... Consciousness is the simultaneous feeling of the whole and of your being separate from the whole. The manifestation of this feeling is love towards everything and towards oneself. Love is the desire of good for the object of love and therefore love towards everything is the desire of good towards everything and brings understanding, peace, union. But self-love is the desire for good for oneself and it brings enmity, strife, division. Furthermore, love of all includes love of self, love of self excludes love of all. And that is why the love of everything defeats the love of self, and this victory is the life of each individual and the life of the whole world.
I received an electric pencil as a gift, which when you turn it lights up the place where you write and only what you write. This pencil is an amazing symbol of our life. Turn, free yourself from what hides the light in your soul, and you will live in the light that shows you what you need to see and know to act, only what you need to know to act.
When it happens to me now, in my old age, to remember the sexual act, I do not feel the revulsion I felt in my youth, but simply amazement, bewilderment that rational human beings could commit such acts.
God does not impart to man the knowledge of himself through human language, through the word, but through his divine language, which the pure heart of man fully understands without words.
God is love, that's right. We know them only because we love. But what is God in itself depends on an often superfluous, even harmful reasoning. If I am asked: but does God himself exist?, I must say and I will say: yes, according to all probabilities, only I do not understand anything about him, about this God himself. But God-love is something else. I certainly understand Him. He is everything to me, the explanation and purpose of my life.
Good thing that the full meaning of human activity is not accessible during life. If the man whose work will be of great importance in the distant future...had her lifetime consciousness, she would be dizzy. If Christ had known the importance of his works, he too would have believed that he was God.
One thing is more and more clear, you don't have to reason about the soul, God and the relationships between one and the other, but you can and must be aware of this relationship and fulfill what is asked of you. [...] It is important to live only through this relationship, keeping only Him in mind and ignoring, despising all other considerations. Keep this relationship in mind, and thus despise the rest of it, despise all that is worldly, and remember only one thing. I console myself with the thought that I am beginning not only to understand, but to feel it.
You say that the best life is the one lived for God and that we should live such a life, but you don't live like that... therefore what you say is false.
Ah, if I could get used to living before the judgment of God, to feel Him always judging me, just as we live before the judgment of men, concerned with it. Oh, that I could live every hour, every moment before Him! What happiness that would be.
People make the mistake of thinking they can force someone to love them. They can and must only refrain from the things that hinder love: conquer sin, understand temptations, clear up prejudices, and then they will have love, love for all, not only the consciousness of their life, but of the whole life.
To be an artist of the word, your soul must rise very high and fall very low. Then all the intermediate steps are known to you and you can live in your imagination, you can live the life of people on different steps.
I do not like, indeed I consider in bad taste, the poetic, artistic and dramatic treatment of religious, philosophical and religious problems, as in Goethe's Faust and others. About these matters we must either not speak at all, or speak with the greatest care and caution, without rhetoric, big words and, God forbid, rhyme.
The most important thing is that the thoughts are in the present. It is a solid preparation of the facts of life.
I do not wish to be a Christian, any more than I would advise anyone to be a Brahmin, Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, Mohammedan, etc. We must all find, each one in our faith, what is common to all of us and, giving up what is characteristic only to us, to preserve what we have in common.
In all religions there is falsehood and there is truth. Untruths differ, truth is one in all. If only from here you can find out what is true and what is false in each religion.
If you see life as something that belongs to you, your life will be constant restlessness, disappointment, bitterness, misery. If you see it as a condition to serve the Master, your life will be peace, contentment, joy and prosperity. Wherever I wake up, that's where the Master sent me. And whatever forces, great or small, spiritual and bodily, I feel in me, all these forces are the tools given by the Master to carry out the work entrusted to me, whether locomotive, ax or broom. But the work which the Master has commanded us to do we find as soon as we cease to be preoccupied with our own self-invented affairs. And there is only one work, the manifestation of love, the merging with all. And this can be done always, everywhere, under the conditions of any forces.
What is the "I" of which I have consciousness within me, separate from the Whole? What is that Whole, from which I am conscious of being separate, and what is the relation between 'my self and the Whole? That is, what is meant by the words doctrine of the soul, doctrine of God, and moral doctrine. Without these doctrines of the soul, of the Whole, of morality, there can be neither rational nor moral life, there can be no rational knowledge. And these doctrines are non-existent in our world. Hence our mad life, and the vain exercise of thought which we call true science.
I feel good in my soul. And that's only because I pray without ceasing with a new prayer and live by it. Help me to be only Your worker. I know that he can help me, as I can help the cells of my body to serve the whole organism, but I only express in prayer what I feel in my soul. And, amazingly, I'm 81 years old and just beginning to understand life and live.
As the axe, the saw, the spade must be sharpened to do the work for which they are intended, so human powers must be loving in order to do what they are meant to do. The laborer with an ax, saw, spade cannot finish the work of the household, and the man who does God's work cannot do it without love. Love is a tool given to man by God to serve Him. But just as the tool, the axe, the saw, the spade must be in good condition, sharpened to cut what it needs to cut, so love must be sharpened so that it can act not only on those close, good, but also on to strangers, evil, on all people, on everything that lives.
We are workers in the common, universal work of God. The ways by which this work is done are not accessible to us, just as workers cannot be accessible to all the tasks of the master (the example, of course, is far from complete, comparing the universal, eternal movement with the particular, temporary work). Any attempt by the worker to guess what the master's work consists of is a waste of effort. Making assumptions results in distraction and slows down the completion of the work. And thus the worker will be deprived of the greatest good, the consciousness of the certainty that he is doing what the master wants of him. This consciousness is given to man only in one way. If he deviates from the master's will, the worker deprives himself of good, if he fulfills it, he receives this good.
Help me, help me to have the consciousness without ceasing that I am Your worker, even a little, help me not to lose this peace and this joy.
Children are especially cute because they always live in the present. Even their dreams are the life lived in the present, they do not break the laws of life.
If he does not live religiously, but only for animal needs, the thinking man can become hideous because he does not even have the family and species instincts that the animal has. Hence he becomes selfish, enemy of all. A terrible enemy, because he is armed with those qualities of thought and speech which are indispensable and harmless only in the presence of religion. It is the same as putting a dagger, a gun, or gunpowder in the hands of a child. Such people are also children. We must strive to pity them, to love them. And it's very hard.
Remember that the condition of your body, your stomach, appetite or its appeasement, fatigue, illness, all these transform, not transform, but raise to the highest stage or descend to the lowest stage your state of mind, your attitude towards life . When you are in the ecstasy of joy, moved by the goodness of life, when you are sad and melancholy. When you love everyone, when you love no one or at least refrain from loving. Remember this, and do not attribute to that state of elation or depression the importance of your true state. And the true state of your "I" is the central, middle one, the one in which you enjoy the state of elevation, strive to maintain it, do not believe in the state of depression and try to overcome it. It is important that this center point always moves up, never down. Thank God it exists.
People who go astray are always more numerous than those who do not go astray at all or go astray only a little. That is why the essential and strongest force is always on the side of the former. In the conditions of the successes of civilization, of the communication channels, of the printing press, especially of the daily press, this power is dying.
The more certain we are that absolute perfection is attainable in this life, the harder and less we move to fulfill the greatest and most accessible perfection to us.
We always forget that the effort of the soul is not precious and important when you are talking with spiritually close people, but quite the opposite. Only one good, but great and true, was given to man: to have the consciousness that he is the manifestation of God (the spiritual principle). This good consists in the fact that the man with the consciousness that he is the manifestation of God has, through the union with God, everything he wants, does not encounter obstacles and knows without fail that his life has the meaning that he recognizes in it. But the man who has the consciousness that he is a personality does not have and can never have what he wants, meets obstacles everywhere and does not know the meaning of his life, even if even a life like his cannot be without meaning.
The movement of the life of one who has the consciousness that he is a spiritual principle is absolutely different from that of the man who believes himself to be a carnal person. For the one who considers himself a spiritual principle, the "I" is immobile, and the rest, including the body, rushes past him. He who has self-awareness stands on the shore, and evil along with everything that floats on the water flows past him. He who believes himself to be a person moves with the whole and is conscious of his movement only because some objects move more slowly and others remain still. He is floating on the river and he knows that he is floating only because some objects float slower than him, the banks remain still, and he knows that he is floating towards death, towards destruction.
I felt acutely what I had known for a long time: everyone has the consciousness of his "I" just as I have it. It seems very simple, but for me it was something absolutely new and remarkable, unusually important. If only I would always remember. If I remembered, it would be the end of all judgment, of all evil deed.
It is important, especially because, although you are not aware of this fact, you vividly imagine another "I" as your own, and then you feel that any other "I", the most radical "I", is not only a just like yours, but it's the same.