The Four Objectives of 1976

The Divine Master's plan for the association, fifty years on, and how to carry it out

In a message of 1976, the Divine Master set out the purpose of the association in a single long sentence:

"Our members are guided to survive the increasing hardships and privations inherent in a changing world whose contemporary concept of values has been adjusted and focused to choice materialism that develops selfish predilection, competition, influence, power, and monopolism. In our objective to provide our members with the best training along moral, spiritual and practical aspects of life, it is hoped that we may be able to (1) build the foundation of a true brotherhood of humanity; (2) disseminate and practice the principles of transcendentalism by living the life of constructive activity, reason, and wisdom; (3) dedicate the efforts of members in the study of occult science and the unexplored phenomena of nature; (4) study and discover new dimensions of knowledge in the expanding horizons of the material and metaphysical worlds; and ultimately accept the concept of an orderly world under the rulership of God whose absolute power governs the Totality of the Kosmos."

Fifty years later the message reads less like a period piece than like a plan drawn for the age of the smartphone, when the materialism it named has only found faster ways to reach us. It is a master plan, a lamp for members trying to find their way through a digital generation. A few years ago I proposed a training module built on it, and the proposal was set aside without discussion, which tells its own story about how the plan has been kept.

Fifty Years On

When the years of the PBMA are reviewed with the four objectives in hand, a few questions come quickly. How many of us could explain what the Divine Master meant by transcendentalism? Has any lecturer ever taught us occult science, or told us what the term covers? What do we know of the metaphysical worlds he asked us to study? Brotherhood we know better, since the PBMA logo carries its clasped masonic grip, but after half a century the association can hardly claim to be a true brotherhood of humanity when its own members have split into red ringers and blue holders, groups in the West, the Rubenian founded in 2017, and smaller circles besides, some of them trading on the Divine Master's name for private ends and others lifting his wisdom and secrets to set up shops of their own.

The last objective fares worse. In past seminars, lecturers and members of the presidential party taught that Ruben Ecleo is God, a claim of enormous weight and very hard to defend in public, and the association has paid for it with the label of a cult. The same lecturers rarely arrived without envelopes for us to fill, which suggests where their attention lay, on collections rather than on growth of the spirit. It is small wonder that so many of us now stand in one faction or another.

The Divine Master once said, "The light is already with us, but the darkness has come over us," and Scripture says that "God is light" (1 John 1:5). The light is with us still. What has come over us is forgetfulness of the message and a drift away from its road, while those charged with carrying out Ruben Ecleo's plans have been busy filling their own pockets, by the same methods from the early years until now. As long as self-interest wears the robes of service, the association will slide backward rather than forward.

The remedy is to take the message up again and set ourselves by it: to seek knowledge, understanding and enlightenment, to live the principles of transcendentalism, to explore occult science and the unexplored phenomena of nature, and to learn from the one teacher we have, Ruben Ecleo. Only then can we go looking for new dimensions of knowledge in the material and metaphysical worlds, and only by living brotherhood, constructive work, reason and wisdom can we lay the foundation of a better world under the rule of God. The four objectives deserve a closer reading, one at a time.

Training for a Changing World, and a True Brotherhood

The message opens with a diagnosis before it offers a cure. The world it describes has bent its values toward materialism, and materialism in turn breeds selfishness, competition, the chase after influence and power, and the urge to monopolize. Against that pull the Divine Master promised training along three lines, moral, spiritual and practical, and the three need each other. Moral training builds integrity, fair dealing, kindness and a sense of justice, so that a member's choices do not simply follow the market. Spiritual training answers the hunger for meaning that no possession satisfies, through prayer, introspection and the disciplines of the inner life. Practical training gives members the means to live, the skills of reasoning, solving problems, speaking well and adapting when circumstances change, without which piety turns brittle the first time the rice runs out. Together they let a member question the values of the age instead of swallowing them, and they build the kind of resilience that bends under hardship and springs back.

The first objective, the foundation of a true brotherhood of humanity, starts from the same place. A brotherhood worth the name rests on understanding, on the effort to see past surface differences to what another person has lived through and to listen before answering. It takes in people of every race, religion and station, since the Divine Master spoke of a brotherhood of humanity and not of one province or one party. It needs mutual respect, the willingness to honor another's beliefs and choices even when they differ from ours, and it needs education, because prejudice survives on ignorance and withers when people learn one another's histories.

Two further supports matter in our case above all. The first is shared work, and here our own tradition of pahina, the communal labor members give freely for one another, already shows what the objective looks like in practice. The second is forgiveness and reconciliation. An association split into factions cannot preach brotherhood to anyone else until it has faced its own quarrels, named the wrongs done on every side, and found a way for the separated groups to sit at one table again, if only once a year.

Transcendentalism: Constructive Activity, Reason and Wisdom

The word has a history, and I should say which history I mean. Transcendentalism is best known as the New England movement of the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson and Thoreau and their circle, who taught that the divine is met through intuition and through nature rather than through creeds, and that each soul carries something of the Over-Soul within it. Whether the Divine Master had Emerson in mind I cannot say, and the message gives no hint; the word may equally carry its older sense, the reaching beyond the limits of the senses and the ordinary self, which is how the theosophical writers of his era used it. What the message does make certain is how the principle is to be practiced, through a life of constructive activity, reason and wisdom.

Constructive activity means work that leaves things better than it found them, for oneself, for others and for the earth, whether in service to the community, in care for the land, or in creative labor that lifts other people. Our culture of pahina is constructive activity in its purest form, members building, cleaning and repairing together without wages because the work is the offering.

Reason asks that beliefs, ideas and customs be examined rather than inherited whole. It gives a member the courage to question dogma and to test authority against truth, which, I will say bluntly, is the very faculty the envelope-bearing lecturers counted on our not using. Wisdom goes further than reason. It is knowledge and experience ripened into discernment, the ability to see past the surface of things to the truths that bind people together, and it grows through introspection, through stillness, and through attention to nature.

In daily life these principles come down to habits: regular self-examination so that our actions follow our convictions, time spent in the natural world as a source of renewal, a lifelong appetite for learning that is willing to have its assumptions overturned, attention to the present moment instead of the scattered half-presence the phone encourages, and ethical choices that weigh the good of others and of the planet beside our own.

Occult Science and the Unexplored Phenomena of Nature

The third objective asks members to give real effort to the study of occult science and of the phenomena nature has not yet explained. The word occult frightens some people, but it means only hidden, and the Divine Master's own life, from the healings to the seawater that burned like gasoline, belongs squarely among the things ordinary science has not explained. A member who studies these matters is therefore studying the ground the Master himself walked.

Such study opens a way into what has eluded conventional understanding. It unsettles easy assumptions and enlarges the picture of the universe, reminding us that the map of what is known has wide blank spaces at its edges, the way old charts of the Philippine seas left whole coasts unmarked until someone sailed them. It rewards curiosity and the habit of asking where the limits of knowledge lie and whether they lie where we were told. And it returns us again and again to nature, to the intricate play of forces in the living world, and to a felt sense that all living things are bound together.

One caution belongs here, because the occult attracts the credulous as readily as the wise. Inquiry into hidden things needs the same discipline as any other inquiry, careful records, truthful reporting of failures as well as successes, and a refusal to believe a thing merely because it is strange, or else it decays into superstition and becomes one more product for the envelope-bearers to sell.

New Dimensions of Knowledge, and an Orderly World under God

The fourth objective sends members out along two frontiers at once, the expanding horizon of the material world and the horizon of the metaphysical one. On the material side it calls for curiosity about new sciences, new technologies and the work that crosses old disciplinary lines, the places where knowledge grows fastest today. On the metaphysical side it calls for the study of consciousness and spirit, through philosophy, mysticism and the contemplative traditions, the inquiries that ask what a life means and where it belongs in the whole.

The Divine Master expected the two roads to meet. The further anyone goes into the laws that govern matter and spirit alike, the harder it becomes to ignore the order running through them, and the message names where that recognition leads, to the acceptance of a world under the rule of God, whose absolute power governs the Totality of the Kosmos. Rather than setting science against faith, the objective asks members to hold empirical observation and metaphysical insight in one view, so that a discovery in the laboratory and an insight in prayer can be read as two pages of a single book.

The last fruit of this study is humility. Every new horizon shows how much remains beyond it, and the mind that sees it falls back into wonder, which is where, by the Master's design, the four objectives were meant to bring us all along.

Putting the Four Objectives to Work

A plan honored only in speeches stays a plan. What follows are proposals for carrying the four objectives into the life of the association, chapter by chapter, for the good of its members, and none of them needs money the association does not already collect, only the will to spend it in the open.

For a true brotherhood

Each chapter can keep a mutual aid fund, a damayan, for members struck by illness, death or disaster, with its accounts read aloud at every monthly assembly and posted where anyone can check them. Nothing would answer the scandal of the envelopes faster than a fund whose every peso can be traced. Pahina can move from an occasional event to a fixed calendar, once a month for the chapter and at least once a quarter for the wider barangay, the clinic, the school or the chapel of a neighbor who is not a member, since the Divine Master spoke of a brotherhood of humanity and not of members alone. Elder members can be paired with young ones, so that the stories, the songs and the discipline pass hand to hand rather than dying with the last witnesses. Once a year, on the anniversary of the Divine Master's birth on December 9 or of his passing on December 20, the association can hold a commemoration open to members of every group, red ringers, blue holders, the Western groups and the Rubenian alike, with no politics on the program and no collection taken.

For constructive activity, reason and wisdom

Practical training can take the form of a members' cooperative and of skills courses in trades, small business and the handling of money, so that members are better able to survive the hardships the message foresaw. Reason can be built into the association's own habits. In study circles, a rule that every doctrinal claim must name the message it comes from, with its date and place, would do more to protect the teaching than any number of warnings, and it would train members to ask the questions that the lecturers of the past hoped they would never ask. Wisdom grows in quiet, so chapters can hold periodic retreats of silence and prayer in natural settings, away from phones.

For occult science and the unexplored phenomena of nature

The association's first duty here is to stop losing its own evidence. An archive project can gather, date, transcribe and index every surviving message of the Guidance Series and every audio recording still in private hands, with copies kept in more than one place and made available to members. Alongside it, an oral history project can record interviews with the remaining eyewitnesses to the Divine Master's deeds, noting the name of each witness, the date and place of the interview, the date and place of the event described, and the witness's consent, then transcribing each account in writing. A historian decades from now will look for exactly this: several independent witnesses to the same event, written down near the time, which is the multiple attestation whose absence would otherwise condemn the miracles to the category of legend. Study of the occult itself can follow a set curriculum with readings and practices, and members can keep journals of their practice and experience, recording what happened and what did not.

For new knowledge and an orderly world under God

The association can fund scholarships for members' children in the sciences and in teaching, so that the next generation meets the expanding horizons of the material world with trained minds. An annual forum on science and spirituality can bring members and invited speakers together on the questions the fourth objective raises. The leadership can also issue a short written statement of core teaching, including how the association speaks of the Divine Master's nature, so that no lecturer improvises claims in the association's name that it cannot defend, and so that outsiders who call us a cult can be answered from a document rather than from rumor.

For the teachers

All of this depends on who teaches. Lecturers can be trained and accredited in the four objectives before they speak in the association's name, in keeping with the rule that spiritual lectures require permission, and teaching sessions can be kept free of collections altogether, with offerings received separately and receipted.

A study module in twelve sessions

The module I once proposed can be laid out simply, three sessions for each objective:

Sessions	Objective	Content	Practice
1 to 3	A true brotherhood of humanity	The 1976 message; brotherhood in the Divine Master's teaching; reconciliation	A pahina for a non-member neighbor; one conversation with a member of another group
4 to 6	Constructive activity, reason and wisdom	Transcendentalism and its senses; reading the messages critically; wisdom and stillness	A skills course; a study circle using the citation rule; a day of silence
7 to 9	Occult science and the phenomena of nature	What occult science covers; the Divine Master's deeds as phenomena; method and records	An oral history interview; a practice journal
10 to 12	New knowledge and an orderly world under God	Science and spirit in one view; the metaphysical worlds; the rule of God over the Kosmos	A forum or reading report; a written reflection on the four objectives

Where We Stand

On a close reading, the four objectives turn out to be a whole education. Through the Spiritual Division and the living presence of the Divine Master, members were meant to be equipped for the moral, spiritual and practical demands of life and to become, in time, representatives of humanity's future. Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion taught that the dreams of yesterday become the realities of tomorrow, and we were meant to be those dreams made flesh. The question is where we stand today.

We were given something rare, the Ancient Wisdom and the Science of God, a knowledge closed to ordinary seekers, and a teacher whom his followers call the Master of the Universe. Hamlet told his friend that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy (Hamlet 1.5), and we, of all people, have had a guide to some of those things. Our present state is a poor return on the gift.

Jesus warned the leaders of his own people what happens to a gift left unused: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt 21:43). The point was never to possess the teaching. The fruit is the teaching lived, in the way we treat one another, in the work of our hands, and in accounts that can bear inspection, and the warning applies to us as squarely as it did to them if we keep the doctrines of the Divine Master on the shelf and leave undone what the Spiritual Division asked of us.

The members of the PBMA and the Rubenian carry a large inheritance and an unusual calling. A recommitment to righteousness, humility and selfless service, made by each member and by the association together, can still turn the four objectives from a forgotten message into a working plan, and the proposals above are one place to begin.

Notes and References

The 1976 message is quoted as preserved in the association's records. Scripture follows the King James Version.

Passages cited: Matt 21:43; 1 John 1:5.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Boston: James Munroe, 1836.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.