To have the consciousness that a foreign "I" is yours is for the good of man, because, recognizing that the foreign "I" is the same as your own, you can do good not only to your "I" but also to everyone else.
Love is something other than recognizing other "selves" as your own.
The teaching in which I live is not anarchism, but the fulfillment of the eternal law that refuses violence and participation in violence. Will the next be his anarchism, on the contrary, slavery under the Japanese or German yoke? I don't know and I don't want to know.
Comet * will engulf the earth and destroy the world, destroy all my material traces and traces of any other activity. So be it. This only shows that any material activity with hypothetical material consequences is absurd. Spiritual activity is the only intelligent activity oriented towards the fulfillment of the desire placed in us, towards the fulfillment of the law. What will be the consequences of this activity I do not know, nor can I assume, because all consequences are temporal, and spiritual activity is timeless, but I know that it is the only intelligent activity.
Apart from the Our Father, the prayers for each day of the week and the Reading Circle * I need one more prayer that corresponds to my spiritual need. My last four prayers were, in order: 1) You who are in me, help me. 2) Help me to be with You. 3) Help me to be aware that I am only Your worker. 4) Every time I talk to a man, help me to see myself in him.
Man is given only one mission: to increase in spirit. Thinking about the consequences is harmful to the fulfillment of the calling and the unknown thing we are doing, even the consequences we can see. "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" *. Our condition may be compared to that of his horse, generally to that of any harnessed animal. It is natural for the animal to move, to advance. Likewise for man, in his spiritual perfection. The animal is harnessed and wants it, doesn't want it, if it moves, then what is connected with it moves, although it doesn't know what and how. In the same way, man, through his spiritual growth, draws something else after him. (He sees something. Sometimes he sees how his evolution contributes to the evolution of others.) That is why the comet is not to be feared. Everything done in the spiritual world remains indestructible when material objects are destroyed.
I remembered so vividly that at 81 years old I have the same consciousness of "I" as at 5 or 6 years old. Consciousness is immobile. That is why there is that movement we call time. If time passes, there must be something that stands still. The consciousness of my "I" stands still. I would like to say the same about matter and space. If there is something in space, then there must also be something immaterial, nonspatial. I don't yet know to what extent I can make that last statement.
Space and matter, time and motion, like number are concepts that we have no right to attribute to phenomena outside of time and space such as soul, God... We cannot say of God that He is one or three (number) , or about the soul that will be or is "in the other world". All these concepts are spatial or temporal and therefore, in relation to something outside of time and space, they have no meaning. We are talking about the life of the soul after death. But if the soul will live after death, then it had to live before life. A one-sided eternity is absurd.
If we are to seriously meditate on our life and the life of the whole world, we cannot fail to recognize that there is SOMETHING that cannot be known in any way, and we cannot fail to recognize that it is a special thing, because this something is one and the same and in my soul, and in myself. (It seemed like a novel idea, but what came out sounds boring.)
In any kind of occupation it is important to stop in front of what you don't know, and not to think you know what you don't know. But the most important thing is curbing false knowledge in everything related to faith, religion. All the madness of religious prejudice comes from this unrestrainedness.
How important it is to remember that we are not asked for perfection, but as close to it in everything (as in my current work), as much as you can. Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes *. This is what we must keep in mind.
Falling asleep, I lose consciousness of my waking self. Dying, I lose the consciousness of the one who lives this life as himself. But just as, when I fall asleep, the one who has consciousness is not destroyed, so it is when I die. What this thing is that has consciousness I do not know and have no way of knowing. It occurs to me: well, my soul is the one with consciousness, it does not die, but somewhere, someday it will manifest again (all are temporal and spatial concepts). But, without the memory of the previous "me", I am no longer me. My consciousness was destroyed with death. Whatever it is after the death of the "I", of the principle that makes up my "I", I am no longer, will not be, and cannot be. But if so, the question arises: what is this "I" of mine that suddenly appeared at birth? What is this "I"? Why is this "I" me? And how can this "I", which has appeared vaguely out of time, not disappear just as strangely out of time. Okay, I'm going to die. But why will no life after my death be my life? There is something here, but I can't clear it and express it.
I thought again about my memory loss. I forgot and am forgetting everything that made me Lev Nikolaevich. What's left? There remains something very important, the most important. Something that manifested at birth in this world, but was not, will not be, but is. And this life of mine is only mine, no doubt mine, but why shouldn't any other life also be mine? I am already aware of this fact through love. It's unclear, but I understand *.
People have elevated malice, the spirit of revenge to the rank of a legitimate feeling, of justice, and their own wickedness attributes it to God. How ridiculous!
I feel bad living because life is bad. Life is bad because we humans live bad. If we humans lived well, life would be good, and I wouldn't live badly. I am just a man among men. And even if I can't force everyone to live well, I can do it for myself, and so I can make people's lives and mine at least a little better. The confirmation of the correctness of this reasoning is that, if everyone adopted it, then for me and for the rest of the people, life would be good.
... Self-denial frees us from sins, humility frees us from temptations, faith frees our minds from prejudices, belief in the truth from false doctrines.
I do not exist, only what is in me exists.
Some think for themselves, then, when it seems to them that their ideas are new and important, they communicate them to their fellows, others think in order to communicate their ideas to their fellows, and after communicating them, especially if people praise them, they take these ideas as truth.
I understand more and more clearly that dreaming and waking, which seemed to me similar to life and death, are more than similar. Just as, waking up, I come to have a clearer, more real consciousness, through what was shown to me in my sleep, the same happens in the case of birth. And just as I remember only a little of what was (?) before birth, so in the waking state I rarely remember what was shown to me in a dream. Just as by falling asleep each day I lose touch with consciousness, so does dying. (The analogy stops at the point where we observe that in sleep we have a lower consciousness, which cannot be true in the case of death.) I lose contact with consciousness, and this loss is not only not a bad thing, but even desirable. Because this loss is rest and preparation for a better life.
Suppose we knew nothing of the lives of men in our Christian world, and were told that 99% lead a life of toil and need, while 1% live in luxury and luxury. If we were to ask what the latter's religion, science, and art are like, I think the answer can only be one: their religion, science, and art are perverted and evil.
To understand any material object, no matter what, we need to know its origin, the cause of its appearance and its relation to other objects. But the origin and cause of the appearance of any material object is lost in infinite time. Likewise, its relation to other objects is difficult to determine, because all objects decompose into infinitely small objects and expand to infinitely large objects. Therefore, we can know neither the origin nor the cause of the appearance of objects, nor their relation to other objects.
The time of existence, not only of my 80-year-old body, but also of our planet, the earth, although it is billions of years, is only an infinitesimal moment of infinite time. That is why the causes of my origin, of the earth and of everything that exists in the world can neither be understood nor known to us. Likewise, the relationship with matter, in space, of my body, the earth and everything you want, is not, if we are talking about the infinite world again, not even a grain of sand, it is nothing. It is not the boundlessness of time and matter in space that is amazing, but what is amazing, I would say, is the infinite stupidity of people who think that material phenomena are easy to understand, who are content to explain life without feeling the need to recognize a spiritual component.
God is the Creator, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, God Jupiter, God is Christ. All these are nonsense that we reject, we cannot but reject these absurd representations. And we do not think that the notion of God, the spiritual principle of all that exists, is such a great and indispensable notion, that we could not have arrived at with the mind, if it had not been revealed to people gradually through the thinking of the most great sages of the world. This is a giant leap for mankind, and we imagine that with radio, airplanes, electricity, we can do without it. Yes, we can, but only as animals, not as humans, as we already live in our New Yorks, Londons and Pariss with 30-storey blocks of flats.
What is the binder that holds my tongue, my heel, my lungs together to make up my body? It is not the degree of closeness: the excrement is closer to me than the skin, and they do not belong to me, while the skin, the ear, the heel, the cells of the body are mine. Their binder is my conscience. Can the universes be connected through consciousness? Perhaps Earth, Mars, the Sun, and many others are united by consciousness, even though to me, with my limited imagination of time and space, it does not seem to me that they can be part of a whole.
I forgot all about dessert. How could it be otherwise, when the inner work of self-judgment takes place in me without ceasing, an effort that dominates all my spiritual forces.
Faith? What is faith? Faith is that spiritual construction on which the whole human life is based, it is what gives man a point of support and therefore the possibility to move. It is the support of the corporeal being. A hair is enough for an insect, a flower, a leaf for a bee, a branch for a bird, a stump for a squirrel, a tree for a bear. So it is with man's faith. For one it is the icon, for another the mysteries, for the third the prophet, for the fourth the personal God, for the fifth... It all depends on the weight of the demands of his heart and mind.
The meaning of life is not measured by time, but by its depth.
You think of people, and God thinks of you.
Pleasure is for the body, good is for the soul. Pleasure and goodness seldom meet.
Matter and space, time and motion separate me and every other living being from God the Whole. How then to imagine a personal God, i.e. limited, located in space and time?