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THE REVELATION OF ARES |
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Last Revised : Corrections made on May 25th, 2001 © copyright Michel Potay 2001 |
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The Revelation of Arès has two parts: The Gospel Delivered in Arès, which I took down from messenger Jesus' mouth from January 15 to April 13, 1974, and The Book, the Maker's message that I collected from October 2 to November 22, 1977. Since then I have not witnessed any supernatural manifestation of such a supreme level, which I could have added to both the former.The Revelation of Arès, it seems, will not go any further. Like all that originates in the Creator The Revelation of Arès is a source of miracles. It is sometimes the sudden, though scarce miracle got without merits other than mere hope of it. It is above all the slow, though guaranteed miracle that will change the world, the miracle at which whoever works when he or she transforms (or recreates) himself or herself by his uninterrupted effort to chase away evil from his or her heart, put good into practice, and persuade other men to do so. As man, Genesis says, is created in the image and likeness of the Creator, any human, a believer or a nonbeliever, that recovers Good refills himself with grace, he or she administers himself or herself the Creator's strength. That force amassed from generation to generation will conquer even death. The Bible and Quran are the revelation of the Eternel and Merciful, the Gospels are the revelation of love, but The Revelation of Arès is the revelation of effort. It calls on man to leave dependant faith, and gain dynamic, creative, free faith. Browsing through The Gospel Delivered in Arès some see a biblical imitation in it, and in The Book they see a stage thunder; they shrug their shoulders. Others devour The Revelation of Arès in search of a magic formula for solving their problems immediately and, as they do not find it, they do not seek to understand its real meaning and goal. Others realize its significance, but they leave it for fear of believing in it. That shallowness explains why The Revelation of Arès will get the attention it deserves very slowly among the society who have turned spineless and lazy, filled with if not envious of material possessions and rewarding easy ideas. But a little attention is enough to detect something very unusual in The Revelation of Arès, an extraordinary nearness and complicity between the Author and the reader, which reminds the latter that both of them share a same Life. Next, the reader notices that the Author, the Maker, stays back from his own Word by speaking about man, always about man, about man again and again. So his Love has no need to utter the word love; the Author's Love is manifest in his very self-effacement. Self-effacement and love form the sign of genuine authority. What a lesson for those who pose as authorities! A lot of ideas have been borrowed from The Revelation of Arès already, whether adapted or even copied word for word. One can recognize them in religious speeches, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, etc., and in some political and philosophical comments. But when The Revelation of Arès was published amidst total indifference in 1974 and 1977, it was entirely new, or to be more precise it entirely resurrected a Word which had long been distorted, misrepresented, or forgotten. Today, The Revelation of Arès's style, tone, concept of spiritual freedom, among other things, have been adopted by some big and small religions, which had not been particularly noted for flexibility and generosity of thought so far, or they have been borrowed by a few so-called revelations here and there published in the world. In the present world engaged in fierce competition it is a commonplace that some preachers short on ideas take for themselves all the credit for The Revelation of Arès's values, but it is amazing that common believers in search of the Light find it in The Revelation of Arès and do not dare speak its name. Perhaps the witness, the location and the circumstances of the supernatural event are regarded so unexpected as to be unlikely, and so raise embarrassment which offsets attraction? In any case, I am delighted to see The Revelation of Arès get emulated. On the 2d of January, 1974, I moved from Bourges (Central France), where I had performed my ministry from 1969 to 1973, to Arès (near Bordeaux) where I, my wife Christiane and daughters Nina and Anne (Sara would be born in 1975 in Arès) settled in a small estate purchased to accomodate a few families who intended to experience the life of a Christian community of the original type depicted in the Acts of the Apostles (see My real story). With the help of a few faithful I set about repairing the delapidated buildings. It was in those days, when I had swapped my clerical dignity for overalls and a toolbox, in a house cluttered with bricks, plaster sacks and electric wire rolls, that in the night of January 15, 1974, I was woken by a voice which called me to go to a room where I found myself face to face with Jesus. He was to come back to the same place and wait for me there, forty times in all, until April 13. Jesus would appear to me in his whole corporeal body. A tunic clung to his skin; it wrinkled and puckered as if he had just come out of the sea. Under my eyes stood a man who had risen from the dead, and who was proving his resurrection, a transfigured human and not a God. My faith in incarnate God was shattered, then replaced with the still greater hope arousing within me at the sight of a fellow man who, only by his courage to become good and surpass the worldly powers, had risen to the most supreme destiny: to live in the universe, and who had just come down to Earth taking care of a few specks of dust in the immensity, his brothers threatened with the very evil that they have been generating. The psalmic words came back to me several times, "Is man so important that Heaven remembers him?" In a resonant voice Jesus would teach me the Creator Father's true Word. He used to move. I could see his hair probably tied back blow in the draughts. He touched me. He had a muscular build and was very tall (compared to a door, his height seemed to me next to 2m or 6 ft 5 ins). His face was typically Levantine, his expression noble. I was most impressed by his searching look; that gaze detected my sins within my innermost recesses. I realized that, were it not that he had infinite patience and love, he would not have come near the wicked man I felt I was for the first time. I never saw him come in, I was always woken after he had arrived in the house, so I could never see him come in, but I could see him leave rising and disappearing. He spoke standard French, apparently inattentive to my difficulties in writing down his words, which I would entitle The Gospel Delivered in Arès. For next to four years afterwards, my conversion to spiritual simplicity developed with difficulties which I had not imagined could be that great. I found out that even a supernatural event of that magnitude does not transform a man rapidly, not by a long shot; his old beliefs and his maturity penchants stick to his body like his entrails. By turns tiredness, fear of telling incredulous, mocking, spiteful people the visits of Jesus, impulses to forget all of the event, and even longing to die, threatened me. My complete conversion, I mean the moment when I began living up to The Gospel Delivered in Arès naturally, took almost four years, it did not consolidate until a short while before I witnessed another supernatural event still more extraordinary: the theophanies (or the Maker's direct manifestations). The theophanies had been heralded by Jesus, "You will have grounds to say: I saw God," but I had not lent concrete meaning to these words. It was a complete shock. On October 2, 1977, in the late night, I was woken by an unusual din sounding like the clashes of swords and shields in a battle. The sky was glimmering. The House of the Saint's Word, the chapel, seemed to be melting in a white light. That fantastic night conflagration would wake me up five times until November 22. Later some locals would say to me that they had sighted the phenomenon, which they ascribed to ufos, but as I ascribed it to God, none of them agreed to testify officially. Each theophany unfolded in about the same way: I was woken by the sounds of a celestial battle, the sky was glimmering, the chapel having changed into a liquidlike white light attracted me, I went through the garden and into the hall of prayer filled with other sounds and other light phenomena, then a stick no taller than a cane but dazzling stood up in front of me, the Voice came out of it, I wrote down its words that were to make up The Book. The language was very terse, but its accurate meaning formed simultaneously within my head. I have lengthily described the theophanies and my states of consciousness during that period in "The Witness's Accounts, Notes and Thoughts" which is a part of The Revelation of Arès. I had transcribedThe Gospel Delivered in Arès as its revelation went along, on the spot (the first pages had been written down with a big carpentry pencil on a plaster sack), and I had published it in its entirety, because its clear language had posed only minor problems for me. I transcribed The Book likewise, but its abbreviated language would require supplementing to gain in legibility. I would serialize it in the periodical Le Pèlerin d'Arès (The Arès Pilgrim), which has been long out of print, but was deposited with La Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as soon as 1978. The setting of The Book to easy legibility that I decided on was not the most elegant, but that which set off its original way of speaking best, and the style and spirit of which the supplements did not conceal or alter (all the verbs were kept in the present tense, etc.). The legibility was further improved in the 1995 bilingual edition. For instance, God had said to me, "Before, the man of Adam is long" (VII/1), which means that the biological man, the thinking animal, had been long in existence when he was transformed into Adam, who therefore was a spiritual creation, but not a corporeal and intellectual one. The wording of that verse in the 1995 edition is, "Before (Adam there is the man(, the soil) of Adam(. Man) is (a) long (time before Adam)," in which the original language and meaning show up well. In May and June 1974 I asked for the advices of about a hundred religious leading experts in the world, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim; I had attached a typesetting of The Gospel Delivered in Arès to each letter. Only one, Si Hamza Boubakeur, answered me, in sympathetic words he felt sorry for me having to bear such a burden. By keeping silent the religious authorities freed me from their chains, I decided to publish The Gospel Delivered in Arès. But that silence was the forerunner of further silences even more amazing. Though well aware that any writing which contradicts "the correct thinking" is trashed in the free countries just as it is in the dictatorships, I did not expect 44 out of the 47 publishers whom I approached to keep absolutely silent. The other three turned down The Gospel Delivered in Arès, but they at least answered me, notably Robert Laffont who considered the event of Arès as fascinating but the risk that the conservative mass media might react violently as major. Later on I would find out that even nonconformists, libertarians, and progressive believers, cannot unprejudicedly consider, because it is supernatural, a message that says that universal good is possible if it is spiritual and free, and that every man has to be encouraged to gain it, and that the world will so abandon religion and politics which both chase evil, but through another evil: law and the arbitrariness law generates and makes worse indefinitely. This is the very plan, though as yet unfulfilled, taught by the Gospel for 2,000 years. Currently the conservatives' anger is apparent in the slander spread by some associations like ADFI and CCMM, but, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote, "its is not with the strip cartoons of hatred that history is ever anticipated". No prophetic movement has ever started off without being fiercely fought. In any case, The Revelation of Arès is to mold the future. I was not until 1984 that The Gospel Delivered in Arès and The Book, which complement each other and cannot part, were printed together under a one title, The Revelation of Arès. That edition also contained some articles, forewords, accounts and annotations, through which I had borne witness to the event and explained its meaning for the previous years. The Revelation of Arès has been published in that form until now. As no French publisher has ever agreed to bring it out, I have continuously published and distributed The Revelation of Arès myself with the help of the Arès Pilgrims. Its circulation has recently reached 230,000, and is increasing, a remarkable figure for a self-distributed book, which scarce favorable reviews have supported in the French press, which conservative and cynical has mostly reviled it. That figure is a sign of irresistibility. I divided The Gospel Delivered in Arès in 40 which I called vigils, and The Book in 50 parts which I called chapters and designated with Roman numerals so that they would not be confused with the vigils. I also split the vigils and chapters into numbered verses. I have been reproached for that splitting; some verses are considered too short and some too long, but I cannot revise it because of the numberless references now in circulation. Few are the vigils or chapters that deal with a one subject, because the plan of this Revelation does not follow our literary logic. It follows the logic of interaction typical of the Creator of the universe, a plan in which each localized idea contains and supports all of the ideas of the book, hence returns and retreatments sometimes unexpected of topics previously expressed. In God's Word the consistency between each particular point and the entirety is a permanent concern. Consequently, The Revelation of Arès is difficult to analyze following cultural methods; it should be read in a single Breath, as it were. But for all that the superb message is by no means muddled, it wraps us up in a different Thought. The Word of Arès is universal. How can it be summed up? Many a formula has been put forward. In 1992, to Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz hostile to The Revelation of Arès I wrote the following formula, which moved him, "All in all, God in Arès says: Let man appear at last so that evil may disappear! For the constrained being is not a man and together with all that constrains him is a source of evil." The Revelation of Arès, as I said above, declares that the masses have persisted in relying on religion and/or politics and their laws to solve the problem of evil, while evil cannot possibly be conquered but in each man's heart. But man does not conquer evil within him, in other words: man does not take possession of himself, without inward absolute freedom. Now, the latter does not emerge until fear of cultural prejudices and of laws is conquered. Is this a vicious circle? No, it is not, The Revelation of Arès says, but the effort put into release is as long and great as the prospects it opens up before the released man is extraordinary. This is why The Revelation of Arès is a school for character; it too arouses thirst for learning, because positive knowledge (sciences, etc.) is a requirement for freedom. Absolute spiritual freedom, at any stage of evolution, is much less hazardous than the coercion of the cultures (not to be mistaken for learning), of the doctrines and of the laws, protective though they may sound. Each man will be encouraged to develop his personal intelligence, and less and less use the conventional mass reason, because mass reason cannot possibly be spiritual, because spirituality goes with individuality. And so on, The Revelation of Arès wrong-foots culture in reversing or rather redressing even the senses of words which people think has gained perpetual acceptance through use. So, the only law ("the law that is to be") it forecasts is that which does away with all of laws, and the penitence that it states is not religious penitence (remorse, punishment, submission), but it is man's constructive inward action of re-creating himself spiritual. The religious authorities (white king) and political, judicial, financial authorities (black king) are harshly treated, but behind very critical words an attentive reader feels the burning Love of all of men. No one is unworthy of climbing the Heights, if he wants to regain his divine essence only by personal penitence and by working at the world's change into good. As everything is interactive in The Revelation of Arès and its richness and strength of expression are immense, it is difficult to sum it up without weakening its Breath. You have to read it again and again; you have to let God speak. It is a mine the more dug, the more enriched. The feeling that overcomes you in the course of interactive readings is that the Creator lies in man and man lies in the Creator. An enormous disproportion obviously separates them in strength, but not in principle, because man shares five powers with the Creator, which The Revelation of Arès does not enumerate, but which show up well against the background: freedom, individuality, speech (the tool of thought), power of creating, and love. Out of freedom man can use these five powers in good, or in evil, or nor not at all. Currently both the creativities, that of the Father and that of man, have resulted in two conflicting plans. On the one hand, the plan of Eden or of happiness, which the Father calls on man to restore, which disappeared without leaving any proof of its plausibility, and which man considers as a legend or an Utopia therefore. On the other hand, the plan of the system created by man, which rules the current world, the values as well as pains and deficiencies of which man knows, but which man believes is the only system possible. This is why what is at stake in The Revelation of Arès lies in the verse, "The Truth is, the world has to change" (28/7), that is, change from the system to man. That change cannot be achieved by mass laws and mass implementations, but by each man's spiritual re-creation by himself. Each man is able to return to good for which he is conceived by forgoing the system of rivalry, of submission, of pains and worries with which everyday life becomes more and more burdened. Mankind has lost spiritual life, which alone can produce good, happiness, perpetuity, the existence of religion and philosophy proves it, which from time immemorial have resulted from the loss of man's calling for surpassing of himself, transcendence, transfiguration. Cut off from spiritual life, turned pessimistic therefore, religion has considered any kind of hope to return to Adam as Utopian and nurtured the notion of the irreparable persistence of evil, misfortune and death and taught that there is no way out but Mercy and paradise. The Revelation of Arès contradicts religion and asserts that spiritual life lies idle under the desert of theology and politics. No, The Revelation of Arès says, man is not conceived to suffer and die, God has nor created man to have Pity on him; his death which occurs before he has gained the amazingly high knowledge, experience and wisdom of which he is capable, and his life in the hereafter, are just accidents, which are never very happy, besides, even in the best occurrence (The Revelation of Arès does not use the word paradise). Some have seen anarchism in The Revelation of Arès, others have seen marxism, others have seen buddhism (an unexpected opinion, since The Revelation of Arès does not vouch for reincarnation), others have seen some Judaic-Moslem-Christian syncretism in it, etc. The Revelation of Arès is a long way ahead of all that. It welcomes any good man, whether a believer or a nonbeliever, it does not dwell on the forms of spirituality provided the latter is a product of love, forgiveness, wisdom, patience, and spiritual intelligence, which are all trainable. It shows the liberating strength once created in Adam, since then suppressed or encaged for millennia, but still retrievable. It calls on man to return to Eden through his heart, even though it will take many generations before the return is achieved. Not only does The Revelation of Arès have guaranteed purity and completion on top of its predecessors', the Bible and the Quran, but it also has warmth. That Word is close to us, even whenever it reprimands men; to us it brings back God, the Father, which religion has made very distant and overwhelming. This Word gives us frequent opportunities of singing and laughing, and of thinking above all. It is not a Word to dream, it is a Word to act. |