A text from Jorge Angel Livraga.

“No philosopher or thinker has ever doubted such a need, this need for a moral condition that comes from an essentially pure nature, from the very Being itself.

Today, an individual’s innate goodness is conditioned by their religion, family origin, geographical location, race, and many other etceteras that would fill entire pages of a detailed display of prejudices and superficialities. Humanity has been dazzled by plans and systems, by the forms of containers rather than their contents.

Individuals would be qualified according to their origin, that is, according to the system that begot them.

Christians were good, “pagans” bad.
The nobles had “blue blood” and the others were “villains”.
The people are good and the kings are bad… Long live the guillotine!
The worker is good and the industrialist is bad.
The soldier is more valid than the farmer, or vice versa.

The “chosen people” … “God’s people” … In short, the “good” ones, who, to exist, need the “bad” ones.

This common denominator makes one speak of Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, whites, blacks, rich, poor, wise, and ignorant. It is racism in all its colors.

This massifying aspiration for collective redemption, and for the also collective destruction of those who do not participate in such redemption, class or party, places all hope in systems, creeds, races, and acceptances. The individual man loses importance.

(…)

It is correct to think that the solution to this problem lies in the pure and simple understanding that what really matters are not the systems, but the individuals who integrate them. And what is fundamental is the moral quality of these individuals. It hardly matters whether a country is governed by the right or the left, whether its regime is presidential or monarchical.

What matters is whether the individuals for the administration of a country are good, honorable, fair, valiant, and thorough. What we need is not for certain factions or political, social, or religious sects to triumph. What we need is good individuals and for them to be recognized as such, to be allowed the highest responsibilities in all fields. If this were done, they would accept them, not out of ambition, but out of a spirit of generosity and solidarity.

If, going back to Plato, the good shoemaker has the duty to make shoes for everyone; the good tailor, clothes for everyone, etc., he who governs himself, who masters his passions and verticalizes his ideas with the strength of his will, will be the most apt to apply what is advantageous in him to all members of his community.

If we can support good individuals and give them the necessary cultural tools, they will be able to integrate any form of government, because any form of government in their hands will be effective.

If a good individual is at the head of a religion, whatever it may be, he will awaken in his believers the Presence of God, for they will see it reflected in himself.

Let us be brave and start now to throw into the waste bin of History the harmful systems that govern us so that, on their ruins, this New Man can walk, whose main characteristic is to be good.”

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

Lewis B. Smedes

“Correct a wise man and you will make a friend. Correct a fool, and you will make an enemy.”

Adapted from Proverbs 9:8

“Then, he sits under the shade of a sacred fig tree to meditate. There, he experiences the enlightenment that would have gave him a full awareness of the absolute truth.

According to traditional accounts, he simultaneously sees the infinite worlds of the Universe, his countless past incarnations, and those of all other beings, and the chain of all causes and effects. At dawn, he intuits the Four Noble Truths, the foundational pillars of Buddhism:

1. Suffering is inherent in every form of existence;
2. Ignorance is the root of suffering;
3. By extinguishing ignorance, suffering can also be extinguished;
4. The path to this is equidistant from surrendering to the pleasures and calls of the world and from the rigors of asceticism and self-mortification.

Buddha would refer to this middle path using the metaphor of a lute, whose strings can neither be too loose nor too tight to produce the right sound.

It is expressed in the Noble Eightfold Path: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. These are eight meditative attitudes whose full understanding cannot be conveyed through words alone.

Through this path, one arrives at the extinction of ignorance, which in Buddhism isn’t associated with the mere lack of information, but with a lack of understanding of the profound meaning of existence.”

“Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, trust, and justice.”

“I will accept the theory that there is no Architect of the Universe when it becomes possible to throw a handful of wood and iron into the air, and they fall to the ground in the shape of a piano playing Bach’s symphony.”

Helena Blavatsky

Social programs have done far more to reduce violence in Brazil than any gun ownership program ever could.

What causes violence is the criminal.
What creates the criminal is misery.

Think of the average profile of a poor family in a favela. Imagine a child born into such a family. Let’s name this child José.

José was born and lives in the favela. His mother works as a cleaner for an outsourcing company, leaving home at 7am and returning at 8pm every day. She goes to church on Sundays and watches soap operas in her free time.

7 out of 10 Brazilians with an income below a thousand reais per month abuse alcohol [1], so let’s assume José’s father is an alcoholic. José doesn’t have a computer or internet, there’s nothing to do at home, so he hits the streets. All his friends gather there because their situation is somewhat similar. Anyone who’s been a kid knows: riding bicycles (if they have one), playing ball, flying kites, graffiti, and messing around.

Collectively, these friends influence each other’s cultures. The most listened-to music genre among teenagers is Funk [2].

Looking at the most popular Funk songs during the research, they’re all about obscenities. Not the good kind of Funk songs.

So there’s José, watching his mother work her fingers to the bone, telling him to study and straighten out his life to get a job.

“Get a job for what? – José says. To work at McDonald’s? Look at the rich kids showing off in BMWs, have you ever stopped to think how much a car costs? 150 thousand reais? I can’t even afford a snack. I’m at the bottom of a massive crap-storm where everything comes down and drowns me. What options do I have in life? Either I get a crappy job or I make my way.”

“Do you prefer to live briefly as a king or a long life as a nobody?”

Crazy Life – Racionais MC’s rap group

José is under pressure, at a highly impressionable phase of life, embedded in a culture that values many things he can’t have. The only path giving him autonomy in his life is crime. If he already has a friend in crime, the easier. And if he joins, it’s possible that other friends follow through him.

Now, see the difference with social programs like Bolsa Família, giving José’s mother money to keep him in school with over 75% attendance. Even José’s father will nag him to go to school.

In school, he knows he has a chance to enter college for free, it’s up to him. He can be anything he wants. He also has a quota system to level the playing field with middle/high class kids who have a comfortable life, computers, internet, English courses, and preparatory classes. The same kid who grows up and criticizes social programs and quotas, thinking the guy is lazy.

The key is: Keep people’s dreams and hopes alive. When you take that away from them, they become animals with nothing to lose, capable of stabbing you for 20 reais.

And then you have Bolsonaro, a president epitomizing the prejudices of the simple-minded racist, surrounded by like-minded folks, like Weintraub, former Minister of Education, saying he wouldn’t fund philosophers and sociologists with education money. My friend, you’re a danger to society.

[1] https://www.estadao.com.br/saude/entre-os-mais-pobres-71-abusam-do-alcool/
[2] http://www.culturanascapitais.com.br/musica/ (Select the age range from 12 to 15 years old. This site was created based on research conducted by JLeiva Culture & Sport consultancy, with participation from Datafolha, and surveyed 10,630 people aged 12 and older, between June 14 and July 27, 2017)

(From my Facebook excerpts, June 2020)

I am reading a book that was written in 1486, it’s remarkable how the account is still relevant today:

“Leave the young, from an early age, to an idle education and to a progressive contagion with vice; when they reach adulthood, give them severe punishments in the name of the Lord for the same crimes they have committed with impunity since childhood. What are you making of them if not thieves, only to later hang them?”

“O Lord my God,
If I seek You for fear of Your hell, burn me in hell.
If I seek You for the desire of Your heaven, cast me out of Your heaven.
But if I seek You for who You are, take me into the bosom of Your glory.”

Rabe’a Al-Adiwiyah – Sufi Mystic

The subject is complicated… But I will give my opinion.

Today, without money, we go hungry, cold, and face humiliation… An unnatural life for man in a cruel, ugly, and selfish habitat.

They pit blacks against whites in a battle where there can be no winner, until there’s genuine and sober altruism. We live in a society of selfishness, and the answer is the exact opposite, to want the best for others more than for oneself. Until this becomes part of our culture, we will live like animals preying on each other.

We shouldn’t wait for change from above, as it won’t come. Change must come from your soul to your heart; teach this to your children, live it fully, through the strength of your will to practice Good on earth and, one day, that force will be so great that it will overthrow selfishness from its throne.

(From my Facebook, March 2016)

I like children because they live in the present, and are not conditioned to social conventions of what is or is not acceptable, so they are spontaneous.

Many parents prune their children for not understanding them, I think they should build the virtue of empathy, disconnect from materialism and things that become commonplace after our 30s~, using imagination and searching in the heart to see the world as a child, from then on you will truly be able to be there for her, not only because you understand her, but because you change in the process, giving value to the most fundamental things in life, instead of the usual mechanical automatic materialism.

Sincerity is the most complex of virtues. Anyone who has seen Harry Potter knows that Dumbledore never told everything he knew. If he was too sincere, Harry would not gain understanding of things.

Instead, he let Harry figure it out for himself, Dumbledore used the utmost sincerity, looking not at the immediate but at the end of his actions. He gave the disciple the necessary tools to assemble the puzzle by himself.

This is the challenge of sincerity, not saying everything you think, but being sincere with everything you act, anticipating the bumps in each path.
The path never ends, but over time we tend to make fewer mistakes, becoming wiser.

It is important that this path be guided by the natural and constant questioning of their actions towards the timeless virtues bequeathed to us by great masters such as Krishna, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Confucius, Dumbledore, and so many others, so many other philosophers we meet on the street every day.

(From my Facebook excerpts, 2015)

But the timeless in you is aware of the timelessness of life, and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream. And what sings and contemplates in you lives on the edge of that first moment that scattered the stars across space.

Khalil Gibran

I have decided to create this blog after re-reading some of my lost Facebook messages from 2015~2018.

These texts reminded me of who I am.

This blog is one action to revive my philosophical spirit in me, and ultimately, to collect my philosophical thoughts, new and old.

I will collect it because I don’t want these to be lost in the wind. I want to exercise writing it down, which is something that helps me unveil more deeply the threads of my thoughts, and ultimately, my soul, because you can only get so far with thoughts, there are things that have to be experienced. This is the Tao of Philosophy.

About me

My name is Lucas Bustamante, I was born in 1992 in a small town in Brazil.

I have developed a great interest by the mysteries of the Universe, and Existence, which led me to Philosophy and Religion. I am not a follower of any specific branch of philosophy or religion, I rather study all of them without discrimination.

Behind every person reaching for the Sacred in all four corners of the World in all times of history, a Higher purpose in the Universe was there to inspire them.

In the end, we are all talking about the same thing.