareness of the danger we’re in. The issue isn’t that there are problems, there’ll always be problems. Surely human beings will go on a process between advances and setbacks, with their difficulties, but a few atomic bombs could mean many years of loss of development and also all life around us. Hiroshima wasn’t just the death of 180,000 people. This is also operating in the memory. People believe that actions of human beings are like fashions—they appear and are replaced one after the other. But they aren’t like fashion, they aren’t replaced, but rather actions are built one on top of another, old actions serve as the foundation for the following ones. Things don’t remain behind or get replaced. Thoughts and actions accumulate on top of the previous ones. Sometimes people believe that something has been left behind in the past and suddenly something happens to create a rupture and matters we thought had disappeared return to flourish on the surface. This occurs both in one’s personal life and in societies. “Integration of, and reconciliation with these contents is important, if not, they remain operating, affecting behaviour and reappearing until they’re integrated. “For a long time, probably since the Neolithic, there’s been a dangerous direction in human beings which has been translated into the form in which they structure their social organisation: in domination, violence and authoritarianism. “We can’t avoid something happening, we can’t prevent a nuclear catastrophe but at least we can try to planetarise a nonviolent consciousness, to raise, a very little, the level of consciousness. Perhaps this opportunity to speak in Berlin, to address those who’ve been recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize and who want to hear our message, may contribute in this sense. They well know that the present situation is critical in all latitudes; that it’s characterised by poverty in vast regions and confrontations between cultures and discrimination which contaminates the daily lives of broad sectors of the population. “Today there are armed conflicts in numerous points and simultaneously a profound crisis in the international financial system. To all of this can be added the growing nuclear threat that is, absolutely, the highest urgency of the present moment. It’s a situation of supreme complexity. To the irresponsible interests of nuclear powers and to the madness of violent groups with possible access to nuclear material in smaller quantities, we must add the risk of an accident that could detonate a devastating conflict. “All of this isn’t a sum of particular crises, but rather a picture that shows the global failure of a system whose methodology of action is violence and whose central value is money.” He resolved that in the Summit he’d ask for collaboration in order to be able to advance with resolution towards global nuclear disarmament; the withdrawal of invading troops in occupied territories; the progressive and proportional reduction of weapons of mass destruction; the signing of non-aggression treaties between countries and the renunciation by governments of the use of wars as a means to resolve conflicts. So in Germany, he called on everyone to join forces and take responsibility in their hands for changing our world, surpassing personal violence and supporting the growth of this positive influence in their closest ambits. He exhorted, as he did over forty years, to carry peace in oneself and to carry it to others; to be coherent with what one believes is good, to make it real in practice without delay. In Berlin, he ended up saying to those who were listening to him, among whom were Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Lech Wałęsa, F.W. De Klerk, Muhammad Yunus, Mikhail Gorbachev and many more: As we all know, the themes of ecology and environmental protection have taken root in our societies. While some governments and certain stakeholders deny the dangers of neglecting the ecosystem, they are nonetheless being obliged to take progressive steps because of the pressure of a population increasingly concerned about the deterioration of our common home. Even our children are becoming more aware each day of the dangers of the situation. Through the media, and even in the humblest schools, attention is paid to issues of preventing environmental deterioration and no one can escape these concerns. But we’re considerably behind this when it comes to concern over the issue of violence. What I mean is that the defence of human life and the most basic human rights have not yet taken root at a global and general level. It seems we’re still apologists for violence when it comes to arguing that it’s for defence or even ‘preventive defence’ against possible aggression. And even massive destruction of defenceless populations doesn’t seem to horrify us. Only when violence touches us in our civic life through violent crimes do we become alarmed, but we still do not stop glorifying the bad examples that poison our society and children, starting in earliest infancy. It’s clear that both the idea and the sensibility that would provoke a profound repudiation and moral disgust that will move us away from the horrors of violence in its various forms have yet to take hold. For our part, we will make every effort to install in the social environment the validity of the themes of Peace and Nonviolence and it’s clear that the time will come when both individual and mass reactions will be produced. That will be the moment of a radical change in our world. The School

Since the beginning of our history as a movement, Silo always said that there exists a knowledge of School. It’s not a speculative knowledge but rather it’s a knowledge that becomes incorporated in the measure in which direct transformations are produced within the subject, as opposed to what happens with the assimilation of information in the development of sciences. He distinguished between knowledge and wisdom. In different stages of our process, he tried in different ways to form others in this knowledge and to constitute The School by organising and recreating the appropriate pathways for it. In my case, it was at the beginning of 2008 when I joined, participating in the entrance ceremonies and the meetings that took place in the Centre of Studies in Punta de Vacas Park over a few days. It was a luminous summer in which Silo gave us the framework for what would be the works of School. Each one of the Masters present had been previously formed in one of the four disciplines: be it through the Morphological, Mental, Energetic or Material pathway and we started reviewing how these practices were understood. “In some way they continue the Aristotelian scheme,” Silo said. “They respond to four different entrances according to the material cause, the efficient or moving cause, the formal cause and what the Greek philosopher called the final cause. There are many possible ways to enter into those spaces of the human mind through other practices that might be interesting for us to investigate. But we’d also like to look at the equivalences between these different pathways that we’ve already travelled along and which we know well, and advance over time in the configuration of Ascesis paths.” “Regarding the Crafts,” he pointed out, “they’re extremely interesting and one could end up practicing them throughout life. We’ve been working in the Workshop and we’ll continue to do so, but we could also apply ourselves to the development of crafts that come from ancient times like, for example, perfumery or other crafts, as they’re very good complements for acquiring the tone of attention, permanence and neatness that interests us in this stage.” “In The School,” he continued, “we’re trying to attain a centre of gravity which is a perspective different from the usual one, a point of connection with oneself, with one’s interior, a level of consciousness, let’s say, a slightly different state of consciousness. “In any case, we have the impression that the equipment that human beings count on is very similar; a sort of backpack with which we all come well supplied. Thanks to this we have diverse mechanisms of consciousness available to us which can help out in different opportunities and they’re there acting or latent. We have them. We come endowed with a psychism capable of accessing extraordinary states that allow us to place ourselves in a certain way and capable of experiencing a special way of seeing the world and things. Usually people have a point of view in accordance with the influences they receive from their surroundings. Their behaviour is in relationship with the world, it compensates for events that they’ve experienced, it responds to certain stimuli of perception coming from the environment around them, it projects values and dreams into the future, it makes a special interpretation in this respect. Their look is determined by their world. But occasionally, we can all start to see the world in a way that isn’t the usual one. “This is sufficiently developed and explained in the book ‘Psychology Notes’, especially in the last chapters of Psychology IV27, where we’ve referred to what we call ‘inspired consciousness’. The phenomena of inspired consciousness are frequent and for sure present themselves in everyone. Some experience it with greater permanence, others have more depth and there are others who try to manage this very special situation of consciousness. Artists, for example, look for it, they need it; it’s indispensable for them in order to create. Scientists too, they try to achieve a mental disposition that allows them to place themselves in a certain way so that they can see things in a way that isn’t customary. It’s precisely because of this inspiration that they’re able to formulate new proposals. “Inspired consciousness is a structure of consciousness that, for us in School, is supremely interesting. Religions also try to access these special inner regions through their particular procedures. They seek to enter into this world. Of course, for believers this state of grace happens through God who is a kind of intermediary they believe in so that they can enter these most profound, spiritual and immaterial dimensions of the mind. The rituals that they practise serve to put them in unusual conditions; so do prayers. In the different religions the mystics are the most exaggerated. They escape the religions. Their way of internally disposing themselves is usually very different to what’s used in the mainstream of churches and religions. “In the absence of adequate information, if you’re unable to count on sufficient knowledge, then those extraordinary states can give rise to translations and interpretations that are very far away from what is really happening in this situation of consciousness. “Because what happens, as we well know,” continued Silo, “is that when someone transits towards these depths, the everyday qualities that are available to the consciousness are annulled. As some of its mechanisms are blocked, afterwards there’s no way for someone to explain to themselves what happened in that moment. If, on the other hand, they haven’t suppressed the usual mechanisms, evidently they haven’t been able to really enter into those other spaces. So in order to correctly describe what they’ve experienced, they have to block the usual vision. In the case when we cannot avoid the everyday manner of thinking, we can’t access a new poetic vision. If this can’t be blocked, there’s no entry. So this is the paradox that certain mechanisms of consciousness must be jammed in order to be able to pass to other mental states. “Furthermore we’re confronted by a second paradox: memories of what’s been experienced are very diffuse. So very rarely do we manage to remember, that we tend to fill the void with interpretations and translations that emerge afterwards. We consider that it’s more convenient to distance ourselves from these translation phenomena. “Everybody has the capacity to access inspired states of consciousness. This is precisely the fundamental theme of School: dwelling in a state of this kind, to have this inspired consciousness as a centre of gravity. This is our target. We want to understand it and comprehend well the procedures that allow us to reach it. “In human history we find different procedures that were used in order to be able to reach these other regions of the mind that we’re so interested in and our studies,

27 Collected Works Volume II, unpublished in English, the text of Psychology IV may be found at: http://www.silo.net/system/documents/89/original/Apuntes_en.pdf, P96 such as the monographs that we’re currently concerned with, seek to better comprehend these forms that were used by those who preceded us in these subjects. “We’re tracking down testimonies that can explain the procedures of those who, in their moment, had access to those states. Reviewing their ways of operating turns out to be an educational experience, getting to know the way of being able to approach these mental situations and allowing them to remain available. For this we must, without doubt, comprehend well how we enter them. Some colourful figures in history had their ‘spontaneous entrances’ but if we study in detail and well, we’ll discover that it’s the same mechanism used by anyone. “Nevertheless, the world in which we live isn’t inspired and these very special states don’t bring home the bacon. “These themes that are so interesting for us aren’t very useful in the short term. Maybe they could be in the long run, maybe what comes to pass one day to human groups will surprise us. But what we’re talking about isn’t useful in daily life. Although there are those who hold that the work of inspired consciousness allows them to reach certain ideas and conceptions that, indirectly, do end up affecting their ‘bacon’ and their lives. “Comprehension of, and approaches to these subjects are primordial for us; understanding fully how it is that these phenomena exist in us and then how we can proceed so that we can produce them at will. Maybe it’s not so possible to directly observe it from our own experience, rather it becomes easier to see it in history and see how the neighbour did it. Surely our attempts to comprehend the procedures that our forefathers have used in these matters will be very illuminating. Information is important because otherwise the interpretations are quite varied. The School tries to advance in these fundamental themes. It starts from the prior condition that these most interesting states do, in fact, exist and it investigates the tricks and the ways of penetrating them. People put themselves in this direction and have their experiences. Furthermore, it’s interesting that everybody arrives in optimum conditions, that they come already favourably prepared. “And how can you enter The School? In order to self-postulate, it’s necessary to have completed the process of formation based on one of our four Disciplines. Evidently it’s an achievement to have had the necessary permanence in a certain direction to finish the chosen Discipline. This permanence is what makes it possible to practice over time each one of the twelve steps, quaterna by quaterna. Sometimes years go by seeking to get the specific registers that indicate whether the process is going well or not. The Disciplines are ways of putting oneself in a tone and consolidating these indicators. “So we need to prepare the people interested in these themes beforehand so that they understand well what this is all about. This is part of the works of levelling. We’ve always suggested these practices to put ourselves into the correct frequency, we’ve suggested working with ourselves to create this prior condition, learning to relax, discharging tensions and transferring our emotional climates, interpreting allegories and dreams, everything that we know. “The preparatory works take their time and constitute a very interesting period. There are several postulants who’ve been putting themselves in theme in this year of work. “If these new states of consciousness aren’t interesting, why would anyone undertake all this work? Today the work of prior preparation is a necessary prerequisite. “We’re therefore interested in certain states of consciousness, the problem that managing to reach them implies, the constitution of The School that puts this subject at its centre, and the way of entering. We also want to have comprehension of these states. Inspiration isn’t enough for us, to this we add information. “We’re referring to a mentality capable of investigating, a mentality curious about all of these phenomena based on testimonies, the creation of written material, different contributions, equipping ourselves, informing ourselves so that we can comprehend. We’re interested in knowing where there was an entire culture that started to generate these kinds of phenomena in many people at the same time, in synchronisation, in many apparently ‘absurd’ productions. “These are the themes and the frequency of the research that we do. We suggest that you carry out different studies and present them here, thereby contributing to the development of The School. The way of carrying them out is through the same way that you entered. If you entered through Morphology, you’ll seek the subject of Forms in other peoples and in different cultures. It’s more accessible because it’s the process you did. You’re trained to do it better this way. You go the way you already entered, it’s the environment that you know better, you develop your research gathering the information of the productions and the ways in which others worked in order to have access to those states. It’s a way of seeing things. “The dialogue established, the interchange, between us is very favourable. Explanations amplify comprehension. They become a source for inspiration. If we’re attentive to what’s being explained, we’ll see that this mechanism of inspiration is activated. All of this is new knowledge for you which becomes tremendously motivating. We must be in a common frequency so that this collegiate body that is The School is enriched. Now we’re in the stage of building the common knowledge of the members of School. For this we favour interchange of some with others. This curiosity that one may feel for what someone else says and being very attentive to what is explained, this is the attitude that is useful to have among us. If not, the whole will not develop. We need to understand from within, putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, what they’re doing. In this sense, the curiosity that we have is very good. The fact of finding other ways to study and trying to comprehend the procedures used by others, forming a centre of gravity in oneself over time, and participating in a collegiate body recognising that it’s in a frequency and synergy continually teaches us new things. All of this makes up the interest and the dynamic of The School. “Let’s grow in knowledge and information, let’s gain in registers and experience, let’s seek the ability to count on more information. We’re targeting both the deepening of experience as well as wisdom. Evidently this needs its time, it’s a process. Wisdom founded on experience. We also aspire to permanence of The School through time. “If the opportunities are correct, this will go quickly. If not, then on the contrary, it’s better to protect oneself, shut The School and even close it down. Historical events determine us and according to the direction that events take, they’ll lead us either to develop or to protect ourselves and finally disappear. The more possibilities the situation of the world gives us, the better it will be for The School! “The conformation of the world in which we live is therefore, for us, another matter of great importance,” Silo concluded. “The environment around us, the opportunity of a favourable moment in events, makes it possible for these issues to be dealt with. In an oppressive world, The School disappears. It’s been this way for long periods of human history. The issues that surround us aren’t, therefore, issues detached from us. We need to do something so that the social and historical conditions are increasingly favourable. We need to do our part and contribute to the general process. “Interesting states of consciousness are related to the world in which we find ourselves. If this occurs, it coincides with the good things that are arising for all those who aren’t in The School. Both things are very connected and feedback on each other. To work in this direction also gives continuity to The School. If populations go crazy, we’ll tend to disappear. There won’t be either permanence in time or growth. The School simply won’t find the favourable ground for its development; it needs the best conditions. Let’s aim for a world that looks like these new levels of consciousness which we’re accessing. Let’s help the external world to correspond to the new internal world.” The Centre of Studies

The edifice with three wings converging in the centre, similar in footprint to the letter Y, is a construction that houses the School in Punta de Vacas Park. It’s arranged in the same way as the geographical form of the three immense mountain chains which come together right there at the conjunction of three rivers. Its azure blue roof, angled and pointed so that snow can’t accumulate in winter, covers the rooms where various masters stay. The unsuspecting visitor only enters into the small dining room where everyone prepares their breakfast or comes to munch on something between one thing and another. Life in that place couldn’t be further from domestic interests. Here people come to meditate, to study, to reflect, to research and to produce things. They work in the workshop and, of course, learning comes from comparing and interchanging with others. In today’s times, it’s the most ideal site possible for mysticism to develop. Located between the highest summits of the West, around midday the crystalline skies are frequented by condors. Besides the condors are a few small birds, from time to time foxes move around the vicinity, there’s a prowling puma that lives in a nearby cave and in the spring butterflies appear and occasionally you can hear the toads. Of course the most dangerous animals are the endemic kissing or vinchuca bugs that can transmit Chagas disease and the scorpions whose stings can do a lot of damage. Silo placed himself here. After my own entry into School I shared many times with him in this inspiring place, remote from the world and yet connected by broadband with the best digital technology. It has its own studio for sound recording and an editing suite that can hold its own against even the most modern production studios. The mini-cinema, like the digital library, probably has the largest quantity of specialist material in these matters that any institution could strive for. As for food, dinner has always been prepared by Edith, a local woman who makes the meals in the kitchen and then withdraws with discretion; leaving the hungry to help themselves when they like. In some of the mealtime conversations I took notes, brief points written between one laugh and another, because usually the daily meal with Silo was tremendously animated, colloquial and intense. Whatever the subject was, he had a view that made it fascinating, a way of establishing new relationships between the pieces of data and he made compelling issues easy or lightened them with his pedagogical gifts. He created an atmosphere by talking, he opened new universes. On occasions he told stories, things that he’d experienced or events told in first person. The five accounts that follow are just this: transcriptions or recreations of subjects that apparently had no other intention than to give a pleasant end to the day. The Popol Vuh

“We know that Master Wizard and Little Sorcerer removed the teeth and bones of the Principal Macaw because they were weary of his pride. All day he screeched, ‘I’m the greatest, I’m better than the sun…’ He was a bighead. Unbearable! They shot him in the jaw with a blowpipe and brought him down. Then they pretended that they were passing by in order to help him and instead they tied him up well. Once they’d bound him, they dismembered him. “The Perez codex that we consulted to write ‘Universal Root Myths’28 is a codex that isn’t very good and the different translations of the Popol Vuh do not agree on many aspects. “The problem seems to have been that the people of Xibalba had kidnapped from the ancestors the souls of their forefathers. The souls of all those who died were led to the kingdom of Xibalba and so they remained unable to remember their origins. “We think that this refers to the migration in remote times across the Bering Straits in the north of the Continent and the forgetting of their origins. The first migrations reached the forests of Central America from icy regions. This is a change of landscape that must’ve been mind-blowing for those populations; from the blue cold of glaciers, to heat, sun, bananas and coconut palms, extensive beaches of fine sand. Imagine! The subsequent waves of migrants who arrived weren’t allowed to settle in the places that had already been populated and they were obliged to continue further south. ‘On you go, carry on going, keep walking, keep going south…’ In this way, over 10,000 years they reached Tierra del Fuego at the other icy end of the continent. And here the Popol Vuh, as they called it, in which we can clearly see the coming from the other side of the sea, can no longer be seen. From the remoteness of Tierra del Fuego it’s no longer possible to see their origins. This is clearly alluding to the passage of people coming from the North of America, in other words, from Asia, from the west for them. “Continuing with the story, finally they liberate the souls of the ancestors from Xibalba and Master Wizard and Little Sorcerer turn into the star, into Venus. Also from this place, from Venus, Quetzalcoatl descends in the form of a feathered serpent. He’s the civilising hero and prohibits them from making human sacrifices, he teaches them to praise their gods through perfumes and aromas that please them. “There are societies that have their mechanisms to establish a connection with other worlds; there are cultures that know how to do this. One of them is the Tibetan culture. They have their prayer wheels, metal cylinders that are charged in the mornings with all the people’s requests and the monks spin them throughout the day so that the prayers go up to the heavens. The prayer wheels are a kind of door to those other worlds. Maybe the smoke, aromas and perfumes that are given off and rise up, perhaps for them they were also going to those other worlds. “Returning to the Popol Vuh, it goes on to relate the creation of mankind which always goes wrong. This is also related to the same issue of their inability to remember their origins. They try to make human beings from earth, from mud, from clay and they fall apart, they’re soft and can’t move, nor are they capable of being

28 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Universal Root Myths”, page 243. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003 strong, they fall over, they’re watery, they can’t move their heads, the face falls to one side, their vision is blurred, they can’t see backwards. In other words, they can’t remember… To begin with they could speak but they have no understanding. They quickly dissolve in water and are incapable of holding themselves up. “So, they broke up the humans made this way and they start again but with sticks, with wood. Like wooden dolls. They looked like men, they spoke like them and they multiplied, but they lacked souls, and they also lacked understanding, they couldn’t remember their Creator, their Maker. They couldn’t remember their origins. The memory of the long migration was obscured. They could speak to begin with but their faces were very dry; their feet and hands weren’t robust; they had no blood or substance, moistness or shape; their cheeks were dry, as were their feet and hands. The objects that they themselves created rebelled against them; plates, jars, pots, grinding stones rose up and smacked them in the faces. The objects burned them saying, ‘just as you threw us into the fire, now we’re throwing you in.’ And so they did! The pots said, ‘You caused us pain and suffering. Our mouths and faces are blackened with soot, we were always put on the fire and you burned us as if we felt no pain. Now you’ll see. We’ll burn you!’ The wooden men were annihilated. The dolls were broken and burnt. “Finally the creators make men from corn and they smell good. These were human beings endowed with intelligence and they could see as far as their vision could reach, they could observe and know everything there is in the world. Even things obscured by distance, they could see everything there was in the world.” Fire

“At the beginning of time, in a primeval era, it must’ve been like a gift from heaven with no one knowing where it came from or how it got there. Human beings took many years before being capable of producing fire and able to call on it at will. It was probably the longest stage in their process until they managed to do it. Over almost a million years they were conserving embers, feeding them, keeping them alive like an animal in order to be able to activate them and relight them, in order to obtain new embers from the dormant ashes. Only 100,000 years have passed since human beings were capable of producing fire for themselves. “What’s conserved isn’t the fire, obviously, but rather the embers. Protecting them, they can be transported, they can be fed from one place to another and passed to different groups. From them it’s possible to once more give birth to dancing flames. If the embers keep their power, fire is available. It can be shared and carried from one zone to another. All of this must’ve been patiently observed and discovered by human beings of those distant times. In reality mankind’s process starts from the times in which they learned how to conserve fire. “It was believed that fire was inside things: that it lived in wood, bone or rock. Likewise it was thought that human beings themselves contained it. Something had to be done for this burning to manifest or come to the surface. Before being able to produce fire, a lot had already been done. In the stage of conservation we can notice that rudimentary ovens appear, for example. The earth on which logs burn becomes dry and turns into baked mud, it doesn’t burn the hands, nor do liquids drain away. It’s not the same to conserve living flames in a sand pit as to cover them with stones, refracting their heat. Concave forms have had great importance, especially in the first times: ovens, bowls, containers. The oven must’ve been invented before discovering how to produce fire. This achievement is really extraordinary and hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated in the telling of our history. “The fire caretakers took on a key function for tribes in nomadic times, a function which was surely undertaken for everyone and had nothing to do with the issue of ‘property’. No one owned the embers, if they weren’t taken care of and they died, everyone’s survival was put at serious risk. “Human beings are the only living beings that don’t run away from flames. All other animals do, they fear it, they flee. What is it about this species that’s capable of defying that tremendous force of nature? What did they do to overcome their most basic instincts and approach the heat? “Initially flames were produced spontaneously in nature, forest fires, a branch breaks and produces a spark as it rubs against another one, volcanic eruptions and lava flows, lightning that sets prairies alight. Mankind’s concern was how to conserve this fire and bring it to the caves they inhabited where they were protected. “The Greeks tell the myth of Prometheus and this stage of conservation. He takes the fire from the Gods and brings it to mankind. Humans don’t produce it; the Gods give it to them. Prometheus, a cultural hero, teaches them. It’s a tale that allegorises the stage in which no one knows how to produce this extraordinary element. “Nevertheless, in the long phase of conservation it’s already possible to recognise the capacity that we all have to imagine the future, the intention to go beyond oneself, to seek ways of surmounting difficulties. Hominids of the time saw fire and must’ve imagined things they could do with it. In order to be able to transport it, they must’ve imagined many things, they must’ve reflected and visualised possible futures beforehand. There’s a great capacity of observation and a lot of intelligence applied throughout this process. “Although it may be very primitive, it’s also possible to recognise in some animals a certain manifestation of the times of consciousness. When a dog buries a bone for example, it’s carrying out a large number of operations, it’s leaving the bone protected in order to recover it another day. “Fire has played an important role in our development process and its discovery characterises us much more than other elements that have been used. They speak about “homo faber” as if the fundamental distinction that we had was the capacity to create tools, but this is also found in many other animal species: monkeys use sticks to hunt for ants and then suck on them afterwards; termites cut leaves and use them to cross rivers. “The first sparks were obtained by hitting together obsidian type rocks. The issue of the ambient temperature was fundamental too. In warmer zones there was better management of production. In other regions they were limited to conserving tinder and applying technology to protect it, without getting to the stage of production. “After being able to produce fire, a process of raising its temperature starts in order to make different works possible: the firing of clay, the melting of some metals, glass and so on, until reaching the point where iron melts at 1600 degrees centigrade. “This mineral was first worked on in the same way as other materials: through abrasion. Iron falling from the sky powerfully grabbed the attention of mankind. This is seen in different parts of the world and in different cultures. It was melted iron and not extracted from the innards of the earth. Different people shaped it using the same techniques used for stones, knifes and farming instruments. Proceeding in a similar way, with the method used for shaping wood and stone, they now start to bang it into sheets, make tools and produce weapons. The metal was found in the earth or contained in meteorites that came from the sky. Small knives made from iron are known, like others made from wood, stone or bones. Much later they put it in a forge and reach the melting point. It’s a long journey. They try with soft metals first: the oven temperatures weren’t sufficiently high enough to melt it. “It’s interesting to observe that the word ‘siderurgy’, which subsequently came into use and is related to the steel industry, is related to the Latin term ‘sidereus’ meaning divine or heavenly. It has to do with this ‘sacred’ space from where these pieces of iron came. For some cultures, the celestial sphere was solid rock. These meteorites were a gift that resulted from stones detaching, like ‘gifts from the gods’. Some cultures from 4000 years ago believed that these sidereal spaces where made from lapis lazuli for example, a blue-coloured stone, and that they were really celestial spheres. In any case, the metal was there, millions of years before, and there were other conditions that allowed for its extraction from the Earth and subsequent working in a very much later historical stage. In those days of iron they advanced simultaneously in the production of ceramics, glasses and alloys such as bronze. “It’s very different to study these things from outside like an academic researcher, than to live it from within and in real life, recreating the complete process from one’s own personal experience, step by step, putting oneself in the situation of resolving the difficulties presented in each stage. We seek these comprehensions in the development of the Fire Workshop, we put ourselves in a situation and we try to delve into the fundamental problems that our species found a way round. “They started with ovens built in the ground, lined with stones of a certain shape, heat refracting stones that could reach higher temperatures. They added a tube to which they attached the hide of a sheep on one end, with a couple of tongues set in the pipe in order to allow air to enter and be blown into the oven, stoking the fire. “Each step implies small qualitative leaps and the management of different operations. For example there’s a similarity between the way of working with glass which is first moulded in heat and then cooled and the way in which some metals are worked, melting and moulding them. It’s a completely different procedure to ceramics which are worked on cold and then taken to the oven to be fired in a heated environment. “Studying the myths of the different peoples we can comprehend the advances of civilisations regarding the conservation and production of fire, as well as the use of ovens to reach certain temperatures. Let’s take the case of Jehovah who gave life to mankind by blowing into mud. We’re clearly talking about ceramics. On the other hand, the Egyptians were already working with glass and metals. “When you take in and become aware of the long history of human beings, you adopt a different perspective regarding the process, you broaden your own horizons. The work that you do with your hands, you do with your head also, you reflect and understand. The intention will be put on starting the work from the beginning: maintaining, transporting and producing fire, starting to gather primordial clays and experimenting with them to discover types that are malleable and then produce the first ovens with our own hands, to then blow air into them to obtain higher temperatures just as they used to do in ancient times, first blowing into them and then using a sheep’s bladder. Like this we’ll make a journey from cold materials to the fire. We’ll move on to work with clays and the need for more heat and experience that a real transformation is produced. We’ll learn that it’s a different matter to conserve a temperature than to produce it, direct it and elevate it. We’ll see how the degree of initial heat is best maintained, whether by dispersing the fire or concentrating it and we’ll learn how to maintain it. We’ll create an atmosphere within the oven capable of transforming clay into ceramic. This change of quality that fired clay undergoes is irreversible; you can’t then dilute ceramic and return it to its initial clay state. It irrevocably stops being what it was and passes to another quality. In its evolution mankind has many positive things. We’ll continue with ceramics, move onto glazing them so that they acquire colour and we’ll thereby get to glass that requires even higher temperatures. Finally we’ll work with the melting of metals. “It’s a nice story and an interesting process. It’s enough to compare this with what any other species has done in the same time period.” Salvation cults

“More or less concomitant with the times of Pythagoras in Magna Graecia, around 700 or 600 years before the Christian era, different types of cults developed whose objective was to save the follower from death. They were salvation cults. “Dionysus is one such case based on the theme of death and subsequent resurrection. The devotee was proposed a process, a pre-planned preparation for their own end. The same thing occurred with the myth of Osiris in Egypt. The god was also killed, placed in a sarcophagus, to be later dismembered and the pieces scattered everywhere. Later, Isis gathers together all the parts and puts the body back together again and finishes by forming a replacement phallus for the one that never appeared and thanks to which Horus is ultimately born. He is a god of vegetation, a green god, very similar to Dionysus. “All of this is Salvationist. They are new customs that end up reaching Rome, the imperial capital. This includes those practiced by the devotees of Isis, Dionysus and also other rites that emerge and are brought by the Christians, for example. In those times cults for the personal salvation of the believer were developed, through which they seek to continue living beyond earthly life; an individual transcendence in which they can continue to advance in the process of their consciousness after the cessation of physical activity. “They all confront the problem of death and get involved with this mess. Surely their salvationist character is in strict relationship with the moment of catastrophe, of social disintegration that people are living in. They all count on their adepts and become a social force; a tremendous social current. “When Cleopatra arrives in Rome as the high priestess of the Cult of Isis that she was, its practices gain enormous strength. Already beforehand it was developing in this overcrowded Rome, with its rites, spreading the myth and holding enormous ceremonies in which a good number of people would happily participate. “For Rome, Cleopatra was a scandal. She empowers the rituals, gives them momentum. Everyone wants to be included in this Romano-Egyptian thing. The cult of Isis creates havoc as it vehemently develops. As her highest priestess, Cleopatra personally leads the practices with large human groups in a context in which Roman religion and its various gods have been exhausted and no longer have any weight. “The Christians coincide here. It’s the time in which Mithraism from Persia was, little by little, becoming the state religion. Mithras, born on the 24 th of December was worshipped and gains a great influence above all among the Roman military. They say that Mithras could be Jesus himself who, when he was born, was visited by Persian priests who worshipped him and brought him gifts: the three wise men who worshipped the child when he was born. The followers of Mithras were also salvationists. “There is a great variety on offer and a lot of competition between these kinds of cults in the New York of the times, in the Imperial capital. “Since a long time already in Rome patrician women had been complaining about the way in which their husbands deserted them, divorcing them with the mere formality of telling them so, abandoning them. They sought a marriage ceremony that would protect them for life. This, among other things, is what Christianity offered. This practice gained a certain strength, above all among women. “Thanks to Constantine, the unfolding of Christianity is prioritised and this great disorder produced by the different rites and cults is replaced. We know the story, don’t we? The Imperial government went looking to them for something interesting. There were a few groups who were to be found in different places, using catacombs and also distributed around the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul and Brittany. Within the empire everything was disintegrating. An agglutinating factor was missing, a glue, a sort of amalgam that could once more give cohesion to the Roman world: it could be the Christians who were dispersed everywhere, speaking different languages. “Constantine called them together to organise them, he made them systematise their theories, and drove it from the State. He gave them temples, old markets that weren’t used very much and the ‘basilicas’, ample buildings that allowed many people to gather together. In the Council of Nicaea, the Caesar helped them to build their creed, organise well the rhythm of their celebrations and ceremonies, define their things and clarify well what they had to go and say, equipped by the State. The Patristics are formed, the theory of the Church Fathers, which is, of course, organised from central power, the symbol of the cross emerges, everything. That’s how Christianity turned into the official religion of the Roman Empire and irradiated simultaneously towards all its confines. If it hadn’t been Christianity, it would have been any salvationist cult, maybe Isis’s, or any other. It was necessary to give continuity to the Empire with something that could have a multicultural character. “The Pythagorean, Platonic and Neo-platonic schools are more cerebral. They also have their approaches to the State in different moments. Pythagoras sets himself up in Crotona, he mounts a government and we know how that ends up. The opposition reacts and annihilates almost three hundred Pythagoreans by setting fire to the barn in which they were meeting. Very few managed to escape. They stop in Metaponto but they don’t try to get involved in politics again. In this very place, later on, Pythagoras dies. Few disciples survive him. Plato also has a go with the tyrants in Syracuse. But these forces try to influence in the social and political world. They’re moralist schools that try to recover and agglutinate, to produce a change of the situation they were in. “The Essenes, on the other hand, escape the cities. They leave, settling many kilometres away and build their communities. A number of people are organised in this way of life, they are the Catechumens. The Essenes set the scene for what will subsequently become Christianity. They want to recover the world that has gone, they are also salvationists and very important. “Dionysus belongs to this same context. Just imagine in the context of Christian thinking how they’d regard the Dionysians! Like demons! They were hated. People attacked and persecuted them, even before the Christians. Maybe today, they’d seem like ‘chic devils’, but back then… The Dionysians belong to that historical moment as did the Orpheans who are more accepted, they’re more related to the history of Greece, especially to high class Greeks. Orphism is more refined, the others—the Dionysians—are seen as a strange cult who have scandalous orgies. “It’s difficult to find information about Dionysus as a person, he isn’t even a God, but rather circumstances arise in which the mythical figure of the liberator appears and there are also salvation cults of individuals. No, we have no information about him as a human being. It’s a myth that comes from way back. “Even Plato becomes mythical as does Orphism. Orphism has its aesthetic, it’s something organised, with a high intellectual level, something well thought out. Dionysus, on the other hand, isn’t like that. In this great confusion that’s built in this part of the world, we can understand how Dionysus could have emerged. Of course we can understand! The figure of Dionysus himself is totally anti-system. Dionysus! His cults used psychological tools of great power which others didn’t use. Ecstasy. This sent his detractors crazy, it created lots of mental problems for them. “Bacchus—Dionysus—is kidnapped and taken on a boat that sails on the Aegean Sea. Suddenly the wind stops—‘like a sea of glass’—and on the deck appears none other than the big, black, elegant panther of Dionysus. Vines creep up the mast, they stretch along the rigging and the boat fills with grapes and wine. The sailors fall into the water and he turns them into dolphins. Since that time dolphins swim close to boats, hoping to return to a human condition. “They always attributed this capacity to Dionysus, the ability to alter the mental states of those who participated in his cult, the ability to go crazy. “They’re myths that approach different mental realities, internal states similar to death, trance and resurrection.” The Void

“In the most profound regions of the mind, the coordinates of time and space disappear, you access a kind of ‘nothing’ which isn’t nothingness. “You can experience the void, it’s an abstraction, but it can be experienced. “Husserl reduces the most abstract things29. “Buddha’s thought which leads to Nirvana is the most abstract. It’s not a void exactly, but it has the attributes of the Unnameable. “This Nirvana is the most similar thing to the transcendent void, the immaterial void. “In these things language puts its limits and complicated traps; it’s not easy to talk about those matters because there’re no terms that can account for what’s experienced; there’s no way to translate it into words. It’s a world of meanings. Words aren’t enough to describe what Husserl was referring to, or Buddha and the Nirvana he reaches, both of which are not voids. “The void we’re referring to doesn’t have eidetic30 material. There’s an absence of all perception and all representation. This can be accessed through practice, through exercise, through dilating this mental posture. In this process emotions are moved. If you register this, it’s because some aspects of your thinking and feeling have changed. “The experience of the void transforms you.”

29 Edmund Husserl and his method of phenomenological reduction 30 The word eidetic, refers to extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall not limited to, but especially of, visual images. Raspaditas and Croissants

“I was looking for the café in Mendoza with tables outside where I’d been so often before but I couldn’t recognise it. If this was it, then they must’ve fixed it up. I knew it was around here somewhere, on this side of the street in the middle of the block, but this wasn’t the place I remembered. It seemed to have the same name on the sign laid out in letters that had a surprisingly modern and minimalist style. I resolved to enter and pushed the door open. “I settled in near the window where I used to sit. At this hour there weren’t many people about and the place was pretty empty. No, I couldn’t recognise it. They’d definitely replaced the lamps with a stainless steel model that was completely different to the ones they had before which had given a warmer light. Also the tables were now smaller and had a smooth surface giving them a more up to date look. They’d obviously painted the walls; I didn’t get why they’d bothered with this major renovation. The fact is that the space now appeared larger to me even with the new tables they’d added. “I asked the girl serving me about it. “She responded, ‘We’re now a franchise of an international chain. So wherever we are the walls are painted the same colours and the furniture is the same. Whether you’re in Buenos Aires, Toronto or Barcelona things are arranged the same. There’s identical lighting and ceramic floors just like this. Everything’s been modernised. It’s cute, isn’t it?’ “I don’t know if I’d call it cute, perhaps only clean and impersonal, a space without history... but hey, at least I knew I was in the right place. “Unfolding my newspaper I said, ‘I’ll have a coffee, please.’ “She dutifully returned with a small glass of sparkling water and a cup with the unmistakable aroma of freshly brewed espresso. She let me know that she hadn’t brought an ashtray because you could no longer smoke here. “Something was missing, something else that now wasn’t here... To my surprise she hadn’t brought my raspadita! “Whenever I’d come here on previous occasions, before the assault of the renovation, they’d always brought one of those typical local pastries that go by the curious name of raspadita. “I remember one time I even asked why they called it that, and taking all the time in the world, with a kindness so characteristic of those who don’t really have anything else more important to do, they explained to me that the dough prepared with flour, water, salt and fat is placed in a clay oven heated by a wood fire. Obviously, they push the embers aside so as to be able to place the flat dough slices. As they cook they go brown and glistening and the bottoms become quite dark. Finally, when they take them out the heat, they scrape31 the bottom to remove the burnt bits. “They also explained to me that since this area was first settled many years ago, they’d set up the characteristic clay ovens in the open field. And that’s where they prepared these dry, compact, satisfying pastries known today as raspaditas. That is, since the first settlements here they’ve been baking these breads that have satisfied

31 raspar in Spanish, hence raspadita the hunger of so many, especially those who worked in rural areas before the time the city was built. “Workers in the fields would plough their land or go harvesting with some in their pockets so that they could rely on them when they needed something. Since they’re hard and dry these pastries don’t easily become stale instead they retain their texture and the pleasure of having to nibble on them with some force in order to loosen a bit and make it last in the mouth, savouring the saltiness and the hint of fat. “They said that the popular tradition of offering strangers hot raspaditas survived even the growth of the city and its buildings. So it wasn’t only rural generosity that had visitors being met with these typical pastries, the city boasted of receiving guests with the same care which originated in the manners of the time. Moreover, when nearly a century later the cafés opened their doors on the downtown streets they maintained the tradition of receiving customers with freshly baked raspaditas to accompany their hot drink. “It’s true that they couldn’t cook them on the premises, but they’d buy them from a bakery that distributed them daily to all the little cafés. To maintain their characteristic ember-cooked flavour they were, as before, produced in wood-fired ovens with their correspondingly scraped bottoms. “Why had this wonderful tradition of giving welcome with a food like these little rolls, with their dense consistency and relatively small size, ceased so suddenly and without explanation? “I called over the same girl who’d informed me about this whole franchise thing to see if she could throw any light on my latest bewilderment. “She came over looking at me with some surprise, as if my query about the loss of what to me seemed irreplaceable was completely inappropriate. "‘You didn’t ask for one,’ she said, ‘and, anyway we no longer have raspaditas. If you want something with your coffee I could bring some croissants.’ “‘How many would like?’ she added with a subtle tone of impatience which sales assistants feel when they’re about to make a sale. “I ordered two, because I thought that one would leave the waitress dissatisfied, even though before a single pastry would’ve been enough. On occasion it had even happened that conversations with friends had extended, as if our time together had expanded, thanks to someone slowly crumbling one of those little breads in their hands, peacefully savouring their dense consistency. But the two croissants I ordered would give me time to finish my newspaper without interruption. “However, I could not help thinking about the crescent moon as a sign adopted by the Ottoman Turks celebrating their conquest of Constantinople in the year 1453... that crescent moon which later became an emblem of the entire Muslim world. “Constantinople—which before Constantine was Byzantium—was a city dedicated to the moon goddess Artemis who had saved it from an attack. The city commemorated the night when their defenders were able to avoid a night time attack thanks to detecting a breach that had been made in the walls in the pale moonlight, by adorning their flag with the slender moon of their protector goddess: Byzantium and its meaningful emblem that the Turks made their own, when they took the city on the Bosphorus and later in history continued invading other territories. “It was in 1683 that the Ottomans, under the command of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, having conquered most of the regions bordering the banks of the Danube, laid siege to Vienna which they wanted to conquer, taking it as they had taken Constantinople two centuries earlier. But the Viennese stood their ground and resisted the siege without surrendering, even though the Turks surrounded them and planned to tunnel under the walls by digging at night to avoid being detected. The sleeping populace never heard them. Only, then as now, there were those who work while others sleep. And one night the bakers kneading their dough heard the incessant work under the walled Austrian city and sounded the alarm. In the end, the defenders took the Muslim troops by surprise and forced them to lift the siege and expelled the enemy army. And so the bakers of Vienna, poking fun at the Ottoman Turks and in gratitude to their own soldiers, produced a bread roll in the shape of a crescent moon: a small pastry that the refined French of the 19th century later ended up calling croissants. “And here I am in front of my two puff pastry croissants which preserve the curved shape of the fertile, crescent moon of Artemis. Facturas, as we also call them (in Argentina) overlooking their distinctively Muslim origin. At times we prepare them with lard, at other times with butter depending on whether they’re meant to be sweet or lightly salted but always they’re the typical French breakfast. These ‘Frenchified’ rolls are made from flaky pastry and glazed with a kind of syrup to make them shine. “Perhaps it was because my coffee was going cold, the fact of the matter is that I tried to tear the croissant I was holding between my fingers, but I found that the pastry was too stretchy. It was excessively light, almost insubstantial. Was this because they used too much yeast or malt extract? I don’t know how they got it so fluffy. It was almost like eating air. You could barely even chew it before it seemed to pass to a later stage of the digestive process, leaving the palate with the taste of vanilla that I preferred to make more bitter with a sip of the liquid in my cup. Two or three bites and I'd done with the croissants, and nothing remained on my plate beyond a couple of flakes. “Full? No way! Rather, an ephemeral taste of a café that of late has become arriviste, aiming to pass for international and believing that it gives them a certain globalised air. With their fast food that leads to ingesting an image more than anything else, you’re left with the need to use the last sip of cold coffee to get rid of the taste. Just as with the culture of this new century which is standardising everything in order to avoid going deeply into the root of any experience, or of dealing with the differences that give us identity, ignoring the local traditions whose meanings are expressed in these customs. “‘Here’s the bill,’ said the hurrying waitress handing me a slip of paper probably wanting me out of the seat as the place was starting to fill with customers. “Yes, of course, these croissants were far more expensive than the raspaditas they used to serve. It’s good business, and that's what matters most—making money— and the ability to avoid any leisure time in which awkward questions might surface. “But I still had this stickiness on my fingers from the syrup they used as glaze. What should I do? Shall I say goodbye to the waitress giving her a couple of soft pats on her back to disguise the fact I'm wiping my fingers on her blouse? Where can I clean off this bothersome stickiness? Better on something belonging to someone else and not me—on the chair, on the so modern table—because the napkin is already dirty, and not on my paper, which I want to continue reading. It would be best done in a way that makes evident my irritation with this abandoning of the things that characterise us, something that makes clear this soulless way we treat each another, a treatment which shows that we no longer give a damn about other people’s things, and even less about foreign things that are no good for doing business. “We go through everything as quickly as possible, locked as we are in our mistrusting behaviour, distanced from others and ourselves, feeling more alone than ever in this interconnected world where we no longer welcome one another, where we don’t love or look after one another. “Better, I suck on my fingers to get rid of the sticky taste of globalisation.” The Last Time We Ate Together

He called Robby Blueh and asked him to reserve one of the dining rooms of “La Casa Vieja”, the place in Ñuñoa where we’d been so many times, so that we could eat in peace, without others around. He even asked Robby to order conger chowder without salt so that he could eat without affecting his blood pressure. Our friend called each one of the seventeen invitees for the night, so that we’d arrive punctually at the restaurant at 8 o’clock. The idea was to meet early and have more time to be together. He observed us jokingly and carefully while the subjects were being discussed around the table without any resistances. We spoke about shamans, how they do their healing and pass from one moment of history to another and how they can be found in all eras and latitudes. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. We also discussed that there are many, such as the case of the Trauco 32 for example, or the practices of Voodoo, certain techniques that developed in the heart of slavery and the soma drink that was used in certain regions. While eating and talking, I asked myself why he’d invited us to this place. What was it Silo was trying to tell us with these stories which, even if they were very much to our liking, were subjects we’d discussed tirelessly? We continued talking about the Mayans: that curious American people that we still don’t know how to explain how around 20,000 of them ended up dying. What happened to that society, why did it burn out? Given that we’d gotten onto the subject of numbers of dead, we remembered that in the first European war 20 million human beings were killed and in the second one of the 20 th century, another 50 million followed. By now, my dinner was becoming difficult to digest. Where was all this leading? Then he changed the subject and while eating dessert, he asked about publishing projects: if the work that Mario Aguilar and Rebeca Bize was working on, on the subject of education, was finished; if the one published by Tomás Hirsch with photographs of the Parks of Study and Reflection was distributing well. But he hadn’t met up with us to get information. He looked at our faces, laughing with ease. I don’t know why someone offered him to try their ice cream and then someone else wanted to, the thing is that spoons and samples of different sweets started to circulate. When the coffee was served, we spoke about the process of formation of The School. There would be the entrance of all the postulants who were in conditions to do so in a short while. Then there would be others and then some more. All of the Masters were being formed for the end of the year. “Let’s wait until the end of the year,” he said. “At the end of the year we’ll see what’s become of The School, who’s participating in it, what materials we have. It’s simple. This process is closing in December, in the last days of December or at most the first days of January. What’s configured remains; what isn’t, isn’t. They’re the last ones to enter, the ones who’ll resolve all this mess. Before this happens, we don’t know… At the end of year everything will be complete. And that’s it. At the end of this year, we’ll see. How will things continue? We don’t know. That’s the great thing!

32 The Trauco is a mythical entity who inhabits the woods of Chiloé, an island in the south of Chile. “There are six months to go,” he continued. “Less than six months in reality. There are quite a number of postulants who seem to be advancing very well. Without anyone giving them orientation, simply working on the basis of the materials that have been made available and with a lot of interchange among them. This way of doing things is more than interesting. They’ve established new relationships, they have a lot of team spirit. The people have been discovering new values and have worked without rules. There are many extraordinary people. It’s been an unexpected phenomenon! “What will happen at the end of 2010? We’ll talk about that once it’s happened, when The School is complete and not before. For now we’re witnessing this process that no one has supervised, that’s sprung from the people and that finds inspiration thanks to dialogue. Very interesting. People are risking opinions and points of view, very well. “Everything pending, let’s do it right now! We’re setting ourselves in motion. We need to reach new people, to give qualification to these individuals. The atmosphere is very good, the tone of affection is very good. Is there anything strange? Of course! This doesn’t tarnish anything. Every process has its anecdotes. “It’s the moment for making a mess. This means going outside. The people are going to do what they have to do and what they believe is useful to do. We’ll base ourselves on that. Without fear of disorder.” We were getting ready to leave, we were going out and putting on our coats. Somehow I felt that we hadn’t come to eat to talk about the themes that we’d touched on, but rather that we were simply there to meet, to see each other, like in this very moment in which we were saying good night to each other. On leaving I realised that this dinner was precisely that: a goodbye. Once outside on the pavement, Silo approached me and turned his face to one side asking for a kiss on the cheek. I held his arm, covered by a light grey coat and with a lot of affection, with a lot of joy, I thanked him. Many times I have recalled that scene. I can still evoke the softness of his coat, the texture of his cheek and the enormous love that seized me in the moment we said goodbye. His Death

We spoke many times about his death, almost always in jest. We’d end up laughing, almost crying with laughter, as only Silo knew how to make us laugh. The perspective of him no longer existing saddened me; a day would come in which he would no longer be among us or guide our process. I knew that no one would ever make us laugh so much, with this extraordinary humour that characterised him even and especially when he spoke about death. “Depart? Yes we’re all going to depart! The only sure thing that we have since the day we were born is that we’re going to depart!” he said. “There’ll be six billion deaths, all of those who’re alive today. There’ll be a stream of bodies like grease in the engines of history… That’s what we are! Or maybe something more?” And he’d make us laugh a lot with his histrionic gestures, mimicking a kind of meat pounding machine. “Please, go through… No, you first, I beg you. Look, I want to live a few more days! Whose turn is it now? Because we’re all going to die. Sooner or later the Grim Reaper comes to visit.” When he spoke seriously one time about his leaving, when we were in the Centre of Studies in Punta de Vacas Park filming the video known as “What we’re doing and where we’re heading,” at the beginning of the year 2010, my anxiety was such that I couldn’t stop myself from telling him, “It will be so difficult, Negro!” To which he immediately responded in reprimand, “And you think that we’ve spent forty years forming you for easy times?” His death was, like everything he did, very special. Despite the fact that we knew it was coming, it was still surprising and masterful. So many times we’d talked about the practices of relatives, funerary rites, the customs of disciples on the death of whoever their master was. He ridiculed those who treasured parts of the body, teeth, those who kept pieces of broken bones and —so that a dog couldn’t come and eat them—put them in specially made objects for conserving relics; they put them in central places in their temples or in more private rooms and they ended up exhibited in museums because they couldn’t get rid of something that had acquired sacred connotations. A bone! A lock of hair! What’s that? Cheap fetishism, stupidity! He always said that he’d prefer his body to be cremated and the ashes scattered so that no trace would remain. In the seventies, in the chats he gave in the Canary Islands he spoke about this matter. There are some difficulties to imagine one’s own death; psychological problems because it’s difficult to represent oneself in inactivity. We always think of ourselves in some place, doing things and of course, feeling something. When we represent ourselves, we always see ourselves feeling, perceiving, doing. And it takes a lot to see ourselves without feeling anything. We appear like in a photograph, we can’t quite manage to visualise ourselves exactly as dead but rather as something photographed. If we try imagining ourselves dead, it’s difficult because, paradoxically, that body seems to be registering activities which are those of our own consciousness precisely as a result of generating that image. I think that I’m going to be dead and still, over there, in a coffin, but I feel the way I do now. Normally we identify human activities with the body. We don’t do it with life functions, instead there’s the impression that it has to do with the body. If these functions stop, life would end. But as the body is here and one normally identifies it with something alive, even though activities have ceased, the body being present, something seems to continue. There’s a serious error of appreciation if we consider the body the same as life, because it’s the body’s functions that set in motion what we call life and not the body itself. When those functions cease, the situation becomes strange. The body is present but life isn’t. We’re concerned a little about our relationship with our remains. Life has foundation in the functions of the body. It’s too abstract and people don’t think like that. When we die, life is exhaled. So when these functions cease the body is surplus to requirements. He explained what happened with the remains. A woman’s family member dies. It’s someone very dear. The woman wants the body buried somewhere. But it turns out that the family member declared before their death that they want to be cremated; with all the problems that involves because this doesn’t go with her beliefs. They arrive at the crematorium, they put the casket in place, they burn it and in this very moment the woman experiences a great relief and declares that she feels a kind of liberation, a deaf comprehension of the phenomenon of death. When the body disappears, there’s nowhere to locate it, it becomes impossible to imagine; so you can’t project onto this image your own sensations. Of course people continue to have strange customs, such as holding on to the ashes. By conserving them we locate the remains of someone who in life was, in any case, in some place. If on the other hand the body is incinerated and we do something with the reduced remains so that the ashes can’t be located in space, where’s the dead person? Where’s their body? It’s nowhere, it’s impossible to locate. Why do you suffer? In any case, through absence of that human being that now, a bit like God, shines through their absence. In other words, they’re noticeable because they aren’t present. This brings us a certain suffering because we’ve articulated our activities and our world of affections precisely with that person. Now they aren’t there and we notice a kind of hole in our emotional relationships that isn’t easily filled. It’s suffering through absence of the other person. This will have its way of being thought, comprehending and incorporating it as an internal content. But regarding suffering through representation of the body of a family member in some place, this isn’t possible. If the body has disappeared, it can’t be located, it’s not there in physical space. Maybe some peoples got it right, psychologically, by conjuring away the remains, making them disappear. Then they made things complicated because they conserved the ashes, but they got it right by making something that created such problems disappear. Even if Silo wasn’t suggesting what others should do, personally he preferred his body to be cremated and his ashes scattered. Although this wasn’t the only aspect he referred to when talking about this subject. There are other questions, he said. They have to do with possession. Why do we suffer? Because of the loss of someone. What do we say? “We’ve lost a relative”, “We’ve lost a friend.” What do we mean? That we don’t have that person. For sure this alludes to possession. When we think about the loss of ourselves, it becomes complicated. Because what do you have to do to lose yourself? This is the loss of sensation of oneself. By not wanting to rid yourself of it, it’s projected onto the body, even when it’s dead. The desire to make one’s activity remain, possessive desire of oneself, creates problems. Of course it mobilises the aspiration for survival. There are those who want to survive but not embalmed—that’s something from another era—but rather in the memory of others. There are those who want to be remembered. How do they feel that others will remember them? They don’t know, but they say that it’s good to be remembered. Others more crudely want to survive in figurative representation, with a statue in a square. We don’t know if that statue feels what’s happening and much less how that sculpted figure has a connection to them, if it’s that they walk about in some place after death… But in fact there are those who aspire to survival through figurative representation. It’s remarkable! There are others who’re less materialistic than those in the squares those who want to continue living not only in the memory of others, but they also aspire that others say a kind of prayer for example. They consider it good that when they die, others pray or say something. There are those, more subtle, who don’t expect to be in any square or remain recorded as a memory in the electrochemical currents of the cerebral cortex of others; they aren’t interested in being prayed for, but they do aspire to a kind of abstract survival; they’re more intellectual. They’re interested in surviving through their special theories. They’d like, even if dead, that their highly specialised doctrines or concepts continue and expand even after death. This abstract survival is a similar aspiration. They do numerous things so that their ideas or work continues in the world after their death. How many things must these people do and what commitment must they put into their ideas and theories so that they circulate around the world and continue surviving through these ideas even after death! How can you survive in an idea? Given how nice it would be to disappear completely and not have any sensations. But the desire to conserve is there, so there are those who worry about their ideas prospering. There are different forms of desire for survival, like an eternal possession of one’s own image. Independently of survival, for me the question always remained regarding what is there after death and so I was shocked by the enormous simplicity with which he responded when I asked him about it on the occasion of the death of my Brazilian friend, Lina Queiroz. “Life functions have ceased in her body,” he said, “so she’s not suffering any pain. Nor can her ‘I’ continue to be present, so she’s not experiencing any suffering. After death there’s no possibility for pain or suffering. Subsequent evolution can only be in her energetic and spiritual nature. Death liberates one from human conditions.” When illness made his movements slower, surely creating pains and tiredness, he picked up his pace and accelerated the rhythm of processes, without speaking about what was happening to him, except very seldom. He said that he had to eat without salt in order to reduce his blood pressure, he was on a diet, but he continued with his life without complaining. When we asked him if he was in pain, a few days before the end, he responded briefly, “I’m continually receiving signals, yes.” The day before, he went to the house of Enrique Guerrero for dinner, his neighbour and friend. They entertained two of the Spaniards most loved by Silo who were spending several days in the area, even postponing their return to Madrid, changing their flights so that they could have the opportunity to spend more time with him: José Caballero and Maxi Elegido, two people with whom he had established a singular confidence and with whom he had a profound bond, cultivated over more than forty years. At dinner was also Ana Luisa, his wife, in addition to someone else from Mendoza. It was the last meal, very joyful. Enrique served, among other things, the tastiest sausages. Negro knew that one would be enough to produce a shock capable of despatching him. He could go at any time, so fragile was his condition. “Exit sausages,” he called them and joked a lot about what would happen if he took what his neighbour was offering. A great way to go, with a sausage that finishes you off! He didn’t eat it. He spent the next day ordering his library, alone at home. Around three in the afternoon, he called his wife to say, “Ana, if you want to come…,” and she immediately knew by his voice that he was counting down the moments. Distressed by the intense pain, he followed his doctor’s recommendations and took a strong painkiller, and then another one a few hours later; painkillers, especially chosen beforehand, that didn’t cause loss of lucidity. The diagnosis was fatal: he’d suffered an aneurysm and had no more than three or four more hours to go. He was accompanied at home by his wife, his eldest son, the two life-long friends from Spain and his neighbour, everyone perfectly conscious of what they were doing. Silo was lying on his bed, the others waiting 10 metres away in the office. Ana Luisa went to see him from time to time, she stroked the most painful part of his body for a while. The rhythm of his breathing couldn’t even be heard in the silence. In one moment, he made himself comfortable, putting his head on the pillow so that he could close his eyes and let everything go and allow himself to go to the Profound. Ana left the room quietly to not interrupt him. When she came back a few moments later, moments that for her seemed eternal, he continued to have a relaxed expression on his face and laid back into the most internal worlds. So much so, that she put her silver phone to his nostrils to see if he was breathing. Then she looked for a little mirror, because there was no sign of breath. She called the friends, letting them know that he was surely no longer in his body. Verifying the fact, they read the ceremony of Assistance for him. Perhaps the last words that he heard were in a Madrid accent. “Prepare to enter the most beautiful City of Light, in this city never perceived by the eye, its song never heard by the human ear… Come, prepare yourself to enter the most beautiful Light…” Suddenly we all knew that he’d gone. The news spread like wildfire, mails, phone calls, international chats, within half an hour in the most remote places of the earth, people were accompanying his transit in peace, his luminous transcendence, giving thanks for the privilege of having known him. It was the 16th of September 2010, just before midnight in Mendoza. Dreams

After so many conversations with Silo about dreams, interchanging about the book of Artemidorus of Ephesus, wondering if it would serve as the basis for the subsequent formulations given by Freud and Jung; through detailed investigation of my own images according to the suggestions that he gave me; interpreting the oneiric contents and systematising them in order to be able to understand them, learning to direct them and reach sequences that I wanted to dream about, it happened to me that while the Master was living, many times I explored the possibility of meeting him in the allegorical world, resorting to the orientation that his representation alone suggested to me from this level of consciousness. This happened even more so from the moment he stopped being among us. On the morning of the 18th of September 2010, his image was intensely present in my dreams—he was making fun of my capacities to intervene in dreams—and he suggested to me that from now on he wouldn’t leave me in peace because he’d come frequently to accompany my nights. I know that this is my own psychism searching for him in the allegorical compositions that arise in sleep and I comprehend perfectly the function that this content fulfils in my consciousness. But, nevertheless, the possibility of meeting him in my dreams is, even today, an important source of inspiration and joy. “A very interesting way of entering into the world of dreams,” he once told me, “is by trying to induce them through imagining an already known sequence, but one whose end can be a surprise, like for example letting yourself go to the first scenes of a film and allowing it then to develop by itself, or through the first paragraphs of one of the Guided Experiences33, and then letting it finish oneirically. “When you have a good dream, one that ends up being encouraging, it’s worth going back to evoke it the following night, re-injecting it into the circuit in order to continue and go deeper once you go back to sleep. Why should you expose yourself to dreaming about anything if, on the other hand, you can go back to what you know you like, something that helps, improves, elevates? People don’t look after the direction of their mental images or their dreams and they put themselves in levels such as anger or violence without noticing how this acts in their behaviour. It seems to be much more interesting to be able to count on a purpose that gives direction to these sequences.” So, following his recommendations, every time his image appears in my dreams, I try to recreate it the following night, thereby allowing his closeness to continue to act. Of course I take notes in the morning in order to leave a record that’s possible to recover in daylight hours. I do it just as he orientated those of us who participated in the Days of Spiritual Inspiration that took place in May 2007 in the Andes, when he invited us to write about the occurrences that presented themselves by taking notes of our experiences, their relationship to our own biography and the emotions experienced, recording the dreams… in order to go deeper in this subtle and diaphanous spiritual experience that leaves its trace at night, like dancing words in undecipherable mysteries.

33 Silo, “Collected Works”, Volume 1. “Guided Experiences”, page 99. Published in the USA by Latitude Press in 2003. Recently I’ve seen that people’s dreams are changing and new conversions are appearing in them. Things that people didn’t think could happen, are taking place. I notice it in my own dreams. I’ve no doubt that with the complicated situation of today’s world people are putting old myths in motion, from their dreams they recover profound aspirations, they rebuild their old models and connect with their guides. Fraternity and justice are returning to find space in the hearts of young people. It wouldn’t be strange if we also start to define what is considered most sacred in a new way. It may also be that ancient religions gain more strength or finally collapse. If it’s the case that we’re at the dawn of a new civilisation, what corresponds is new myths and their translations into diverse images. It’s not easy to understand other times from within and even the oneiric world that someone of this 21st century has is different to what was dreamt in other historical moments. What one thinks and dreams is as much a part of the times as what one feels and does, so in these images one can manage to project where we’re heading. Today, vitality is valued more than ideas. The issue is the vital situation, the most internal of human existence, which is even expressed in what we think and in what we dream. The current moment in which we find ourselves is different to any other. We cannot live in the future, nor can we live in the past… Nevertheless, the world of the future already exists… it’s in the heads of people, in their imagination, in their aspirations; it won’t be long before it’s appearing in the news headlines. The ideas of the future world are, as in Plato, starting to materialise and the reminiscences that seek to grasp this world are already operating. In fact, I see it in the bright eyes of enthusiasm, the joyful passion and the daring; in the social movements and their innovative proposals, the Springs charged with hope, the dignity with which the clamour for a different type of society is rising. In today’s young people I notice a spirit that animates the future and which is stirred by so many hands and lifted up to converge in synergy. If what happens now is the beginning of a new civilisation, then it’ll have to be accompanied by a different spirituality, a corresponding social paradigm and a new culture. It’ll have to permeate all aspects of human beings and also the relationship that we have with other forms of life. In this transitional stage between a world that’s dying and a new sensitivity that’s giving origin to the Universal Human Nation, the look of people will change accordingly and in their dreams the new landscape will start to be clearly glimpsed. The charges of images seek to be accommodated during sleep. We know that in order to achieve transformation, it’s necessary to produce a destabilisation. Nothing changes from conservatism, the appropriate terrain for change is disorder. With large crises that are destructuring the system today, what other moment would we wait for in order to try to change everything? This world that is already coming is on the horizon of our era. The new sensitivity is stuttering because it feels that it can speak of a world civilisation that is emerging little by little and is strengthening itself by taking this tremendous dream as its own. It’s not coming from the memory bank, it’s coming from another side. It’s the emergence of a new world. And if it were true? If what we’ve been saying over so many years were not only a dream but were actually true? If it were possible right now to try this enormous transmutation of social conditions that leads to a just world, to human beings free of pain and suffering, free from violence and discrimination? This is in the atmosphere today, it constitutes the fresh air that we’re breathing in this asphyxiating society. It’s not down to any one person, but we’re all feeling that something very new is coming, something is pressing to be expressed and it’s pushing us from the confines of what is human. History always sets conditions. If the appropriate conditions aren’t there, individuals can do nothing. But if it were possible, now in the confused present, for something to emerge from this difficult moment, something that we’re most yearning for, like the old skin of a snake which falls off, while giving rise to the vulnerable softness of a profoundly transformed humanity… And if it were true? If this curtain of cynicism were destabilised, if we could tunnel through this block of cement which comes from the previous dark process and prevents us imagining a new dawn… If it were true that History is helping to break this block down… maybe one day soon we’ll look back at the dreams we have today and from that framework we’ll recover the inspiring figure of the Master of our Times.