Consciousness is the comparison of your bodily "I", your personality, with the divine, spiritual, total "I", which is also in me. That is why conscience is the basis of all morality. There are people lacking or almost lacking this quality, consciousness. Often these people, in addition to the enormous amount of knowledge and sophistication, are completely devoid of moral pretensions, and there are a lot of them, all invited. I remember how in my childhood I was almost amazed by the manifestation of consciousness in me, which at that time still did not know how to express itself very well. I remember being amazed that I could, with my consciousness, be aware that I was aware of myself, and moreover, I was aware that I was aware of being aware of myself. And so ad infinitum. Yes, conscience is the recognition of God in me and the judgment of God in me on my person And all that is revealed to me from the perspective of personality.
I wrote in February: why does the world present itself to us im Werden, in motion, and why will I no longer exist, and the world will continue to change? And I answered then: I don't know. I know. The world presents itself to me im Werden, becoming, because it is not in my power to embrace the whole world, as it is outside of time, just as I embrace the whole of a dead (beloved) being, it is no longer for me change, but complete entity. The fact that the world will change without me is an assumption that is not based on anything. The world will present itself to other beings (that is, it seems to me that it will present itself to other beings) again.
We want to order the happy and righteous life of men, but since we know the life of men and know that they have always striven for it, we know that they have never attained a happy and righteous life. Always after the attainment of one step of good, another, the next, was revealed, as persistently indispensable as the one just reached seemed. And it continued that way until our times, beginning with cannibalism and ending with the nationalization of the land. That is why it is natural not only to assume, but also to be confident that it will always be like this.
To understand the laws of life we do not need to explain the origin of spirit, that is, of consciousness. It is the only clear, indubitable and timeless thing that does not require an explanation of its origin, but on the contrary, only on it can all knowledge be based. In order to understand the laws of life, we need to explain why the consciousness of all people receives the phenomena of the material world (the boundaries of separate consciousness), sees, hears, perceives the same.
If we knew for sure that death makes us worse, it would be terrible to live to die. But if we knew for sure that death improves our condition, we would despise life. Therefore, we cannot wish for anything better than what we have.
We must always remember three requirements of good: self-control, truth, and love.
This morning I was walking around the garden and as usual I was thinking about my mother, the "mommy" that I don't remember at all, but she remained a holy ideal for me. I have never heard anything bad about her. And walking along the avenue of birch trees and approaching the one with walnut trees, I saw in the mud a small footprint of a woman's foot and I thought of her, of her body. I could not form the image of her body. Trupescul would have soiled her. What a good feeling I have about her! How I wish I had the same feeling for everyone, women and men alike. And it is possible. When I deal with people, I should feel this, think this about them.
I am beginning to get used to the recognition of love as the main and only fact of life. The most important thing is what you think. I cannot insist enough on the fact that whoever wants to live the true life must first of all make the effort to touch the true life in his thoughts, when he is alone with himself. It's amazing how well known this is.
It is said that there are three tenses: past, present and future. What a gross and damaging mistake. There are two kinds of time, past and future, the present is outside of time. And true, free life is outside of time, that is, in the present. How important it is to know this. One can only live in the present, that is, freely.
It is bad when moral good becomes a means to achieve external conditions or states. This is where people's greatest misfortunes come from: the religious lie, the state lie, the revolutionary lie...
... Selfishness, that is, loving yourself more than anything else, is the greatest error and ultimate perfection. It is a mistake to love your person more than anything, and it is the highest perfection to love more than anything that spiritual principle that lives and manifests itself in you.
I've been in a happy mood lately. As soon as I have a doubt about something (to say or not to say something, to go or not to go somewhere), usually caused by a lust or the temptation of worldly glory, or if I have any regrets, I I say: what do you need this for? Life is only for the God within you and without you, and the doubt immediately dissipates, I am at peace, I feel good and I feel full of joy.
It is hard to get rid of tobacco, it is hard for a drunkard to give up wine, but harder and more necessary than anything is to get rid of drunkenness with yourself, with your "I". And I am beginning to feel now, before death, the possibility of such an abdication. The merit is not great.
The basis of all thinking about the world and about God is one: man has the consciousness of unity with the principle of everything that exists, he has the consciousness of his divinity and at the same time the consciousness of his separation, of his nothingness. I am Tsar, I am God, I am a slave, I am a worm. *
The personality of any man is composed of two qualities, the first, mental capacities, memory, cleverness, the ability to be attentive and to concentrate (the main one, in the case of this quality, concentration of attention), the second, the vividness with which he perceives the consciousness of the ideal of perfection . The first is always satisfied with herself, the second always dissatisfied.
Not to punish, not to resist evil with violence, not to have the rich, all these seem to us great deeds, unfulfillable requirements, but they are only the simplest indications to stop harming ourselves. Similarly, it seemed a great feat not to curse, not to get drunk, not to eat meat. And now we understand that they are just practical advice to avoid harming ourselves. The same can be said about punishment, violence, wealth.
I begin to understand that it is possible, when I meet people, to always have in mind what the other needs, not me: to remember that in life I should not be interested in "me", but "you" or HE . It is possible, it is possible.
I was riding through the forest and saw some ripe fruit in the thicket. And I thought: no one will see these berries, they are not needed by anyone and they are not needed by anyone, but they rigorously fulfill, with all their might, not their purpose, but the one destined for them, doing the will To that "I" who lives as a separate being in this plant. So is man who, unlike the plant, has the (relative) advantage of being able to have the consciousness of this universal "I" in his separate being.
Yes, I, L. N., I, the writer, I, the beggar, I, the tsar, is a big mistake. This is where all human suffering comes from. There is only One and innumerable manifestations of Him, one of which is what I consider to be my self. And we would do well not to recognize His manifestation within us as our separate "I," but to feel that "I" within us and live through Him. We go through the most various and inevitable bitterness and suffering if we live in the delusion that "I" is our "I". The purpose of life is the fulfillment of the will of one's "I", in other words, the longing for the cessation of separation, the merging with the Whole. And love, this nearness of fusion, is the greatest good of our lives.
Let us recognize again the old truth which says that it is madness to live oblivious to death, that the thought of the inherence of death, the possibility of its occurrence at any moment, is the indispensable condition of life. Without the awareness of this fact, life is an absurdity in which despair can overtake us at any time at the thought of death. It seems inevitable to understand that in life we are like workers brought to work, workers whom the master can at any moment dismiss and send to where he brought them. "There" and "From where" are equally mysterious to us. It would seem that people have no way to perceive their life differently. And they perceive it as something that belongs to them, in which they can achieve their goals. How could they not despair at the thought of death when they have such a vision?
Yes, you are only a worker in God's household, and you know without fail that you have only been sent here to do the work He has given you. There is no point in thinking about whether this condition is good or bad, it is the way it is and it will not change. We can and must think about one thing: how to live better. We can live better, obviously, only if we do the work entrusted to us. You will find that you are doing the work entrusted to you if you do it with the greatest ease, but also with joy. Since we have been surveying the lives of men, the wisest have sought to define this work and have indicated it. All true religions and moral teachings have pointed to it, and it is always the same: union with all and all and participation in union with all and all, love. But if the master will reward us after death for a job well done, we can only guess and believe. But it is all the less necessary to guess the better and more we do our work. Fulfillment bestows good, good in the present, which excludes any interest in the future.
... It is hard to live in the opulence in which I have been given to lead my life, and harder still to die under these conditions, with their peddling, their medicine, their false relief, their healing, for all these are impossible and useless and only make my state of mind worse. The attitude towards death is not one of fear at all, but of tense curiosity. But more on that later, if I can.
In the body of every man dwells the spirit of God. If there were not in the body of all men the same spirit of God, there would be no life either. If it weren't for people's bodies, which separated people, then there wouldn't be life either.
Man's love unites him with his fellow men and with God, it gives him the ultimate good. This love would not exist if there were no body, and therefore the body is indispensable for the good of men.
Life is the liberation of the soul from the body, and when liberation takes place in love, life is good.
If it were not for the spirit imprisoned in the body, there would be no life. We have no right to speak separately of spirit and body. We do not know and have no way of knowing one or the other separated, but neither can we conceive of our life without this separation, because we know that our whole life is incessant destruction of the body and clarification of the spirit. Through death the complete destruction of the body is accomplished and the purification of the spirit which then disappears.
Only the body suffers. The spirit knows no suffering. The weaker the spiritual life, the stronger the sufferings. What a mistake it is to live for the body and not for the spirit.
God is the lawgiver of life, that is, I, in my humanity, accept the presence of a lawgiver behind the law. There is the law of life. God is the lawgiver.
God does not like extra persons. You can talk to him privately.
I had a disgusting dream through his immorality, and I was more convinced than ever that morality can have no material foundation. It is the main sign of the spiritual nature.