Despre Dumnezeu și om - Din jurnalul ultimilor ani

How terrified man must feel alone in the world, cut off from everything! If, no matter how much he wanders, man does not have a spiritual connection with the world, with God, he would not be able to live. But if he loses consciousness of this connection, he can no longer live and kills himself. That explains almost all suicides.

The workers, generally the poor, are not better but worse than the rich, they judge and envy them. For this they are more to be pitied than for their poverty. But the rich are always more immoral than the poor, they take advantage of their work, they live in luxury, and above all for this they are worthy of pity.

Life is not in motion, but throbbing, stirring in every being. The fact that it seems to me that life moves in time is an illusion. Life just manifests itself more and more over time. The sun does not move as the clouds that covered it reveal it again.

Rejoice, and again I say to you, rejoice. If you live as it falls, the joy is unceasing. I realize this in my old age. Old age makes me happy. There are good moments when I also enjoy the nearness of death.

Consciousness is limited in space and time, but in itself it is independent. It is free, but it can express itself, manifest itself only in space and time.

Yes, it is not Russia that needs to be saved, but what is millions and millions of times more expensive than the imagined existence of Russia, our soul.

I would not want to die without expressing what I feel and understand now with all clarity. It's funny that I'm writing at the end of my life a truth known to everyone, and this truth as I understand it now, or rather as I feel it, seems absolutely new to me. The truth is that we must love everyone and build our lives in such a way that we can love everyone. I would like to write such a law of God for children.

We must not imagine that the life of religious people needs to be overwhelmed by the care of supporting religiosity and that it must be boring, dedicated to an abstract activity. On the contrary, the life of people who have a religious background cannot but be full of joy completely free of concern for their religiosity. To think otherwise is like thinking that people with political and scientific views only talk about politics and science.

Religious instruction must be the basis of education. Education without religious instruction is not education, but both depravity and the numbing of the higher faculties.

In order not to live in torment, you must have the hope of joy in front of you. But what hope of joy can there be, when you face old age and death? There is only one way out of this situation, to devote your whole life to spiritual perfection, in ever-increasing communion with God. Only then is life unbroken joy, and death is also joy.

Among the organs of man, above all is reason, and man cannot, must not give it up, because the life of the world is the work of people guided by reason. The good understanding of men will be achieved not by the refusal of reason, but by the recognition by all of its laws.

An anarchist with expropriating ideas once told the peasants in the villages that they should not work for the masters and that they should confiscate what they (the masters) considered to be theirs. I would like to ask him and his teachers: for the horse that has 10 horses, is it a wheelwright or makes bricks, etc., is it possible to work or not? If it is still possible, then where do we stop? And if we establish for whom one cannot work, how can we state, legislate this? Will we make laws that will be enforced by force? But then there will be new abuses of power.

The organization of society on the basis of coercion aims to end acts of violence between people. Whereas thought, experience, and the whole of history show us that the right of coercion afforded to some could not and cannot prevent men from breaking the existing order and resorting to violence. It turns out that an order based on coercion will only increase the number of those who use violence.

... I would add to the idea the impossibility of organizing society without coercion, and that, just as ancient societies were inconceivable without slaves, it would also have been inconceivable without some beings even more miserable than slaves, without masters. The slaves were freed, it's time these wretches were freed too.

In order to clearly understand the unreality of space (corporeality) and time (movement), the fact that both are only limitations of our thinking, I must also conceive that my body in space, like my movement in time, are equally infinitely small in compared to the infinitely large (which I cannot but accept) and infinitely large compared to the infinitely small which we must necessarily think about.

I just thought that intellectually limited people, the so-called materialists, shirk any serious reasoning about the attributes of human nature and reason (see Kant, Plato, Christ) considering it all just uncertain, unclear, contradictory "philosophy" , within which all reasoning is useless.

What an astonishing phenomenon that Brahmanism, in spite of its far superior religious understanding to Judaism, has been subjected to the same, if not worse, distortions, or rather has been invaded by tumors.

So rarely do we encounter, and even more rarely do we feel, true love, love for love, love not only for all people, but also for everything, for God. Lord, help me to live in this love, come and dwell in me.

Revolutionaries are driven above all by envy, ambition and love of power. And what is worse, these ugly feelings are masked by the false love and compassion for the people, and, what is even more ridiculous, by the false love of freedom: they enslave themselves to power, in the most terrible of slaves, for the love of freedom!

We think and say: why didn't God tell us His will through words, but we forget that through words, always imprecise, unclear, always incomplete, only humans speak in their imperfection; God has another language, another means of conveying the truth: by making us aware of His nature.

Life is based on our boundless striving for good. But as bounded and separate beings, we never receive the whole of that good which we desire. We can receive the ultimate good only as a participant not only in the life of mankind, but also in all that exists. And we have this possibility to participate in the life of the Whole if we become aware that we are that spiritual beginning that gives us life. The consciousness of this fact manifests itself in us through love.

... We live here our separate life and the life of another, far more comprehensive being, which includes our separate beings as our body includes all the separate cells that make it up. And that is why our activity for the good of that Whole is not wasted, just as the activity of the cells for the whole organism is not wasted. Perhaps this is why death is only a transfer of consciousness from a separate person to a more comprehensive being that includes the separate persons. And this is probably because the whole of human life is only the continuous increase of consciousness.

We would do well to always remember that life, the bodily life of a separate being, is not a state, but a perpetual motion. Life is a state only for the consciousness of that spirit in relation to which bodily life is perpetual motion.

Worldly life (from birth to death) is man's growing understanding of his spirituality. For this to be possible, the spiritual being must open more and more. This openness appears to us as movement in time and space of the body.

Movement is related to time just as the body is related to space.

Astronomy is the science that shows in the clearest way how illusory space and time are. You have to be a complete idiot or a scientist not to understand that if there are so many billions of kilometers to Sirius, then by the same reasoning there should also be stars at distances that cannot even be written in numbers in the space between us and Sirius. And that would be only a small fraction of the distance to even more distant worlds, and so on ad infinitum. And if that is the case, it is clear that these worlds do not even exist, but only show us that our representations in the form of time and space are illusory.

The decent rich man pities the poor and is ashamed of his wealth, and often sincerely wishes to do good to the poor. Even the decent poor almost always envies the rich, resents being poor, and would sooner do harm than good to the rich. Especially in this regard the poor are worthy of pity.

It's easy to say: you shouldn't hate bad people, but on the contrary, pity and love them. It is. But to do this sincerely, there is only one way: to see Him, to feel Him, to love Him in them that God who is in you and in them. To be able to do this, you must become aware that God is in you and love Him. And that's why everything, everything depends on it.

Judge others as you judge yourself. For they are you. And therefore be lenient with their evil deeds, as you were and are with you. And so desire the repentance and correction of their sins, as you hope to have yours forgiven.

All beliefs have the same foundation. And it cannot be otherwise, man is the same everywhere.