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THE ARES PILGRIMS |
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Last revised: Corrections made on May 25th, 2001 © copyright Michel Potay 2001 |
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No one knows who created the designation Arès Pilgrims (or Pilgrims to Arès) which appeared before a pilgrimage became common practice in Arès. I myself heard it before I used it. The designation might have been drawn from the verse 12/9 in The Revelation of Arès, "...the pilgrim's misery that mollifies the Father." As for the Arès Pilgrims' mission, it came to birth just as spontaneously in the midst of The Revelation of Arès's readers. The Arès Pilgrims are free believers, humanists, existentialists, who live in the world. They believe and spread the word that good and the transfiguring strength of good are produced by the individual's heart and will, but not by powers, institutions, laws, policies, religions, mass ethics and cultures. No headquarters, or organization, or association, represent the Arès Pilgrims as such. The many associations created by some Arès Pilgrims are just limited free initiatives which bind only their members; their various purposes (mainly missionnary, but also philantropic, humanitarian, etc.) always come into line with universal good such as it is defined by The Revelation of Arès. The Arès Pilgrims have no rulers, or dogmas, or structures, or obligations, which have never made any man good, and which at the very most have stopped a number of men from doing harm by threatening or punishing them. The Arès Pilgrims do not enter into any register or files, or an initiation program. Their pray freely essentially out of concern for remembering the Word to be "achieved"; the concern for praise and supplication is nonessential and often absent. The authority that an Arès Pilgrim follows is his consciousness in the path of good: love, respect for all of men, forgiveness, peace, freedom, spiritual intelligence, and in the mission to remind mankind that only good can conquer evil and will change the world What binds the Arès Pilgrims together is the meaning of life and the logic of action naturally given by The Revelation of Arès. Some Arès Pilgrims are still practising Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems. The Aresian faith is not one of religion, but of spiritual life. As The Revelation of Arès is universal, it affects life in all its aspects. As life is by nature evolutional, the Arès Pilgrims' faith is evolutional unlike religious or sectarian faith. Even the pilgrimage to Arès, which besides is a not compulsory and the confined place of which could not hold all of the Arès Pilgrims (hence the strangeness of the designation Arès Pilgrims), is not performed in a religious spirit, it is performed in a spirit of renewal and evolution, and for this reason sometimes attracts a few nonbelievers. Several features both spiritual and rational of the Aresian faith are thus difficult to explain concerning men and women whose ideal is inspired by a book of uniquely supernatural origin: The Revelation of Arès. An Arès Pilgrim's life is an uninterrupted undertaking of his consciousness, willpower and efforts to create himself good and persuade other men to create themselves good, each driving evil away from himself, gaining love, virtue, careful consideration, patience, and absolute spiritual freedom failing which the man of the system cannot change into "the man of the time to come". Those who have not got any knowledge of The Revelation of Arès will understand better what the Arès Pilgrim is, if I compare him with the traditional believer. As an Arès Pilgrim, a realist, I have an opinion, but I do not judge men, their beliefs and ideologies. Not only do I have love and respect for all men, but I believe that most of them can contribute to the world's change which The Revelation of Arès encourages. By comparing the Aresian faith with religious faith I do not judge the latter, I only use a quick way to explain the Arès Pilgrims' convictions: > On the one hand, there is the traditional religious faith. What does it consist in? It consists in pursuing afterlife salvation or/and pleasing God, or a deity, or a founder, or a venerated scripture, nobody could disobey unless he lays himself open to doom, by submitting to unalterable dogmas, creeds, prayers, customs, sometimes to an authority as well. The basis and the form of religious faith were decided on once and for all as though the coming generations would be only made up of mental deficient people unable to understand and live up to the sources any better. So religion is pessimistic about human condition; it teaches or it implies that man cannot elude sin, fatal error, and misfortune, otherwise than through mercy whose inescapable mediator religion is. In other words, a nonreligious human is rather unlikely to get some favors, or protection, or miracles here below, and a happy sojourn in the afterlife. On the other hand, there is the Aresian faith, which is roughly opposite to traditional religious faith. To be exact, the Aresian faith is drawn from The Revelation of Arès, which is not conflicting with the antique Word, but which on essential points radically corrects the interpretations and behaviors forever derived from the antique Word by religions. Notably, no Arès Pilgrim claims that he is saved because he has The Revelation of Arès as his source of faith (Is anyone able to know whoever is saved, whoever is not saved? it says). As he is aware of his shortcomings and sins, the Arès Pilgrim guards against judging any man, and readily rejoyces over other believers or nonbelievers' surpassing him or her in love, forgiveness, peace, etc. "Under such conditions," some ask, "is there any advantage at all to be an Arès Pilgrim?" It is not a matter of advantage, it is a matter of joining the vanguard of the spiritual rebirth of the individual and of the world. Truth, penitence and freedom make up the triple condition of the universal passage from evil to good, which The Revelation of Arès calls "the change". It is a matter of nonviolently going beyond the era of the institutions, which have all reached their limits, to hit the long but final Road to the world's salvation. An Arès Pilgrim does not believe that any man, a believer or a nonbeliever, gains good and therefore his or her salvation without helping other men gain good and therefore their salvations, and he or she thinks that The Revelation of Arès shows the most consistent path in this prospect. Striving to gain good the Arès Pilgrim does not claim to be superior to other believers and humanists; he has only found out before they find them out the real definitions and natures of the strength and willpower of transformation and salvation. His humbleness is resolutely optimistic, "If I, an ordinary individual, am able to turn good, a lot of ordinary people are already good for sure, then much more people sooner or later will be able to turn good; the world will change." Also optimistic is the Creator, such as The Revelation of Arès depicts him, who does not call for creeds, praises, prayers or worships, though he does not turn down any, but who wishes that mankind who have got his "image and likeness" (Genesis), by adoption, as it were, recover the free spirituality and creativity which will enable them to conquer evil and recreate the world. The Father intervenes rarely in human history, whether individual or collective. He is a Father who loves all of his children without discrimination, and who has respect for their freedom, and who only expresses his burning wish that they come back to the plan he offered them in the days when the human nation was named Adam, and give up the plan they have given themselves, that I call the system (an overworked word) for convenience. For millennia the problem between the Creator and the creatures, between faith and godlessness, etc., has lain in the opposition of two prospects and two regimes of values: Eden's plan and the world's system. In broad outlines, the system that men have given themselves generates happiness, but at the cost of evil, sufferings, violence, and death, whereas the Creator's plan used to generate happiness at the cost of love, peace, wisdom. Which cost is the highest?, the Arès Pilgrims ask. Mankind, even its religious part, is incredulous of the plan of Eden, because there is no exterior proof of it left; for the time being the proof is only found in the depths of each man that gives up sin and strives to be good, not only charitable, but also a liberator, a re-creator of the human context. The Arès Pilgrim does not have the religious concept of exclusively personal salvation. Just as he does not distinguish between his sin and the world's sin, between his merits and the goodmen's merits, between his responsability and collective human responsability, he considers his salvation as linked with the salvation of whole mankind, if not during his short lifetime, at least in the future generations whom he prepares for the acquisition of good. The Arès Pilgrim cannot help but believe in that, because the Creator, the Father, himself believes that man is capable of changing its destiny by exceeding the system through the resurgence and self-education of abilities long asleep or wasted in the depths of every individual. The Aresian faith considers the human finality as corporeal. Man's death and the wanderings of his immortal remains (the mind and soul or the mind alone, if the deceased was not an good man) are but the accident which is the logic end of suffering and aging brought about by evil which wears down whole humanity. Once evil is conquered thanks to struggling generations, the flesh will recover surprising properties, notably perpetuity. The theme of the rising of the dead found in every Scripture is related to that transfiguration of the body. But the victory over evil is only possible in absolute spiritual freedom, which will be long and hard to materialize, because both the religious and political powers, which restrict freedom, justify themselves only by claiming that evil is unbeatable and that they alone can protect mankind from it. The missions about which the Arès Pilgrims think follow the opposite logic, that of God, whom The Revelation od Arès enables us to rediscover, God who teaches us the creative power of love and generosity, God who does not impose himself on men, who does not even force them to have faith in him; because he knows that from absolute inner freedom good and then absolute good will emerge, and that, through that Path, man will meet his Creator again, anyhow. The Revelation of Arès does not say that faith is useless, far from it; it says that carrying out good without believing saves while believing without carrying out good is of no use. Good alone brings salvation, but faith most powerfully generates the will of good. Any man, the best and the more wicked, has two natures: a thinking animal's nature and the divine nature, the latter turned idle within most of men. The Revelation of Arès is not preoccupied with the form or the forms that mankind will give itself when it has changed. The Revelation of Arès is preoccupied with a one thing: Let numbers of men make both their natures coexist in themselves, so that they each may be "a body, a mind (born of the mother's womb) and a soul (born of the consciousness of good)", and the world will be transfigured, no matter how organized it will be: capitalist, communist or otherwise. Transfiguration will never result of ideologies, sciences and laws, it will forever come out of love and intelligence. Nowadays in this turbulent world a lot of men are able to refuse to do evil and make themselves be good. Every thinking animal can either be a christ as well ("I made him a God", The Revelation of Arès says) or remain just a thinking animal, sometimes very mediocre and ferocious. When a new born, a man is made of a body and a mind, to which when old enough to have consciousness he will add a soul, the "blood" of divinity, the strength of uplifting, if he pursues good, in other words: spiritual life, even though he is a nonbeliever (Unbelief is understandable, The Revelation of Arès says, because mankind has been outraged). It is from that angle of transformation from (sinful) existence to (spiritual) essence, two words that Sartre made famous, that we best see the Arès Pilgrims as existentialists. All in all, The Revelation od Arès is a Call to the thinking animal so that he will change into a God, by saying to him in substance: Evil can be conquered by the God within you. In The Revelation of Arès the renewal of good, or of spiritual life, is referred by several names, all of them dynamic, notably change, ascent, penitence, a term which it does not give the meaning of remorse or punishment, but the meaning of re-creation of God's son by himself. Consequently, the people in The Revelation of Arès is not "the flock of geese which ask for the mash", as Charles Péguy said. Each man has to repossess himself and forge his destiny. Philosopher Schopenhauer said, "I cannot see men with any thought, I can only see authorities." The same can be said about all those who dispute every development of the notion of man, and so dispute the Arès Pilgrims' faith. Those opponents of the Aresian faith speak "out of authority" without studying or thinking about The Revelation of Arès. They very sincerely champion the lies, the mistakes, the injustices, in short, the consequences of the system without wondering if the the Arès Pilgrims are showing the world a new way, much more rational than they think it to be, of prompting mankind to get rid of evil. By refusing to accept the Truth that The Revelation of Arès restores, those whom the Arès Pilgrims annoy will go on supporting the colossal loss of human and spiritual values and their aftermath: the colossal mediocrity that overshadows the world. It 's been ages since man was no longer discussed, except in theological and philosophical circles, if that! The political assemblies, the courts, never go about man in a fundamental manner. So the essential notions have remained "momified". Can man be judged? Yes, he can, the world's authorities say, who so perpetuate what The Revelation of Arès calls "endless revenge" actually barbarous. No, he cannot, Jesus already said 2,000 years ago, implying that society has to shield itself against malevolent individuals, but through other ways, by loving them and helping them change. Is man unable to change the world into good? Yes, he is unable to do so, the authorities answer. No, God's Word replies, man is able to do so, but we still have to make him conscious of that. Speaking about the change either scares or amuses people today just as it did in the prophets' days. This is why "four generations will not be enough" to change men's attitudes, The Revelation of Arès says, but as long as the principle of the world's respiritualization does not meet general acceptance, evil will be as rife as ever. The Arès Pilgrims, or "the small remnant", regard themselves as the vanguard of that work that consists in persuading mankind that the spiritual is the overall saver. They do not seek to convert people to a religion. But why absolute inner spiritual freedom? To bring about a revolution? No, revolutions never change many things; they only swap powers and laws. Without absolute inner freedom no one realizes that thought has been long confiscated, and that each man's destiny has been set, and that whatever it has left seemingly free is controlled by those who assert everywhere that nothing can ever be changed except in some details. Every official speech and sermon is on the verge of autism. Culture, even the most calamitous one, is set up as the absolute prerequisite of the people's safety. Every progress amounts to the lure, very limited anyway, of the material benefits and the moral licenses offered by politics or by religion, both of them taken together in The Revelation of Arès, because they operate almost alike. The world which thinks it is dynamic because it is agitated lives actually in immobility. The Arès Pilgrims are aware that man, if he failed to set off again, could not regain spiritual life, its real vocation. In order to translate the ageless words of The Revelation of Arès into words of the age we are now nearing, the third millennium, the Arès Pilgrims announce without hatred or anger, but with firmness and realism, that the best way of serving the Father and/or Truth is to heal and help others heal the blindness maintained sincerely or cynically by those who keep on transmitting to men some "values" that have brought as many lies, mistakes, hardships and sufferings as benefits, supposing that the 20th centurie's tremendous progresses of technology are all benefits. Two world wars in the 20th century, which is ending in a massacre in Rwanda and a war in Kosovo, and some big economic, social and moral crises in sight. What proofs can the inquisitors of The Revelation of Arès set against it? |