Help me, Lord, to free myself through effort, thoughts and deeds from these sins. Help me to despise my carnal "I", to forget about it, help me to restrain myself in deed and in speech from everything that is not guided by love and that takes me away from liberation. Help me to be aware of my life in freedom from the sins of the flesh through love. I remember, I want to always remember, that my life, my true life, is freedom from bodily sins in the present, that I can live this life, that its manifestation through love gives me steadfast good that cannot be destroyed either by suffering or of death. Help me, Lord, to remember that what we call life is only the gradual release of the soul from the body, that if this body and the gradual release from it did not exist, there would be neither what we call life nor good which this gradual release gives us. Help me, help me, help me to walk steadfastly on the path of this liberation and to remember that only in it do I find good and life.
Everything that is alive has consciousness. In self-consciousness as a separate being life itself and every living thing feels itself subject to general laws and its own laws: the stone obeys gravity and is impenetrable, the plant obeys gravity, growth and reproduction, the animal obeys gravity, growth, reproduction and communication with his like, man obeys gravity, growth, reproduction, communication, and rational moral behavior.
A short prayer: You (I cannot name You) do not leave me. Help me to serve You in Your work, to be with You, in You and to be You.
Eating when you are hungry, drinking water when you are thirsty is a great satisfaction for the body. But to refuse food, drink, everything the body desires, is no longer satisfaction, but joy of the soul. Only one who has been through it knows.
Do not leave me and help me, Lord, to fulfill Your will, to always be You, in love towards all living things. Don't leave me and help me.
Thank You, Lord, for life and its goodness. Help me live it in love. Do not leave me, so that I remember that You are in me and that I live only through You.
I believe that you are only You, and You are in me and in everything that lives. I feel separated from You, but my life is in You, and therefore I seek to unite with You through love and with all that is alive, with all that is from You. I want this union and I fight with everything that separates me from You: with the desires of the body, with laziness, with debauchery and especially with the lack of kindness. I struggle with the temptations of pride, arrogance, love of silver, revenge; I fight the prejudices of the desire for power, the state, theology, science. I fight by striving in deed and thought, by self-denial, humility, sincerity and self-restraint in deed and word. I know that life is only love now and that for the spiritual life there is no suffering, no death, there is only what the soul desires, only the good. Thank you.
I forgot and forget everything, so the past disappears from me. Likewise, to an even greater extent, the future also disappears. How good it is! All the force of life, and this force has increased immeasurably, is transferred into the present. I am aware of this fact. What happiness!
Alas, worldly glory! How they confuse us! How important it is to get rid of it. Yes, the steps are: 1) for self, 2) for people, 3) for God in himself. From the first to the second is a small distance, from the second to the third, the huge.
If you want to join people, you won't join. If you live only for yourself, for your soul, without thinking about union, you will unite with the Chinese, with the Hindu, with the man of the 25th century.
- Why should we love people who don't suffer? Why take medicine? To love those who do not suffer because you like it, because in this lies the good.
God likes to be tête-à-tête! Two is company...
A short prayer. I want to live here through You.
Our life has only one goal: good, and this goal can be achieved. But to be touched our life must be in space and time. For good to exist for man, it does not have to be permanent, but attainable.
What amazing madness: to kill people for their own good!
How wonderful, I forgot all the past and freed myself from thoughts about the future. Yes, I begin from this life to get out of it, from its main condition, time.
Yes, when I was born, I died for that life, I lost consciousness of that life. I can't imagine, I can't think otherwise than in the conditions of the time that I was born, that I lost consciousness (I use the verbs in the past, everything is in the past, therefore in time). Yes, in this life I cannot think outside of time, but that does not prove that that life was in time, nor that the life after death (which I cannot conceive of outside of time) will be in time.
What an incomparable, astonishing joy: to love everyone, to feel this love in yourself, or rather to feel that you are love. How everything we think is bad from perversion is destroyed, how everyone, everyone, becomes close, mine... I shouldn't even write, it just destroys the feeling.
It is not enough to cross ourselves, to say that we want to live a Christian life. We have to learn a lot and with perseverance, to learn to live Christianly, at least to learn to welcome every person... with love and respect. And relations with property, with food, with entertainment, with speech... Yes, at 80 years old I'm just starting not to learn, but to understand that I have to learn. I'm starting to learn.
Yesterday and today I thought and it became absolutely clear that one of the essential, if not the main, knowledge from which the highest moral states flow is the consciousness of our spirituality, of divinity. Its consequence, as far as you perceive it, is that you cannot deceive, hide, fear, and above all you cannot not love anyone. As a rule of thumb, I use it like this: when I'm afraid of something, I'm angry, I want something, I don't like someone, especially I'm afraid of something, I remember who I am, I understand that I'm a free almighty being, and everything passes. It becomes clear that if you fear something, want to and can't, the obstacle is in you. And as soon as you understand that, you are free and all-powerful. Any dissatisfaction is only a deviation from the true path, you hit the walls, you go in a direction where you have nothing to look for. If you come to your senses, you come back and you are again with everyone, with Everything, with God. It's good.
I'm walking, I'm sitting on the bench, I'm looking at the bushes and the trees, and it seems to me that there are like two big orange handkerchiefs in the tree. But there are actually two leaves in the nearest bush. I relate them to the trees in the distance, and they look like two big handkerchiefs, they are orange because I relate their color to the distant object. And I said to myself: the whole world as we know it is only the fruit of our superficial senses, of sight and touch... and of our imagination. How to believe in reality, the only reality of the world as we imagine it? What does it look like for fleas? What does it look like to Sirius or to a being unknown to me, gifted with senses unknown to me? Space and time are constructed by me. What I call infinitesimally small beings, they are nothing smaller than me. And what I call a moment is not at all shorter than what I call eternity. Only the perceiver exists, but what is perceived does not exist.
On the sense of measure in art. The lack of sense of measure exposes the creator of art and therefore the illusion of the fact that I do not receive, but create is destroyed.
All the ways of man are commanded, except one, that of perfection, of increasing spiritual strength, of liberation from the body, and of nearness to God. This is the only wise act in life and it is done only in the present moment. The past did not exist, it is, like all relationships with the world, only material for perfection. But do not set the future as the goal of your activity (this is the most important thing that I understood now). The future, the image of what will be, need not exist for the man who lives wisely. There is only the present, in which I can do my own life's work. I don't know what will come of this. It is not given to me to know what will turn out for the world (and men imagine they can know this, and are guided by it; therein lies the chief cause of the evil life of men), I am not given to know what will turn out for my soul. So we don't have to become better or live a better life expecting a reward. And how good it is. You feel the true joy of good only if you get nothing in return.
I could almost believe that a life lived in goodness prepares the soul for a better life beyond the grave. But it's not like that. Nothing will be. Everything is. If you live in goodness, now is all the good you can want. And what freedom and power you have when all life is only in the present!
I am more and more aware, I realize the impossibility of living in the name of the future. You cannot organize the state, you cannot organize your family, you cannot organize YOU. Leave to Him the care of what will be, and you live in what is, striving to do what all men have always wanted, what they have taught you, the thing that you alone can do without weight, the thing which only you really want to do and which makes you truly happy: to become better and more loving. November 10
Today I prayed very well. Not my will, but Your will be done, not what I want, but what You want, and not as I want, but as You want. How good it is when you understand clearly, deeply. That's all. And the fact that everything that is external is not according to my will, but according to Your will, that is, everything is good, as it should be, and what is inside me, in me, I want it to be according to His will, that is, to be unceasing love.
I know from experience what a blessing and joy it is not to judge anyone in your words, but especially in your thoughts.
Plead guilty, and all the tangles will clear up immediately. It is always easy to plead guilty before God, before the best part of you. And let people think that you are guilty in front of them. But I, of course, am guilty of them.
Death is the cessation of the life force in space and time. Yes, that's right, the cessation of its manifestation only in space and time.
The movement of the body in space and time is an indispensable condition of its life. And this movement of the body in space and time is absurd, it contradicts reason and consciousness. The only wise and conscientious way out is to liberate the spirit from these conditions. Life is a gradual release, death is a complete one.