The Secret Doctrine of the Spiritual Division

Immortality, the Divine Master, and the long-lived ones

"Ako ang nag-tago sa walay pagtago, ug ako ang nagtug-an sa walay pagtug-an. Ang akong guitaguan guitug-an, guitug-an ug akong guisulti ang akong guitug-an, managkauban pa sila."

Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion, Main Office, San Jose, Dinagat, December 9, 1970

Anyone who reads through the messages of the early leaders of the PBMA notices something within the first few pages: the older the message, the more teaching is packed into it. Those early texts carry an urgency that later documents often lose, as though the speakers knew the audience in front of them would not always be there to hear. Working through the preserved materials recently, I came upon a piece of doctrine that deserves careful examination, because it lies close to the center of what the Spiritual Division claimed to be.

Lolo Adriano's Message of 1978

The message that opened the question came from General Adriano dela Concepcion, known in the organization as Lolo Adriano, and it is dated January 1, 1978. On its surface it reads as an exhortation to discipline and obedience, the sort of New Year address any religious body might hear. Embedded inside it, though, is a theological claim that reaches far past organizational conduct:

"Apan mga anak sa buhatan sa DOKTRINA SA SPIRITUAL DIVISION adunay napatik nga mga pulong nga nag-ingon: dunay kinabuhi nga magpabilin nga walay katapusan, kon siya nagbaton man sa mga buhat nga matarong."

Roughly, the sentence says that in the teaching of the Doctrine of the Spiritual Division there are written words declaring that a life which remains without end belongs to whoever embraces righteous deeds. The phrase magpabilin nga walay katapusan, remaining without end, is the hinge. Placed inside a message about law and membership, the promise turns the rules of the organization into preparation for something larger than good order, and the discipline asked of members becomes a training for endurance. Whether Lolo Adriano meant that endurance bodily or spiritually, the Cebuano sentence does not say, and my own reading, that the doctrine points toward a life that does not end in the ordinary way, is an inference from the wider archive rather than something this one line states.

The English rendering of the full message, as preserved in the original document, frames the contrast this way:

"To all my beloved children, I want to emphasize the importance of giving our undivided attention to the opportunities that have been bestowed upon us. Let us strengthen our belief in our ability to achieve success in our goals. These goals, my dear children, are the very essence of the PBMA organization. We established this organization with the intention of preserving righteousness in this world, ensuring that a precious gem remains amidst the chaos. As stated in the scriptures, it is inevitable that we all face mortality. However, within the teachings of the DOCTRINE OF SPIRITUAL DIVISION, we find solace in the words that proclaim the existence of eternal life for those who lead righteous lives. Therefore, my children, we bear witness to the power of the PBMA group."

The contrast is deliberate. Scripture says every human being dies (the allusion is close to Hebrews 9:27, "it is appointed unto men once to die"), and the Doctrine of the Spiritual Division answers that something else waits for those who comply. The message does not set the doctrine against scripture so much as claim to open a room in scripture that ordinary readers walk past without seeing the door.

Are There Immortal Men?

A doctrine of unending life raises an immediate question about parallels, and the wider religious and historical record supplies plenty of them, though nearly all belong to legend rather than to anything a historian could verify.

The Wandering Jew is the best known in the West. The earliest written form of the story comes from the English chronicler Roger of Wendover, who recorded in 1228 that an Armenian archbishop visiting the abbey of St Albans spoke of a man named Cartaphilus, once Pilate's doorkeeper, who struck Jesus on the way out of the judgment hall and was told, in substance, that Jesus was going and Cartaphilus would wait until he returned. The man was said to have been baptized as Joseph and to be living still. Matthew Paris copied the account into his own chronicle, and the legend reached a mass readership through a German pamphlet of 1602 that renamed the wanderer Ahasuerus. Whether any Cartaphilus ever existed cannot be known. What the legend preserves is the old human intuition that a few people live outside the ordinary terms of mortality, usually as punishment, occasionally as reward.

John the Apostle offers a case with an actual text behind it. In the last chapter of the Fourth Gospel, Peter asks what will become of the beloved disciple, and Jesus answers, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" (John 21:22). The next verse reports that a saying went abroad among the brethren that this disciple should not die, and then corrects it, "yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die" (21:23), which tells us the rumor was strong enough by the time the Gospel was finished to need answering. Mark 9:1, where Jesus says some standing there will not taste death before they see the kingdom come with power, fed the same expectation. Later tradition kept John alive against the odds: Tertullian reports that he was plunged into boiling oil at Rome and came out unharmed (De Praescriptione Haereticorum 36), legend added a poisoned cup he drank without injury, and Augustine passes along, without endorsing it, a story that the earth over John's grave at Ephesus rose and fell as though he were breathing beneath it (Tractates on John 124.2). Augustine's skepticism is audible, and also his reluctance to throw the story away.

The Book of Mormon tells of three of the twelve disciples chosen by Jesus in the Americas who asked to remain on earth until his return, and the text has Jesus grant it, promising that they would never taste of death (3 Nephi 28:4–9). They are known as the Three Nephites. The record withholds their names on purpose, the narrator saying he was forbidden to write them (3 Nephi 28:25), and Latter-day Saint folklore has since filled the silence with a century and more of reported encounters with mysterious helpful strangers on the roads of Utah.

Outside scripture, the Count of Saint-Germain is the strangest of the company. He moved through European courts in the middle of the eighteenth century, learned, multilingual, a gifted musician and a chemist of sorts, and the rumor that he was centuries old and had known figures of antiquity followed him everywhere, though how much of it he spread himself and how much his admirers spread for him is impossible to sort out now. Voltaire, writing to Frederick the Great in 1760, called him a man who never dies and knows everything, and the joke has been read straight by occultists ever since. Saint-Germain died at Eckernförde in Schleswig in 1784, reports of sightings continued for decades, and Theosophical writers later enrolled him among the Masters.

The list could run much longer. Nicolas Flamel, a Paris scribe and bookseller who died in 1418, acquired his reputation as an alchemist who found the elixir of life only in the seventeenth century, two hundred years after his burial. Mahavatar Babaji entered the wider world through Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), and a later Kriya Yoga lineage assigns him a birth in 203 CE and a life that has not ended. The Eight Immortals of Chinese Daoism reached their state through cultivation and virtue. These figures come from cultures separated by oceans and centuries, which says something about how stubborn the intuition is that a few people step outside biological time; whether the intuition answers to a fact, to a wish, or to both is a question no list of legends can settle.

The Divine Master: What the Messages Claim

The claims made about Ruben Ecleo Sr. in the preserved Guidance Series messages go further than anything said of the figures above, and I find this the hardest part of the archive to approach with a level hand.

The messages present him as a being of ancient origin who has lived in a succession of bodies across Philippine history. Among the identities named are Francisco Dagohoy, whose revolt in Bohol ran from 1744 to 1829 and remains the longest in the country's history, and León Kilat, the name by which Pantaleón Villegas led the uprising in Cebu in April 1898. In a message given at Bugnay, Jordan, Guimaras on October 27, 1984, the Divine Master himself listed several of these identities by region:

"Pagdating roon sa Samar iba naman, doon sa Leyte iba naman yong pangalan niya. TORIO SINGKAW dahil yong kamay niya naganon ang kamay niya makita yon ninyo sa mga release."

The claim, then, is that one soul inhabited distinct persons in different provinces across several centuries: the Matandang Villarin in Palawan, Toryong Singkaw in Leyte, Dagohoy in Bohol, León Kilat in Cebu. Dagohoy and León Kilat are figures of the documented historical record, while the identification of the Divine Master with them belongs to the tradition alone, and whether the tradition intends the identification literally, figuratively, or in some third sense of its own is a question the messages leave open for anyone reading from outside.

The Christmas message of December 25, 1974 meets the biographical puzzle head on:

"Why? I am only 39 years old and there are many people claiming that they were with me in 1879. What is 19, and how many years different is that? A hundred years. So maybe one century, you see..."

He does not wave the claim away. Members in their sixties and seventies were reporting memories of having been his companions in events a century before his birth, and his answer is to set out the arithmetic and leave it standing in front of his listeners, which is unusual in devotional literature, where awkward numbers tend to be rounded off or quietly dropped. One small wrinkle in the arithmetic belongs here too. By the 1934 year of record he had turned forty on December 9, sixteen days before this message, so the "39" is either a slip of the tongue or a count from some other reckoning, and the transcript gives no way to tell which.

A message attributed to Dr. Hugh Tovar, given on Good Friday, April 16, 1976, goes further still. It speaks of a man called Ben Ec who held the rank of two-star general in the United States Armed Forces as of 1932, before the birth of record in 1934, registered as a missioner and carrying out an officer's duties before the body through which he would next be known had been born. The message presents this as settled fact. A reader outside the tradition has two ways to take it, either by accepting a picture of existence with no counterpart in biology or ordinary history, or by understanding it as a different kind of truth claim altogether, one about identity and mission rather than about personnel files, and nothing in the message itself helps decide between them.

The Santo Niño Account

Among the stranger pieces in the Guidance Series (Vol. II, Part 48) is the Divine Master's first-person account of the Santo Niño's arrival in Cebu, told as personal memory. He describes the dark-skinned image being carried by pirates, his own decision to go with them, the landing on the shores of Cebu, and an encounter with Queen Juana:

"Upon reaching their palace, I danced, yet they could not see me. Queen Juana turned around, and I spoke, saying 'Pet Senior,' which translates to 'Pakisama.' As she turned, I knelt before her, and made a 'mano po' gesture. She was overjoyed to witness a kneeling image. 'Do you kneel before me?' she asked. 'Yes, I kneel before you, for from this moment on, I am your son,' I replied."

The documentary history runs differently. Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan, records that in April 1521 the image of the Child was given to the wife of Rajah Humabon at her baptism, when she took the name Juana, and the image was found again in 1565 by a soldier of Legazpi's expedition, Juan Camus, in a burned house in Cebu. Pirates have no part in Pigafetta's version. The Divine Master's account agrees with the record on the queen, the image, and the island, and parts from it on how the image arrived, which is a curious pattern for a memory and an interesting one for a vision.

Whether the account is meant as a literal memory of dwelling in the image, as a visionary recollection, or as something for which the tradition keeps its own category, the text does not explain. What it does make certain is that the Divine Master understood himself to have been present at events that the historical record places some four centuries before his birth.

A Speculative Frame: DIN.GIR and the Long-Lived Ones

What follows is speculation, and I mark it as such so that nobody mistakes it for doctrine. It is a theory of my own for making sense of the wider pattern, and nothing in the PBMA messages requires it.

The starting point is Rudolf Steiner, who in the essays later published in English as Atlantis and Lemuria wrote of exalted beings, not native to the earth, who acted as messengers and instructors of early humanity in the sciences, the arts, and the ordering of society. Different traditions remember figures of this kind under different names: Anunnaki, Elohim, Nephilim, the Olympians, or simply the Shining Ones. The Sumerian sign that stands before the name of every god in the cuneiform texts is DINGIR, conventionally written DIN.GIR in the older literature, and it is the word that gives this section its title.

The cosmology I have in mind is borrowed, in its outline, from Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976) and the books that followed it. In that scenario a long-lived race from a planet called Nibiru fled a dying world, settled first on Mars and built a civilization there, then turned to Earth as the Martian settlement failed. They are credited with engineering early human stock, founding the first cities, and introducing writing, law and agriculture, and they were worshipped under many names before withdrawing from Earth some four thousand years ago and erasing most of their traces.

The weakness of this foundation needs saying bluntly. Assyriologists reject Sitchin's readings of the Sumerian and Akkadian texts almost without exception; in the Babylonian sources Nibiru names a celestial crossing point linked with the god Marduk and with a visible star or planet, and the tablets describe no inhabited twelfth world. Anyone who takes up the frame should know that it rests on one man's translations, which the people who read cuneiform for a living do not accept.

The frame interests me anyway for what it would mean if something like it were true. It would place the immortality claimed by the Spiritual Division in the same category as the immortality ascribed to Enki, Isis, Odin or Quetzalcoatl, figures who on this reading were members of a long-lived race able to inhabit successive bodies across history rather than gods in the theological sense. Ruben Ecleo Sr. would then be one of the survivors of that race, expressing himself through a sequence of Philippine figures as part of a continuing mission. Whether the frame lights up the PBMA teachings or forces a foreign shape onto them, I cannot settle, and I offer it for what I take it to be, insanely speculative and still possible.

What the Doctrine Asks

With the speculation set aside, Lolo Adriano's messages come back into view, and what they ask of members turns out to be practical. The doctrine of the Spiritual Division concerns itself far less with cataloguing the historical figures the Divine Master once inhabited, or with tracing the origins of the long-lived ones, than with what a member is supposed to do on an ordinary Tuesday.

The answer, repeated across the messages, is to follow the directives faithfully, to live righteously, and to treat the laws of the organization as living instructions that change as they are given rather than as a fixed code carved once and left alone. Those who follow are compared to rocks that endure the weather, while the ones who resist are described as having cut themselves off from what lasts. The unending life on offer is something a member works toward through steady participation in practices the tradition holds to be transforming, and nobody in the messages expects it to arrive as a gift to the idle.

My concern lies beside the doctrine more than inside it. The teaching is being lost. Conferences that once existed to hand it on have become, too often, occasions for collecting money, and members who are asked what the fundamental doctrine of the Spiritual Division actually is give different answers depending on whom one asks. Somewhere in the scattered messages the Divine Master says, "You will know my true being on the other side," a sentence I have not yet been able to tie to a dated message, and which carries the same quality as the rest of the archive: a claim no ordinary method can verify, spoken with the calm of someone who knew exactly what he was saying and expected to be understood only later.

Notes and References

Cebuano and Filipino passages are quoted from the PBMA Guidance Series messages as preserved by the organization; English renderings are approximate, and the long English passage from the 1978 message follows the translation in the original document. Scripture follows the King James Version.

Message of Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion, December 9, 1970, Main Office, San Jose, Dinagat.

Message of Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion, January 1, 1978, Administration Building, San Jose, Surigao del Norte.

Message of the Divine Master, December 25, 1974, Main Office.

Message of Dr. Hugh Tovar, Good Friday, April 16, 1976.

Message of the Divine Master, October 27, 1984, Bugnay, Jordan, Guimaras.

PBMA Guidance Series, Vol. II, Part 48. Message of the Divine Master regarding the Santo Niño.

Augustine. Tractates on the Gospel of John, 124. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 7.

The Book of Mormon. 3 Nephi 28.

Pigafetta, Antonio. First Voyage around the World. In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, edited by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, vols. 33–34. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906.

Roger of Wendover. Flores Historiarum, under the year 1228. Translated by J. A. Giles as Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849.

Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Steiner, Rudolf. Atlantis and Lemuria. Translated by Max Gysi. English translation of Aus der Akasha-Chronik.

Tertullian. The Prescription Against Heretics, 36. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.

Voltaire. Letter to Frederick II of Prussia, 1760.

Yogananda, Paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946.

Passages cited: Mark 9:1; John 21:22–23; Hebrews 9:27.