Mario Rodríguez Cobos

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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9]

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".[10]

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.[11]

Some institutions showed recognition of his career in the days after his death, such as the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica.[12]

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:

understanding feeling as the register obtained when detecting a stimulus from the external or internal environment and the variation in the tone of work of the sense involved. (...)

Understanding perception as a structure of sensations made by the consciousness referred to a sense , or several senses (...)

Preferring to understand the image as a re-presentation and formalization of sensations or perceptions, coming from the external or internal environment. The image is therefore not a "copy" but a synthesis, an intention and therefore is not mere passivity of the consciousness. (...)

In this work, an account of the image is given as an active way for the consciousness to be in the world which can not be independent of spatiality and as a way in which it accomplishes the many functions it performs, depending on the position assumed in this spatiality. (...)

To every perception there is a corresponding representation that unfailingly modifies the “data” of “reality.” In other words, the structure perception-image is a behaviour of the consciousness in the world, whose meaning is the transformation of this world. (...)

This mode of consciousness-being-in-the-world is basically a mode of action in perspective, whose immediate spatial reference is the body itself, not simply the intrabody. But the body, while being an object of the world, is also an object of the landscape and an object of transformation, and in this way it ends up becoming a prosthesis of human intentionality. If images allow recognition and action, then according to the structure of the landscape and the needs of individuals and peoples (or according to what they consider their needs to be), they will, in the same way, tend to transform the world.

— Psychology of the Image - Contributions to Thought

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:

All the senses produce their representations, and this representation is given in a mental space, this space sets an ambit where the representations are emplaced that have originated from different perceptual sources. This space is nothing other than the totality of internal representations proper to the cenaesthetic system. And so the mental space is a sort of screen that reproduces the impulses of one’s cenaesthesia. Thus, every phenomenon of perception that arrives to the apparatus of coordination is emplaced at some point of the representation screen. Whether it is a matter of a sound, a smell, or an object that enters visually, in every case it is emplaced at some point of the space of representation. This space not only has gradation on two planes—it has depth, it has volume, and it approximately replicates one’s own body. It is a “body” of representation, or—if you prefer—a “spatial referential background.”

— Psychology II - Psychology Notes

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:

Human beings are historical beings whose mode of social action transforms their own nature. If we accept this definition, we will also have to accept that this is a being that can, intentionally, transform its physical constitution. And indeed, that is something we see happening. This process began with the use of instruments that, arrayed before the body as external “prostheses,” allowed human beings to extend their reach, to extend and amplify their senses, and to increase their strength and the quality of their work. Though not endowed with the ability to function in aerial or aquatic environments, they have nonetheless created the means to move through these media, and have even begun to migrate from their natural environment, the planet Earth. Today, moreover, human beings have begun to penetrate into the interior of their own bodies, transplanting organs, intervening in their neurochemistry, practicing in vitro fertilization, and even manipulating their genes. If by the word “nature” we have wanted to signify something fixed and unchanging, then it’s a seriously deficient idea, even when applied to what is most object-like about the human being, that is, the body. In light of this, it is clear that nothing of what is termed “natural morality” or “natural law” or “natural institutions” exists through nature; on the contrary, all of this is socio-historic.

— Third Letter to my Friends

Humanist action does not draw its inspiration from imaginative theories about God, nature, society, or history. Rather, it begins with life’s necessities, which consist most elementally of avoiding pain and moving toward pleasure. Yet human life entails the additional need to foresee future necessities, based on past experience and the intention to improve the present situation. Human experience is not simply the product of natural physiological accumulation or selection, as happens in all other species. It is social experience and personal experience directed toward overcoming pain in the present and avoiding it in the future. Human work, accumulated in the productions of society, is passed on and transformed from one generation to the next in a continuous struggle to improve the existing or natural conditions, even those of the human body itself. Human beings must therefore be defined as historical beings whose mode of social behaviour is capable of transforming both the world and their own nature. Each time that individuals or human groups violently impose themselves on others, they succeed in detaining history, turning their victims into “natural” objects. Nature does not have intentions, and thus to negate the freedom and intentions of others is to convert them into natural objects without intentions, objects to be used.

— Sixth letter to my Friends

Silo explains his thoughts about spirituality in these terms:

All human beings should have full rights to believe, or not to believe, in immortality and the sacred. The Message gives the utmost importance to the themes of immortality and the sacred because, depending on how a person places him or herself with respect to these themes, so will be his or her orientation in life.

The Message takes on the difficulties of openly examining the fundamental beliefs, clashing with the censorship and self-censorship that inhibit freedom of thought and good conscience. Within the context of freedom of interpretation, immortality for some refers to the actions performed in life continuing in the world despite physical death. For others, the memory that continues in loved ones, or even in societies, guarantees the persistence after physical death. For still others, immortality is accepted as personal persistence in another level of existence.

Continuing with freedom of interpretation, some feel the sacred as one’s deepest affection. For them, their children or other loved ones represent the sacred and possess an utmost value that should not be defiled for any reason. There are some others who consider the human being and his universal rights as sacred. Still others experience the divinity as the essence of the sacred.

The different positions taken with respect to the themes of immortality and the sacred should not be simply “tolerated,” but rather genuinely respected.

— Silo's Message