Mario Rodríguez Cobos

Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos (6 January 1938 – 16 September 2010), also known by the mononym Silo, was an Argentine writer and founder of the international volunteer organisation Humanist Movement.

An active speaker, he wrote books, short stories, articles and studies related to politics, society, psychology, spirituality and other topics. Although he described himself simply as a writer, many see him as a thinker and philosopher, based on the diversity of issues about which he has written.

Biography

Silo was born into a middle-class family of Spanish origin in Mendoza, Argentina. His father was winemaker Rafael Rodriguez (from Granada) and his mother Maria Luisa Cobos, a Basque and a music teacher. He was the youngest of three children, with two older siblings in Raquel and Guillermo. He undertook primary and secondary education with the Maristas Brotherhood, achieving excellent grades, while practising gymnastics and specializing in the pommel horse and reaching high positions in the regional rankings. In addition, he was involved in various youth organizations and lead a very active social and intellectual life. He carried out special studies, in languages including French and Italian, and philosophy. He also published articles in cultural magazines.

Silo studied law for three years at the National University of Córdoba, and later returned to his home town to continue his studies in this field at the National University of Cuyo. At university he began to organize research groups on human beings and their existential and social problems.

Silo travelled around Argentina, South America and Europe and undertook various jobs. By 1960 – following "a rearrangement of his inner truths" as a newspaper slogan of the time reported – he began to present his proposals, while still forming study groups in Argentina and Chile. With members of these groups he organized a public talk, which was initially banned by the military government but later was permitted in the mountains, away from the centres of population. The military dictatorships which subsequently beset the country were present throughout the life of Silo with successive arrests and detentions.

So, on 4 May 1969, Silo spoke to some two hundred people gathered in Punta de Vacas (Province of Mendoza), in the high Andes mountains near Mount Aconcagua, and gave his first public exposition of the ideas, that in time, would form the basis of the Humanist Movement. In this talk, known as "''The Healing of Suffering''", he explained themes such as the overcoming of pain and suffering, the meaning of life, violence, desire and pleasure.

Silo married Ana Luisa Cremaschi, whom he knew from his youth, and had two sons, Alejandro and Federico, with whom he lived in his hometown.

In 1972 he published ''The Inner Look'' and the initial groups extended to other countries, partly because the military dictatorships provoked the exile of many of the participants. In the early 70's, Silo created the current of thought now known as New Humanism or Universalist Humanism, and founded the Humanist Movement, an organized group that sought to translate this thought into practice. It can be said that this thinking encompasses the whole of human existence, not only social but also personal.

Since the eighties, and under his orientation, the Humanist Movement began a period of expansion in the world with the creation of organisms and fronts of action: the Humanist Party with a presence in more than 30 countries, The Community for Human Development (a cultural association), Convergence of Cultures (a civil association), World Without Wars (an anti-armament association) and the World Centre of Humanist Studies.

During 1981 he was invited to express his proposals in various public rallies in European and Asian cities, visiting Madrid, Rome, Barcelona, and later Mumbai (India) and Colombo (Sri Lanka), before returning to Paris, and later San Francisco (California) and Mexico City. He explained with particular force the position of nonviolence, manifested in the overcoming of suffering, the human treatment of others and the attitude of not searching for those to blame. Aspects of these talks relevant to his thought were published in the book''Silo Speaks''.

On 6 October 1993 in Moscow, Silo was awarded a ''doctorate honoris causa'' by the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. In this ceremony, he supported his ideas on "conditions of dialogue," concluding his presentation with these words: "We will see no full dialogue on the fundamental questions of today’s civilization until we, as a society, begin to lose our belief in the innumerable illusions fed by the enticements of the current system. In the meantime, the dialogue will continue to be insubstantial and without any connection to the profound motivations of society. However, in some latitudes of the world something new has begun to move, something that, beginning in a dialogue of specialists, will slowly begin to move into the public arena."

Later years

In early 2002, Silo announced his retirement from the Humanist Movement, after being its driving force for 32 years. He did it by moving the orientation of the Humanist Movement to an assembly composed of the general coordinators of the movement. By August 2007 there were about 400 members in this assembly.

In mid-2002 he launched ''Silo's Message'' understood as a book, an experience and a path. Among his more recent projects he gave impetus to the construction of complexes known as Parks of Study and Reflection in Argentina, Chile, Spain, USA, Italy, India and Egypt, among other geographical locations. The money to build these parks was gathered from voluntary donations.

During the first decade of the 21st century he returned to speak at Punta de Vacas on several occasions with proposals of reconciliation, access to the profound and the sacred of human being, accepting invitations to speak about his Message and going to more humble places, like family homes, or small halls (salitas) in the same neighbourhood of Mendoza, and in greater Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Quito (Ecuador). He also attended events organized in Lisbon, Rome, northern Italy and elsewhere. Furthermore, as well as organising Halls of the Message and Parks of Study and Reflection around his works, Silo attended various opening ceremonies in places such as in La Reja (Buenos Aires), Las Manantiales (Santiago de Chile), Carcarañá (Rosario, Argentina), Toledo (Spain), Attigliano (Rome, Italy), etc.

One of his last public addresses was made in Berlin at the Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, on 11 November 2009, during the passage through that city of the " World March for Peace and Nonviolence". On this occasion Silo called for global nuclear disarmament as the main urgency of the moment.

His last years were spent in Chacras de Coria, a town on the outskirts of the city of Mendoza. He died at his home on 16 September 2010, after suffering for more than a year with renal disease.

His figure, until his death, was highly controversial, since he was considered a "spiritual guide" by his followers, while his critics labeled him a cult leader. He referred to himself as a writer and practitioner of what he called an "inner religion".

There exist few interviews and reports in the media on the life of Silo, however, the most numerous were carried out in Chile in the early nineties (with the return to democracy) from the major talk shows on television.

Some institutions showed recognition of his career in the days after his death, such as the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica.

Outline of his thought

On psychology

The concept of the intentionality of the consciousness, which had been taken up by Franz Brentano from medieval scholasticism and developed by Edmund Husserl in '' Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy'', takes central importance in the thought of Silo. In it he made a differentiation between sensation, perception and imagination:

Rejecting ideas of the unconscious and subconscious as epochal myths based on scientific premises which are incorrectly formulated, it focuses on the study of the co-presence, impulses, levels of consciousness, centres of response, etc., as part of the psychism and the functioning of consciousness. What is new in Silo's thinking is the definition of the space of representation:

On the conception of the human being

Silo differentiates himself further from the academic ambits with a conception of the human being which led to the formation of the Humanist Movement. In fact, the definition of humanist movement as the group of people who study and interpret the needs of human beings and provide the conditions for advancing from the field of determinism to the field of freedom, i.e. to overcome pain and suffering, both individually and socially, is implied in the idea of human beings:

On spirituality

Silo explains his thoughts about spirituality in these terms:

Published books

* 1979: ''The Inner Look''.
* 1981: ''The Internal Landscape''.
* 1989: ''Humanize the Earth'' (consisting of ''the Inner Look'', ''the Internal Landscape'' and ''the Human Landscape'').
* 1989: ''Guided Experiences''.
* 1991: ''Contributions to Thought''.
* 1991: ''Universal Root Myths''.
* 1993: ''Letters to my Friends''.
* 1993: ''The Day of the Winged Lion''.
* 1996: ''Dictionary of New Humanism''.
* 1996: ''Silo Speaks''.
* 1998: ''Collected Works - Volume I''.
* 2002: ''Collected Works - Volume II''.
* 2006: ''Notes on Psychology'' (collection of conferences, 1975, 1976, 1978 and 2006).
* 2008: ''Silo's Message''.

All these books are translated and published in the most common major languages.

Criticism and influence

In a journal of anthropology and American studies in the early 1970s, sections of the left began a campaign against Silo and his followers, who were accused of fascism and of being a reactionary movement. At the same time, conservative sectors of the Catholic Church accused them of threatening the family and Christian morality, as seen in the Chilean newspapers of the time. According to Siloists, this campaign was a reaction to the growing influence of Silo with the youth and the proposal of a new leftist, humanist, non-Marxist ideology.

The notoriety of his influence was reflected in obituaries in the newspapers ''Página/12'' in Argentina and ''El País'' in Spain. The latter refers to Silo as the "founder of a philosophy that came to gather a million followers in over 100 countries" and "a strange character for the West, one who could have been born in the East. He trumpeted a spiritual and social change as the foundation of the “human nation”".

Two months after his death, he was honoured at the Book Fair in Mar del Plata, Argentina.El pensador argentino Silo será homenajeado en la Feria del Libro.

Notes and references

External links

Silo.net
(official web site of Silo).

DelNuevoHumanismo.org
(artículo destacado, 2006).

Silo.net
(«El sabio de los Andes», documental de 47 min, cortesía de Reel Time Images, todos los derechos reservados).

ImaginaTuVuelo.blogspot.com
(blog dedicado al pensamiento de Silo).
* (A now defunct site of an ex-member of the Humanist Movement)

Lies My Guru Told Me

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodriguez, Mario
1938 births
2010 deaths
Argentine humanists
Argentine male writers
20th-century Argentine philosophers
21st-century Argentine philosophers
People from Mendoza, Argentina