Extending Life Through Collaboration

"And if you want to expand life further, unite your joy 
to the joy of your fellow man. Unite your effort to that of others and you will then feel that your life grows because you will also receive by reflection what the others feel."
(Lecture given in Buenos Aires, March 23, 1943 by Carlos Bernardo Gonzalez Pecotche*)

"I want to insist once again and will always insist that it is necessary to conquer death in order to feel and know what life really is. Death is conquered by conquering inertia, which is the absence of life and by conquering distraction, which is the absence of conscience, while the heart beats to the rhythm of what you call life. You will then see that this continuous life, this life without the interruptions of inertia, of lack, of will power, of despondency, of pessimism, and of idleness will saturate you with happiness because it is a life that contains strength and will continuously convey joy and well-being. It is up to you to fill those gaps with life; if not the gaps of the past, at least you will be able to avoid those of the future, thus filling life so as to enjoy it in its broadest sense and expanding your perspectives and also your time because, logically, the more you live the more time will be available to you; conversely, time spent in idleness is time gone, and is lost.

And if you want to expand life further, unite your joy to the joy of your fellow man. Unite your effort to that of others and you will then feel that your life grows because you will also receive by reflection what the others feel. It would be as if all the lives constituted one gigantic life. If you alone, for example, enjoy ten events, in this way you will be able to enjoy a hundred, a thousand, countless happenings; because each joy, each benefit that your fellow man conquers, will be yours to enjoy. In this way, existence will take on a different meaning.

This is what you have to understand in its plenitude. All the particles that configure nature collaborate with each other. This is what makes possible - with the assistance of all the elements of Creation - the sprouting of vegetation, yielding beautiful flowers and fruits.

If we were to place in our patio a small plant in a vase, it will only serve to distract egotistically our sight, and the plant will be sterilized as its seed will fall on the cold tile that cannot absorb it. Consequently, the seed will not be able to continue its existence through other plants that could have grown from its own seed because no assistance could be given by the tile or the marble to the fallen seed. Conversely, if instead of falling on a sterile place the seed finds a fertile earth that absorbs the night's dew or the sprinkle offered by a charitable hand, we would see surging a plant here, another there and many more successively.

If each one of you work, you will advance; on the other hand if you retreat within yourself your seed will also fall on a cold tile and will not have continuity of life, as it will die where it fell. Yet, if like the plants that grow in fertile land you shed the seed of your understanding around you, and some here and others there extend generously their hands to irrigate it, soon there will be many plants of the same kind, of the same seed...

You may have also observed another curious thing in Nature: there are trees that nourish with their roots the roots of other small trees, and there are amongst them those which absorb underground the life of other roots and dry them up. I hope you will be like the first ones and offer life to the small plants by showing them the roots of your knowledge, of your example and of your morals so that these small plants feed on this example, this knowledge and these morals and grow robust. Would you not perhaps enjoy this truth that will nourish later your old age?

One of the most sublime means to open one's understanding to the purest truth is to offer to human possibilities the element capable of nourishing it and allowing it to create a new individuality."

*Excerpt from the book "An Introduction to Logosophical Cognition"originally published in Spanish. Free Translation