By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The last affair of our group here in Baguio from what I could remember was in 1976 at the compound of the Lamens at Trancoville courtesy of now Atty. Graal Lamen-Militar. The coming one will be at the Pilando Center as a favor from Letty Pilando. We are lucky we have as members these children of old Mountain Province political families whose generosity let us use their facilities.
Another lawyer who will likely attend this time around would be Atty. Matthias Bawayan. He is senior enough to be with us being a 1960s vintage GMC member. After he became a lawyer in the early 1980s he went to the US with his family. He stayed there for decades and just came back to practice law again just before 2010. He reminds me of a Kalinga worker of mine who went to borrow money from a Fil-Am who retired from a nursing job in America so she came home for good. When the retiree said she did not have money as her pension was just enough to go by, the Kalinga worker came back to the office muttering, “Apay ada nagapo America nga awan kwarta na!” How about that Atty. Bawayan?
At any rate, the good thing about us lawyers compared to our other members is we don’t suffer from any kind of heart disease—because we are heartless.
Kidding aside, the questions we members of the group might have to ask ourselves is, “Why did we have to go to UP Los Banos, Laguna to get a college education? Why did we have to go that far? Were we destined to meet each other there?”
In my case, I think I found the answer. It was in the early 1980s when I attended a seminar in a small but quaint resort in Pakil which is just the next town from Los Banos. It was summer and kind of hot but the resort was in the middle of a forest offruit trees so it was not that sweltering. Sitting on a bench in front of the small building there on top of a stone on a hill under the shed of trees and overlooking Laguna de Bay with a cool gentle breeze coming from the lake, I was amazed at the sight of the lake with all the trees at the periphery of where I was forming the “margin of the frame.” Near the lake were the few denizens of the place going about othe activities as rural farmers and fishermen. With the cool breeze, the whole thing was a sight to behold, an idyllic one.
Then I got that déjà vu. “That feeling of having been here in the distant past, in a past life.” A hundred of years or hundreds of years? Perhaps. My having gone back was not an accident, for there actually is no such a thing. Everything is an incident. And so I kept going back to that vicinity. Something in me has to be “lived out” or expressed there.
And it was in UP Los Banos where I joined the Ananda Marga Yoga Society. Yoga by the way is 7,000 years old. The group however is not just about yoga. It seeks to change the world thru spiritual leadership and with its socioeconomic and political ideology. It was 1976 and the group was just a ragtag one in the Philippines. Change the world? You must be dreaming. That time, Gina Lopez had been a member already for about six years already. She went on to work full time for the organization around the world breaking new ground in many foreign countries including those in Africa.
Just last month I met a Cordilleran who worked for the organization in Europe. He stayed for sometime in Poland. It was inspiring to hear that the organization had taken root in many countries there. The first places in Europe where the organization’s roots were established in the early 70s were in the Scandinavian countries As it spread out in the democratic countries there, workers were also establishing a foothold across the pond or in North America. Then it started spreading in the Central and South Americas. The last frontier then for the group was Eastern Europe particularly those countries with the Soviet block. Now, there is no more last frontier. The organization is now in almost all those countries, especially in Russia. Of course, Asia had always been not a problem.
With me it all started in UP at Los Banos in 1976.
Back to the question which I raised last issue. What did we GMC members do in our lives in consideration of the fact that we got our college education thru government expense? I do think everybody had done enough for society and that we are still doing something good. The bottom line is, that is a question each and every one of us have to ask ourselves individually. For the good or bad karma will come upon us individually, if at all.**
