Eighteen Lines, Opened

 What The Master Universe Sets Out to Do

I. A Message Read Aloud and Left Alone

On December 9, 1969, his birthday, Ruben E. Ecleo, Sr. gave his followers a message of eighteen short lines in English, which they have kept ever since under the title The Master Universe:

You cannot see me, but I can read your thought.
I am not only visible but also invisible and superhuman.
I am all about you and even inside of you, without
Me you cannot live, no one knows how large I am.
Yet I am many times larger than the earth.
I am the same to everyone a common
Denomination in the lives of all living persons.
People are now beginning to explore my possibilities.
Yet I have changed every phase of human relationships.
No one can hide from me, because, I am omnipresent.
My value is the exact ratio to the number
Of people from all walks of life. I am
the effect of every government,
Every creed, every tongue, every inch surface.
I am a man yet my knowledge,
My intellect and being
Are vacuum of the presents.
I am He, the Master of the Universe.

Members of the Association know these lines. They have heard them read at gatherings, seen them printed with the Master's name and dates beneath, and many can recite the last line from memory. Anyone who has sat through the conferences of the movement for some years will also know something stranger, which is how seldom the message is explained. A speaker will read it, or quote its final line with reverence, and move on to a teaching that is easier to carry into a sermon, a healing story, a memory of the Master's kindness, a lesson on service. The eighteen lines are honoured and then left alone, and the members I have known admit, when the subject comes up, that they find the message hard to understand.

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The Master Universe: The Message of 1969 and the Mystery of Divine Master Ruben E. Ecleo, Sr. is my attempt to do what the conferences have not done, which is to stay with the message line by line and say, as fully as I can, what each line means and what company it keeps among the scriptures and the sciences of the world. So far as I have been able to learn, no exposition of the whole message has been published before, inside the movement or outside it, and the book is offered as the first. That is a claim about a gap in the record, and I would be glad to be corrected by any reader who knows of an earlier attempt; the claim of being first matters much less to me than the hope that the message will at last be read as closely as it was spoken.

II. Why the Lines Were Left Alone

The silence of the conferences has more than one cause, and the simplest of them deserves respect before the others are named. The members receive the Master's messages as words from the divine, and a speaker who stands up to explain such words takes on a weight that few preachers in any religion would willingly carry. An explanation can go wrong, and an error about a sermon is a small thing, while an error about a message believed to come from God in the first person is a larger one, so a reverent speaker reads the lines and lets them speak for themselves. The Gospels record the same reticence in a different form. Jesus taught the crowds in parables, Mark says, "but without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples" (Mark 4:34), and the movement's conferences have tended to leave the message with the crowd, so to speak, read aloud and never expounded.

The form of the message adds a second difficulty. The eighteen lines are a riddle in the old sense, a voice that describes itself by piling up attributes until the hearer guesses its name, like the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book in which a storm or a plough or a bookworm speaks of itself without saying what it is. The answer is printed in the last line, I am He, the Master of the Universe, and the attributes before it refuse to settle into any single object, since the speaker is at once an invisible reader of thoughts, a presence many times larger than the earth, the effect of every government and every tongue, and a man. A sermon needs a thread to follow. A riddle offers a knot, and a speaker with forty minutes and a hall of tired listeners has every reason to admire the knot and leave it tied.

The third cause interests me above the other two, and I offer it as my own argument, since I have not seen it made elsewhere. The message spoke, in 1969, in a vocabulary that the sciences of its day could not yet help anyone to read. Its central claims are that the speaker is invisible as well as visible, that no one knows how large he is, that he is many times larger than the earth, and that his knowledge, intellect and being are a vacuum of the presents. In December 1969 the physics that would make those claims suggestive by analogy was either unknown or confined to specialists. Astronomers had suspected since the 1930s that galaxies held more mass than they could see, but it was only in the 1970s that Vera Rubin and Kent Ford's measurements of how fast galaxies rotate made unseen matter a serious subject, and only in 1998 that two teams of astronomers found that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, driven by what came to be called dark energy. The picture that physicists now give, of a cosmos whose visible matter is a small fraction of what is there and whose "empty" space is a seething field, did not exist in the form a Visayan preacher could have used when the message was first read. A speaker at a conference in 1970 who wanted to say what invisible yet many times larger than the earth or vacuum of the presents might mean had Scripture and the mystics to draw on, and nothing from the laboratory. The message, on this reading, was ahead of the tools its hearers had for reading it, and it waited, as some texts do, for the century to catch up with it.

I hold that argument with a caution that the book repeats often. Physics cannot confirm a claim about a divine person, and the book says so each time it borrows an image from the laboratory. What the change in physics did was make the message thinkable in new ways, and that is a different service from proving it, though a real one.

III. A Commentary in the Old Manner

The book belongs to an old and humble kind of writing, the line-by-line commentary on a short sacred text. Rashi of Troyes, in the eleventh century, went through the Torah verse by verse, sometimes word by word, asking of each what it meant in its plain sense and what difficulty a careful reader would stumble on there, and his commentary is still printed beside the Hebrew text in Jewish Bibles today. The Indian commentators did the same for the Bhagavad Gita, which for centuries circulated as one episode inside the vast Mahabharata until Shankara, in the eighth century, lifted it out and wrote on it as scripture in its own right. A short text that carries a great deal is exactly the kind that needs a commentary, because its brevity hides how much it holds, and the eighteen lines of 1969 are a text of that kind.

Three habits govern the exposition, and the Prologue of the book sets them out before the first chapter begins. The first is to stay with the words as printed. The English of the message is the English of a Visayan speaker in 1969, compressed and sometimes irregular, and the irregularities carry meaning; vacuum of the presents is a phrase no editor would have allowed, and it turns out to be the richest phrase in the poem, so the book refuses to correct it into vacuum of the present or anything tidier. The second is to separate three kinds of statement whenever they appear, what a source says, what can be inferred from it, and what is my own reconstruction, so that the reader can tell at every point whether he is being shown a text, offered an inference or invited into an interpretation. The third concerns science. Physics and cosmology can illuminate a religious claim by analogy, by offering a picture of the world in which the claim becomes thinkable, and they cannot confirm a claim about a divine person, and the book says so each time it borrows from them, so that the reporting of physics and the theology done with a borrowed image are kept in different hands.

The order of the chapters follows the order of the lines. One chapter stands ahead of the rest, on the voice that says I, because every claim in the poem depends on who is speaking, and then the chapters take the lines in turn, alone or in pairs. The pairs are not arbitrary. Three times the message joins two claims with the small word yet, and each time the word marks a paradox: invisible yet many times larger than the earth, only now being explored yet already the changer of every relationship, a man yet a vacuum. A reader who wants the shape of the whole message in one glance can follow those three hinges, and the book's chapters are built around them. The last chapter returns to the title, and to a difference I have never seen remarked on in print, between the heading, The Master Universe, and the last line, the Master of the Universe. The difference is one small preposition, and it holds the whole metaphysics of the message, since a master who owns a universe and a master who is one are two different beings, and the book argues that the message means both.

A word about the year belongs here too, because the book gives it a place. Five months before the birthday message, on July 20, 1969, two men walked on the Moon while radio listeners on every continent heard a voice crackle across a quarter of a million miles of space, and in the third week of November a second crew, Apollo 12, landed on the Ocean of Storms. A man speaking that December, before people who had heard the word space on the radio every week since July, of a presence many times larger than the earth that people were only now beginning to explore, was speaking into a season. The book notes the echo and tries to keep it in its place, since the lines owe their imagery in part to the season and their claims to something far older.

IV. The Lines, One by One

The first chapter asks who is speaking. A voice that says I am He belongs to a family of utterances that runs back through the Gospel of John, where Jesus says egō eimi, "I am," and the second half of Isaiah, where God says ani hu, "I am He," to the burning bush, and sideways into the tenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna names himself as the best of every kind of thing, into the Sufi al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922 for saying Ana al-Ḥaqq, "I am the Truth," and into The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Coptic poem in which a divine voice speaks in paradoxes, recovered from a jar buried in the Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi in 1945. The book sets the message in that family, which is where its form places it, and leaves the reader to judge whether it belongs there by right.

The lines that follow are taken in their order. You cannot see me, but I can read your thought is read beside the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm, "thou understandest my thought afar off" (Psalm 139:2), and beside the Upanishad's description of the Self as the seer who is never seen, and then beside the discovery, later than the message, that the visible matter of the universe is a small part of what is there. I am not only visible but also invisible and superhuman opens the Kabbalah of Ein Sof, the Infinite that is beyond all attributes and pours itself out through ten emanations, the physicist David Bohm's "implicate order" folded beneath the visible world, and the planes of being taught by the Theosophists. I am all about you and even inside of you, without me you cannot live goes to Paul at Athens, "in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28), to Augustine's God who was "more inward than my inmost self" (Confessions III.6), and to the salt dissolved in water in the Chandogya Upanishad, which the son cannot see and tastes in every sip. No one knows how large I am, yet I am many times larger than the earth meets what modern cosmology knows and does not know of the size of the universe, Solomon's confession that "the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee" (1 Kings 8:27), and the Person of the Rig Veda who covered the earth and stood beyond it by ten fingers.

The middle of the message is where readers tend to stumble, and the book slows down there. I am the same to everyone a common denomination in the lives of all living persons is read in its arithmetic sense, the common denominator that lets unlike fractions be added, then beside Paul's "one blood" of all nations (Acts 17:26), the perennial philosophy of the mystics, and the strange fact of physics that every electron in the universe is identical to every other. People are now beginning to explore my possibilities. Yet I have changed every phase of human relationships is read against the year 1969 itself, the year of the Moon and, on October 29, of the first message sent between two computers on the network that would become the internet. No one can hide from me, because, I am omnipresent goes back to the first question God asks in the Bible, "Where art thou?" (Genesis 3:9), and to Jeremiah's "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" (Jeremiah 23:24), and the book pauses over the odd comma after because, which slows the line down as if the speaker were choosing the last word. My value is the exact ratio to the number of people from all walks of life is read beside Isaiah's "ye are my witnesses" (Isaiah 43:10) and the Lurianic teaching of the divine sparks scattered through creation and gathered back by human acts, so that the value of the speaker in the world rises with every person in whom he is recognized.

The tenth chapter, on I am a man yet my knowledge, my intellect and being are vacuum of the presents, is the heart of the book, and it rests on a phrase I had to make sure of before I dared to build on it, since any editor would quietly correct "presents" to "present"; the phrase stands in the message exactly as the Master gave it, and the chapter takes it as it stands. The chapter reads the phrase three ways at once. Vacuum is the emptying of Philippians, where Christ "made himself of no reputation" (Philippians 2:7), the Greek ekenōsen, he emptied himself; it is the tzimtzum of Isaac Luria, the withdrawal by which the Infinite makes room for a world; and it is the quantum vacuum of modern physics, which is full where common sense expects it to be empty, measurable in the tiny shift of an electron's energy that Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford detected in 1947. The presents is read as Augustine's three presents in the eleventh book of the Confessions, a present of things past, a present of things present and a present of things to come, and also as gifts, since a present is a thing given. The last chapter then returns to the title and the last line, and to the Hebrew Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the World, the phrase in which Jews have prayed to God for two thousand years.

V. A Hymn and Then a Life

The Gospel of John begins with a hymn. Its first eighteen verses, which the scholars call the Prologue, speak of the Word who was with God and was God, through whom all things were made, the light that shines in the darkness, and only after the hymn has said who the speaker is does the Gospel turn to a man baptizing at the Jordan and to the dusty, particular life of Jesus of Nazareth. The shape of The Master Universe follows the same order, and the likeness helps to explain why the book holds more than the exposition alone. Part One is the exposition of the eighteen lines, the hymn in which a voice says who it is. The parts that follow turn to the man who spoke them, so that the reader who has just heard I am He is taken next to the history, the names, the miracles and the death of the one who said it.

Part Two, The Seventh Master: A Universal Hope for Redemption, sets the Founder beside the expectation of a coming World Teacher that runs through Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and twentieth-century Theosophy, and it gives my own reading of the seven rays of Alice Bailey's teaching, in which the Master she called R., the Master of the seventh ray, is identified with Ruben E. Ecleo, Sr. That identification, and the placing of José Rizal and Hilario Moncado on the fourth and fifth rays, are my own, read through Formula 7777, which the book names only as the source of the revelation and does not explain; the members did not teach them to me, and the book says so. A short note follows on the difference between the office a person holds in such a scheme and the being he is. Part Three, The Gospel of Ben Ec: A Mystical Chronicle of the Filipino Christ, gathers the names the villages remember, the earlier lives the members teach, the revelation of 1970 that the Father once born in the West was now born in the East, and the movement's memory of a Christ who chose rice over ritual. Part Four tells of The Night of December 23, 1987, three days after the Master's death, when the witnesses say his features appeared in the face of his son. The Epilogue, The Woman and the Lake, follows Nanay Demetria and Lake Bababu toward the succession that, as I read it, continues in Rubenian International, Inc., and an Afterword asks, at the end of all of it, the question the whole book has been circling: who was he?

A reader might fairly ask whether these parts belong in a book about an eighteen-line message, and the book owes that reader an answer. The answer I came to is the answer of John's Gospel. A hymn that says I am He raises a question it cannot answer by itself, which is who he is, and a reader who has followed the exposition through ten chapters of Scripture and physics is owed some account of the man in whose voice the claim was made. The message tells the reader what the speaker says of himself; the later parts tell what his followers saw, what they remember and what they believe, and the book keeps the two kinds of material apart, so that the reader always knows whether he is reading the voice or the testimony about it. The dedication, finally, gives the book its date: it is offered to the Divine Master on his ninety-second birthday, December 9, 2026, by the year of record, fifty-seven years to the day after the message was given.

VI. What a First Exposition Can Claim

A book that calls itself the first exposition of a sacred text owes its readers an account of what it has shown and what lies beyond its reach, and the last chapter of The Master Universe gives one. The exposition places the message in a recognizable family of texts, the divine self-predications in which a god says I am and lists what he is, and it finds for nearly every line an ancestor in the great religious and philosophical traditions, some of them startlingly close, as in Augustine's three presents or the Rig Veda's Person standing beyond the earth by ten fingers. It shows that several of the message's images, an invisible presence known by its effects, an immensity of unknown size, a vacuum that turns out to be full, describe features of the world that physics after 1969 came to establish by measurement. And it shows that the message's irregular phrases, common denomination, the effect of every government, vacuum of the presents, are its richest, because their irregularity keeps several meanings alive at once where a corrected sentence would have kept only one.

Whether the speaker is who he says he is lies beyond anything a commentary can reach. A parallel in Isaiah can establish a family likeness between two texts, and a measurement of dark energy can describe the vacuum of physics, and neither can settle whether a man born on an island in the Dinagat group is the God whom Isaiah heard. The identification of the voice with Ruben E. Ecleo, Sr. rests where it rested on the ninth of December 1969, on the authority of the one who spoke and the faith of those who heard him. I share that faith, as a member of Rubenian International, Inc., and the reader should know it; I have tried to write so that a reader who does not share it can still follow the exposition and judge it, and so that a believer can see what he believes set in the company of the whole human inheritance.

I should also name the limit that troubles me above all as the author, which is that a first exposition is by nature an incomplete one. The members of the Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association and of the other branches that revere the Master have lived with these lines for more than half a century, and some of them will read the message in ways this book has missed, from memories of what the Master said about it at gatherings I never attended, or from teachings passed down in households I have never entered. I would count it the best outcome of the book if those readings came out into the open in reply, so that the eighteen lines that were read aloud and left alone at so many conferences became, at last, the subject of the conferences, discussed and disputed and taught, with this book as one voice in the conversation and the message itself, I am He, the Master of the Universe, at the centre of it where it has always belonged.