When I have no self-consciousness I live an animal life; when I have self-awareness and do what I decide with my soul, I live a human life; but when I am aware of the life of other creatures, loving them, I live a divine life.
Yes, here is a good definition of love: Être un homme n'est rien ; être homme est quelque chose; être l'homme voila ce que m'attire * - Amiel.
In addition to other positive consequences, the most beneficial result of people's judgment, gossip, insults is that any judgments, insults and especially gossip take you away from the care of human judgment and, without your permission, bring you closer to the care of the judgment of your conscience, the care God's judgments.
No kind of riots, revolts, unions bring even a thousandth of what abstinence from two things, drinking vodka and enlisting in the army can bring.
You talk to a man about simple, clear things, it would even seem necessary and indispensable for everyone, and he just waits for you to finish. And when you're done, respond with cunning, very clever reasoning related to the issue at hand. You wonder, what will this be? He is a man interested in all knowledge and capable of understanding, knows mathematics, solves chess problems wonderfully, and suddenly shows such a lack of understanding. Why? Because he feels that your idea destroys his position, and he values his position more than the truth of the idea. That's why he doesn't understand, he doesn't want to understand what you say. Here is the explanation of all the absurd reasonings, recognized by the sciences that reign today. All this because people fall into two categories: for some the idea leads life, for others the opposite. Herein lies the key to explaining the madness of the world.
All evil comes from the fact that, by perverting the idea, people force it to serve their advantage.
Strange as it may seem, the firmest, most inflexible beliefs are the shallowest. Deep convictions are always mobile.
People do not understand the truth and invent strange sophistry to refute it or to defend their position, or not to accept that all their work has been a vain and harmful waste of time.
Although I clearly understand God, not the known God, but whose consciousness I can have, I often wish I had a personal God to whom I could pray. It's a weakness, a habit and at the same time a natural desire to communicate with God as I communicate with people, although that's not what it's about. It's a possible, natural desire. To fulfill it we must believe that He is exactly as I would like Him to be, that is, a personal being, to whom I could address not necessarily internally, as actually happens, but through external communication, as a separate being.
As long as you live without asking who it is that lives in you, you live like an animal. But as soon as you ask yourself and you have found in yourself the one through whom you live, you have known the one who lives in Everything, you have also known love, you have also known God.
It is good and necessary to remember the nothingness of our "I", nothingness in the true sense, i.e. the fact that the bodily "I" is absolutely nothing, a / ∞, i.e. zero. Only the spiritual "I" is something, the organ of something. Today, walking in the morning, I understood with all clarity this nothingness, nothingness in space too...infinitely small hum in the middle of an infinitely large world, and in time - the whole life of eighty years is a moment that means something only when you live in the present moment.
It is said: think not of death, and death will not exist. In fact it is just the opposite, remember death incessantly and you will have the life for which there is no death.
I don't like talking to people who, by listening to you, imply that they know what you're going to say and agree in advance. Please, we understand each other and that's it. My peasants almost always listen and that's what I say.
Our life is like a night's dream in which we forget everything that was before the dream.
Very important and ancient thing since the world, but it's the first time I understand it: for life to be lived in joy (and it should be), it is needed (truly, not with words, but with deeds) as the goal that you are looking for it not to be your person, Lev, but the deeds of love, and all the deeds of love are always outside of me, in others. For the first time I understood that it is possible. I will learn.
Our whole life, all the points of interest of our life are in objects that are found at a certain time in certain states. The objects themselves are different by the places they occupy in space, and space is infinite and therefore objects are equal, that is, they represent nothing in relation to the infinity of space, a / ∞. Likewise with the temporal states of objects: they are nothing compared to the infinity of time. Therefore, what we mean by infinity and what we call infinity is only an indication that everything material and personal in our life is illusory, unreal.
People's selfishness irritates you, upsets you. But think only, and you will see that they are to be pitied. They are deprived of the greatest good, which is incomparable to nothing, the good of the self-consciousness of that which is always free, always joyful, always outside time and the constraints of matter.
And now the most important thing (so it seems to me). I have the consciousness that I am the All and at the same time I am separate from the All. And my life (and that of all beings) is the destruction of the barriers that separate us. The mystery of my life, of every man, indeed of every being, is the recognition of our separation from what is actually the All.
In order for man (and any being) to be aware of his separation from All, he must be aware of himself in moving matter. Matter without motion is nothing, and so is motion without matter. Matter can be conceived only in infinite space, and motion only in infinite time. The infinity of one and the other shows that they are illusory, imagined. Separation of beings is one of the manifestations. Of what? Why? We are not given to know. Man knows only that he is All And at the same time a separate being. He knows that that love, which he feels for himself, and then for the All, is the only basis of the life separated from the All.
Inaction (according to Lao Zi) is more important than action, because action is most of the time beyond our power, but inaction is always within our reach. All clear commandments, don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't commit adultery, are always negative. The positive commandments can only refer to spiritual activity, which is always free: love, wish for another what you wish for yourself... Lao Zi's inaction stems from his belief (from the metaphysical basis, to use a nasty word) , from the belief that Tao is both in heaven and in man, or that God is independent and in man. Lao Zi's teaching is not to act, that is, not to do what man wants of you, but to let the Tao-God who lives in you do through you what He wants.
And in moments of weakness and moments of strength I like to say: Help me, God... And I think no one hears me, but I say it anyway. And it occurred to me: if the attitude of the beginning of all towards me is like my attitude towards the parts of my body, so that I can by the power of will be conscious of one part or another of my body, why not I imagine that just as I can, if I want, insert myself, my consciousness, into my hand, my foot, my finger, so also the One from whom I ask for help can, if he wants, insert Himself, His consciousness , in His particle, in me, in my soul imprisoned in the body? (All this is a fantasy, but a pleasant one.) If so, just as the suffering of one part of my body awakens the consciousness of that part, so my suffering, of my whole being, awakens in God the consciousness of my "I." How can you not wish for suffering?
I feel a joy And I feel like crying. I feel like throwing up In the arms of eternity. I feel a joyful tenderness. At night I dreamed... and debauchery, and a talk with Lao Zi, and the man's attitude towards inaction, rather towards the One who does not act, was so clear. Man only acts out of weakness. Only by not acting does one merge with the Tao, the non-doing beginning. Do not perform, but live with the Tao. At night everything was absolutely clear and full of joy.
I thought about worldly glory. In this need for people to have a good opinion of you, to love you, there is something irresistible and legitimate. And it occurred to me: the more false, the more guilty is the desire for praise and love of people during life, the better, more legitimate is the desire to continue your life in the souls of other people after death. In this desire there was no indulgence for the cult of personality, nothing out of the ordinary. It is only the desire to participate in the general, universal, spiritual life, in the work of God, disinterested, impersonal. It seems right.
Only what is spiritual in our life really exists. Thus, the new consciousness of the spiritual truth is an accomplished fact, even if this consciousness has not acquired or will never acquire (because of death, for example) the translation into fact. The spirit is outside of space and time, therefore consciousness, if it is really spiritual, sincere, then it has already been accomplished at least in intention.
The secret of our life, its essence, lies in the transference of self-consciousness as a separate being to self-consciousness as the Whole, indivisible, unique, free, almighty being, God. Life seems to us a gradual release of the divine consciousness within us. Life is this, only this. Those who still believe in the old concept of God can say that God gave people the good of knowing Him within themselves. But that's an arbitrary assumption. There is and it is only right that man's life is liberation in itself (of the immaterial, immovable, nonspatial and timeless principle) from the state of limitation and its ineluctable conditions. The boundary conditions are matter in space and motion in time.
I am everything and nothing. I am everything when I have the consciousness that I am a spiritual being, inseparable from the whole being, And I manifest this consciousness through love towards the whole of which I have consciousness, that is, towards everything that I accept to be alive. I am nothing when I have the consciousness of being corporeal, separate from the whole being, and I manifest my consciousness of love only towards my corporeal "I", separate from everything.
Once upon a time there was a grain of wheat that had lain thousands of years in Egyptian tombs And knew nothing of itself. For himself, for the grain of wheat, it was as if he did not exist. The scholars dug up the graves and, finding the grains of wheat in them, made the experience of taking some, covered them with earth and watered them periodically. and here is how the grain of wheat, which existed but knew nothing about itself, suddenly found out about itself that it exists and that it is at the same time a grain and a sprout of wheat.
Whatever you imagine in space and time is a / ∞, meaning nothing. Therefore there is, there really is only that which is outside of space and time, my spiritual consciousness, one with the consciousness of all men, one and indivisible, which can be known by me in the present moment outside of space and time.
Life is the transfer of consciousness from spatial and temporal to nonspatial and timeless. I wrote it like this, but it's incorrect: the transfer is already something temporal. Better said: ... is liberation from temporal and spatial.
How harmful it is to make plans. As an obstacle arises in the way of their fulfillment, so does irritation.