The continuing wisdom of Facundo Cabral…
Only one who is present can comprehend the whole. He who drinks directly from the fountain of essence, by this means will know everything that happens.
Nothing will afflict him, and most importantly, by learning of his errors, he transforms them into success.
No one has the right to ignorance. By taking it on, one pays an exorbitant price and casts a tragic shadow over the paths of everyone. Ignorance is the unconconscious method of evil, an ideology that by its separateness has the power to provoke war.
The sage knows his task is to deal with himself and to harmonize differences. He knows that the separated self, in addition to impoverished, is a form of suicide. By separateness, death follows all the way to the soccer field.
The sage does not separate because he knows he’s part of everything; he’s attentive only to the viewing of connections. I have sometimes sung that a star moves whenever a flower is plucked. The sage swims in the uniting river, in the energy that weaves us all. The sage knows he is God’s dream coming true; if we view reality as anything less, it becomes mere sleep.
Where the ignorant see things, the sage sees one and that one is truth. The sage sees himself in what he observes, is illuminated and illuminates; is conscious that he’s light. Light is the state more elevated than being.
What we call death is a more subtle state of light.
If you want light, live in peace. If you want death, live in war. Take care with every word because we are structured by word. Don’t hurt or offend anyone because that passage from one to another can come back to you, transformed into a bomb.
St. Augustine advised: Ask only for justice, but it would be better to ask for nothing, or to put it another way, don’t trouble your puny head with the grand works of the Lord; while St. Francis prayed, Make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is sadness, let me bring joy; where there is darkness, light; where there is hatred, love.
And here, my mother’s prayer: Lord, I ask Your pardon for my sins, above all for having made pilgrimage to your many shrines, forgetting that you are present everywhere. Secondly, I seek forgiveness for having implored Your help so many times, forgetting that my wellbeing worries You more than it does me; and finally, I ask Your pardon for being here begging Your pardon while my heart knows that my sins were pardoned before I committed them, so great is Your loving mercy, dear Lord.
Don’t exhaust yourself in competition. God knows what is yours, and that data resides in your heart too, so do what you love. There is no other way to live.
The same love that He brought me, He brought to you. It’s an error to say that we make love; love made us, and it fashions us day by day, relying on the malleable state of our openness. Being a work of love, the human being is marvelous.
To Him we are indebted for bread, cheese, wine, music, painting, airplanes and computers, among other things. And if man is what He loves, we are all that we were, and all that made us possible: from Buddha to Rembrandt, from Mozart to Picasso, from Copernicus to Freud. We are the wind that refreshes and the rain that renews; we are the winter snow and the flowers of springtime; we are the moon, the sun; we are the fruit of God.
I am newborn, but through the experience that oversees my memory, I don’t wish to hurt anyone now. I know that agression brings sickness. It over-complicates things; we are all part of the process. If I do you harm, I harm myself. Reason, which is subjective, used to move me; now it’s love, the reason of the Universe. But I didn’t lose my fire. If anything, it’s of finer quality now because before I burned, and now I illuminate. That is to say, I transformed from a destroyer to a creator.
To the poor I speak of hope and to the rich, conversion—hope redeems the poor, and conversion purifies the rich. Hope among the poor and conversion among the rich brings our brothers closer, and I came here to bring about that encounter. When all are joined, there will be no locks on door, no borders between nations; that’s when all will be shared and good humour will reign: Clinton and Castro will play tennis in Cancún, and Hussein will take his children to Disneyworld.
You’re not depressed, you are distracted…
by peace, and so I ask, when are you going to stop battling and begin to live? Because one can’t do both at the same time.
You ask me when Jesus will return, and I tell you, he never left; that he’s always been in your heart. You only have to silence your head and listen. No one asks the great question, who am I? Everyone just goes on complying with some law, decided by others, on how to succeed and fail. Everything is seen through bodies and material achievements, and those material things become so important that love begins in parks and ends in courtrooms.
Everyone practices begging in some fashion, forgetting or never discovering that they are princes, part of an extraordinary universe, to the point of disregarding their community, their parish, to focus only on their families.
I recognize many faces and I know a few names, but few individuals know who they are. You ask me where I can be found, and I tell you, anywhere, because I am part of the universe.
Names and titles are distractions, jails, limitation. They are a road that marks us and keeps us so blindly occupied that we never stop to think who we are, and spirit is who we are, and spirit does not accept conditions.
So don’t confuse the material with reality, because there are no borders, even though the majority clings to them out of fear of the infinite. This is why institutions like marriage were invented—nationalism, ideals, the homeland, stakes to which we’ve tied ourselves to avoid living with totality.
The house of one is one, which is why I’m fine anywhere, and through my house thoughts and events come and go constantly. And if I am my house, and I’m part of everything, then my house is this ocean and this beach, those dolphins and this hotel, this chair and that sailboat that leaves a white trail on the turquoise that invents light—that too is my house, like the shadows of labyrinths that occupy the minds of the insane. Those too are my house. Like the music of Mahler, the paintings of Cézanne, the cigars of Chez Davidoff, and rock and roll.
You can’t move your body because it’s too weighted down with the past. Forget your name and start living in this moment, and you will immediately feel that you live in a marvelous world. When you can feel that you’re not what you think, you can fly. Beginning and end, that is to say, life and death are inventions of the mind, like how you suffer when your child goes away because you’ve accustomed yourself to thinking you are only a parent.
Set the past aside and you will feel all of life, only the molecules are dissolved. Consciousness doesn’t die with the material; the light of awareness continues to illuminate the infinite roads of life.
We aren’t as bad as we think we are, and so peace is possible, and peace is the furthest point that we can reach. And from all accounts, God loves us more than we love ourselves because He keeps giving us new opportunities every day.
St. Francis was right: the sun and moon are brothers, animals and plants, our siblings, because we are all creatures of the Lord. And so our works are the brothers and sisters of the sun, moon, animals and plants. And when I speak of works, I mean painting, music, literature, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers.
Don’t look outside yourself for what is within. You can’t ask for love if you don’t give it. You can’t ask for justice, if you are not just. You won’t find peace outside yourself, if you don’t have peace on the inside.
to be continued…
© Facundo Cabral, 2008
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Stirling, 2012
Image from “Bitácora del Trovador”, blog by Olman Briceño
