Self-forgetfulness is also necessary in religious doctrines; you have to forget everything that is dear to you, familiar, in order to agree with other doctrines.
Why do we rush forward, always forward? Because life is discovery.
The emancipation of the people, the constitution, the various freedoms, the greatness of the state, patriotism, the best social order, they are all just a cover under which envy, love of power, ambition, pride, greed, despair are hidden. The consequences of these good intentions are the fight against everyone, hatred instead of love and a growing decay of morals.
Life presents itself to us as movement. For motion to exist we must have a fixed point relative to which the motion occurs. The consciousness of our spirituality is such a point. What appears to us as movement is the rising of the waves that cover the spirit that is within us.
Our life appears to us as movement, beginning with birth and ending with death. And we want to judge all life through the lens of our passing life, giving it movement, beginning and end. We speak of the making of the world or its conception, of the end of the world and of the dynamics of life in the world, while these terms are proper only to our limited part of life, they cannot by any means be proper to the whole life of the world.
One of the most disastrous mistakes of those who want to improve their lives is the opinion that there is an order, a social arrangement in which people can be better off than in any other. The chronic struggle of the parties, the social layers that form the appearance of order, all these are only delusions that bring with them a new evil because they distract people from the only concern that would lead to a better social order: the work of people on themselves.
The media is increasingly replacing personal communication between people. This substitution especially discourages loving communication between people. As great as the advantages of mass media are, this disadvantage almost tips the balance to the opposite side.
The religious-metaphysical consciousness has four steps: 1) I know I exist. 2) I know there are other people and other beings. 3) I know that the beginning, the basis of the existence of all people, animals and everything that exists is the same in them as in me. 4) I yearn to unite the ground of my life with the life of other beings through love.
I have no way of knowing anything directly about what it was like when I was gone, I have no way of knowing what my life was like in my mother's womb and in my early childhood, I know nothing directly of what happened to me during sleep or self-forgetfulness. All this wouldn't exist if it weren't for people like me, from whom I learn what they knew about the life unknown to me about what precedes it. All this is the result of my communication with other people, who through their stories give me an image of what happened to me and up to me. These testimonies are necessary only for the external chaining of phenomena, but in themselves they are not part of my life, they are not necessary for me, and they are often inaccurate, but their accuracy or inaccuracy is of no importance to me. What matters to me, and constitutes my true life, is all that I have known directly and that has been revealed to my consciousness through the thoughts of conscious beings who have conversed with me in this life, or who lived thousands of years ago and expressed in words that hid murky in my consciousness and, receiving the form of the expression, became part of it. Thus the thoughts of Buddha, Kant, Christ, Amiel and others are part of my life, while a large part of my youthful life and the lives of the people who live with me and talk to me day by day are completely given oblivion.
In relation to the free-arbitrary, to answer the question of whether man is free, we must first say that man has two consciousnesses, the corporeal and the spiritual (that is, man feels when he is spiritual, when he is corporeal). As for bodily consciousness, there can be no question of freedom here either, since bodily life takes place in the conditions of space and time (and there is no present). There can be no question of freedom with regard to spiritual consciousness either, since there is nothing so strong that it can be constrained, it being all-powerful. but this consciousness manifested itself only in that which did not exist for bodily consciousness, at present. Therefore, the answer to the question regarding free will is: man is not free in his bodily consciousness and he is free in his spiritual one. To the question: is man free to pass from one state of consciousness to another?, the answer is: life exists only in spiritual consciousness.
Why am I a separate manifestation of God? To experience the benefits of self-awareness and communication with the whole world.
Dogmatism is necessary and does not harm children.
It's increasingly clear to me the madness and especially the guilt, the ugliness of political activity, the hypocrisy of this activity.
Strange thing, unheard of by me, I care the cause of the lack of love of sons for fathers (of course, in non-Christian families) is envy and rivalry between them.
The present is that moment outside of time that unites the past with the future. In this present I can appeal to consciousness so that the moment becomes real. But the past and the future are illusions.
I am one, I was and I will be, I am an apparition of a moment in time.
I, the spirit, do not want to be in the body; therefore I am not in the body by my own will, but by a superior will.
I feel the advantages of old age and sickness that free me from concern for people's opinions. It also helps that now they insult me more than they praise me.
Man is free only in the area of consciousness. Consciousness is possible, however, only in the present moment.
I feel eternal, the only one truly existing, and I too, when I think of myself, see myself as nothing, an infinitesimal particle of something infinitely large. Which is true, the first or the second statement? If it is the second, then the consciousness of the first, the eternal "I" is deceptive. But this is not a little because without this delusion (the first "I") there is no life, there is nothing, and above all there is no second "I". But if the first statement is true, then it means that all bodily life is delusion. But even that is not possible, because without bodily life I would not have been able to make these reasonings. And therefore there was both: I am the spiritual, non-spatial, timeless being, in corporeal, spatial and temporal conditions.
Mercy is like the man who drains a field by digging ditches, and then waters it only where it is too dry. All that the people have is taken from them, even the ability to feed themselves by their labor, and then efforts are made to support only the poorest by giving them a portion of what has been taken from them.
It's not just me, L.N. the one in flesh and bones, from birth to death, but I, even bodily, am the bodily manifestation of all my ancestors without end, and the link between them and my descendants, also without end: I am the shining for a moment of something.
The tradition of a nation is the raw manifestation of the consciousness of its unity.
Love does not express well the consciousness of human unity. [...] Pesemne love is only the consequence of this consciousness, and the consciousness of unity lies deeper.
Man's life is always a transition from animal consciousness to spiritual consciousness. But what kind of passage is that, when time does not exist? The transition doesn't even exist in fact, and to me both the bodily and the spiritual consciousness are accessible to me only in time, in other words: in the form of time. You say that time is only form, that time does not exist. But what does it mean that before you did not exist, and now you are, you live in the world and you will die? It means that I cannot simultaneously understand existence and non-existence in this world. So I am and I am not of this world.
How tormented must be those who have a lot of money. So many ask them, how can they figure out who to give to? The only solution is to give everything.
It would be good to forget about myself, but I can't, and that's why I have to put the sign of equality: treat others as you would like them to treat you.
If in a dispute you notice that the man defends his external condition, stop the discussion immediately.
Young people have a hard time neglecting their bodies. But they don't have to do everything at once. First to stop doing bad things, then to do good things, then to give oneself.
That true life is outside of time is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that it exists only in the present, which is always timeless.