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Stepping Stones to an
Improved Civilization By Richard Kieninger Why have the
Brotherhoods emphatically stated that a culture must be created and be
preserved to bridge the next planet-wide cataclysm? A look at the timeline of
significant historical milestones shows the length of time involved to
“recover” from cataclysmic changes. 5500 BC: A portion of mankind learns how to stay
alive after the last world-wide cataclysm. 1225 AD: The Magna Carta, a set of articles limiting King John’s power
and initiating common law is accepted. 1776: U.S.
Constitution establishes a limited-power government. 1863: Emancipation
Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln further broadens the definition of freedom. 1900s: The acts of the US Congress and the presidential
Executive Orders remove intrinsically valued currency, prohibit religious
observances in public places, support family-disrupting activities, and
deplete our military manpower and hardware. At the
time of this writing, the government, bankers and corporations own and/or
control nearly all land in the country and have signed most people into one
form of servitude or another. From this, it is obvious
that Western Civilization will not be producing many more Masters if the
world continues on its current track. The human race has taken over 7000
years to lift itself to basic understanding that “... all men are created
equal” and only 100 years to fall into the slavery of the modern one-world
corporation/government. Our only hope is to save our appropriate
technology—machines and people—and continue where we left off without the
encumbrances of Katholis, Phrees and Priests. We,
at Adelphi, are well on our way to building a solid framework of time-proven
techniques for allowing the fuller human potential to emerge. We look forward
to all of you adding your expertise to our part of the Great Plan! Toward the goal of
improving our conditions and building for the future, we have listed below
the aspects of Western Civilization that can most easily be
changed by individuals seeking advancement. Each aspect is examined by
first discussing the current wide-spread problems
followed by Adelphi’s undertakings for betterment. •
Respect for Human Life •
Families Are the Foundation of Civilization •
Live by the Culture's “Rules of Life” “Problems cannot be solved by the level of
thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein Respect for Human Life The Father Shall Be Divided Against the Son … The front-page attention to
the increasing incidence of violence in the public schools is a
bottom-of-the-barrel approach at glamorizing human injustice. While these
overt acts of violence involve only a tiny fraction of one percent of all
school-age children, it nevertheless highlights a very real and deep-seated
problem in the United States—the use of computerized toys to dehumanize the
beautiful image of man. Through the use of video games, violent movies (most
of them) and television (sit-coms, soap operas, news, commercials, etc.),
children slowly and inexorably grow up learning that disrespectful behavior,
the ultimate of which is killing and war, are merely like entertainment.
Spending so much time interacting with fantasy creates a blurring between
what their physical senses report and the
years of unreal images still active in their brains. The “bad guys” are
depicted as grotesquely deformed monsters who live
only to destroy and kill everything they encounter. These scenes of violence
are far more degrading and obscene than any portrayal of the gentle acts of love-making, which many Americans find so dirty. What
perversity has so twisted our values that love is made
base and war exalted? These
situations evidence a pernicious and craven attitude which
is the exploitation, through fantasy, of an adolescent viewer’s highly
suggestible mental state. This, coupled with wide-spread portrayals of an “anything-goes lifestyle,” sets up the
unwitting youth for personal involvement in the various forms and techniques
of violence. A
notable precedent of this atrocity was the conditioning of the general
population in ancient Rome to degrade themselves as spectators of the popular
“bodily contact sports” of the Roman arena. The intensity of the screams of
the emotionally-hardened spectators rose and lowered in proportion to the
degree of physical injury, taking place on the
sands of the arena. The modern-day population finds its counterpart as
spectators of football, ice-hockey, auto-racing,
“professional” wrestling and the skyrocketing levels of gambling and
stock-market mania. When bestial forms of pleasure, either direct or
vicarious, displace the subtle pleasures of goodness, that culture, like
ancient Rome, has lost the moral fitness to survive. Love Your Neighbors as Yourself The
competitive ethic, which teaches children that they must advance at the
expense of others, is being replaced in Adelphi by
values of co-operation and a pursuit of excellence for its own sake. We raise
children to be emotionally capable of giving love and affection rather than
exploiting others. Parents can help their teenagers by
openly and honestly discussing topics of concern. Such demonstrations
of caring provides an environment supportive of mature attitudes and the
growth of respectful relationships. Nobody
starts out in life wanting to be bad—neither the parents nor child. But we all have habits that are passed on to our children
regardless how much we try to suppress them. Most habits are so ingrained in
Western people that we don’t even recognize them.
The habit-forming mechanism is the physical plane counterpart of our power of
Mind called consciousness, which is constantly being
programmed through the input of our senses—seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling, and tasting. The result is that we mimic those around us and adapt
their ways of thinking; even their very patterns of
thought! It’s not until around the mid-30s that our
Egoic consciousness effectively asserts itself over our physical brain. This
continues through the rest of our lives and is experienced as a sense of
difficulty with the status quo. The key to learning how to
love depends on developing self-worth, and this depends upon performing and
accomplishing in accordance with one’s higher ideals. This is in contrast to
the current practice-at-large of reducing frustration by lowering one’s
ideals and demands of conscience in order to satisfy one’s desires without
psychic conflict, which is a distortion of emotional maturity. Acquiring the
Great Virtues, being recognized for one’s contribution of skills, practicing
love of Christ, and accepting responsibility in serving others are the paths
to self-worth and self-love; and these in turn eventually allow one to give
love and become an open channel for it. Love supplants fear and hate; and
inasmuch as bodily ills, insanity, bigotry and warlike tendencies spring from
fear and hate, the loving person is free of these destructive, crippling
conditions. Indeed, he becomes attuned to Christ’s work for mankind’s uplift. Families Are the Foundation
of Civilization
Breaking
Down Family Structures
In Western culture, the
separation of infant and mother at birth followed by farming out the baby to
sitters or to day care, causes children to be alienated from parents and
establishes a lifelong pattern of rejection feelings. One tragic result of
this practice is that children bond to material things (teddy bears,
blankets, toys) rather than to their parents (and vice-versa) because basic
mental, physical, and spiritual needs were neglected
in infancy and childhood. A corporate structure which
tends to separate either parent from the family by travel, extended meetings
or overtime work weakens the parent-child relationship and harms family
stability. The pattern also allows
easy acceptance of the nuclear family, which consists of a man and wife and
their children. The expanding requirements of a growing family and the desire
and ability to move up to more prestigious neighborhoods or out of
deteriorating neighborhoods, induce parents to follow the job market by
moving every few years. Being on the move away from relatives, friends and
familiar, supportive groups of people and church forces the nuclear family to
cling together and try to be all things to both the parents and the children
as they move from location to location. Such moves separate a family from
their kin and make them almost wholly dependent on their own resources. The
resultant sense of isolation from the other transient people in the
constantly fluctuating neighborhoods turns the family inward on itself in
order to provide a measure of security from the rootlessness
of their outer environment. The plight of our greatest
resource—children—in our mobile, socially aloof neighborhoods is
dehumanizing. Children have no sense of caring about the unknown people
teeming about them, and they feel alienated from the temporary neighbors,
temporary fellow students, and they become
victims to sharpsters who prey on their innocence.
Such children don’t put down roots or give trust or
even feel wanted by society, let alone needed. They tend to strike out rather
than reach out. Their own little nuclear family is stifling, and the implied
or stated demand that they give their love exclusively to their parents in
exchange for being fed, clothed, educated, and entertained becomes burdensome
and guilt engendering. The pursuit of material
possessions does not allow the mother and father of most families to have
much time for their children. While the youngsters may be well fed and
clothed and have material advantages, they grow up without the all-important
loving involvement with their parents, which would have set the stage for a
healthy, interpersonal regard for others. Parents and children may talk in
the car en route to school or day care, and to home afterwards; however,
after arriving home, it’s everyone for themselves.
The pressure derives from the fact that no one is getting even his minimal
needs met. There is not enough time to get the housework done, not enough
time to spend much “quality time” with each other, or to see that homework gets done, or to even have regular marital sex. With families in decline
for the past several decades there is little wonder
that academic skill levels are plummeting and that crime is escalating
geometrically. For many children, gangs are replacing the missing parental
guidance. But gangs have distorted ethics.
Everywhere there is fragmentation, frustration,
irritation and pressures, and the few pleasures available come through drugs
and the things we purchase rather than from loving associations in the home
and elsewhere. No wonder children move away from home as soon as they can. But have they been equipped to do any better? Whatever
is necessary to hold existing families together must be found, because a
society without a strong, stable family life is doomed.
Russian people found this out a few generations ago when their experiments
against families ended in national disaster. Divorce was
made easy and the state appropriated the children and raised them in
communal boarding schools away from the influence of parents. They found that
the children raised under this system were so socially dangerous they were
“removed from society” during the time of the Nazi invasion. The Soviet leaders re-established family law inside Russia itself but
continue to impose the family-destroying methods to undermine and break down
family structures in an occupied satellite country in order to cripple and
dominate it. This illustrates the importance now attached to a stable family
by the Communists. Numerous studies of
juvenile delinquents and adult criminals have revealed a family background of
broken homes and/or physically abusive parents. These studies have rarely
mentioned, let alone measured, the relationship between deprivation of
physical affection and violence. One notable study in this respect is that of
Brandt F. Steele and C. B. Pollock, psychiatrists at the University of
Colorado, who studied child abuse in three generations of families who
physically abused their children. They found that parents who abused their
children were invariably deprived of physical affection themselves during
childhood and that their adult sex life was extremely poor. The hypothesis
that physical pleasure actively inhibits physical violence can
be appreciated from our own sexual experiences. How many of us feel
like assaulting someone after we have just experienced orgasm? The Basics of
Families The family is at the core
of society, and thus it holds a vital place in the philosophy of The
Ultimate Frontier. Conversely, a society and its culture can only be as
good as the family units within it. Family building does not
happen automatically; it takes years of happy interactions that are as close
to one-on-one as possible for the older generation to pass on the best that
it has to offer to the succeeding one, and for the younger generation to
receive, integrate, and put into daily practice that which it has been given. One of the many essential
requirements for forming a successful family (and civilization) is an
attitude of personal responsibility. An individual who has assumed personal
responsibility for what is occurring in his environment will immediately
recognize other individuals who have also assumed responsibility. This
attitude is the seed of trust and the foundation for true cooperation. Personal Responsibility is best seen as an
attitude toward oneself and an awareness of events and forces in the
environment. It implies a determination of and a prioritization of activities
and for decision-making and action in the flow of our life. Such awareness
and ability requires Discernment, Precision, Courage, Efficiency and
Patience. Responsibility therefore implies the practice of the twelve Great
Virtues as an individual deals with problems and other people in the
environment. Before
people can truly love one another, they must first live in an atmosphere of
trust and respectfulness fostered by a climate of safety, which is created by
engaging in those behaviors that are conducive to trust-building.
Hopefully, most people have acquired some respectful
behavior and have gone through the motions of engaging in these behaviors
many times themselves. With a little bit of concerted practice these
remembered bits of respectful behavior can be put
into practice and eventually into automatic responses. People are stable when
they grow in an atmosphere of love and order, and society depends on stable
people in order to accomplish its work and pull together for its advancement
and preservation. Marriages are the foundations of sound families. Western Civilization marriages
are different from those that existed in more advanced cultures. For example,
in Lemuria, men married no earlier than their early thirties and women in
their late twenties. Furthermore, married couples lived together at least
three years prior to having their first child to build their union into a
solid, loving and respectful relationship between two intelligent, secure,
independent, and psychologically enriched individuals. Preparation for
marriage began in early childhood, and it was a great help that the entire
society provided examples of emotional maturity for children as they grew up.
The Lemurian school system conducted separate,
confidential classes for boys and girls in their late teens and instructed
them how to achieve the mystique of their respective masculinity or
femininity in relationship to the opposite sex. They were
taught a passion about life while being protected from the traps of
prematurely gratifying sexual desire without love, and they learned that good
grooming, graciousness and mystery can attract and keep a mate. Only an ordered family can
produce the responsible and caring people who are so essential to a great
civilization. A healthy family develops mature, vivacious engagers with life
upon whom to found a great, exciting civilization. Children are the hope of our future. So
much so that if a culture is to produce Initiates in large numbers, it is
mandatory that much of its attention and energy be devoted to the
maximization of the potentials of each succeeding generation. Each child must
receive optimum support and training if he is to be
neurologically, emotionally and psychologically fulfilled and have the
best chance of becoming intellectually bright and creative. His
intelligence is directly proportional to all these factors.
Adelphi has been given
specific guidelines by the Brotherhoods to help
guarantee that children enjoy the highest probability of attaining full use
of their brains and can thus help advance civilization at the fastest pace
possible. These guidelines emphasize the necessity of the complete devotion
of each set of parents and of the whole community to the education of Adelphi
children. The Brotherhoods have stated that every mother must be supported
financially and emotionally by a loving husband so that she can devote all
the attention appropriate to her children’s education and fulfillment of
their natural needs. A wife is expected to have a
child only when she is prepared and willing to personally lavish six years of
intense, dedicated education on each infant and provide continual active
support of each of her children for twelve years thereafter. Parents are expected to space their children at least six years
apart because each child is entitled to exclusive upbringing by his parents
during the first six years of life, when the great majority of his lifetime’s
attitudes, morality, and intelligence will be established unalterably. As in Lemuria,
families consist of two, and at most three,
children. Family planning is
essential. Children must be properly spaced so that each can receive optimal
affection and care. The needs of the infant should be
immediately met. Cross-cultural evidence does not support the view
that such practices will “spoil” the infant. It is harmful for a baby to cry
itself to sleep. By not answering an infant’s needs immediately and
consistently, we not only teach a child distrust at
a very basic emotional level, but also establish patterns of neglect which
harm the child’s social and emotional health. Fundamental programming of
behavior and attitudes is established in childhood.
The most deeply rooted of these are learned in the
earliest years of life. It is very difficult to undo what has
been learned in the first six years of life. Years of psychotherapy
often cannot undo bad childhood experiences. At best we can only hope to develop awareness and overlay it
with a secondary response. On the other hand, a good childhood environment is
the springboard for a happy, healthy and productive life experience. To
develop a peaceful society, we must put more emphasis on human relationships. Live by the Culture’s “Rules of Life” Lawless
Society In this country we are abandoning
our code of moral law—not only sexual morality but such elementary precepts
such as truth-telling, promise-keeping, respect for other humans and their
private property, honoring of elders, forbearance and restraint. It is known that as morals decline, there is a corresponding
increase in written laws—as though external rules could somehow substitute
for personal character. But, as the Romans found,
when the internally embraced moral laws were abandoned, they did not become
free; rather, they discovered the tyranny of a multitude of laws and those
who enforced them. Our
country, the U.S.A., that started out with a strong moral and ethical conduct
has deteriorated into what we see and hear from the mass-media
today. This deterioration also appears in our government with presidents who
are consolidating all branches of government into a single, all-powerful
entity. The tool of this consolidation is the Executive Order. While
originally intended as a written method of communication that enabled him to facilitate
administrative functions, Executive Orders are now being used to circumvent
our system of representative government—no checks and balances, no debating
the issue, only the whims of the president and his unelected
advisors in executing policy of this nation! Building on the 1917
Trading With the Enemies Act, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933
successfully petitioned the U.S. Congress to enact the War and Emergency
Powers Act. This set the stage for what has been, in the U.S., a continuous
state of declared national emergency since March 9, 1933. Other U.S. presidents have
continued this tradition by declaring more national emergencies than and we
continue to live in a state of declared national emergency. For instance: 1)
The U.S. is now required to sustain potentially devastating nuclear missile
hits, with the likelihood of heavy casualties, before we are
allowed to respond. Previously, our military was
required to launch on warning when it was verified that an enemy missile was
headed toward our mainland or our territories; 2) Erased the Tenth Amendment;
3) Implemented unratified international treaties,
ignoring the constitutional requirement of the two-thirds approval vote by
our duly elected representatives in the Senate; 4) Secretly assigned our
troops to the United Nations and placed them under foreign command; 5)
Enabled United Nations representatives to be immune from legal action for
violations of U.S. law; 6) Placed the country in a state of emergency that
allows the president, or others in his administration, to suspend the Bill of
Rights and the Constitution at will. The Framers of the U.S.
Constitution clearly stated which branches of government would exclusively
handle lawmaking, law enforcing and judging functions. The Founding Fathers
never expected all three branches of the government to break their contract
with the American people and to cooperate in bringing dictatorial government
to this country. What have we done to teach
our children to love the concept of Law as the foundation of civilization? Religious leaders encourage them in civil disobedience; their
school teachers flaunt the injunctions of the courts and refuse to return to
teaching while strike negotiations proceed; labor leaders organize the
fathers of these children with beatings and dynamite, and nobody is brought
to trial; the Mafia murders to maintain control over organized crime and then
buys off police officials in order to function unhindered. The result of all this is
that the young have been cast adrift without good,
firm, proven rules, and they find their plight psychologically untenable. We
cannot expect youngsters to respect civilization if we haven’t
given them anything worthwhile to live up to. They have
been left to their own devices in an amoral climate, and their
inherent need for idealism has taken many warped paths. The angry ones seek
to destroy our “bad” civilization, and so they cannot logically fight or die
in the armed services to maintain what they view as a corrupt scheme. Their
frustration is admittedly short-sighted, but this
makes them no less destructive to the continuance of social order. A nation with a large
percentage of such self-defeating, uncohesive
people cannot long stand or resist the encroachments of competitor nations. The “Rule” of Love
Love
cannot be mandated or lectured into being, but an environment can be created which is warm, supportive and nurturing,
and in this environment, love can grow. Establishing a solid foundation of
codes by which to live, all who come after will naturally blend in with the
high standards. The Brotherhoods have long ago
established standards for their members. There the requirements are highest.
One can be a likable guy, but if he doesn’t meet the
requirements, he isn’t in. And once in, he knows if
at any time he ceases to maintain any one of those requirements, he must
leave. Therefore, it is good practice for us to get used to having to meet
certain minimum standards in preparation for Citizenship in the Nation of
God. The emotionally mature,
loving mother rears children who learn how to love by example, and they come
to expect that the world is a loving place. They are well on their way to
becoming capable, confident, outgoing youngsters who will engage with life in
a zestful, creative manner and be able to cope successfully with the problems
of life. When a person is feeling on top of the world, when he can find joy
in everything he does, and when he finds good in everyone he knows, then he
expresses love in the most expansive terms—he loves God and man and needs not
hoard his love. Having clear guidelines of
behavior allows each of us to be at various levels of personal development
while exhibiting commonly understood and accepted behaviors. By following a
code of conduct (a system of etiquette, manners and guidelines) and creating
an emotionally and physically safe environment, people start to give more of themselves. Courtesy is contagious. It
takes more strength to be gentle and more independence to be considerate than
it does to be bullying and selfish. The Brotherhoods
will be judged by the world at large by each of Their behaviors, and that
memory will last forever. They are living representatives of the Great Plan
itself; it is a wonderful responsibility. Indeed, we have before us the
awesome responsibility of determining what the future civilization will be.
Our behaviors in every encounter serve as models for future members and for
the next generation. This is the beginning point of creating the culture. And a culture cannot be created without a code by which we
treat each other. Literally, every future inhabitant of the planet will be affected by what we say and do now. These
guidelines will prove useful as a road map for each of us in judging
ourselves and in shaping the tone of the future. |
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