LIFE WITHOUT WORK and WORK WITHOUT LIFE
PART 1

“You shall eat bread by the sweat of your brow!” It seems clear today that this sentence never held a curse, but a blessing like so many others. Work is what gives man dignity it is something that gives proper meaning to his existence and most of all it is the one thing that makes him a useful piece in the cogwheel of Creation.

A useful piece! This is how the human being must behave in God's great Loom. As a useful and necessary piece, subject to a continuous process of refinement, that shapes and lubricates through the experiences that work provides. He is a piece, naturally small and limited when compared to the gigantic unit of the universal cogwheel, but who has an admirable resource of being able to adjust himself during his useful life, by correcting eventual mistakes of his material origins and then self-balancing himself, so that he can contribute towards the harmonious functioning of the whole mechanism. This, if he, in fact, wants to adjust himself appropriately to this mechanism, which is only possible after he is fully aware of himself, otherwise he will very easily allow himself to deregulate and even crack under any strong vibration, and end up by becoming a faulty piece, completely lost inside the immense machine, instead of an useful one. Therefore it is befitting for man, as a human piece to proceed with the necessary and continuous adjustments of adapting himself to his neighboring movement. And he has to do this while he carries out his activities, because the cogwheel that maintains everything in movement in Creation never alters its rhythm under any circumstance, much less shut down for any reason. Defective pieces that don't want to adapt at all are simply thrown out of the automatic process.

If it wasn't for this gift called work, which always held above it the responsibility of maintaining the human race in permanent movement here on Earth, with the intention of keeping his corporal subsistence and his spiritual improvement, he would have already annihilated himself a long time ago, even well before the end of the period granted for his development. He would have sunk entirely into a deadly indolence, for which, in fact, he always manifested an indisputable and undisguised weakness. If life could really be as the majority of people would like it to be, that is, a “big sweet perpetual nothing”, stagnation would soon set in and with it disease and death, for nothing else could happen if movement were to end. For example, it is neither coincidence nor by chance, the occurrence of so many apparently premature deaths a short period after the much desired “conquest” of retirement; in the cases where retirees really start to fully exercise a profession as leisure paid administrators. On wanting to “take advantage of” the remainder of their lives to relax, they unknowingly shorten life once and for all.

Everything in the life is movement. Life itself is movement. Permanent, uninterrupted movement is a continuous balance between giving and receiving. To stop moving is consciously taking the first step towards becoming rigid, the initial stage of rigor mortis. It is the same as carrying out a slow suicide. Therefore, without movement, without work, nobody can live if one intends to make use of a healthy and useful life, in consonance with the Laws of Creation.

But then if work is so indispensable to human nature, what is the cause for the millions, in fact, hundreds of millions all over the world that simply cannot find work? Why is employment, the life pact of survival between work and capital, production and consumption, in frank decline almost worldwide? So, what is the real cause of this global tragedy? What is hidden behind the diagnoses and above the prognostics of the economists and sociologists, and why is it not possible to understand it through intellectual analyses? What has provoked this terrible social disease, endemic for a few decades and already pandemic today?

Let us make a few premises. Without much effort (and exemption) we will have to recognize that in all life situations wherever any unbalance appears, the human hand is always present as the catalyst agent. Always. On all these occasions, there he is dumping sand in the perfect cogwheels of Creation. Be they natural phenomena or human relationships, wherever something disturbing appears the cause is one alone: the disastrous interference of man. He is the only one that has freewill - a necessary contingency for his spiritual development - and this also makes him the only one responsible for all the misfortune, for all the evil that befalls him, be it in his environment or upon himself, because he used this gift so he could always decide diametrically opposite to what was preconized by Who conceived him and granted him life. Each evil, each tragedy, each disaster always had a deeper cause, a previous flaw of a spiritual nature that then provoked the inevitable, ruin, both visibly and materially perceptible.

That is why we also already know before hand the only one to blame for the global crisis of unemployment and ever-increasing poverty. But this time it is not so easy to see what man did that was so wrong for things to have gotten to this stage. Thus neither is it so easy to recognize the spiritual flaw that has brought about such an unbalance between giving and receiving, to the point that not so many have the basic necessities for each one's own subsistence. It is difficult as we exclusively seek to see the final effect, the material manifestation of a spiritual mistake. The so-called economic, sociological causes, and even the anthropological effects of unemployment are not, in fact, the true causes, but just effects of a first, larger and far more encompassing cause, and it is one of a spiritual nature.

The last foundation to still sustain the thin social peace in which the rich and poor nations lie together is sinking fast like the Titanic. The quality of employment has submerged well below the standard in this post-modern and pre-catastrophic whirlwind of the present global economy, causing the ballast of excessive labor supply and the search for profits to be the principal imbalance. Too many people and too much greed is shoring up water on all sides…

Profit, profit, and more profit! This comes first of all! Never before in history has the First of the Ten Commandments been so criminally disobeyed, so blatantly belittled, so happily mocked by a creature as now, carried out by contemporary man. And never has humanity ever experienced this size of impact, nor such concentrated disastrous consequences of its desolate passage on Earth, a bitter harvest that it is obliged to swallow now as a consequence of its diversified bad sowing, that is so contrary to the predeterminations of its own Creator. The economic ruin that we are now experiencing is just one of the rotten fruit, only one, that we find ourselves forced to swallow now in the time of the harvest.

Profit as a means in itself doesn't generate prosperity, it doesn't bring about beneficial movement, to the contrary, it only provokes stagnation all over when generating more profit still in an absurd illusory spiral of wealth, just like a financial Babel Tower, whose end won't be so radiant either.

However, such a convulsive effort in obtaining profit for profits sake is just an absolute natural consequence of the unrestricted domain of the human intellect, in detriment to the spirit. As the intellect is a product of the brain that is nothing more than an organ of the material body, it is only capable of dealing with matter and things related to it, due to its very constitution. Thus, it can never serve as an absolute guide for man, as he is in fact constituted of the spirit, and for this reason he possesses much higher incumbencies, not being able to waste his life only running after earthly values, which are invariably perishable and ephemeral.

Man, so full of himself and his uncontrolled intellect, resembles a well-dressed cavalier, sitting upright on a wild horse that he believes he has already dominated a long time ago. The cavalier is proud of his qualities and the pose of his horse, absolutely convinced that it is submissive to him and always ready to obey his orders. Then, wanting to show that his horse is capable, he spurs it with all his force and lets it gallop off alone, with blinkers and without reins on a chosen path by the animal itself. Nevertheless, although such a path is full of danger and leads directly to an abyss, the untamed horse won't stop at all, once it has started its crazed gallop, and it'll end up perishing together with its unfortunate owner. Unfortunate and quite foolish indeed and it is just as well.

This is exactly what the intellect does to man when it gains supremacy over his life, when it is crowned by a person and raised up on a sovereign's throne that doesn't befit it, as the throne belongs to the spirit. The unrestricted domain of the intellect over the spirit, the preponderance of cold reasoning over the voice of intuition, is ultimately the deranged driving force of this uncontrolled race for profit, because of the profit itself. This is the main cause, the only one, of this insane competition that will never revert into progress or into well being at all, much to the contrary. It is a senseless race, disputed amongst senseless contenders, that only makes the unemployment levels rise, because the product of work will never be a match for profit originating from speculation, in the myopic view of the immediate evaluation of the intellect. It is a greedy race, completely foolish, where only losers will be crossing the finish line.

Roberto C. P. Junior