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 THE CONTEMPLATIVE SOCIETY
interview with Félix de Almeida Mendonça
Guillermo Ortega Noriega
Basing his ideas on his experience of life, which has brought him to a paradigm for younger generations, Felix de Almeida Mendonça is also an analyst with a perfectly clear vision of reality. An engineer, builder and Brazilian politician, he has been married to Maria Helena for fifty years, and is the father of Cristiana, Andrea and Felix Jr. He opened the doors of his summer house to us, opposite Salvador de Bahía, on the Penha Beach, Vera Cruz, on the Island of Itaparica, to record this interview, while we drank the delicious local coconut juice.
At 80 years of age you have travelled to Brasilia and back – almost 3000 km a week by air – for two decades now, due to your political activity in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, where you carry out your duty with dynamism and an enviable good humour. How do you do it?
Wherever I am, I walk for an hour every day. During that hour I forget all about my tasks and obligations, and I give myself over to enjoying everything that living with nature can offer. I believe in the possibility of arriving at a society in which the human mind must be completely free of daily tasks, to multiply the intelligence through robots, with routine work to be carried out by machines. The advances in the development of the human species should allow contemplation and the pleasure of new discoveries. Protection from the natural phenomena which could lead to the extinction of the species, or from those generated by man himself, such as global warming: these are some examples of what could be achieved with the liberation of the intelligence.
In Santos, 72 km from São Paulo, two lady students of the Radical Surf School, located on the José Menino beach, managed to get to their feet on their surfboards after two months of training. They were both 80 years old. Have you tried surfing yet?
I have never had the opportunity to live in a place with waves as large as those in your country, Peru, which is famous throughout the world as a nursery for excellent champion surfers. But let us take this opportunity to wonder about the reason for the competitiveness which is a feature of our species, as man demonstrates in such sporting abilities. It is this, though obviously on a small scale, which drove these two ladies, my age-mates. There would be no point running after a football, except to practise one’s skills to the full. Another example is those
somad-seeming people who drive their cars like crazy just to overtake their competitors in search of a victory.
Would you say that there is some kind of genetic transmission in all that?
Yes, probably. In the case of Man all that could have been transmitted from the very beginning of his competence, by the sperm rushing to reach the ovum. Why is it that animals, which are higher beings, chose sexual reproduction through coupling? And why does the amoeba, whose reproduction is through cellular division or partition, begin a new life at the moment of division?
Listening to you talking about the arrival of the Portuguese in the country known today as Brazil transports us back to those days when the idiosyncratic future of the people of this country was practically created…
It would be good to remember the society found here by Pedro Alvarez Cabral in the 16th century. That society lived in absolute freedom and harmony. Due to that way of life, and without the slightest idea who they were dealing with, they welcomed the discoverer of our country with open arms and great enthusiasm. Pero-Vaz de Caminha, the scribe of Cabral’s armada, says about this land of ours: “There went among them three or four very young and gentle girls with black hair, broad in the shoulders and erect in their modesty, such clean and virginal maidens that we felt no shame to look upon them, although they (…) had nothing to cover their bodies.”
When would the contemplative society arise in Brazil?
Through the reports of Pero-Vaz de Caminha we can deduce that in the formation of the Brazilian personality, the Indian brought sensuality and happiness. The white man brought remorse, and the black man, though without re-morse, brought his muscular strength
as well as his ancestral culture. The contemplative society will tend to grow because it is only in that manner that man may be liberated from physical labour to devote himself to music, philosophy and astronomy: to sensory perception and to ratiocination; and above all to make use of all the means to maximise his intellectual potential. Why not imagine, as an exercise for the intelligence, that life arose from the sensation of pleasure? Imagine masses dispersed by the formation of the planet, subject to magnetic fields, with chemical substances attracted to each other and, joining together and dividing, allowing the creation of life. These masses, during the nights of millennia, were evolving to allow the formation of life in beings which are not equal, from the most primitive up to those which continued to evolve, such as man. Pleasure is present in all forms of life.
So, would that make pleasure a language of God, still intact in our memory of all our origin and evolution, until the advance of intelligence can reconstruct our origins?
Who could ever answer that? But even so, while this impulse does not yet arise, man continues in his biological evolution, though naturally enough, more slowly. Against expectations, research into regenerating organs by stem cells is continuing with impressive success, as well as some daring things we have never imagined, such as the modification of the genetic structure which leads to ageing. I have a particular interest in this subject, since I hope to see great advances, which will allow people, and me in particular, to live in perfect health to 150 years of age. |
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