To love God is to love His manifestation. The consciousness of His manifestation is clearest (above all) in me. But I can't help but see His manifestation everywhere: in the sky, on the earth, in the stone, in the sand, in the stars. The difference between these manifestations is only that some are closer to me (not in place, but in the nature of the manifestation), and others are more distant. The closer they are to me, the more I can and must love them. The most distant from me are the earth, the stone, the sand, the sky, the planets. It's natural to love them too, but the tree, the plant are closer to me, And I love them more, I love animals even more, and most of all the one closest to me, man. But even more, more than anything in the world, I cannot but love myself, my self, but not the corporeal, miserable self, which must be as far from me as any animal, even as stone or sand , but the spiritual self, which if I love I reach love itself, love towards everything. Bodily selfishness is repulsive, but there is nothing higher than spiritual selfishness, the transference of your consciousness into the spiritual, eternal, universal self. This transfer is done through love and brings with it a good that makes you want nothing else. How can we not thank the One who gave us this good?!
Why do I not at all accept the presence of life in rock, sand, but do not reject the possibility of life in the stars? Probably because I know the stone through all my senses, and I do not find life in it, but I know the stars only through the sense of sight, and therefore I accept the possibility of life. But this does not prove that there is no life in the stone, and there may be in the stars, but only that my five external senses are insufficient to penetrate the life of the stone.
One of the main mistakes that prevents the fulfillment of the law of love is the idea that in order to live in accordance with the teaching of Love, it is necessary for each person in his life to fully fulfill the law of love. Fulfillment is not necessary, full fulfillment is impossible, if it were fulfilled there would be no more life, only the approach to fulfillment is necessary. This closeness represents life and its good.
Usually, for people the teaching is the full fulfillment of the law of love, and seeing the impossibility of this fulfillment for each individual and for all humanity at the moment, solve the problem by accepting that the teaching is wonderful and, at the same time, unrealizable. Some this leads to the denial of any religion, others to a perversion of Christianity in which the impossibility of fully fulfilling the teaching is corrected by grace, faith in salvation and mysteries. This mistake leads people away from the clear understanding of life that comes from the teaching of love, according to which the goal of life is this approach to perfection. The approach must necessarily be gradual, it starts with reaching the first steps of perfection, then the next ones, etc.
As the Chinese sage says, to climb the mountain you have to start at its foot. This gradation is the main difficulty in putting into practice the teaching of love. You cannot strive to be charitable if you are agonizing and keeping possessions useless to life. You cannot be humble if you consider yourself a boss, an aristocrat, an important worldly person or a high church figure. You can't be a lover of people if you're in the military, if you're a soldier.
True, I now have the painful consciousness of pride because the other temptations have weakened, but bracketing my old age, pride remains one of the most damaging temptations. It is harmful especially because it replaces religious feeling or conscience. And that is why it is perhaps the worst, the most harmful of temptations. For others, it is dangerous, repulsive for the lecherous, the miser, the angry, the liar, but for me the worst is the proud man, the one who does everything for the sake of people's opinion. For the other temptations there is a limit, for the latter there was none. Only faith frees man from slavery to the opinions of men.
In education, the most important thing is to teach children (and even adults) to act independently of people's opinions.
Celebration is a bad sign for me. The celebration of Mecinikov * gave me something to think about. We're both obviously stupid people if we've been such a crowd pleaser. I am only consoled by the fact that it is not the envious people who criticize me, but the revolutionaries, and the church leaders, the clergy.
There are two gross and harmful prejudices: first, that God who made the world and man gave him a concrete law, expressed in words; second, that the world known through our senses is in reality as it is presented to us, and our life, i.e. the law of our life, is defined by our relations with this world. The first prejudice is widespread among the masses, but gross as it may be, it is less gross and less harmful than the prejudice of the educated minority regarding the organization of life, a prejudice which arises from the attitude towards the world known by the senses of those who do not recognize that their own view of to the world it is a belief, when in fact it is only a belief, even a ridiculous one.
"What is the meaning of life? What is good and what is bad? What is God? What is spirit, what is matter?" etc. The student, the young man asks all these questions imagining that only he is so clever that he can ask them and stand out... But he, poor him, is so ignorant and incurably stupid, confident, that he does not know, nor does it occur to him, that these questions have been put to him by the most enlightened minds in the world, and have received answers of which he has no idea. This ignorance is very widespread and it's the sign of stupidity.
Time is only that form in which I have the consciousness of my life, in which I have the joy of making it. My whole life already exists for the source of life, for God. Through me and an infinity of other beings God lives and gives us the joy and good of life to me and to all these beings. What we call freedom of the will, and what freedom really is, is the acceptance or non-acceptance of God in me, so that He can make life through me and live. Not accepting Him in me deprives me of the good of life, but it cannot prevent Him from living, for He lives in an infinity of beings, in a way incomprehensible to me. Furthermore, he also lives in beings who do not consciously accept him within themselves. And, living in them, he achieves his goals. The important thing is that man, each of us, possessing the unconscious good of life, can have part of the greatest conscious good, can be God's tool, uniting directly with Him and making His life and at the same time our life. The rain waters the plains, the forests, the steppes and the grains that already grow there, the trees, the grass receive through the moisture the joy of growth, flowering, fruiting, but the moisture, the rain also acts on the desert land, softening it, preparing it to receive the seeds and their sprouting . The same with people, those who consciously participate in the divine life and those who do not have the consciousness of God, but participate, without knowing it, in His life.
When we talk to people we should not think about our desires, but about their desires. But not to their judgment about us, but to the way our relationship with them will be judged.
I had to make an effort to remember how I behaved with an olog. And that's because I behaved properly, that is, well. Good deeds cannot and must not make us happy. The joy, the good is not in the deeds, but in the peace, in the freedom they bring us.
Cruelty is not peculiar to man and is explained only by the narrowness of the goal, the concentration of life's efforts on the goal. The narrower the goal, the more likely the occurrence of cruelty. Love aims at the good of others and is therefore incompatible with cruelty.
Morning prayer. I believe that God lives in me and in every person, and therefore I want to love and glorify him in myself and in others, and for this to do nothing against Him. Not to upset, not to insult, not to judge anyone, to be lenient with everyone, to do to others only what I want to be done to me, to love everyone. Evening prayer. I believe that God is in me and in all people, and therefore I do not want to do anything against Him, but here I have done both. To think about why I did what I did, so as not to do it again.
The knowledge of God can be threefold: a) through faith, b) through reason and c) through love. I can believe that God is what I have been told about Him. I can arrive by reasoning at the recognition of the beginning of all that is, at the existence of something indestructible outside of time and space, at the necessity of accepting either boundedness or unboundedness, and here lies the mark of unreality. I don't express myself well, I want to say that everything that is corporeal, occupies a limited space in infinite space and is produced in infinite time in both directions, all this does not exist in reality. There is that which is outside of time and space. And the essence is only what we call God. We can come to accept the existence of God by having the consciousness of something outside of space and time, that is knowing Him through union with Him expressed in love.
About the rotten apple and generally about any seed. I don't know if I will be able to express myself. get the idea: My body is destroying itself. This is how the body of a rotten apple is destroyed. The apple, the seed coat, rots, the seed remains which produces other apples and other apples. Even clearer is the case of seeds that do not have a body shell, such as cereals. Is it possible that the only purpose of the apple is to reproduce its kind? Is it possible for man to have the same purpose? But there is already something else in the apple besides the reproductive seed, the covering that has its purpose. Obviously, man must also have another purpose besides reproduction. Moreover, that other purpose is the true, the main purpose. Reproduction is the most insignificant and it is not even a purpose, because repeating the same thing does not make sense. What is the purpose of this?
I remembered about my villains clear and pregnant... And I dare to judge people. It felt so good to realize my villainy.
I know God because I know my love for people and for all living things. I know that I live only because I love myself and I love everything that lives.
I do not love people and I do not love my soul because I know God and know His will, but I know God and I know His will because I love people and I love my soul.
I know God because I know my soul. And I know my soul because I love my soul, and not only my soul, but also the souls of other people, the soul of the whole world.
Cruelty and injustice provoke rebellion only in the beginning. Then you get rid of it. And when you are born and live in them, like now, when they have invaded the earth, you can't even see them anymore.
Man knows he will die, and he does die every day. It would seem that you come to know this in order to understand (what no one understands) that the meaning of life cannot but be independent of the ephemerality of existence. The meaning of life is the fulfillment in this world of the will of the one who sent you or of what gives meaning to every moment of life, and the meaning is given by only one thing: fulfillment, striving towards the fulfillment of the only desire in which you can be free, moral perfection .
Short prayer. I know that if I am in love I am with You. And if I am with You, all is well. So I will always love everyone with deed, word and thought. (I learned it by heart.)
(Very important) Through reason we know God, we know love. Until we know love, reason seems to be everything, God (God is the word).
Last night I had a shameful, crazy thought, that it is amazing that I, my poor, pitiful, scoundrel self, was chosen by God to be His manifestation, an infinitesimal particle , lowly, and yet His.
The man looted the whole village, put all the loot in a pile and is guarding it. A naked man comes and steals a shirt. The thief catches him and punishes him according to the law that he also established. Isn't that what all the rich, and especially the landowners, do to the poor? Loot endlessly millions from thousands of people. They took the fodder of the cows and horses from them, and the one judged and condemned is not the robber, but the man who took the necessary things from the land that belongs to him with proper documents. Before laws are made forbidding the stealing of yokes, timber, hay, laws must be made forbidding the plundering of the most lawful property of the people, the land.
Yes, I read Engels's Marx yesterday... I woke up today with a clear, simple, easy-to-understand denial of materialism. In the waking state it was no longer as clear as in the dream, but something still remained. Namely, that materialists must accept that the Creator made an error in explaining why matter arranged itself in such a way as to form separate beings, of which I am the first, and with such attributes as the senses and the mind. For the non-materialist it is clear that everything I call the material world is the product of my "I". For him the main secret is the separation of me and beings.
Strange as it may seem, materialists must accept the Creator in order to answer the question of why matter exists, whence arose the material world with its transformations. Without the recognition of the basis of all that is, of consciousness and matter in space and time as the only possibility to understand the world around us, there is no other explanation for the existence of matter than God the Creator. Materialists pride themselves on their atheism, but all their teaching implies *, includes the concept of God the Creator. Les extremes se touchent **. Only the recognition of the ground of all that is, of consciousness, does not need the concept of God the Creator.
Two smart and good people when they are messed up become stupid and bad when they meet. What can come out good when 20, 100, 1000 come together, when they all come together?