I forgot everything. I remember only one thing: what should I answer to him who condemns me because I am not poor like John the Baptist. The answer is that John is a saint, and I am a reserve officer, I did not lead a good life and only in my old age did I start thinking about God and getting closer to how I can serve Him.
Any prayer that asks is a sign of distrust in God. God is the ultimate reason, the ultimate love. Everything is for our good. What I don't like is only a sign of my inevitable lack of understanding. (That's how it felt last night when I wrote this, and how trite it sounds now.)
The work of art is authentic only when the person who receives it cannot imagine anything other than what he sees, hears or understands. When the one who receives it goes through a state similar to remembering, as if it had existed once before, and not once, I knew this long ago, only I did not know how to express myself, and here my self was shown to me. Especially when he feels that what he hears, sees, understands cannot be otherwise, but must be exactly as it is received. But if the receiver feels that what the artist shows him can be different, he sees the artist, he sees his pleasure, then it is not art.
There are double arts: music, theater, partly painting, in which the idea, the problem of art and the execution are separated. In music there is composition and performance, so in the theater, the composition of the play and its performance, in part also in painting, generally in the fine arts, conception and execution, and the illustration of books to the greatest extent. In these double arts false art is most often encountered: the idea is vain, while the performance of musicians, actors, or painters is wonderful. But most often it happens in theater and music.
There are two consciousnesses. One is that of the body and its various parts, which I can move or that hurt or eat me, and the other is the consciousness of the soul, of its various properties that I can direct on one thing or another or that suffers.
Prayer: I am glad that I know that You are and that I am, and especially that I know that You and I are one.
In old age, life passes more and more from the past and future to the present. And the more you transfer the life force, Wille zum Leben *, from past and future to the present, the freer and happier life is.
My prayer now is: Remember that you have nothing to do with people, that you are before God.
Yes, all or almost all of people's unhappiness comes from being preoccupied with others, not self. If people were concerned only with themselves, with their true good, everyone would be (or should be) satisfied with their lives, they would not make others suffer, nor would they suffer because of them.
I, my "I" do not exist, there is only my duty to Him.
I as a separate being am an illusion. I am one of the infinitely small organs of the infinitely great Whole, inaccessible to me. My role is to serve this whole, as each cell, each particle serves the body. It is the height of madness to imagine that I am a separate, independent being. I am only an organ. There is no "I". There is only the obligation and the opportunity to serve the Whole, having the consciousness of the joy of this service. Service is possible only if the organ is united with the Whole. Union with the whole is accomplished through love. So love is not the goal of the Whole (God is not love), but only the condition in which the organ, what is presented to me as "me", merges with the Whole. But the purpose of the Whole is not accessible to me, although I know that I serve it.
One of the main causes of the limitation of our intellectuals is the rush for modernity, the insistence to find out or at least have an idea about what has been written lately. "If I don't miss something." And in every field mountains of books are written. And all of them, judging by the ease with which they are mentioned in conversation, are accessible. Whatever you were talking about: "But have you read Celpanov, Kuhn, Breding *?" If you haven't read them, don't talk." And you must hurry to read them. But there are whole mountains. This haste and head-butting with trivial, tangled modernity excludes any possibility of serious, true, necessary knowledge. The error is so clear! We already have the result of the thinking of the greatest thinkers who have distinguished themselves in the course of thousands of years among billions and billions of people, and the result of their thinking has been sifted through the sieve of time. Everything that is mediocre has been thrown away, only what is original, deep, necessary has remained. The Vedas, Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao Zi, Confucius, Mencius, Christ, Mohammed, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus remained, and among the new ones: Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Schopenhauer and many others. People who run after modernity know nothing about all this, they fill their heads with chaff, garbage that will be sifted and nothing will remain.
There are decent people who lack the spiritual life and, therefore, the understanding of the spiritual life of others, people who would be in despair if they knew that they were causing physical suffering to others, especially those close to them, but without any rebuke of conscience they cause the worst suffering to the spiritual life of fellow men: they make them fight, they offend what is most sacred and precious to them.
There is physical renunciation and spiritual renunciation. The first is to give food to others when you are hungry too, to give them your money, your work... The second is to yield the glory of a good deed to another, to pass as a fool, a bad man to fulfill the demands of conscience, the law of the God of love .
There is no object more disagreeable to contemplation and observation than our corporeal personality. Yes, I don't exist, only my obligations exist.
The foundation of physics (as of other natural sciences) is one, the study of the laws of knowledge through the senses. The basic sense is tactile, sight, hearing, smell, taste are subordinate to it.
Do not judge by word or thought, and even more do not concern yourself with what people think. Because most often he who lives only with the care of people's opinion judges almost everyone he knows.
It's amazing how blind materialists are. I have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Good. The world is conditioned by this fundamental sense of touch, common to all men and all beings. Good. I, as a human, test the sense of sight, hearing..., but that's not all, can I ask myself what I feel now by sight, touch, smell or taste? In addition, they can test the sense itself in the consciousness of that sense, that is, they can transfer consciousness to one sense or another. Moreover, I think, may I ask myself, what am I thinking? Who is it that has the conscience and asks? It is not a sense and it is not an idea, it is the consciousness of life. But may I ask what is consciousness? And to have the conscience of conscience? Not. Therefore this is the basis of what we call life. And what is life? What we call life, although related to what presents itself to us as the body, cannot in any way be explained in bodily terms.
Nothing in this world can be said to exist. Everything that is material happens and passes. If there is anything, it is only what is immaterial.
I understood very clearly the overwhelming influence of "science," that is, the memorization of other people's ideas. Nothing atrophies, kills the ability to have your ideas and know how to direct them more than this accumulation of foreign ideas.
What a great help my new prayer brings me! Help me, Lord, to be with You. It helps me in general, but I rarely remember it when I'm talking to people. I never thought it could be so hard to remember while talking to people.
The essential thing I must do now is to die well. This is the essential thing for everyone, because to die well you have to live well. But at 25 you don't remember and understand it the same way you do at 81.
Vanity, the care for worldly glory, with which I have struggled and continue to struggle, is as strong as sexual desire in young beings.
Strange thing, I understood that both feelings are equally indispensable for the life of the human collective. Sexual desire is necessary for the perpetuation of the human race, the need for glory, for the continuation of the evolution of human thought. The pursuit of the first is the perpetuation of life, the pursuit of the second is the evolution, the perfection of life.
There is no God who can meet our demands, there is only one whose demands we must meet.
The secret is that there is something unchanging, related to space and time. This something is consciousness. (Compare with man in Buddhist belief). Consciousness is something still, united with what is in motion. Consciousness of consciousness is love.
Consciousness began with birth, so it seems to me. But it is not right: the union of immobile consciousness with a known object in motion, separated in space, began, but consciousness was outside time and therefore could not begin, just as evil does not begin when a mill is built, but the mill starts. And that is why the purpose of human life is to penetrate into consciousness, to reach as much depth as possible, to the extent that it is accessible to every human being.
The most refined spiritual delight for the soul, like culinary delicacies for the stomach, is the loving, kind, gentle, unadulterated attitude towards the one who offended you. It's even more refined if you manage to do him a favor without his knowledge.
Today I feel very close to God and I pray so well, honestly, with a short prayer: Help me to be with You even when I talk to people, and when I read letters, and when I remember people.
Forgiveness has no meaning for the Christian. The idea of forgiveness comes from the unchristian feeling and the idea of punishment, of revenge.