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For Every Day
Leo Tolstoy
1
Table
of
Contents
Tolstoy’s
Final
Book
2
January
20
February
116
March
209
April
311
May
411
June
514
July
609
August
714
September
815
October
908
November
1013
December
1119
People
and
Texts
Cited
by
Tolstoy
1228
2
Tolstoy’s
Final
Book
In
March
1855,
26-‐year-‐old
Leo
Tolstoy
wrote
in
his
diary:
“Yesterday
a
conversation
about
the
divine
and
faith
gave
me
a
great,
stupendous
idea,
the
manifestation
of
which
I
feel
myself
capable
of
devoting
my
life
to.
This
idea
is
a
new
religion
corresponding
with
man’s
development,
the
religion
of
Christ,
but
purified
of
faith
and
sacraments,
a
practical
religion
that
doesn’t
promise
future
bliss
but
gives
happiness
on
earth.”i
Written
before
his
great
novels
and
long
before
he
became
world-‐famous
as
a
religious
thinker
and,
in
the
eyes
of
many,
a
modern-‐day
prophet,
this
passage
shows
that
even
in
his
undisciplined
youth
Tolstoy
was
dreaming
of
a
new
religion
that
he
would
express
eloquently
and
concisely
in
his
many
treatises
and
particularly
in
his
last
major
project,
For
Every
Day.
For
although
it
appears
to
be
just
a
collection
of
thoughts
to
be
read
each
day
of
the
year,
Tolstoy’s
final
book
expounds
his
new
religion
in
a
methodical
way.
Furthermore,
the
book
is
arranged
so
that,
if
followed
by
enough
people,
it
would
gradually
enact
the
pacifist
revolution
Tolstoy
believed
was
the
only
way
to
divert
humanity
from
the
destructive
path
it
was
pursuing
and
create
a
utopian
Christian
anarchistic
society.
In
this
sense,
For
Every
Day
is
the
Bible
of
Tolstoyanism.
Tolstoy
began
what
eventually
became
For
Every
Day
in
March
1884,
when
he
started
translating
excerpts
from
S.
Julien’s
French
translation
of
Lao
Tsu’s
Tao
Te
Ching.
On
March
27
he
made
his
first
reference
to
the
project:
“I
must
compile
a
cycle
of
reading
for
myself:
Epictetus,
Marcus
Aurelius,
Lao
Tsu,
Buddha,
Pascal,
the
Gospels.
It’s
something
that
would
be
useful
for
others
as
well.”ii
This
breadth
of
sources
reveals
Tolstoy’s
universalist
perspective
on
religion,
something
he
commented
on
himself
on
April
10
of
the
same
year:
“I
read
Confucius.
More
profound
and
better
still.
Without
him
Lao
Tsu
and
the
Gospels
are
incomplete.
And
he’s
nothing
without
the
Gospels.”iii
This
notion
of
the
complementary,
rather
than
contradictory,
nature
of
the
world’s
religions
plays
a
central
role
in
Tolstoy’s
philosophy
and
in
the
theoretical
foundation
of
For
Every
Day.
Finding
the
fundamental
truths
that
lie
at
the
base
of
every
religion
became
one
of
Tolstoy’s
tasks
as
he
explored
Islam,
Buddhism,
Hinduism
and
other
faiths,
and
he
posed
a
similar
task
for
his
readers
in
For
Every
Day:
“Try
to
find
the
truth
in
the
religion
you
were
born
into.
The
truth
in
every
religion
is
comprehensible,
simple
and
clear.
And
this
comprehensible,
simple
and
clear
truth
is
in
all
religions.”
(August
1,
3
Entry
One)
For
Every
Day
is
Tolstoy’s
last
attempt
to
distill
this
simple
truth
and
provide
a
map
for
applying
it
to
one’s
life.
Tolstoy
quickly
added
more
thinkers
to
his
growing
list
of
inspirational
thoughts.
In
June
1885
he
wrote
to
his
friend
and
spiritual
compatriot
Vladimir
Chertkov
that
“I
know
for
myself
how
much
strength,
peace
and
happiness
you
receive
by
communing
with
the
souls
of
people
like
Socrates,
Epictetus,
Arnold,
Parker,
etc.
(A
strange
combination,
but
it
works
for
me).
Thanks
to
Kalmykova’s
Socratesiv
I’m
rereading
the
Stoics
and
have
learned
a
lot.
[
.
.
.
]
I
would
really
like
to
compile
a
cycle
of
reading,
i.e.
a
series
of
books
and
excerpts
from
them
that
would
all
speak
of
the
same
subject:
what
a
person
needs
first
of
all,
what
his
life,
his
happiness
consists
of.”v
Before
he
compiled
these
quotes
into
a
collection,
however,
Tolstoy
published
Calendar
with
Proverbs
for
1887.
It
was
intended
as
a
simple
daily
reading,
a
popular
genre
in
Russia
at
the
time,
although
the
quotes
for
such
collections
were
normally
taken
from
the
Bible
or
Church
authorities
rather
than
folk
sources.
The
Russian
censors
weren’t
happy
with
Tolstoy’s
innovation
and
wouldn’t
allow
its
publication
without
the
inclusion
of
traditional
Russian
Orthodox
sources,
and
so
the
final
version
includes
passages
from
the
Gospels
and
sayings
of
Church
figures
along
with
traditional
Russian
proverbs.
Meanwhile,
Tolstoy
continued
to
collect
sayings
and
passages
by
people
whose
philosophy
complemented
his
own
and
began
arrange
them
systematically.
His
first
attempt
was
The
Thoughts
of
Wise
People
for
Every
Day.
By
January
1903
the
work
was
already
in
progress,
for
his
daughter
and
disciple
Maria
Obolenskaya
mentions
in
her
diary
that
she
was
helping
to
compile
it.vi
Tolstoy
included
a
large
number
of
sayings
by
Marcus
Aurelius,
Blaise
Pascal,
American
social
critic
John
Ruskin,
Epictetus,
Lao
Tsu,
Confucius
and
other
Chinese
philosophers,
as
well
as
excerpts
from
the
Dhammapada,
the
Talmud,
and
the
Gospels.
He
also
included
some
of
his
own
sayings,
all
but
three
specially
written
for
the
collection.
Augustine,
Aristotle,
Jeremy
Bentham,
Plato,
Fyodor
Dostoevsky
and
many
others
appear
here
and
there
in
the
collection
as
well.
Tolstoy
had
already
completed
the
book
by
February,
and
after
it
passed
the
censors
(who
only
deleted
sayings
by
Ruskin,
a
particularly
harsh
critic
of
the
wealthy)
on
June
25,
Tolstoy
and
his
friends
polished
the
edition.
It
was
published
on
August
28,
1903,
Tolstoy’s
75th
birthday,
by
Tolstoy
and
Chertkov’s
publishing
house
Posrednik
(The
Intermediary).
In
essence,
the
book
is
a
short
version
of
For
Every
Day,
having
only
one
or
two
passages
per
day.
Unlike
For
Every
Day,
there’s
no
thematic
continuity
either
from
month
to
month
or
day
to
day;
this
is
something
Tolstoy
would
develop
and
perfect
only
as
he
worked
on
the
final
version.
The
collection
is
interesting,
but
doesn’t
make
nearly
the
impact
of
For
Every
Day
because
of
its
brevity,
its
paucity
of
Tolstoy’s
own
words,
and
its
lack
of
an
overarching
thematic
organization.
What
the
book
does
show,
however,
is
that
Tolstoy’s
philosophy
was
in
its
final
form
by
1903.
The
rest
of
his
life
was
spent
organizing
the
material
he’d
collected
into
a
form
that
would
make
the
greatest
impact.
4
Tolstoy
was
dissatisfied
with
The
Thoughts
of
Wise
People
for
Every
Day
and
decided
to
create
an
expanded
version
that
evolved
into
Cycle
of
Reading.
Greatly
expanded
from
The
Thoughts
of
Wise
People
for
Every
Day,
Cycle
of
Reading
contains
many
quotes
by
Tolstoy
himself,
passages
from
other
writers
that
he
used
previously,
and
a
plethora
of
new
ones.
Additionally,
he
included
Weekly
Readings:
short
stories
he
felt
would
exemplify
the
lessons
he
was
conveying.
Each
day
revolved
around
a
particular
theme,
but
like
The
Thoughts
of
Wise
People
for
Every
Day
there
is
little
continuity
between
the
themes
from
one
day
to
the
next.
Although
the
first
draft
was
completed
by
December,
1904,
Tolstoy
put
much
more
effort
into
perfecting
this
version
and
so
Cycle
of
Reading
wasn’t
published
until
summer
1906.
Beginning
in
1907,
Tolstoy
devoted
nearly
all
his
time
to
the
creation
of
what
he
first
called
A
New
Cycle
of
Reading.
By
early
1908
he
was
developing
a
plan
for
ordering
the
themes
in
a
meaningful
way,
and
by
the
end
of
the
year
he
was
composing
his
own
entries
for
the
new
collection.
These
are
the
two
additions
that
make
For
Every
Day
stand
out
from
all
his
previous
attempts.
In
early
1909
Chertkov
suggested
the
new
title,
and
Tolstoy
spent
the
rest
of
the
year
arranging
the
entries.
During
1909
the
Sytin
publishing
house
released
excerpts
from
the
final
version,
although
the
censor
deleted
many
entries.
Also
in
1909
the
newspaper
New
Russia
published
excerpts,
as
a
result
of
which
the
editor,
K.
P.
Slavnin,
was
charged
with
blasphemy
and
was
forced
to
flee
the
country.
The
entire
book
didn’t
appear
in
print
until
1932
as
volumes
43
and
44
of
Tolstoy’s
complete
collected
works.
Tolstoy
also
had
blueprints
for
publishing
an
edition
of
For
Every
Day
for
children
and
another
one
for
people
who
didn’t
believe
in
God
both
of
which
were
simply
abbreviated
versions
of
the
complete
text
but
were
never
formally
compiled.
However,
in
1910
Tolstoy
did
edit
and
reorganize
the
quotes
in
For
Every
Day
as
a
series
of
thematically-‐organized
pamphlets
for
less-‐educated
people
that
were
assembled
into
yet
another
book,
The
Path
of
Life.
Although
it
wasn’t
published
in
Tolstoy’s
lifetime,
it
was
released
as
volume
45
of
his
complete
collected
works
in
1956.
Although
it
was
compiled
after
For
Every
Day,
the
exclusion
of
the
more
scholarly
quotations
and
the
thematic
organization
makes
it
seem
like
a
watered-‐down
version
of
the
same
book.
The
last
part
of
For
Every
Day
that
Tolstoy
devoted
a
great
deal
of
time
to
was
the
preface.
His
first
attempt
was
in
the
form
of
a
prayer,
but
he
dismissed
it
as
a
bad
idea.
More
successful
was
an
attempt
at
an
explanation
of
the
ordering
of
the
sections
of
For
Every
Day.
Tolstoy
never
finished
it,
and
the
preface
doesn’t
completely
correspond
to
the
final
ordering
of
sections
(there’s
even
a
numerical
discrepancy
in
the
preface
itself.)
Nevertheless,
this
preface
does
provide
valuable
insights
into
the
highly
structured
and
deliberate
method
Tolstoy
employed
in
For
Every
Day:
Preface
This
book,
just
like
the
original
Cycle
of
Reading,
is
comprised
of
a
collection
of
thoughts
for
each
day.
The
only
difference
is
that
the
thoughts
assembled
here
aren’t
arranged
as
haphazardly
as
in
the
previous
book.
Here
each
month
is
arranged
so
that
5
the
content
and
central
theme
of
each
day’s
entries
flows
from
the
content
of
the
thoughts
of
the
previous
days.
In
this
way,
each
month
taken
separately
contains
an
exposition
of
the
same
specific
religious
and
moral
conception
of
life
from
which
emerges
a
guide
for
behavior
as
well.
This
conception
of
life
is
confirmed
and
illuminated
by
the
thoughts
of
ancient
and
modern
thinkers
of
various
nations.
So
as
with
the
number
of
months,
the
entire
book
repeats
twelve
times
the
same
ideology
that’s
expressed
according
to
the
number
of
days
in
each
month,
in
thirty
units.
These
units
are
arranged
in
the
following
order:
1.
Faith.
In
order
for
a
person
to
live
well
he
has
to
know
what
he
must
and
must
not
do.
In
order
to
know
this,
he
needs
genuine
faith.
Faith
is
only
genuine
when
it’s
one
and
the
same
for
all
people.
There
is
such
a
faith,
and
all
people
know
it:
this
genuine
faith
consists
of
what
is
the
same
in
all
religions
and
in
the
mind
and
heart
of
every
person.
2.
The
Soul.
This
faith
is
the
realization
that
in
every
person
there’s
something
other
than
the
body
that’s
incorporeal
and
that
gives
life
to
the
body.
3.
One
Soul
in
All.
This
incorporeal
essence
is
the
same
in
all
people
and
all
living
things.
We
call
this
essence
the
soul.
4.
God.
This
incorporeal
essence,
which
lies
in
the
heart
of
every
person,
which
is
inseparable
from
the
body
and
gives
life
to
all
that
lives,
is
what
we
call
God.
5.
Life
is
Union.
Even
though
they’re
separated
from
other
beings
and
from
God
by
our
bodies,
our
souls
are
constantly
searching
for
union
with
that
from
which
they’ve
been
separated.
6.
Love.
Union
with
other
beings
and
with
God
is
accomplished
through
love.
7.
Sins,
Temptations,
and
Superstitions.
The
human
soul
wants
to
unite
with
the
souls
of
others
and
with
God,
but
sins,
which
subordinate
the
human
soul
to
the
body,
interfere
with
this.
8.
The
Sin
of
Lechery.
The
sin
of
lechery
subordinates
the
human
soul
to
the
body
more
than
any
other.
This
sin
consists
of
a
person
surrendering
to
sexual
passion
for
the
satisfaction
of
human
desire
rather
than
the
continuation
of
the
species
through
the
creation
of
children.
9.
The
Sin
of
Overindulgence.
Likewise,
the
human
soul
is
subordinated
to
the
body
by
the
sin
of
overindulgence.
This
sin
consists
of
a
person
forgetting
his
soul
for
the
sake
of
passion
for
food,
clothing,
housing
and
all
sorts
of
luxuries.
10.
The
Sin
of
Wealth.
The
third
sin
is
the
sin
of
wealth.
This
sin
consists
of
a
person
seizing
the
labor
of
others
for
himself
and
refusing
to
share
it
with
others.
11.
The
Sin
of
Parasitism.
The
fourth
sin
is
the
sin
of
parasitism.
This
sin
consists
of
a
person
declining
to
work
because
he
can
get
others
to
work
for
him.
6
12.
The
Sin
of
Ill
Will.
The
sins
of
lechery,
excess,
wealth
and
parasitism
lead
a
person
into
conflict
with
others.
This
conflict
with
others
leads
a
person
into
the
worst
of
all
sins:
the
sin
of
ill
will.
13.
The
Temptation
of
Pride.
Sins
interfere
with
a
person’s
ability
to
unite
with
others
and
with
God.
Temptations
justify
sins.
The
most
harmful
temptation
is
the
temptation
of
pride.
This
temptation
consists
of
a
person
considering
himself
better
than
others,
and
as
a
result
justifying
himself
when
he
commits
actions
that
are
considered
sins
for
others.
14.
The
Temptation
of
Worldly
Glory.
The
second
temptation
is
the
temptation
of
worldly
glory.
This
temptation
consists
of
a
person
failing
to
do
what
his
conscience
considers
good
and
doing
what
pleases
others
instead.
15.
The
Temptation
of
Punishment.
The
third
temptation
is
the
temptation
of
punishment.
This
temptation
consists
of
people
justifying
their
hostility
by
claiming
that
the
evil
they
commit
against
others
is
done
for
their
benefit,
calling
the
evil
they
commit
“punishment”
rather
than
“evil.”
16.
The
Superstition
of
Violence.
Superstitions
support
temptations.
One
of
the
most
harmful
superstitions
is
the
superstition
of
violence.
This
superstition
consists
of
the
belief
that
some
people
can
organize
the
lives
of
other
people
through
coercion.
17.
The
Superstition
of
Government.
The
superstition
of
violence
gives
birth
to
the
superstition
of
government.
This
superstition
consists
of
the
belief
that
in
order
to
live
well
people
can’t
live
by
their
own
wills
and
reason
but
rather
must
live
by
the
will
and
reason
of
a
handful
of
people,
and
therefore
they
must
fulfill
the
demands
of
these
people,
no
matter
who
they
might
be.
18.
The
Superstition
of
the
Church.
The
temptation
of
government
is
supported
by
the
superstition
of
the
church.
This
superstition
consists
of
the
belief
that
certain
people
exist
who,
having
assembled
and
called
themselves
the
church,
can
once
and
for
all
establish
God’s
law
for
all
people.
19.
The
Superstition
of
Science.
Similar
to
the
superstition
of
the
church
is
the
superstition
of
science,
which
also
supports
the
superstition
of
government.
This
superstition
consists
of
the
belief
that
some
people
have
freed
themselves
from
labor,
which
is
necessary
for
human
life,
and
have
acquired
certain
types
of
knowledge
that
are
essential
for
the
government,
and
which
are
important
and
necessary
for
all
people.
20.
Effort.
In
order
to
free
yourself
from
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions,
you
must
exert
spiritual
effort.
21.
Effort
in
Self-‐Renunciation.
The
source
of
all
sins
is
the
body.
Therefore
spiritual
effort
against
sins
consists
of
self-‐renunciation,
i.e.
renunciation
of
the
body
so
that
the
body
doesn’t
rule
the
soul,
but
rather
the
soul
rules
the
body.
22.
Effort
in
Humility.
The
cause
of
all
temptations
is
pride,
i.e.
in
the
elevation
of
oneself
above
others.
Therefore
spiritual
effort
against
temptations
is
found
in
humility:
remembrance
of
the
fact
that
in
one’s
soul
a
person
can’t
be
greater
than
any
other
person.
7
23.
Effort
in
Honesty.
The
cause
of
all
superstitions
is
the
belief
in
superficial
human
doctrines.
Therefore
spiritual
effort
against
superstitions
is
found
in
recognition
of
one’s
divine
nature
and
the
manifestation
of
reason
within
it,
which
recognizes
something
as
true
only
when
that
something
is
in
agreement
with
reason.
24.
Restraint
in
Deed.
Effort
toward
self-‐renunciation,
humility,
and
honesty
are
all
such
that
a
person
shouldn’t
so
much
think
about
what
he
must
do
but
rather
about
what
he
must
restrain
himself
from
doing.
25.
Restraint
in
Word.
The
effort
needed
to
restrain
oneself
in
deed
is
just
as
necessary
in
restraining
oneself
in
word,
because
the
word
can
divide
people
as
well
as
unite
them.
26.
Restraint
in
Thought.
The
most
important
effort
in
restraint
is
in
thought.
This
effort
is
especially
important
because
it’s
in
thought
that
sinful,
tempting,
and
superstitious
words
and
actions
are
born.
27.
Life
Exists
Only
in
the
Present.
Human
life
doesn’t
move
through
time,
through
a
number
of
days,
months
and
years
from
birth
to
death,
but
is
constantly
taking
place
now,
in
the
present
moment.
Therefore,
good
and
evil
in
a
person’s
life
can
only
pass
through
the
present
moment
along
with
him.
That
which
accompanies
a
person
through
the
present
moment
is
always
within
his
power.
If
a
person
exerts
effort
right
now
to
unite
with
other
people
and
with
God
his
life
will
be
good,
and
a
person
can
always
do
this.
28.
There
is
No
Evil.
Therefore,
the
more
a
person
believes
that
the
present
moment
exists
so
that
he
can
exert
effort
to
free
himself
from
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions,
the
less
he’ll
feel
the
physical
tragedies
that
are
considered
misfortunes.
29.
There
is
No
Death.
The
body
lives
in
time,
and
therefore
there
is
death
for
the
body.
The
soul
lives
in
the
present,
and
the
present
has
neither
a
beginning
nor
an
end,
and
therefore
for
the
soul
death
does
not
and
can
never
exist.
30.
After
Death.
The
fact
that
people
die
before
our
eyes
merely
shows
us
that
the
human
body
changes,
although
we
know
that
our
life,
of
which
we’re
aware
in
the
present
moment,
can’t
be
destroyed,
because
it’s
the
only
thing
that
exists.
If
it
didn’t
exist,
nothing
would.
31.
Life
is
a
Blessing.
Human
life
consists
of
greater
and
greater
union
of
the
soul,
which
has
been
separated
from
other
souls
and
from
God
by
the
body,
with
that
from
which
it’s
been
separated.
This
union
is
accomplished
by
the
soul’s
increasing
liberation
from
the
body.
Therefore,
if
a
person
understands
that
his
life
consists
of
this
liberation,
his
life
will
become
nothing
other
than
what
he
desires:
a
blessing.
Since
some
months
have
thirty
days
and
others
have
thirty-‐one,
in
the
months
that
have
thirty
days
I’ve
combined
two
contiguous
sections
together.
8
I’ve
included
the
names
of
the
thinkers
whose
ideas
I’ve
borrowed.
However,
I’ve
shortened
and
changed
many
of
these
thoughts
according
to
my
own
understanding.
I
wrote
all
the
thoughts
that
have
no
citations.
The
thirty-‐one
units
Tolstoy
outlines
in
this
preface
can
be
divided
into
four
major
sections.
The
first
is
Tolstoy’s
notion
of
the
goal
of
life:
to
achieve
faith.
Tolstoy’s
notion
of
faith,
however,
excludes
blind
faith
in
any
sort
of
external
teachings
(the
type
of
faith
he
was
referring
to
in
his
1855
diary
entry):
He
who
is
unsure
whether
or
not
God
exists
and
tortures
himself
over
it
hasn’t
yet
rejected
God
and
can
still
save
his
soul.
But
a
person
who’s
accepted
what
he’s
been
told
about
God
without
searching
for
God
himself
is
in
real
trouble.
(May
1,
Entry
One)
True
religion
isn’t
a
belief
established
once
and
for
all
as
a
result
of
supposed
supernatural
feats
and
some
laws
established
by
some
supernatural
being
and
his
disciples
and
followers.
It
is
not,
as
the
scholars
believe,
the
remnants
of
the
superstitions
of
ancient
ignorance
that
have
no
relevance
to
our
time.
True
religion
is
the
relationship
of
man
to
his
neighbor
and
to
the
entire
infinite
world,
in
agreement
with
reason
and
contemporary
knowledge.
(January
1,
Entry
Five)
Echoing
his
diary
entry
of
March
1855,
Tolstoy
encourages
his
readers
to
challenge
their
beliefs
and
subject
everything
to
rational
analysis:
True
religion
is
not
a
religion
of
reason,
but
true
religion
cannot
contradict
reason.
(April
1,
Entry
Six)
For
Tolstoy,
faith
is
something
each
person
must
search
for
one
his
or
her
own,
and
the
intensive
the
search
the
better
the
results
will
be:
Doubt
doesn’t
destroy
faith,
it
strengthens
it.
(May
1,
Entry
Five)
For
Tolstoy,
faith
is
inextricably
bound
to
the
concept
of
the
unity
of
all
beings.
In
order
to
have
faith,
a
person
must
recognize
this
bond,
which
is
predicated
on
the
belief
in
a
non-‐corporeal
spiritual
essence.
He
calls
this
essence
God,
although
a
survey
of
Tolstoy’s
statements
on
God
in
For
Every
Day
and
elsewhere
reveals
that
his
notion
is
closer
to
panentheism
than
the
monotheism
of
the
Abrahamic
traditions:vii
Some
people
say
that
God
should
be
understood
as
a
person.
This
is
a
great
misunderstanding,
for
a
person
is
limited.
A
person
feels
his
individuality
only
because
he
comes
in
contact
with
other
individuals.
If
there
were
only
one
person,
he
wouldn’t
be
an
individual.
These
two
9
concepts
are
mutually
reliant:
(1)
the
external
world,
other
beings
and
(2)
the
individual.
If
there
were
no
external
world
and
no
other
beings,
a
person
wouldn’t
perceive
(wouldn’t
recognize)
himself
as
an
individual,
and
he
wouldn’t
recognize
the
existence
of
other
beings.
Therefore,
a
person
in
this
world
is
unthinkable
except
as
an
individual.
Yet
people
say
that
God
is
an
individual,
that
he’s
a
person.
You
can
say
of
God,
as
Moses
and
Muhammad
did,
that
He
is
one,
but
not
in
the
sense
that
there
are
no
other
gods
(there
can
be
no
notion
of
number
in
relation
to
God,
and
so
you
can’t
really
say
that
He
is
one),
but
only
in
the
sense
that
God
is
all
that
really
exists.
We
know
God
as
a
single
being—we
can’t
understand
him
in
any
other
way—and
at
the
same
time
we
can’t
understand
a
single
being
that
encompasses
everything.
For
us
as
humans,
this
is
the
central
inscrutable
aspect
of
God.
If
God
isn’t
one,
then
He
disintegrates.
He
doesn’t
exist.
If
He
is
one,
then
we
involuntarily
imagine
Him
as
a
personality,
and
He’s
no
longer
a
higher
being,
he’s
not
everything.
And
yet
in
order
to
know
God
and
to
rely
upon
Him
we
have
to
understand
Him
as
manifesting
Himself
in
everything
and
at
the
same
time
as
a
single
being.
(May
4,
Entry
Nine)
Prove
the
existence
of
God!
Can
there
be
a
more
stupid
concept:
prove
the
existence
of
God?!
Proving
God’s
existence
is
the
same
as
proving
your
own
existence.
For
whom?
To
whom?
Why?
Nothing
exists
except
God.
(October
4,
Entry
Seven)
However,
Tolstoy
believed
that
each
person’s
concept
of
God
will
be
suited
to
that
person
at
a
particular
point
in
his
own
spiritual
development
and
will
necessarily
change
from
time
to
time.
He
also
asserted
that
no
one’s
conception
of
God
is
necessarily
wrong,
just
as
no
one’s
conception
of
God
can
be
completely
accurate:
If
you
ever
get
the
notion
that
all
you
ever
thought
about
God
is
wrong
and
that
there
is
no
God,
don’t
let
it
fluster
you,
but
realize
that
this
has
happened
and
does
happen
to
everyone.
Don’t
think
that
if
you’ve
stopped
believing
in
the
God
in
which
you
once
believed,
it’s
because
there’s
no
God.
If
you
no
longer
believe
in
the
God
you
once
did,
this
is
simply
because
there
was
something
false
in
your
belief
in
God,
and
you
need
to
try
to
have
a
better
understanding
of
what
you
call
God.
If
a
savage
stops
believing
in
his
wooden
god,
it
doesn’t
mean
there’s
no
God,
but
only
that
God
isn’t
made
of
wood.
We
can
never
fully
understand
God;
we
can
only
increasingly
understand
the
source
of
all.
Therefore,
if
we
reject
a
lower
conception
of
God,
this
is
useful
to
us.
It
allows
us
to
achieve
a
better
and
higher
understanding
of
that
which
we
call
God.
(August
4,
Entry
Six)
10
Tolstoy
avoids
all
attempts
to
define
God
as
something
specific,
although
he
alludes
to
various
possible
manifestations
in
the
world
as
elements
of
God’s
nature:
God
is
what
we
call
that
everything
of
which
we
feel
ourselves
a
part,
and
the
perfection
we
want
to
attain.
(January
4,
Entry
Two)
Someone
is
doing
something
with
the
life
of
the
entire
world
and
with
our
own
individual
lives.
This
someone
who
is
doing
this
is
what
we
call
God.
(February
4,
Entry
Eight)
Love
isn’t
the
fulfillment
of
a
law
but
merely
the
recognition
of
the
meaning
of
your
life.
God
isn’t
love.
Love
is
simply
one
of
God’s
manifestations.
Man
is
love.
(December
6,
Entry
Six)
Love
is
really
the
key
to
Tolstoy’s
philosophy.
His
final
treatise,
“The
Law
of
Love
and
the
Law
of
Violence,”
presents
love
as
the
only
salvation
for
humanity.
His
equating
love
with
God’s
manifestation
on
Earth
is
not
surprising.
It
is
through
love
that
union
occurs,
and
this
is
the
only
way
to
achieve
true
faith.
In
the
second
section
Tolstoy
discusses
the
obstacles
to
achieving
the
goal
of
life
he
defined
in
the
first.
It’s
here
that
Tolstoy
asserts
that
a
person’s
naturally
pure
inner
life
is
corrupted
by
outer
societal
life.
In
making
this
connection,
Tolstoy
provides
a
blueprint
for
simultaneously
improving
one’s
own
life
and
destroying
the
fundamental
supports
of
modern
society.
Tolstoy
establishes
the
connection
between
the
inner
life
of
individuals
and
the
outer
life
of
society
through
three
concepts:
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions.
Tolstoy
only
has
units
for
four
categories
of
sin:
overindulgence,
parasitism,
lechery,
and
ill
will.
He
does
refer
to
other
sins
in
various
entries
in
the
unit
“Sins,
Temptations
and
Superstitions,”
although
in
most
cases
he
categorizes
these
“sins”
as
temptations
in
later
units
of
For
Every
Day,
e.g.
pride
(April
7,
Entry
Two)
and
punishment
(May
7,
Entry
4),
while
in
other
places
he
enumerates
sins
that
have
no
independent
categories.
Tolstoy
apparently
decided
to
focus
on
what
he
considered
the
most
grievous
sins
in
independent
sections
while
relegating
other
sins
to
individual
passages.
As
for
the
sin/temptation
conflict,
Tolstoy
most
likely
considered
some
“temptations”
sins
as
well.
While
Tolstoy’s
definition
of
sin
is
similar
to
the
common
understanding
of
the
term
as
a
moral
error,
he
rejects
external
means
of
forgiveness.
Tolstoy
believed
that
seeking
forgiveness,
either
from
other
people
or
from
God,
was
ineffective
at
best
and
blasphemous
at
worst.
For
him,
sin
is
an
error
in
judgment
based
on
a
false
concept
of
life
that
has
negative
consequences
for
both
the
person
who
sins
and
for
others.
The
only
means
of
atoning
for
a
sin
is
inner
work
to
assure
that
you
never
commit
that
sin
again:
11
To
repent
means
to
recognize
your
sins
and
to
prepare
for
battle
with
them,
so
it’s
best
to
repent
while
you
still
have
all
your
strength.
You
have
to
pour
the
oil
on
the
flame
while
the
wick
is
still
burning.
(September
7,
Entry
Two)
According
to
Tolstoy,
people
commit
sins
because
false
justifications
support
their
erroneous
behavior.
Tolstoy
describes
these
justifications
with
the
Russian
word
“soblazn’,”
which
corresponds
with
the
English
word
“temptation.”
He
lists
five
temptations:
wealth,
pride,
worldly
glory,
punishment
and
inequality
(although
only
January
and
February
have
sections
dedicated
to
the
last
temptation).
In
a
sense,
they
are
temptations,
as
they
lead
people
into
committing
sins,
but
as
is
clear
from
the
fifth
entry
for
February
7,
Tolstoy’s
understanding
of
the
term
is
much
more
in
line
with
the
English
terms
rationalization
and
justification:
The
ruinous
effects
of
sins
for
those
who
commit
them
as
well
as
for
the
society
in
which
they
live
are
so
obvious
that
from
the
most
ancient
times
people
have
seen
the
evil
that
emanates
from
them
and
have
preached
and
created
laws
against
sins
and
punished
people
for
them:
they
forbade
theft,
murder,
fornication,
slander,
and
intoxication.
However,
despite
these
prohibitions
and
punishments
people
continued
and
still
continue
to
sin,
poisoning
their
lives
and
the
lives
of
those
close
to
them.
This
occurs
because
false
rationalizations
were
created
to
justify
sins.
These
rationalizations
assert
that
there
are
extraordinary
circumstances
in
which
sins
are
not
only
permissible
but
necessary.
The
Gospels
call
such
false
rationalizations
temptations.
Because
of
these
temptations,
i.e.
false
justifications
of
sins,
most
people
fail
to
correct
themselves
and
continue
to
stagnate
in
them
instead,
and
worst
of
all
they
turn
these
temptations
into
doctrines
of
faith
and
teach
them
to
younger
generations.
In
Tolstoy’s
lexicon,
temptations
not
only
entice
people
to
commit
sins,
but
also
provide
ready-‐made
excuses
for
their
sins.
They’re
both
personal
and
deeply
ingrained
into
the
fabric
of
modern
society.
These
justifications
come
into
being
as
a
result
of
the
acceptance
of
four
“superstitions”:
widely
held
false
beliefs
about
the
nature
of
societal
life.
The
first
and
most
fundamental
superstition
is
the
belief
that
violence
is
permissible
and
even
necessary
under
certain
circumstances.
Indeed,
the
rejection
of
violence
was
the
cornerstone
of
all
Tolstoy’s
philosophy.
He
was
initially
inspired
by
Matthew
5:38-‐42:
As
you
know,
we
were
once
told,
‘An
eye
for
an
eye”
and
“A
tooth
for
a
tooth.’
But
I
tell
you:
Don’t
react
violently
to
the
one
that
is
evil:
when
he
slaps
you
on
the
right
cheek,
turn
the
other
as
well.
If
someone
is
determined
to
sue
you
for
your
shirt,
let
that
person
have
your
coat
along
with
it.
Further,
when
anyone
conscripts
you
for
one
mile,
go
along
12
an
extra
mile.
Give
to
the
one
who
begs
from
you;
and
don’t
turn
away
from
the
one
who
tries
to
borrow
from
you.viii
Tolstoy
talks
about
the
effect
this
passage
had
on
him
in
his
1884
treatise,
“What
Does
My
Faith
Consist
Of?”:
The
text
that
gave
me
the
key
to
the
truth
was
the
thirty-‐ninth
verse
of
the
fifth
chapter
of
St.
Matthew
.
.
.
I’d
often
read
the
passage,
but
these
words
had
never
before
grabbed
my
attention:
“But
I
tell
you:
‘Do
not
resist
evil.”
[
.
.
.
]
The
words,
‘Whoever
strikes
you
on
your
right
cheek,
turn
to
him
the
other
also,’
had
always
appeared
to
me
as
requiring
endurance
and
self-‐mastery
such
as
human
nature
is
hardly
capable
of.
They
touched
me.
I
felt
that
a
person
would
achieve
moral
perfection
if
he
were
to
act
this
way;
but
I
also
felt
that
I’d
never
be
able
to
obey
them
if
they
entailed
nothing
but
suffering.
I
said
to
myself,
‘Well,
I’ll
turn
my
cheek;
I’ll
let
myself
be
struck
again.
I’ll
give
up
my
coat;
Let
them
take
everything.
They’ll
even
take
my
life.
However,
life
was
given
to
me.
Why
should
I
lose
it
like
that?
This
can’t
be
what
Christ
demands
of
us.’
Then
I
said
to
myself,
‘Perhaps
in
these
words
Christ
only
wishes
to
extol
suffering
and
self-‐denial,
and
in
doing
so
He
exaggerates
and
His
expressions
should
therefore
be
considered
illustrations
rather
than
specific
requirements.’
But
as
soon
as
I
understood
the
meaning
of
the
words,
‘do
not
resist
evil,’
it
became
clear
to
me
that
Christ
did
not
exaggerate,
that
He
doesn’t
require
suffering
merely
for
the
sake
of
suffering,
and
that
He’s
only
expressing
clearly
and
specifically
what
He
means.
He
says,
‘Do
not
resist
evil,’
and
if
you
don’t
resist
evil,
you
may
meet
with
some
who,
having
struck
you
on
one
cheek
and
meeting
with
no
resistance,
will
strike
you
on
the
other;
after
having
taken
away
your
shirt,
will
take
away
your
coat
as
well;
having
profited
by
your
work,
will
force
you
to
keep
working;
will
take
and
never
give
back.
‘Nevertheless,
I
say
to
you,
do
not
resist
evil.
Do
good
even
to
those
who
strike
and
abuse
you.’
Now
I
understood
that
the
whole
force
of
the
teaching
lay
in
the
words
‘do
not
resist
evil,’
and
that
the
entire
context
was
but
an
application
of
that
great
precept.
[
.
.
.
]
We
might
bring
forward,
as
an
objection,
the
difficulty
of
always
obeying
such
a
law;
we
may
even
say,
as
unbelievers
do,
that
it’s
a
foolish
doctrine,
that
Christ
was
a
dreamer,
an
idealist
who
gave
precepts
that
are
impossible
to
follow.
But
whatever
our
objections
may
be
we
can’t
deny
that
Christ
expresses
His
meaning
very
clearly
and
distinctly;
and
His
meaning
is
that
man
must
not
resist
evil;
he
who
fully
accepts
His
teaching
cannot
resist
evil.ix
13
However,
as
time
passed
Tolstoy
argued
that
violence
wasn’t
simply
contrary
to
the
words
of
Christ
but
irrational.
Perhaps
his
most
succinct
statement
on
the
subject
is
the
seventh
entry
for
May
15
in
For
Every
Day:
The
use
of
violence
evokes
others’
spite
and
exposes
the
person
who
employs
violence
for
his
defense
to
far
greater
dangers
than
restraining
from
violence.
Thus,
the
use
of
violence
is
merely
stupidity
and
recklessness.
(May
15,
Entry
7)
In
the
letter
that
engendered
Tolstoy’s
correspondence
with
Mahatma
Gandhi
in
the
last
year
of
his
life,
he
likewise
blamed
the
Indians’
woes
on
their
acceptance
of
violence
as
a
legitimate
method
of
achieving
freedom:
You
say
that
the
English
have
enslaved
and
keep
the
Hindus
in
subjection
because
the
latter
have
not
resisted
sufficiently,
and
do
not
resist
the
violence
by
force.
But
it
is
just
the
contrary.
If
the
English
have
enslaved
the
Hindoos,
it
is
just
because
the
Hindus
recognised
and
do
recognise
coercion
as
the
main
and
fundamental
principle
of
their
social
order:
in
the
name
of
this
principle
they
submitted
to
their
little
Rajas,
in
their
name
they
struggled
with
each
other,
fought
with
Europeans,
with
the
English,
and
at
present
are
preparing
to
a
struggle
with
them
again.
A
commercial
company
enslaved
a
nation
comprising
200
millions.
Tell
this
to
a
man
free
from
superstition
and
he
will
fail
to
grasp
what
these
words
mean.
What
does
it
mean
that
thirty
thousand
people
not
athletes,
but
rather
weak
and
ill-‐looking
have
enslaved
200
millions
of
vigorous,
clever,
strong,
freedom-‐loving
people?
Do
not
the
figures
make
it
clear
that
not
the
English,
but
the
Hindus,
have
enslaved
themselves?
For
the
Hindus
to
complain
that
the
English
have
enslaved
them,
is
equal
to
people
who
are
addicted
to
drink,
complaining
that
vendors
of
wine,
who
have
settled
in
their
midst,
have
enslaved
them.
You
tell
them
that
they
can
abstain
from
drinking,
but
they
answer
that
they
are
so
accustomed
to
it
that
they
cannot
abstain,
that
they
find
it
necessary
to
keep
up
their
energy
by
wine.
Is
not
that
the
case
with
all
the
people,
with
millions
of
people
who
submit
to
thousands
and
hundreds
of
individuals,
either
of
their
own
nation
or
of
foreign
nations?
If
the
Hindus
have
been
enslaved
by
violence
it
is
because
they
themselves
have
lived
by
violence,
live
by
violence,
and
do
not
recognise
the
eternal
law
of
love,
inherent
in
humanity.x
Tolstoy’s
conception
of
passive
resistance
differed
from
Gandhi’s
as
he
rejected
all
forms
of
nationalism.
Likewise,
Martin
Luther
King
rejected
Tolstoy’s
call
for
using
passive
resistance
as
a
means
of
destroying
government
rather
than
reforming
it.
14
Nevertheless,
his
influence
on
both
of
these
great
advocates
of
passive
resistance
was
tremendous.
Violence
is
the
foundation
for
the
superstition
of
government,
the
institutionalization
of
violence.
Although
Tolstoy
drew
this
conclusion
from
his
experiences
with
the
Russian
Imperial
Government,
he
saw
little
difference
between
despotism
and
democracy:
The
main
difference
between
representational
and
despotic
governments
isn’t
that
under
a
representational
government
there’s
greater
justice,
but
only
that
under
such
a
government
people
are
deprived
of
the
right
to
complain
that
the
government
is
evil.
(April
17,
Entry
Four)
For
Tolstoy,
only
Christian
anarchy
was
an
acceptable
form
for
society
to
take.
In
many
ways
his
utopia
resembles
Marx’s
vision
of
a
communist
anarchistic
society,
but
Tolstoy
first
of
all
rejected
industrialization
and
more
importantly
felt
that
the
creation
of
such
a
society
rested
exclusively
on
each
individual’s
efforts
at
self-‐perfection.
The
superstitions
of
church
and
science,
which
provide
false
arguments
for
the
necessity
of
the
state,
support
the
superstition
of
government.
As
with
his
judgment
of
government,
Tolstoy
drew
his
conclusions
about
religion
from
his
observations
of
the
Russian
Orthodox
Church’s
power
in
Russian
society
and
its
influence
on
affairs
of
state.
Tolstoy
vehemently
opposed
the
union
of
church
and
state:
Teachings
that
call
themselves
state
teachings
and
which
support
the
power
of
the
state
and
violence
can’t
be
Christianity,
since
their
foundation,
violence,
is
anti-‐Christian.
(December
18,
Entry
Eleven)
As
anyone
who
reads
For
Every
Day
can
see,
Tolstoy
opposed
organized
religion
for
a
variety
of
reasons,
although
he
saw
its
defense
of
state
authority
as
its
greatest
threat
to
his
utopia.
As
for
science,
Tolstoy
primarily
has
in
mind
the
social
sciences,
as
he
explains
in
this
entry
from
August
19:
A
legitimate
goal
of
science
is
knowledge
of
truths
that
serve
humanity’s
happiness.
A
false
goal
is
the
justification
of
deceptions
that
bring
evil
into
man’s
world.
Jurisprudence,
political
economy
and
especially
theology
have
such
goals.
As
people
began
to
lose
faith
in
state
religions,
social
scientists
appeared
with
new
justifications
for
the
status
quo:
When
there
were
slaves
in
ancient
times,
it
was
asserted
that
God
defined
people’s
status—slaves
and
masters—and
that
both
classes
should
be
satisfied
with
their
position,
since
things
would
be
better
for
the
slaves
in
the
next
world
and
the
masters
should
be
merciful
to
their
15
slaves.
Then
when
the
slaves
were
freed,
it
was
asserted
that
God
entrusted
wealth
to
some
people
so
that
they
could
use
part
of
it
for
good
deeds.
This
explanation
satisfied
both
the
poor
and
the
wealthy
(especially
the
wealthy)
for
a
long
time.
However,
the
time
came
when
this
explanation
was
found
unsatisfactory.
So
then
a
new
explanation
appeared
in
the
form
of
political
science,
which
discovered
laws
that
demonstrated
that
the
division
and
exploitation
of
labor
depended
on
supply
and
demand,
on
capital,
rents,
paid
labor,
value,
profit,
etc.
In
a
short
time
there
were
as
many
books,
brochures
and
lectures
on
this
doctrine
as
there
were
theological
treatises
and
sermons
on
the
previous
doctrine.
The
conclusion
of
this
scholarship
was
that
if
there
are
many
thieves
and
bandits
in
society
who
steal
the
fruit
of
working
people’s
labor,
it
isn’t
because
bandits
and
thieves
behave
badly
but
because
there
are
immutable
economic
laws
that
can
be
changed
only
through
slow,
precise
study,
through
evolution,
and
therefore
according
to
this
scholarship
people
who
are
bandits,
thieves
or
their
accessories,
who
employ
theft
and
banditry,
can
calmly
continue
to
enjoy
their
stolen
wealth
and
property.
Even
though
they
don’t
know
the
details
of
these
comforting
scholarly
explanations
just
as
most
of
their
ancestors
didn’t
know
the
details
of
theological
explanations
that
justified
their
position,
most
people
of
our
world
know
all
the
same
that
there
is
such
an
explanation
and
that
scholars,
intelligent
people,
have
conclusively
proven
and
continue
to
prove
that
the
current
order
of
things
is
as
it
should
be,
and
that
therefore
they
can
live
peacefully
in
this
order
without
trying
to
change
it.
(October
14,
Entry
Six)
Tolstoy
is
critical
of
the
physical
sciences
as
well,
but
for
a
different
reason:
he
felt
that
a
great
deal
of
scientific
investigation
contributed
nothing
to
human
happiness
(he’s
particularly
critical
of
astronomy).
He
even
opposed
technological
advances
that
would
improve
people’s
lives
if
such
advances
were
purchased
at
the
cost
of
a
single
human
life:
If,
in
order
to
light
London
and
Petersburg
with
electricity,
or
build
exhibition
halls,
or
manufacture
beautiful
dyes,
or
weave
beautiful
fabrics
quickly
and
in
large
quantities,
it’s
necessary
that
even
the
smallest
number
of
lives
must
perish
or
be
corrupted
(and
statistics
show
us
that
in
fact
many
perish),
then
let
London
and
Petersburg
be
lighted
by
gas
or
oil,
let
there
be
no
exhibitions
at
all,
let
there
be
no
dyes
or
fabrics
just
as
long
there’s
no
slavery
or
the
destruction
of
human
lives
it
causes.xi
16
As
with
all
aspects
of
his
philosophy,
Tolstoy
is
extreme
in
his
rejection
of
science,
but
as
always
when
we
look
closely
at
his
views
we
can
see
that
his
rationale
is
reasonable.
Human
life
is
always
more
valuable
than
luxuries
such
as
dyes,
exhibitions
and
(in
Tolstoy’s
view)
electric
lights.
Sacrificing
even
one
person’s
happiness
for
the
sake
of
a
luxury
violates
the
law
of
love,
and
so
all
scientific
endeavors
should
proceed
only
when
no
one
is
threatened
or
harmed
by
it.
The
current
debates
about
gene
splicing,
genetic
engineering,
nanotechnology
and
other
scientific
advances
are
certainly
informed
by
the
same
ethical
perspective
Tolstoy
provides
in
the
above
passage
and
on
the
pages
of
For
Every
Day.
In
the
third
section
Tolstoy
enumerates
various
types
of
effort
a
person
must
exert
to
free
himself
from
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions.
He
begins
with
a
unit
on
the
importance
of
personal
effort
in
general,
and
then
examines
three
forms
of
negative
effort—restraint—and
three
forms
of
positive
effort.
Tolstoy
has
units
discussing
restraint
in
deed,
word
and
thought,
and
notes
that
restraint
in
thought
is
the
critical
area
in
which
a
person
must
exert
effort:
You
can’t
escape
from
sins,
temptations,
superstitions
and
deceptions
through
physical
strength.
You
can
only
escape
them
through
the
power
of
thought.
Only
through
thought
can
you
train
yourself
to
be
selfless,
humble
and
restrained
in
word
and
deed.
Only
when
a
person
strives
with
his
thoughts
toward
self-‐renunciation,
humility,
honesty
and
abstinence—only
then
will
he
be
strong
enough
to
do
battle
with
sins,
temptations,
superstitions
and
deceptions.
(February
23,
Entry
Three)
Never
forget
that
there
is
nothing
more
important
in
your
life
than
your
thoughts.
(February
23,
Entry
Four)
As
with
many
moralistic
teachers,
Tolstoy
puts
more
emphasis
on
restraint
than
activity:
For
each
time
you
commit
evil
against
yourself
and
others
because
of
what
you
failed
to
do,
you
commit
evil
ten
thousand
times
because
of
something
you
did.
(November
24,
Entry
Three)
In
contrast
with
these
broad
categories
of
negative
effort,
Tolstoy’s
categories
of
positive
effort
are
quite
specialized:
self-‐renunciation,
humility
and
honesty.
Developing
these
characteristics
helps
a
person
defeat
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions:
In
order
to
succeed
in
your
struggle
with
sins,
temptations
and
superstitions,
you
must
have
a
clear
idea
of
what
sort
of
spiritual
state
counteracts
them
and
destroys
sin.
Humanity
has
always
struggled
with
sin,
and
the
struggle
continues
today.
Meanwhile,
sages
in
every
nation
teach
people
the
spiritual
states
they
need
to
establish
within
themselves
to
successfully
combat
sin,
just
as
other
sages
did
in
the
past.
There
are
three
states
in
which
a
person
cannot
be
defeated
by
sins,
temptations
or
17
superstitions: renunciation of physical desires defeats sin, humility
defeats temptations, and truth defeats superstition. (July 21, Entry Four)
In accord with his early concept of a new religion “purified of . . . sacraments,” Tolstoy
rejects outside assistance in fighting sin, such as grace and forgiveness. His emphasis is
exclusively on personal effort.
Mastery of all these types of effort leads a person to a series of conclusions
about life, which are the subjects of the fourth section of For Every Day. Perhaps the
opposite of Tolstoy’s “superstitions,” these are presented as true statements about the
nature of life. The unit “Life Exists Only in the Present” underscores the need to exert
effort at all times, since “it’s the only time a person has power over himself.”
(September 27, Entry One) “There is No Evil” emphasizes that a person who has
internalized all of Tolstoy’s prescriptions will never see evil in anything, for all
misfortunes can be turned to a person’s advantage:
When you’re suffering, seek its value for your spiritual growth and
you’ll annihilate the pain of suffering. (March 27, Entry Six)
Tolstoy believed that since nothing but good could come from God, what people call evil
was actually good that they didn’t understand.
The next two units reveal Tolstoy’s inconclusive attitude toward death. He
certainly believed that existence continued on after death, although he never states
what it might be and even expressed his own doubts in some of the entries:
I don’t remember anything about myself before my birth, and
therefore I assume that after death I won’t remember anything about my
present life. If there’s life after death then it’s something we can’t
imagine. (March 30, Entry Two)
Instead of postulating on what life after death might be, Tolstoy places his fate
completely in God’s hands:
If you ask yourself: “Will I, I separate from all else, will I Peter, or I
John, live after death?” whoever believes in the God of love can only
answer: if it’s better that there is separate life after death, it will
continue, and if not, it will end. If I believe in the God of love, then I have
to believe that all He does is the very best, both for me and for the entire
world. (March 30, Entry One)
For Tolstoy, trying to understand life after death is like trying to understand God’s
nature. His ultimate lesson: do your duty and trust God in all things. The reward for such
a life is summed up in the title of the last unit: “Life is a Blessing.” If a person actualizes
all that Tolstoy recommend on the pages of For Every Day, he’ll see life as one continual
blessing.
18
While
Tolstoy
meant
For
Every
Day
to
be
a
plan
of
action,
anyone
can
enjoy
and
be
inspired
by
Tolstoy’s
wisdom,
humor,
and
analytic
acumen.
In
addition,
understanding
Tolstoy’s
philosophy
as
expressed
in
For
Every
Day
allows
for
a
richer
appreciation
of
his
literary
works.
*************************************************************
Translating
Tolstoy’s
prose
presents
several
challenges.
First
is
the
issue
of
the
Russian
word
“chelovek,”
which
means
“person”
and
which
Tolstoy
uses
throughout
the
text.
In
Russian,
it
can
refer
to
either
a
man
or
a
woman,
but
grammatically
it’s
masculine,
so
the
pronoun
that
refers
to
it
is
“on,”
“he.”
It’s
clear
that
Tolstoy
is
referring
to
all
people,
men
and
women,
throughout
For
Every
Day
(even
when
he
refers
to
all
people
as
“brothers”),
and
so
a
few
possible
ways
of
addressing
this
in
English
presented
themselves.
First
would
be
to
use
the
plural
“they”
in
all
instances,
second
would
be
to
use
“he
or
she”
throughout,
and
third
is
to
alternate
“he”
and
“she”
in
different
passages
in
the
text.
However,
my
primary
goal
was
to
render
the
passages
as
readable
as
possible,
and
I
found
that
none
of
these
strategies
achieved
that
goal.
Therefore,
I
opted
for
the
pronoun
“he,”
even
though
it
has
the
potential
of
portraying
Tolstoy’s
philosophy
as
geared
towards
men
only.
Second,
Tolstoy
wrote
in
a
dialect
many
Russians
consider
substandard;
I’ve
even
heard
Russians
say
that
they
prefer
reading
War
and
Peace
in
English
because
Tolstoy’s
dialect
grates
on
their
ears.
Second,
Tolstoy
wrote
many
of
the
aphorisms
as
if
he
were
speaking
to
the
reader,
and
so
they
contain
repetitions
of
the
same
words
and
phrases
that
in
written
form
seem
overly
redundant.
Third,
Tolstoy
frequently
uses
words
that
do
not
easily
translate
into
a
single
English
word.
In
dealing
with
these
challenges,
I
chose
to
focus
on
the
meaning
of
each
quote
rather
than
the
form,
and
where
necessary
I
changed
phrasing
to
convey
what
I
felt
was
the
original
intention
of
the
passage
as
clearly
as
possible.
Another
challenge
is
the
issue
of
passages
from
other
writers
whom
Tolstoy
quotes.
As
we’ve
seen,
Tolstoy
admits
in
his
preface
that
he
“shortened
and
changed
many
of
these
thoughts
according
to
my
own
understanding.”
Tolstoy
is
in
fact
not
faithful
to
the
original
quotes
he
includes
from
other
sources
and
even
alters
their
meaning
from
time
to
time.
For
example,
the
fifth
entry
for
July
5,
attributed
to
the
Quran,
is:
“No
matter
where
you
are,
use
all
your
strength
to
strive
for
union
with
one
another;
don’t
wait
for
God
to
unite
you.”
A
more
complete,
and
different,
version
of
the
quote
is
in
Cycle
of
Reading
for
May
9:
“If
God
had
so
wished,
he
would
have
made
you
a
single
people,
but
he’s
testing
you.
No
matter
where
you
are,
strive
with
all
your
strength
for
the
good;
the
day
will
come
when
God
will
unite
you
all.”xii
19
The
passage
is
Sura
5,
ayat
48,
and
when
translated
verbatim
into
English
it
reads:
“And
if
Allah
had
wished,
he
would
have
made
you
a
single
umma
(nation),
but
he
is
testing
you
in
what
he’s
given
you.
So
strive
as
in
a
race
in
all
virtues.
The
goal
of
you
all
is
to
Allah,
and
he
will
show
you
the
truth
in
the
matters
about
which
you
dispute.”
As
is
easily
seen,
Tolstoy
changes
the
meaning
of
the
original
passage
significantly.
It
is
because
of
this
adaptation
and
reworking
of
quotes
that
I
chose
to
ignore
the
original
passages
and
“back-‐translate”
the
quotes
he
took
from
the
English
language,
even
where
the
original
English
version
is
easily
available:
the
original
quotes
don’t
necessarily
reflect
the
message
Tolstoy
is
attempting
to
convey.
This
is
how
all
such
quotes
should
be
read:
not
as
the
thoughts
of
the
original
authors,
but
as
Tolstoy’s
interpretation
of
them.
Walt
Richmond
La
Crescenta,
California
May,
2017
20
January
January 1
Faith
The law of God consists of doing what He wants from humanity. Since people are all
the same, the law of God is the same for everyone.
The law of God doesn’t consist of rituals, but of works, of doing what God wants of
us and not doing what he doesn’t want us to do.
People can have happy lives only if they know the law of God and follow it.
A person can look upon himself as an animal among other animals, living for today;
he can see himself as part of a family or society, or a nation that lives for ages; he can
even see himself as part of the eternal world that lives in endless time (and in fact he has
no choice but to see himself as such, since his reason inexorably forces him to).
Therefore, in addition to his relationship to the things that are closest to him, a
reasonable person must establish a relationship with the world, endless in both time
and space, and understand it as a unified whole. The establishment of such a
relationship of man to this totality, which he feels himself a part of and from which he
derives guidance for his actions, has been and is still called religion.
21
True religion isn’t a belief established once and for all as a result of supposed
supernatural feats and some laws established by some supernatural being and his
disciples and followers. It is not, as the scholars believe, the remnants of the
superstitions of ancient ignorance that have no relevance to our time. True religion is the
relationship of man to his neighbor and to the entire infinite world, in agreement with
reason and contemporary knowledge.
A wise Jewish proverb states that “the human soul is the lamp of God.” Man is a
weak, unhappy animal until his soul burns with the light of God. Only when this light
burns in his soul does a person become free and strong. It can’t be otherwise, for it’s no
longer his own strength that acts within him, but God’s.
In all beliefs, contemporary as well as those of prior generations, there are rules that
change, but there are also rules that are eternal. These eternal rules comprise true
religion.
22
A religion isn’t true because holy people preach it; holy people preach it because it’s
true. Gotthold Lessing
A true religious law is so clear that people can’t feign ignorance of it. People who
don’t want to follow it have one course of action: reject reason. This they do.
“And one of them, a legalist, testing him, asked him, ‘Teacher! What is the greatest
commandment in the law?’ Jesus told him, ‘Love your Lord God with all your heart and
all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the
second is the same: love your neighbor as you love yourself. In these two commandments
lies the entire law of the prophets.’” Matthew 22: 35-‐40
23
January 2
The Soul
The soul that lives in our body and is bound to it is what we call ourselves.
It is said that you shouldn’t love yourself, but without love for oneself there can be no
life. The issue lies simply in what to love in yourself: your body or your soul.
As a candle can’t burn without fire, so a person can’t live without spiritual strength.
The spirit lives in all people, but not all people realize it. Life is joyful for someone who
knows it, and unhappy for someone who doesn’t.
Based on a Passage by Ramakrishna
There are two paths in life: to live for the body or live for the soul. Live for your body
and you’ll soon learn that the joys of the body do not endure; they weaken year by year
and can end at any moment with death. Live for your soul and you’ll discover the kind
of joy that becomes stronger with each passing year and has no fear of death.
24
Every person who lives a long life began as a baby, then became a child, then either a
man or a woman, and then an elderly person. But no matter how much a person
changes, he’ll always refer to himself as “I.” And this “I” within him remains the same. It
exists in the baby, the adult, and the old man or woman. It is this unchanging “I” that
we call the soul.
We call various vessels for holding water a bucket, a barrel, a bottle, and a ladle, but
we know that the water in them is always the same. Likewise, we call a person’s body a
boy, a girl, a woman, an old man, but we know that in these bodies lives one and the
same spirit.
Many people think that the spiritual is incomprehensible. On the contrary, the
spiritual is most comprehensible; it’s the physical that’s incomprehensible.
If you think of yourself as merely a physical being, you’ll become a riddle you cannot
solve. The solution, which lies in time and space—the origin of the universe and life—
becomes more and more complex and inaccessible to the human mind, which is
incapable of comprehending infinity. But as soon as a person understands that his self
is a spiritual essence confined within the boundaries of a body, there’s no riddle at all,
and he’ll not only understand himself but also the entire world.
25
When we say, “it was,” “it will be,” or “it might be,” we’re talking about earthly,
physical life. But besides this life that was and will be, we know of another life within
ourselves: our spiritual life. And this spiritual life—which never was, will not be and
cannot be, but exists only now—this is true life. A person is best off living this spiritual
life more often than earthly, physical life.
If we compare our physical strength with the incredible power of the world, we’re
nothing. But if we’d look at our soul, our spiritual self, in which the spirit of God lives,
then we’d understand that we’re not insignificant, but are greater than anything that
could be imagined.
People say, “save your soul.” But you can’t save your soul, because it cannot perish.
Your soul belongs to God, and God can’t allow something that’s a part of Him to perish.
You can only cleanse your soul of whatever conceals it from you and let it shine. We
all do this for each other as well as ourselves, and most importantly, God does it for all of
us.
You can save the mortal, but not the eternal.
26
January 3
One Soul in All
Only when you see yourself in every other person will you understand your own life.
A river doesn’t resemble a pond, a pond doesn’t resemble a cask, and a cask doesn’t
resemble a ladle filled with water.
Yet in the river, the pond, the cask, and the ladle is the same water. And so it is with
the spirit that lives in all people. If you look at the body, it seems that each person is
unique. However, all people are the same in spirit, because the same spirit lives in
everyone: in the healthy man, the sick child, the young king, the poor old woman, and
everything that lives. One and the same spirit of God gives life to all.
People often find their lives difficult only because they don’t understand that the
soul that lives in each of them lives in all people. Because of this ignorance people treat
each other with hostility, some are rich and some are poor, some are lords, some are
workers; because of it there is envy and malice. This ignorance is the cause of all human
misfortunes.
27
We’re inseparably united not only with all people, but with all living things. We’re
united by our consciousness that the spiritual source which gives us life is the same in all
beings.
I remember someone once told me that in each person there’s a lot that’s both very
good and philanthropic, and there’s a lot that’s both very bad and spiteful, and that
depending on a person’s mood he can be one or the other. This is absolutely true.
The sight of someone suffering, not only different people but the same person, can
sometimes evoke sympathy and other times something like a sense of satisfaction, which
can escalate into the most vicious malice.
I’ve noticed in myself that I look on all beings sometimes with heartfelt sympathy
and sometimes with total indifference, and occasionally with hatred and even malice.
This clearly demonstrates that within us are two different and directly opposed
modes of comprehension. One is perception of ourselves as individuals and all other
beings as completely foreign: they’re all “not me.” At those times we can’t feel anything
towards them except indifference, envy, hatred, and malice. The other mode of
comprehension is the recognition of our unity with everyone. Using this mode, we see all
beings as the same as ourselves, and therefore the sight of them evokes love within us.
One mode of comprehension divides us with an impenetrable wall, while the other
clears away this wall so that we unite as one. One mode teaches me to see all other beings
as “not me,” while the other teaches me that all beings are the very same self that I
recognize within myself. Arthur Schopenhauer
28
You can’t say that monkeys, dogs, horses and birds aren’t our brothers. If you say
that they’re alien to us, then why not say that those people whom we consider savages
are alien? And if savages are alien, then aren’t the Japanese alien to the Russians and
the Russians alien to the Japanese? Who is our neighbor? There’s only one answer to
that question: don’t ask who your neighbor is, but do unto all living things what you
would like them to do unto you.
You must treat animals as well as people the way you’d like to be treated.
If we weren’t so blindly obedient to the habits that have enslaved us, no perceptive
person could ever make peace with the idea that our nourishment comes from the daily
murder of a huge number of animals, despite the fact that the beneficent Earth gives us
a large variety of vegetable treasures. Bernard de Mandeville
Because of the false notion that our relations with animals have no moral
significance or, to put it in terms of conventional morals, we have no obligations to
animals, outrageous brutality and barbarity is perpetrated. Arthur Schopenhauer
29
January 4
God
You can refuse to think about the nature of the entire world, endless in every
direction, and the nature of your soul, which knows itself, but if only you’d think about
it you couldn’t help but recognize that which we call God.
Anything you can say about God doesn't reflect him. It is impossible to express God
in words. Angelus Silesius
God is what we call that everything of which we feel ourselves a part, and the
perfection we want to attain.
You can be conscious of God either intellectually or morally, depending on your
beliefs. Intellectual cognition is untrustworthy and subject to dangerous errors, while
moral cognition attributes to God only those characteristics that require moral behavior.
This kind of faith is both natural and supernatural. It’s supernatural because it’s
founded on an inexplicable, miraculous moral feeling. It’s natural because it doesn’t
recognize any miracles. Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
30
People often say that God is love, or that love is God. They also say that God is
reason, or that reason is God. This is all wrong. Love and reason are only qualities of
God that we recognize in ourselves; we can never know what resides in God Himself.
We can’t know God. The one thing we can know about Him is His law, His will, as
expressed in the Gospels. Since we know His law, we can conclude that there’s a lawgiver,
someone who’s sent the law, although we can never know the One who sent it. We can
only know for sure that there is a law to which we must submit and from which we can’t
escape, either in life or in death. In life we can take part in the fulfillment of the law,
while in death our part in the law’s fulfillment is finished. New work hasn’t been
assigned, so we’re workers without employment. We can’t know any more than that, and
really, we don’t need to know any more about God.
There is no God for someone who doesn’t know Him within himself.
When I pray, I don’t address God because He’s a person (I even know for a fact that
He’s not a person, because personality is limited, and God has no limits), but because
I’m a person.
If I have green glass in front of my eyes, everything I see is green. I can’t help but see
the world as green, even if I know it’s not.
31
January 5
Life is Union
As a person matures he hears two discordant voices within himself more and more
often. One voice says, “In this world, there is only your own self. You must live only for
that.” The other voice tells him, “Besides your self there is the same self in other people,
and you must live for them as well.” The older a person becomes, the more the first voice
weakens and the more the second voice increases. The first voice divides people, the
second unites them.
God is love, and he who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him. No one has
ever seen God. If we love one another, then God lives in us, and His love is perfected in
us. He who says “I love God” but hates his brother is a liar, for if you don’t love your
brother, whom you can see, how can you love God, whom you can’t? Brothers, let’s love
one another, because love is from God and every person who loves is born of God and
knows God, because God is love. 1 John 4:16, 12, 20, 7, 8
32
All of recorded human history has been a movement towards greater and greater
union. This union is being achieved by the most diverse means: trade relations, modes of
communication, the telegraph, the press, and most of all by the growth of love within
people and their increasing respect for one another. And it’s not only those who work
towards this union who serve it; even those people who oppose it involuntarily serve it.
Therefore, union is one of the outward goals humanity is destined to reach.
In order to fulfill the law of human life, let’s help everything that unites people
and discard everything that divides them. In fulfilling this law, we’ll spontaneously
receive the greatest blessings of which people are worthy, even if we don’t wish for them.
My duty is to fulfill the will of the One who sent me here. I can’t know what His will
is, but by rising to the pinnacle of my reason I can unite with God’s reason, and even
though I don’t know what the ultimate meaning of life is, I know that this meaning
exists, and I know that I must do what it takes to live in harmony with this meaning. I
have to do all I can to unite with people and all that exists. And this is easy for me to do,
because I’m unconsciously moving toward this union.
33
People can only unite with the truth. In order for people to come together as one,
they shouldn’t move toward each other; they have to all move together toward the truth.
Only in truth will they really meet. People don’t want to unite some random person; they
unite only with those who are going the same direction they are.
If there was a gigantic temple in which light fell from above only in the center, people
wouldn’t try to meet separately one on one; they’d all go and meet in the light. Only then
would all people in such a temple unite.
It’s the same in the world. All people are heading towards God, towards the truth,
and they’ll all come together one day.
A person who’s conscious of the wretchedness and mortality of his physical self
places all his consciousness into his spiritual self. However, this shift of one’s physical
self into the spiritual doesn’t weaken and end life, but on the contrary it strengthens it,
albeit in a different direction. The spiritual self can’t help but realize that it’s not merely
similar to, but identical to the spiritual self in all other beings. Naturally, and even
inescapably, this spiritual self tries to unite with what is identical to it. This is the
beginning of spiritual life and its goal.
34
The contradiction between the desire for happiness for your separate being and the
consciousness of the impossibility of achieving this happiness—the consequence of the
inescapable struggle with all other separate beings like yourself that comprise the
world—is destroyed only when a person recognizes his spiritual self and, having
recognized it within himself, understands that he’s not only similar to all other beings
but is exactly the same as them. The contradiction is annihilated when, instead of
struggle, a person living spiritually aims at uniting with that common spiritual source in
all other living beings.
35
January 6
Love
We know that we’ve crossed over from death to life because we love our brothers. He
who does not love his brother abides in death. 1 John 3:14
Some people asked a Chinese sage, “What is science?” He said, “That which teaches
us to know people.” Then they asked him, “What is virtue?” He said, “That which teaches
us to love people.”
In order to live by its own law, a bird must fly, a snake must crawl, a fish must swim,
and a man must love. Therefore, if instead of loving people a man does evil to them, he
behaves as strangely as a bird that tries to swim or a fish that tries to fly.
We say that we love those we like, those who praise us, who do good to us, but we love
them for our own sake, so that our own lives will improve. True love happens when we
love not for our own sake, not because we wish good for ourselves, not because we like
someone or because he’s useful to us, but because we recognize in every other person the
same spirit that lives in us.
Only when we love in this way do we love as Christ taught us: to love not just those
who love us, but those who hate us, our enemies.
36
Whenever someone offends you and evil thoughts about him come to mind, try to
remember that within him lives the same spirit of God that lives within you.
When times are bad, when your life is muddled and you’re afraid of what awaits
you, tell yourself: “I’m going to stop worrying about what’s going to happen to me. I’m
going to love everyone I meet, and what will be, will be.” Just try to live this way and
you’ll see that suddenly everything becomes clear and that you have nothing to fear.
Pitiable and ridiculous is the person who searches for something that’s right behind
him, and just as pitiable and ridiculous is the person who searches for happiness
without realizing that it’s in the love that’s been placed in his heart.
Don’t pay attention to the world and the affairs of men. Gaze into your soul and
you’ll find the happiness you were searching for in places where it doesn’t exist. You’ll
find love, and having found love you’ll realize that the blessings of love are endless, and
that once you have these blessings you need do nothing more.
Based on a Saying by Krishna
37
If you love a person, but only the person and not the spirit that’s within him, there’s
a good chance you’ll stop loving him and begin to despise and even hate the person you
used to love.
It’s best of all to start the day like this: As soon as you wake up say to yourself, “Can’t
I bring joy to at least one person today?” Friedrich Nietzsche
If you can’t teach yourself to look for occasions to do good like a hunter seeking
game, then at least don’t let a chance to do good slip by you.
Kindness in dealing with people is absolutely essential. If you’re unkind towards
someone, you’re neglecting your primary responsibility.
38
January 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
A person lives well only when he lives in harmony with other people and with God,
but the human body wants happiness for itself alone, and people yield to this deception.
As soon as a person lives for his body instead of his soul, he parts from people and from
God.
It’s called a sin in the field when the ploughman doesn’t restrain the plough and it
jumps out of the furrow and fails to hold onto what it should. It’s the same thing in life.
Sin is when a person doesn’t restrain his body and it breaks from the path and doesn’t
do what it should.
Without sins and repentance for sins there is no life. Sins are like an eggshell or a
seed: freedom from sins is like a crack in the egg or the seed, through which the germ of
life begins to grow and is exposed to the influences of air and light. In the same way the
spiritual source of a person, having made its way through sins, begins to grow and is
exposed to the influences of the divine source of which it is a part.
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The path of truth is straight and clear, and you won’t stumble if you follow it. As
soon as you feel that your feet are getting muddled in the worries of earthly life, know
that you’ve strayed from the path of truth.
If people’s bodies didn’t separate them from each other the spirit of God that lives
within all people would unite as one. Without the body there can be no life. Life is in
liberation from the body.
There are vices within us that remain only due to other vices, and which disappear as
soon as we annihilate the vices on which they’re founded, just as tree branches fall when
you cut the trunk. Blaise Pascal
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January 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
The first and most barbaric sin is the sin of the pleasing of the body. It’s a sin
because pleasing the body can never bring you happiness. A person’s life isn’t in his
body, it’s in his soul.
You should serve the body only when it demands attention, not when you think
about what might please it. Thinking about pleasing the body is living life backwards:
the body doesn’t serve the soul, but rather the soul serves the body.
Only the body can suffer; the spirit knows no suffering. The weaker your spiritual
life, the more you suffer. Therefore, if you don’t want to suffer, live more for your soul
and less for your body.
It’s dangerous to please the body both because it’s never satisfied and just wants
more and because the more you serve the body the more demands it makes, so you’ll
never satisfy it.
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“Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be,” it says in the Gospels. If a
person considers his body his treasure and wants tasty food, a quiet home, beautiful
clothes and all sorts of comforts for his body, he’ll put all his energy into that. And the
more a person puts his energy into his body, the less that remains for his spiritual life.
If a person believes his strength is in his physical rather than his spiritual life, he’s
like a bird that walks from place to place on its pathetic little legs and doesn’t use its
wings to fly where it needs to go.
An irrational child cries and screams if he doesn’t get something his body needs. As
soon as he gets what his body needs he calms down and doesn’t ask for anything more.
But not so for adults when they believe their life is in the body rather than the soul. Such
people never grow calm and always need something.
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Getting used to luxury is a blatant error, a sin, a total lack of reasoning. It’s a lack of
reasoning because the more your body needs the more you have to work to feed, dress
and house it. This mistake only goes unnoticed by the wealthy: those who through some
sort of swindle or another have arranged their affairs so that other people have to work
for them, and not for themselves. So for the wealthy this is not only a lack of reasoning,
it’s a foul affair.
The science of medicine, as it’s pursued in our day, is a blatant sign of the takeover
of the world by the sin of carnal satisfaction. Science, with all its tricks, flaws, delusions
and deceptions originated and has flourished because of this widespread sin of carnal
satisfaction. People say: “We want to live contrary to the law of our lives, we want to live
for the sake of satisfying our bodies, and we don’t want any harmful consequences for
such a life.” Medicine says: “You can. We’ve done it, are doing it, and will continue to do
it.”
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January 9
The Sin of Parasitism
From the sin of pleasing the body emerges another sin: laziness, sloth.
A person can’t live without working. If a person didn’t work, he’d die of hunger and
all sorts of deprivations. Everyone knows this. If a person doesn’t work and doesn’t die
or live on charity but instead lives in luxury, it means that through cunning or force he’s
taken from others what they worked for.
Let him who wishes not to work not eat, either. Paul the Apostle1
If you do a lot of work for others, don’t feel weighed down by this work and don’t
hope for praise, but know that if you love what you’re doing for others, your labor is
most valuable of all for your own soul.
You can’t escape from manual labor without losing intellectual strength and the
ability to understand truth. I have no doubt that the mistakes and vices of our literature
and philosophy—their excessive subtlety, femininity, and melancholy—should be
ascribed to the weak and morbid condition of our literary world. Let a book be not quite
as good, but let the person who writes it be a better and more capable person, and not as
we see him now: a ridiculous contrast to what he writes. Ralph Waldo Emerson
1
This is Tolstoy’s reference. The passage is from 2 Thessalonians 3:10.
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There’s nothing wrong with having fun.
But having fun is wrong when it requires preparation, and the people who make
these preparations don’t share in the fun.
All people of the upper classes—and I’m not speaking metaphorically but am
describing reality—grow up and are educated in a nest of thieves, and only when they
mature and look around do they understand where they are and what they are. Then
they deal with this situation in various ways. Some become thieves straightaway and
start robbing people. Others believe they have a right to commit their own robberies
because of their imaginary, unnecessary concerns about the people who’ve been robbed,
without actually approving of robbery. A third group becomes disgusted and wants to
destroy the thieves’ nest, but they’re weak and few in number. There’s one way to do it:
realize that it’s a thieves’ nest and refuse to participate in it.
Charity is only a good deed when you give out of your own labors.
There’s a proverb that says: “a dry hand is tight-‐fisted, a sweaty hand is generous.”
Likewise, in the “Teachings of the Twelve Apostles” it says: “Let your charity come from
your own hands.”
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January 10
The Sin of Lechery
Jesus Christ taught the following about sexual relations:
“Recalling the words of Moses, he said, ‘You have been told not to fornicate. But I say
to you that whoever looks upon a woman with lust has already fornicated with her in his
soul.’” (Matthew 5:27-‐28)
These words mean that according to the teaching of Christ you should first and
foremost try to be celibate, and if you can remain completely celibate, that’s best of all.
Just as it’s a mistake and a sin to look upon food as entertainment, it’s an even
greater mistake and sin to look upon sexual desire as entertainment. As soon as you
look upon food as entertainment there will be more privations and suffering than joys
because of it, both for you and others; it’s exactly the same way with sexual desire. As
soon as you look upon this act as entertainment, then instead of joy there will be all
kinds of trouble, and most of all harm to the soul of the person you perform the act
with, and frequently the death of the children who are born of such a union.
It’s not unreasonable to suggest that people want to marry and have children
because they feel too weak to fulfill God’s will themselves, and so they place their hope in
their children. You can see the confirmation of this notion in the fact that the lower a
person stands spiritually, the stronger is his desire for sexual relations, and vice versa.
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Marriage is a union of a man and a woman in which they promise each other that if
they are to have children, it will only be with each other.
Don’t forget that you never have been and never will be completely chaste, if not in
deed then in thought, but nevertheless that you’re at a certain stage in approaching
chastity. Therefore, never be despondent on this path. When temptation seizes you and
even when you fall, tell yourself: I’m falling, but I hate to fall and I know that if not
today, nevertheless victory will come not to my body, but to me, to my true spiritual self.
If a person sees gratification in sexual relations, even within marriage (as it happens
in our world), he’ll inevitably fall into debauchery. Therefore both men and women
should strive for complete chastity, and then things will take care of themselves.
The more beautiful a woman is, the more integrity she must have, because only
through integrity can she counteract the danger that her beauty can bring her.
Gotthold Lessing
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January 11
The Sin of Ill Will
The carnal sins of overeating, laziness, and sloth are bad in and of themselves, but
they’re particularly bad in that they open the way for the worst sin: ill will and coldness
towards others.
If a person thinks that his happiness lies in pleasing the body, in delicious food, in
idleness, in voluptuousness, he’ll always be in conflict with others, because what he
needs, others need as well.
We only get angry with people when we live for our body and not our soul. The soul
is the same in everyone. How can it be angry with itself?
You think that the person you’re angry with is your enemy, but your main enemy is
the anger toward your brother that’s in your heart. Therefore, make peace with your
brother as soon as possible and suffocate this torturous feeling within you.
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You can only deal coldly with inanimate objects: you can chop down trees, make
bricks and forge iron, but you can’t deal with people without love, just as you can’t deal
with bees without caution. The nature of the bee is such that if you deal with them
without caution, both you and the bees will suffer.
If you don’t love people, then sit quietly, take care of yourself and deal with
inanimate objects however you want; just don’t deal with people. If you let yourself deal
with people coldly, before you know it you’ll stop being a person and become a beast,
doing evil to others and torturing yourself.
People devote themselves to spite and seeking ways of offending a person against
whom they have a grudge. So you have to keep this froth of spite within you from getting
whipped up and beware of creating a bitter nest of malice.
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We often fail to see others’ good deeds, and we fail to see them because there are
some people we simply don’t like. This is a huge mistake. In order to escape the grievous
feeling of animosity towards someone we have to do the exact opposite: we have to take
special care to see and value the good that’s in a person we don’t like.
Don’t despise or overly respect anyone. If you despise someone you’ll overlook the
good that’s within him, and if you overly respect someone you’ll expect too much from
him. Treating every person fairly means not excessively elevating him as an individual
physical being but rather respecting him as one with God and your own spiritual
essence.
The Buddhists say that every sin is committed out of stupidity. This is true of all sins,
but especially of the sin of ill will. A fisherman or a fowler gets angry with the fish or the
bird because he can’t catch it, and I get angry with a person because he does what he
needs to do and not what I want him to. Aren’t we equally stupid?
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January 12
The Temptation of Pride
It’s bad when a person becomes angry with his brother rather than loving him. But
it’s even worse when a person assures himself that he’s not the same as others but better
than them and so he can treat them differently than he’d want them to treat him.
It’s stupid for one person to consider himself better than other people, but it’s even
stupider for an entire nation to consider itself better than other nations. And every
nation, the majority of every nation, lives in this stupid and harmful sin.
Just as a person cannot raise himself physically, a person cannot exalt himself.
It’s stupid when people are proud of themselves or their appearance, but it’s even
stupider when they’re proud of their parents, ancestors, friends, class, or nation.
Most of the world’s evil is committed because of this stupid pride. Because of it
people argue, families feud, and nations go to war.
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People worry about establishing equality according to their own laws but don’t wish
to know about the equality that’s been established by the eternal law, which their own
laws violate.
A proud person becomes encrusted in ice, through which no good feelings can pass.
Pride is stupid. A proud person considers himself better than others. However, there
isn’t just one such person in the world; there are many, and each considers himself
better than all the others.
Pride is particularly vile when people are proud of things they should be ashamed of:
their power over others, their wealth.
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January 13
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
People do much evil for the sake of their carnal desires, but they do even more evil to
gain the praise of others.
Worldly wisdom consists in living like everyone else. True wisdom consists in living
for your soul, even though everyone else will condemn such a life.
A person can become accustomed to the worst of lives just as long as everyone
around him lives the same way.
It’s finally time for man to recognize his worth. Is he really nothing more than a
being born without any rules governing him? Is it fitting for me to look around timidly
and see if I please people or not? No, let me hold my head firmly, high on my shoulders.
Life wasn’t given to me for show, but so that I would live it. I recognize my duty to live for
my soul. I must concern myself with my true purpose, not with people’s opinions of me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People say, “One person can’t oppose everyone.” But if your cause is a good one, then
you’re not alone: God is always with those who do good. And whoever God supports, all
people will support sooner or later.
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Man spends the first part of his life primarily serving the demands of his carnal
nature. The first stage of development he usually passes through is a struggle with the
animal instincts he indulges in for the sake of conforming to the opinions of the people
with whom he lives. The next step is that most difficult struggle between concern for
people’s opinions and submission to the demands of the soul and conscience alone.
A person often continues to live a bad life despite the reproach of his conscience
simply because others are doing the same thing. Those other people do the same thing
he does because he’s doing it. And so he’s living a bad life because others live badly, and
others live badly because he lives among them, also living badly. If you want life to
improve, someone has to start, someone has to stop thinking about what other people
say, reject their judgments and start living according to his conscience instead of the
way others live.
You’re afraid people will despise you for your good deeds, but fair-‐minded people
can never despise you for that, and everyone else is of no consequence to you, so what are
you afraid of? A skilled carpenter doesn’t get upset because a person who knows
nothing of his craft doesn’t like his good work.
People who despise you for your good deeds don’t understand what is good for
humanity. Based on a Passage by Epictetus
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If you always accept human opinion as just and live by it, that means you don’t
believe in God. John Ruskin
The most certain way to acquire the reputation as a man of virtue is to work on
yourself in order to become one. Xenophon (Socratic Dialogues)
If you look at something on a ship while you’re sailing, you don’t notice that you’re
moving. If you look at the shore, then you immediately see that you’re sailing. It’s the
same with life. When all people fail to live as they should, you don’t notice your own bad
life if you look only at them. However, you only have to come to your senses and begin to
live life a Godly life, and it will immediately become clear to you how badly everyone
lives. Blaise Pascal
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January 14
The Temptation of Wealth
A compassionate person is never rich. A rich person is most certainly not
compassionate. Manchurian Proverb
People of the working class often try to join the class of the well-‐to-‐do, who live off
other people’s labor. They call this entering the company of good people, when in fact it’s
leaving the company of good people for the company of bad people.
People seek wealth, but if they only knew how much goodness people lose when they
acquire and live with wealth they’d flee from wealth as fervently as they now try to
acquire it.
How far from truth is he who, living in a Christian society among those in need, not
only possesses wealth but revels in it.
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Only a person who believes that he’s not like everyone else but better than them can
possess wealth among the poor with a clear conscience. Only by thinking that he’s better
than others can such a person justify his wealth while living among those in need. And
what’s most astonishing is that the very possession of wealth, which makes a person
worse than other, poorer people, is what a rich person uses as the main evidence of his
superiority over the poor. “I’m wealthy because I’m better than others. And I’m better
than others because I’m wealthy.” This is what such a person says.
It’s difficult for a wealthy person to enter the Kingdom of God. It’s easier for a camel
to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.
Did God really give something to one person that he didn’t give to another? Did the
God of all exclude one of His children? If you demand a special right to use His gifts,
produce the bequest in which He deprives your brothers of their inheritance.
Hugues-‐Félicité Robert de Lamennais
Wealth never gives satisfaction. Demands always imperceptibly grow with the
increase of wealth, so that the more wealth you have the less your demands are satisfied.
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Why does a person want to be rich? Why does he need expensive horses, fine clothes,
a beautiful home, the right to enter public places, entertainment? Only because of a lack
of spiritual life.
Give this person an inner spiritual life and he’ll never need anything.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who owns land in excess of that necessary to feed himself and his family doesn’t
just contribute to the need, poverty and deprivation from which the masses suffer, but is
himself the cause of it.
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January 15
The Temptation of Inequality
Always keep in mind that within every person lives the same God who lives within
you, and when you meet someone, no matter who it is, never forget that there is nothing
greater or more exalted in this world than what is in that person. Therefore, no matter
how evil a person's acts are, you must consider the person himself, no matter who he is,
the same as God and must love him as you love yourself and do for him what you would
want done for yourself if you were in his place.
People are called your excellency, your radiance, your grace, your highness, kind sir,
my dear fellow, sir, while a single title is appropriate for all and offensive to none. That
title is brother. This title is also good in that it reminds us of the Father who has made us
all brothers.
The deception of people’s inequality and the resultant intoxication of power and
obsequiousness cause people, when united in a governmental system, to be uniquely
capable of performing acts that violate their conscience without feeling its reproaches.
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All people know certainly, firmly and with their entire being that all people are
equal, and yet they not only see around them the division of people into two castes—
one that labors, endures oppression, lacks what it needs and suffers, and the other that
sits around idly oppressing people, living in luxury and indulging in merrymaking—
they all involuntarily join one side or the other of this division of humanity despite how
repulsive their rational minds find it, and so they also can’t help but suffer from
consciousness of the contradiction in which they live.
People of antiquity and even the Middle Ages believed, believed with all certainty,
that people are unequal, that the only true people were Persians, Greeks, Romans, or
French, but we can no longer believe that. Therefore, people in our time who champion
the aristocracy or patriotism can’t possibly believe what they say.
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No one lives a life of true equality like children do. And how guilty adults are when
they destroy this holy feeling by teaching them that there are kings, millionaires, and
celebrities whom you must treat with respect, and that there are servants, workers, and
poor people whom you must treat with condescension. “And he who seduces the weakest
among you . . .”
Christianity was distorted just like all other religions, with the single difference that
because Christianity proclaimed as its fundamental basis the equality of all people as
children of God with particular clarity, all its teachings had to be more grossly distorted
in order to conceal this basis.
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January 16
The Temptation of Punishment
Nothing impedes the realization of the Kingdom of God on Earth like people’s desire
to establish it by actions that are contrary to it: by violence.
“You’ve heard it said: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I tell you: do not resist
evil. If someone strikes your right cheek, turn the other one to him.” This means that it is
better to suffer from an evildoer twice than to commit evil toward someone else.
It would seem obvious that evil can’t annihilate evil but only increase it. Nevertheless,
because of both our own malevolence and the doctrine that it’s useful to punish people,
we act in exactly the opposite manner that we should and, by repaying evil with evil, we
only increase that which we wish to escape.
How far our lives are from a Christian life can be seen in the way we consider
punishment useful both in the upbringing of children and in the lives of adults. The law
of Christ orders us not only to forgive but to repay evil with good. We take these words
as a joke and continue to do the opposite.
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If you hit a dog or if another dog bites him, he growls. A person acts the same way
when, having been hit, he immediately wants to repay it with another blow and in many
cases follows through. No matter how irrational such behavior is for a reasonable
person, especially a Christian, such actions do a thousand times less harm than the
doctrine that states that someone who commits a bad deed can be punished. From this
false doctrine come fights, courts, prisons, executions and wars.
If we do what we need with a stone, soil, or water, we only expect these things to be
drawn back into the earth. When we do something with plants, we know that in
addition to being drawn back into the earth they have the ability to grow, blossom, and
produce seeds, and so we place them where they have what they need: moisture, air, sun
and soil. When we deal with animals—cows, horses, dogs, cats and the like—we know
that they not only return to the soil and that they eat, grow and multiply, but that they
have the ability to remember, experience fear and develop habits, and so when we deal
with them we punish and frighten them. Therefore it’s clear that when we deal with
people, who have the ability not only to return to the soil, eat, remember, and fear, but
also to think, we have to deal with them differently than the way we deal with stones,
plants and animals. People forget this when they commit violence against others without
taking into consideration their rational abilities. It’s the same as dealing with a plant the
way you deal with a stone, or dealing with an animal as if it were a plant.
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The foundation of pagan life was revenge and violence. That’s how it had to be, too.
The foundation of our Christian life, so it would seem, must inescapably be love and the
rejection of violence, yet violence still rules. Why is this? It’s because what we preach as
the doctrine of Christ is in fact not his doctrine.
He who refuses to forgive destroys the bridge over which he must one day cross, since
every person needs forgiveness. Sir Edward Herbert
In ancient times it was considered just and necessary, both in personal relations and
in relations between peoples, to repay evil with evil. It was believed that by repaying evil
with evil you could eradicate evil. But evil wasn’t eradicated; it only grew worse. People
started to fear one another and started to arm themselves, torture, abuse and kill each
other. Then Christ’s doctrine appeared.
This doctrine taught love for all and forbade repaying offense with offense, evil with
evil, and taught everyone that according to the law of love, regardless of the temptations,
if people would only stop repaying evil with evil they would certainly defeat evil with
good and not only escape all their enemies but turn their enemies into their friends.
Based on a Passage by Adin Ballou
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January 17
The Superstition of Violence
One of the most harmful superstitions is the belief that you can force people to live a
good life through violence.
It’s impossible for one group of people to improve the lives of others. Each person
can improve his life only through his own effort.
You can understand why rulers believe that they’re able to organize other people’s
lives and that such organization is useful to them and to those they rule. But it’s
astounding when the people they rule believe that this organization they’ve haphazardly
been subjected to, which deprives them of the fruits of their labor and their freedom, is
useful and beneficial to them.
Only those who profit from ruling others can believe that it’s possible to structure
the other people’s lives through violence. For people who haven’t fallen under the spell of
this superstition, it should be clear that people’s lives change for the better only through
their inner spiritual transformation, and not through any sort of violence they commit
or that others commit against them.
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People want freedom, and to acquire it they submit to a societal structure that has
been violently imposed upon them: slavery.
Nothing interferes with the improvement of people’s lives like their desire to improve
it through violence. More than anything else, violence committed by one group against
another distracts people from the only thing that can improve their lives: trying to
improve themselves.
It’s impossible to liberate people in the external world through force any further
than they’ve freed themselves within. Alexander Herzen
We don’t and can’t know what happiness for all people consists of, but we know full
well that gaining this common happiness is possible only through the eternal law of
kindness, revealed through human wisdom and residing in the hearts of all people.
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The spirit of Christ, which the powerful have tried to drag down from its heights,
still continues to appear everywhere. Has the spirit of the Gospels really failed to
penetrate people’s consciousness? Have they really not begun to see the light? Has not
comprehension of rights and responsibilities become clearer for each person? Have not
the calls for more just laws, for institutions that defend the weak, based upon just
equality, been heard everywhere? Is not the former hostility between peoples that
forcibly divided them being extinguished? Do nations not feel their brotherhood with
others? Already the oppressors are trembling, as if a voice within them is warning them
of their imminent demise. Agitated by terrible visions, they feverishly squeeze in their
hands the chains with which they shackle the people, the chains which Christ came to
free the people from and which will soon fall. A noise from beneath the earth disturbs
their sleep. In the secret depths of society work is being accomplished that they cannot
stop no matter how they try and whose continual success plunges them into
inexpressible anguish. This is the work of a bud that’s ready to blossom, the work of love
which will wipe sin from the earth, reinvigorate dwindling life, comfort the suffering,
break the fetters of the imprisoned, and open a new way of life to the people: the inner
law that will no longer be violence but people’s love for each other.
Hugues-‐Félicité Robert de Lamennais
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January 18
The Superstition of Government
The superstition that some people can arrange other people’s lives through violence
creates and entrenches an even worse superstition: the belief that people can’t live
without distinguishing their nation from others and without establishing an authority
that everyone must obey.
When man’s law contradicts God’s law, you cannot and must not obey it.
People follow human laws more strictly than the law of God. However, it shouldn’t be
this way, because the Divine law is the same for all people everywhere. Human laws are
not only different from place to place, but even in a single state they’re different from
day to day.
As soon as authority appeared in the world, it became the goal of everyone’s
ambitions. Government, authority, power, state—all these words mean the same thing:
each person sees in them the means to raise himself and oppress and tread upon those
like him. People of all parties incessantly turn their eyes to authority as their only goal.
Pierre-‐Joseph Proudhon
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Soon humanity will pass the stage of development where governments are necessary.
Government is a historically necessary evil, a transient form of development. Along with
the inevitable destruction of government, all that we call legal rights, all the so-‐call legal
regulations for people’s lives that come from above in the guise of legislation will likewise
disappear. Everyone already feels that this moment is near, that the change will soon
occur, and that our age will see it. Mikhail Bakunin
Governmental power lies in the fact that in its hands is authority and a false
doctrine that creates and sustains authority. Authority allows the propagation of the
false doctrine, obliterating all that opposes it, and this false doctrine makes people think
that what is dangerous is useful, necessary and beneficent.
There’s only one way to liberate yourself from the evil of governmental organization:
refuse to participate in the violence that sustains the state.
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When Socrates was asked where he was born, he said, “on Earth.” When he was
asked in which state, he said, “the universal.”
These are great words. In order to stop people from hating others and doing evil to
them only because they live beyond our piece of the Earth and submit to a different
group of people than we do, each person must remember that political borders and the
multitude of governmental authorities are human creations, and that before God we are
all inhabitants of one and the same Earth and all subject to God’s law, not some human
authority.
What is contemporary government, which it seems people can’t live without?
There may have been a time when governments were necessary and less harmful
than remaining defenseless against one’s armed neighbors, but today’s governments are
unnecessary and significantly more harmful than the things they frighten their people
with.
Governments might have been, I won’t say useful, but harmless only if they were
comprised of sinless, holy people, as it is assumed the Chinese have. But indeed, by their
very activity, based upon the use of violence, governments are composed of people who
are the very opposite of holy—the most insolent, base and depraved people.
Therefore a government, and particularly a government that possesses military
power, is the most harmful and dangerous institution in the world.
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In its broadest sense a government is nothing more than an organization in which
the majority are subjugated to the authority of a minority. This minority is subjugated to
a smaller minority, and that minority to an even smaller one, etc. And so it ends with a
handful of people or, in some cases, a single person. This person acquires power over the
rest through military force. In such cases, this person is always the one who’s more
cunning, insolent and unscrupulous than the rest.
Such a person holds full control not only over the property and lives of all the people,
but also over their spiritual and moral development, education, and religious leadership.
This is the terrible machine people have created for themselves: authority that can be
seized by whoever comes along (and without doubt it’s always seized by the most
morally corrupt person), and people slavishly submit to the person who’s seized power
and then wonder why their lives are bad. They’re afraid of bombs and anarchists, but
they’re not afraid of this terrible institution that threatens them with horrific disasters
at every moment.
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If you study the millions of laws that govern man, you can easily see that they fit into
three categories: defense of property, defense of authority, and defense of person. If you
then study each of these categories you’ll be led to the inescapable conclusion that
legislation is useless and harmful. Laws concerning property aren’t established to
guarantee individuals and society the products of their labor. On the contrary, they exist
to seize from the producer part of his production and defend the property of a handful
of people who’ve stolen it either from those who produced it or from all of society. As for
laws that protect the government, we know very well that the purpose of every
government without exception is to defend and preserve by force the privileges of the
upper classes: the aristocracy, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie. Laws concerning the
defense of person, crime prevention and their penalties are just as useless and
dangerous. Pyotr Kropotkin
A government is particularly dangerous because it continually envelops itself in
external greatness and through it commands respect for all the crimes it commits, and
thus perverts people’s opinions.
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January 19
The Superstition of the Church
This is the judgment: light came into the world, but people loved darkness more
than light, because their acts were evil.
For anyone who does evil hates the light and does not go toward the light because it
would expose his acts because they are evil, while he who travels on the path of truth
goes toward the light where it will be clear that his acts were done in God. John 3:19-‐21
People often think that they believe in the law of God, but they just believe what
everyone else does. No one believes in the law of God; for them, the law of God is that
which suits their life and doesn’t interfere in their business.
When people blindly believe teachings that are presented to them as the law of God,
they deprive themselves of their God-‐given ability to reason, which is the only way they
can know the true law of God.
All religions talk about themselves as the one true faith and about all others as false.
This alone is enough to prove that none of them are true or can be true. True faith is
always that with which all people are in agreement.
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If people live in sin and temptation they can’t be at peace. Such people can do one of
two things: admit their guilt before man and God and stop sinning, or continue their
sinful lives, committing foul acts, and call their evil deeds good. For such people,
religious doctrines are contrived that allow them to consider themselves righteous while
living foul lives.
Christian revelation was the doctrine of the equality of all, of God as our father and
men as brothers. This struck at the very heart of the enslavement that had been
crushing people, smashed the chains that bound the slaves and annihilated the great lie
that gave a small handful of people the ability to live in luxury at the expense of the
workers’ labor and held the workers in darkness. This is why the original form of
Christianity was persecuted and why the wealthy classes distorted it when it became
clear that it couldn’t be destroyed. And so it ceased being true Christianity and became
a tool of those classes. Henry George
74
Faith teaches people how to understand life. For thousands of years no one
understood what people today understand, and therefore many of the faiths that were
professed in antiquity are unfit for us. And yet our children study these very faiths. They
think that they’re true because they’re old. This is a major mistake.
If in childhood a person is given wrong answers to questions that are inherent in his
soul, once he’s an adult either he’ll stop thinking about these questions, the most
important in life, or if he remembers the false answers given to him in childhood, he’ll
come up with cunning explanations of why they’re correct.
So don’t talk to children like this, and most of all don’t teach them that something is
holy, indisputable truth if you either don’t believe it or have doubts about it. To do so is a
great crime.
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Did God really tell us to abandon our reason? That which is presented to us as the
revelation of God only demeans God, ascribing human passions to Him. Instead of
clarifying our understanding of the Supreme Being, individual dogmas only muddle it.
Instead of enriching our understanding of God, they impoverish it. To the mystical
incomprehensibility that surrounds Him they add mindless contradictions that make
men conceited, insufferable, and cruel. Instead of establishing peace on Earth they bring
war. I ask myself: What is the purpose? And I have no answer. I see in it only crime and
human suffering.
They tell me that revelation is required to teach people to serve God. As evidence they
show me various religions that are established around the world and they refuse to see
that the differences between them are a result of these revelations. As soon as people
take it upon themselves to speak for God, each speaks for God in his own way and
makes Him say what he wants Him to. If we would only listen to what God says in the
human heart there would be only one religion on Earth.
They say there must be a single form of worship, but the worship that God asks for is
the worship of the heart, and if it’s sincere it’s always the same. It’s stupid to imagine
that God considers priests’ garments, the sequence of the words they say, the movements
they perform at the altar, and their genuflections important. No my friend, stand tall
and you’ll be sufficiently close to the ground no matter what. God wants you to bow your
soul to the truth, and in this is the duty of the religions of all nations and all people.
Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
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There are people who take upon themselves the right to decide for others what their
relationship to God and the world should be, and there are people—the vast
majority—who give this right to others and blindly believe what they say. Both are
equally guilty and pathetic.
Our church Christianity is built on empty and shaky foundations. If you rely upon it
you’ll constantly be in danger and always afraid of something. A strong expression of
doubt that shakes all its foundations arouses thunder and lightning from the church’s
representatives, and the more fundamental the doubt, the greater the alarm.
Are people afraid that the mountains will collapse? Religious tradition is ready to
collapse at any moment. Theodore Parker
77
It’s a great evil and injustice that people of different religions teach their children
their faiths. Teaching your children your own religion, which doesn’t agree with the
religions of other peoples, is one of those temptations that destroys the world, just as
Christ said. What right do we have to profess as truth something that billions of people
dispute? The one thing we can and must teach children is the body of truths common to
all the peoples of the world.
Faith is confirmed by understanding. The best of religions is the clearest one. The
one filled with secrets and contradictions in the doctrine it preaches makes me wary of it
because of its very doctrine. The God I worship isn’t the God of obscurity. He didn’t give
me reason so that He could forbid me from using it. When someone tells me I should
subordinate my reason I see an insult against his Creator. Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
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January 20
The Superstition of Science
People often think that the more you know, the better. This isn’t true. It’s not
important to know a lot; it’s important to know the most necessary of all there is to
know.
Socrates once said that stupidity isn’t a lack of knowledge but rather failure to know
yourself and the belief that you know that which you don’t. He called this both stupidity
and ignorance.
Wise men are never scholars; scholars are never wise. Lao Tsu
Owls can see in the dark, but they’re blind in the light of day. It’s the same with
scholars. They know a lot of unnecessary scientific trivia but don’t and can’t know the
most important matter in life: how a person should live in the world.
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Just as there are false doctrines in religion, there are false doctrines in science. This
false doctrine consists in accepting as true science that which people who’ve taken upon
themselves the right to define true science consider true. As soon as science ceases to be
something all people need and becomes whatever those who’ve taken upon themselves
the right to define it call science, science can’t help but be false. This is what has
happened in our world.
Science now occupies the position in our world that the church occupied 200-‐300
years ago.
There are the same idle high priests: the professors; the same councils and synods as
the church: academies, universities, conferences.
There’s the same faith and absence of criticism, the same disagreements that fail to
disturb the faithful. The same incomprehensible words taking the place of thought.
The same self-‐assured pride.
“How can you talk to him? He denies revelation and the church.”
“How can you talk to him? He denies science.”
All that in our day is called science, nearly all of it, is just a fiction of wealthy people
that they need merely to pass their free time.
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The mind gains strength from the study of what’s necessary and important for man
and weakens with the study of the unnecessary and insignificant just as assuredly as the
body grows stronger or weaker from fresh or stale air and food. John Ruskin
If a person knows all the sciences and can speak every language but doesn’t know
the nature of the eternal world in which he lives, and most importantly doesn’t know
why he lives and what’s demanded of him, he’s less enlightened than an illiterate old
woman who believes in God, realizes that she lives by His will and knows that this God
demands righteousness from her. She’s more enlightened than the scholar because she
knows the answer to the most important question: what is her life and how must she
live? That same scientist, who has the most evasive answers to the most complex but
unimportant questions of life, doesn’t know the answer to the main question facing
every rational person: what is the purpose of my life and what must I do?
As an Egyptian accepted the propositions that his priests forwarded as the truth not
as we look upon them now—as beliefs—but as revelation of higher knowledge, i.e.
science, so nowadays in exactly the same way naïve people who know nothing of science
accept as indubitable truth that which is proclaimed by the modern priests of science—
they have faith in it.
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January 21
Effort
“The Kingdom of God is entered through effort.” “The Kingdom of God in within
you.” (Luke 16:16, 17:21)
These two verses of the Gospels mean that in order for the soul to unite with God
and for the Kingdom of God to come to be, effort is needed. Only by struggling with
themselves can people overcome those sins, temptations, superstitions and deceptions
that interfere with drawing nearer to the Kingdom of God.
It’s more valuable than anything for a person to be free and live according to his own
will rather than someone else’s. In order to live this way, you have to live for your soul.
And in order to live for your soul, you must make a forceful effort to suppress the lusts
of your body.
The law of the life of the wise isn’t clear, but it becomes clearer and clearer for a
person who exerts effort to follow it. The law of the life of worldly people is clear, but it
becomes more and more muddled the more a person follows it. Confucius
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Sins, temptations and superstitions conceal a person’s soul from him. In order to
reveal his own soul to himself, a person must exert effort. Such effort against sins,
temptations, superstitions and deceptions is the main purpose of every person’s life.
Obstacles on the path to goodness that my soul’s efforts overcome bring me new
strength: that which threatened to be a barrier to the achievement of goodness has itself
become good, and a bright path suddenly opens up where once no escape was visible.
Marcus Aurelius
Virtue is nothing more than doing what needs to be done. In order to do what needs
to be done, you always have to exert effort. If you do good out of habit rather than effort,
it’s not virtue. A virtuous person always moves forward, and in order to move forward
you have to exert effort.
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People often think that in order to be a true Christian you have to do special,
extraordinary things. This isn’t true. A Christian doesn’t need to perform exceptional,
extraordinary acts, but merely exert continuous effort to free himself from sins,
temptations, superstitions and deceptions.
Lessing once said that man’s joy doesn’t come from the truth itself but rather from
the act of obtaining it. You could say the same thing about virtue. It’s not virtue that’s
valuable, but the approach to virtue through effort.
Life is a continual war between body and soul. The body divides, the soul unites. In
the battle between the body and the soul, the soul always wins. However, there’s never a
final victory. The body assaults the soul once again and tears it asunder, but the soul
again defeats it. And with each new assault the body becomes weaker and weaker, and
the soul becomes stronger and stronger.
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January 22
Restraint in Word and Deed
If you’re not sure whether to act or not, know in advance that it’s always better to
restrain yourself than to act. If you were unable to restrain yourself and you knew for
certain that the act was good, you wouldn’t be asking yourself whether to act or not. If
you’re asking, then it’s better to do nothing than to act.
Not doing what you should isn’t as harmful as not restraining yourself from doing
what you shouldn’t.
The Chinese sage Lao Tsu preached inaction as the highest good. At first this seems
strange, but if you look at all the evil that exists because we do things that are
unnecessary and harmful you’ll believe it.
If people would use one-‐tenth of one percent of the energy they use to become
wealthy, amuse themselves, create animosity between individuals and nations to restrain
themselves from doing things that contradict their reason and conscience, how quickly
the evil from which we now suffer would disappear.
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Most people we call evil became that way because they took their bad disposition as
their natural state and gave in to it instead of exerting effort to resist it.
If someone upsets or offends you, beware of doing anything at all as long as you’re
agitated, and if you must act, calm your spiritual agitation first.
Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
In our day all people know that the entire structure of their lives contradicts their
conscience, but threats, executions, bribes, hypnotism, and the violence of governments
have taken possession of humanity to such a degree that, while rejecting their
governments’ actions in their conscience, they submit to their demands in deed, and the
scales remain unmoved. To move the scales we need effort, we need action; this is the
only way the Kingdom of God can be attained. The effort that people of our day need to
exert isn’t something complex and difficult; on the contrary it’s most simple and, so it
would seem, easy, as it lies not in positive action but only in negative action: not doing
things that contradict your conscience.
If you’re overwhelmed with unpleasant tasks and feel yourself becoming agitated or
angry, retreat at once into yourself and don’t lose self-‐control. The more you practice
reviving a peaceful state of soul through will power the stronger this ability will become.
Marcus Aurelius
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Effort is needed for every act of self-‐restraint, but the restraint of your tongue
requires the most effort. It’s also the most necessary.
Talking badly about someone immediately harms three: the person who’s being
talked about, the person who’s being talked to, but most of all it harms the person who’s
talking. Basil the Great
All of your life and happiness lies in uniting your spirit with that which is identical
to it: other people’s spirits and the perfection of God. One of the main tools in this
process of union is the word. Therefore you should be afraid of using it on trivial matters
and especially on goals that are opposed to union, and you should treat all words—
your own, other people’s, the printed, the written, the recited—with respect.
The word is a great affair. It’s great because the word can unite people and it can
divide them. The word can serve love and it can serve enmity and hatred. Guard yourself
against words that can divide people.
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Listen, pay attention, but don’t talk a lot.
Never talk unless someone asks you something, and if they do answer briefly and
don’t be ashamed if you have to admit that you don’t know the answer. Sufi Wisdom
Criticizing someone behind their back is particularly bad because the assessment of
a person’s shortcomings, which might be of use to him if he were there, is concealed
from the very person who could most benefit from it, and is conveyed to someone for
whom it’s harmful, because it creates negative feelings within him toward the person
being criticized.
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Simply expressing good intentions weakens the desire to fulfill them. So how do you
restrain youthful bursts of smug, noble sentiments? Only by remembering them some
time later and regretting them the way you’d regret picking a flower before it had a
chance to fully bloom, leaving the ground dead and trampled.
If you know how people should live so that they’ll be happy and wish them
happiness, you’ll tell them, and you’ll tell them in a way that encourages them to believe
your teachings. In order for them to believe and understand you, you have to try to
relate your thoughts calmly and kindly.
When you’re talking to someone and want to relate some sort of truth to him, the
most important thing is not to annoy them or say a single unkind or offensive word.
Based on a Passage by Epictetus
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January 23
Restraint in Thought
Our lives become good or evil depending upon our thoughts, and we can rule our
thoughts. Therefore, in order to live well, to live for your soul, you need to work on your
thoughts and resist evil ones.
Thoughts frequently come of their own accord, but we can allow entrance to some
and forbid entrance to others.
We often think that life is real only when we’re with others. This isn’t true. Our life is
most real when we’re alone, with no one but ourselves, interacting with nothing but our
thoughts.
We regret losing a wallet full of money, but a good idea we came up with, or one that
we heard or read about—an idea that, if we were to put it into practice, could bring
about a great deal of good—we forget, and feel no regret over losing something worth
more than millions.
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A person’s struggle with the things that divide people always begins with his
thoughts.
And the more effort you put into your thoughts, the more successful your struggle
will be.
Changes in our lives always come about through changes in our thoughts. Therefore
effort to change our thoughts is far more important than the effort we exert to change
our physical lives.
You often hear young people say, “I don’t want to live according to somebody else’s
ideas; I want to think things over myself.” This is completely justifiable. When correct, an
idea you came up with yourself is more valuable than all the ideas anyone else can give
you. But why do you want to think over something that’s already been worked out? Take
what’s been prepared for you and move on. The ability to utilize other people’s ideas and
take them further is humanity’s strength.
We don’t need to make mental effort to recognize that we should love God and other
people. Thinking doesn’t do this and, moreover, we know it doesn’t. Mental effort merely
shows us what we shouldn’t love and what interferes with love. Therefore, mental effort
is more valuable than anything.
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From within or from behind light shines through us, and we realize that we’re
nothing while this light is everything. Man is only a façade of the temple in which all
wisdom and goodness lives. That which we commonly call man—an eating, drinking,
sitting, thinking being—isn’t man in his true light, but on the contrary it is man in a
false light. This is not what we respect in man; we respect the soul he carries within him.
If he would only reveal it in his actions we’d bow before him. When this soul appears
through man’s mind, it’s genius; when it appears through his will, it’s virtue; when it
appears through his emotions, it’s love.
A wise proverb says, “God comes without knocking.” There are no roadblocks
between us and infinity, and so there are no walls between man—the effect—and
God—the cause. We conquer the walls and see all the profound impact of God’s
attributes. Only mental labor will open a hole through which we can commune with
God. Based on a Passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer has been recognized as essential for humanity since ancient times.
For people of antiquity, prayer consisted of an appeal, made under specific
conditions, in specific places, using specific actions and words, to appease God or the
gods. It remains so for most people today.
Christian doctrine knows no such prayers, but rather teaches that prayer is essential
not as a means of deliverance from worldly troubles or the acquisition of worldly
happiness, but as a means of strengthening a person’s good thoughts.
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January 24
Honesty
False teachings divide people. Truth alone unites everyone. It unites because it is the
same for all.
If a person shrinks from the truth and stifles it within himself in order to justify his
position he doesn’t make his position better, he makes it worse.
The most faithful sign of the truth is simplicity and clarity. Lies are always
complicated, pretentious and long-‐winded.
When you live in society it’s difficult to free yourself from lies after you’ve become
accustomed to them from childhood and the people around you live in falsehood. You
can only do it when you’re alone. In such times of solitude the most important thing is to
confirm with your reason the teachings and ideas of which you’re not completely sure.
One of the most powerful means of recognizing the truth, one that frees you from
superstition, is to learn and assimilate all that humanity has done to recognize and
express the truths common to all people.
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All superstitions—the law of God, government, science—all these are merely
perversions of thought, and therefore you can escape from them only by confronting
them with the demands of truth revealed by reason.
Both children and adults like to believe that what they find beneficial and pleasant is
the truth. But the longer people live and the more their reason develops, the more they
free themselves from doctrines that conceal the truth. Therefore, it’s more important
than anything for people to verify all propositions that they’ve accepted on faith, both
with their own mental effort and with the endeavors of wise people of the past, in order
to free themselves from false teachings.
Drinking, smoking—all forms of intentional mental impairment—these are a
result of terror before the truth. The more sensitive one’s conscience or the worse one’s
life, the more he needs to destroy it with narcotics.
So it is that the most conscientious and the most depraved people are the ones who
indulge in intentional mental impairment more than anyone.
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January 25
Humility
We try to hide our sins so that people won’t censure us. This is a major mistake.
People’s censure is useful because it humbles us, while justifying our sins to ourselves
and others distances us from humility and harms our souls.
All temptations come from pride. The salvation from all temptations is humility.
Lao Tsu said this about humility: a person who seeks worldly glory extols himself
more and more, and the more he aggrandizes himself before others the more he
weakens before himself, and he finally reaches the point where he can do nothing. If a
person seeks God’s approval rather than man’s, then he becomes lower and lower in
man’s eyes, but he becomes more and more powerful and finally reaches the point where
there’s nothing he can’t accomplish.
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A person unenlightened by Christianity loves only himself. Every person who loves
himself alone wants to be great, but sees that he’s tiny; wants to be important, but feels
that he’s insignificant; wants to be good, but knows that he’s bad. Seeing this, he starts
to dislike the truth and comes up with rationalizations that make him appear to be the
person he’d like to be, and he begins to see himself as great, important, and good. In this
is the enormous double sin of pride and falsehood. From pride comes falsehood, and
from falsehood comes pride. Based on a Passage by Blaise Pascal
An intelligent person doesn’t know he’s intelligent. It seems so natural to him that he
understands what he does that he doesn’t ascribe any significance to it. Besides, there’s
so much he still doesn’t understand. It’s the same if a person is truly kind: he doesn’t
sense his kindness, because he knows how much kinder he could be. Therefore, all
intelligent and kind people are humble.
Live so that it doesn’t matter to you whether you conceal or reveal your acts to others.
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There are people who start teaching others almost as soon as they hear some wise
teachings. What happens to them is the same thing that happens to a sick stomach
when it vomits food immediately after it takes it in. Don’t imitate such people. First
digest well what you’ve heard, and don’t regurgitate it until the proper time. Otherwise,
you’ll produce such filth that it won’t be of any use to anyone. Epictetus
Ask everyone, ask pilgrims, ask those both near and far: is there anything in this
world greater than truth, love and humility? Buddhist Suttas
In order for people to live well there must be peace between them. There can be no
peace where each person wants to be greater than others. Only humility can destroy that
which impedes a peaceful life for all people.
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January 26
Self-‐Renunciation
It is written in the Gospels that he who destroys his life will receive it. This means
that true life comes easily only to a person who has rejected the blessings of physical life.
True human life begins only when a person searches for the happiness of his soul
and not of his body.
The more a person disavows his physical self the freer is his life, the more needed he
is by others, and the more joyful life is for him.
All crude, physical sins—sloth, gluttony, lechery, ill will—come only from
acceptance of your body as your self, from the subordination of your spiritual self to
your animal self. The only escape from sin is the subordination of your animal existence
to your spiritual source, in renunciation of your animal self.
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Christ’s teaching that you can’t safeguard your life but rather be prepared to die at
any minute provides greater happiness than the worldly doctrine that you have to
safeguard your life. It gives greater happiness simply because death is inescapable and
the impossibility of preserving life is accepted by both Christ’s and the world’s doctrine.
But if you live according to Christ’s teaching, every last crumb of life isn’t gobbled up by
the idle business of pretending to safeguard your life. Instead, life becomes free and can
be applied to its one true purpose: perfection of your soul and love for others.
The rejection of physical happiness for the sake of spiritual happiness is the
consequence of a change in consciousness: a person who once thought he was nothing
but an animal begins to realize that he’s a spiritual being. If this change in
consciousness reaches completion, then what used to appear as deprivation and
suffering no longer seems to be deprivation and suffering but only the natural
preference of the best over the worst.
When the light of your spiritual life goes out, the dark shadow of your physical
desires falls across your path. Beware of this terrible shadow. The light of your spirit
cannot destroy this darkness until you banish the desires of the body from your soul.
Based on a Passage from “The Voice of Silence”
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The ages pass, and people discover the distance to the stars, determine their mass,
learn the composition of the sun and heavenly bodies, but the question of how to
reconcile the demands of personal happiness with the life of the world remains unsolved
for the majority, just as it remained for people a thousand years ago. Reason tells man:
yes, you can have happiness, but only if everyone loves you more than they love
themselves. And this same reason shows man that this can never be, because everyone
loves themselves alone. Therefore, man’s only happiness, revealed by reason, is once
again concealed by reason.
Ages pass, and the riddle of human happiness remains the same unsolved riddle for
the majority of humanity. However, this riddle was solved long ago, and all those who
learn the answer are always astonished that they didn’t solve it themselves, that it seems
as though they knew it all along but merely forgot it, because the riddle that seems so
difficult to solve among the false teachings of the world solves itself so simply.
Do you want everyone to live for you? Do you want everyone to love you more than
themselves? There’s only one way to fulfill this desire. All beings must live for others’
happiness and love others more than themselves. Only then will all people be loved by
everyone, and you’ll be among those who gain the happiness you desire. If this
happiness can only be acquired when all beings love others more than themselves then
you, a living being, must love other beings more than yourself.
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If you expect nothing and want nothing from others, then people can never frighten
you, just as a bee can’t frighten another bee, just as a horse can’t frighten another horse.
But if others have power over your happiness, then you’ll most certainly fear them.
You must begin with this: renounce all that you don’t possess, renounce it so that it
doesn’t become your master, renounce everything your body needs, renounce love of
wealth, glory, rank, honor; renounce your children, your wife, your brothers. You must
tell yourself that none of that belongs to you.
How can you do this? Submit your will to the will of God. If He wants me to have a
fever, then I want that too. If he wants things to happen to me that I never expected, I
want that too. Epictetus
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January 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
The past is gone, the future has yet to come. What is there? Only the place where the
past and future meet. It might seem that this place is nothing, but nevertheless our
entire life is right here.
The main business of life is love. You can’t love in the past or the future. You can only
love in the present, now, this minute.
People generally divide life into three segments of time: past, present and future.
This is wrong. In time there is the past and the future, but there is no present in time,
nor can there be. The present is merely the place where the past and future meet.
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To love means to do good. That’s how we understand love, and there’s no other way
to understand it.
And love is not just a word. It consists of actions that we perform for other people’s
happiness.
If a person decides that it’s best to refrain from the demands of the smallest bit of
love in the present in the name of greater love in the future, he’s either deceiving himself
or others, and loves no one but himself.
There is no love in the future. Love exists only in the present. If a person doesn’t
perform acts of love in the present, there’s no love in him.
Time exists only for physical life. All the strength of the spiritual self opposes sin,
and this strength is always outside time. It’s outside time because it can only be in the
present, and the present exists outside time.
103
If you think only about the future you’ll feel weak and insignificant, but as soon as
you realize that your business is to fulfill the will of the One who sent you here right now
you’ll feel free, joyful and strong.
Time only seems to exist, but it really doesn’t. It’s merely an internal prism through
which we analyze existence and life, a concept through which we gradually see that
which is beyond time, in the realm of ideas. Our eyes can’t see the planet all at once,
although the entire planet exists at the same time. One of two things is necessary: either
the planet must revolve before the eyes that are watching it, or the eyes must
circumscribe the entire globe.
In the first instance, the planet unfolds, or seems to unfold, in time. In the second
instance, our thought analyzes and gradually reconstructs it. For the highest rationality
there is no time; what will be is what is. Time and space are crumbled remains of the
infinite for the use of finite beings. Henri Amiel
104
The first and most common temptation to seize a person is the temptation to
prepare for life instead of living.
“I can step away from what my spiritual nature demands of me for a moment,
because I’m not ready,” a person says to himself. “And once I’m ready, the time will
come, and I’ll begin to live in complete harmony with my conscience.”
The lie of this temptation consists of the fact that a person steps away from life in the
present, the only true life, and places life in the future, when in fact the future doesn’t
belong to man.
To keep from falling into this temptation a person must understand and remember
that there’s no time to prepare, that he must live in the best way possible right now, the
way he is, that the perfection he needs is simply perfection in love, and that this
perfection can only be achieved in the present. Therefore, he must not set life aside, but
rather live each present moment with all his strength for God, in other words for every
person who places a demand on his life, knowing that he could be deprived of this
opportunity to serve at any moment, and that it is this continual service for which he
was brought into the world.
We can’t imagine life after death and can’t remember life before our birth because
we can’t imagine anything outside of time. We don’t live within time.
105
January 28
There is No Evil
Evil exists only within us, a place where we can remove it ourselves.
We call suffering evil, but nothing unites people through love more than suffering.
Man is God’s spirit in the body.
At the beginning of life a person doesn’t realize this; he thinks that his life is in his
body. But the longer he lives, the more he finds that his true life is in his soul and not his
body. All a person’s life consists of becoming more and more conscious of this fact and
of freeing his soul from his body. We complain about things that cause our bodies to
suffer, but really, all our sufferings are blessings, because they free us from the body and
make our life more and more what it should be: spiritual.
Every satisfaction is acquired at the price of suffering. For true satisfaction you pay
ahead of time. For false satisfaction you pay afterwards. John Foster
If you have an enemy and are able to use him to learn how to forgive and love your
enemies, then what you’ve acquired is far greater than the good fortune you would have
gained by escaping from your enemy.
106
A person lives for his body and says, “Everything’s bad.” A person lives for his soul
and says, “You’re wrong; everything is wonderful. What you consider bad is a
grindstone, without which the most valuable thing within you—your soul—would
grow dull and rusty.”
Only through suffering did I realize the close affinity of all human souls. You only
have to suffer for yourself to understand all who suffer. What’s more, your mind
becomes clear: the conditions and stages of development where men stand, formerly
hidden from you, are revealed, and now it’s clear what their needs are. Great is God, He
makes us wise! But how has he made us wise? Through the very grief from which we flee
and wish to hide. Sufferings and grief are intended to help us to mine the grains of
wisdom that can’t be acquired from books. Nikolai Gogol
There is no illness that can interfere with fulfillment of your duty. If you can’t serve
others through labor, then serve them by giving an example of loving patience.
Suicide is the final stage of the perversion of the consciousness of life. The primary
characteristic of life is striving for happiness and manifesting it more and more.
Suddenly a person perverts his understanding of happiness, sees only evil in the world
and destroys his own life. In suicide this perversion is total, but it occurs to various
greater or lesser degrees, whenever a person sees evil in his life. Therefore, believing that
there’s more evil than good in the world is a preparation for suicide.
107
January 29
There is No Death
Consciousness of death teaches people to complete their affairs. Out of all affairs
there’s only one that can always be entirely completed: this is the affair of love of the
present.
Lead your life so that you neither fear death nor desire it.
People often say, “There’s nothing more left I need to do; it’s time to die.” If you can
neglect doing something because you’re dying, then it was never worth doing under any
circumstances. But there is one thing you always need to do, and the closer you are to
death the more you need to do it: improve your soul.
An animal lives without knowing its life must end in death, and so it doesn’t suffer
from fear of death. Why has man been given the ability to see the end that awaits him,
and why does it appear so terrible to him? What is it that from time to time so tears his
soul that he wants to kill himself out of terror of death? I can’t tell you the cause, but I
can tell you the purpose. It’s so that a rational person will transfer his life from the
physical to the spiritual. This transference not only annihilates the fear of death, it turns
waiting for death into something similar to the feeling a wayfarer experiences when he’s
returning home after a long journey.
108
Death delivers us from all difficulties and tragedies so easily that people who don’t
believe in immortality should wish for it. People who believe in immortality and who
expect a new life should wish for it even more. Why don’t most people wish for death?
Because the majority of people live a physical life rather than a spiritual one.
You want freedom from sins, and life helps you by weakening your body and its
passions. Believe that your life is a struggle to free yourself of sin and sickness, old age,
adversities and death will become blessings.
As you weaken, grow old, and die in your body, you will strengthen, grow and be
born in your soul.
Am I afraid of death? No. However, as I approach it or when I think about it I can’t
help but experience agitation similar to that of a wayfarer approaching a place where his
train descends from a great height to the sea or when he rises to an incredible height in
a balloon. When a person’s dying, he knows that nothing will happen to him, that what
will happen to him is the same thing that’s happened to millions of beings, that he
merely changes his form of transportation, but he can’t help but feel agitation as he
approaches it.
109
January 30
After Death
We think that life ends with death because we consider life to be the life of the body
from birth to death. Thinking about life like this is like thinking that a pond isn’t the
water in the pond, but its banks, and that if the water were to leave the pond it would
cease to be.
He who loves the good—God—with all his soul cannot believe that life ends with
death. Love of the good—God—and belief in eternal life is one and the same thing.
Death is the destruction of the glass through which I look at the world. Whether or
not this glass will be replaced with another, we can’t know and we don’t need to know.
One thing we know for sure: the destruction of the glass doesn’t destroy the eyes.
No one can brag that he knows what God and the future life are. I can’t say that I
know without doubt that God and my immortality exist, but I have to say that I feel that
God exists and that my “self” is immortal. This means that belief in God and in the
immortality of the soul is so bound to my nature that it’s impossible to separate me from
this belief. Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
110
Experience teaches us that many who are familiar with the doctrine of life after
death and are convinced of its veracity nevertheless surrender to vices and commit base
acts, then try to come up with very clever ways to avoid the consequences of their
behavior that threaten to confront them in the future. At the same time, there has never
been a single moral person on this Earth who’d be able to accept the notion that
everything ends with death and whose noble thoughts didn’t rise to the hope of a future
life. Therefore, it seems to me that basing your belief in a future life on the convictions of
such noble souls is more in harmony with human nature and the purity of morals than,
on the contrary, basing your own noble behavior on the hope of another life. This is in
reality true faith, the kindheartedness that rises above all sorts of stratagems and
sophisticated ideas and which alone can reach any person no matter his condition,
because it leads him along a straight rather than a roundabout path to his true goal.
Immanuel Kant
111
He who sees the meaning of life in spiritual perfection can’t believe in death: the
possibility of this act of perfection being terminated. That which is gradually perfected
merely changes form.
Death is the termination of the consciousness of life that I experience now.
Consciousness terminates—I see this in the dying—but what becomes of that which
was conscious? I don’t and can’t know. One thing is certain: this “something” that was
conscious can’t be terminated.
Death and birth are two thresholds. Beyond these thresholds is the same thing,
unknown to me, but still something, not nothing.
112
January 31
Life is a Blessing
A person wants what’s good for himself from birth to death. And what he wants has
been given to him, if he would search for it where it exists: in love of God and others.
One person cannot truly do good for another. True good can only be done by each
person for himself by living for his soul rather than his body.
People say that a person who does good needs no reward. This is true if you think
that a reward doesn’t come from within yourself and not right at once but in the future.
But without a reward, without that through which doing good gives joy to a person, a
person couldn’t do good. The point is simply to understand what true joy is. True joy
isn’t in the external world or in the future, but rather within yourself and in the present:
in the betterment of your soul. In this joy lie both the reward and the motivation for
doing good.
There’s nothing but death ahead and nothing but the fulfillment of responsibilities
now. How dismal it seems. And yet if you understand your life as what it truly is—
greater and greater union with God and others through love—what once seemed
dismal will be the greatest, indestructible happiness.
113
By transferring his life from the physical to the spiritual domain, a person can
escape evil, and moreover can also transform his life into a blessing that nothing can
shatter.
“And on that day you will not ask me about anything. Truly, truly I tell you:
whatever you ask the Father for in my name, He will give you.” John 16:23
Everything has been given to you. Just search for your happiness where it is, in
harmony with your own soul and with the will of God, and you’ll have everything you
could desire.
All our troubles come only from ourselves when we do something other than what
we’ve been assigned to do.
Joy in life is just like oil in a lamp. As soon as the oil runs low the wick flickers, goes
out, ceases to illuminate and only emits black, foul-‐smelling smoke.
Life without joy passes without purpose and spreads only gloom and sadness. Joy is
given to people only when they conquer sins, temptations and superstitions and
surrender to the Divine love that lives in their souls.
114
Never search for pleasure, but always be ready to find pleasure in everything. If your
hands are busy but your heart is free, then the tiniest thing can please you, and you’ll
find your share of fascination and pleasure in all you hear. But if you make pleasure the
goal of your life, the day will come when the funniest scenes won’t evoke true laughter
from you. John Ruskin
When a person is unhappy, a string of the most complex and insoluble questions
confront him: why am I in the world, what’s the point of the whole world? And it seems
to him that without solving these questions life is impossible. If he were happy, these
questions would instantly vanish and there would be one answer for all of them: “I
thank all and everyone and wish the same to all.” Therefore, it’s obvious that people can
and must be happy.
115
February
February 1
Faith
There are many different faiths, but in all faiths the lesson of how people should live
is one and the same. This one lesson is the law of God.
If a person believes that he can please God with rituals and prayers but not deeds, it
means he wants to deceive God, but he only deceives himself.
We give too much credit to people when we talk about their faith in this or that
religion, for they neither know nor search for any religion at all. When they say “my
religion,” what they mean is their church’s official dogma. The so-‐called religious wars
that so frequently shock the world with bloodshed have never been anything more than
altercations because of the doctrines of different churches. Meanwhile, the oppressed
complain, in essence, not that they’re being kept from believing in their religion, since no
external force can stop them from doing that, but that they’re not allowed to publicly
follow their church’s dogma. Immanuel Kant
116
Asserting that you are not living in truth but in falsehood is the cruelest thing one
person can say to another, especially when it concerns the most important matter in life.
Nevertheless, this is exactly what people say when they argue about religion.
Religious practice for the sake of human glory or for the external appearance of piety
has no value, and its source is found in the lowest demands of the soul. Repentance and
self-‐torture, or torture of others, are all the result false doctrines. Repentance of the body
is chastity. Repentance of speech is making sure that you always speak the truth with
kindness. Repentance of thought is ruling oneself, purifying your soul, silence and
predisposition to kindness. Mahabharata
He who places his religion second in his life has no religion. Much in the heart of
man is compatible with God, but one thing isn’t: putting the law of God in second place.
He who gives Him second place doesn’t give Him any place at all. John Ruskin
Different religions—what a strange expression! Of course, there can be different
beliefs under different historical circumstances, passed from generation to generation
for the sake of confirming religion. This is precisely how religious differences occur (the
Zend Avesta, the Vedas, the Quran, the Gospels, etc.) But there can only be one true
religion for all time. The only thing all these different faiths can contain is the basic
foundation for the true religion. They appear randomly and differ depending on the
time and place of their appearance. Immanuel Kant
117
February 2
The Soul
A person knows himself only when he knows that his life is not in his body, but in
his soul.
It’s easier for someone who believes that life doesn’t start with birth and end with
death to live a good life than someone who doesn’t understand and believe this.
A person will realize that he’ll never die just as soon as he understands that he was
never born.
The spiritual source—God—cannot be limited, cannot be partitioned.
Consciousness of this spiritual source can be limited. This limited consciousness of the
spiritual source is man.
A person experiences freedom to the degree to which he transfers his life from
physical to spiritual existence.
118
As soon as you feel passion seducing you, summon your consciousness of your
spiritual essence. As soon as you feel the darkening of your divinity, be aware that
passion rules you, and fight it.
Confucius said:
“The sky and earth are great, but they possess color, form and dimension. In man
there is something that possesses neither color, form, number, nor dimension, and this
something that possesses neither color, form, number, nor dimension possesses reason.
“Therefore, if the world itself had been inanimate, to would have been animated by
reason.”
Through consciousness of his spiritual essence, a person can transfer his self from
the realm of inferiority, impermanence and wretchedness to the realm of freedom,
permanence and joy.
119
Let the scientists and philosophers concoct their theories of predetermination, their
necessary motions; let them think that the world is the result of a series of accidents. I
see in the world such a unity of design that despite their assertions I’m compelled to
recognize the Prime Source. If someone told me that the Iliad was composed from
randomly combined characters I wouldn’t hesitate to tell him he’s wrong, even though I
have no other reason to disbelieve it than the fact that I can’t believe it.
Scholars say, “This is all superstition.” I reply, “Maybe it is superstition; however,
what makes your vague argument against superstition more convincing than
superstition?”
You say, “There can’t be two sources, spiritual and physical.” I say, “A tree and a
thought have nothing in common.”
And what’s most amusing of all is that they themselves would shatter their sophisms
and be prepared to ascribe a soul to a stone before they’d recognize it in a human.
Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
120
February 3
One Soul in All
We feel that the essence of our lives, that which we call our true self, is the same not
only for every person, but for dogs, horses, mice, chickens, sparrows, bees, even trees.
Sometimes a person thinks that he’s the only one who really lives, that he’s all there
is and that everyone else is nothing. There are many such people. But there are also wise,
good people who understand that the lives of other people and even animals are just as
important as theirs. Such people don’t live in their own solitary self but also in others,
and they worry about other people and animals as much they worry about themselves.
It’s easy for them to live and easy for them to die. When they die, only that which lived
within them dies, while that through which they lived in others remains. For those who
live only in themselves, life is difficult and stifling and death is tortuous, because when
they die they think that everything through which they lived is dying along with them.
Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
121
There was a time when people ate human flesh and saw nothing wrong with it. Then
the best among them understood the evil in it and people began to gradually wean
themselves from human flesh, and now they’ve become so unaccustomed to it that
they’re horrified to think about eating their brothers. In the same way, many people are
beginning to realize that eating animals is wrong, and more and more such people are
appearing all the time. Soon the time will come when people are just as horrified at the
thought of killing a sheep, cow or pig in order to eat it as they are now at the thought of
killing a human in order to eat him.
All beings, both people and animals, are connected to one another in such a way that
when one suffers, sooner or later these sufferings reach everyone and everything in one
way or another. Likewise, the happiness of each individual is connected with everyone
and in one way or another will reach everyone.
If you’re indifferent to the sufferings of others, you don’t deserve the title of human.
Saadi
122
Rational beings who unite to work together on a single project fulfill the same
purpose in the world that limbs serve in the human body. They’ve been created for
rational cooperation. There is something encouraging and comforting in the
consciousness that you’re a part of a great spiritual brotherhood. Marcus Aurelius
If a person thinks that his life is in his individual self and lives exclusively for
himself, he inescapably suffers. If he would just understand that what lives in him is the
same in all people, not only would his suffering lessen but he’d recognize the greatest
happiness in the world: his love for others and their love for him.
Morality is directing your will toward common, universal goals. A person who acts
for individual goals is immoral. A person is moral—and here we speak in unison with
Marcus Aurelius and Kant—if his goal or motivation can be made the goal of all living
beings. We assert that this sublime understanding lies in every person’s consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Meat cannot be obtained without harming animals, and the killing of animals
makes the path to blessedness more difficult. Let man refrain from eating meat.
Based on One of the Brahmanic Laws of Manu
123
February 4
God
Anyone can feel God, but no one can know Him. Therefore, don’t try to know Him,
but try to feel Him become more and more alive within you.
You can only know God within yourself. Until you know Him within yourself, you
won’t know Him anywhere.
Don’t seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. He lives in you. Just
surrender yourself to Him and you’ll rise above happiness and sorrow.
God lives in every good and kind person.
124
A reasonable person finds within himself the notions of both his own soul and the
universal soul—God—and realizing the impossibility of fully understanding them, he
humbly pauses before them and doesn’t touch the veil that covers them.
All the peoples of the world know and honor the higher source of everything.
Although each person dresses Him up in his own way, beneath all these garments is the
same God. However, there have been and always will be educated people with
sophisticated minds who refuse to be satisfied with the facts provided by common sense
and wish to express the concept of God in words. I don’t condemn these people, but
they’re wrong when they assert that God is concealed from people because they can’t see
Him. I accept the fact that it’s possible that people can temporarily convince the majority
that God doesn’t exist with their clever shenanigans, but such atheism cannot endure.
In one way or another people will always need God. If God were to appear before us with
more clarity than He does now, I have no doubt that people who deny God now would
come up with new, sophisticated ways to deny Him. Reason always obeys the demands
of the heart. Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
Belief in God is as inherent in man as is the ability to walk upright. This belief might
change in some people and even die out completely, but a person needs it to understand
his life. Based on a Passage by Georg Lichtenberg
125
The proposition that God exists and the proposition that He doesn’t are equally
incomprehensible, as are the propositions that the body possesses a soul and that it
doesn’t, that the world was created and that it wasn’t. Blaise Pascal
Someone is doing something with the life of the entire world and with our own
individual lives. This someone who is doing this is what we call God.
126
February 5
Life is Union
My body separates me from others. The spirit unites, because it’s one and the same
in everyone.
Everyone knows that they need to avoid doing things that distance them from others
and do all that they can to unite with them. They don’t know this because someone told
them but because the more they unite with others the better their lives become, and the
more they distance themselves from others the worse their lives become.
As long as a person lives an animal’s life it seems natural that his body separates
him from all other people. It seems to him that this is the way it has to be. However, as
soon as a person begins to live a spiritual life this idea seems strange, even
incomprehensible, and he’s involuntarily pulled toward union with everyone, and not
just people but all that lives.
127
When a person lives a physical life it seems to him that everything in the world exists
only for his individual self. “There is only me, everything is for me, everything is trivial
except for me.” The only thing in the world that’s important is this self, and this self
can’t imagine life without itself and wants to live forever. At the same time, the rational
mind that a person’s very self possesses tells him, first of all, that he isn’t alone and that
there are millions upon millions of such selves who consider themselves the only thing
that’s important. In order for him to obtain all that his self wants he has to struggle with
all of these other selves, and since he’s alone while these other selves are constantly being
born in an incalculable number he’ll inevitably be defeated. Second, his rational mind
tells him that he can never acquire all that his self wants because this self is never
satisfied and no matter what it receives it needs more and more so that there’s end to it.
Third, his rational mind tells him that what he calls his precious self, which wants to live
forever, must certainly and doubtlessly perish and disappear very soon. There’s only one
escape from this contradiction: recognition of your self not in the body, but in the spirit,
recognition of the self that needs no struggles and only needs to unite with the same
spirit that lives within you and for which there is no death. And this union is always
possible through love.
128
The body wants happiness only for itself, even though it’s harmful to the soul; the
soul wants happiness, even though it’s harmful to the body. This struggle will end only
when a person understands that life isn’t in that which moves, deteriorates and dies: not
in the body, but in the soul, and that the body is merely something that the soul must
work on.
It’s as if two masters live simultaneously within each of us: the body and the soul. At
first the body dominates, and when it prevails conflict, hostility, and ill will towards
others is inevitable. But the longer a person lives, the more the soul gains authority, and
the more the soul gains authority the more it abandons conflict and strives for union
with the spiritual source that’s the same in all beings.
The main difference between what the body wants and what the soul wants is that
satisfying the body divides people, while satisfying the soul unites them.
129
February 6
Love
Every person loves himself, but if he loves his body he’s mistaken, for nothing can
result from this kind of love except suffering. Love of oneself is only good when a person
loves his spirit. The spirit is the same in all people, and to love that which is the same in
all people means to love all people and all living things.
It’s only when a person understands the fragility and poverty of his corporeal life
that he feels and understands the happiness love gives him.
We can only gain physical happiness by taking it from others. Spiritual happiness,
the happiness of love, only increases others’ happiness.
Just as all the water will flow out of a barrel if there’s so much as one little hole in it,
so all the joy of love will drain out of your soul if in your soul there is enmity toward so
much as a single person. This truth can’t be repeated often enough, because concealing
it has turned all doctrines concerning love into mere words that have totally lost their
ability to reveal happiness to individuals and the entire world.
130
“He who wants to save his life will lose it; but he who gives his life for the sake of the
good will save it. It is of no use to man to obtain the entire world if he harms his soul.” So
said Christ. This is what Marcus Aurelius, a pagan Roman emperor, once said: “When
will you, soul of mine,” he asked himself, “become lord of my body? When will you free
yourself from all these worldly desires and sorrows and stop demanding that people
serve you with their lives and deaths? When will you understand that true happiness is
always within your power and consists of one thing: love for all people?”
If you expect a reward from others for your love, then it isn’t true love. There might
be a reward from people for love, but there might not be. But one of love’s features is
that it gives happiness to those who experience it.
It’s as natural for a person to love as it is for water to flow downhill. Eastern Wisdom
131
To live a Godly life means to be like God. In order to be like God, you must want
nothing, fear nothing, and simply love. And as soon as you start to love, you’ll want
nothing and fear nothing. We must be like God, but not the God “Yahweh Tsebaoth,”
the creator they talk about in church religion, which is obviously nonsense, but like the
God we know exclusively through love. In order to be like God, we simply need to love.
People live not by thinking about themselves but through the love within them.
It’s as if God didn’t want people to live alone, and so he didn’t reveal to us what each
person needs for himself; rather, he wanted people to live as one, and so he revealed to
us that we need everyone and everyone needs us—He revealed to us that our lives
consist of love.
You strive for happiness, and you’ll attain what you strive for if you strive for the
happiness that’s achieved through love: happiness for all.
132
February 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
The body should serve the soul, but frequently passion overpowers man and the soul
becomes the servant of the body. This is sin.
The more a person becomes convinced that his life is in his body, the more he sins
and deprives himself of true life: love.
For a person to be happy, he must free himself from the authority of his body, and
every person’s life consists of this process of liberation from the body’s authority.
Whether he wishes it or not, a person’s life leads him toward greater and greater
freedom from sin. A person who understands this exerts all his effort to assist in what is
being done with his life, and the life of such a person is in harmony with what is being
done with him.
133
The ruinous effects of sins for those who commit them as well as for the society in
which they live are so obvious that from the most ancient times people have seen the evil
that emanates from them and have preached and created laws against sins and
punished people for them: they forbade theft, murder, fornication, slander, and
intoxication. However, despite these prohibitions and punishments people continued
and still continue to sin, poisoning their lives and the lives of those close to them.
This occurs because false rationalizations were created to justify sins. These
rationalizations assert that there are extraordinary circumstances in which sins are not
only permissible but necessary. The Gospels call such false rationalizations temptations.
Because of these temptations, i.e. false justifications of sins, most people fail to
correct themselves and continue to stagnate in them instead, and worst of all they turn
these temptations into doctrines of faith and teach them to younger generations.
Why are children morally superior to most adults? Because their reason hasn’t been
corrupted by superstitions, temptations or sins. Nothing stands in their way on the path
to perfection, while sins, temptations and superstitions stand in the way of adults.
Children need only live, while adults must struggle.
Everything is bound together more firmly in the moral world than in the physical
world. Every deception creates a series of deceptions, and every cruelty creates a series of
cruelties.
134
February 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
There are sins against others and sins against yourself. Sins against others occur
when you fail to respect the spirit of God in another person. Sins against yourself occur
when you fail to respect the spirit of God in yourself and indulge in your carnal lusts.
If it weren’t for greed, no bird would ever fall into a net, and the bird catcher
wouldn’t catch a single bird. The same bait catches people. The stomach is a chain on
the hands and shackles on the legs. A slave of the stomach is forever a slave. If you want
to be free, first of all free yourself from your stomach. Struggle with it. Eat in order to
satisfy hunger, not to gain satisfaction. Based on a Saying by Saadi
Harmful and even fatal consequences in the form of physical and spiritual
sufferings inescapably follow people’s sins, whether they’re simple physical sins,
temptations or superstitions. The only difference is that a person who’s mired in simple
physical sins can quickly come to his senses, feel the consequences of gluttony, lechery
and anger in his life, while a person living with the temptations of pride, vanity, and
wealth can go for a long time without seeing the consequences of his sins. People under
the spell of societal, state, religious and scientific superstitions see them least of all.
135
Which is more profitable: to spend four hours a week preparing bread to feed your
family for the entire week or to spend twenty-‐one hours a week preparing tasty,
exquisite food? Which is more valuable: seventeen hours a week or tasty food?
Every murder is repulsive, but the most repulsive of all is murder with the goal of
eating the creature you murdered. And the more a person deliberates on this form of
murder and the more he focuses his attention and effort on how to eat the murdered
being with the most satisfaction and how to make the murdered being taste the best, the
more repulsive the murder is. Mikhail Goldstein
The less you appease your body with food, clothing, housing, and merrymaking the
freer your life will be. And vice versa. Just try to improve your food, drink, housing, and
merrymaking, and there will be no end to your labor and worries.
God gave people food, and the Devil gave them chefs.
136
February 9
The Sin of Parasitism
If you don’t want to work, either grovel or use violence.
Like all living creatures, a person must labor, he must work with his arms and legs.
He can force other people to do what he needs done, but nevertheless he must expend
his physical strength on something. If a person doesn’t work in a necessary, intelligent
manner, then he’ll work superfluously and foolishly.
Eternal inactivity should be considered one of the torments of hell, but on the
contrary, it’s been placed among the joys of paradise. Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
Physical labor is particularly important in that it prevents wandering of the mind:
thinking about trivial things.
You should respect people not because of their title or their wealth, but because of
the work they do. The more useful their work, the more worthy of respect they are.
However, it frequently happens the other way around: people respect idle, rich people,
and not those who do work inarguably useful to everyone: farmers, laborers.
137
Doubt, sadness, despondency, resentment, despair: all these demons keep their eyes
on people, and as soon as a person begins to live an idle life they immediately descend
upon him. The most reliable salvation from these misfortunes is hard physical labor.
When a person is undertaking such work none of these demons dare approach him;
they can only grumble at him from a distance. Thomas Carlyle
Nothing poisons a good life like neglect of affairs that are considered unimportant in
the worldly sense. The wealthy consider the business of serving their needs—preparing
their food, cleaning their homes, making their clothes, etc.—unimportant, but in fact
for a conscientious person there are no more important matters than these.
In recent years we’ve devoted a vast amount of time to the study and perfection of
that great invention of civilization: the division of labor. However, we’ve named it falsely.
In order to express it correctly, we should say: it’s not labor that has been divided, but
rather people who’ve been divided into fractions of humans, chopped into little pieces,
crumbs, so much so that the little piece of intellect that’s left in a person is insufficient to
make an entire pin or an entire nail; it’s been depleted to the point where it can only
make the tip of a pin or the head of a nail. It’s true that many pins can be made each
day, and made very well; but if we’d look at what kind of sand we polish them with—
the sand of the human soul—then we’d understand that it’s disadvantageous.
138
You can shackle people, torture them, harness them like cattle, kill them like the flies
of summer, but nevertheless these people, in a sense, in the best sense, can remain free.
But to crush the immortal soul within them, crush their human reason and turn it into
a rotting little stump, use their meat and skin on belts in order to operate machines:
that is true slavery. It is this mortification of man, this transformation of man into
nothing more than a machine that forces workers to struggle mindlessly, ruinously and
vainly for freedom, the essence of which they themselves fail to understand. Their hatred
of the wealthy and the ruling class is not evoked by the stress of hunger or the pricks of
offended pride (these two causes have made their impact in all ages, but the foundations
of society have never been as destabilized as they are now). It isn’t the fact that people
eat poorly, but that they obtain no satisfaction from the labor they have to perform to
obtain their bread, and so they look upon wealth as the sole means of satisfaction.
It isn’t the fact that people suffer from the contempt the upper classes express
toward them, but the fact that they can’t endure the contempt they feel for themselves,
sensing that the labor to which they’ve been sentenced humiliates them, poisons them,
and turns them into something less than human. Never have the upper classes
demonstrated as much love and sympathy for the downtrodden as they do now, and yet
never have the downtrodden hated them so much. John Ruskin
139
February 10
The Sin of Lechery
If a man and a woman have sexual relations only for the sake of gratification and
don’t think about the fact that children are born as a result, their lives will be unhappy.
It’s good to live in an honest marriage, but it’s best of all to preserve your purity,
never marry, and live exclusively for your soul. Few people can do this, but it will turn
out well for anyone who tries.
The law of God is to love God and your neighbor. Sexual love of a man for a woman
or a woman for a man is always exclusive, so sexual love and marriage make it difficult
for a person to fulfill the law of God: equal love for all people. This is why Christ
preached complete chastity.
Spiritual love for all people and love between a man and a woman are two entirely
different things. Spiritual love is that higher feeling you must strive to increase within
yourself, while love between a man and a woman is the kind of love that a person must
restrain himself from as much as he can. People frequently fail to distinguish these two
types of love—spiritual and physical—from each other. This is the same as failing to
distinguish flattery from words of endearment.
140
It seems to me that the infatuation that a pure young man and woman feel for one
another is a feeling that promotes the observance of chastity. When a young man and
woman fall in love, they idealize the object of their love and can’t help but look upon the
sex act with revulsion. Thus, infatuation delivers young people during the most critical
years—from sixteen to twenty—the very years when the struggle to keep from falling
into lust is most difficult. This is the place for infatuation. When people become
infatuated later in life and especially after marriage, it’s no longer pure but rather
disgusting.
It’s said that if people practice chastity the human race will come to an end. But
according to church teachings the end of the world must surely come. According to
science, man’s life on earth and the very earth itself will come to an end. So why does it
perturb people that a good, moral life will also lead to the end of the human race?
Indeed, all human life is nothing more than a battle with sins and gradual liberation
from them. If people were to liberate themselves from all sins, including lust, there
would be no life, and so the end of the human race would simply be something that
must be.
Most importantly, it’s none of our business whether or not the human race comes to
an end. Our business consists of one thing: living well. And concerning sexual relations
this means living a pure life.
141
Permitting two people of the opposite sex to live a sexual life in marriage not only
doesn’t promote chastity, it directly contradicts it.
Under any circumstances, chastity always promotes nothing other than a spiritual
life. Therefore, whatever weakens it—like permitting sexual relations in a marriage—is
contradictory to the demands of a spiritual life.
Struggling with sexual desire is essential. But first you must understand the full
strength of your enemy and not flatter yourself with false hope of a quick victory; the
fight with your enemy will be tough. However, you must not lose heart. Let there be
setbacks. No matter how difficult they are, they won’t be terrible. A child falls hundreds
of times, hurts himself, cries, but finally learns to walk. It’s not the fall that’s terrible, it’s
justifying the fall that’s terrible; what’s terrible is the “philosophical” lie that presents
these falls either as something tragic and fateful or as something unusually splendid
and elevated. So we fall from the path toward freedom from filth, the path to perfection,
from time to time; let’s all struggle with all our strength to stay on it. We won’t say that
filth is our destiny, we won’t “philosophically” or “poetically” lie in order to justify
ourselves. We’ll clearly remember that evil is evil and that we must not commit it. Ivan
Nazhivin
142
February 11
The Sin of Ill Will
You have heard what was said to the ancients: do not kill; he who kills will be called
to judgment. (Exodus 20:13). But I tell you that anyone who holds ill will toward his
brother will be called to judgment. Matthew 5:21-‐22
“And when they came to the place called the Skull they crucified him and two
evildoers, one to his right and one to his left. Jesus said, “Father! Forgive them, for they
know not what they do.” (Luke 23:33-‐34).
If only we could say this, not when someone crucifies us, but when people commit
small offenses against us.
143
A horse is saved from its enemy by its speed. You don’t pity a horse if it can’t sing
like a bird but only if it loses that which it was given: its speed.
A dog has the sense of smell, and if it’s deprived of what it’s been given, its sense of
smell, it’s pitiable. It’s not in trouble if it can’t fly.
In exactly the same way, it’s no misfortune for a person if he can’t overpower a bear
or evil people, or if he doesn’t have a lot of money, but only if he loses that which was
given to him: kindness and reason. That’s the sort of person who’s truly worthy of
sympathy.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for a person who grows old, loses his strength, his
money, home, possessions, and health, for none of this belongs to man. A person should
be pitied when he loses his true ability: when he stops being kind and rational and
responds to offense with offense and to insult with insult.
Based on a Passage by Epictetus
In order to love all people you must not value physical happiness, the kind that can’t
be achieved by everyone at once, but see your life in the spiritual: in that which can
immediately be achieved by all.
144
Don’t think that human courage lies exclusively in bravery and strength. If you can
rise above anger, forgive and re-‐establish good feelings in your soul toward someone,
then you’ve done the best a person can do. Persian Wisdom
Someone’s offended you and you’re angry with him. The affair has passed, but
animosity toward him lingers in your soul, and when you think of him you grow angry
again. It’s as if a devil is perpetually standing at the door of your heart and exploits the
times when you feel anger toward someone, opening the door, jumping into your heart
and becoming its master.
145
We say, “I’ve lost my wife, my husband, my father,” when they die. However, we lose
people often, very often, before they die. We lose them when we distance ourselves from
them, and this is worse than when they die. On the other hand, it often happens that we
find people we’ve lost after they’ve died. After they die we become closer to them. Most
important of all is not to lose people while they’re still alive.
Theft, murder and executions aren’t terrible. What is theft? It’s the transfer of
property from one person to another. This has always happened and always will
happen, and there’s nothing terrible about it. What is execution, murder? It’s a person’s
transition from life to death. These transitions have always happened and always will
happen, and there’s nothing terrible about them. Theft and murders aren’t terrible;
what’s terrible is the feeling people have when they hate, rob and kill each other. Hatred
is terrible.
146
February 12
The Temptation of Pride
A person considers himself better than others only because he can’t understand
their virtues.
The more a person is satisfied with himself, the less there is about him to be satisfied
with.
A proud person directs all his mental energy toward convincing himself that he’s
better than other people. However, this can never be true. Therefore, the prouder a
person is, the more dishonest he is.
No one can consider himself smarter, kinder, or better than others simply because
no one can know the mind, kindness or any of the virtues of another.
It sometimes happens that because a person feels that all he does is bad, he assures
himself that all he does is good.
147
Only those living an exclusively physical life can consider people unequal, some
being better and others worse. If a person lives a spiritual life there can be no inequality.
People living a physical life are so in need of inequality that it’s not enough for them
to claim inequality between people. They also invent inequality between families, peoples
and religions.
Inequality is incompatible with love. Love is only love when, like the rays of the sun, it
falls equally on all that lies beneath it. When a person can relate to some people but
exclude others, this is evidence that there is no longer love but merely something that
resembles it.
148
February 13
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
It is perilous to live for people’s praise. You can do a great deal of harm for your own
sake, but for people’s praise you can do things that are a hundred, a thousand times
worse than anything you could do for yourself.
It’s hard to tell whether you’re serving people for your soul, for God, or for people
and their praise. Here’s one way to check: ask yourself if you’d do the same thing if you
knew in advance that no one would ever know what you did. If you knew this and would
still do the same thing, then you’re certainly doing it for your soul and for God.
It’s hard to fully escape from concern about worldly glory. To want worldly glory is
the same as wanting people to love you, and people’s love can’t help but make a person
happy. You must simply never back away from the demands of your conscience for the
sake of human glory.
Train yourself to be indifferent to false claims about you. Without such indifference
you can’t be free.
Most sins weaken with the years. However, you must never stop struggling with the
sin of conceit throughout your entire life. It’s the most tenacious of all.
149
It often happens that a person feels a sudden letdown after enthusiastically serving
others. Why? Simply because he served people for human glory, and not God and his
soul. So when he receives no glory or praise, he’s disappointed.
No one will ever be praised by everyone. If he’s good, bad people will find something
wrong with him or else mock and criticize him. If he’s bad, good people will disapprove
of him. In order to be praised by everyone, you have to pretend to be good around good
people and bad around bad people. But as soon as one group or the other figures out
you’re pretending, everyone will despise you. There’s only one option: be good, don’t
worry about people’s opinions, and look for the reward for your life in yourself rather
than in others’ opinions.
It’s amazing that there are people who live neither for others’ happiness nor their
own, but only for human praise. At the same time, how few people there are who value
the approval of their conscience above the approval of strangers.
150
February 14
The Temptation of Wealth
If you receive an income without earning it, then someone earned it without
receiving it. Maimonides
There are two ways to deliver yourself from poverty. The first is to increase your
wealth, and the second is to teach yourself to be satisfied with little. Increasing your
wealth is not always possible but always dishonest, while decreasing your desires is
always within your power.
The day will soon come when people stop believing that wealth brings happiness and
will finally understand the simple truth: in acquiring and holding onto wealth people
don’t improve their lives, they harm them.
Amass for yourself the wealth that no one can take from you, which will remain with
you until death and which will never diminish or vanish. This wealth is your soul. Indian
Proverb
151
Ten good men can lie down and sleep peacefully on a single rug, but two wealthy
men can’t share ten rooms. If a good man acquires a crust of bread he’ll give half to a
hungry man; but if a king conquers half the world, he can’t be at peace until he
conquers the other half.
If you want Divine mercy, prove it by your deeds. But perhaps someone, like the rich
young man, will say, “I’ve fulfilled all my duties; I’ve never stolen, murdered, or
committed fornication.” But Christ said that more than this is needed. What? He said,
“Sell your property, give the money to the poor and follow me.” (Matthew 19:21) To follow
him means to imitate his acts. Which acts? Love toward one’s neighbor. And if the
young man, living in such affluence, couldn’t give his property away to the poor, then
how can he say that he loves his neighbor? If love is strong, then you must show it not
only in words but also in deeds. And for a rich person, showing love in deeds means
rejecting his wealth. Based on a Passage by John Chrysostum
When you buy one fashionable ornament for yourself, you have to buy ten more
things so that everything you wear will complement each other. Because of this, rich
people are never satisfied with what they have and want more and more.
Whoever has less than he wants should know that he has more than he deserves.
Georg Lichtenberg
152
We occupy an island on which we live through the labors of our own hands. A sailor
is shipwrecked on our shore. Does he have a natural right, as we do, based on the same
foundation as ours, to occupy a piece of the land so that he can feed himself through his
own labors? It would seem that this right is indisputable. Yet how many people born
onto our planet are denied this right by those already here. Émile Laveleye
If you accept the proposition that the entire inhabited world can be the property of
rich landowners and that they have jurisdiction over its surface, then all those who don’t
own land have no right to it. If this is the case, non-‐landowners can exist on earth only if
the landowners allow it. What’s more: non-‐landowners acquire the right to occupy the
very place where they stand only if the rich landowners allow it. So if the landowners
don’t want to give them a place to rest, they could be thrown off the earth.
Herbert Spencer
Life for a rich man becomes more and more shameful, while life for a poor man
becomes more and more difficult.
153
February 15
The Temptation of Inequality
One and the same spiritual source lives in every person, and this spiritual source is
so great that all the differences between people no longer have any meaning in the
presence of the universal equality of this source. Therefore, no rational person can
consider himself better or worse than anyone else.
God wants his servants to be united as one in a union of love. Therefore, laws that
divide people into different groups (classes) are human fabrications. Peter Chelčicky
The temptation to consider people unequal is based upon the crude superstition of
patriotism, which is encouraged by the government and the ruling classes through
public victory celebrations, spectacles, memorials, holidays, all of which are created
through seizure of the people’s property, and which urge the people to profess the
exclusive importance of their nation, the unique greatness of their government and its
rulers, and ill will and even hatred toward other nations.
There is no condition more contrary to Christianity, contrary to feelings natural and
inherent in all people and contrary to common sense than serving in the houses of the
wealthy.
154
The life of our upper classes is in sharp contradiction to Christianity—it is a total
rejection of the notion of the brotherhood of all people. An unfortunate person who’s
fallen into the net of this life must reject the most valuable thing on earth: human
relations with others. Of course, he feels a sort of sentimental sympathy with his “little
brothers,” but at the same time he finds that to invite one of them into the house he
inhabits would simply be offensive. And his words of sympathy for the poor and
suffering disappear into the air without a trace, while the sparkle of all his jewels
remains forever before their eyes. Edward Carpenter
When rational beings are called to work together toward one goal, they fulfill the
same purpose in the collective life of the world that the members of the human body
serve. They were created for rational, united action. There’s something heartening and
consoling in the consciousness that you’re a member of a great spiritual brotherhood.
Marcus Aurelius
Consciousness of the unity of all people is permeating humanity more and more.
155
He who said, “come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will comfort
you,” became the focus of all humanity through these words, for all humanity lives
under the weight of oppression and labor.
Consider those who don’t carry this weight but place it on others, those who exploit
the labor and oppression of others. Are there many such people? For one lord there are
a million slaves, for one fortunate man, in Satan’s terminology, a million beings bent to
the ground that they water with their sweat and tears. They’re impoverished creations,
these sheep of the good shepherd, these sheep of Christ, they who give up their lives. He
calls to them, and little by little, as the promised time gradually approaches, they raise
their heads, hear his voice, recognize him and prepare to follow him. From all
sheepfolds, from all human habitations the sheep come running, for they all belong to
the good shepherd, and he will gather them. Scattered, disunited, they crowd together
with a vague expectation of the one who will lead them to pastures where they won’t be
handed over to the authority of landowners who abandon their sheep and flee when
they see a wolf coming, or to strangers who, concerned only about their own profit and
the satisfaction of their greed, appropriate them, dress themselves in their fleece and eat
their meat. And having reached the good shepherd all the sheep will gather around him
and become a single flock with a single shepherd.
The goal of Christ’s mission on earth is to assemble all people into a single
brotherhood, to unite all people, and having united them with God affirm their unity
under the holy laws of freedom: the eternal and limitless advancement of love, which is
the eternal life of all that exists. Hugues-‐Félicité Robert de Lamennais
156
It’s impossible to love someone you fear or someone who fears you. Cicero
Those who preach morality but limit their responsibilities to the boundaries of their
families and homeland are preaching egoism. Each person might preach a greater or
lesser degree of egoism, but nevertheless it’s harmful to you and others. Family and
homeland are two circles contained within a much broader circle: humanity. They’re two
steps through which you must pass but at which you must not remain.
Giuseppe Mazzini
Consciousness of one’s unity, which emerges from the consciousness of the single
divine source within everyone, gives people the greatest internal—personal—and
external—societal—happiness, and therefore all that interferes with it is evil, and all
that supports it is good. Superstitions and partitions of people interfere with it most of
all, while truth and love assist it.
157
February 16
The Temptation of Punishment
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.” This is a beastly law, not a
human one. And such a law is ascribed to God!
He who experiences the joy of repaying evil with good just once will never again let
an opportunity to feel this joy pass by.
Why have people been given reason, and more importantly, why has love been
placed in their hearts, if you can only deal with them like animals: with threats and
violence?
It should be obvious that you can’t put out fire with fire, stop a flood with water, or
correct evil with evil. However, instead of admitting that their low, bestial desire for
vengeance is a sin, people try to argue that revenge is a legitimate affair, necessary for
their happiness and the happiness of others.
158
Revenge, the retaliation against a person who’s offended, outraged, and injured us
through the same means that he used and justified through disingenuous reasoning, is
becoming a ruinous doctrine that teaches that properly instituted violence can be useful.
Violence can only stop a person from doing what he wishes for a time, but this delay
will only be temporary. Just as a dam can’t stop a river, violence can’t change or destroy
people’s thoughts and feelings, and these thoughts and feelings will demand their
fulfillment sooner or later.
It should be obvious that if we commit evil against a person for what he’s done, that
person will as a rule fail to acknowledge the evil that he’s done but rather will want to
repay the person who has done evil to him with more evil. So the evil that we commit will
only increase evil. But people don’t see this; they don’t want to see it. But what they see
or fail to see can’t change the truth of the matter: every repayment of evil for evil will
simply escalate evil indefinitely.
159
People often say that life without violence is impossible and that a just world can
only be established by using violence. But if people establish a just world using violence,
then the people who establish this world should know what justice and injustice are. If
some people are capable of seeing what justice is and can be just, then why can’t all
people know this and be just?
From this reasoning it’s clear that the violence of the ruling classes is merely
vengeance and doesn’t attain the goal that it purports to.
One dog bites another and the other one snarls. One horse kicks another and the
other one does the same. A child, a fool, and a person deprived of his reason all act
likewise. However, in our day it’s completely incomprehensible how people can recognize
laws written in barbaric times such as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as the laws
of God. It’s time people freed themselves from this terrible delusion.
160
February 17
The Superstition of Violence
People want to remain as bad as they are, but they want their lives to improve.
Do what I command and ignore what I do.
It seems very easy and quite possible to construct a form of society that will improve
everyone, so people enthusiastically engage in the reorganization of society while they
neglect the task of their own inner perfection: the only means for the actual
improvement of the life of society.
Just as there are superstitions about false gods, prophecies, and ritualistic means to
please God and save your soul, there’s a superstition among people that some can use
violence to force others to live a good life. Superstitions about gods, prophecies and
ritualistic ways of saving your soul are already beginning to crumble and are nearly
destroyed, but everyone still believes the superstition of a governmental organization
that will make people happy, and in its name the most terrible atrocities are committed.
161
Organizing the external forms of social life before people have succeeded in
perfecting themselves is like reinforcing a collapsing building with unfinished bricks
and no lime. No matter how you place the bricks they won’t be protected from bad
weather and the entire building will collapse.
All suffering comes from ignorance. The salvation from suffering is knowledge. True
knowledge is acquired through perfecting yourself. Therefore, there’s only one salvation
from suffering: perfection. Perfection comes to a person through silent work on himself,
but never through a change in the external forms of life. Work on the external forms of
life, as is the case in our Christian world, not only destroys the peace necessary for
internal work, but always lowers morality, diverting people through these external
changes to work that is incompatible with true perfection.
162
If there ever was a time when there could be heroes and wise men so morally
superior to the common people that the majority naturally and readily submitted to all
their demands, even those that were contrary to their own interests, that time has long
passed. In our day it’s already difficult to find someone who doesn’t realize that those
ruling over them are not only morally inferior to them, but also nearly always morally
inferior to most people, yet would never consider questioning the acts and orders of
these people. Most people don’t approve of them, but won’t commit themselves to
opposing them as long as they can’t count on widespread and immediate support. In
our time the relationship between subject and ruler, be it autocratic ruler or elected
official, is retained only out of habit, but you can’t help but sense that this relationship
has been outdated for a long time.
The system by which all nations of the earth function is based upon the foulest
deception, the deepest ignorance, or a combination of the two, so much so that no
modification of the foundations that support this system can bring people anything
good. On the contrary, its practical consequences must always be evil and the perpetual
creation of evil. Robert Owen
163
The coming transformation of the structure of people’s lives in our Christian world
will consist of the replacement of violence with love, the recognition of the possibility, the
ease, and the blessedness of life founded not on violence and the threat of violence, but
on love. Therefore, this transformation can’t possibly come from the violence of
authority.
The superstition that some people can arrange the lives of others is terrible because
wherever this belief is held, the more people value it the less moral they are.
The right of the powerful isn’t a right but the simple fact that it can be treated as a
right as long as it meets no protest or opposition. It’s like cold, darkness, or a heavy
weight, which can be endured until you find heat, light, or a lever. All human industry is
liberation from the power of crude nature, while the advancement of justice is nothing
more than a series of restrictions established by the tyranny of the powerful. As
medicine is victory over illness, happiness is victory over blind brutality and the
unrestrained desires of man as animal. Accordingly, I always see one and the same law:
the increasing freedom of the individual, the approach of people to happiness, to justice,
to wisdom. Insatiable greed is the starting point; rational generosity is the goal.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
164
February 18
The Superstition of Government
When a person has to choose between what God commands and what the
government commands and he obeys the government, he behaves like someone who
doesn’t obey his employer and landlord but rather the first person he meets on the
street.
Always keep in mind that if a good deed can only be accomplished through
coercion, it’s not a good deed.
165
The doctrine of Christ has always been contrary to the doctrine of the world.
According to the doctrine of the world, rulers govern the people and, in order to govern
them, they force some people to kill, execute and punish other people, force them to
swear that they will fulfill the will of their rulers, and force them to fight wars with other
nations. According to the doctrine of Christ, not only must a person not kill, but he
must not violate another, he must not even resist another by force; he must refrain from
evil not only against those close to him but also against his enemies. The doctrine of the
world and the doctrine of Christ have always been polar opposites. Christ knew this and
told his followers that they would be tortured and killed for following his doctrine and
that the world would hate them the same way he hated it, because they would not be
servants of the world, but of the Father.
And it turned out and continues to be just as Christ foretold.
166
If a government were to reach its goal and establish a perfect system, one that
resembled a system where people who desired and strove for total justice governed
themselves, the internal essence and genesis of these two situations would nevertheless
directly contradict one another. In the latter case, no one would wish to create injustice;
in the former, no one would wish to endure injustice, and the solution would be achieved
through external means. So the goal of external justice can only be achieved by
administrative means that are directly opposed to internal justice, much like a muzzled
carnivore is rendered as harmless as an herbivore. Beyond this a government cannot
venture; it cannot accomplish that which mutual goodwill and love can achieve in
human society. Arthur Schopenhauer
We live in an age of discipline, culture and civilization, but we are far from an age of
morality. In the state that people find themselves in now, it’s clear that the good fortune
of the government increases along with the misfortune of the people. And the question
remains: were we happier in our primal condition, when we didn’t have this culture,
than in our current condition?
It’s impossible to make people happy without first making them moral and wise.
Immanuel Kant
167
“I’m very sorry that I have to order the confiscation of property, imprisonment, exile,
forced labor, executions, war—in other words, mass murder—but I’m required to act
this way because this is what the people who’ve granted me authority demand,” say
those in power. “If I take people’s property, drag them from their families, lock them up,
exile them, execute them, if I murder people of another nation, devastate them, go into
their cities and shoot women and children, I’m not doing it on my own authority,
because I’m fulfilling the will of a higher power, which I’ve promised to obey for the sake
of the common good.”
This is the essence of the terrible superstition of governmental organization. Only
the superstition of government, which no longer has any meaning in our age, allows
such mindless, completely unjustifiable power of hundreds of people over millions and
deprives those millions of freedom. A person who lives in Canada, Kansas, Bohemia,
Little Russia, or Normandy can’t be free as long as he considers himself—and
frequently takes pride in being—a Canadian, American, Austrian, Russian or French
citizen. A government entrusted with the impossible task of maintaining the unity of
such meaningless unions like Russia, Britain, Germany and France can’t provide their
citizens with true freedom, not even a semblance of it, as all the cunning constitutional,
monarchical, republican and democratic systems try to do. The primary, if not the only
reason, for people’s lack of freedom is the superstition about the necessity of
government. People can be deprived of freedom when there’s no government, but where
there’s government they can’t be free.
168
Every government is supported by armed men who are prepared to impose its will
on the people and who’ve been trained to murder anyone the government tells them to.
These people are the police and, primarily, the army. An army is nothing more than a
collection of disciplined murderers. An army has always stood and continues to stand at
the foundation of authority. Power has always lain in the hands of the one who controls
the army, and all rulers from the Roman Caesars to the Russian and German emperors
have concerned themselves most of all with the army. An army supports the external
power of the government more than anything else. It does not tolerate its authority
being taken from it by other governments. War is nothing more than a conflict among a
few rulers about power over their subjects. Because of the army’s significance in this
regard, each government finds it essential to enlarge its army. The enlargement of
armies is infectious, as Montesquieu noted one hundred and fifty years ago. But when
people think that governments maintain armies only for defense from foreign invasions,
they forget that governments need armies first and foremost to defend themselves from
their oppressed and enslaved subjects.
An essential characteristic of every government is its demand that its citizens
participate in the crude violence that supports it. Thus, every citizen is his own
oppressor. Government demands of its citizens violence and approval of violence.
169
All misfortunes, indivisibly tied to government, gradually increase with its
enlargement and decrease with its constriction.
It’s far more natural to imagine a human society governed by rational laws that are
advantageous to and recognized by all than a society where people submit to
governmental laws established by no one knows who.
170
February 19
The Superstition of the Church
It’s bad when people don’t know God, but it’s worse when they see God in that which
is not God. Lactantius
“Beware of the scribes, who love to walk around in long robes and to be welcomed at
public gatherings, to occupy the seats of honor at synagogues and the best couches at
banquets, who consume widows’ property and hypocritically pray for long stretches.”
(Luke 20:46-‐47)
Wherever there is false faith there will always be such scribes, and they will always
behave like those described in the Gospels.
If something is forwarded as the law of God and it doesn’t demand love, then it’s all
a man-‐made story, and not the law of God. Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
As soon as people appear who start claiming that they’re the Church and therefore
they alone are sinless, others immediately appear saying the same thing about
themselves. And as soon as there are two factions who talk about each other, each
claiming the other preaches falsehood, it’s most likely they’re both wrong.
171
We live badly, even worse than pagans, because in place of true faith we have only a
false faith, a deception of faith.
When people don’t have the courage to rely on their inner convictions—the voice of
God within them—they become victims of the teachers of false religions, which in the
name of punishments and rewards in a future life, force them to do things that are
incompatible with their souls but which for some reason are desirable and profitable to
the teachers of false faith. Based on a Passage by Lucy Mallory
Any form of slavery is easier to destroy than religious slavery. A person who kowtows
before the despotism of the church will be a slave to any master who wishes to collar
him.
172
From the time of Moses to the time of Jesus many different peoples and nations
achieved stunning intellectual and religious progress. From the time of Jesus to our time
this development, both in individuals and nations, has been even more significant. Old
errors have been rejected, and new truths have entered man’s consciousness. One person
can’t be as great as all humanity. If a person is so much greater than his brothers that
they don’t understand him, the time will come when they first catch up with him, then
outdistance him and go so far that they, in turn, become incomprehensible to those who
stand where the formerly great person stood. Every great religious genius clarifies
religious truth more and more and contributes to the greater and greater unity of all
people. Theodore Parker
173
As with each individual person, so all humanity must not linger in its current
condition but transform, proceed from a lower state to a higher one, the limit of which is
God himself. Each condition is the consequence of the previous one. Growth continues
perpetually and imperceptibly, much like the growth of an embryo; it happens in a way
that allows nothing to destroy the connection with subsequent conditions in this never-‐
ending evolution. But it is the destiny of individuals and all humanity to accomplish this
transformation through labor and suffering.
Before you can be clothed in greatness, before you can enter the light, you must
move through darkness, endure persecution, and surrender your body to save your soul.
You must die in order to be born again in a more powerful and perfect form. And after
eighteen centuries, having achieved one cycle of its development, humanity once again
strives to transform itself. The old systems, the old institutions, all the features the old
world are collapsing all at once, and people now live among ruins in terror and misery.
So don’t be despondent amidst these ruins, these deaths that have happened or are
bound to happen, but rather grow up. The union of all humanity is close at hand.
Hugues-‐Félicité Robert de Lamennais
174
It would seem that even a small child should understand that there is no external
sign of the piety that the churches ascribe to themselves, and that the assertion “I am the
church; the Holy Spirit speaks through me,” is the pinnacle of pride, madness, and
blasphemy. How amazing it is that this fraud still exists today. If you collate only the
various teachings that exclude and detest each other, and especially if you follow the
horrific history of the churches and councils, it becomes clear that these illusory decrees
about the Holy Spirit came about by accident, through worldly authority, threats and
deceptions, and since these illusory decrees about the Holy Spirit contradict one another
you can’t help but be astonished that some people still maintain this obvious lie, and
that others—many of them intelligent and well-‐educated—actually believe it.
Our age is the true age of criticism, before which all should submit.
Religion and legislation usually slip past criticism: the former because of its sanctity,
and the latter because of its grandeur.
But in that case they arouse justifiable suspicion against themselves and can’t expect
genuine respect, because reason only respects that which is able to withstand free and
public investigation. Immanuel Kant
175
February 20
The Superstition of Science
It’s better to know less than it’s possible to than to know more than is necessary.
From excessive knowledge people become contented, self-‐assured and become stupider
than they would have been if they knew nothing.
Don’t fear ignorance, fear superfluous knowledge, especially if the goal of this
knowledge is personal gain or praise.
It’s much better to know nothing and—what’s very rare—to know that you know
nothing than to know a little and think you know everything. A person who knows
nothing is far more intelligent than a person who thinks he knows that which he
doesn’t.
In order to be a good person, first of all you have to concern yourself with your soul.
And for your soul to be in good order, you must search for truth and holiness. This
happens only to a person who knows what every person needs to know in order to live a
good life, even if he knows little else.
176
There are no two more incompatible concepts than knowledge and profit, science
and money. If you need money to become better educated, if education can be bought,
then the salesman and the buyer are mistaken. Christ threw the merchants from the
temple. In the same way, there can be no buyers and sellers of science.
It’s better to possess a small share of common sense with humility than to possess
the great treasures of science with self-‐satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with
scholarship and every form of knowledge is good in and of itself, but a good conscience
and a virtuous life must be established before education can begin. Thomas van Kempen
There are some errors that are impossible to refute. You have to convey to the mind
in error the knowledge that will enlighten him, and then the error will disappear on its
own. Immanuel Kant
To free a person from error means to give him something, not take something away.
The consciousness that something is false is already the consciousness of truth. A
mistake is always harmful; it may happen sooner or later, but it will harm a person who
stands by it. Arthur Schopenhauer
177
The mind’s ability to absorb knowledge is unlimited. Therefore, you can’t say: “The
more you know the better.” Knowledge of a large amount of trivia is an insurmountable
obstacle to knowing what’s truly necessary.
In our day, people who consider themselves educated, cultured and enlightened, who
know countless useless facts while stagnating in deep ignorance, not only ignorant of
the meaning of life but even proud of this ignorance, are more common than just about
anything. On the other hand, another no less common phenomenon is meeting people
living among the semi-‐literate and illiterate who know nothing about the periodic table,
parallaxes and the characteristics of a radius, but who are truly enlightened and don’t
take pride in it.
178
February 21
Effort
You commit sins yourself, you conceive of evil yourself, you escape from sin yourself,
you purify your thoughts yourself. You are either pure or evil through yourself. No one
else will save you. Dhammapada
The goodness of a dove isn’t virtue. A dove is no more virtuous than a wolf. For a
human being, virtue only begins when he exerts effort to live well, and the more effort he
exerts the better he is.
When a person tries to improve himself, it always happens that he falls and goes
backwards from time to time. However, these steps backwards are always smaller than
his movement forward. So in the end, if a person exerts effort to live well, he’ll always
move towards the good.
We must free ourselves from the ridiculous idea that Heaven can correct our
mistakes. If you cook a bad meal, you don’t think Providence is going to make it tasty;
and so if you mindlessly steer your life in a false direction for a number years, you
shouldn’t expect divine intervention to straighten it out and arrange everything for the
best. John Ruskin
179
Saying that you don’t have the strength to restrain yourself from a bad deed is like
admitting that you’re not a human being, not even an animal, but a thing. People who
don’t try often say this, but no matter how times they repeat it they know in their souls
that as long as they’re alive they have the ability to exert effort.
A person perceives himself not in thought but in action. Only in the exertion of effort
to fulfill his duty does he recognize his value. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We exert effort to wake up, and really do wake ourselves up when we have a terrible
dream and don’t have the strength to endure it. We have to do the same thing when our
lives become repugnant, using the strength of our soul to awaken from animal life into
spiritual life.
The true enemies of Christianity and all faiths are those who teach people that they
can be saved by something other than their own effort; that they can be saved through
ransoms, prayers, or rituals.
Every true religion simply teaches that all human life is effort to pass from lower
animal life to a life that is more and more spiritual.
180
February 22
Restraint in Word and Deed
All our best actions come not from turbulent inner passions but, on the contrary,
from quiet inner work on our souls. All the doors to sublime and holy peace open
towards us and require effort. Only the doors to destruction open easily and effortlessly.
Don’t tell stories about the misdeeds and shortcomings of those close to you. Don’t
reveal what you know about their bad behavior to others. And if you hear something
bad about someone close to you, try to forget it. The less people know about the bad
deeds of others the better it is for them.
It’s impossible to increase the blessings and sanctity of our lives. All of life is blessed
and holy. We simply have to use all our strength to keep from befouling and spoiling it,
and we befoul and spoil it not by failing to do this or that, but by doing what we could
have avoided doing.
181
Among all the actions that people undertake, there’s one type of action that
demands the least amount of physical effort, is distinguished from all other actions by
its moral significance and, as a result, possesses the most influence upon people’s lives.
This action is the word.
When people malevolently argue with each other, a child can’t determine who’s right
and who’s wrong and sadly flees from them, condemning them both; and he’s more
correct than either of the people arguing. Even if he can’t explain it, he correctly
perceives that as soon as an argument begins the opponents use words to fight each
other rather than to relate the truth.
A person with his passions is like a lion or bear tamer in a circus. To calm them,
tame them and turn them into domesticated animals and servants: this is every person’s
task. Let these beasts roar and try to tear you to pieces, but they won’t dare; they’ll
submit to you.
If you really feel the urge to speak, definitely stay silent, and most of all don’t say
what you want to say.
In order to find joy in serving people and all living things, you must first teach
yourself not to commit evil against people and other living things; you must not build
your life on others’ suffering.
182
The word is the key to the heart. If a conversation leads to nothing, then the word by
itself is a waste. When you’re alone, think about your sins, and when you’re among
people forget about the sins of others. Chinese Saying
People only fret, suffer and long for what they don’t need. What they do need is
acquired without agitation or suffering. If it’s hard to acquire something you do need,
more often than not it’s because you did much that was superfluous before you set out
to achieve what you needed.
De mortuis aut bene aut nihil. “Either speak well of the dead or remain silent.” What
an erroneous rule! On the contrary, you should say, “either speak well of the living or
remain silent.” How much suffering this would save people from, and how easy it is!
Why shouldn’t you speak ill of the dead? Quite the opposite. In our world there’s a rule:
at funerals and memorials you must speak of the dead exclusively in horrifically
exaggerated panegyrics, and therefore only with lies. This causes people great harm,
diluting and effacing the meaning of good and evil.
183
February 23
Restraint in Thought
When something bad happens to you, know that it happened not because of
something you did, but because of something you thought.
That which is still at peace can be kept peaceful. That which hasn’t happened yet can
be prepared for. That which is still weak can easily be broken. That which is still small
can easily be scattered.
A thick tree began as a narrow shoot. A nine-‐story tower began with the placement
of small bricks. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Be aware of you
thoughts, for they are the beginning of actions. Lao Tsu
You can’t escape from sins, temptations, superstitions and deceptions through
physical strength. You can only escape them through the power of thought. Only
through thought can you train yourself to be selfless, humble and restrained in word
and deed. Only when a person strives with his thoughts toward self-‐renunciation,
humility, honesty and abstinence—only then will he be strong enough to do battle with
sins, temptations, superstitions and deceptions.
Never forget that there is nothing more important in your life than your thoughts.
184
The activity of thought is valuable not only because it corrects our own lives but also
because it can aid the lives of others. This is why the power of thought is especially
important.
A person’s will cannot be just until the habits of his mind are corrected, since their
consequences constitute the will. The habits of the mind are established through
intercourse with the wisdom of the world’s finest minds. Seneca
Everything is in Heaven’s power except our choice to serve either God or ourselves.
We can’t stop birds from flying above our heads, but we can keep them from nesting on
our heads. In the same way, we can’t prohibit bad thoughts from flashing through our
minds, but we have the power to keep them from nesting there to breed and hatch evil
deeds. Martin Luther
There’s a spiritual power that moves the world yet escapes our attention. It’s not in
books, nor in newspapers, speeches, laws, or academic treatises; it is elusive and always
free. It is in the depths of human consciousness. The most powerful and elusive free
force is the one that develops in the human soul when it meditates on the phenomenon
of the world alone and then relates it to those with whom it comes into contact. Neither
millions of rubles, nor millions of soldiers, nor constitutions, wars, nor revolutions can
produce what these thoughts can when they’re expressed simply to a free person.
185
As the life of an individual is defined by something we pay less attention to than our
actions—our thoughts—so the lives of human societies and nations are defined not by
the acts perpetrated by these societies and nations, but by the thoughts that unite the
majority of these peoples and societies.
One great thought instilled in a human soul can transform it. The notion of freedom
in both ancient and recent religions and the notion of Divine truth in religious sects—
how effortlessly they vanquish worldly gains! How many heroes and martyrs they give
us! Great ideas are more powerful than our passions. William Channing
A person can live without prayer only when sins have completely possessed him or,
on the contrary, when he’s completely free of sins. However, for a person who’s
struggling with his passions and living among temptations, superstitions and
deceptions, prayer is a necessary condition for a good life, as it serves to re-‐establish in
his consciousness the higher understanding of the meaning of his life and the guidance
that flows from it for all his actions.
186
February 24
Honesty
A person is free only when he lives in truth. Truth is uncovered by reason.
Don’t believe anything based on what you hear. Think everything over yourself and
accept only that which is in agreement with reason.
Superstitions and deceptions torment people. The only deliverance from them is
truth. We recognize truth through our own efforts as well as through wise and holy
people who lived before us. Therefore in order to live a good, kind life you have to search
for the truth yourself and employ the guidance provided by truths that have reached us
from wise and holy people of the past.
“The eye is the lamp of the body; so if your eye is pure then all your body will be pure,
and if your eye is befouled then your body will be dark. So look: is the light within you
clouded?” (Luke 11:34-‐35)
The eye is man’s reason, and the body is his entire life. If reason is obscured then all
a person’s life will be unhappy. Falsehood obscures reason, so fear falsehood more than
anything in the world.
187
Whether we want to believe it or not, no truth can enter the human soul without the
help of reason. Reason is like a grate or a sifter attached to a thresher or a fanner, so
that you can only obtain grain through the sifter. Dirt might pass through the sifter too,
but there’s no other way; in order to obtain grain you have to keep the sifter in good
order and keep passing grain through the sifter of reason.
If we believe that there can be clean grain without sifting it, then we’re deceiving
ourselves and we’ll end up eating dirt instead of bread.
If you wish to know the truth, first of all free yourself, at least while you’re searching
for the truth, from all considerations of self-‐interest in the possible results of your
search.
188
Innocence and childhood are sacred. Like a sower casting seed, a father, a mother
and a mentor cast with their words the foundations of a worldview into a child’s soul,
thereby accomplishing a holy purpose. Therefore, they must always perform such acts
with reverence, for they work in service of the Divine Kingdom. Every sowing is a
mysterious affair whether the seed is cast onto the ground or into a human soul. Every
person is like a farmer: his entire purpose, if he understands it correctly, lies in the
clarification of truth and its dissemination everywhere. This is man’s vocation, and it is a
holy vocation. And the word is his primary tool.
Too often we forget that the word is both dissemination and revelation. The
consequences of a word spoken at the right time are incalculable. We see stones and
trees on the side of the road, the furnishings in our homes, we see all sorts of material
things, but we don’t notice the strings of invisible thoughts that fill the atmosphere and
constantly beat their wings around each of us. Henri Frédéric Amiel
“Woe to the world that one must face temptation; but woe to the person through
whom temptations come into being. If your hand or your foot tempts you, cut it off and
throw it away.” (Matthew 18:7-‐8)
These words mean that if you’re following the path of truth and lose something,
sometimes quite a bit, of the earthly life, it shouldn’t stop you, because the minor losses
you incur while pursuing truth are incomparably less than what you’ll lose if you don’t
pursue it.
189
Any time you feel that you want to do something not based upon your own
reasoning but because everyone else is doing it and wants you to act the same way, stop
and think whether what you’re being advised to do is good or bad.
The main obstacle to recognizing the truth isn’t falsehood but the similitude of
truth.
The purpose of reason is to uncover truth, and therefore it’s a great and ruinous
error to use reason to conceal or distort the truth.
190
February 25
Humility
Do good in secret and be sorry when someone finds out about it, and you’ll learn the
joy of doing good for your soul.
Truly virtuous people don’t consider themselves virtuous, and therefore they are
virtuous. People who aren’t truly virtuous are always conscious their virtue, and
therefore they aren’t virtuous.
True virtue doesn’t recognize itself and doesn’t put on a show. False virtue
recognizes itself and puts itself on display.
True kindness doesn’t recognize itself and doesn’t try to call attention to itself. False
kindness recognizes itself and tries to display itself. True justice appears when it’s
needed but it doesn’t try to display itself. False justice is always putting on a show and
trying to draw attention to itself.
Genuine propriety appears when it’s needed but it doesn’t try to display itself. False
propriety constantly appears and, when no one responds to it, uses violence to force its
rules on others.
When true virtue is lost kindness appears. When kindness is lost, justice appears.
When justice is lost, propriety appears.
The rules of propriety are only approximations of truth and the beginning of all
forms of disorder. Lao Tsu
191
Only a person who knows that God lives in his soul can be humble. For such a
person it doesn’t matter how people judge him.
Don’t live so that people will think well of you but so that you’ll know for yourself
that you’re living well.
Self-‐assured, mindless and immoral people often command the respect of modest,
intelligent and moral people precisely because a modest person, basing his judgment on
his own behavior, can’t imagine how a bad person could respect himself and discuss
things he knows nothing about with such self-‐confidence.
Humility is the foundation of everything, both virtue and reason. There’s nothing
more useful for your soul than to remember that you’re an insignificant little being in
both time and space, and that all your strength lies in your comprehension of your
insignificance.
There’s nothing better than when people condemn you for a good deed and you take
joy in it. Marcus Aurelius
192
To be unknown to people or incomprehensible to them and not to grieve over it is a
quality of a truly virtuous person. Chinese Wisdom
In order to calmly and rationally understand life and death it is essential to
understand your insignificance. You are some sort of infinitely small particle of
something, and you would be nothing if you didn’t have a definite mission: your deeds.
This alone gives your life meaning and value. Your work consists of using the tools that
have been given to you (blunting an axe or sharpening a scythe) as they’ve been given to
all that exists. All actions are equal, and you can’t do any more than what’s been
assigned to you, and you can’t help but do it. Your entire concern is to do your work
gladly. Therefore, you can be an enemy of God, you can torture yourself, but it doesn’t
matter: whether you want to or not you’ll fulfill your duty. It’s best not to oppose or
delay that which you can do well. Therefore, a person can’t do anything great or
important. As soon as you consider a person great or exceptional, you turn him into a
freak. If you ascribe these qualities to yourself, you perish. Only when you understand
this can you have a rational, peaceful life and be fearless in the face of death. As soon as
you ascribe more importance to yourself than an apple or a maple tree, which produce
fruit, you deprive yourself of peace, joy in life, and humility before death.
193
February 26
Self-‐Renunciation
The more your give of the physical, the more you will receive of the spiritual, and vice
versa. See which of the two you need more.
There is no life without sacrifice. All of life is a sacrifice of the physical to the
spiritual.
The one true and joyful business of life is the cultivation of your soul, and in order to
cultivate your soul you must renounce yourself. Start by renouncing yourself in small
matters, and then you’ll be able to renounce yourself in major affairs too.
Only he who doesn’t live for himself doesn’t perish. But for who should you live if not
for yourself? Only when you live for all can you cease to live for yourself. Only when a
person lives for all can he be at peace. Lao Tsu
194
The more a person transfers his life from the physical to the spiritual, the more his
life becomes free and joyful. In order to transfer his life from the physical to the spiritual
he must believe that it is in the spiritual that his happiness lies. For a person to believe
this he must renounce physical life. Faith requires self-‐renunciation, and self-‐
renunciation requires faith. One helps the other.
A person has no basis to evaluate or, what’s more, the right to judge the
consequences of a life full of absolute dedication while he himself lacks the courage to
attempt to live such a life, at least for a little while. However, I doubt that there’s so much
as one rational person who wouldn’t desire the beneficial influence that even incidental
instances of forgetting himself and renouncing his individuality have upon his body
and soul, nor is there on honest person who would dare to deny it. John Ruskin
It pays to think about yourself in the middle of a conversation and lose your train of
thought. Only when we completely forget ourselves and go out of ourselves do we
fruitfully interact with others and become able to serve and influence them.
195
Sooner or later, clearly or vaguely, every person will experience an internal
contradiction: “I want to live for myself and I want to live rationally, but it’s irrational to
live for myself.” This appears to be a contradiction, but is it really? If so, then for a
rotting seed it’s a contradiction that it’s rotting while it releases a stalk. The
contradiction exists only as long as you refuse to listen to the voice of reason. Reason
reveals the necessity of transferring your consciousness of life from personal life into
your blossoming spiritual life. It reveals the uselessness and senselessness of personal life
and promises a new life, just as a kernel germinates and bursts forth from a cherry pit.
A contradiction exists only when we cling to this external form of life that has meaning
in its own time but outlives its purpose like a seed’s shell does once the kernel breaks
through it, wishing to claim its own life. That which we call a contradiction is merely the
birth pangs of a new life. All you have to do is not resist the inevitable destruction of
personal life through rational consciousness and submit to this rational consciousness,
and a new life will be revealed.
196
February 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Remember that if you can do a good deed or show love toward someone you must do
it immediately, because the opportunity will pass and never return.
We must serve God here and now. Therefore, try to do here and now what you
consider necessary before your soul and before God.
Life now, in the present, is the state in which God lives within us. Therefore, the
present moment in life is more valuable than anything. Use all the powers of your soul
to make sure this moment doesn’t pass in vain and that it doesn’t conceal from you the
God who can appear within you.
Repentance is always useful. Repentance is regret that you failed to do what you
could have done. It’s useful in that you won’t let an opportunity pass by to do what you
must in the future.
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It’s hard to remember that your life is now, in the present moment, when you’re
interacting with people, when you become distracted by thoughts of the past or the
future. But this remembrance is so important and precious. Try to teach yourself this
lesson. You can escape a great deal of evil if you teach yourself to make the one single
moment that truly exists the focus of your life’s concerns.
The older I get, the more animated my recollections become. And amazingly enough,
I recall only joyful and good memories and delight in these memories no less, and
sometimes even more, than I did when they actually occurred. What does this mean? It
means that nothing passes by, nothing will be and nothing once was, but rather
everything is. And the more life is revealed, the more sharply you see the distinction
between what’s good and true and what’s evil and false: that which doesn’t and
shouldn’t exist.
We flounder when we try to solve the question of a future life. The question is posed
falsely and incorrectly: there is no future life. Life and the future is a contradiction; life
exists only in the present. It only appears to us as though it was and will be. We
shouldn’t be solving the question of the future but rather the question of how to live
now, in the present.
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How many moral torments—and all so that you can die in just a few minutes!
What should you focus your attention on and why?
Indeed, time is nothing, and your life is full and this very day is worth centuries if,
today, you find God. Henri Frédéric Amiel
What is memory, which makes me out of me—first a babe, then an adult with all
his strength, and then a decrepit old man—one and the same being from childhood to
death? What is this attribute that binds together individual beings separated by time?
You shouldn’t ask what unites these beings, but rather what separates them. The
attribute of time, outside of which I cannot see myself, is what separates. I am an
indivisible being from birth to death, but I must manifest and be conscious of myself
within time.
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February 28
There is No Evil
When something unpleasant happens to us, we usually blame someone else or fate,
but we never consider the possibility that if people or fate can harm us, it means
something within us is not as it should be. To those who live for their soul, no one and
nothing can do evil; neither persecution, nor insult, nor poverty nor illness is evil for
such a person. Based on a Passage by Epictetus
The only business of life is to make your animal self more and more spiritual. In
order to do this, that which we call evil is necessary. Only by freeing ourselves from what
we call evil—from sorrows, illnesses, and suffering—can we learn to recast our animal
self into a spiritual being.
Since we all know how weak and frequently bad people are who have easy lives, who
are always healthy, rich, and who never face harm or insults, we can clearly see how
essential trials are for a person, yet we frequently complain when we have to endure
them.
In order to learn patience, you have to practice as much as you would when learning
to play a musical instrument. Nevertheless, when a teacher arrives and a chance to learn
patience comes we run from the lesson. John Ruskin
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Some people say, “If a person was able neither to fear nor think about death—the
terrible, pointless and totally unjust suffering that he must face and from which there is
no return—that would be enough to destroy all rational meaning ascribed to life.
“I’m doing good work. It’s undoubtedly useful for others, and then suddenly
sickness seizes me, stops my work, and exhausts and tortures me without sense or
reason. Screws on a rail rust, and so on the very day when it jump the rails, a kind
mother happens to be in the car and her children are crushed right before her eyes.
There’s an earthquake and the ground collapses right under Lisbon or Verny, and
totally innocent people are buried and die in horrific suffering. Why do these and
thousands of other meaningless and terrible tragedies and afflictions seize people?
What is the meaning of all this?”
The answer is that these arguments are perfectly reasonable for people who fail to
recognize spiritual life. However, there can be no such thing as a healthy person who
doesn’t recognize spiritual life. People only think that they don’t recognize spiritual life.
If people only drew those conclusions that inescapably follow from a merely physical
worldview, such people, who understand their lives as finite existence, couldn’t live for a
single moment. No worker would ever live with an employer who hires him and, when he
gets the notion, cooks the worker alive over a slow fire, or skins a man alive, or rips out
his sinews or does all those horrors an employer does to his workers right before their
eyes without any reason or explanation. If people understood life as completely they say
they do, not one of them would remain living in this world simply because of their fear
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of all the torturous and inexplicable sufferings they see around them and into which
they could fall at any moment.
But people—people live, complain and cry over sufferings and continue to live.
There’s only one explanation to this strange contradiction: in the depths of their
souls people know that life isn’t physical but spiritual, and that all sufferings are
necessary, essential for spiritual happiness. When they rage against suffering but
continue to live, it’s because they affirm the corporeality of life with their minds, while in
the depths of their souls they know that life is spiritual and that there’s no suffering that
can deprive a person of his true happiness.
Illness is the natural condition of a Christian, for in this condition a Christian can be
as he should always be. It makes him accustomed to the lack of physical pleasures, trains
him to restrain the passions that overwhelm him throughout life, to be without
ambition, without greed, and always ready for death. Blaise Pascal
The maturation of the soul is more valuable than the splendor and brilliance of
strength, and that which is eternal within us should take advantage of the weakening
that time brings about within us. Henri Frédéric Amiel
Physical growth is merely the body’s preparation of its resources for the spiritual
growth that begins with the withering away of the body.
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February 29
There is No Death
After Death
Life is a Blessing
If death is terrible, the reason doesn’t lie in it but in us. The better a person is, the
less he fears death.
For a sage there is no death.
You fear death, but think of what would become of you if you had to live as you are
now forever.
If life is sleep and death is an awakening, then seeing myself as separate from all
existence is a dream.
Life has nothing in common with death. Therefore, undoubtedly, there constantly
arises within us mindless hope that obscures reason and makes us doubt the
trustworthiness of our knowledge of death’s inevitability. Physical life strives to hold on
to existence. Like the parrot in the fable, it repeats over and over, even at the moment
when life is being smothered out of it, “This is nothing, nothing.” Henri Frédéric Amiel
203
In the last moments before death the spiritual source abandons the body and, in
abandoning it, we don’t know whether it unites with the source of all, beyond time and
space, or changes into another limited form. We only know that the body is abandoned
by that which causes it to live and it becomes merely an object for observation.
We cheerfully head for the abyss, covering our eyes so we don’t see it. Blaise Pascal
Like a beast, man resists death, but thanks to reason he can always exchange this
resistance not only for resignation, but even approval.
Something reveals itself to a person at the moment of death. “Ah, so that’s it,” he
expresses with all his will. Those of us who remain can’t see what’s been revealed to him.
It will be revealed to us later, at the proper time.
The thought of the nearness of death places a value on every one of our actions
according to the degree of their true importance in our lives. A person sentenced to
immediate execution doesn’t worry about the increase or maintenance of his fortune,
nor about attaining good repute, nor about his nation’s victory over others, nor about
the discovery of new planets, etc., but in the moment before death tries to comfort the
distressed, help up an elderly person who’s fallen, bandage a wound, or fix a child’s toy.
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Death is liberation from the one-‐sidedness of individuality. It’s because of this, so it
would seem, that the faces of the majority of deceased persons express peace and solace.
For a good person, death is normally peaceful and easy; but to die willingly, readily,
gladly—this is a privilege that belongs to someone who denies himself, rejects the will to
live, disavows it, because only such a person truly, and not just apparently, wants to die,
and has no need of further existence as an individual and doesn’t demand it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Is there a future life? I don’t know about a future life. I know that there’s a God, a
spiritual source, according to whose will I’ve entered this temporal life and live in it. This
temporal life will end according to His will. After that, I’ll once again be subject to His
will. So: I came from You and I shall return to You, or rather I have always been in You
and remain in You. This is the answer when the nearness of death worries you. And
sometimes—precisely when you don’t think but surrender—it’s simple and easy.
All human life is a series of changes that can be observed, but which man doesn’t
notice. However, the beginning of these changes, accomplished in birth, and their end,
accomplished in death, are imperceptible to him.
Death is a change in the form of that which is united with our spirit. Don’t confuse
the form with what is united with it.
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When we’re born, our souls are placed into the coffin of our body. This coffin—the
body—is gradually destroyed and our soul becomes more and more liberated. When
the body dies, the soul is completely free. Based on a Passage by Heraclitus
No matter what happens to you, you can’t be unhappy as long as you’re conscious of
your unity with God.
People say: “Why love those we don’t like?” Because there’s joy in it. Try it and you’ll
see if it’s true or not.
Some people seek happiness in power, others in curiosity, in the sciences, and still
others in physical pleasures. These three types of desires compose three different
disciplines, and all philosophies follow from one of these three. Those who are closer to
true philosophy than most understand that the general welfare—toward which all
people strive—cannot lie in any one of the individual endeavors that only some people
can master. Being separate from one another, they soon upset those who’ve mastered
them because they lack the missing pieces that would allow the piece they possess to
satisfy them. Then they understand that true happiness can only be that which can be
acquired all at once, without loss and without envy, and which can’t be lost against their
will. This happiness exists: it is the happiness of love. Blaise Pascal
206
We seek praise and approval, but there can’t be any compensation for the good we
do, because we’ve been given only one great happiness—life—and no matter how
diligent we are we’ll never do enough to be worthy of it.
If people commit evil, they commit it against themselves; no one can do evil to you.
You weren’t born to create evil and sin with others, but to help them in good deeds and
find your happiness in the act of helping them.
Know and remember that if a person is unhappy he himself is the cause of it, for
God created all people to be happy, not to be unhappy.
Of all that God provides for us in this life he placed one part under our authority,
and this constitutes our property. The other part lies outside our power and doesn’t
belong to us. Anything that others are able to take from us isn’t ours, while that which
no one and nothing can interfere with or spoil is our property. And through His
kindness God has given us as property precisely that which is also our true happiness.
God isn’t our enemy; He deals with us like a good father. The only thing He won’t give us
is that which can’t bring us any happiness. Epictetus
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My life isn’t mine, and so its goal can’t be happiness for me alone. Its goal can only
be what the One Who sent me into life wants. He wants love of all for all, the very thing
that brings happiness for all as well as my personal happiness.
If we’re unhappy, it only means that we’re doing something we shouldn’t or not
doing something we should. So not only is happiness the consequence of fulfilling our
duty, but in addition our duty is to experience happiness.
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March
March 1
Faith
People often think that it’s difficult to fulfill the law of God. This is not true. God
doesn’t ask anything of us other than love of our neighbor, and love isn’t difficult, it’s
joyful. Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
Don’t think that an old religion is true because it’s old. The longer humanity lives,
the more comprehensible, reliable, clear and simple the law of God becomes. Thinking
that you need to believe exactly as your grandfathers and great-‐grandfathers believed is
like thinking that the clothes you wore as a child will fit you perfectly once you’ve grown
up.
For true faith you don’t need magnificent temples, gold ornaments, organs or choirs.
On the contrary, true faith always enters your heart in silence and solitude.
A person’s faith doesn’t consist of those many things he doubts and tries to believe,
but of the few things he’s so certain of that it seems to him that he’s always known them.
Thomas Carlyle
209
It doesn’t take any extraordinary powers of reasoning to understand that you have
to act with good and kind motives. Inexperienced in understanding the world as a
whole, ill-‐equipped to sort out and take account of all the events that occur in it, I ask
myself one question: should the motivations that guide my actions become mandatory
laws for everyone? If not, then my motivations are inappropriate, and inappropriate not
only because of the harm they can cause to both others and me but also because they’re
inappropriate as fundamental laws for all. Reason compels me to respect such laws
without hesitation. Although I don’t understand the justification for this respect, I do
understand that what I respect in these laws is something far more valuable than all my
subconscious preferences, and that acting exclusively out of respect for moral law is the
duty upon which every other motivation must base itself. Based on a Passage by
Immanuel Kant
True religion turns us from slaves of God into children of God. A slave fulfills God’s
law out of fear, a child—out of love for one’s parent.
To believe that God exists is not the same as knowing God. To believe He exists
means to be in awe of Him and to fear Him. To know God means to love God, to rely on
Him and live according to His law. Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
210
A person can use the traditions that have been passed down to him by wise and holy
people of the past, but he must confirm with his reason what’s been passed down and
reject those traditions that are not in harmony with reason while accepting those that
are. Each person must establish his own relationship with the world.
Religion is a state in which actions are not conditional upon considerations of
temporal life only, but upon considerations of eternal, infinite life.
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March 2
The Soul
A person lives not by the body but by the soul. If a person understands this and
believes his life is in his soul rather than his body, you can put him in chains or lock him
in iron locks and he’ll still remain free.
All our troubles are caused by our forgetting that God lives within us, and we sell
this God for a cup of porridge: physical pleasure.
Saying that the foundation of everything is entirely physical and that the spiritual is
a creation of the physical is like saying that the foundation of my physical life is the food
I eat. Although it’s quite fair to say that I can’t live without food and that my body is
nothing more than converted food, food doesn’t make up my entire physical life. Food is
merely one of the conditions of my physical life. My life is dependent upon the complex
construction of my body, with all its functions.
It’s the same situation between your body and your spiritual existence. Although I
can’t know my entire spiritual existence without my body, I know that my body is merely
one of the dimensions of my spiritual source that I’m conscious of. If there were no body,
there would be no food nor even the very concept of food. In the same way, if there were
no spirit, there would be neither body nor the conception of one. The source of
everything is my spiritual recognition of life.
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Without a belief in life outside time and space there can be neither a rational, nor
good, nor happy life.
Man is conscious of two lives within himself: one is physical and gradually weakens
and moves toward death, while the other is spiritual and gradually strengthens as it
moves from birth to death. (Lao Tsu expressed this beautifully, saying that anything
weak and flexible, like a child, is powerful and full of life, while anything strong and
hard is approaching death). If a person is unaware of the latter life, which is developing
and ever-‐growing, he’s like someone who’s been sentenced to death where the sentence is
continually carried out a little at a time. This situation is terrible, but all a person has to
do is recognize the spiritual essence within himself and he’ll see everything in reverse: it
will no longer be gradual annihilation but gradual growth of that which he considers
himself.
There is no life in the body. The body only lives through the soul. If it sometimes
seems to you that you live only through your body, this only means that you don’t know
where your life lies. Knowing that you live through your soul and not your body is
essential for a good life.
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For God, I’m another version of Him. Within me He finds that which will eternally be
the same as Him. Angelus Silesius
The philosopher Kant said that two things always astonished and inspired him more
and more: the starry sky and the consciousness of the law of kindness that a person
recognizes in his soul.
I’m the same as God, except that He is He and I am I. Muhammad
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March 3
One Soul in All
If you simply talk to a person and look clearly into his eyes, you’ll feel that he’s
related to you and that you’ve known him for a long time. Why? Because that which
gives us life is the same in you and in him and in all people.
People think it’s acceptable to eat animals because false teachers have convinced
them that animals have been designated by God for people’s exploitation. This is a lie. It
doesn’t matter in what book it’s written that it’s not a sin to kill animals, it is written in
everyone’s hearts more clearly than in any book that we mustn’t kill animals, but rather
we must sympathize with them just like with people. We all know this, unless we’ve
silenced the conscience within us.
No matter what you think of an evil person, no matter how repulsive he is, you must
think and say to yourself: this person repulses me, but what’s repulsive about him is his
body, his voice, his speech, and his deeds. His soul is one with mine. Within him lives the
very same spirit that lives in me. You must search within every person for what unites
you, not what divides you.
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Confucius once said: “Respect every person as much as yourself and deal with him
the way you’d like others to deal with you. There is nothing higher than this.”
The more a person lives for his soul rather than his body, the more he feels his unity
with all living beings.
There are two ways to understand the external world:
The first, the crudest and most unavoidable, is to understand through the five
senses. If we employ this method we’ll never understand the world we know and we’ll
end up in a tangled mess we’ll never be able to sort out.
The second method is to use love of yourself to recognize yourself, and then to use
love towards other beings in order to recognize them, and then to transfer yourself into
them and live through them. People are separated from one another by their bodies and
fail to recognize each other, but through love they can always mentally transfer
themselves into one another. If we employ this method we’ll truly recognize other beings.
Man can always leave himself and enter another person, and not just one other person
but the life of the entire world. This is humanity’s greatest blessing.
Our bodies separate us, but through our souls we’re connected to all living beings.
We feel some of the convulsions of the spiritual world, while others haven’t reached
us yet; but they’re coming just as the light from a star that’s too far away to see is
nevertheless coming.
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All souls belong to one and the same family; they are all from the same source, all of
the same nature, all vivified by the same light and all strive for the same center, the same
happiness. This great truth, so great for us, lies in all religions. This truth is not merely
proven by reason: every person feels it without any proof at all. William Channing
The consciousness that your life is in your spirit and the recognition of this same
spirit in others is incompatible with subordination, patronage, and sponsorship of one
person by another; it is compatible only with love.
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March 4
God
Fearing God is good, but it’s better to love Him. Best of all is to resurrect Him within
yourself. Angelus Silesius
According to an Arabian tale, Moses was wandering in the desert when he heard a
shepherd praying to God. The shepherd prayed, “O, Lord, how I want to be one with you
and be your slave. It would bring me so much joy to put on your shoes, wash your feet
and kiss them, comb your hair, wash your clothes, clean your home and bring you milk
from my herd. My heart wants You!” Hearing these words, Moses got angry and said,
“You’re a blasphemer. God doesn’t have a body. He doesn’t need clothes, or a home, or a
servant. What you’re saying is foul and base.” This made the shepherd sad. He couldn’t
imagine God without a body and physical needs, and he could no longer pray and serve
God, and fell into despair. Then God said to Moses, “Why did you chase my loyal servant
away from Me? Every person has his own ideas and his own way of expressing them.
What might be bad for you is good for someone else. What might be poison for you
might be sweet honey for someone else. Words are meaningless; I see the heart of every
person who turns to Me.”
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What is God? God is that infinite all of which I feel myself a part. God is what every
person is heading toward, whether he wants to or not, and this motion toward God is
the essence of every person’s life. Therefore, God is that which essentially and
inescapably exists for every person. God inescapably exists for every person, but there
isn’t a single person who can understand Him. If a person understood God he would
reach Him, and there would be nothing to strive for and therefore no life.
Consciousness of one’s separate existence is consciousness of oneself: man.
Consciousness of everything is consciousness of God. We possess consciousness of both.
Through love—the expansion of one’s boundaries—a person approaches God, but
love isn’t one of God’s qualities, as people usually say. Love is a human quality.
Man can’t help but accept that there is a law of his life. This acceptance of a law of
one’s life is recognition of the existence of God.
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God exists. We don’t need to prove it. Trying to prove God’s existence is sacrilege;
denying Him is madness. God lives in our conscience, in the consciousness of all
humanity, in the universe around us. Only a very pathetic person or a criminal could
deny God beneath the dome of the night sky, at the graves of people he loved, or at the
sight of a martyr’s joyful death at his execution.
Based on a Passage by Giuseppe Mazzini
I know that within me is something without which nothing could exist. What else
could that be but God? Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
Every person has thoughts, feelings and states of mind that he wants to convey to
others, but he suddenly feels that it’s impossible to transmit this to someone else; they
won’t understand. But to convey thoughts, feelings and states of mind is necessary. Only
God can convey them.
220
March 5
Life is Union
The longer a person lives, the easier he finds it to unite with others and the more
difficult he finds it to separate himself from them. Since this occurs with every person,
the longer people live, the more they unite with one another.
Whether they want to or not, all people move toward the same God their whole lives,
and therefore the longer they live the closer they come to the same God and the closer
they come to one another.
If you want happiness (and everyone wants it), then realize that the only true
happiness is that which gives everyone happiness.
Simply free yourself from exclusive love for yourself and a handful of people and
your soul will spontaneously merge with everyone around you.
Christ showed people the God who lives in their souls and who shares His very self
with them: he separates a person’s soul from his body. If a person recognizes the spirit of
God within himself, he distances himself from his body and unites with the same spirit
that lies within all other people. And so only he who distances himself from himself
finds union with others.
221
Europe’s current situation, with its dynamite, cannons, battleships and mutual
hatred between nations is horrible, but none of it has any real form in human
consciousness. They are merely external manifestations, and therefore they can
disappear at any moment. All a person has to do is recognize his true spiritual self,
which can’t approve of any of these horrors, and what appears so powerful will
immediately disappear. People who were enemies yesterday will become neighbors and
unite through something that can’t help but unite them: the same source that gives life
to all people.
If we’d only hold firmly to the rule that when we associate with someone based on
what we agree upon we don’t insist that he agree with us where he doesn’t and ask that
he not demand the same from us, then we’d never violate Christ’s central doctrine—
union—and without uttering Christ’s words we’d be more Christian than if we used all
sorts of methods to force others to say that they believe in Christ and all sorts of dogmas
they don’t believe.
You can recognize the path to union as easily as you recognize a foot bridge over a
swamp. And as soon as you veer from the path you get mired in the swamp of strife and
malice.
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March 6
Love
An Indian sage once said: “As a mother cares for her only child, nurses him and
raises him, so you too, each person, raise, nourish and guard the most valuable thing in
the world, which lies within you: love for people and all that lives.” All faiths teach this:
Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Chinese, Christian, and Islamic. Therefore, the most necessary
thing on earth is to learn to love.
The fact that we feel all is well when we love and when someone loves us proves that
the only blessing in our life lies in love.
There’s nothing in the world more valuable than people’s love. But it’s amazing: in
order to obtain people’s love you shouldn’t try to please them but rather concern
yourself with becoming closer to God. Simply concern yourself with becoming closer to
God and people will love you.
If you don’t concern yourself with becoming closer to God, no matter how much you
try to please people they won’t love you.
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If you understand that your central task in life is love, then when you interact with
someone you won’t think about how he might be useful to you, but rather how you
might be useful to him. Just do this and you’ll succeed in everything far more than if you
worry about yourself.
God is love, and he who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him. No one has
ever seen God. If we love one another, then God lives in us and his love is perfected in us.
He who says, “I love God” but hates his brother is a liar, for if you hate your brother
whom you can see, how can you love God, whom you can’t? Let’s love one another,
because love is from God and every person who loves is born of God and knows God,
because God is love.
He who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him. 1 John 4:16, 12, 20, 7, 8
Consciousness of the unity of our existence with everything that lives manifests itself
in us as love. Love is the expansion of life. The more we love the vaster, fuller and more
joyful our lives become.
224
“He who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.” Love living within us, or our
living in love, doesn’t refer to our actions but rather our spiritual condition, as a result of
which we do things that please others and evoke their love, but also things that displease
them and can evoke their hatred. If by living a Godly life you evoke people’s ill will you
can either succumb to them, cease living a Godly life and thereby free yourself of their ill
will and at the same time involuntarily evoke within yourself antipathy toward those
who wish you ill (which will drive you from living a good life), or you can continue to live
a Godly life regardless of people’s ill will, live in love toward those who wish you ill and,
in love, pity them.
Why should I submit to the law of love, and what will I get from submitting to it? I
don’t know. I only know that the more I submit to this law the better things are for
others and for me.
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You thrash about, suffer and search for happiness everywhere, but it’s within you.
It’s not in people’s love for you, as it appears at first, but in your love for them.
You must respect every person, no matter how pathetic or ridiculous he might be.
You must remember that in every person lives the same spirit that lives in you. Even
when a person is repulsive in both body and soul you have to think: “Yes, in this world
there must be such freaks, and we have to endure them patiently.” If we express our
revulsion to such people, first of all we’re being unfair, and second, we’re declaring war
on them, and not just to victory but to the death. No matter who a person is, he can’t
remake himself. What more can he do but fight with us as if he were in a battle with a
deadly enemy? In fact, we want to be kind to him only if he stops being the way he is.
But he can’t do that. Therefore, you have to be kind to every person, no matter who it is,
and not demand of him that which he’s incapable of doing: becoming a different
person. Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
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March 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
No one can serve two masters. You’ll either hate one and love the other, or you’ll
become zealous toward one and neglectful toward the other. You cannot serve both God
and Mammon. Matthew 6:24
You can’t worry about your soul and worldly glory at the same time. If you want
worldly glory renounce your soul, and if you want to save your soul renounce worldly
glory. Otherwise you’ll only be torn and achieve neither one nor the other.
Based on a Passage by Epictetus
Every person, the longer he lives, the more he’s able to free himself from his mistakes.
If a person doesn’t believe that his life consists of freeing himself from mistakes, he’s
made the greatest and most dangerous mistake of all.
There’s no such thing as a sinless person, and no matter how much a person
struggles with sins and frees himself from them he’ll never be sinless, although he might
be less sinful than before. All human life is nothing more than liberation from sins.
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It’s hard for a person to recognize his sins, but on the other hand there’s great joy in
feeling that you’ve freed yourself from them. If it weren’t for the night, we wouldn’t
rejoice at the sun’s light. If there were no sins, a person wouldn’t know the joy of
righteousness.
Woe to the person who tells himself he’s free of sins. Such a person deprives himself
not only of the joy of life, but of life itself.
There’s no salvation from sin for a person who’s certain of his righteousness. If
someone points out his sins to him, he only gets angry with the person who points them
out and commits a new sin.
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It’s possible to portray the movement of physical and spiritual life as two lines
diverging from the same point of origin. At first the line of personal life expands more
than the line of spiritual life, but the time comes when the line of personal life stops
expanding and begins to contract, while the line of spiritual life never stops expanding
and expanding until it disappears into death. And the point where spiritual and
physical lives begin to diverge is where sin begins.
If a person doesn’t recognize his sins, he’s like a tightly corked bottle: he can’t accept
into himself that which can free him of sin. To humble yourself and repent is to open the
bottle and become capable of freeing yourself from sin.
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March 8
The Sin of Lechery
When a person’s young he can never be completely celibate, if not in deed then in
thought. Therefore, strive to avoid all that sets lust afire: crude conversations, books and
images, idleness, sweet foods, and alcoholic beverages. The more you strengthen
yourself, the more free and joyful your life will be. Therefore, be on guard and don’t be
weak.
The moth flies into the flame because it doesn’t know the flame will burn its wings.
The fish bites the worm on the hook because it doesn’t know it will destroy him. But we
know that lecherous behavior will entangle us in all sorts of miseries, and we surrender
to it anyway.
Sexual lust is always repulsive to an uncorrupted person, and when such a person
thinks or hears about lustful affairs he’s always ashamed. Every person should protect
this sense of shame and fear everything that silences it.
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Whether total abstinence from sex is necessary or not, I don’t know. However, I do
know without doubt that the sex act is a filthy affair that a person can look upon and
think about without revulsion only under the influence of passion.
If it weren’t for the frenzy of passion a man would never agree to sex with the woman
he loves even for the sake of having children, and in the same manner a woman would
never allow herself to do it with a man she loves and respects.
There’s no subject more unclear, muddled and obscure than the subject of sexual
relations. Therefore, it would be best if people would express their opinions about it as
honestly as possible. If each person would only express his feelings and thoughts on this
subject from his sincere point of view, much that is obscure would be clarified, that
which is normally concealed through deceit would be revealed, and much that’s
considered natural would appear to us in a new and unexpectedly repulsive light.
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In order to clearly understand all the horror, all the vicissitude of life in European
Christian society, you need only recall that in these societies women who must satisfy the
monstrous demands of men are considered essential.
When people look upon marriage as permission to surrender to lust from the day of
the wedding rather than as a promise that if a man or a woman abandons celibacy
they’ll give it up only to each other, then marriage ceases to be a means to control lust
and becomes the opposite: a way of encouraging lust. Unfortunately, this is how most
people see marriage.
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March 9
The Sin of Overindulgence
Which person is better: he who, through his own labor, feeds himself enough so that
he doesn’t go hungry, builds a home so that he doesn’t get wet or cold, or he who, either
through begging, subservience or, what’s most common of all, swindling or violence
obtains fine food, expensive clothes, and extravagant homes?
“A kettle of cabbage soup, and you’ll be fine.” This is a good proverb; we should all
live by it.
Pleasing the body above and beyond the satisfaction of its needs, the reinforcement
of its satisfaction, is always a big mistake because the reinforcement of satisfaction
always weakens a person’s ability to put his satisfaction to the test.
You started riding to places you could easily get to on foot, your legs have grown
weak and you already find it hard to walk when there are no horses available. You got
used to soft beds, refined, sweet food and luxurious finery in your home and became
accustomed to having others do what you yourself could: it’s the same result in every
case. The more you become unaccustomed to simple living, the weaker you become and
the more you decrease rather than increase your joy, peace and freedom.
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Many people of our time think that all human life consists of service to the body.
This is clearly illustrated by socialist doctrine, which is widely accepted and considered
progressive. This doctrine asserts that a life with few demands—a poor life—is a
bestial life, and that the increase of demands is the first sure sign of an educated person,
the consciousness of his human dignity. People of our time believe in this strange
doctrine to the point where they mock the wise people of the past and of our own time
who see the decrease of demands as human happiness.
The sin of serving the body accustoms people to the superfluous, and the
superfluous is always harmful.
If a person bases his life on physical satisfaction and can’t get all he wants, then he
tries to deceive himself: he puts himself in a state where it appears as though he has
what he wants: he stupefies himself with tobacco, wine, and opium.
Instead of trying to conquer their bodies with their souls, people come up with
means of weakening the soul so that the body can conquer it. These means are
stupefying poisons: tobacco, alcohol, and opium.
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March 10
The Temptation of Wealth
“You won’t earn stone mansions from righteous labor.” “From labor you’ll get
hunchbacked, but you won’t get rich.”
These proverbs aren’t vain mumblings. All great wealth is acquired not by labor, but
by evil deeds. So for a man of conscience great wealth is a burden, not a joy. Great wealth
is not allowed in the Kingdom of God.
“Don’t store up wealth on earth. On earth the worm gnaws, rust corrodes, and the
thief steals; rather, store up heavenly wealth. Heavenly wealth is neither eaten by the
worm, nor corroded by rust, nor stolen by the thief. Where your wealth is, that’s where
your heart will be.” (Matthew 6:19-‐21).
To store up heavenly wealth means to increase the love within you. And love not only
conflicts with wealth, it’s totally incompatible with it. A person who lives in love can
neither acquire wealth nor keep it if he has it.
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“It’s impossible to serve two masters. If you satisfy one, you offend the other. It’s
impossible to serve God and the flesh. You can work for earthly life or you can work for
God. Therefore, don’t worry about what you’re going to eat and drink and what you’re
going to wear. Indeed, life is more than food and clothing, and God gave it to you.
“Take a look at God’s creatures; look at the birds. They neither sow, nor reap, nor
gather, but God feeds them. Man is no less than a bird. If God can give life to man, he
can certainly feed him. Indeed, you yourselves know that no matter how much you
bustle around, you can’t do anything for yourselves. You can’t extend your life by so
much as an hour. And why do you worry about clothes? The flowers of the field neither
work nor spin, but they’re decked out so richly that Solomon in all his splendor couldn’t
dress himself as well. And really, if God has decked out the grass that grows today but
will be mown down tomorrow, don’t you think he’ll dress you?
“Don’t worry, don’t fret, and don’t say that you have to think about what you’ll eat
and wear. These are things all people need, and God knows these needs of yours. So
don’t worry about the future. Live for today. Worry about fulfilling God’s will. Wish for
the one thing that’s important, and the rest will come on its own. Just try to fulfill God’s
will. So don’t worry about the future. When the future comes, there will be worries then
too.” (Matthew 6: 24-‐34)
So spoke Jesus, and each person can confirm the justice of these words in his own
life.
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The lives of the wealthy, freed of labor, can’t help but be mad. People who don’t
work, in other words fail to fulfill one of the laws of human life, can’t help but go insane.
Overfed domesticated animals—horses, dogs, and pigs—go mad in the same way.
People can live by theft, charity, or labor. Those who live by labor are easily visible.
Those who live on charity are equally visible. Only thieves are hard to identify right away.
Most of them pretend to work.
A poor man laughs more often and more joyfully than a rich man. Seneca
If a person is living a spiritual life then wealth is not just unnecessary but a nuisance.
People who base their lives on the oppression of their neighbor—as do all the
wealthy—cannot be merciful or charitable.
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Just as I was born for the Earth, the Earth has been given to me so that I may take
from it what I need for cultivation and planting, and I have the right to demand my
share. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Earth is our common mother. She gives us a place to live, gladdens and feeds us
from the moment of our birth until we rest peacefully in eternal slumber within her.
Nevertheless, people discuss buying and selling her, and in our mercantile era the
Earth really seems to be a marketplace for appraisal and for this so-‐called sale. But the
sale of land brought into existence by the heavenly Creator is a crude absurdity. The
earth can only belong to almighty God and all his mortal children who work on it, or
those who will one day work on it.
The earth is not the property of one man or even an entire generation, but of all past,
present and future generations who work on it. Based on a Passage by Thomas Carlyle
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March 11
The Sin of Parasitism
Not to stand at the doors of the wealthy and speak like a beggar is the best life. In
order to make sure you don’t, you must not fear work. Gitopadesha
It’s better to take a rope and go into the forest for firewood and sell bundles of wood
for food than to ask others to feed you. If they don’t give you anything you’ll be pathetic,
and if they do it will be worse: you’ll be ashamed. Muhammad
No matter how splendid the clothes granted to the king are, your own homemade
clothes are better, and no matter how delicious the food of the wealthy is, bread from
your own table is the best food of all. Saadi
Work ennobles a person. It’s impossible to respect a parasite.
This is why the idle and wealthy are always concerned with putting on a show of
their riches. They understand that if it weren’t for that, people would hold them in more
contempt than the lowest beggar.
You can escape fulfillment of the law of labor only through evil means: either the evil
of violence or the evil of flattery, lies and deceit.
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Man lives both a physical and a spiritual life, and there are physical and spiritual
laws in his life. The law of physical life is labor. The law of spiritual life is love. If a person
violates the law of physical life—the law of labor—then he inescapably violates the law
of spiritual life as well.
When someone pays you for your labor you never know for sure whether or not your
labor was worth the money you received. You sit in court, in a legislative chamber, you
play the violin, you write books, and you receive a hundred, a thousand times more than
a worker does for his fourteen hours of labor. You have to ask yourself: what, am I worth
so much money? So in order not to be wrong you have to work as much as you can and
take as little money as you can.
Go along a busy street and look at what’s being sold in the best stores: things that
are manufactured through the painful, occasionally ruinous labor of millions. We can
get along in life without any of these things. If people only understood how much evil
they create when they demand them.
A monk took refuge in a monastery. He read prayers incessantly and rose twice
during the night to pray. A peasant would bring him food. Eventually a doubt came to
him: is this really a good way to live? He went to the elder for advice. He came into the
elder’s chamber and told him about his life: how he prayed, what prayers he said, how
he would rise during the night, how he lived off charity, and he asked, “Have I been
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doing the right thing?” The elder said, “This is all good, but go and see how the peasant
who brings your food lives. Maybe you can learn something from him.”
The monk went to the peasant and stayed with him day and night. The peasant got
up early in the morning and simply said “Lord!” before going off to plow the land all
day. Toward evening he returned home, and when he went to bed he said “Lord!” a
second time.
This is what the monk saw of the peasant’s life. “There’s nothing for me to learn
here,” he thought, and was surprised that the elder sent him to the peasant.
The monk returned to the elder and told him everything: that he’d been at the
peasant’s home but had found nothing to learn there. “He doesn’t think about God and
only remembers Him twice a day.”
Then the elder told him, “Take this cup full of oil, circle the village and return, but
make sure not a drop of oil spills onto the ground.”
The monk did as he was told, and when he returned the elder asked him:
“Tell me, how many times did you remember God while you were carrying the cup?”
The monk admitted that he didn’t remember God once. He said, “All I thought
about was not spilling the oil.”
Then the elder said, “This one cup of oil so occupied you that you didn’t remember
God even once. The peasant has to feed himself, his family and you through his labor
and care, and yet he remembers God twice a day.” Based on a Passage by Ramakrishna
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March 12
The Sin of Ill Will
There once was a foolish woman who went blind and couldn’t understand for the life
of her that she was blind, and was always getting angry that wherever she went
everything on the road was getting in her way and jostling her. She didn’t think that she
was jostling things, but that things were jostling her.
The same thing happens with people when they become blind to their spiritual life.
They think that everything that happens to them happens from evil intent, and they get
angry at people without understanding, just like the foolish woman, that things aren’t
bad because of other people, but because they themselves are blind to their spiritual life
and live for their bodies.
If you get angry with someone, it means you’re living a physical rather than a divine
life. If you were living a divine life no one could offend you, because it’s impossible to
offend God, and God, that God within you, knows no anger.
You must never become angry with animals as well as people. Getting angry with
animals is worse than getting angry with people, because a person can understand what
you want while an animal can’t, yet you get angry with it.
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The better a person considers himself the easier it is for him to think badly of others.
The more humble a person is the kinder he is, and the less likely he is to become angry.
Once upon a time St. Francis was travelling with Brother Leo from Perugia to
Porziuncola. It was so cold that they were shivering. Francis called to Brother Leo, who
was walking in front, and said to him, “Brother Leo, God grant that our brothers give a
good example of holy life throughout the world. However, note that this is not perfect
happiness.”
After having gone a bit farther, Francis called out to Brother Leo again:
“Write further, Brother Leo, that if our brothers heal the sick, expel demons, cure the
blind, or raise those who’ve been dead for four days—write that this is not perfect
happiness.”
And after having gone a bit farther, Francis said to Leo, “Write further, Brother Leo,
that if we learn to speak in the language of the angels, if we understand the motion of
the stars, if we discover all the treasures within the Earth, and if we comprehend all the
secrets in the lives of the birds—write that this is also not perfect happiness.”
And having gone on a bit farther, Francis called out to Leo once again and said,
“Also write that if we become such accomplished missionaries that we turn all the
pagans into Christ’s disciples—write that in this is not perfect happiness.”
Then Brother Leo said to Francis, “What is perfect happiness, Brother Francis?”
Francis answered, “It is this. If, when we arrive in Porziuncola filthy, wet, hungry and
numb from the cold and we ask them to let us in, the gatekeeper says, “What do you
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want, you tramps? You wander all over the earth, lead people into temptation, and take
charity from the poor. Get out of here,” and refuses to let us in, if we don’t take offense
but humbly and lovingly think that the gatekeeper is right, that God himself has
inspired him to behave this way with us, and remain in the snow until morning cold,
wet and hungry without a single word of reproach against the gatekeeper—then
Brother Leo, only then will we have perfect happiness.”
He who plans revenge keeps his wounds fresh. They would heal if he wouldn’t.
Francis Bacon
In order for your relations with others to always be joyful, when you interact with
people you must remember not what’s important to you but what’s important to the
person with whom you’re speaking, and what the God Who lives within both of you
requires of you.
Just remember this when you experience unpleasant feelings toward someone, and
those feelings will immediately disappear.
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March 13
The Temptation of Pride
A person knows that he lives badly, but rather than change his life for the better he
tries to convince himself that he’s not like other people, but better than them, and
therefore he must live as he does. Because of this, people often live badly and are also
proud.
A child treats a king the same as a working man. We should learn from children
how to treat people. For a child all people are the same. They should be this way to a
Christian.
A person can consider himself better than others only if he lives a physical life. One
body can be bigger, stronger, better than another. However, if a person lives a spiritual
life, he can’t consider himself better than anyone. The soul is one and the same in all.
Pride cannot exist without stupidity. There can be stupidity without pride, but there
can be no pride without stupidity.
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A person who understands the meaning and purpose of life can’t help but feel his
equality and brotherhood not just with his own people, but with all peoples.
When I was in Sevastopol I often saw Russian and French soldiers meet each other
while a truce was in force, treating each other as friends and smiling at one another like
brothers, making gestures and patting each other on the shoulder or the stomach. How
superior they were to those who started the war and convinced people that they weren’t
brothers and weren’t a single people, but enemies because they were members of
different nations.
The main reason for our dissatisfaction with life is that we seek happiness where we
haven’t been given it.
In this error is the essence of all temptations.
We’ve been given happiness incomparable to anything else in life and we say: it’s not
enough. We’re given the greatest happiness in life—companionship with the people of
the world—and we say: I want separate happiness for myself, my family, and my
nation.
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It’s amusing to watch two proud people conversing who each consider themselves
better than everyone else in the world. It’s amusing to watch, but it’s not amusing for the
two egotists. They hate each other and torture themselves over it.
Nothing emboldens people to perpetrate bad deeds more than comradery: the
recognition of a specific circle of people who are distinct and separate from others. And
the most astonishing thing is that the evil feeling of wishing to separate yourself from all
people is considered a virtue.
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March 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
A man asked someone why he did something he didn’t want to.
“Because everyone does it,” he answered.
“Well, let’s accept that not everyone does it, because I don’t, and there are others who
don’t.”
“Well then, not everyone, but lots, most people.”
“Please tell me, which are there more of: intelligent people or stupid people?”
“Stupid people, of course.”
“So that means you’re doing what stupid people do.” K.
It’s far more difficult to force people to consider us good than to become as we would
wish people to consider us. Georg Lichtenberg
People have always ridiculed those who sit in silence, those who talk a lot, and those
who talk little. There’s no one on earth who hasn’t been criticized. There never has been
and never will be a person who’s perpetually criticized for everything, just as there’s no
person who’s perpetually praised for everything. Therefore, it’s not worth it to worry
either about people’s praise or their criticism.
He who lives for others’ praise rather than for the sake of his conscience lives badly.
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“We’re unfit for Heaven because of our sins and unfit for the Earth because of our
virtues.” We’re guilty before God for our sins, but most people consider us guilty and
condemn us for what’s good in us but doesn’t agree with the life of the majority.
You have to train yourself to live without any thought of public opinion, even without
any desire for people’s love, but only for the fulfillment of the law of your life: the will of
God. It’s true that in living such a life alone with God you’ll lose the occasional impulse
to perform good deeds for the sake of people’s praise, but you’ll gain freedom, peace,
stability and a firm consciousness of the trustworthiness of your path that no one who
lives for human glory experiences. And you can train yourself to do it.
As soon as you descend from the height upon which you live for your soul you
immediately fall into pathetic concerns about human glory. But living for human glory
isn’t the last stage of man’s fall. Become indifferent to people’s praise and you’ll fall even
farther down into a realm of nothing but bestial passions.
Concern yourself with the quality of your admirers, not the quantity. It’s admirable
to be disliked by evil men. Seneca
Vanity is the first and crudest weapon in the act of perfecting yourself against
animal passions, but eventually you’ll need to cure yourself from this medicine. There’s
only one cure: live for your soul.
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March 15
The Temptation of Punishment
People say that you can repay evil with evil because it reforms people. This is a lie.
People deceive both themselves and others when they think and say this. They don’t
repay evil with evil as a way to reform people but as a way to exact revenge. It’s
impossible to correct evil by doing evil.
If I can force a person to do what I consider good, then in the same manner another
person can force me to do what he considers good, even though what he and I consider
good are totally contradictory.
You must realize and remember that the desire to punish is the desire for revenge,
something uncharacteristic of a rational creature: man. This desire is characteristic only
of man’s animal nature. Therefore, you must try to free yourself from this feeling and
never justify it in any way.
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If only we hadn’t been taught since childhood that repaying evil with evil is useful to
the person against whom we commit it, we’d simply be astonished that anyone could
teach others that punishment can be useful, as if deliberately trying to ruin them. We
punish a child in order to stop him from doing something bad, but the punishment
itself teaches him in the most effective possible manner to believe that punishment can
be useful and just. And of all the bad inclinations for which we punish him, can there be
one more harmful than the inclination that we implant in him with our punishment?
The child says, “They’re punishing me, hurting me, because I hurt someone, so that
means punishment, repaying evil with evil, is good,” and puts this into practice the first
chance he gets.
Our lives would become wonderful if we would only see that which destroys our
happiness. What destroys our happiness more than anything else is the superstition
that violence can provide it.
Someone who uses violence to coerce us deprives us of our rights and we hate him for
that. We love those who reassure us as benefactors. It’s a crude person, not a wise one,
who turns to violence. In order to employ force, you need many collaborators. In order to
persuade, you need no one. He who feels enough strength within himself to influence
others will never turn to violence. Government turns to violence precisely because it
recognizes its powerlessness to persuade people of its necessity. Based on a Passage by
Xenophon
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Prisons, transit camps, labor camps—it’s as if these establishments were
deliberately contrived to drive debauchery and vice to its final limit as no other
conditions could. It’s as if the founders of these institutions wanted to disseminate vice
and debauchery as widely as possible throughout the entire nation. It’s the perfect
solution to the problem of how to best and most effectively corrupt as many people as
possible. Hundreds of thousands of people are driven to the highest level of corruption
annually, and once they’re fully corrupted they’re set free so that they can spread the
corruption that prison instilled in them throughout the nation. Simple, common people
with simple, common needs based on Christian morality abandon these concepts and
adopt new ones, the morals of the prison, which primarily consist of the notion that any
outrage or violence against an individual, any annihilation of a human being is
permitted when it’s profitable. Those who have lived in prison know with all their being
that all the moral laws of respect and compassion of one person for another that
religious and moral teachers preach have in reality been annulled and that there’s no
need to adhere to them.
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If you permit the impermissible—that man has the right to punish—then who
among us will take that right upon himself? Only those who’ve fallen so low that they
don’t remember and don’t recognize their own sins.
Not the condemnation of evil but rather the exaltation of good creates harmony and
union in personal and communal life. A person condemns evil and the one who
commits it, but this very condemnation of evil and those who commit it merely facilitates
its growth, while ignoring evil and concerning oneself only with good destroys evil. Lucy
Mallory
True kindness is not only a virtue and a joy but also a weapon in battle far more
powerful than violence.
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March 16
The Superstition of Violence
Man is given authority over himself alone. A person can arrange only his own life in
a way that he considers good and necessary, but nearly all people busy themselves with
the arrangement of other people’s lives. Because of this concern for the arrangement of
people’s lives they submit to systems that other people have arranged for them.
If you think you can make your life better after having established it otherwise,
you’re like a little child who thinks that if he sits on a stick and takes both ends and
pulls on them he’ll lift himself up and fly.
People have become so accustomed to violence that they think they can live in
harmony only through courts, police, and armies.
This is not merely wrong but the exact opposite of the truth. All these courts,
policemen and armies interfere with people’s peaceful and harmonious lives more than
anything else. All these systems place people in such a position that they can’t live
without violence. Then people use this very system as evidence that they can’t live
without the violence of government.
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The superstition of organization through violence is so entrenched in our society
that you continually hear people say that they want to serve others, serve the people and
make them happy through their labor. Some of them educate, some organize, some
enlighten, while most govern. All these people do what no one has asked them to. On the
contrary, any rational person who wants happiness for himself and his people can ask
for one thing only: that people attend to themselves, to their souls, and leave in peace
those whom they wish to serve with such fervor.
No person can be used as a weapon or a goal. In this lies man’s dignity. And just as
he can’t place a value on himself (as that would be contrary to his dignity), he has no
right to place a price on the lives of others. He’s obligated to recognize the true virtue of
human dignity in every person and therefore he must express this respect in his
relations with every person. Immanuel Kant
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People are rational beings and therefore can live guided by reason, so they’re
inescapably obligated to replace violence with free agreement. Every act of violence
places this time further off.
Why do people have reason if they can only be influenced by violence?
It’s strange! Man resents the evil that comes from outside him, from others, which he
can’t eliminate, but he doesn’t struggle with his own evil, even though that’s always
within his power. Marcus Aurelius
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March 17
The Superstition of Government
As long as violence is considered lawful, people cannot have good and rational lives.
“People tell me: ‘give such-‐and-‐such amount of money to someone called the
government.’ This same someone orders me to join the army and promise to kill
whomever he orders me to. When I ask: ‘Who is this someone?’ They tell me: ‘the
government.’ ‘Who is this government?’ ‘People.’ ‘Who are they, some sort of special
people?’ ‘No, they’re the same as everyone.’ ‘Why should I do what they order me to? It
would be alright if they ordered me to do good things, but they explicitly order me to do
evil. I don’t want to do that. Leave me in peace.’” This is what all people would say if they
hadn’t been duped by the superstition of government.
It’s understandable that humans look after cows, horses and sheep. People know
what animals need and how best to nourish them. Horses, cows and sheep can’t nourish
each other because they’re all identical in nature. In the same way, all people are
identical. Why are some people able to rule others and force them to live as they think
best? All people are equally rational, and the only one who can rule them is someone
who’s above them. There’s only one thing above them: the spirit that lives in them all,
that which we call conscience. Therefore, people should only obey their consciences, and
not those who call themselves kings, parliaments, congresses, senates, courts . . .
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When you study the many different activities people undertake thoroughly rather
than just looking at them superficially, you can’t help but see how many lives are wasted
for the perpetuation of the kingdom of evil on Earth and how the existence of
governments and the resulting government agencies facilitate this evil.
Your astonishment and sorrow will increase when you realize that none of it is
necessary, and that this evil, complacently accepted by the vast majority, exists only
because of their stupidity; only because they allow a relatively small number of cunning
and corrupt people to rule them. Based on a Passage by Patrice Larroque
Government is a temporal establishment and must perish.
The sabre and the gun, the weapons of our age, will disappear with the passage of
time and be found in museums as curiosities from a bygone age, just as instruments of
torture are now. Based on a Passage by Ernest Crosby
258
Government issues as many laws as there are human relations that require
definition. Since there are an endless number of such relations, legislation must
continue incessantly. Laws, decrees, edicts, orders and resolutions must pour down like
hail on the unfortunate people. And so they do. The French Convention issued 11,600
laws and decrees in three years, one month and four days. The executive and legislative
assemblies issued just as many. The Empire and more recent governments worked just
as feverishly. Currently, the law code contains more than 50,000 documents. If our
leaders were to fulfill their duty, this huge number would quickly double. Do you think
that a nation and the government itself can retain their rationality in such a tangle?
Pierre Joesph Proudhon
Authority of one person over another is nothing more than acknowledgement of the
right not only to hand people over for torture and murder but also to force people to
torture themselves. And there’s no way to make people torture and kill each other by the
will of a ruler other than through deceptions, lies, cunning and, most of all, cruelty. This
is how all rulers have behaved and must behave.
259
You only have to think about what governmental authority is founded upon in order
to understand that those who rule others must be cruel, immoral, and most
undoubtedly stand on a lower moral level than most people in their society. Not just a
moral person but even a person who’s not entirely immoral could never sit on a throne,
or be a minister, legislator, judge or determiner of the fate of entire peoples. A moral,
virtuous government official is as much a contradiction as a celibate prostitute, a
temperate drunkard or a mild-‐mannered brigand.
The doctrine of love cannot advocate two contrary tendencies at the same time, and
so it cannot relate sympathetically to governments as they currently exist. The doctrine
of love cannot defend war, the death penalty, the impoverishment of the minds and
souls of the masses for the benefit of a handful of individuals; it cannot sympathize with
judicial retribution, violence or injury. Therefore, the doctrine of love rejects the laws of
any government that’s founded upon and maintained by the law of struggle and
retaliation; and since there is no other kind of government, it rejects them all.
Adin Ballou
260
March 18
The Superstition of the Church
“When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to stand and pray in the
streets and synagogues in order to show off in front of the people. Verily I tell you,
they’ve already received their reward. When you pray, go into your room, lock the door
and pray to your Father Who is hidden, and your Father, Who sees what is hidden, will
give to you openly. And when you pray, don’t say what is unnecessary, like the pagans,
who think that you’ll be heard if you say a lot of words. Don’t be like them, for your
Father knows what you need before you ask for it.” Matthew 6:5-‐8.
“And don’t call yourselves teachers, for you have only one teacher—Christ—and
you are all brothers. And don’t call anyone on earth father, for you have but one Father,
Who is in heaven.” Matthew 23:8-‐9.
Thus spoke Christ clearly. And so what do those who consider him God and his
teachings their law do? They offer masses, vigils and all sorts of church services.
Moreover, as if in mockery of and malice towards the words of Christ, who specifically
said that no one should call themselves teachers or fathers, there is an entire caste of
men who, considering themselves the top experts of the law, call themselves teachers and
fathers.
261
We only need to understand Christ’s teaching in its true sense in order to clearly see
the deception in which we were raised and in which our brothers are raised.
This is what prayer consists of: having abandoned everything worldly, everything
that could divert my feelings (the Muslims act splendidly when, upon entering a mosque
or starting a prayer, they cover their eyes and ears with their fingers), I call forth the
divine source in myself. The best way to do this is the way Christ taught: to go alone into
a cell and lock yourself away and pray in complete solitude, whether you’re in a cell, or a
forest, or a field. In prayer, you first abandon everything worldly, then call forth from
within yourself the divine part of your soul, abandon yourself to it, and through it enter
into communion with the One of Whom your soul is a part, recognize yourself as God’s
servant and examine your actions and desires based on this divine part of your soul
rather than the external conditions of the world.
This kind of prayer is not the idle expression of emotion and exhilaration that
communal prayers with their singing, images, lights and preaching evoke; it’s an aid, a
fortification, an elevation of the soul. This kind of prayer is a confession, an assessment
of your past actions and a guide for your future actions.
You cause great harm when you lie to others, but it’s most harmful of all to lie to
yourself. Such lies are particularly harmful because when you lie to others they expose
and condemn you, but when you lie to yourself no one exposes or condemns you.
Therefore, take care not to lie to yourself, especially when the matter concerns faith.
262
We must liberate the religion Christ preached from the religion in which Christ is
the subject, and when we recognize the primary meaning, the fundamental nucleus of
the eternal gospel of love, we must to hold fast to it.
Just as the pathetic lights of a village or little hand candles vanish before the great
miracle of the sun’s light, so too will our insignificant, provincial, accidental and
questionable wonders vanish before the law of the life of the soul, which has been
revealed to humanity. Henri Frédéric Amiel
Never think that church Christianity is incomplete, one-‐sided, formal Christianity,
but still Christianity. Never think this way. Church Christianity is not only opposed to
Christianity, it is true Christianity’s most vicious enemy. Church Christianity now
stands before true Christianity like a criminal caught at the scene of the crime. It has
only two ways out: either destroy itself or commit more and more new crimes. And no
matter how hopeless the Church’s situation is, it will continue its terrible, criminal
activity.
A thought expressed in the Gospels, the Bible, the Quran, or the Upanishads doesn’t
become true because it’s expressed in a book that’s considered holy. To believe that
everything in a book considered holy is true is idolatry of books, which is more harmful
than any other kind of idolatry.
263
The majority of crimes and evil in the world are perpetrated through stupidity:
“Believe or be damned.” This is the primary cause of evil. When a person accepts
something that should be rationally analyzed without thinking it through, he ends up
becoming unaccustomed to rational analysis and really does become damned and leads
those close to him into sin. Salvation is simply teaching yourself to think independently
so that you can faithfully direct your thoughts. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s a very common mistake to think that there are doctrines everyone believes that
you can accept on faith. A person is obligated to verify with his own reason every
doctrine that’s presented as true.
264
Every error is poison, and therefore there can be no harmless errors; moreover, there
can be no glorious or sacred errors.
Why do I need such reassurances, over which hangs the Damoclean Sword of
disillusionment day and night? Only truth is harmless. Only truth is firm, on it alone
one can depend. Only in it is true comfort; it alone is an indestructible diamond.
Arthur Schopenhauer
“And so if you take your offering to the place of sacrifice and once there remember
that your brother holds something against you, leave your offering there in front of the
place of sacrifice and go make peace with your brother first, then go make your
offering.” (Matthew 5:23-‐24)
In this is true faith: not in ritual, not in sacrifice, but in union with people.
265
March 19
The Superstition of Science
Every person’s task in life is to become better and better. Therefore, only sciences
that aid in this task are worthwhile.
People take one of two things for science: either that most important science on
Earth that teaches people how they should live here, or all that’s flattering for a person
to know and that they may or may not find useful. The first type of knowledge is a great
affair, while the second is for the most part an empty pursuit.
There’s no limit to knowledge. Therefore, a person who knows a great deal can’t say
that he knows more than a person who doesn’t.
Only the sciences and arts that serve people’s happiness are beneficial. If a science or
an art doesn’t serve people’s happiness, it’s certainly harmful.
266
The only explanation for the senseless life the people of our time lead, which offends
the consciences of the best people of all ages, is that the younger generation studies a
countless number of the most difficult subjects: the composition of the heavenly bodies,
the composition of the Earth in a million years, the origin of organisms and so on. The
one thing they don’t study is something everyone has always needed to know: the
meaning of human life and how to live it. This is the very question the wisest people of
all ages and all nations have pondered and solved. Not only does the younger generation
not study this problem, in place of it they study the most blatant nonsense that they
themselves don’t believe but call the law of God. In place of bricks, they place bubbles
inflated with air beneath the edifice of our lives. How can such a building stand?
Knowledge is only knowledge when it’s acquired through your own mental effort
and not memory alone.
Only when we completely forget what we’ve been taught do we truly understand. I
don’t come one hair closer to understanding a subject as long as I look upon that subject
as I was taught to look at it. In order to understand a subject, I have to approach it as
something completely unknown. Henry David Thoreau
267
Every idiot believes what his teachers tell him, and he calls his gullibility science and
morality with the same assurance that his fathers called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
People are incapable of knowing and understanding everything in this world, and so
their assessments of many things are wrong. Human ignorance is of two kinds. One type
of ignorance is that pure, natural ignorance in which humans are born; the other type of
ignorance is, so to speak, truly wise ignorance. When a person studies all the sciences
and learns all that people have known and know now, he sees that all this knowledge is
so inconsequential that it doesn’t provide any means to truly understand God’s world,
and he becomes convinced that educated people, in essence, know nothing more than
simple, uneducated people. On the other hand, there are unobservant people who learn
something, acquire cursory knowledge of various sciences and become conceited. They’ve
gone beyond natural ignorance but haven’t reached the true wisdom of those scholars
who understand the imperfection and insignificance of all human knowledge. These
people, believing themselves to be intelligent, muddle the world. They judge everything
confidently and recklessly and, naturally, continually make mistakes. They can throw
dust in your eyes, and people frequently treat them with respect, but the common people
see their uselessness and detest them; and they detest the people, whom they consider
ignorant. Blaise Pascal
268
March 20
Effort
Every person’s task in life is to become better and better, and you can only become
better by exerting effort.
Everyone knows that you can’t accomplish any physical task without effort. It’s
essential to understand that in the most important business of life, the life of the soul,
nothing can be accomplished without effort either.
If only everyone would suddenly wish to live a Godly life, then all of life would be
good. But not everyone wants this yet, and so for those who do want it a Godly life
doesn’t come into being all by itself; it requires effort to achieve.
You often hear it said that exerting effort to change life, eradicate evil and establish a
just world is useless because everything happens on its own and that progress will
achieve everything. People row on the water, but the rowers have reached the shore and
gone out onto it, while those who remain in the boat don’t pick up the oars, assuming
that since the boat moved before, it will move again.
269
There cannot and must not be peace on earth. Life is striving for a goal that you can
get closer to but which you can never achieve; therefore, there’s no peace here. Peace is
immoral. I haven’t determined what the goal is, but no matter what it is, it must exist,
and approaching it can only be accomplished through effort. Without it, life is
nonsense, irony and deception. Giuseppe Mazzini
All history confirms the incontrovertible fact that God cannot be comprehended by
reasoning but by accepting that only by fulfilling God’s will does the existence of
timeless order in the world become apparent. Only on this path can we know God on
earth. John Ruskin
There can be no moral law if I can’t fulfill it. People say, “We were born egotistical,
greedy and lustful, and we can’t be anything else.”
Yes, you can. Your first order of business is to feel in your heart who you really are
and who you must be. Your second order of business is to exert effort to draw nearer to
who you must be. Based on a Passage by Samuel Salter
270
You are free actors: you all feel it. Every possible sophism of that pathetic philosophy
that tries to juxtapose the doctrine of fatalism against the clear voice of human
conscience is impotent to silence those two incorruptible witnesses of human freedom:
the reproaches of conscience and the nobility of martyrdom. From Socrates to Christ
and from Christ right up to the people who’ve died for the truth throughout the
centuries, all martyrs of faith protest against this servile doctrine and tell us clearly: “We
too loved life and all the people who made our lives beautiful and who begged us to give
up the struggle. Every beat of our heart called out loudly to us: live! But in order to fulfill
the law of life we preferred death.” From Cain to the most despicable person of our time,
everyone who chooses the path of evil hears deep in their soul the voice of reproach and
condemnation, a voice that gives them no peace and that repeats incessantly: “Why have
you turned from the path of truth; you were able and are able to exert effort.” You are
free actors, and the power is in your hands either to stagnate in sin or free yourselves
from it. Giuseppe Mazzini
271
Every person of our time who has assimilated, however vaguely, a Christian
consciousness, finds himself in the position of a sleeping man who dreams that he’s
compelled to do something that even while dreaming he knows he shouldn’t do. He
knows it in the depths of his consciousness but nevertheless, as if powerless to change
his situation, he can’t stop himself from doing what he knows he shouldn’t. And just as
in a dream, his situation becomes more and more tortuous and finally, when the stress
reaches its limit, he begins to doubt the reality of what he sees and uses the power of his
consciousness to destroy this delusion that shackles him.
This is the position the average person of our Christian world finds himself in. He
feels that everything that he himself is doing and all that’s happening around him is
absurd, ugly, repulsive and inconceivable to his consciousness and feels that this
situation is becoming more and more painful and is approaching its final limit.
“This can’t be; It can’t be that we, the people of our day, with our flesh and blood
permeated by Christian consciousness of the dignity of man and the equality of all, with
our demand for peaceful relations and unity of all peoples, that we really live so that our
every joy, our every comfort is paid for with suffering, with the lives of our brothers, and
while in the midst of this we’re living every minute on edge, worried that we’ll pounce on
one another like wild beasts, nation against nation, mercilessly annihilating the labors
and lives of others simply because some clever diplomat says or writes some idiocy to
another clever diplomat or ruler.”
272
This cannot be. Nevertheless, every person of our time sees that this is precisely what
is being done, and being done with complete assurance that it must be done and can’t
be otherwise. And the situation becomes more and more painful.
And just as the dreaming man can’t believe that what appears to him as reality is
truly real and wants to awaken to another true reality, so too the average person of our
day can’t believe in the depths of his soul that this terrible situation in which he finds
himself and which is becoming worse and worse is reality, and wants to awaken to the
reality that already lives in his consciousness.
And just as the dreamer only has to exert the effort to ask himself: “isn’t this just a
dream?” in order to destroy the situation that appears hopeless to him instantly and
awaken into a peaceful and joyful reality, so too people today need only exert the effort
of their spiritual consciousness in order to destroy this unnatural, hopeless state, and
life will develop in accordance with that true spiritual practice that the vast majority of
the people of our time already recognize.
273
March 21
Self-‐Renunciation
“Therefore I say to you: don’t worry about your soul, what you’re going to eat and
drink, and don’t worry about your body, what you’re going to wear. Isn’t your soul more
than food and your body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the skies: they don’t
sow, nor do they harvest, nor do they gather into granaries, and your Heavenly Father
feeds them. Aren’t you much better than they are? And who among you can, through
worrying, add even one cubit to their height? So, don’t worry and don’t say: what can we
eat? or: what is there to drink? or: what is there to wear? Search out first the Kingdom of
God and His truth, and everything will be given to you. Don’t worry about tomorrow, for
tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day’s worries are enough.”
Matthew 6:25-‐27, 31, 32-‐34.
Renouncing yourself doesn’t mean renouncing life. On the contrary, it means
strengthening your true life by renouncing carnal life.
In order to understand how important it is to renounce physical life for spiritual life,
you only have to imagine how horrible and repulsive a person’s life would be if he
surrendered everything to physical, animal desires. True human life begins only when
renunciation of animal life begins.
274
All people live both for their animal selves and their souls. The only difference is that
some live more for their souls and less for their bodies, while others live more for their
bodies and less for their souls.
The only renunciation that’s genuine and necessary for life is renunciation of
physical life for the sake of divine love. True, renunciation of physical life might be for
ignoble goals—renunciation for the sake of a beloved person, one’s family or nation, or
human glory—but it still leads a person out of base physicality. However false and
dangerous such an incomplete renunciation of physicality this might be for you or for
others, however crude it may be, nevertheless you can only progress toward true life
through renunciation.
275
The world is nothing. If you despise it, there’s little merit in that. For those who live
in God, both you and the world will always be nothing. Angelus Silesius
Just as a plant can’t live without light, and as a plant that’s exposed to the light
never asks which direction it should grow or if the light is good and doesn’t wait for
another, better light, but accepts the one light in the world—the sun—and stretches
out toward it, so a person who’s renounced personal gain never worries about whom he
should love, whether he should love those he loves right now or if there might be some
better kind of love in the future, but gives the love that’s available to him right now to
whatever being he happens to be interacting with at the moment.
There’s no other love than the love that gives its own soul for its friends. Love is only
love when it’s a sacrifice. Only when a person forgets himself and lives life for the one he
loves, only then is love genuine, and only in this kind of love can we find happiness, the
reward of love, and the presence of this kind of love in people is the only thing that gives
the world value.
276
In order to understand Christ’s teaching about saving your life, first of all you have
to understand what all the prophets have said, what Solomon said, what Buddha said,
what all the wise people of the world have said about personal life. As Pascal once put it,
you can carry a shield in front of you that conceals from view the pit of death toward
which we’re all heading, but it still pays to think about what individual human life is. If
you do, you’ll come to the conclusion that if all life is merely personal life then it has no
meaning whatsoever and that it’s an evil mockery of the heart and mind of man and all
that’s good in people. Therefore, in order to understand Christ’s doctrine you have to
come to your senses, rethink everything, so that you achieve within you what Christ’s
predecessor John, while preaching his doctrine, told people who were as deluded as we
are to achieve. He said, “First of all repent, reconsider, or you will all perish.” Then when
Christ began his teaching, he said the same thing: reconsider or you will all perish.
Christ told of the destruction of the Galileans who were killed by Pilate and said: “Do
you think that these Galileans were more sinful than all other Galileans, and that’s why
they suffered? No, I tell you. But if you don’t repent, you will all perish in the same way.
Inescapable death stands before you all and you try in vain to forget about it. When it
arrives unexpectedly it will be all the more terrifying. There’s only one salvation:
renounce the life that dies and live the life for which there is no death.”
277
There’s nothing more important than inner work alone with God. This work consists
of stopping the desire for personal, bestial pleasure within you and remembering the
foolishness of personal, animal life. Only when you’re alone with yourself, with God, can
you do this. Once you’re out in the world it’s too late. When you’re among people you
only act well if you’ve developed your ability to renounce yourself in solitude, eye to eye
with God.
278
March 22
Humility
The one who elevates himself will be debased, and the one who debases himself will
be elevated. Luke 14:11
The only person who’s truly humble is the one who doesn’t know he’s humble.
Angelus Silesius
When people criticize and condemn you, take joy. When they praise and applaud
you, be afraid and grieve.
There’s no physical advantage—strength, beauty, wealth, rank—there isn’t even a
single good characteristic—erudition, enlightenment, even kindness—which isn’t
destroyed, ceasing to be a benefit or good characteristic and becoming a repulsive
quality, if you don’t have humility. There’s nothing more repellent than a person who
brags about his wealth, rank, intelligence, education, or even his kindness. People want
others to love them, and they know that humility attracts people, yet they still refuse to
be humble. Why is that? It’s because humility can’t be attained in isolation. Humility is
the consequence of a person transferring his desires from the earthly realm to the
spiritual.
279
You truly succeed in doing good only when you pay no attention to your success.
I have to believe that God’s work is in fact the work of God, and that it isn’t
accomplished by me alone, nor will it be. God’s work is done and will be done without
me. If it happens that I turn out to be a small participant, then I can consider this a
great joy, but not any sort of virtue on my part.
For a mild and humble heart everything is easy and everything is a blessing. We
know and believe this, but as we go through life we often feel that our yoke is no blessing
and our load is heavy. What does this mean? It means one of two things: either that
nothing is easy for a mild and humble heart or that we’re not sufficiently mild and
humble.
There’s always one black spot in our world beneath the sun: it’s the shadow that falls
as a result of the honor we give our personal selves. Thomas Carlyle
280
March 23
Honesty
One of man’s most important tasks is to rouse with all his strength that bright
source of reason that God has given us. Chinese Wisdom
You must never stop learning how to act, speak and think honestly. Only he who
begins to learn this will understand how far we are from truth and how much we need
to learn.
Don’t think that you only have to speak and behave honestly in important matters.
You always have to speak and behave honestly. Even in the most trivial matters you
must not permit yourself to lie. It doesn’t matter whether a greater or lesser evil comes
out of your falsehood; what’s important is that you don’t defile yourself by lying.
281
If we look at the lives of the majority of people we see that man is a being created, like
a plant, to swallow various juices, mature, perpetuate its species on Earth, and finally
grow old and die. This being the case, humans achieve the goals of their existence less
than any other being, because they use their superlative abilities for goals that other
beings achieve much more quickly and effectively. Furthermore, out of all beings man
deserves to be held in contempt, at least in the eyes of true wisdom, if he doesn’t use the
wisdom of others and doesn’t think and express in words his thoughts and follow them
in his actions. Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
Reason and the mind are two completely different attributes.
Mind is the ability to understand and think about the conditions of life and the
world, while reason is the divine essence of the soul that reveals to the soul its relation to
the world and to God. Reason is not only different from the mind; it’s completely
opposed to it. Reason frees a person from those temptations (deceptions) that the mind
imposes on him. This is the main activity of reason: by destroying temptations, reason
frees the essence of the human soul—love—and allows it to express itself.
282
Truth is the beginning and end of all existence. If there were no truth, there would
be nothing. This is why wise people have always looked upon truth as a treasure.
Truth not only exists in and of itself, it has also created all things. It exists in and of
itself because it is love; it has created all things because it is wisdom, the primal virtue
and the Tao that unites the external with the internal. People might pay no mind to the
truth, but the truth never loses its significance. Confucius
People make a huge mistake when they use their reason to maintain their lives in
their former and present conditions. Truth shows that it’s impossible to maintain life in
its former state, and therefore it’s essential to find new conditions that are consonant
with new times.
It’s pleasant when you see someone else’s mistake and expose it, but it’s much more
pleasant to see your own mistake and bring it to light. Try to give yourself this pleasure
as much as possible.
283
People become confused and disagree with each other when they search for the truth
and try to recognize it only because they distrust their reason. As a result human life,
ruled by customs, traditions, fashion, superstitions, prejudices, violence, and whatever
you please other than reason flows on its own, while reason exists in and of itself. It often
happens that if the organ of reason—the mind—is applied to something, it’s not
applied to the search for and dissemination of truth, but rather to the justification and
maintenance of customs, traditions, fashions, superstitions and prejudices at any cost.
Confusion and disagreement among people in the recognition of the truth doesn’t
occur because reason is different for different people, or because reason is incapable of
exposing the same truth to each of them, but because they don’t believe in reason.
If they believed in their rationality, they’d find a way to harmonize the results of their
own reason with the results of other people’s reason. And once they discovered this
method of mutual verification, they’d become convinced that there’s only one reason,
despite the fact that it’s expressed in different ways, depending upon the strength of
each person’s organ of rationality: the mind.
However, it’s not simply the different degrees of understanding that cause
disagreements between people in the recognition of a single truth. The reason for these
disagreements is found in man’s self-‐love, thanks to which a person who recognizes
within himself the rationality of his interlocutor’s arguments still continues to hold the
opinion he’s already expressed. Fyodor Strakhov
284
March 24
Restraint in Deed
Often, in order to have what you wish done, you merely need to stop what you’re
doing.
If a coachman can’t stop his horses right away he doesn’t throw down the reins; he
keeps pulling on them until the horses stop. It’s the same with you and your passions: if
you didn’t restrain yourself one time, keep fighting and you’ll win, not your passions.
Failure to restrain yourself in one act weakens your ability to restrain yourself in the
next, and the failure to restrain yourself in the next evokes failure to restrain yourself in
a third. The habit of intemperance is an invisible stream beneath your home that will
eventually wash away its foundation.
If you want something so much it seems you can’t hold back, don’t trust yourself. It’s
not true that a person can’t restrain himself from everything that challenges him. Only a
person who first convinces himself that he can’t restrain himself finds it impossible to do
so.
285
Briullov once told a great joke: it’s better to do nothing than to have nothing to do.
For me, the meaning of this is that when a person does nothing, in other words engages
in trifles, visits, primping, parades, church services, empty conversations etc., it’s much
worse than when he simply sits with folded hands, because in the first case he feels
satisfied, while in the second he feels quite the opposite.
The more difficult a situation seems, the less necessary it is to act. By acting we
usually spoil an improvement in our situation just as it’s beginning.
In life, every person is like a horse on a treadmill: whether you want to or not, you
have to work. The only question a person can decide is what sort of a treadmill he’ll work
on. Will he work for the world or for his soul?
Just as a worker knows that he’s serving his employer’s interests if he does what he’s
been assigned to you, you also know, you indubitably know that you’re doing God’s
work as long as you recognize the truth that’s been revealed to you and fulfill it.
You don’t have to accomplish any great feats or possess any special physical strength
to do this. You only need the inner effort of your consciousness to reject hypocrisy and
accept the truth, and every person can make this effort because in doing so he becomes
independent of all external influences and, having achieved that, becomes forever free.
286
March 25
Restraint in Word
The blessing of people’s lives is their love for one another. Take care that an unkind
word doesn’t destroy love.
Judge not, and you will not be judged. For how you judge is how you will be judged,
and the measure that you use will be used against you. And why do you look at the
splinter in your brother’s eye when you don’t feel the board in your own? Why do you
say to your brother: “Here, I’ll take the splinter out of your eye,” when there’s a board in
your own eye? Hypocrite! First take the board out of your own eye, and then you’ll see
how to take the splinter from your brother’s eye. Matthew 7:1-‐5.
You should speak without thinking about what you’re going to say only when you
feel calm, kind, and sympathetic. If you’re agitated and annoyed, beware of committing
a sin with your words.
287
He who doesn’t sin in word is perfect and able to control his body as well. We put a
bit in a horse’s mouth so that it will obey us, and we control its entire body. A ship, no
matter how big it is and no matter how powerfully the wind drives it along, is directed
wherever the helmsman wants by a tiny wheel. It’s the same with your tongue: a small
organ, but it accomplishes much. See how much a small fire can burn! And your tongue
is a fire, a world of iniquity. James 3:2-‐6
In its first stages an argument is like a stream of water that’s broken through a dam.
As soon as it breaks through, you can’t hold it back any longer. And every argument is
started and supported by words. Based on a Passage from the Talmud
288
After a long conversation, try to remember everything that was said and you’ll be
astonished by how empty, unnecessary, and frequently bad it all was.
An argument never persuades anyone; it divides and embitters people. An argument
influences a person’s opinion like a hammer influences a nail. After an argument
opinions, already shaky, for the most part become as hopelessly beaten in the head as
the head of a nail. Based on a Passage by Juvenal
If we search within ourselves, we can almost always find the very sin we condemn
someone else for. If we don’t find precisely that sin, all we have to do is search and we’ll
find something worse.
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March 26
Restraint in Thought
We often think that the main force of life is physical strength. This is because our
bodies constantly feel this strength whether we want to or not. Spiritual power, the
power of thought, seems insignificant to us and we fail to recognize this power. However,
in this power, in it alone, is the one true strength that can change both our lives and the
lives of all people.
Value kind thoughts, whether yours or someone else’s, when you recognize them.
Nothing can help you as much as kind thoughts can in the fulfillment of the true
business of your life.
We accept thoughts only when they appease our passions and defend us. Therefore,
we must be particularly strict and discerning toward thoughts that give us great
satisfaction.
When we recognize a new idea and accept it as true, it seems as if we once knew it
long ago and we’re just remembering what we already knew. Every truth is already lying
in the soul of every person. Just don’t muffle it with falsehood and sooner or later it will
reveal itself to you.
290
The only people who try to convince others that their lives can’t be guided by reason
are those whose own reason is so corrupted that they realize they can’t trust it.
People can be divided into two categories: some think before they speak or act, and
others speak or act before they think.
Reason is the same in every person. People’s interactions and their influence on one
another are founded on reason. Therefore, it’s particularly important that you don’t
allow something into your thoughts that doesn’t conform to the demands of this reason
common to all.
When you’re reflecting on things you can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad, go deep
within yourself. Don’t search for salvation in the external world, but rather silence this
external world. It alone interferes with your ability to see good and evil.
291
We can isolate ourselves in our personal, temporal lives, but every one of our
thoughts finds, has found, and will continue to find its echo in humanity. For some
people, those whom the majority of humanity recognize as their leaders, reformers and
enlighteners, this echo is great and resounds with particular force. However, there is no
person whose thoughts haven’t evoked a similar reaction in others, albeit many times
less profound. Every sincere manifestation of a person’s soul, every expression of a
personal conviction serves someone or something, even if the person expressing it
doesn’t realize it and even if they gag him or throw a noose around his neck. Once a
word is spoken it exerts an indestructible influence and like all movement changes into
another form but is never destroyed. Henri Frédéric Amiel
It’s good to go off into solitude to pray. Christ taught this. However, in addition to
prayer in solitude there’s prayer among people. This sort of prayer is just as important
and necessary. Such prayer doesn’t consist of gathering together to read or sing prayers
the way many people do, but rather of remembering every time you meet or interact
with someone that within this person is the same God Who is within you, and so you
must relate to him with the same brotherly love and respect no matter who he might be,
drunkard, beggar or a king in all his false grandeur.
This is the most necessary prayer, and you have to teach yourself to do it.
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March 27
There is No Evil
I pray to God, asking Him to deliver me from the sufferings that torment me, but
God sent suffering to me in order to deliver me from evil. A landlord whips the cattle to
drive them out of a burning pen and save them and the cattle pray for deliverance from
the whip.
We grieve when someone belittles or criticizes us, but this is always useful. When you
estrange yourself from people you draw closer to God.
Illness finds us unprepared for life in sickness, and because of this, we don’t consider
it life when we’re ill and only think about recovering so we can start to live again. This is
a big mistake. You can live either a good or a bad life in sickness, just as in health.
Minor suffering exasperates us; major suffering, on the other hand, returns us to
our true life, to spiritual life. Based on a Passage by Johann Richter
293
Sorrow and illness are inescapable parts of human life. Therefore the definition of
happiness should be expanded to include some degree of grief and suffering. If some
deity offered to completely eradicate all suffering and all its causes from our lives, we’d
certainly fall into the great temptation of accepting the proposal immediately. When
heavy labor and need pressures us, when illness pains us, when worry seizes our hearts,
we get the feeling that there can be nothing better than a life without labor: tranquil,
secure, comfortable, and peaceful. However, I think that once we experienced such a life
we’d quickly feel bored and ask that our former life be returned with all its labors,
needs, miseries and dangers. Life without any suffering or fear quickly becomes boring
and intolerable. Of course, if the causes of misery, dangers, obstacles and failures were
to disappear then exertion, ardor, the thrill of risk, the tension of struggle, and
jubilation over victory would disappear as well. All that would remain would be the
unimpeded accomplishment of plans, success without opposition. We’d quickly grow
tired of this, like a game in which we knew beforehand that we’d win every time. Who
would play chess with a partner if he knew he’d always win? Who would go hunting if
the game surrounded him at every step and he never missed a shot? Uncertainty,
difficulty, and failure: these are the essential elements of any game that can enchant and
satisfy us as much as happiness and victory. Friedrich Paulson
294
When you’re suffering, seek its value for your spiritual growth and you’ll annihilate
the pain of suffering.
For an animal, the cause of suffering is the violation of the law of animal life. This
violation manifests itself as the consciousness of pain, and as a result of this violation an
animal directs its energy toward distancing itself from pain. For a rational being the
cause of suffering is the violation of the law of rational life. This violation manifests itself
as the consciousness of error—sin—and as a result of this violation a rational being
directs his energy toward distancing himself from error and sin. And just as an animal’s
suffering evokes action directed toward the pain that frees suffering of its painfulness,
so too the suffering of a rational being evokes action directed toward error which frees
suffering of its painfulness.
It’s good for a person to endure unhappiness in this earthly life, for it brings him
into holy union with his heart, where he finds himself something like an exile from his
native land and unable to trust any earthly joys. Likewise, it’s good for him to meet with
contradictions and reproaches, with people who think badly of him no matter how pure
and correct his actions are, because this behavior supports his humility and acts as an
antitoxin against empty praise. Most of all, it’s good because we can confer with the
witness within us, who is God, confer when we’re hated, shown disrespect and deprived
of love in the world. In such situations we must rely on God to do as He chooses, so that
when we’re sad we never rely upon human beings for comfort. Thomas van Kempen
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March 28
Life Exists Only in the Present
We say that time is moving. This isn’t true. We’re moving, not time. When we go
down a river it appears as though the shore is moving and not the boat we’re in. It’s the
same with time.
You want happiness, but happiness can only be now. There can be no happiness in
the future, because the future doesn’t exist. There is only the present.
You shouldn’t think about the future but simply try to make life joyful for yourself
and others in the present. “Tomorrow will cook by itself.” This is a great truth. Life is
good in that there’s no way you can know what you’ll need in the future. There’s one
thing that’s certain and needed at all times: true love toward others.
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Let’s not hesitate to be just, compassionate, and attentive to those whom we love.
Let’s not wait until we or they are inflicted with illness or threatened with death. Life is
short, and there can never be too much time to gladden the hearts of our fellow travelers
in this brief passage. Let’s make haste to be kind.
Based on a Passage by Henri Frédéric Amiel
Our soul has been thrown into the body, where it finds number, time and
dimension. It contemplates this and calls it nature and necessity, and can’t think
otherwise. Blaise Pascal
297
In the beginning, the nature of life appears to be clear and simple. First of all it
seems to a person that life is in him, in his body. “I live through the body, and therefore
life is in my body.” However, as soon as he begins to search for life in his body he
immediately encounters difficulties. There’s no life in the nails, none in the hair, nor in
the feet nor the hands (since you can cut off your feet and hands), it’s not in blood, nor
in the vessels, nor in the nerves. One thing after another fails to reveal life. Life appears
everywhere and nowhere and it’s impossible to discover where it dwells. Having failed to
find the place that contains life a person searches for it in time, and once again it seems
very easy at first, but as soon as you start to search in time you immediately see that it’s
not so simple. I live twenty, thirty, fifty, sixty years according to the records, but I know
that of these years I slept through a third of them. So was I living or not? And when I
was in my mother’s womb and with my wet nurse, again, was I living or not? Then for
the greater half of the remaining two thirds I was walking as if I were asleep; again, I
don’t know if I was living or not. I lived some, I didn’t live some; so in time as well, it
turns out life is everywhere and nowhere. Then the question involuntarily arises: where
does this physical life that I can’t find anywhere come from? Then I find out. Darwin
says it came from the lower organisms. But where did they come from? So here again it
turns out that what seemed to be simple was not merely difficult but impossible. It turns
out that I was searching for something other than my life. It turns out that in order to
search for life you must search not in time, not in space, not as the consequence of some
cause, but as something that you know within yourself that exists outside time, in the
present and completely independent of time and space.
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We know life only as something separated from the rest of the world. As something
separated from all existence, we can’t help but think in terms of time and space.
However, we only need temporal and spatial considerations to control our separate
existence in this world. In the effort to understand my true self, temporal and spatial
considerations not only fail to help, they serve as the main impediments to
understanding, because by considering my self in terms of time and space I’m inevitably
led to eternity, and be it great or small everything becomes incomprehensible before
eternity.
In the realm of material life we’re always ignorant because everything happens
within time, and in this realm we can never know the future. In the spiritual realm we
know everything, because there is no future. Therefore, uncertainty in our lives decreases
to the degree to which our lives move from the material to the spiritual: to the degree to
which we truly live.
Everything we do for the sake of the security of our lives is just like what an ostrich
does when it stops and sticks its head in the ground so it won’t see that it’s about to be
killed. We act worse than the ostrich: in order to questionably secure our questionable
lives in the questionable future, we certainly ruin our genuine life in the genuine
present.
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March 29
There is No Death
There’s nothing terrible about death. What we ourselves have done in our lives is
what makes it seem terrible.
Remember that you’re not standing still, but passing through, that you’re not in a
house but on a train that’s taking you toward death. Remember that your body is just
passing through and lives for a short time and that only the spirit within you truly lives.
Here’s a crowd of people in chains. They’ve all been condemned to death, and every
day several of them are killed right in front of the rest. Those who remain watch these
murders, wait their turn, and live in terror. This is what life is like for people if they
don’t understand the meaning of life. Death can’t frighten a person who understands
that we all come from God and return to Him. Such a person knows that we all pass
through life—some quickly, others more slowly—but every one of us returns to Him,
from Whom we came. This One from Whom we came and to Whom we’re returning is
love and happiness.
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People ask: why do children and young people have to die when they’ve only
experienced a little bit of life? How do you know they lived little? This is simply your
crude measure of time, but life isn’t measured in time. It’s like saying: why are these
adages, these poems, these paintings, these musical compositions so short? Why did
their creators cut them off and not stretch them out to the size of the biggest speeches,
paintings, or performances? The significance of a life (its magnitude) is even less
dependent on its length than the significance of a creation of wisdom or poetry is. How
can you know what inner growth a soul has undergone in its short time on earth and
what its influence on others has been?
It’s impossible to measure spiritual life with a physical yardstick.
All that I know and see teaches me to believe that which I don’t know or see. No
matter what it might be, whatever Providence prepares for us in the future must be
something majestic and good, the same as what I would recognize as good in this life if I
were able to see it. Ralph Waldo Emerson
If God were to give a person a choice—die or live forever, be it in endless poverty,
dependence, misery, illness or even with wealth, power, satisfaction, and health but
constantly under the threat that he could be deprived of it all—there’s no telling what
he’d choose.
Nature decides matters and saves us of the difficulty of choosing.
Étienne de La Bruyère
301
I love my garden, I love to read books, and to pamper children. When I die I’m
deprived of these things, and so I don’t want to die and I fear death.
It might be that my entire life is composed of such temporary, worldly desires and
their gratification. If this is so, then I have no reason to fear the cessation of these
desires. However, if these desires and their gratification change within me and are
replaced by a different desire—the desire to fulfill God’s will, to surrender to Him as I
now am and in all possible forms that I might be in the future—then the more my
desires change the less terrible death seems to me. If I completely replace my worldly
desires with divine ones, then there’s nothing for me except life, and death no longer
exists.
Replacing the worldly and temporary with the eternal is the path of life, and you
must hold fast to it.
The evil in me poisons my life and I can’t find any way to escape it. Death frees me
from this evil. How can I not consider that a blessing? Angelus Silesius
302
March 30
After Death
If you ask yourself: “Will I, I separate from all else, will I Peter, or I John, live after
death?” whoever believes in the God of love can only answer: if it’s better that there is
separate life after death, it will continue, and if not, it will end. If I believe in the God of
love, then I have to believe that all He does is the very best, both for me and for the entire
world.
I don’t remember anything about myself before my birth, and therefore I assume
that after death I won’t remember anything about my present life. If there’s life after
death then it’s something we can’t imagine.
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Beneath my feet is hard, frozen ground, all around are huge trees, and above my
head is an overcast sky. I feel my body and I’m consumed by thoughts, yet all the time I
know, I feel with all my being, that the hard, frozen land, the trees, the sky, my body and
my thought, all of this is nothing more than the random result of my five senses, my
conception, a world that I constructed, and that everything appears as it does only
because I’m an element of this part of the world and not another, because this is how my
separation from the world appears. I know that death lies before me, and none of this
will disappear but change like sets in the theater: out of branches and rocks they make
palaces, towers, etc. Death creates such a transformation within me that, if it’s true that I
don’t completely cease to exist, I’ll transform into another being, separated from the
world in a different way. Right now I consider my body and its feelings to be me, but
after I transform that which is within me will be manifested in a completely different
way. Then the entire world, remaining the same for those who live in it, will become
something different for me. Indeed, the world is as it is and not anything else because I
consider myself this particular independent being rather than some other one. Beings
separated from the world can be of an infinite number, and therefore the means of
separation can be infinite as well.
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The more spiritual our lives become, the more we believe in immortality. Our doubts
are annihilate to the extent that our nature distances itself from bestial crudeness. The
veil is lifted from the future, the darkness dissipates, and we already begin to feel our
immortality. Harriet Martineau
I don’t believe in any existing religion and therefore can’t be suspected of blindly
following some tradition or of being influenced by my upbringing. However, throughout
my life I’ve thought as deeply as I can about the law of our lives. I searched for it in the
history of humanity and in my own consciousness, and I have come to the unshakeable
conclusion that death does not exist; that life can only be eternal; that eternal perfection
is the law of our lives; that every ability, every thought, every aspiration that’s been
placed within me must be pragmatically developed; that we possess thoughts and
aspirations that go far beyond the potential of our earthly life; that this very fact that we
possess them and yet can’t trace their origin back to our senses serves as proof that they
come to us from a place outside this world and can be fully manifested only outside this
world as well; that nothing dies here on earth except forms, and to think that we die
because our form has died is the same as thinking that a workman has died because his
tools have worn out. Giuseppe Mazzini
305
Everything is revealed during your life and it’s all revealed at the same gradual pace.
Then death arrives and suddenly either that which was being revealed stops being
revealed or the person to whom it was being revealed ceases to see what had already
been revealed. He to whom the revelation occurred cannot but remain, because all that
existed did so only because he existed. He alone exists.
Only he who establishes in his consciousness a new relationship with the world that
is too large for this life is able to believe in a future life.
Future life beyond the grave is as clear and indubitable as present life is. It’s not only
clear and indubitable, it’s the same life. It only appears transient as a result of the
illusion of time, i.e. the occurrence of changes.
If we believe that all that happens to us in our lives happens for the sake of our
happiness, then we can’t help but believe that what happens to us when we die must be
for the sake of our happiness.
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March 31
Life is a Blessing
The most reliable way to be happy is simply to love, love everyone, both good and
evil. Love without interruption and you’ll never cease being happy.
We don’t know and can’t know the purpose of our lives. Therefore, it would be
impossible for us to know what we should and shouldn’t do if there weren’t the desire
for happiness. This desire faithfully shows us what we need to do if only we understand
life not as an animal, but as a soul in a body. And this very happiness that our soul
desires, this very happiness is given to us: given in love. And love is always within our
power.
Believe that happiness is beyond your power and you’ll always be unhappy. Realize
that happiness is the only thing that’s within your power and no one will ever take your
happiness away.
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No one gets tired of making himself happy. But indeed, the greatest happiness is
doing what my soul wants, and my soul wants one thing: love for others and love for
itself. Make the goal of your life the increase of love and you’ll find that happiness is
always within your power.
In a person’s natural state there’s a union of good and evil, but in his aspirations
there is no such intermixture. Aspirations can either be evil—the fulfillment of the will
of one’s animal essence—or good, the fulfillment of God’s will. If a person gives in to the
first aspiration, he can’t help but be unhappy. If he gives in to the second, there can be
no unhappiness for him, only joy.
To make each moment of life as good as possible, no matter what the hand of fate
deals you, be it favorable or unfavorable: this is the art of life and the true privilege of a
rational being. Georg Lichtenberg
308
Praise be to God that He has made what people need easy and what they don’t need
difficult. Most of all a person needs happiness, and being happy is easiest of all. Praise
be to God!
The Kingdom of God is within you. Happiness is in our hearts as long as we have
love within us.
What would happen if the happiness that every person needs were conditional on
the place, time, condition, health and strength of the body? What would happen if
happiness only occurred in America, or only in Jerusalem, or in the time of Solomon, or
in royal palaces, or in wealth, or rank, or in the wilderness, or in the sciences, or in
health, or in beauty?
Is it possible for all people to live only in America, or in Jerusalem, or to live at the
same time? If happiness were wealth, or health, or beauty, then all poor people, all the
elderly, all the sick and all the ugly would be unhappy. Would God really deprive all
these people of happiness? No. Praise be to God, He’s made the difficult unnecessary;
He’s arranged it so that there’s no happiness in wealth, nor in rank, nor in the body’s
beauty. Happiness is found in one place: in a good life, and that is within everyone’s
power. Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
309
If a person’s life isn’t joyful, it’s simply because he hasn’t done what he needs to
make his life unceasing joy.
Doing good is one thing about which you can say with certainty that it’s
undoubtedly useful.
What more happiness do you need when God and the entire world are within you?
Angelus Silesius
310
April
April 1
Faith
A man went out to look for a job and ran into two workers who’d each found
employment. The man told them he was looking for work, and both of them told him to
come see each of their respective employers. One said, “Come to my employer. It’s a good
job. It’s true that if he’s not pleased with your work he’ll put you in prison and have you
flogged, but if he’s happy with you there’s no better life to be had. When you finish your
term of employment you’ll get rewarded with a good life, no chores, and every day
there’ll be entertainment, singing, wine, sweets, and sleigh rides.” This is how one hired
worker encouraged the man to work for his employer.
The other worker also told the man he should work for his employer, but didn’t say a
word about how the employer would reward him. He couldn’t even say how the workers
would live, whether the work was easy or hard, but only said that his employer was kind,
never punished his workers and lived right alongside them.
The man thought about the first hired worker. “He promises a lot. If it’s as he says,
there’s no reason to promise so much. He tempts me with a life more luxurious than
anything. But the employer must be an angry man, because he punishes those who
don’t do things the way he tells them. I think it would be better to go with the other
311
man. He didn’t promise anything, but said the employer’s kind and lives right alongside
the workers.”
It’s the same with religious doctrines. False teachers attract people to a good life by
frightening them with punishments and deceiving them with a reward in a world no
one’s ever seen. True teachers only teach that the source of life—love—lives in the souls
of men and women, and that it’s good for those who unite with it.
If you serve God for the sake of eternal bliss, then you’re serving yourself, not God.
Angelus Silesius
In all religious doctrines people who’ve taken upon themselves the right to be the
interpreters and teachers of the faith have consistently used three methods to
subordinate people to their teachings. First is the assertion that there exist certain
people who alone are able to be intermediaries between man and God or the gods;
second, that miracles have occurred and continue to occur, and that they prove the
truth of what these intermediaries between man and God say; and third, that there are
certain words, repeated orally or written in books, that express the unchanging will of
God or the gods and which are therefore sacred and infallible. As soon as people accept
these three propositions they immediately accept as holy truth all that the
intermediaries between man and God say, and the greatest truths are perverted and the
most incredible absurdities are accepted as truth. This happens in all religions,
including Christianity.
312
The time is coming when ritualistic, oral worship, which attracts us with it poetry
and splendor, when violent governmental organization, which appears inevitable, will be
superseded by knowledge of the true law of God. The time of the kingdom of heaven, the
kingdom of God on earth, is coming, when through our acts our very lives will be
fulfilled by conscious, uninterrupted worship, which alone is true service to God.
This requires an understanding of religion in its true meaning: not in witchcraft and
deception, but in a science of the life of man; not in the notion that worship is something
mysterious and supernatural, nor the idea that without a priest or grace you can do
nothing, but in the idea that worship comprises love of God and one’s neighbor, serving
one’s neighbor, true personal action for the good of one’s neighbor, for the good of all:
the idea that worship of God means doing good. Buka
Every person feels in the same way the insignificance of that which is
comprehensible and the greatness of that which is incomprehensible and essential, that
which undoubtedly is and cannot not be. The relationship to this incomprehensible and
certain reality is religion.
True religion is not a religion of reason, but true religion cannot contradict reason.
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The belief in the power of reason lies at the foundation of all other beliefs. It’s
impossible to believe in God if we trivialize the significance of this ability through which
we recognize God. Reason is the very ability toward which so-‐called revelation directs
itself, and this so-‐called revelation can only be understood through reason. If, after
conscientious and dispassionate utilization of our best abilities, an accepted religious
doctrine appears contradictory or out of harmony with fundamental principles of which
we have no doubt, we must by all means refrain from accepting that faith and those
doctrines. I’m more certain that my reason comes from God than that some book
expresses God’s will. William Channing
The general state of human life depends on how people understand the law of God.
With the passage of time God’s law becomes simpler, more comprehensible, clearer, and
more in harmony with true knowledge. And as the law becomes simpler and clearer,
people unite with one another more and more.
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April 2
The Soul
It’s good for a person to think that physically he seems quite large when compared to
a flea but quite tiny when compared with the Earth. It’s also good to consider that our
entire planet is a speck of sand when compared to the Sun, and the Sun is nothing in
comparison with Sirius, and Sirius is nothing in comparison with other even larger
objects. And so it goes without end. So what is man with his body in comparison with
these suns and stars? Nothing. And if you also think about the fact that there was no
mention of any of us when other people like us were born, grew up, grew old and died
over a hundred, a thousand, and many thousands of years, and that out of these
millions and millions of people just like you neither their bones nor even the dust of
their bones remains, and that after us millions and millions of people just like us will
pass their lives, and that from our ashes grass will grow, and sheep will eat the grass,
and people will eat the sheep, and not a single trace or memory of us will remain. What
are we? Nothing.
Nothing, nothing, and only this nothing understands itself and its place in the
world. And if it understands, then this understanding is not nothing, but something
bigger than all this infinite world and all eternal time.
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God wishes good for all, and so if you wish good for all, if you love everyone, then
God lives within you.
It’s good when someone says to you, “have you forgotten God?” If you’ve forgotten
God, then you’ve forgotten about the One who’s always within you and through whom
you live.
Remembrance of God is a great affair. You can’t remember Him through words, but
by acknowledging that He lives within you.
There’s no body so strong and healthy that it never falls ill; there’s no wealth that
can’t be lost; there’s no authority that won’t come to an end. It’s all temporary. If a
person considers being healthy, rich or powerful to be the foundation of his life, even if
he attains what he strives for he’ll never be at ease, for he’ll see that all he’s founded his
life upon is abandoning him; he’ll see that he’s slowly growing old and approaching
death.
What can a person do to avoid worry and fear?
There’s one only way. You must make the foundation of your life something that
never perishes and can never perish: the spirit that lives in man.
Man, don’t remain man. Make yourself God. Only then will you do with yourself
what you should. Angelus Silesius
316
When a person lives consciously, he frequently notices within himself two different
beings: one blind and sensual, the other clear-‐sighted and spiritual. The blind animal
being eats, drinks, rests, sleeps, reproduces and moves like a clock; the one that can see,
which is bound to the animal, does nothing on its own but evaluates the activity of the
animal being so that when it approves of its actions it merges with it and when it
disapproves of the animal being’s activity it distances itself from it.
The clear-‐sighted spiritual being is what we call our conscience. Our conscience,
which always indicates what is good, can be compared to the needle of a compass that
always points north. As long as we’re headed north we don’t notice any movement on
the needle’s part, and likewise we don’t notice our spiritual being in our conscience as
long as we follow the path of good. But as soon as we commit an act that is contrary to
the direction of our conscience, this spiritual being points out our animal activity’s
divergence from the demands of our spiritual self.
All truth has its source in God. When it manifests itself in man, that doesn’t prove
that it comes from man, but only that man has the attribute of transparency that allows
truth to manifest itself. Blaise Pascal
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Consciousness of your spiritual essence will save you from anything. No matter what
happens to you, evil cannot touch you if you’re aware of your spiritual essence.
The source of true happiness is the heart. Anyone who searches for it elsewhere is a
fool. He’s like a shepherd who goes searching for a lamb that’s right under his nose.
Why do you collect stones to build giant temples? Why do you torture yourself like
that when God is always alive within you?
A guard dog is better than a lifeless idol in the home, and better than all demigods is
the great God of the world.
The light that lives within the heart of every person like the morning star, that light
is your sanctuary. Vamana Purana
Our sense of duty forces us to feel the reality of the material world and to take part
in its life, and at the same time it tears us from this world and reveals its lack of true
substance. Based on a Passage by Henri Frédéric Amiel
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April 3
One Soul in All
We always get a pleasant feeling in our soul after we do something good for
someone. This is because when we do something for someone else rather than ourselves
we realize more completely that our life isn’t just in us but in all people and all living
things. When we live alone in ourselves, for ourselves alone, we find life constrained and
difficult. When we feel that we live in everyone, we find life free and easy. For a person
who lives only for himself, all people and all the world are enemies. For a person who
lives for others, all people and the world are his friends.
If a person understands that his life is not in a body but a spirit, then he’ll recognize
this spirit in all living beings and feel his unity with all that lives.
If a person doesn’t see the same spirit that lives within him in everyone around him,
he’s living in a dream. A person only awakens and truly lives when he sees and feels in
every other person the same spirit that lives within him.
When we stop respecting someone because he’s evil, stupid, or unjust, we deprive
ourselves of the most essential thing in life: consciousness of our connection with all that
lives.
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You’ll never find traces of an earthly origin of the soul. There is nothing constituent
in the soul, nothing that could arise from or be created on Earth. The soul has nothing
in common with water, air or fire. There’s nothing in water, nor air, nor fire that could
possess the ability to remember, understand, think, retain the past, look into the future
or comprehend and ponder the present. Therefore, there’s something in each of us that’s
distinct from the entire material world, and that is what we call our spirit.
The sky is closer than the earth to those who have purified their souls and are free
from doubt.
Even a person who possesses all the knowledge that one can gain from the five senses
will find no benefit in it if he doesn’t know the spiritual nature of things.
True knowledge concerning each thing is the understanding that within that thing
is something we can’t see.
The soul’s true birth is cognition of one’s spiritual being, united with all.
Anyone who follows this path will never return. Thirukkural
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Compassion for all living things is the most trustworthy and reliable method for
attaining virtue. Whoever follows this rule can never be offended or insulted, can never
be harmed by anyone, will never demand anything from anyone, and will forgive
everyone as much as possible. It’s impossible to say, “This person is virtuous but he has
no compassion,” or, “this person is unjust and evil, but he’s very compassionate.”
Compassion for all living things is inseparable from virtue. Based on a Passage by
Arthur Schopenhauer
You can easily live with anyone if you think about what you have in common and not
about how you differ from each other.
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April 4
God
People talk about God in different ways, but they all feel and understand Him in
exactly the same way.
If God didn’t love Himself within you, you could never love either yourself or God.
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Some people say that God lives in the sky. They call God the king of the heavens and
they also say that God lives within man.
People say “isn’t God within you?” to someone who’s acting badly. And this is
correct. That which we call God we see in the heavens and in every person. Look at the
sky on a winter night and you’ll see stars, stars, star after star without end. And when
you consider that each of these stars is many times larger than the world on which we
live, and that beyond the stars we can see there are hundreds, thousands, millions of
stars like them and even bigger than them, and that there’s no end to either the stars or
the sky—then you’ll realize that there’s something we can’t comprehend. And this
something we can’t comprehend is what we call God.
When you look within yourself you see within you that which we call your self, your
soul. You can’t touch, hear, see, or understand this soul, but we know it more firmly
than anything else, and through it we know all that exists. And that which is in our soul,
incomprehensible yet comprehending everything, is also what we call God.
So we recognize God outside ourselves in the physical infinity that we see all around
us, and in the spiritual infinity that we feel in our souls.
A person can’t help but feel that something is being done with his life and that he’s
someone’s instrument. And if he’s someone’s instrument, that someone is the one who’s
working though him. That someone who works through him is God.
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God is eternal and universal life in endless time and space. He is all that is, and there
is no other God but God. All is within Him, and therefore nothing exists outside Him.
Every life is a manifestation of His life. When a life begins it comes from nothing other
than God, and when a life ends it doesn’t cease to exist but rather returns to God.
Barthélemy Enfantin
A person must love, and true love is only possible where there is nothing evil.
Therefore, there must be something that contains no evil. There is only one being in
which there is no evil: God.
You can refuse to say “God” or run from the word, but you can’t deny His existence.
Nothing exists if He doesn’t exist.
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April 5
Life is Union
A person can understand life like this: “Only I truly live, but around me also live all
sorts of other people, animals, insects, and all sorts of beings.” When you understand
your life in this manner, life is difficult and terrible and, most importantly, evil feelings
toward everything that isn’t you accumulate in your soul. But it’s also possible to
understand life this way: “Everything lives, all the world is precisely the same as me, and
every being is as important to itself as I am to me.” When you understand your life in
this manner, more and more you want to unite with everyone, and more and more
goodness toward all living things accumulates, and your soul becomes light and joyful.
“I’m bored and in agony all alone.” So who ordered you to separate yourself from
everyone and lock yourself in the prison of your solitary self?
Powerful forces are at work in the world. No one can stop them. The signs of this
power: a new understanding of Christianity, new respect for man, a new feeling of
brotherhood, and all people experiencing the same relationship with the Father of
everyone. We see it, we feel it, and all oppression falls before it. Society, silently imbued
with this spirit, is exchanging eternal war for peace. The power of self-‐love, which
consumes everything and seems unconquerable, is surrendering before this force. “Peace
on earth and goodwill toward all” will not be a dream forever. William Channing
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For the most part, people never stop improving. Individuals die, but the truth they
strive to learn, the truth they express doesn’t perish with them. Humanity preserves it
all, and a person utilizes all that was achieved by those who came before him. Each one
of us was nurtured in the beliefs of those who lived before us, and each of us brings to
these beliefs something new and necessary for the life of humanity. People are raised in
the same way the pyramids were built in ancient times. We, minute tenants, we
disappear, but the education of humanity, leading it to union, albeit slowly, never ceases
to be perfected. Based on a Passage by Giuseppe Mazzini
Inconspicuously but incessantly, humanity is heading toward the fruition of its ideal:
union and mutual happiness.
The more conscious we are of our union with God, with Everything, the more
conscious we are of our unity with each of His individual manifestations.
A person can live a good life only if he understands that he’s a spiritual being,
united with all beings and with Everything. If a person understands himself merely as a
physical being, he’ll live only for himself. A person who lives only for himself cannot live
a good life.
Act so that you’re able to tell others: act as I do. Based on a Passage by Immanuel
Kant
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April 6
Love
It might appear as though there are various types of good in the world, but there is
only one true good: that which isn’t good for just one person but for everyone. This one
true good is people’s love for others.
Not by money, nor gifts, nor lessons, nor even labor can people improve each other’s
lives, but only by love.
What you love, you become. If you love the earthly, you become the Earth. If you love
God, you become God. Angelus Silesius
There can be no virtue without love. There can be no happiness without love either.
People often think that there’s merit in living according to God’s will and loving your
neighbors. However, there’s no merit in this at all. If you love your neighbors, you
haven’t earned anything from God. On the contrary, God has given you something you
haven’t earned: that greatest joy of love and union with Him through love.
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People say you need to fear God. This isn’t true. You must love God, not fear Him. It’s
impossible to love what you fear. Additionally, it’s impossible to fear God because God is
love. How can you fear love? You shouldn’t fear God, you should love Him, and if you
love God you’ll fear nothing on Earth.
Any love that has a reason is earthly, imperfect love. Even love that has a spiritual
reason is limited to itself and such love can disappear when its cause disappears. Only
love that has no cause is eternal. It doesn’t grow old and doesn’t pass away, but rather
grows and grows endlessly throughout the ages. Krishna
Having created Heaven and Earth, which cannot feel the joy of their existence, God
wanted to create beings that would be conscious of this joy and would compose a single
body from conscious parts. All people are the parts of this body. In order to be happy,
they must make their will conform to the common will as directed by the entire body.
And yet a person often thinks that he’s everything. Failing to perceive the body upon
which he depends, he thinks that he depends only on himself, and wants to make
himself the heart and body. However, a person in this situation is like a limb cut from its
body, which doesn’t possess within itself the source of life and so only strays and
wonders at the incomprehensibility of its existence. When a person finally reaches full
understanding of his purpose, it’s as if he returns to himself, cognizant of the fact that
he’s not the entire body but only one part of the common body, and that separated from
its body this part has only a moribund, dying existence, and that he must love himself
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only for this body, or to put it more accurately, he must only love this common body,
because by loving it he loves himself, since life only exists through it.
In order to identify this love that you must have for yourself you have to imagine a
body composed of conscious parts, because we are parts of the Whole, and then decide
how to love each individual part.
The body loves its arm, and if the arm had will, it would love itself as much as the
body loves it. Any love greater than this is improper. If the arms and legs had their own
will, they would be in good form only when they submitted to the body; beyond this
there would be disorder and suffering. By wishing for happiness for the body, they
achieve their own happiness.
The parts of our body don’t feel the happiness of their union, their amazing
harmony, and don’t sense how nature, which placed in them this harmony and causes
them to grow and exist, cares for them. If they were given the power of comprehension,
they’d use it to retain the nourishment they received and not share it with the other
parts; they’d not only be unjust, they’d be unhappy, they wouldn’t love each other,but
would hate each other instead, since their happiness as well as their responsibilities lie in
this conforming to the activity of the common soul to which they all belong and which
loves them more than they love themselves. Blaise Pascal
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People of the world, you are unhappy. Miseries and troubles hang over your heads,
lie beneath your feet and encircle you right and left. Furthermore, you’re a puzzle to
yourself, and you’ll remain stuck on these puzzles if you don’t become as loving and
joyful as children. Only when you recognize Me—love—and after recognizing Me you
recognize yourself, only then will you be able to control yourself.
Only when you look on the external world from the internal world will everything in
the external world, and within yourselves, be joyful. Buddhist Suttas
Love—not love toward a specific person but the spiritual condition of readiness to
love everything—is the only condition in which we are conscious of the true spiritual
source of our souls.
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Man’s animal nature demands happiness. Rational consciousness reveals to man the
wretchedness of all the beings that battle each other and shows him that his animal
nature will never find happiness. It shows him that the only happiness he can obtain is
that which doesn’t struggle with other beings, which doesn’t vanish once he’s gained it,
and which is indifferent to the shadow and horror of death.
And so, like a key made just for this lock, in his soul a person finds the sensation
that gives him the very happiness that reason shows him is the only kind possible. This
sensation not only solves life’s former contradictions but also finds in these
contradictions an opportunity to become manifest.
Love of God is love of oneself: it is the love of love itself. This love is the greatest
blessing. Such a love does not allow the possibility of antipathy toward any being. As
soon as you lose your love for a single person, you lose love of God and the blessing of
this love.
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April 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Fighting with sins, temptations and superstitions and liberating yourself from them
is the essence of human life. If there were no sins, temptations or superstitions, people
would be angels and they'd have nothing to do in this world.
Five main sins torment people: (1) the sin of voluptuousness, gluttony, and all
luxury; (2) the sin of indolence: idleness; (3) the sin of passion: lust; (4) the sin of malice:
anger; (5) the sin of pride.
If there were no darkness, we wouldn’t be aware of different colors or even light. In
the same way, if there were no sins we wouldn’t be aware of virtue or righteousness.
If a person didn’t have a soul he wouldn’t know the sins of the body, and if not for
the body’s passions he wouldn’t know he has a soul.
A person’s task in this world is to increase the love within himself and manifest it in
the world. This is what God wants from every person. What can a person do to fulfill the
will of God? Only one thing: don’t interfere with the love that fills the soul of every
person from manifesting in the world. Serving your body interferes with this
manifestation.
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It’s clear that my life in this Divine world has no significance on its own, but only in
service. It’s clear that in the corporeal sense defeat and death await us; we see this with
our eyes, we reason it with our minds, and all nature bears witness to it. This is the law
of life in this Divine world; this is what God wishes. A person who achieves this
understanding will, little by little and according to the degree of his comprehension of
this simple truth, gradually lose his appetite for fighting and struggling with others for
the sake of his physical happiness, for a kind of happiness that, so it turns out, is an
alien, temporary and cruel master. Buka
All sin is the result of ignorance.
The Buddhists believe there are five primary sins: (1) murder: the deliberate
deprivation of life of another being; (2) the confiscation of an item that is considered the
property of another; (3) fornication: the betrayal of a husband by his wife or a wife by
her husband; (4) dishonesty; (5) any sort of self-‐stupefaction through drinking or
smoking.
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April 8
The Sin of Lechery
In all animal life, and especially in the birth of children, people must be higher than
animals, and never lower than them. For the most part, it’s precisely in this domain that
people are lower than the animals. Male and female animals have liaisons only when
they can issue fruit. Humans, men and women, have liaisons whenever they feel like it,
without considering whether or not children will result from it.
If a man and a woman have sexual relations for any reason other than to create and
raise children together they commit a sin, and in one way or another this will have a bad
effect on their lives.
All sins are born in and supported by our thoughts, but there’s no sin that’s
supported and strengthened by our thoughts like the sin of lust. Don’t dwell on lustful
thoughts; drive them out instead. Recall your spiritual source. Lust debases and destroys
this spiritual source, and it is in this source alone that life’s blessings lie.
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Although very few people can be completely sexually abstinent, any person can
understand and remember that he can always be more abstinent than he was previously
and can return to abstinence if it’s been disrupted, and that the more a person
approaches complete chastity, in accordance with his own ability, the more he achieves
true earthly happiness and the more he contributes to the happiness of others.
It’s not our business to decide whether the birth of children is a blessing or not. He
who established this penance for the sin of violating chastity knows what He’s doing.
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In order for a marriage to be a rational and moral affair, the following are needed:
(1) Not to believe, as people nowadays do, that every person, man and woman, is
obligated to get married, but rather to believe that it’s best for every person, man and
woman, to observe chastity so that nothing can deprive them of their ability to serve
God.
(2) Not to look upon the fall of a person, man or woman, into sexual relations as a
mistake that can be corrected by a new sexual relation (in the form of a marriage) with a
different person or as a pardonable satisfaction of desire, or even a simple pleasure, as
people do nowadays, but rather to look upon one’s first sexual encounter, no matter who
you are and no matter who it is with, as entrance into an indissoluble marriage
(Matthew 19:4-‐6), obliging those who’ve entered into it to follow a defined course of
action that serves as penance for the sin they’ve committed.
(3) Not to look upon marriage as the solution to satisfying physical lust, as people do
nowadays, but rather as a sin that demands atonement.
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Cohabitation, the result of which might be the birth of children, is a true and
genuine marriage. All those ceremonies, announcements and vows aren’t a part of
marriage and for the most part serve to acknowledge that all prior cohabitations aren’t
marriage.
“If the Christian ideal had been put into practice at the time of Christ’s mission, then
people wouldn’t fight, there would be no wars, no executions, no poverty, and the
human race would multiply so much (there are people who work on these calculations)
that in our time there wouldn’t be enough land for everyone.”
People who reason this way forget that an ideal moral life includes chastity.
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April 9
The Sin of Overindulgence
There’s no reason for concern when the body suffers due to spiritual work, but it’s
bad when the most valuable part of a person—his soul—suffers because of the body’s
passions.
Our bodies’ desires resemble little children. Children are constantly upset and
always sticking to their mother, asking her for this and then for that, and no matter
what she gives them it’s not enough and they ask for more and more. It’s the same with
the body’s desires: the more it’s given, the more it demands without end. Based on a
Passage in “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
That which the body needs, the body alone, is always easy to acquire. You have to be
particularly unfortunate not to have clothes to cover your body or a crust of bread to
feed yourself. But when the body’s desires become enhanced by your imagination they’ll
never be satisfied, for there’s no end to the desires of the imagination.
Happy is he who has consciously and freely exchanged personal life for true spiritual
life, but woe to him who clings to personal life. Suffering will compel him to renounce it.
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If you cater to the body you weaken it, and if you overly burden the body you weaken
it as well. There is a middle ground: don’t pamper your body and don’t exhaust it.
However, remember that when searching for this median it’s best to err on the side of
exhausting the body. This yields the best results because if you don’t fulfill the demands
of the body—if you eat or sleep too little, if you overwork—your body calls your
attention to your mistake immediately. If you pamper your body too much it won’t
immediately point out your error, but will expose it much later, after you’ve already
gotten used to it and have grown weak.
Socrates restrained himself from all excess, such as eating for the sake of the taste of
the food rather than for quenching hunger, and urged his disciples to do the same. He
said that it was a great disservice both to the body and the soul to eat and drink
excessively, and he advised them never to eat their fill, but rather to leave the table while
they were still hungry. He reminded his disciples of the tale about wise Odysseus: the
witch Circe couldn’t bewitch him simply because he wouldn’t overeat, while his
comrades all turned into pigs when they threw themselves onto the sweet food.
Xenophon
Just as the first rule of wisdom is to know yourself, no matter how hard it may be, so
the first rule of charity is to be satisfied with little, no matter how hard it may be. Only
such a satisfied and content person can be strong enough to show charity to another.
John Ruskin
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April 10
The Temptation of Wealth
Jesus told his disciples: “Truly I say to you, it is difficult for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.
“And I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 19:23-‐24
Wise and good people are terrified of wealth, while unkind, stupid people try with all
their might to gather more and more of that which wise people fear.
Wealth is like manure. It stinks when it piles up, and it’s only useful when it’s
scattered.
It’s understandable that rich people, having gathered their wealth, consider it a
virtue and honor it as such. They’ve sacrificed so much for it. But it’s amazing that poor
people also honor the wealthy simply because they’re wealthy. Why? Because just like the
wealthy, the poor consider wealth a blessing and long for it.
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No matter how much he acquires, a person who puts all his effort into accumulating
wealth will never be satisfied. The richer a person becomes the more his needs endlessly
increase.
Help your brother without considering who he is: an oppressor or someone who’s
being oppressed. “But how can we help him if he’s an oppressor?” Help the oppressor to
restrain himself from oppression. Muhammad
Thieves live by theft and brigands live by banditry, and neither thieves nor bandits
can consider themselves good people until they abandon their professions; neither
prayers nor sacrifices can make them good. It’s the same with wealthy, idle people: as
long as they refuse to work but instead exploit the labor of others, they can never
consider themselves good people nor think that prayers and sacrifices to God can make
them good.
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Remember that life is a lesson that has been given to us. The lesson is that we must
nurture the soul within us.
What a foul error people make when, instead of nurturing their soul, they do the
opposite, disparaging and corrupting it simply so they can collect more unnecessary
and harmful wealth.
When two different systems of slavery occur at the same stage of moral development,
the system where humans are turned into property is far more humane than the system
where land is turned into private property. Wherever land is recognized as private
property people die from labor and hunger, are deprived of all the joy and beauty of life,
and are doomed to ignorance and a beastly existence that leads them to crime and
suicide, which appears to be an act of fate for which no one can be held responsible,
rather than as a result of someone’s will. Henry George
The injustice of land ownership, like all injustice, is inescapably bound to an entire
series of injustices and evil deeds that it needs to preserve itself.
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April 11
The Sin of Parasitism
Never bother someone else with something you can do yourself.
There once was a wealthy man who had everything people long for: millions in
money, a splendid palace, a beautiful wife, hundreds of servants, expensive meals, all
sorts of foods and wines, and a stable filled with the finest horses. And all of this bored
him so much that he’d sit around all day in his finely decorated chambers, moaning and
complaining about his boredom. His only activity and his only joy was eating. He’d wake
up and wait for breakfast, then after breakfast wait for lunch, and after lunch he’d wait
for dinner. But before long he was deprived of this joy. He ate so much rich food that he
damaged his stomach and completely lost his appetite. He summoned doctors, who gave
him medicine and told him to go for a two-‐hour walk every day.
One day he was out doing his assigned two-‐hour walk and grieving over the fact that
he had no desire to eat. A beggar came up to him.
“Give something,” he said, “to a poor man, for Christ’s sake.”
The rich man was so wrapped up in his misery about not wanting to eat that he
didn’t hear the beggar.
“Have pity, sir, I haven’t eaten all day.”
When the rich man heard about food, he stopped.
“What, you want to eat?”
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“How could I not want to, sir? I desperately want to eat.”
“What a lucky man,” the rich man thought. And he began to envy the poor man.
The poor envy the rich, and the rich envy the poor.
They’re equal. It’s better for the poor though, because they’re rarely responsible for
their poverty, while the rich are always themselves guilty of their wealth.
The lives of Arcadian shepherdesses and our beloved aristocratic life are both
ridiculous and unnatural, even though they’re alluring, for there can never be true
contentment where contentment becomes your occupation. Only a respite from activity,
rare, brief and without preparation, is lasting and truly pleasant. Immanuel Kant
If a person living in solitude frees himself from responsibility for struggling with
nature, he forthwith sentences himself to death, for his body will begin to die. If a person
not only frees himself from this responsibility but also forces others to fulfill it, he
forthwith sentences himself to death, for his soul will wither and die.
The greatest blessing in life is love. Wealthy people cannot love. How can they love
when their entire lives are founded on fighting others? All that they enjoy is created by
destitute, forced laborers, often while those who make what they enjoy curse them. In
order for wealthy people to be able to love, first of all they have to stop living off other
people’s suffering.
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Manual labor, and especially agricultural labor, is useful not only to the body but
also to the soul. People who don’t work with their hands find it difficult to understand
things in a healthy manner. Such people never stop thinking, talking, listening and
reading, and their minds get no rest and eventually overheat and flounder. In addition
to the respite it provides the mind, agricultural labor is useful in that it brings people
close to nature.
People think that manual labor interferes with intellectual, spiritual life. On the
contrary, a truly spiritual life only exists when a person doesn’t shun manual labor.
For the most part, “division of labor” is an excuse to do nothing or engage in trifling
activities and dump the work you need done on others. Those who control this division
always take upon themselves the work that they find the most pleasant; they pass on to
others work that appears difficult. The most astonishing thing is that these people
always make a mistake: the work they believe to be the most pleasant turns out in the
end to be the most burdensome, while the work they shun is the most enjoyable.
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Manual labor is the study of the external world.
The benefits of wealth remain with those who earn wealth and not those who receive
it for free.
When I go into my garden with a shovel and dig a flower bed, I feel such a rush of
health and joy that I always think: Why do I always deprive myself of such happiness by
letting others do what I could do with my own two hands? This isn’t simply a matter of
satisfaction and health, but also of education.
I always feel ashamed when I’m around my woodcutter, my ploughman, and my
cook, because they’re able to satisfy themselves with their own hands and pass day and
night without my help, while I depend on them and don’t have the right of ownership
over my own hands and feet. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest talents are destroyed by idleness. Michel Montaigne
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April 12
The Sin of Ill Will
It is truly difficult to be kind to a scoundrel, a liar, especially if he insults us as well,
but with him, with this person in particular, we must be kind, both for him and for
ourselves.
A wise person knows that all he needs in within himself, and therefore he expects
good only from himself. An unreasonable person expects all good only from others and
gets angry with them when they don’t give him what he wants. A wise person gets angry
with no one but himself. And therefore a wise person never gets angry.
Drop by drop the barrel is filled. In the same way, a person becomes filled with evil
no matter how slowly he gathers it, if he allows himself to become angry with others. Evil
returns to the one who creates it like dust thrown into the wind.
There is no place in the entire world—not in the sky, nor in the sea, nor on the
peaks of mountains—where a person can free himself of the evil in his heart.
Remember this. Dhammapada
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In Hindu law it is written: As certainly as winter is cold and summer is warm, so for
an evil person life will be bad and for a kind person it will be good. Let no one enter into
a dispute no matter how he’s been offended or has suffered. Let no one offend another
by word, thought, or deed. All of this deprives people of their greatest happiness.
Take care not to quarrel. Every word spoken to someone with a dissatisfied voice, an
unkind glance: none of this is a joke. These kinds of trifles cause strife and contention,
which ruin our lives more than anything else.
It’s difficult to disentangle sins that divide people, but no matter how hard such
disentanglement might be, this is what the entire business life consists of. If it were
simple then the Kingdom of God would instantly appear. But no: it’s easier to tunnel
through a mountain or build airplanes and submarines than to eliminate the feeling of
ill will that divides people. But the fact that something is difficult not only fails to prove
that it doesn’t need to be done, but it proves instead that you should devote all your
strength directly toward accomplishing it.
348
If you become angry, before you act or say anything, count to ten. If you’re still
angry, count to one hundred.
If you remember this when you become angry, you won’t need to count because
you’ll remember that you need to stay silent when you’re angry; and if you do stay silent,
you’ll be amazed that you could become angry over such nonsense.
If a person offends you, you could respond to the offense like a dog, a cow, or a horse:
if your insulter is stronger than you, you can run away, or you can bite, butt, or kick.
However, you could respond to an offense like a rational person, and say to yourself: it’s
his business that he offended me; it’s my business to do what I consider right.
When we’re angry with ourselves we don’t condemn ourselves and our soul; we
condemn our bad actions. This is precisely how we should relate to others: condemn
their actions if they’re bad, but not them and their souls.
349
April 13
The Temptation of Pride
It’s easy to live with a person only when you consider yourself no better than him
and him no better than you.
A proud man wants to be praised. In order to be praised he has to be what people
consider good. People consider what they like to be good, and they like to be considered
good themselves. Therefore a proud person can never achieve what he wants.
People consider some above themselves and others beneath. All you have to do is
recall that one and the same spirit lives in all people to see how incredibly stupid this is!
To consider all people equal doesn’t mean that you have to be as strong, clever,
intelligent, educated, and kind as other people, but simply realize that within you is
something more important than anything else on earth and that’s the same in all
people: the Divine spirit.
350
“And Christ’s mother and brothers came to see him, but they couldn’t reach him
because there were so many people gathered around him. A man saw them and went up
to Christ and said, “Your family, your mother and brothers are outside and want to see
you.” Christ said, “My mother and my brothers are those who understand my Father’s
will and fulfill it.” (Matthew 12:46-‐50)
The meaning of Christ’s words is that for a rational person who understands his
purpose in life there can be no differentiation among people or any superiority among
them.
People could never have accomplished one percent of the atrocities they’ve
committed and continue to commit incessantly in the name of the belief that some
people are superior to others. “We Christians can kill and torture the non-‐Christians; we
Orthodox can do the same to the infidels; we white people can kill and oppress dark
people,” and so on.
No matter what their background, religion or race, children greet other children
with the same kind, joyful smile. Meanwhile an adult, who should be more rational than
a child, considers a person’s background, religion and race before he enters into a
relationship with him, no matter what kind of relationship it might be, and treats him
one way or another, depending on that person’s class, religion and race. Not in vain did
Christ say: Be like the children.
351
Christ revealed to humanity that the distinction people make between their nation
and others is a deception and an evil. Once a Christian understands this, he can no
longer fail to see the falsity of the feeling of ill will toward other nations; he can no
longer justify as he used to the cruel acts committed against other peoples as a result of
his nation’s feeling of superiority over them, or because of the errors, cruelty or barbarity
of another nation. Knowing that the separation of his nation from others is evil and
destroys his happiness, recognizing the temptation that led him into this evil, he can no
longer consciously serve this temptation as he once did. Realizing that his happiness
isn’t bound exclusively to his own people but to the happiness of all the people of the
world, he now knows that his unity with all people cannot be destroyed by a national
boundary and government orders concerning membership in one nation or another. He
now knows that all people are brothers and therefore equal, and once he understand
this a Christian can’t help but change his entire attitude toward other nations and
toward the government. That which once seemed dignified and lofty—love for the
fatherland, for his people, for his government, service that harms the happiness of other
peoples, military action—none of this seems lofty and splendid anymore. On the
contrary, it now appears base and evil. All that once appeared evil and shameful—
rejection of one’s fatherland, cosmopolitanism—now appears dignified and lofty. If, in
a moment of forgetfulness, a Christian might wish more success for his own nation or
government, once he’s thinking clearly again he can no longer surrender to this
superstition, which he knows will destroy his life and the lives of others. He can’t
recognize any governments or nations, he can’t take part in any activities that are
352
founded on the differentiation of states, such as customs offices and import tax offices,
nor can he participate in the manufacture of bullets or weapons, military service, nor,
most importantly, in war with other nations.
Patriotism is so unnatural to people of our day that it can only be aroused through
artificial incitement.
This is what governments and those whom patriotism serves do: they incite
patriotism in those for whom it’s harmful. Be on guard against this deception.
353
April 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
There’s no harm in people praising you for your deeds. The harm is if you do things
so that people will praise you.
In order to free yourself from concern for people’s praise, it’s good to do things that
no one will ever know about. Try to do these sorts of things and you’ll see that there’s a
special kind of joy in them.
The less a person thinks about his soul, the more he concerns himself with other
people’s opinions of him.
You have to live like people swallowed up in a mine who know they’re never getting
out and that no one will ever know how they lived there. You must live this way because
only such a life, without any concern about what people say or what will come of it, only
that kind of life is real.
To live for God rather than for people seems difficult because you can’t see any
reward for a good life. So it seems. However, this isn’t true. God, who lives within you, is
rewarding you at this very moment for your good life, and in a way that people never
will.
354
Just as prayer is only genuine when spoken alone with God, so good deeds are only
genuine when God alone knows why you’re doing what you’re doing.
A sycophant only flatters because he has a low opinion of you, and yet you listen to
him and take joy in his praise.
The freer a person is from trying to please others and from conceit the easier it is for
him to serve God, and vice versa.
He who worries about what people say about him will never be at peace.
355
April 15
The Temptation of Punishment
When a child hits the floor that he fell against it’s stupid but understandable, just as
it’s clear why a person jumps when he hurts himself. It’s just as understandable when a
person immediately threatens or hits someone who struck him. But if you deliberately
do evil to someone because he did evil in the past and convince yourself that it’s
necessary, that means you’ve completely rejected reason.
From malice and the desire to avenge themselves for an offense, people commit evil
and then to justify it they convince themselves and others that they’re only doing it to
correct the person who did evil to them.
It’s the humble who are skilled in dealing with people. This is called the virtue of
nonresistance. It is called concord with Heaven. Lao Tsu
Those who think you can only rule people through violence—punishment and
threats—while ignoring their reason act like people who put blinders on horses so that
they’ll walk in circles more manageably.
356
We fail to see the criminality of violence only because we submit to it. Violence
inherently leads to murder.
If one person tells another: “Do such and such, and if you don’t I’ll force you to fulfill
my orders,” it simply means that if you don’t do what he wants he’ll ultimately kill you.
Every person who threatens violence is a murderer.
A person does something evil, and another person or a group of people can find
nothing better to oppose him with than more evil, which they call punishment.
357
It has been said, “If a person strikes your right cheek, turn your left cheek to him.”
For a Christian, this is the law of God. No matter who commits violence and no
matter why it’s committed, violence is always evil, as evil as murder or fornication. It
doesn’t matter why it’s committed or who commits it, whether it’s one person or millions
of people, evil is evil, because before God all people are equal and because God’s
commandments aren’t like man’s commandments. Sometimes you have to fulfill man’s
laws, sometimes you need not fulfill them; some laws should be followed, others need not
be. God’s commandments are different: they’re always mandatory for all. Therefore, all
Christians must consistently fulfill the law of love and eschew violence. It’s better to
suffer from violence than to commit it. In the most extreme case, for a Christian it’s
better to be murdered than to be a murderer. If someone injures me, as a Christian my
duty is to reason thusly: “I’ve also harmed people, and so it’s good that God is sending
me a trial for my admonition and purification of sin. If I innocently suffer harm from
others, that’s even better, because then what’s happened to me is the same as what
happened to all holy people, and if I react as they did I can start to resemble them.” You
can’t save your soul through evil; you can’t approach good along the road of evil, just as
you can’t make it home by going in the opposite direction. Satan won’t expel Satan, and
evil won’t conquer evil but only superimpose evil on top of evil and strengthen it. Evil is
only conquered by righteousness and kindness. Kindness, only kindness, patience and
suffering can and must extinguish evil. Based on a Passage by Buka
358
Punishing a person for his evil deeds is like stoking a fire. Every person who’s
committed an evil act is already punished by the deprivation of his serenity and is
tortured by his conscience. If his conscience doesn’t torture him, any punishment that
can be inflicted upon him will fail to correct him and simply embitter him.
Punishment is always cruel and torturous. If it weren’t cruel and torturous it
wouldn’t be used. For people of our day, imprisonment is just as torturously cruel as
flogging was one hundred years ago.
359
April 16
The Superstition of Violence
You can organize the lives of others only by using violence, but violence doesn’t
organize people’s lives, it disrupts them. Therefore, one person or a group of people
cannot organize the life of another person or group of people.
If you see that the organization of society is bad and wish to correct it, you should
know that there’s only one way to do it: all people must become better. And in the task of
making people better you have power over only one thing: making yourself better.
What an amazing delusion it is to think that some people can force others to do
what they consider good for them rather than what those people consider good for
themselves. Yet all of society’s structures—familial, social, governmental, and even
religious—are founded upon this amazing delusion. Some people force others to
pretend that they’re willingly doing what they’re ordered to do, threatening to commit
violence against them if they stop this pretence, totally confident that they’re doing
something useful and even worthy of praise from everyone, even those against whom
they commit violence.
360
When the superstition that people’s happiness relies upon state violence is
destroyed, the afflictions caused by state violence from which they now suffer will
disappear as well.
People are conscious of the fact that there’s something wrong with their lives and
something that needs improvement. A person can only improve the one thing that’s
within his power: himself. But to improve ourselves first of all we have to acknowledge
that we’re not entirely good, and I don’t want to do that. So we direct all our attention
not toward that which is within our power—ourselves—but on external conditions
that are beyond our power to change and which, if they were changed, would improve
people’s lives as much as it would change the quality of wine to stir it or pour it into
another container. As a result, idleness takes ahold first of all, and then harmful, proud
(we’re correcting others) and evil (we can kill people who interfere with societal
happiness) activity begins.
Political activity not only fails to contribute to people’s liberation from governmental
violence, on the contrary it makes people less and less capable of performing the only
activity that can free them.
361
There’s never been a single serious step toward the perfection of human society that
didn’t have faith as the primary motivation for this perfection. Therefore any doctrine
that’s not founded upon faith will always be powerless to improve society. It might be
able to create splendid forms, but these forms will always be inferior to the spark that
Prometheus stole from Heaven. Giuseppe Mazzini
Redress for the evil in life can only begin with the exposure of the religious lie and
the free establishment of religious truth in each person.
It would be instructive to conduct a poll of all the so-‐called educated people of our
world today about how life should be organized. Nothing could more clearly
demonstrate the stupidity of the idea that it’s possible for some people to arrange the
lives of others than the disagreements that would be expressed in their answers.
362
April 17
The Superstition of Government
The superstition of government is dangerous because it passes off a lie for the truth,
but most of all because it teaches good people to believe that there are times when they
must perform acts that contradict their consciences and the law of God: rob people,
execute them, and wage war.
I can understand why kings, ministers and the wealthy convince themselves and
others that people can’t live without government: all their benefits would disappear
without government. But why do the poor stand behind the government, when it gives
them nothing but merely torments them? Because the superstition of government has
been instilled within them.
Entrepreneurs (capitalists) rob the people, acting as mediators between the workers
and the providers of the tools and means of labor. In the same way, merchants rob the
people, acting as mediators between producers and consumers.
Likewise, governmental thievery is founded upon the pretense of mediation between
offenders and their victims.
363
The main difference between representational and despotic governments isn’t that
under a representational government there’s greater justice, but only that under such a
government people are deprived of the right to complain that the government is evil.
People in our time have become so accustomed to the idea that of all possible actions
there are some that are forbidden and, moreover, some that they’re obliged to do,
regardless of how difficult they are, and that if they do what they’re forbidden to or
don’t do what they’re ordered to someone will punish them or that things will turn out
bad for them—people have become so accustomed to this idea that they don’t even ask
who these people are who forbid and command and who the people are who will punish
them for failing to follow orders, and they submissively fulfill all they’re ordered to.
They seem to think that it’s not other people who are demanding all this from them
but rather some special entity, which they call authority, government, or the state. But
all they need to do is ask themselves: “Who is this authority, this government, this
state?” and they’ll realize that they’re simply ordinary people, and that the enforcers of
all their orders are none other than the same class of people who are subjected to the
same violence.
364
Imagine a flock of doves in a field of rye. Imagine that instead of eating what they
want and gathering just what they need, ninety nine of them gather all they can find
into a huge pile and, leaving behind nothing but the chaff, protect this pile for the
weakest and scrawniest of the flock. Imagine how, while sitting in a circle, they watch
these few doves finish eating, discard and waste what remains, and then attack and tear
to pieces a dove that’s bolder and hungrier than the rest only because it touched one
kernel in the pile.
If you can see all this, you’ve merely seen what has been established and is constantly
taking place among people who live under governments. William Paley
If people would only exert 1/1000th the amount of effort they put into creating all
sorts of government institutions—police, prisons, children’s shelters, hospices for the
elderly, children’s clinics, insane asylums, hospitals, insurance companies, institutions
for child criminals and all the educational institutions constructed with resources
acquired through violence and whose goal is to conceal evil and do nothing but increase
it—on the task of resolving all the evil that these institutions conceal, then the evil that
these institutions aim to correct would quickly disappear.
365
If the many people of the lower classes oppress and torture themselves and in so
doing commit acts opposed to their consciences, the reason can only be a continually
reinforced deception. There are far more working class and poor people than there are
idle and rich, and so violence against the workers can’t be committed by the people of
the ruling class. In order for violence to be committed against the working class, the
workers must do it themselves. In order to compel the workers to commit violence
against themselves you can’t promise them they’ll profit from violence as the ruling
classes do, because they’ll be ordered to steal from themselves what they already possess,
and so the workers have to be continually and forcefully deceived—which is precisely
what a government does.
366
It seems to worldly people that all the activities of Christians, who’ve liberated
themselves from governmental authority and denounced it, are vacuous and useless;
that the Christians who denounced authority have died and the world has continued on
its own path independently of the actions of Christians; that the efforts of Christians
were one thing and the efforts of the world, which improves its form of life, are another,
and that there can be no relationship between the two. This is false, however. Despite all
the efforts of the authorities to conceal them and the amazing failure of the press to
understand their meaning and report on them, I know of a hundred instances not only
in Russia, but also in Europe, where the same conditions of life must evoke the same
reaction. And all instances of refusals to take oaths, to serve in the military, to
participate in courts of law, to pay taxes, and in general refusals to participate in the
government’s violence, regardless of how few they are in comparison with the number of
people who fulfill the government’s demands, not only do not disappear without a trace,
but are fraught with enormous consequences, and the governments sense this and
tremble before them.
367
It’s impossible to imagine a person who’s a true Christian being a member of a
society that possesses an army, navy and military institutions.
Could he really agree that the person he recognizes as the head of the government
could command the army and navy and lead his brothers to kill their brothers of other
lands?
No Christian could recognize such a grandee and participate in his election, nor
could he take an oath before God to agree to commit violence and murder.
How disgusting and illogical it is to defend worldly affairs; and it’s so stupid that
with the first examination it seems to be beyond common sense!
Congress has the power to declare war.
My representatives have the power to commit this atrocity in my name and as it
wishes. They have the power to turn the entire nation into godless murderers and
bandits, they have the power to declare just and lawful all these horrors, they have the
right to permit the perpetration of any crime, and all this is founded upon my
authorization.
Under such conditions a Christian can never undertake any responsibilities. He will
never wish to be a voter or an elected official, and he’ll never join any church or
government as long as they support such beliefs, as long as they continue to crucify
Christ. Adin Ballou
368
April 18
The Superstition of the Church
Just because a book claims that it comes from God, it doesn’t mean it’s really from
God. However, we know quite well that our reason comes from God. Therefore, we
shouldn’t evaluate our reason by using books; we should evaluate books by using our
reason. Based on a Passage by Georg Lichtenberg
When Christ was asked what the law consisted of, one time he said, “love God and
your neighbor.” Another time he said, “The way you would like people to act toward you,
act toward them. This is the entire law.” Buddha and Confucius said the same thing. But
ask the legalists today what the law is, and they can’t give a simple answer, but rather
say that you have to study it for a long time.
Church religion uses miracles as evidence of its truth, and it argues that miracles
are true because it recognizes them.
369
“When raising children, you must remember that we’re not raising them for life in
the present condition of the human race, but for a future condition, a life in different,
better circumstances. It’s particularly important to remember this. Usually, parents
raise their children only so they’ll be fit for the world today. They must raise their
children for a better structure of the world in the future, and in this way they’ll improve
this future world structure.”
Thus wrote Kant. This error in raising children is particularly noticeable when we
teach children as God’s law things that could only seem true to people who lived a
thousand years ago.
To pray means to call up within yourself the highest divine reason that lives within
every person. You can only do this in solitude. Therefore all public prayers are merely
semblances of prayer.
All formal religious rituals are hostile to true religion. Rituals can’t create a religious
state of mind. A ritual only creates the semblance of one, causing a person to think that
he controls something he doesn’t.
370
As strange as it might sound, churches, as churches, have always been and can only
be institutions not just alien, but completely hostile to Christ’s teachings. Not in vain
have all or nearly all so-‐called Christian sects declared and continue to call the church
the whore described in the Apocalypse. It’s no accident that the history of the church is a
history of the greatest cruelties and horrors.
Churches, as churches, are not various institutions founded on a Christian source
that have wandered from the straight path, as many think. Churches, as churches, as
congregations that assert their infallibility, are anti-‐Christian institutions. Not only do
churches, as churches, and Christianity have nothing in common but the name,
churches have a source that is totally opposed and hostile to Christianity. One is pride,
violence, self-‐affirmation, immobility and death; the other is humility, repentance,
submission, motion and life.
You cannot serve these two masters at the same time; you must reject one or the
other.
From the moment when a person rejects his moral independence, from the moment
when he begins to prioritize his responsibilities according to the opinions of a highly
reputed institution or party, from the moment he casts off his personal responsibility
because he’s only one among millions: from that moment he’s deprived of his moral
strength and expects from people what he should expect from God alone; he erects base
human prescriptions in place of divine power. William Channing
371
There are many ways to deny Christ. First, you can shout vulgar curses and mock his
greatness, but this isn’t dangerous: religion is too valuable to people for someone’s
mockery to take if from them. However, there’s another method: you can call Christ the
Lord and not follow his teaching, silence and conceal his clear ideas with your words,
sanctifying all sorts of nonsense, errors and human sins with his name. This second
method is particularly dangerous. Theodore Parker
God instills faith in the human heart with the help of conscience and reason. It’s
impossible to instill faith with violence and threats. Violence and threats don’t instill
faith, they instill terror.
There’s no point in condemning and rebuking unbelievers and those who are lost in
error; they’re unhappy enough in their delusions without it. It would make sense to
rebuke people if it might help them, but condemnations only push them further away
and cause them harm. Blaise Pascal
You frequently hear of a good man who argues passionately, defending an obvious
lie. This is because he needs this lie either for his present or future affairs or to justify his
past actions. This is always a result false faith.
372
April 19
The Superstition of Science
When people study for themselves, what they learn is always useful; if they study to
achieve praise, it has less value; if they study for the sake of money, what they learn is
always harmful.
It’s better to know a little thoroughly than to know many things superficially.
It often happens that people who’ve studied the sciences, in other words who’ve
memorized other people’s thoughts, are proud of themselves and lord it over
blacksmiths, carpenters, and cobblers. However, it would be more proper for the
blacksmith, cobbler and carpenter to lord it over the scholar. A master craftsman can
make things that are useful to others, but a scholar can only repeat other people’s
thoughts that they’ve memorized and that are often utterly useless.
373
The most passionate defenders of every science, without ever casting so much as a
sidelong glance upon it, are usually people who not only have spent little time studying
science but don’t even know what the essence of any science is.
Based on a Passage by Georg Lichtenberg
The merit of the world’s greatest thinkers lies in the fact that they expressed what
they themselves thought independently of the books and stories that surrounded them
rather than repeating what people who lived before them or who lived alongside them
thought.
In the same way, each of us must be vigilant and catch those brilliant thoughts that,
much like sparks, flare up and catch fire in our consciousness from time to time. For
each one of us, this kind of internal enlightenment holds far more meaning than
contemplation and study of an entire constellation of poets and sages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
374
An uninterrupted stream of others’ thoughts will stop and silence your own, and
over an extended period of time they’ll even atrophy your power of thought unless your
intellect has a level of elasticity great enough to counter this unnatural stream. This is
how constant reading and study unhinges the mind. In the same fashion, the system of
our own thoughts and cognition loses its integrated unity if we frequently disrupt it
arbitrarily to make room for a completely alien train of thought. In my opinion, driving
out your own thoughts in order to make room for those from a book is like selling your
land so that you can look at someone else’s, as Shakespeare rebuked travellers of his day.
It’s harmful just to read about a subject before you’ve considered it yourself, for
along with new material a foreign point of view and a foreign relationship to the
material creeps into your head. It becomes even more likely because from indolence and
apathy a person naturally tries to avoid exerting effort to think, accepts prepared
thoughts and allows them in. Ultimately this habit becomes engrained and thoughts go
along a habitual path like a brook heading for a ditch. Finding your own thoughts then
becomes twice as difficult. This is why you meet so little independence of thought among
scholars. Arthur Schopenhauer
375
You often hear people say, “science says it’s so” when they’re supporting their
opinion. However, in and of itself science has no proof of its veracity other than people’s
conviction that what it says is true. Therefore, you can’t believe in science any more than
the churches if it asserts its veracity by simply saying that it’s science.
Wisdom doesn’t mean knowing a lot. We can never know everything. Wisdom
doesn’t even mean knowing as much as possible, but knowing which sciences are most
needed and which are least needed. Out of all the sciences, the most important is the
science of how to live well: the way to gain the most happiness possible, happiness that
doesn’t interfere with the happiness of others but rather promotes it. Often, very often
people of our time study and go to great lengths to find teachers of the most useless
sciences, but don’t study the one science that all great religious teachers of the world
have taught clearly and succinctly.
You have to study a lot to understand that you know very little.
Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
True science doesn’t perform its function when it teaches us why spots appear on the
sun and other similar bits of information that are of no use to us, but only when it
teaches us the laws of our own lives and why we must not violate them.
Based on a Passage by John Ruskin
376
April 20
Effort
A man dropped a valuable pearl into the sea, and in order to get it back he started
spooning out water with a ladle. The spirit of the sea came forth and asked him: “Are
you going to stop anytime soon?” The man said: “When I scoop out the sea and get my
pearl back.” The spirit brought forth the pearl and gave it to him.
This is how a person should struggle with the evil that keeps happiness from him.
A person’s happiness is in love, but he has neither love nor happiness because sin,
temptation and superstition block the path to love. What can a person do? Only one
thing: use all his strength to struggle with all that interferes with love and drive it away.
A person shouldn’t get tired from the struggle with all that conceals love. But it often
happens that a person can’t overcome sins, temptations and superstitions and falls from
one sin, temptation and superstition into others, loses heart, despairs, and stops
exerting effort. And people often stop precisely when they only need to apply themselves
a little more to achieve liberation. Never let up your efforts. Struggling for the good is a
person’s entire life, and the reward is in the struggle itself.
377
When a person says of himself, “I’m hungry, I’m exhausted”; and when he says, “I
understand” or “I’m guilty,” these two “I”s are different. The physical self wants to eat;
the spiritual self understands and considers himself guilty. It sometimes happens that
the spiritual and physical are in harmony, but it also happens that the physical self
wants one thing and the spiritual self wants something else. The physical self wants to
eat, while the spiritual self wants to give its food to the hungry.
At the beginning of life the physical self is stronger than the spiritual, but the longer
a person lives the more the spiritual takes control of the physical. The physical self
considers all sorts of things its own: homes, fields, and livestock. It says: “This is mine.”
In the same way, it calls the body “mine.” The spiritual self thinks nothing in this world
belongs to it and never says about anything: “This is mine”; it doesn’t even think it
possesses the body in which it lives. The spiritual self only considers its soul to be its
possession. So throughout life this struggle between the spiritual and the physical selves
goes on, and the longer a person lives the weaker the physical self becomes, and it
gradually stops calling things “mine” as it used to. At the end of life it even stops calling
the body “mine.”
All of a person’s life consists in this freeing the spiritual self from the physical.
And the sooner a person understands that his physical self is temporary and
transitional and that true life is in his efforts to free his spiritual self from veils of the
body that conceals it from him, the happier he is.
378
Life consists of effort in liberation from sins, temptations and superstitions. The
greater the effort, the greater your blessings. Therefore, a person’s happiness lies in
effort.
No matter how insignificant your role is in the overall transformation of the world
for the better, it is essential, because movement toward the good from which you benefit
is composed of such insignificant, efforts that go unnoticed by the masses. Therefore,
don’t go astray, but pull the reigns even though no one sees and no one drives you on.
People say you can’t count on yourself and your own efforts. This is lie. A person who
imagines himself to be a catenation of mechanical forces governed by matter can say
that a person shouldn’t rely on himself, but for anyone with a religious conception of life
a person is a living force, a Divine spark placed in a body and living there. God sent this
little piece of Himself into my body, hoping that it would do His work. How can I not
count on it? God puts His faith in me, so how can I not have faith in what He has faith
in? The life of man is His activity. Man can either save or destroy his soul. The entire
doctrine of Christ is simply the lesson of what people must do: don’t say “Lord, Lord”
but fulfill your duty, be perfect like your Father, be merciful and charitable, be meek
and selfless. Who’s going to do all this if not you yourself? And in order to act, you have
to put faith in your actions.
379
You must never stop on the path to self-‐perfection. As soon as you feel more interest
in the external world than your soul, you’ve stopped. The world is moving past you, and
you’re standing still.
The sun continually pours its light onto the entire world, yet its light is never
exhausted. In the same manner, your reason must be a light, pouring out in all
directions. It flows everywhere inexhaustibly, and when it meets an obstacle it must
demonstrate neither irritability nor anger, but must peacefully illuminate all who thirst
for it without subsiding or tiring, enveloping everything that turns to the light and
leaving in darkness only that which looks away. Marcus Aurelius
Pay attention to all that you do, and don’t consider anything unworthy of attention.
Confucius
380
April 21
Self-‐Renunciation
Just as a candle only burns when the wax from which it is made is expended, so life
is only real when it is expended for others.
“Because the Father loves me, I give up my life in order to receive it again.
“No one can take it from me, but I give it up myself. I have the power to give it, and I
have the power to take it once again. I received this revelation from my Father.” (John
10:17-‐18)
These words mean that a person must give up his physical life for the sake of his
spiritual life.
He who in his dying moment does not see himself knows the truth of life. Buddhist
Wisdom
381
When dealing with others, you have to learn how to say to yourself, “I will think only
of him, and not of me.”
Even if you were to wish for it, you couldn’t separate your life from humanity. You
live in it, by it, and for it. Your soul can’t free itself from the demand of selflessness that
it has been given, because we were all created to cooperate with each other like legs,
arms, and eyes, and cooperation is impossible without selflessness.
Based on a Passage by Marcus Aurelius
The greatest happiness is given to the one who seeks righteousness alone. To be
selfless means to be strong, and the person who can’t be tempted has the world at his
feet.
382
How profound are Lao-‐Tsu’s words that only in emptiness are perfection, happiness,
meaning and usefulness found: a hub of a wheel, a vessel, or a doorway. A person’s
greatest strength, value and happiness lie in in the acknowledgement that life’s
foundation lies on something that has no appearance, that appears to be nothing, a
void.
Nothing demonstrates that our true life lies in selflessness more than the demand
many feel to sacrifice and suffer. This aspiration only occurs on random occasions, but
nonetheless it’s natural. The fact that it’s often foolish only further proves that it’s
natural.
When love for yourself transcends a certain limit, it becomes a spiritual malady.
Taken to the highest level, it manifests itself as the spiritual malady called delusion of
grandeur.
383
April 22
Humility
Try not to think well of yourself. If you can’t think badly of yourself, know that it’s
already bad that you can’t think badly of yourself.
If a person seeks humility he also wants that which makes him humble. And
disgrace makes one humble. Therefore a person who seeks humility not only doesn’t fear
disgrace but accepts it as a trial and incentive toward humility.
In order to be strong you must be like water. When there are no obstructions it flows.
When there’s a dam it stops. When the dam breaks it flows again. When it’s placed in a
square container it becomes square, and when it’s placed in a round container, it’s
round. Because it’s so compliant, it’s more necessary and stronger than anything.
Lao Tsu
If you want to know the full joy of a good deed, do it secretly and then forget about it.
Only then will your good deed be within you and not outside you.
384
Dissatisfaction with yourself is an essential condition of rational life. Only this
dissatisfaction urges you to work on yourself.
Arrogance and defiance torment people. Therefore, the opposite qualities—
submission and humility—make life’s yoke a blessing. There’s nothing more beneficial
for the soul than humiliation when it’s accepted with joy. Like a warm rain falling after
the glaring, parching sun of self-‐satisfaction, humility refreshes the soul.
Every time you compare yourself with others to justify yourself you submit to a
temptation that impedes both a good life and its main purpose: striving for perfection.
385
Compare yourself only with the highest perfection you can imagine, not with people
you consider beneath you.
A person can’t look so deeply into his heart as to be completely certain of the purity
of his moral intentions and of the irreproachability of his thought processes even in
relation to a single act of his, even if he harbors no doubt as to the lawfulness of his
action. Often a person considers a weakness that keeps him from committing a crime to
be a virtue, which creates the notion of strength. Many, many people live long,
irreproachable lives, and yet these are people who are simply fortunate enough to have
evaded many temptations. The relative moral content of their thoughts as they
performed each act remains hidden from them. Immanuel Kant
We’re more dissatisfied with others when we’re dissatisfied with ourselves.
Consciousness of our evil acts irritates us, and in its craftiness our heart turns toward
something outside us in order to silence what it feels. Henri Frédéric Amiel
386
April 23
Honesty
A truthful word is more powerful than popes, bishops, kings, and all the rich men
on earth.
You can kill a person who speaks the truth, but once spoken the truth remains.
Prayer is remembrance of the eternal truth, the examination of one’s life before this
divine truth. It’s good to make this examination when you’re alone with God, but it’s
even better to make it around people, in the bustle of daily life.
No matter how seductive a lie and its temptations might be, the time comes when it
torments a person so much that he turns to the truth, not in order find the truth but
simply to escape the confusion that’s inextricably tied to falsehood, and in the truth he
finds salvation.
Coleridge once said: “He who loves Christianity more than the truth will very soon
love his own denomination or sect more than Christianity, and in the end he’ll love
himself more than anything on earth.” This is true, because we only love Christianity
because we love truth, and there’s nothing that can verify or confirm the truth; on the
contrary, truth verifies and confirms everything else.
387
In order for the truth to be heard, it must be spoken with love. No matter how wise
and true a spoken word is it will not be conveyed to someone if it’s spoken in anger. So
keep in mind that if someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it’s either because
what you consider truth is in fact not the truth, or because you didn’t say it with love.
Based on a Passage by Henry David Thoreau
Honesty is not a virtue, but without it not only can there be no virtue, but every
virtue becomes a vice.
In order for people to be able to live together in harmony they must be able to
communicate the truth to one another, to speak that which they truly know, that which
they’ve actually experienced or felt, and not things they’ve made up or just imagine.
Living in a large community is more beneficial and joyful than living alone, and so the
ability and habit of speaking the truth is very important for people’s happiness.
Everyone must try to accustom themselves to speaking only the truth everywhere and
always. If you’re not sure—stay silent. Only speak when you know something with
certainty. It doesn’t cost anything to be honest, but without honesty people can’t have
good lives.
388
Our lives are a continual flight from ourselves, just as if pangs of our conscience
pursue and terrorize us. As soon as a person stands on his own two feet he starts to
shout so that he won’t hear his inner voice. He’s in despair, so he hurries to distract
himself. There’s nothing for him to do, so he invents occupations for himself. From
hatred of solitude he befriends everyone, reads everything, involves himself in others’
affairs, and finally he unexpectedly gets married. He whose life is a failure intoxicates
himself on all sorts of things: wine, numismatics, cards, horse racing, women, and
benefaction. He takes a shot at mysticism, imposes monstrous labors upon himself, and
nevertheless all these things seem easier to handle than the threatening truth that lies
dormant within him. We go through life half-‐asleep in this manufactured waste of time,
in these counterfeit misfortunes that complicate our every step like fictitious whores,
fearing to examine it all so that we won’t see what nonsense it is, and we die in a daze of
foolishness and triviality without ever having found ourselves. Alexander Herzen
389
Reason is the same in all people. Association with others is founded on reason.
Therefore, the demands of reason are the same for all.
There is nothing more valuable and necessary in man than the light of reason. So
what an amazing thing that in addition to all those passions that affect the soul and
weaken the light of wisdom, people use narcotics—substances that have a direct effect
upon the brain, the organ or reason—to deliberately deaden this light.
390
April 24
Restraint in Deed
There’s a great deal of evil in the world not so much because people don’t do good,
but because they do what is unnecessary or do things when they don’t need to be done.
In order to be able to restrain yourself, you have to learn how. A wise old man taught
it like this:
“Work on a hot day, and when you feel thirsty hold cold water in your mouth, don’t
swallow a single drop, spit it out, and most importantly don’t tell a soul about it.”
More valuable than anything in the world is to restrain yourself from a bad deed
when passion seizes you.
If you wish to serve the common good and perform acts of love, the power of
restraint is most important: to restrain yourself not so much from evil acts as from
unnecessary ones, to restrain yourself from uttering one word that might offend
someone. It’s all about tiny, imperceptible acts and words, and from these mustard
seeds grow trees of love, whose boughs cover the entire world.
391
It’s good to praise activity and condemn indolence among people who are busy with
the satisfaction of the demands of their bodies and the bodies of others.
However, among people who are occupied with trifling affairs such as theaters,
concerts, exhibitions, newspapers, current events, as well as all sorts of foul affairs like
luxurious living, fine clothes, courts, and armies, activity is an evil and inaction is a
virtue.
How true is the saying, “Restrain yourself when in doubt.” I consider this a wise
Christian rule. It’s the same as Lao Tsu’s highest virtue: inaction. I understand it to
mean that all our sins occur because we act, we act for ourselves, when we could refrain
from acting. Only that which we can’t help but do, that alone is God’s affair,
accomplished through us as God’s instruments. If a person would refrain from all his
personal affairs there would nevertheless be affairs that he couldn’t refrain from
attending to, and these would be God’s affairs. If a person tends to his own affairs, they
and the vanity they engender will keep him from seeing God’s affairs and he’ll never
recognize them.
Therefore, act only when you can’t refrain from acting, when you can’t do anything
else but act.
392
The most insignificant trifles contribute to the formation of a person’s character.
Don’t say that trifles are insignificant, but remember that restraint from such trifles is
an important and great affair, because trifles comprise something great: all human life.
Busy people are usually very irritable, and no matter how strange it seems, they often
deliberately take on more activities in order to give themselves a reason to be irritable.
That which is lawful is clear, and that which is unlawful is also clear, but there’s an
area of doubt between the two. When you find yourself in this area of doubt, restrain
yourself and don’t do anything. Muhammad
393
April 25
Restraint in Word
In the lives of the saints there’s a story about an old man who dreamed he saw a
deceased man who had many weaknesses in his life and who was now a monk in the
best place in Heaven. When the man asked him why he was considered worthy of such
great blessings when he was worthless in his many weaknesses, the monk replied that
throughout his life he had never judged anyone.
Remember that a word is a deed that differs from others in that it’s harder to tell
what it will produce. So be careful when accepting and speaking them.
What a bad habit it is to begin a conversation with a joke. Within every person is
God, and you can’t joke with God. Whenever you interact with someone, always speak in
all earnestness.
Don’t speak badly of anyone, and if someone speaks badly of you and brings to light
vices that he knows you possess, don’t expose vices you know he possesses. Muhammad
394
Those who speak profusely, skillfully and with pleasant manners rarely possess the
virtue of love of humanity. Chinese Wisdom
Never judge your neighbor unless you’re in his place. Talmud
Let the speaker be a madman; be a wise listener!
A brief answer expels malice; offensive words awaken anger.
Try to stop judging people and you’ll experience a feeling similar to that which an
alcoholic experiences when he quits drinking, or a smoker who gives up tobacco: a
uniquely pleasant sensation of purity and only in the beginning an occasional urge to
return to the bad habit you’ve forgone.
395
April 26
Restraint in Thought
Most evil isn’t committed because people are evil, but because they believe in other
people’s false ideas and accept them as faith. Be careful when accepting other peoples’
ideas.
If we understood more clearly and remembered more often that our main strength
lies in thought, much evil would be destroyed in the world and much good would be
created.
Thought is a powerful force. This force is released from a person through the word
and creates a curse or a blessing, depending on whether it’s good or evil. Lucy Mallory
Just as we only hear the sound of a cannon after the shell has been fired from the
barrel, so we see the evil of earthly deeds long after the thoughts appear that led to those
deeds. All human deeds—good or bad—arise from thoughts.
A feeling arises independently of a person’s will, but the mind can approve or
disapprove of a feeling and, depending on which it chooses to do, either encourage or
restrain it. Therefore all our actions lie in our thoughts.
396
Truth that we’ve learned through memorization merely clings to us like an artificial
limb, a false tooth, a wax nose and in the most extreme case like an artificial nose made
from someone else’s skin. Truth obtained by your own thought processes is like a
natural limb; it alone truly belongs to you. Arthur Schopenhauer
People usually think that improving human life lies in increasing knowledge and the
comforts of life that result from it. This is absolutely not the case. The improvement of
life lies only in clarifying more and more the answers to life’s central questions. Man can
always find the truth. It can’t be otherwise, because truth lies in the human soul. Like
gold, truth is acquired not by its own growth but by cleansing from it all that is not gold.
The task is simply to cleanse the truth that’s hidden in the human soul of all that keeps
it in darkness. The improvement of human life lies not in the increase of truth, but in its
liberation from that which conceals it. This freedom is achieved through exerting your
mind.
397
As our thoughts are, so is our life; life is born in our heart and takes shape in our
mind. If a person speaks or acts with evil intentions, suffering will forever be attached to
him as a wheel is attached the leg of an ox that’s harnessed to a cart.
As our thoughts are, so is our life; it is born in our heart and forms in our mind. If a
person speaks or acts with good thoughts, joy will follow him like a shadow and will
never abandon him. Buddhist Wisdom
Thoughts are like guests. We’re not to blame for the thoughts that come to us, be
they good or bad, but we have the power to expel the bad ones and keep the good ones.
A seed in the ground is invisible, but it’s only from a seed that a giant tree can grow.
Thoughts are just as invisible, but only from thought emerge the greatest events in
human life.
398
April 27
There is No Evil
If you simply tell yourself that everything that happens is the will of God and believe
that the will of God is always good, you’ll never be afraid and your life will always be
blessed.
A person can escape the misfortunes that God sends him, but there’s no salvation
from the misfortunes he himself creates through living badly.
Every person has his cross, his yoke, not in the sense of a burden, but in the sense of
true life. If we see our cross not as a burden but as true life it becomes easier to carry. It’s
easier for us to carry when we’re meek, submissive and humble in our hearts. It’s even
easier when we renounce ourselves. It’s easier still when we carry our cross at all times, as
Christ taught. It becomes still easier when we forget ourselves in our spiritual work the
way we forget ourselves in worldly work. The cross that has been sent to us is what we
need to work on. Our entire life consists of this work. If your cross is illness, carry it with
submission. If it’s people’s insults, be able to repay evil with good. If it’s humiliation, be
humble. If it’s death, then accept it with gratitude.
399
Everything great in human affairs is accomplished only through suffering. Jesus
knew that this awaited him and foresaw everything: the hatred of those whose authority
he came to destroy, their secret conspiracies, their violence, and the ungrateful betrayal
of the people whose illness he was curing, whom in the desert of the old world he
nourished with the bread of his words. He foresaw the cross, death, and his own people’s
desertion, which was more painful than death itself. Yet although these thoughts never
left him, they didn’t stop him for a minute. If his physical nature spurned “his cup,” his
more determined will accepted it without hesitation. And in this he gave them—all
those who continue his mission, who work for the salvation of humanity by liberating it
from the burden of delusion and evil—he gave them an example that must be
remembered for all time. If people wish to reach the goal to which Christ leads they have
to go along the same path he did. Only at this price can people serve others. You want
them all to be true brothers, you summon them to the laws of their common nature, you
struggle against all oppression, all lawlessness, and all hypocrisy; you call for a kingdom
of justice, duty, truth and love on earth—how can the people whose power is founded
on the very opposite not rise up against you?! Do you really think they’ll let you destroy
their temple and build a new one—not a worldly temple, but an eternal temple whose
foundation is truth—without a fight? Abandon this hope, if you were ever naïve
enough to have it. You will drink from the cup to the final drop. They’ll treat you like a
thief; they’ll find false witnesses against you, and as far as what you bring them, they’ll
shout: he’s blaspheming! The judges will say: he should be put to death. When this
400
happens, take joy: it’s the last sign, the sign that you’re doing real and necessary work.
Hughes Felicité Lamennais
In John 6:38-‐39 it is said: “For I came down from heaven not to exercise my own will
but the will of my Father who sent me. The will of my Father who sent me is for me not
to destroy anything that he gave me.” This means that you must preserve and cultivate
within yourself and raise to the highest possible level of divinity that spark of reason
that has been given to you, entrusted to you like a child to a nanny. What do you need to
fulfill it? Not the satisfaction of lust, nor human glory, but on the contrary restraint,
humility, labor, struggle, deprivation, suffering, humiliation, and persecution: the very
things the Gospels speak of over and over. And this very thing we need is sent to us in
the most varied of forms, in both small and large dimensions. If we could only accept it
as we should, as something we need, and therefore as labor that brings us joy, and not
as something annoying that disrupts the animal existence we call life.
401
Despondency and a bad disposition are not only trying for those around you, they’re
infectious. Therefore a decent person not only commits acts that might upset others only
while in solitude, he also indulges in his despondency and bad moods in solitude as well.
A person complains that he’s weak and can’t work. To complain that I can no longer
do what I used to be able to do is as irrational as complaining that I can’t fly like a bird.
All that’s needed, no matter what condition you find yourself in, is to reject your own
will and give yourself over to the One who sent you here. Perhaps He needs me to do
nothing and be a temptation for others; it’s His will.
A person who doesn’t recognize the beneficence of suffering has not yet begun to live
a rational, real life.
402
April 28
Life Exists Only in the Present
Time doesn’t exist. There is only now, this instant. And in it, in this instant, is our
entire life. Therefore we must believe that all our power is in this one instant.
Every time you wake up ask yourself: what good shall I accomplish today? And say
to yourself: as the sun sets it takes away a part of the life that has been granted to me.
Indian Saying
Love is the manifestation of the Divine Spirit, for which there is no time. Therefore,
love appears only in the present, right now, in every moment of the present.
There’s not a single act in physical life that doesn’t carry the potential for disastrous
results either for the one who performs it or for others.
This ignorance is a necessary condition of life. Complete knowledge would exclude
the possibility of life.
This ignorance decreases only to the degree to which a person’s activity is transferred
from the realm of the flesh to the realm of the spirit—to the degree to which a person
lives not for the attainment of material but rather spiritual goals: the union of his will
with God’s will.
403
When we live a spiritual life, in union with God, even though we can’t know the
consequences of our actions we know with certainty that these consequences will be
beneficial.
“I’ll do that when I grow up.” “I’ll live like that when I finish school.” “I’ll arrange my
life like that when I have children, when my son marries, or when I get rich, or when I
move somewhere else.”
That’s how children, adults, and old people talk, and yet no one knows if he’ll live to
see the evening. We can never know if any of these things will happen or not, nor
whether death will prevent them from happening.
Only one thing can impede death. Death cannot interfere with a person who every
hour of his life fulfills the will of God: who loves others.
Someone plants some grain and gets so worried about whether it will sprout quickly
or not he digs it back up and looks at it to see if it’s begun to sprout, and having dug up
the ground around the seed he’s damaged it and rendered it infertile.
The same thing happens with people when they admire their work and want to see
the fruits of their labors instead of just working.
Never stop working and don’t give yourself a deadline. The fruit will come when it’s
time.
404
No person ever knew, or knows, or will know if what he’s doing will be good for
himself and others.
Someone went to a party to have fun; an argument broke out and resulted in evil. He
rented land and sowed it thinking it would improve his health, but it crippled him. It’s
this way with everything. It’s not for a person to know what will be of benefit to him. A
person can always know only one thing: which acts are good and which are bad.
Therefore you must first of all do what you know for a fact is good. In addition, you
have to act this way because the consequences of a good act always turn out to be the
very best both for others and for yourself, although we’re not in a position to say in
advance what will be best and of what the best will comprise.
Guess what the future holds if you wish, but never let love abandon you in the
present.
405
April 29
There is No Death
After Death
Only someone who fails to truly think about life doesn’t believe in immortality. If a
person is only a physical being, then death is the end of something insignificant. If a
person is a spiritual being and the soul only lives in the body temporarily, then death is
simply a transformation.
When a wise man was talking about the immortality of the soul someone asked him,
“Well, how can that be if the world will eventually come to an end?” He answered, “I
don’t need the world for my soul to be immortal.”
Our body confines the Divine spiritual source that we call the soul. And just as a
vessel gives form to the liquid or gas contained within it, this confinement gives form to
our spiritual source. When a vessel breaks, that which was contained within it loses the
form it had as it spills out. Does it unite with other substances? Does it take on a new
form? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we surely know that it’s lost
the form it had when it was confined, because what confined it has broken. This we
know, but there’s no way to know anything about what will happen to what was
confined. We only know that after death the soul becomes something different—
something we’re incapable of seeing and understanding.
406
Consciousness of immortality is a natural characteristic of the human soul. Only the
evil we commit and the degree to which we commit it deprives us of this consciousness.
A son lives in his father’s house for his entire life, while a hired laborer only lives
there for a short time. Therefore, the son must conduct himself differently than the
laborer: he must concern himself with his father’s home and not think like the laborer,
whose only concern is receiving his salary. If a person believes that his life doesn’t end
with death, then he’ll live like a son in his father’s house. If life is merely the life of this
world, then he’ll live like a laborer, trying to gather as much in this life as he can.
First and foremost, every person must answer the question: does everything end with
physical death or not? If not, life is by definition eternal. Once we understand what is
mortal and what is immortal within us it becomes clear that we should concern
ourselves in this life more with the immortal than the mortal.
Everything in the world grows, blossoms, and then returns to its source. Returning
to one’s source means being at peace in harmony with nature. Peace in harmony with
nature is a sign of eternity; therefore there’s no danger in the destruction of the body.
Lao Tsu
407
If you suddenly remember death, it means that you’re living without it being a part
of your consciousness. Your goal shouldn’t be to remember death from time to time but
to live joyfully with the consciousness of its gradual approach.
A dog or a horse will walk over the most terrifying abyss without hesitation, but a
person can’t. So how can he cross the abyss of death, which is always beneath him, when
he possesses an imagination that keeps him from crossing any abyss in peace? He acts
like an animal in relation to death: he surrenders to his imagination when it interferes
with his affairs and fails to use it when he needs it.
When people know that death is approaching they pray and repent for their sins in
order to be ready to meet God with a clean soul. However, we die a little bit every day,
and we could die once and for all at any moment. Therefore, we can’t wait for the hour
of death but must be ready at every moment.
And being ready for death means living well.
This is why death is always hanging over people: so they’ll prepare for death, and in
preparing for it they’ll live well.
408
April 30
Life is a Blessing
True happiness is always in our hands. It follows a good life like a shadow.
More than one hundred years ago a wise man called Skovoroda lived in Little Russia.
He was both intelligent and well educated, and bishops and secular leaders alike offered
him lucrative and important posts, but he never accepted any of them and lived his
entire life as a wayfarer.
His property consisted only of what he carried on his back in a knapsack: a change
of clothes and books. Everyone who knew him loved him and was overjoyed when he
stopped in to visit. He never judged anyone, he gave people advice only when he was
asked, and he was happy with everyone he met. His favorite saying was:
“Praise be to God that he has made everything necessary easy and only the
unnecessary difficult.”
According to false Christianity life in this world is evil, and happiness is only gained
in a future life.
According to true Christianity the goal of life is happiness, and this happiness is
found here.
409
No matter what your life may be, it’s a blessing greater than anything else. If we say
that life is evil, we can only say this by contrasting it with another, better life. However,
we know of no other life and can’t possibly know of one.
We can understand our lives only as movement toward joy. Life must be this way,
and it truly is if we understand it correctly.
Don’t think that this life is merely a journey to another world and that we can only
be happy there. This is false. It is our lot to be happy here, in this world; and in order to
be happy in this world we simply have to live the way the One Who sent us here wishes
us to live. Never say that in order for life to be good for you everyone has to live properly,
according to God’s will, for that is false. Live your own life according to God’s will, make
your own effort, and life will certainly be good for you. The most common and deadly
error people make is thinking that they can’t find the happiness they wish for in this life.
If someone says he feels unhappy when he’s doing good it either means that he
doesn’t believe in God or that what he considers good isn’t in fact good.
If heaven isn’t within you, you’ll never enter it. Angelus Silesius
410
May
May 1
Faith
He who is unsure whether or not God exists and tortures himself over it hasn’t yet
rejected God and can still save his soul. But a person who’s accepted what he’s been told
about God without searching for God himself is in real trouble.
He who doesn’t believe what he’s been taught isn’t an unbeliever. A true unbeliever is
someone who thinks and says that he believes in something that he really doesn’t.
Every religion is simply the answer to the question: how do I live my life not before
people, but before the power that sent me into the world?
For the majority of humanity religion is custom, or rather custom is religion. As
strange as it may seem, I’m convinced that the first step toward moral perfection is
liberation from the religion in which you were raised. No one can walk the path of
perfection by any other path than this one. Henry David Thoreau
411
Doubt doesn’t destroy faith, it strengthens it.
Jesus didn’t tell the Samaritans, “Leave your beliefs and customs for the Jewish ones;
he didn’t tell the Jews, “Unite with the Samaritans.” He told both the Jews and the
Samaritans, “You’ve all gone astray. God is spirit, and His religion can only be found
within you. It isn’t bound to a place or any external forms.” Temples and temple services
aren’t important, Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem aren’t important. The time will come,
and has come already, not when people bow to the Father on Gerizim or in Jerusalem,
but when true worshipers bow to God in spirit and truth, for this is the kind of
worshiper God seeks. He sought them in the time of Jerusalem and He seeks them now.
When will He find them? When every person, tired of drawing from springs that can
never bring relief, says to Jesus: “Lord, give me water that will quench my thirst so that I
need not search any longer;” when from all corners of the Earth weary people come
together to rest at the well of Jesus. Hughes Felicité Lamennais
Christ came to reveal to humanity that the eternal isn’t the future but only the
unseen, that the eternal isn’t an ocean into which people flow from the river of time, but
something that’s all around them right now and that their lives are real only to the
degree to which they feel its presence. He came to teach them that God isn’t some kind of
random abstraction eternally separated from them in the distant heavens, but that He’s
the Father in Whom they live, move and exist, and that the service He loves doesn’t
consist in solemn church rituals but only in love. Frederic Farra
412
May 2
The Soul
When we think or do something detestable, our conscience bothers us. When we
hear that someone’s done something detestable we say, “He has no conscience.”
What is this conscience?
Conscience is the voice of the spirit that lives within us.
People often think that the only things that exist are those that they can feel with
their hands. Such people are seriously mistaken. The only thing that exists is something
that’s impossible to see, hear, or feel: that which you call your self.
When you’re suffering, don’t look for comfort in temples or books; look for it within
yourself. Only the God who lives within you can help.
Life is neither in the body nor the soul but in the spirit that lives in all. This spirit
alone is conscious of both body and soul, yet nothing is conscious of this spirit.
413
The essence of Christ’s teaching is that a person should recognize who he is: that like
a bird running along the ground instead of using his wings, he should understand that
within him is something that will lift him above this life and its circumstances and give
him indestructible freedom and joy. This something that raises him above physical life is
consciousness of the spirit that lives within him.
I’m conscious of my body, I’m conscious of my soul, but I’m not conscious of what is
conscious of both: the divine, spiritual source that lives within me. All you have to do is
remember that each person has the ability to judge his own spiritual condition and look
at it as something external and you’ll be convinced of this. When a person looks at
himself, he’s conscious of being in an annoyed or a tender mood, but he can’t be
conscious of this consciousness; he can’t look at this consciousness as something
external. I can say that I’m aware (and even that I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m aware
that I’m aware), but this awareness will never have any sort of content whatsoever and
will always be the same consciousness of the highest limit of my spiritual source.
414
Consciousness of a person’s separation from all other things—his body—awakens
within him before anything else. Next is consciousness of that which is separated—his
soul—and then consciousness of what this spiritual source of life is separated from:
consciousness of All.
The best thoughts are usually those that inexplicably come without any effort. That’s
because such thoughts are the manifestation of the Divine within us.
Based on a Passage by John Ruskin
Temporary renunciation of all worldly life and contemplation of your spiritual
essence is as essential for nourishing your soul as food is for your body.
415
May 3
One Soul in All
He who despises his brother despises himself.
It’s not enough to say: “Within every person lives the same kind of spirit that lives
within me.” Within every person lives the very same spirit that lives within you. People
are separated from one another by their bodies, but the same spirit of God lives within
everyone.
It’s considered an unforgivable sin to insult icons, holy books, and temples, but it’s
considered a forgivable sin to insult people. However, all these icons, books and temples
are human creations while within man, even the most corrupt man, lives God.
416
We feel good after every good deed we perform because each good deed we do for
others rather than ourselves confirms that our true self isn’t in our individual
personality but in all that lives.
When we live only for ourselves we feel that we live as a mere particle of our true self
and therefore we’re anxious, troubled and afraid of everything. The knowledge that all
life is our own self frees us from everything that burdens, binds and disturbs us. Living
only for himself, a person feels that he’s among strangers and enemies and that others’
happiness interferes with his. Living for others, a person feels that he’s among friends
and that every person’s happiness is his own.
Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
417
In every person lives a spirit greater than anything we know of on earth. Therefore,
no matter who someone might be in the world—king or convict, bishop or beggar—all
people are equal because in each one is something greater than anything in the world.
To appreciate and respect a person because he’s a king or a bishop more than a person
who’s a beggar or a convict is like appreciating and respecting one gold coin more than
another because one is wrapped in white paper and the other in black.
There are people who teach that whenever you meet someone, no matter who it
is, you should bow before his feet because God is in every person. The teaching of such
people is true. If you don’t actually bow before every person’s feet, then it’s good to
remember that within each person lives something greater than anything else in the
world—the spirit of God—and therefore you should treat all people the same: with
extreme care and reverence.
I’m so convinced that a person does everything out of personal gain (if the term is
understood properly) that I believe that this striving for personal gain is as essential for
the life of the world as is sentience for the preservation of your body. I see this in the fact
that a person frequently can’t attain his goal without making thousands of other people
happy. How wisely the source that created us manages to bind the interests of all people
together. Georg Lichtenberg
418
You must remember that when you meet a person God is within him and that when
you stand before a person you stand before God. This is when true prayer is needed.
And by the doors of the church stand beggars—beings within whom God lives-‐-‐and we
walk past thinking that the true God is in a temple, in images and rituals.
We never understand the Divine spirit that lives in our souls more than when we
love our neighbors: when we unite with them in love.
Compassion for animals is so closely tied to goodness that I dare say that a person
who’s cruel to animals cannot be a good person. Compassion for animals flows from the
same source as good behavior towards people. So, for example, when a sensitive person
recalls that he hit his dog or horse and hurt it, he’s as upset with himself as if he recalled
how he harmed a person. Arthur Schopenhauer
Only he who recognizes the same God in all people recognizes Him within himself.
419
May 4
God
There is no God only for someone who doesn’t look for Him. Search for Him and He
will reveal Himself to you.
God loves solitude. He will enter your heart only when He can be alone there, when
you’ll think about Him alone. Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
People may understand God in different ways, but at the heart of it all they
understand God in the same way. They all understand what God asks of them in the
same way, too.
There are two kinds of people who know God: truly intelligent people and people
with a humble heart, whether they’re intelligent or not. The only people who don’t know
God are the proud and those of middling intelligence. Blaise Pascal
According to the doctrine of Lao Tsu, believing that there’s no God—the Source of
everything—is like believing that if you smell fur the scent comes from the fur and not
from the air and that fur can emit an odor where there’s no air.
420
You can easily feel God within yourself. You can never know God’s nature, nor do
you need to.
Only he who fulfills God’s law understands God, and the closer he comes to fulfilling
God’s law the better he understands Him. Just as you can only understand any item by
getting closer to it, you can only understand God when you approach Him, and the only
way to approach God is through good deeds and love for all. The more you train yourself
to love others the more you’ll recognize God, and the more you recognize God the more
you’ll love others. One helps the other.
If I live a worldly life I can get along without God, but it pays to think about where I
came from when I was born and where I’m going when I die, and I can’t help but see
that where I came from is where I’m going. I can’t help but see that I came into this
world from something I don’t understand and that I’m going back to that same
something I don’t understand.
This something I came from and toward which I’m headed is what I call God.
421
Some people say that God should be understood as a person. This is a great
misunderstanding, for a person is limited. A person feels his individuality only because
he comes in contact with other individuals. If there were only one person, he wouldn’t be
an individual. These two concepts are mutually reliant: (1) the external world, other
beings and (2) the individual. If there were no external world and no other beings, a
person wouldn’t perceive (wouldn’t recognize) himself as an individual, and he wouldn’t
recognize the existence of other beings. Therefore, a person in this world is unthinkable
except as an individual. Yet people say that God is an individual, that he’s a person. You
can say of God, as Moses and Muhammad did, that He is one, but not in the sense that
there are no other gods (there can be no notion of number in relation to God, and so you
can’t really say that He is one), but only in the sense that God is all that really exists.
We know God as a single being—we can’t understand him in any other way—and
at the same time we can’t understand a single being that encompasses everything. For
us as humans, this is the central inscrutable aspect of God. If God isn’t one, then He
disintegrates. He doesn’t exist. If He is one, then we involuntarily imagine Him as a
personality, and He’s no longer a higher being, he’s not everything. And yet in order to
know God and to rely upon Him we have to understand Him as manifesting Himself in
everything and at the same time as a single being.
As long as a person sings, cries and says, “O Lord, Lord!” know that he hasn’t found
the Lord. He who has found him remains silent. Ramakrishna
422
May 5
Life is Union
It’s only because of thoughtlessness that a person imagines that he wants happiness
for himself. This is merely appearance: the desire for happiness is the voice of God, who
lives within man, and God wants happiness for all. Each person thinks that he wants
happiness only for himself, for his own body.
The more a person lives for others, the freer and more joyful is his life. The more he
lives for himself alone, the more his life is constricted and painful.
The purpose of a person’s life is to free his soul from his body more and more and to
unite it with other souls and with Everything.
A person lives well when he consciously fulfills this purpose.
To live not for yourself but for others means to transfer your self from physical life to
spiritual life: to that for which there is no time, death or evil.
423
Only union with the entire world will give a person strength and freedom. Union
with just a certain group of people, on the other hand, weakens and enslaves a person
more than anything, for it separates him from those with whom he’s united: from all
people. Such are unions with families, social classes, and nations. This kind of union
with just a certain group of people is often the worst form of separation.
Consciousness of our separation from other beings is a notion that emerges from
consciousness of our bodies. The more we free ourselves from it and live a spiritual life,
the more we’ll recognize our unity with everyone and the easier and more joyful our lives
will become.
There’s one indubitable sign that distinguishes good people from evil ones. If a
person’s actions increase love and people’s unity, he’s good. If his actions create enmity
and disunity, he’s evil.
424
The age of the union of peoples, which must replace the age of discord, wars,
executions and hatred, must certainly come, for people already know and they know
without doubt that disunity is a ruinous evil for both the soul and society, and that only
union gives happiness to both the individual and humanity. The time is near. It depends
on us doing what is necessary to bring it about and refraining from doing what holds it
back.
The central attribute of life, common to all beings, is striving for happiness.
Happiness isn’t a natural, unchanging state; it must be acquired. Such happiness is
given to us when we recognize greater and greater freedom after the suppression of
freedom, greater and greater satisfaction after dissatisfaction, and greater and greater
union with God after the solitude of separation. Happiness has been given to us; our
task is merely to recognize and utilize it.
One of the necessary conditions for the coming of God’s Kingdom, which will unite
people, is material progress: means of communication. This progress has been achieved
and continues to be achieved, but people get distracted and believe the means is the
goal. This is like people who plow the same land over and over but never plant seeds. In
order for material progress to bear its fruit, progress must be spiritual; it must be the
progress of love.
425
May 6
Love
Try to love all people. Learn to do this and you’ll see how joyful life becomes, how no
sorrows exist, and how nothing frightens you. Live so that it’s all the same to you
whether people praise or condemn you, even whether people love you or not. But
whether you want it or not, all the same good people will love you and evil people won’t
have the power to hate you and do harm to you.
As soon as a person thinks that life was given to him so that he alone can live well,
his life becomes a tortuous struggle with others. But if a person understands that life
was given to him so that he can unite more and more in love with people and with All
and the source of All, then his life becomes an unending joy free of all struggles.
426
“Whoever says he’s in the light but hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever
loves his brother is in the light and suffers no temptation. But whoever hates his brother
is in darkness, walks in darkness, and is unaware of where he’s going, because darkness
has blinded his eyes . . . We must love not with words or our tongues but with deeds and
truth. This is how we learn that we come from truth, and this calms our hearts . . . Love
reaches such perfection within us that we will be confident on the Day of Judgment
because we acted in this world as he did. In love there is no fear, because in fear there is
torment. Those who fear are imperfect in love.” (John 2:9-‐11; 3:18-‐19; 4:17-‐18).
If there is a God whom they teach us to pray to or not, and if there is a future life or
not—I don’t know. I only know that the best thing I can do is increase the love within
me. Therefore, the increase of love increases happiness at the same time.
He who says he loves God but doesn’t love his neighbor deceives others. He who says
he loves his neighbor but doesn’t love God deceives himself.
O Lord! Grant me love for You; grant me love for those You love; allow me to perform
acts that serve Your love; make Your love more valuable to me than my own self, more
valuable than my family and my wealth. Muhammad
427
The application of love’s power to the greatest interests of human societies has
become outdated and forgotten. It’s been applied once or twice in history, and always
with great success. But the time will come when love becomes the common law of human
life and all calamities will melt away in the sun’s all-‐encompassing light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it’s possible to instill and be instilled with respect for imaginary holy items—
sacraments, relics, and books—then how much more necessary it is to instill in
children and unthinking people respect not for imaginary things but for the most
genuine feeling: love for others, which is comprehensible to and joyous for all. And the
time will come, that very time about which Christ spoke, which he yearned for in
expectation; the time will come when people won’t be proud of commanding others and
their labors through violence, when they won’t take joy in instilling fear and envy in
others, but will be proud that they love everyone and take joy that they experience that
feeling which liberates them from all that is evil despite all the grief people inflict upon
them.
Until I see people observing Christ’s most important commandment—love for one’s
enemies—I won’t stop doubting that those who pose as Christians really are.
Gotthold Lessing
428
I know of only one pure and supreme blessing in this world: people’s love—when
people love you. However, you can’t obtain this blessing by searching for it, by seeking
people’s love. The only way to attain it is by fulfilling the law of life, the will of God, by
striving for self-‐perfection. This supreme blessing will be given to you if you truly search
for the Kingdom of God.
The doctrine that has always been called the doctrine of happiness, the doctrine of
truth, has shown people that in place of the delusory doctrine they seek for the sake of
their animal existence, there is true happiness lying within their very selves, a happiness
that they can have right now, here, and not just sometimes and in some places, a
happiness that’s always available to them.
This happiness isn’t something that’s merely derived from debates, it isn’t something
that you have to look for somewhere, and it isn’t happiness promised once upon a time
somewhere, but a kind of happiness that every person knows well and toward which the
soul of every person who hasn’t been corrupted strives: the happiness of love.
Passionate preference for some people over others, which is mistakenly called love, is
only a wild tree onto which true love might be grafted so it can bear its fruit. But just as
a wild tree isn’t an apple tree and produces no fruit, or sour instead of sweet fruit,
preference is not love and either gives people no happiness or creates greater evil.
429
May 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Sinless are animals, plants, and whatever is unconscious of the spirit that is united
with God and with all that lives.
Man is conscious of both the animal and the Divine within himself at the same time
and therefore cannot be sinless. We call children sinless, but this is incorrect. A child
isn’t sinless. There are fewer sins in a child than in an adult, but there are already the
sins of the body. In the same way, a man who lives the holiest of lives is not sinless. There
are fewer sins in him, but there are sins. Without sins there is no life.
Some people think life is in gluttony, others in the joys of sex, still others in power,
and others in worldly glory. They waste their energy on all these pastimes, while in fact
people need only one thing: to cultivate their soul. This alone provides the one true
happiness that no one can take away.
Man is born into sin. All sins come from the body, but the soul lives within man and
fights against the body. All of man’s life is this struggle between body and soul. A person
does well if he doesn’t ally with the body, the side that will surely be defeated, but rather
the side of the soul, which will surely be victorious, if only in the last hour of his life.
430
Five commandments in the Gospels briefly note the main sins that interfere with
love:
1. The sin of anger, of ill feelings towards others: “You have heard that it was said to
your ancestors: do not kill; he who kills shall face judgment. (Exodus 20:13) But I say to
you that anyone who holds ill feelings toward his brother shall face judgment; he who
calls his brother a scoundrel shall be turned over to the Sanhedrin, and he who calls his
brother a fool shall be turned over to the fire of Gehenna. So, if you’re bringing a
sacrifice to the altar and remember that your brother holds something against you, leave
your offering at the altar and first make peace with your brother before you make your
sacrifice. Make peace with your adversary quickly, while you’re both still on the same
road, so that your adversary doesn’t take you to court where the court throws you in a
dungeon. Truly I say to you: You won’t get out until you’ve given up your last penny.”
(Matthew 5:21-‐26)
2. The sin of seeking satisfaction for one’s personal and sexual passions: “You have
heard that it was said to your ancestors: do not commit fornication. (Exodus 20:14) But I
say to you that anyone who looks upon a woman with desire has already fornicated with
her in his heart. It is further said that he who divorces his wife should give her a
certificate of divorce. (Deuteronomy 24:1) But I say to you: he who divorces his wife
causes her to fornicate in addition to his own sin of adultery.” (Matthew 5: 27-‐28, 31-‐32)
3. The sin of giving an oath or promise of obedience to someone: “You have heard
that it was said to your ancestors: Don’t make oaths you don’t plan to fulfill, but fulfill
before the Lord your promises. (Leviticus 19:12; Deuteronomy 23:21) But I say to you:
431
Don’t make any oaths at all; not to the sky, for it is God’s throne; nor to the earth, for it
is God’s pedestal; nor to Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King; nor should you
make oaths by the hairs of your head, for you can’t turn a single hair white or black. Let
this be your word: “yes, yes, no, no,” Saying more than that is devious.” (Matthew 5:33-‐
37)
4. The sin of vengeance, judgment, and punishment: “You have heard it said: An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. (Exodus 21:24) But I say to you: Don’t resist an evil person.
He who strikes your right cheek, turn your left to him, and he who takes you to court for
your shirt, give him your jacket as well; he who forces you to walk with him for the
length of a field, walk with him for two. Give to him who asks, and don’t turn away from
someone who wants something from you.” (Matthew 5:38-‐42)
5. The sin of recognizing your membership in some sort of single nation or state, and
not all humanity: “You have heard it said: Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
(Leviticus 19:18) But I say to you: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good
to those who hate you and pray for those who insult you and drive you out, and you will
be children of your Heavenly Father. For He commands His sun to rise over the evil and
the good and he sends rain to the righteous as well as the unrighteous. And if you love
those who love you, what sort of reward can you expect? Don’t the publicans do that?
And if you only greet your brothers, have you done anything special? Don’t the pagans
do the same? So be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-‐48)
These sins interfere with a person’s true happiness: the happiness of love.
432
Sins, temptations and superstitions: these are what keep people away from their true
happiness in love. How pitiful is the error that causes people to believe their happiness
lies in lust, pride and false beliefs instead of liberation from sins, temptations and
superstitions.
It’s a huge mistake to believe that you can free yourself from sins by repentance and
people’s forgiveness. A sin can only be atoned for by being conscious of it and employing
effort to free yourself from it, but never by people’s forgiveness.
Every mistake, every sin, committed for the first time, binds you. But when you first
commit it, it binds you as lightly as a spider web. If you commit the same sin a second
time, the web becomes a string, and then a cord. If you keep repeating the same sin, it
begins you like a rope, and then like a chain.
In the beginning sin is an alien in your soul, but then it becomes a guest, and once
you become accustomed to this sin it lives in your soul like the master of the house.
If there were no spirit in the body there would be no life. The body binds the spirit;
the spirit breaks through the body and frees itself more and more. This is life.
433
May 8
The Sin of Lechery
In all people, men and women, lives the spirit of God. What a sin it is to look upon
the vessel of the spirit of God as a means of gratification. First and foremost, a man
should look upon every woman as his sister, and a woman should see every man as her
brother.
It’s impossible to imagine a married holy person. The closer a person is to holiness,
the chaster he is.
Some scientist has calculated that if humanity doubles every fifty years as it’s
currently multiplying, then in seven thousand years so many people would be produced
from one couple today that if you packed them shoulder to shoulder all around the
world there wouldn’t be enough space for three percent of them.
What conclusion can we draw from this? What should we wish for? That people
reproduce the way they do now, but that many more people should die? That they
should die from illness, starvation and war? Or that they should reproduce less and live
better?
It seems clear that good and rational beings should want people to reproduce less. In
order for people to reproduce less, we need the very thing that has been planted in every
person’s soul: the desire for chastity.
434
As an animal, man submits to the law of struggle and sexual desire for the
strengthening of the species. As a rational, loving divine being, he submits to an inverse
law: not struggle with competitors and enemies but rather love for them, and not sexual
desire but rather celibacy. Human life as it should be is composed of the union of these
two tendencies.
Only children can justify and sanctify a marriage. If people can’t do all that God
wants of them on their own they can, by properly raising their children, serve God’s will
through them. Therefore a marriage in which the partners don’t want children is worse
than adultery or any kind of debauchery.
It’s said in the Bible that a husband and wife are not two beings but one, and this is
true not because the Bible says so but because in fact sexual relations between two
beings, which has the consequence of children, unites these two beings in a mystical way
that’s different from all other unions.
The call to chastity is not destroyed by marriage. The more chastity there is in a
marriage, the better it is for both partners.
435
Christian doctrine concerning sex is the same as with all other relations: it doesn’t
give specific rules but places before people an ideal that gives them greater and greater
joy as they approach it. Concerning sex, the ideal is complete celibacy. The closer people
come to this ideal, the better their lives are.
One of the most powerful devices to crush sexual lust is love: spiritual love between a
woman and a man.
Permission to engage in sex, which is called a Christian marriage, is not only not a
Christian institution, but is directly opposed to Christianity, which places before man
the ideal of practicing chastity as much as possible.
436
May 9
The Sin of Overindulgence
As smoke drives bees from the hive, so gluttony and drunkenness drive all the best
spiritual strengths from man. Basil the Great
If a person eats what he doesn’t need, if he overeats, it’s difficult for him to be
industrious. If he drinks spirits, it’s difficult for him to be chaste.
If you have a stomach that hasn’t been spoiled by sweet, unwholesome food, and if
you work until you’re tired, then food and water will seem sweeter to you than any spice,
a bed of straw will seem softer than any spring mattress, and a worker’s jacket will seem
more comfortable than any velvet or fur clothing seems to a wealthy person.
You’d think that scholars and wealthy people, who consider themselves enlightened,
would understand that there’s nothing good in gluttony and drunkenness and that
there’s nothing good in fine clothes. Yet these very people contrive sweet foods,
intoxicating beverages and fancy clothes, and furthermore they use these things to
corrupt and weaken themselves and bait the working class.
437
A man is walking with a lantern late at night and can only make out the road with
difficulty, gets lost and then finds his way again. Finally he gets tired of looking for the
road and so he puts out the lantern and walks haphazardly.
Isn’t this what a person does when he clouds his mind with tobacco, wine and
opium? It’s difficult to find the right path in life and not get lost and, when you do get
lost, to find the path again. So in order to save themselves the trouble of finding the
path, people extinguish the only light within them—their reason—with smoking and
drinking.
You should eat to live, not live to eat.
A cow feeds you and your children for ten years; a sheep dresses and warms you
with its wool. How do you reward them? You cut their throats and eat them.
If wine, tobacco and opium didn’t act upon the reason and silence it, and in so doing
give power to foul desires, no one would drink or smoke bitter liquids or vapors.
Don’t deaden your hearts with excessive eating and drinking. Muhammad
438
May 10
The Temptation of Wealth
As heavy clothing hinders the movement of the body, so wealth hinders the
movement of the soul. Demophilus
If a poor man envies a rich man, he’s no better than a rich man.
A wealthy man is unsympathetic and indifferent to others’ sufferings. Talmud
If wealth, which people grab and hold onto with such effort and such sinfulness, has
any value at all, it lies in the satisfaction a person can feel when he rejects it.
If a government rules on the basis of reason then it should be ashamed if there’s
poverty and homelessness. If a government doesn’t rule on the basis of reason, then it
should be ashamed of wealth and honor. Chinese Wisdom
A wise man doesn’t wait for thieves to steal his wealth. He gives it away himself, so
that thieves will have nothing to take from him.
439
People complain about poverty and put all their efforts into acquiring wealth, but
privation and poverty give people strength and fortitude, while excess and luxury
results in weakness and death.
It’s in vain that poor people wish to exchange poverty, which is useful to the body
and soul, for wealth, which is harmful to the body and soul.
Nothing accustoms a person to pride, cruelty, self-‐satisfaction, ignorance and
debauchery like the acquisition of wealth. Madeleine Puiseaux
It’s good when wealthy people see the sin of their wealth and don’t condemn the
poor for their envy and ill will, and it’s bad if they condemn the poor for their ill will and
fail to see their own sins. It’s also good when poor people see the sin of their envy and ill
will and don’t condemn the rich but pity them instead, and it’s bad if they condemn the
rich while failing to see their own sins.
Take money, goods or livestock from a person or a group of people and your thievery
will end with your departure. Of course, the passage of time doesn’t make your crime a
good thing, but it wipes out its consequences. It quickly fades into the past along with
the people who perpetrated it.
But take people’s land and your thievery will continue forever. It will be a new theft
for each new generation, every new year, every single day. Henry George
440
May 11
The Sin of Parasitism
As a horse on a grinding wheel can’t stop but must keep moving, so a man cannot be
idle. Therefore, a man’s merit lies in how much he works just as much as a horse’s merit
lies in how much it moves its feet while tied to the wheel. It’s important that man acts.
One of the best and purest forms of joy is rest after labor. Immanuel Kant
He who doesn’t work the land will hear the land tell him: “Because you refuse to
work me with your two hands you’ll always be standing at the doors of strangers along
with all the beggars and you’ll eternally be eating the scraps left by the rich.” Zoroaster
A European was praising the advantages of industrial manufacturing to a man from
China. “It frees people from labor,” the European said. “Freedom from labor would be a
great calamity,” the Chinese man answered. “Without labor there can be no happiness.”
It’s impossible to take joy in the birth of children into wealth: it’s the propagation of
parasites.
441
No one has yet made a count of all the painful, strenuous millions of days and the
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted in our world on the preparation
for merriment. It’s because of this that merriment in our world is joyless. It’s joyless
because it’s sin, not merrymaking.
God’s power does the same thing in people’s lives that a person does when he makes
a bucket out of a church’s onion dome: it lowers that which was high and raises that
which was low. God’s power takes from those who have a lot and gives it to those who
have little. A rich person has more things but derives less joy from them. A poor person
has fewer things but feels more joy in his life. Water from a spring and a crust of bread
are far tastier to a poor person than the most expensive foods and drinks are to a rich,
idle person. Rich people are sick and tired of everything and find no joy anywhere.
Hell is hidden behind luxury, and heaven is hidden behind labor and distress.
Muhammad
Simplicity in life, language and habits give a people strength, while luxury in life,
flamboyant language and docility in habits lead to weakness and death. John Ruskin
442
May 12
The Sin of Ill Will
I know myself: I don’t want to do evil, but if I’ve done it and continue to do it, it’s
because I can’t restrain myself. All people are just like me: if they do evil, it’s also because
they can’t restrain themselves. So how can I think badly of them and judge them?
In order to avoid committing evil against your neighbor—to love him—you have to
train yourself to refrain from speaking badly to him or about him. In order to learn this,
you have to train yourself to refrain from thinking badly of him and to refuse to allow
the feeling of ill will to enter your soul.
Could you get angry with a man who has a festering wound? It’s not his fault that
you find the sight of his wound repulsive. You should act the same way concerning other
people’s vices.
“But,” you say, “a person possesses reason in order to recognize and correct his
vices.” This is true. Therefore, since you possess reason as well, you should be able to
acknowledge that you shouldn’t become angry with a man for his vices, but on the
contrary you should try to awaken his conscience in a reasonable and kind manner,
without anger, impatience or arrogance. Marcus Aurelius
443
If there is enmity between two people, both are at fault. No matter how great a
number you multiply zero by, it will still equal zero. If one of the two held no ill feelings
in his soul, there would be no enmity.
When you berate a person and create enmity with him, you’re forgetting that all
people are your brothers and you make an enemy out of him instead of being his friend.
You harm yourself when you do this, because when you stop being a rational and good
being as God created you, you lose your most valuable quality. You notice it when you
lose a wallet full of money, so why don’t you notice your greatest loss of all: the loss of
your rationality and kindness? Based on a Passage by Epictetus
It should be obvious that anger can never be a good or useful feeling, but how
often—almost always—do we try to justify it, calling it indignation and anticipating
some benefit from it.
444
From early morning on you must take care and say to yourself: it may happen that
I’ll have some dealings with an insolent, brazen, hypocritical, bothersome, bitter person.
There are many such people. These people don’t know the difference between good and
evil. But if I have firm knowledge of what’s good and what’s evil, then I understand that
what causes me evil is merely the evil I myself commit; if I realize this then no sort of evil
person can harm me. Indeed, no one can force me to commit evil. If I also understand
that every person is close to me, not on account of their flesh and blood but on account
of their spirit, and that God’s spirit lives within every one of us, I can’t be angry with a
being that’s so close to me. Indeed, I know that we’ve been created for one another, that
we’re called upon to help one another, like one hand helping the other or one foot
helping the other, the way eyes and teeth help each other and the entire body. How can I
turn from one close to me if he commits evil against me in opposition to his true nature?
Marcus Aurelius
We’re frequently filled with the vilest sins, and yet we notice the smallest sins of
others without condemning our own.
Others’ sins are obvious to us, just as dirt on someone else’s face is, but we don’t see
our own sins because we never look in the mirror. That mirror is our conscience.
Look into this mirror more often. When you’re sitting alone in contemplation, put
more time into recalling all the bad things you’ve done. Do this more often and you’ll
judge others less and you yourself will become purer.
445
May 13
The Temptation of Pride
A proud person suffers many punishments, but the worst punishment is the fact
that no matter what good qualities he has and no matter how he tries, no one likes him.
You’re right if you believe that no one in this world is better than you, but you’re
seriously mistaken if you think that there’s even one person in this world who’s worse
than you.
Proud people are so busy teaching others that they have no time to think about
themselves, and no reason to either; they’re so good already. Therefore, the more they
teach others the lower and lower they themselves fall.
No one can truly recognize the equality of people in life as well as children can. So
how criminal it is for adults to teach them that there are kings, rich men and celebrities
whom you must respect, and servants, workers and beggars whom you’re allowed to
treat with contemptuous condescension.
446
The stupidity and danger of pride—the belief that you alone or you and a select
group are better than others—would seem to be obvious to everyone, since proud
people must know that there are other proud people just like them, and that these
people consider themselves to be the best people or the best nation. So someone’s clearly
mistaken. However, this doesn’t make proud people hesitate: every one of them is
absolutely certain that everyone is mistaken except them.
Take a lesson from water in deep oceans and mountain canyons: streams rush on
noisily, while the boundless ocean remains silent and scarcely moves. Buddhist Suttas
When children play they break up into two hostile parties, but they know that as
soon as the game ends they’re all equal again. When adults divide themselves into
parties, classes, and nations, they stay there all their lives.
447
Human pride is often difficult to destroy; as soon as you mend one hole it peeks out
of another; you seal that one up, and it pops out through a third. Based on a Passage by
Georg Lichtenberg
Membership in a group of people who consider themselves better than others leads
people to such insanity that they even take pride in their shameful deeds: the fact that
they live in luxury by exploiting others’ labor, or that they’ve robbed and killed people.
One practice accepted everywhere—speaking coldly to some people and intimately
with others, shaking some people’s hands but not shaking the hands of others, inviting
some people into your parlor and dealing with others in the doorway—demonstrates
how far people are from recognizing the single spiritual source of all.
448
May 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
Simply get used to doing what “everyone” demands, and before you turn around
you’ll be doing evil things and considering them good.
If you concern yourself with people’s approval it’s hard to decide on any one thing.
Some approve of this, others approve of that. You have to decide for yourself. It’s faster
too.
It’s very difficult to break habits once they become established, but with your every
step toward becoming better you stumble over habits and people’s opinions more than
anything else.
Society tells the individual: “Think as we think, believe as we believe, eat and drink as
we eat and drink and dress as we dress.” If a person doesn’t give in to these demands
society torments him with its ridicule, gossip and curses. It’s hard not to submit to it, but
if you do submit you’ll cease being a free man and become a slave.
Based on a Passage by Lucy Mallory
449
It’s bad to make people angry by violating their accepted customs, but it’s even worse
to ignore the demands of your conscience and reason in order to pander to them.
I’m ashamed to recall how often I failed to live according to my conscience and
instead submitted to foolish customs and rules that everyone else accepts.
Based on a Passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s unpleasant when people praise you for something you haven’t done, and it’s just
as unpleasant when they berate you when you don’t deserve it. However, undeserved
praise and reproaches can be useful. If you’re praised for a good deed you haven’t done,
then go out and try to do what you were praised for, and if you’re berated for something
you didn’t do, then try not to do what you were berated for in the future.
We should be grateful when people criticize us and thereby point out our
deficiencies. When we recognize our deficiencies they begin to trouble us, won’t let our
conscience rest, and so we try to free ourselves from them. Blaise Pascal
The most important thing for you is not other people’s judgments but how you
understand yourself, because this is what will make you either happy or unhappy.
Therefore, never think about people’s judgments, but only about strengthening rather
than weakening your spiritual life.
450
May 15
The Temptation of Punishment
People don’t believe that you should repay evil with good instead of evil only because
they’ve been taught from childhood that without repaying evil for evil all human life will
be reduced to chaos.
“Then Peter stepped forward and asked him: ‘Master! How many times shall I
forgive my brother who has sinned against me? Seven times?’ Jesus told him: ‘I say to
you, not seven times, but seven times seventy times.’”
To forgive doesn’t mean to say, “I forgive you,” but to tear from your heart every
reproach and shred of anger against the person who hurt you. To be able to do this, you
have to remember your own sins. If you remember, then most likely you’ll find that
you’ve committed worse sins than the one that made you angry.
451
One way of killing a bear is by hanging a heavy log from a branch above a trough of
honey. The bear bats the log out of the way so he can eat the honey. The log swings back
and hits him. The bear gets angry and hits to log harder, and it hits him harder. This
goes on until the log kills the bear. People do the same thing when they repay evil with
evil. Can’t people be more rational than bears?
The essence of all religious doctrines is the same as the essence of Christianity: love.
Christianity’s uniqueness is merely the clarity and precision with which it exposes the
habitual deviation from the demands of love that people have permitted and continue to
permit, even though they recognize the obligation and beneficence of the law of love.
Permitting the use of violence by man against his fellow man under any
circumstances is this deviation.
Christian doctrine clearly and definitively indicates that all violence of man against
man is incompatible with love.
452
You can live by the law of Christ or the law of Satan. To live by the law of Christ
means to live like a human being, to love others, to do good and to repay evil with good.
To live by the law of Satan means to live like a beast, to love only yourself and to repay
evil with evil. The more we live by the law of Christ, the more love and happiness people
will experience. The more we live by the law of Satan, the more disastrous our lives will
be.
The commandment concerning love reveals two paths. The first is the path of truth,
the path of Christ, the path of righteousness, of good: the path of life. The other path is
the path of deceit, the path of all sorts of hypocrisies: the path of death. And although
it’s frightening to renounce self-‐defense by violence, we know that this renunciation is
the path to salvation.
To reject violence doesn’t mean you can’t defend your life and labor and the lives
and labors of others, but only that you must defend them in a way that doesn’t
contradict reason and love. Defending people’s lives and labors must be done by trying
to awaken kind feelings in a villain who’s committing a crime, and in order to do that
you have to know what’s good and rational. For example, if I see one person preparing
to kill another, the best thing I can do is to put myself in the place of the victim and
defend him with my body or, if possible, to rescue him by carrying him off or concealing
him, just as if I was saving a person from a raging fire or from drowning. I might die
myself or I might save him. If I can’t do this because I myself am a lost sinner, that
doesn’t mean I have to become a beast and commit evil to justify myself.
Based on a Passage by Buka
453
Whenever someone employs violence, make a reasonable case against it and you’ll
rarely lose anything in the earthly sense and you’ll always be victorious in the spiritual
sense.
The use of violence evokes others’ spite and exposes the person who employs violence
for his defense to far greater dangers than restraining from violence.
Thus, the use of violence is merely stupidity and recklessness.
People of the world teach and declare that the violence of authority defends them. Is
humanity really protected and defended by the threat of personal violence and harm?
On what foundation do the practitioners of legalized chaos and crime base their
assertion that the minute their crimes cease, people will immediately start cutting each
others’ throats? There are still very few people who understand the clear and shameless
falsehood of such assertions. The masses have become accustomed to bowing before
violence, and they pray to it in the form of the sword, prisons and guillotines. They
honor it in the form of priesthoods, armies, navies, people’s militias, fortresses, arsenals,
courts, correctional institutions, etc. When someone proposes that all these outrageous
acts and institutions be discarded in the name of what they call God, we hear a horrific
cry:
“Get away from us, don’t tempt us. Your actions are harmful and your doctrine will
lead to the destruction of all the blessings that humanity has won for itself through the
454
blood and sweat of former generations. Don’t torment us. We’ll all die if we eliminate
the authority to torture, draw and quarter and kill those who we deem to call criminals.”
The crowd will yell and, most horrifying of all, it will yell sincerely: “What will
happen to humanity if war and executions were suddenly eliminated?!”
So many martyrs have been placed on the altar of the god violence that they would
fill twenty planets the size of Earth, yet has their goal been accomplished to even the
slightest degree?
Violence has produced nothing but negative results, and yet it remains the god of
the mob. Before this blood-‐soaked altar humanity seems to have decided to forever bow
at the sound of the drum, at the rumble of weapons and the moans of a bloodied
humanity. Adin Ballou
Don’t say that if people help you then you’ll help them, but that if they oppress you
then you’ll oppress them. Instead, if people help you then you should help them, but if
people oppress you then you shouldn’t oppress them. Muhammad
The true punishment for every evil deed occurs in the soul of the criminal himself
and consists in the reduction of his ability to enjoy life’s blessings. External punishment
only aggravates the criminal.
455
May 16
The Superstition of Violence
We can teach people by revealing the truth to them and providing a good example,
but not by forcing them to do what we want.
Forcing people to stop doing evil things is like damming a river and being happy
that the river beyond the dam is shallower for a while. Just as in its own time the river
will spill over the dam and continue to flow, so people who do evil things won’t give up
but will merely bide their time.
When people say that everyone must live peacefully and harm no one but then
violently force others to live according to their will, it’s as if they’re saying: do as we say,
and not as we do. You should fear such people and never trust them.
The ruling classes think they can force people to live good lives through violence, but
through this very violence they show people more than anything an example of a bad
life. People are mired in filth, and instead of getting out of it themselves, they teach
people how not to get filthy.
456
The cruelties of all revolutions are merely the consequences of the cruelties of all
rulers. Revolutionaries are quick learners. Uncorrupted people would never come up
with the notion that people have the right and ability to organize others’ lives through
violence if those in power, all the rulers, didn’t teach it to them.
Those in power are certain that people can only be motivated and controlled through
violence, and so they use violence to maintain the existing order. However, the existing
order is maintained not through violence but through public opinion, and violence
destroys public opinion. Therefore acts of violence weaken and destroy the very thing
that it hopes to maintain.
Man was created no more to rule than he was to be ruled. People ruin each other
with these two customs. There’s ignorance here, insolence there, and true human dignity
is nowhere to be found. Victor Considerant
457
If some people force others to submit through violence or threats, they themselves
prove that what they’re doing is unjust, and so the person who’s subjected to violence
will abandon justice as well and use violence when he can.
Teach your heart, but don’t learn from it. Buddhist Proverb
The death penalty stands as the clearest evidence that the organization of our society
is completely alien to Christianity.
458
May 17
The Superstition of Government
Man’s vocation is to serve God and all people, not to serve some people and do evil to
others. Therefore a person who understands his vocation cannot consider himself a
member of an individual state.
The American Indians lived without any kind of authority, laws or government. They
simply obeyed their traditions and conscience. Those who acted against tradition and
conscience were expelled from the community or, when it was something significant like
murder, those who had been injured enforced punishment. And among the American
Indians there was much less crime than in our states, with our authorities, prisons, and
judges. Where is there more evil: where there are no laws, as with the savage American
Indians, or where there are too many laws? I think that we can safely say that it is where
there are too many laws. Sheep would most likely be happier if they were allowed to
worry about themselves rather than be given over to the care of wolves. Based on a
Passage by Thomas Jefferson
459
A stranger came up to a worker who knew well the duties that his employer had
entrusted to him and told him to abandon his employer’s work and do something that
completely contradicted what he’d been ordered to do and that would completely
destroy his employer’s business. What worker, knowing that his employer could
summon him at any minute, would agree to this unless he was either insane or
delirious?
Incidentally, this is exactly what every Christian does when the government orders
him to perform acts that are opposed to his conscience and the law of God, such as
participating in the courts or committing murder in war.
The anarchists are right in everything: in the rejection of the current state of affairs
and in the assertion that under contemporary moral conditions there can be nothing
worse than governmental violence. However, they’re profoundly mistaken in believing
that anarchy can be established through a revolution. Anarchy can only be established
by the process of people becoming less and less reliant upon governmental authority
and becoming more and more ashamed of participating in this authority.
We must pay close attention to our attitude toward our social activities. We must be
prepared to change our opinions, reject old perspectives and adopt new ones. We must
discard prejudices and make our judgments with a completely free mind. A sailor who
never adjusts his sails regardless of changes in the wind will never reach his harbor.
Henry George
460
To rationally love virtue, to respect great accomplishments, to recognize good deeds
from which we receive no benefit and even are deprived of our comfort for the glory and
benefit of those we love and those who deserve it: thus, if the inhabitants of a land find a
person who demonstrates great wisdom and safeguards them, exhibits great bravery
and defends them, and takes great care to lead them—if as a result they become
accustomed to obeying him and in so doing provide him with some advantages, I don’t
think you could call this unreasonable.
But my God! What do you call it when you see a large number of people not only
obeying but serving, not only submitting but kowtowing to a man or several men,
kowtowing so much that they have nothing of their own—no property, children, or
even life itself, that they consider theirs—when they endure theft and cruelty not from
war, not from bandits, but from one person, and not Hercules or Samson, but people
who are for the most part morally corrupt? What would you call that? Would you say
that these people are cowards? If it were two, three or four people who failed to defend
themselves against one, that would be strange but not altogether impossible and we
could say that they lacked courage, but if it’s one hundred thousand or a million people
who don’t strike back at a handful who are making them suffer and turning them into
slaves, what would you call that astonishing situation?
Nevertheless, this happens in every country and among all peoples every day: a
handful of people rule over a hundred thousand peasants and deprive them of their
rights. Who would believe this if they didn’t see it themselves but merely heard about it?
And if this was observed only in distant, foreign lands, who wouldn’t think that it was
461
more likely a fraudulent system rather than the actual administration of justice? Indeed,
this small minority that oppresses everyone doesn’t need to be conquered or defended
against. They’d be conquered forever if only people would refuse to become their slaves.
People don’t need to take anything from them. If they simply stopped giving them
anything they’d be free. In submitting to the authority of their oppressors, the people cut
their own throats. A nation that could be free but gives away its freedom places a yoke
upon itself and doesn’t merely approve of its own oppression but looks for it. If it were to
cost them something to regain their freedom, humanity’s most valuable possession and
natural right, and they didn’t look for it, then I’d understand how they could prefer
safety and comfort to the fight for freedom. But if in order to gain their freedom they
only need to wish for it, then can there be a nation in the world that would consider that
too great a price: to acquire freedom simply by the people’s wish?
You poor, unfortunate, foolish people, stubbornly holding on to what’s evil and blind
to what’s good. You allow the best part of your earnings to be taken from you, you allow
your lands and your homes to be robbed, you live as if you own nothing and allow your
conscience to be taken from you when you agree to become murderers. And all these
tragedies, devastations and depravations don’t come from real enemies but from the
enemy that you yourselves have created. How could this enemy gain power over you if
you didn’t give it to him? What could he do to you if you didn’t harbor this thief who
pillages you, if you didn’t participate in the murders of the person who’s murdering you,
if you weren’t traitors to yourselves? You sow grain so that he can destroy your harvest,
you build and clean your homes in preparation for his banditry; you raise your children
so that he can send them into his wars, into slaughterhouses, so that he can turn them
462
into executors of his lusts and his vengeance. And you can free yourselves from all the
horrors that no animal would tolerate even if you don’t want to work for your freedom
simply by wishing for it.
Choose to serve him no longer and you’ll be freed by this single wish for freedom. I
don’t want you to attack this enemy, but only to stop supporting him, so that you’ll see
that he’s like a giant statue from which the foundation has been removed, and which
will fall from its own weight and smash to pieces. Étienne de la Boétie
People must stop believing in government first of all because with each passing day
it becomes more and more obvious that all that government has promised to achieve has
not been achieved; second, because the criminality of the acts people commit in the
name of government has risen to the level where they can no longer pretend they don’t
see the evil that they’re committing.
463
The inhabitants of planet Earth are still in such a state of foolishness, irrationality,
and stupidity that every day they read in the magazines published in civilized nations
about diplomatic negotiations between heads of state whose goals are unions against an
imaginary enemy, of preparations for war in which the people allow their leaders to send
them off like cattle into a slaughterhouse, as if they didn’t even suspect that every
human life is a person’s own property.
The inhabitants of this strange planet are all raised to believe that there are nations,
borders and flags, and they all have such a weak conception of humanity that it
disappears before the spectacle of the fatherland. It’s true that if thinking people could
agree among themselves this situation would change because no one personally wants
war. However, political alliances exist, and as a result there are millions of parasites, and
these parasites need war and so they stop people from reaching agreements. Camille
Flammarion
I think that we must first of all be human beings, and then subjects. It’s undesirable
to encourage yourself to respect the law as much as the good. The law can never make
people more just. On the contrary, respect for the law turns good people into
practitioners of injustice. Henry David Thoreau
The coming transformation that is tied to humanity’s advancement from animal
existence to human existence consists of the disappearance of government.
Mikhail Bakunin
464
May 18
The Superstition of the Church
You can please God only by living a good life. Therefore, whatever a person thinks
will please God other than a good, pure, kind life is a base and dangerous fraud.
It’s impossible to know God through stories about Him. You can only know Him by
fulfilling His law, the law that the heart of every person knows.
Teaching children God’s law is an important part of their upbringing. However, in
our Christian society children are taught things as the law of God that no one believes
in. Children see this and not only don’t believe what they’re taught, but those who teach
them as well.
From the moment members of a religious council said, “May it seem good to us and
the Holy Spirit,” placing external authority above internal authority and recognizing the
conclusions of their pathetic human discourses in their councils as more important and
holier than the one true holy essence in man—his reason and conscience—from that
moment falsehood began, falsehood that lulls both the human body and soul, that ruins
millions of human lives and continues its horrific work today.
465
The security of society is really founded upon the morality of its members, and
morality is founded upon religion. The government and the ruling classes wanted to
justify their immoral life and in order to do so they’ve perverted religion; and as soon as
religion was perverted, morality collapsed and with this collapse of morality the security
of society was destroyed more and more, and so the government and ruling classes had
to pervert religion more and more and employ violence to maintain security, and not
only the security of society in general but their own as well. This is what our Christian
governments have done and continue to do, and our situation becomes worse and
worse. At present, there seems to be no way out for government.
Christianity proclaims the true law of human life; however, humanity is far from
practicing it. So sensing all the beauty, truth, and beneficence of this law and at the
same time its incompatibility with the established order, people accept Christianity with
their words but pervert it in their deeds so that the existing structure of life won’t be
disturbed.
466
A church, a true church—the union of people who truly believe and therefore
believe in the same way—is always an inner church. The Kingdom of God is within us.
Mutual strangers separated from each other by time and space are inseparably united
in the single truth that they profess. An external church that unites people in time and
space destroys that true inner unity and replaces it with an external union.
A visible church is merely a deceptive similitude of true union.
If a church does exist, then this church is comprised of people living in past ages as
well as now, scattered in India, Australia, Greenland, all over the face of the globe and
unknown to one another. The conception of a church as a gathering of the chosen, the
best, is a false, proud-‐spirited and unchristian conception. Who’s better, who’s worse?
Peter was better until the cock crowed, while the thief was worse until he was crucified.
Do we really know within ourselves the angel and the devil which keep changing places
in our lives, do we realize that there’s never been a person who could completely repel
the angel from within him, just as there’s never been a person in whom the angel
couldn’t occasionally become a devil? How can we, as such motley beings, ever assemble
a group of the select and the righteous?
There is the light of truth, and there are people approaching it from every direction,
from as many directions as there are radiuses in a circle. Therefore, there are an infinite
number of different paths. Let’s use all our effort to seek the light of truth that unites
everyone, and let it not be our task to judge how close we’ve come to it.
467
Church religion not only teaches that a sinner’s repentance can purify him, but also
that the prayers of others can expedite his own happiness in this life and in some future
life. When he goes to bed, a little boy asks his nanny to continue a game he began with
some dolls while he sleeps. The relationship of churchgoers to God is the same as the
boy’s to the dolls. People live badly, go to sleep, others pray for them, and then they
continue their game.
Don’t confuse Christianity as a historical fact with the original source from which it
came. Only as a result of unparalleled dishonesty could people ascribe holiness to that
which is now called “church faith.” What did Christ deny? Precisely what is now called
the Catholic Church.
The church is an absolute contradiction to the source of Christian teaching. In the
same way, that which in the Catholic Church means Christ is not Christ in its
fundamental sense. In place of symbols, in the church there are objects and images; in
place of eternal events there is history; in place of a practical code of life, there are rules,
rituals and dogmas.
Christianity is a doctrine that teaches a person how to be happy:
“You must make no distinction between your own people and outsiders. You must
not become angry or belittle anyone. Practice charity in secret. Don’t take oaths. Don’t
judge others. Make peace and forgive. Pray in secret.”
468
Jesus turned straight to the heart of the matter, to the Kingdom of God in the
human heart, and he showed that the path leading there wasn’t an outer one consisting
of laws to be followed, but an inner one.
He dealt with all the crude methods of communication with God in the same way: he
taught how a person should live in order to feel “deified.” In order to become godlike,
you must renounce your own self.
The church is something fundamentally different from what Christ did and wanted.
The Gospel proclaims that access to happiness is open to the humble and the poor;
all you have to do for this is free yourself from all traditions and the tutelage of the
upper classes. Property, possessions, homeland, class and social standing, courts, police,
government, church, education, art, the military: these are all obstacles to attaining
happiness, they’re all delusions, hallucinations caused by the devil, which the Gospel
threatens with the Day of Judgment.
Out of Christianity the church created a doctrine that would reconcile itself with the
acts of government: war, courts, torture, oaths and hatred.
The church had to give primacy to the concept of guilt and sin. It didn’t need a new
life according to Christ’s teaching, but a new cult, a new faith in miraculous
transformation (“redemption through faith”).
This is all humorous, tragically humorous: the church restored in outline all that
Christ destroyed. Ultimately, it took government under its protection.
The church is exactly what Christ preached against and what he commanded his
disciples to fight against.
469
Christianity is implemented every minute; it needs no metaphysics, no asceticism, no
“natural sciences.” Christianity is life. It teaches a person how to act.
If a person says, “I don’t want to be a soldier,” “the courts are none of my affair,” “I
won’t do anything that might destroy my internal peace,” and “if I suffer from this,
nothing can make me more peaceful than suffering,” that person is a true Christian.
Friedrich Nietzsche
470
May 19
The Superstition of Science
Scholars know much that they have absolutely no need of and are rarely fully certain
of what they know. A wise person knows just a few things, but all that he knows is of use
to him and others, and all he knows he knows with certainty.
Read less, study less, think more. Learn through books and teachers only what you
need and wish to know.
There are a countless multitude of sciences, and each science is endless; you can
delve into it deeper and deeper. Therefore, when dealing with science in general the first
and most important matter is to know which sciences are most important, which are less
important and which are even less important. You have to know this because you can’t
learn everything, so you have to study what’s most important.
471
Ever since people have lived on earth there have always and everywhere been
teachers who’ve taught their people what they need to know most of all: man’s purpose
and, consequently, true happiness for each person and all people. Only someone who
knows this science is able to judge the value of all other sciences.
There are an infinite number of scientific subjects, and without knowing what the
purpose and happiness of humanity consists of it’s impossible to choose from this
infinite number. Without this knowledge all remaining arts and sciences become idle
and harmful amusements, as is the case in our society.
In our age an enormous amount of information worthy of study is accumulating.
Soon our abilities will be too feeble and our lives too short to learn anything other than
the most useful aspects of all this information. We have an abundance of wealth at our
service, but now that we recognize it we must once again discard a great deal that’s
useless rubbish. We’ll be better off if we don’t burden ourselves with it. Immanuel Kant
472
How much useless reading we can avoid if we just think for ourselves.
Are reading and learning really the same thing? Someone once asserted with good
reason that if publishing facilitated a wider distribution of books, it came at the cost of a
decrease in the quality of the content. Reading too much is detrimental to one’s ability to
think. In the same way, the greatest thinkers among scholars I’ve met as well as those I’ve
studied were always those who read only a little.
If people studied how they should think, and not simply what they should think,
they wouldn’t make this mistake. Georg Lichtenberg
Writing imitates what happens in life. Most people aren’t very intelligent and make
many mistakes. This is why so many poor books are distributed alongside a little bit of
good writing and why there are so many writers’ disputes. Such books merely waste
people’s time, money and attention.
Bad books are not just useless but harmful. And really, nine tenths of all books are
published only to put money in people’s pockets.
Therefore, it’s best not to read the books everyone talks and writes about. People
should try first of all to read and learn about the best writers of all ages and nations.
Those are the books that you should read first of all. And you’ll never be able to read
them all. Only these writers teach and educate.
You can never read too few bad books and you can never read too many good ones.
Bad books are moral poisons that only stupefy people.
Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
473
Take care that reading too many authors and all sorts of books doesn’t create
uncertainty and doubt in your mind. Be careful to nourish your mind only with writers
of doubtless merit. Superfluous reading diverts the mind and breaks the habit of
independent work. If sometimes you feel the desire to turn to a different kind of reading
for a while, never forget to return to your former habit. Seneca
The primary evil in the science of our day lies in the fact that, because scientists can’t
study everything and lacking the aid of religion they fail to understand what should be
studied, they only study subjects that they themselves, who live misguided lives, find
necessary and pleasant.
What they need most of all is a living, beneficial discipline.
What they find most pleasant is satisfaction of their idle curiosity that doesn’t
demand excessive mental effort.
474
May 20
Effort
In order that life not be suffering but rather total joy you must always be kind to all,
both people and animals. And in order to always be kind you must learn how. And in
order to learn how you must never let a single bad deed pass by without reproaching
yourself for it.
Do this and soon you’ll become accustomed to being kind to all people and animals.
And if you become accustomed to kindness, there will always be joy in your heart.
You must constantly fight sins, temptations and superstitions, because the moment
you stop fighting them, your body begins to rule you.
Remember that all the energy you exert against sin and temptation or to free
yourself from an ingrained superstition is the most important thing you can do, far
more important than acquiring wealth, honor, or education.
There’s only one way to overcome the general evil of life: moral perfection of your life.
Moral perfection is accomplished through effort and liberation from sins, temptations
and superstitions.
475
The merit of a moral act lies not in whether the deed you performed is important or
not, but in the amount of effort you used to accomplish it.
That which is unclear should be clarified. That which is difficult should be
accomplished using all your effort without abatement. Confucius
There’s no kind of external organization of the world, no sort of external laws and
regulations that can change the life of the world; only the inner effort of each individual
can. The most important kind of effort isn’t directed toward accomplishing something,
but rather restraining yourself from doing what you know is evil.
The path to sound knowledge never lies on soft, lily-‐dotted meadow grass; you
always have to climb bare cliffs.
476
The search for truth isn’t achieved through merrymaking but through agitation and
discomfort; but nevertheless you must search for it, because if you fail to find and love it
you’ll perish. “But,” you say, “if the truth wanted me to find and love it, it would reveal
itself to me.” It does reveal itself to you, but you pay no attention. Search for the truth.
That’s what it wants you to do. Blaise Pascal
An idle person will cry in pain if his muscles ache just like they do when he’s
working, although he doesn’t notice it when he’s working. In the same way, a person
who does no spiritual work on his inner world will experience tormenting pain from the
same adversities that a person endures without noticing if he considers the main
business of life to be the exertion of effort to free himself from sins and achieve moral
perfection.
477
May 21
Self-‐Renunciation
You can only genuinely love God and rightfully hate yourself. Blaise Pascal
In order to love people not just in words, but truly love them, you have to stop loving
yourself both in word and deed. We often say that we love others, but we love them in
words alone, while we say we don’t love ourselves while we love ourselves in deed. We
don’t think about clothing, feeding and housing others, but we never forget to do those
things for ourselves. Therefore, in order to truly love others in deed we have to learn to
forget about clothing, feeding and housing ourselves just as we forget to do those things
for others.
Self-‐renunciation isn’t really a renunciation of yourself, but simply the
transformation of your self from a corporeal being into a spiritual one.
If a person only thinks about himself and seeks his own benefit in everything, he’ll
never be happy. If you want to live for yourself, live for others. Seneca
478
In every person is the consciousness of the life of all humanity. It lies deep in a
person’s soul, but it’s there, and sooner or later a person must become conscious of this
broader life.
The renunciation of the personal goals a person is trying to achieve is immediately
rewarded by a stronger life, into which he enters.
Simply by renouncing his exclusive personal life he becomes a genuine living person,
and by recognizing his life in the lives of others he becomes conscious of a life within
himself that has no limits or end. Edward Carpenter
Some people think that renunciation destroys freedom. They don’t realize that only
renunciation give us true freedom, freedom from ourselves, freedom from enslavement
to our depravity. Our passions are the cruelest of tyrants; simply renounce them and
you’ll know freedom. François Fénelon
A person’s consciousness of his limited nature in an infinite world and his
sinfulness—his failure to do all that he could and should do but didn’t—will be with
him as long as he lives, and nothing can help him understand the insignificance of his
self, renounce it and live in union with God in a free, spiritual life the way this
consciousness can.
479
The fact that a sacrifice done in the name of the good brings joy but not satisfaction
is evidence that self-‐renunciation is a natural human characteristic. There’s no
satisfaction because it always seems that you could do more.
You shouldn’t renounce your individuality in the sense of renouncing all the
conditions in which you exist, but you should and must refuse to concede to those
conditions in your life. You should and must use the conditions life gave you, but you
shouldn’t look upon these conditions as life’s goal. Don’t renounce your individuality;
renounce your individuality’s happiness and stop thinking of your individuality as life.
This is what you should do in order to return to union, so that happiness, which is the
goal of your life, can be achieved.
480
May 22
Humility
He who is satisfied with himself is always dissatisfied with others.
He who is always dissatisfied with himself is always satisfied with others.
The entrance to the temple of truth is low. Only those who bow will enter. And those
who enter this door will find happiness. In the temple is a great expanse and freedom,
and people there love one another, help one another and know no grief.
This temple is the true life of men. The door to the temple is the study of wisdom.
Wisdom is given to the humble: those who don’t raise themselves up but rather
disparage themselves.
A man on tiptoe cannot stand for long. A man who puts himself on display cannot
shine. He who is satisfied with himself cannot earn fame. He who brags has no merit. He
who is proud cannot rise. Before the judgment of a reasonable person such people
resemble garbage and evoke the revulsion of all. Therefore, he who has reason doesn’t
rely on himself. Lao Tsu
481
Beware of thinking that you’re better than others, that you have virtues others don’t.
No matter what virtues you possess, they’re worthless if you think this way.
Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
Whoever fails to harbor revulsion for his self-‐love, that characteristic that compels
him to place himself above everything in the world, is completely blind, because nothing
so contradicts truth and justice as it does. It’s false in and of itself because it’s impossible
to be greater than everything in the world, and in addition it’s unjust, since everyone
demands the same thing. Blaise Pascal
The more strictly and mercilessly you judge yourself the more justly and leniently
you’ll judge others. Confucius
482
If you have an opportunity to do something good for your neighbor, don’t brag
about it in front of others and forget about what you did. If you’ve done evil to your
neighbor, even if it wasn’t anything significant, never hide it and never forget it, but do
everything in your power to correct it. Likewise, never forget the good people have done
for you; tell others about it and try to repay them with good as well. If people do evil to
you, conceal it from others, but remember it, and if you wish to experience great joy, try
to do good for the person who offended you.
The best way to fulfill life’s work isn’t simply to disregard the evil in others, to
consider everyone equal to you, to consider yourself no better than you used to be or to
see any improvement in yourself, but to be so occupied with self-‐improvement that you
can only see your weaknesses and to concern yourself only with freeing yourself from
them.
483
May 23
Honesty
Falsehood conceals the God who dwells within us and all people, and therefore
there’s nothing more valuable than truth, which conquers falsehood and restores in us
love of God and our neighbor.
When people stray from the true path they don’t like to think about goodness and
truth. In order to forget goodness and truth they try to forget themselves. And so since
ancient times in order to forget themselves people have concocted beverages and
smokable substances that would cloud their brains so that they couldn’t distinguish
good from evil and truth from falsehood. These things are wine, vodka, tobacco and
opium. All these beverages and smokable substances harm the body and weaken it, but
they do the greatest harm of all to the soul, because when a person stupefies himself he
no longer hears the voice of God in his soul and lives badly, feeling no shame or regret.
Man’s life consists of enlightening his conscience and mind more and more, but
both the conscience and the mind are clouded more and more by things like wine,
tobacco, and opium, and the person using them doesn’t realize it.
484
The purpose of reason is to liberate yourself from falsehood and to confirm the
truth. When, under the influence of passion, reason becomes the defender of falsehood,
then it’s not only subverted, but also damaged and loses its ability to distinguish truth
from falsehood, good from evil, righteousness from impiety. William Channing
As with everything in this world, each new resource, convenience and advantage
brings its own disadvantages. Reason, which gives people such a great advantage over
the animals, brings its own disadvantages and opens paths to temptation onto which no
animal could fall. As a result, the human will falls under the power of new types of
motivations that are out of reach of the animals, namely abstract motivations: simple
thoughts that are not the result of personal experience but rather are frequently born
from words, the example of others, and literature.
With a person’s ability to understand, the possibility of delusion arises as well.
Sooner or later every delusion causes harm, and the bigger the delusion the worse the
harm. A person frequently has to pay a high price for a personal delusion at some point;
it’s the same for entire peoples on a much greater scale. Therefore, you can’t remember
too often that you have to pursue and eradicate each delusion as an enemy to humanity
no matter where you encounter it, and that there’s no such thing as a harmless delusion,
much less a useful one. A rational person must enter into battle with them even if
humanity shrieks like a sick man when a doctor cuts open an abscess.
Arthur Schopenhauer
485
There’s no need for truth to take on evil violently; its conspicuousness, transparency
and inner strength strikes evil more powerfully than anything. Henry David Thoreau
Speak the truth no matter how bitter and unpleasant it might be for others.
Muhammad
A person’ most valuable possession is what is called his conscience. Conscience is the
property through which a person sees the actual truth in all the confusion of human
affairs. No matter how disadvantageous it might be, this property of conscience tells us
that every other person is just important as we are and that we must accept the fact that
every other being needs the same things we do.
This property of conscience commands us to always recognize the truth, even when
the truth is contrary to our profit or pride.
Don’t be afraid that reason will destroy established traditions.
Reason can’t destroy anything without replacing it with the truth. That is its nature.
As soon as an ideal greater than a previous one held is placed before humanity, all
former ideals pale before it like stars before the sun, and humanity has no option but to
recognize this new, higher ideal and strive for it.
486
The animal world doesn’t lie. Study the physiology of all beings and you’ll see that
everything speaks as it should. From generation to generation the expression of their
inner feelings is imprinted in their features as involuntary signs.
Neither the wolf nor the tiger lies in order to tear you apart. A lion doesn’t stop
scowling in order to bribe you. He can’t remake his roar into an artificial sound. A snake
hides but you can see the hatred in his eyes. He doesn’t lie. Even the ever-‐so-‐human ape
doesn’t try to conceal the expression on his face. It’s the same with all animals. The ones
that make traps, like the spider, don’t flatter their victims. They don’t lie.
Animals let out cries and imitate sounds, but in their cries and imitations there’s no
intention of appearing as something they’re not.
There’s only one creature on Earth that lies: man. He alone can master his face and
voice and through them appear as something quite different from what he really is.
Clever animals merely hide and wait for their prey, but they can’t soften their faces,
drop their eyelids, change their voices, smile, or take on the appearance of a lamb.
But man can. Why? Because man has learned to rule himself, and as a result the
animal instincts within him have become lies. Wilhelm Ketteler
487
May 24
Restraint in Deed
True strength doesn’t belong to the person who conquers others but to the one who
conquers himself and doesn’t allow his animal self to do what it wishes.
You can’t be happy if you can’t restrain yourself, if you can’t overpower your desires.
In order to learn to restrain yourself, you must learn to separate the physical self from
the spiritual self and make the physical self refrain from what it wishes to do and do
what the spiritual self wishes. The physical being says, “I want to eat some more,” and
the spiritual being says, “You’ve had enough, stop.” The physical being says, “I want to
sleep some more,” and the spiritual being says, “get up.” The physical being says, “I want
to criticize someone,” and the spiritual being says, “no, don’t.” The physical being says, “I
want to take everything for myself,” and the spiritual being says, “Give to others.”
Only when you train the physical self to obey the spiritual self for many years, only
then will it become easy to restrain yourself from your desires. And a person who’s
accustomed to restraining himself from his desires, and can do it, has an easy and joyful
life in this world.
Every passion in the human heart begins as a petitioner, then becomes a guest, and
finally ends up the master of the house. Try to reject the petitioner; don’t open the door
to him.
488
Unfortunately, there’s nothing more stupid and ridiculous than the widespread
belief that activity, simply as activity without considering its nature, is an honorable
affair that deserves respect, and that idleness and inactivity is a shameful and almost
criminal state. The real question is under what conditions a person does nothing. One
person composes poetry from morning till evening while hundreds of people work to
fulfill his demands, and another person lives in the forest and does nothing, living off
the crusts of bread people give him. There’s no doubt whatsoever that the first person is
on a much lower moral plane.
In order not to commit evil acts it’s not enough to restrain yourself from the acts
themselves. You must learn to restrain yourself from unkind conversation and most of
all from unkind thoughts. As soon as you realize that a conversation is unkind—that
you’re mocking, condemning, or reviling another person—stop, quit talking and quit
listening. Do the same thing when unkind thoughts come to you: when you think badly
of your neighbor, whether it’s justified or not, stop and try to think of something else. If
you’d only learn to restrain yourself from unkind thoughts and words you’d have the
strength to restrain yourself from evil deeds.
489
People often decline to participate in harmless fun, saying that they don’t have the
time because they have business to attend to. However, without even mentioning that
good-‐spirited, cheerful fun is more important and necessary than many other activities
that busy people brag about, it’s often the case that it would be better that their business
never be done.
When you feel satisfaction with some harmless activity (you should never occupy
yourself with harmful ones under any circumstances) that is nevertheless unproductive
and even benign, remember that there are demands of your soul (your conscience) that
are more important than any satisfaction or activity, and that such activities should be
abandoned as soon as your conscience summons you to start a new one or to put the one
you’ve started aside.
490
May 25
Restraint in Word
We all know you have to treat a loaded gun carefully, but we won’t accept the fact
that you have to treat the spoken word the same way. A word can kill and do evil worse
than death.
He who talks a lot does little. A wise person is always afraid that his words will be
greater than his deeds. Therefore, he’s more usually silent and speaks only when it is
necessary for others rather than himself.
If you have time to think first before you speak, consider: is what you want to say
worth it? Is it necessary? Could it hurt someone? And most of the time, if you think, you
won’t speak.
There’s nothing more obviously harmful to a person of intellectual ability than the
temptation of witty deprecation of those close to him.
A witty insult is a corpse in sauce. Without the sauce you’d be revolted, but when
covered in sauce you don’t realize what you’re eating.
491
If you hear of a person’s bad deeds, never tell anyone else about them. Talk about the
good things you know of others. If people know about the many bad things other people
do, they’ll forgive themselves for their own bad deeds. If people hear only about other
people’s good deeds, they’ll try to imitate those good deeds and feel ashamed over their
bad ones.
There was a large assembly of people, more than a thousand, in a big theater. Right
in the middle of the performance some fool decided to have a laugh and shouted “fire!”
Everyone charged for the doors.
They all crowded together and crushed each other, and by the time they came to
their senses twenty people had been crushed to death and more than fifty had been
injured.
A single word can cause this much evil.
In the theater everyone could see the evil that a single stupid word caused, but it’s
often the case that the damage caused by a stupid word isn’t immediately noticeable as
it was in the theater, but gradually and inconspicuously creates even greater evil.
492
The best answer to a fool is silence. Every word you speak to a fool bounces back to
you. Repaying offense with offense is just putting more wood on the fire, but he who
meets his offender with peace has already defeated him with peace itself.
Muhammad and Ali once met a man who believed Ali had offended him and started
to insult him. Ali endured it all patiently and silently for quite a long time, but finally he
couldn’t restrain himself and began responding to the man’s insults with more insults.
Then Muhammad kept walking, leaving the two to finish their argument. When Ali
caught up with Muhammad, he said indignantly, “why did you leave me alone to endure
that insolent man’s insults?” Muhammad answered, “When that man was insulting you
and you remained silent, I saw ten angels answering him. When you started to insult
him back the angels left, so I did too.” Muslim Story
493
May 26
Restraint in Thought
No matter how hungry it might be, a cow, horse, or any animal won’t leave the yard
if the gates open inward. It will die of starvation if the gates are strong and it can’t break
them and no one opens them. It never thinks of backing away from the gates and
pulling them towards itself. Only man understands that you must be patient, labor, and
not to do what you feel like doing at the present time in order to achieve what you want.
Man can restrain himself from eating and drinking when he feels like it, he can endure
torment and suffering, he can deprive himself of sleep when he feels like sleeping simply
because he knows what he must do and what’s the right thing to do, and what’s stupid
and wrong to do. Man’s reason teaches him this, and this reason is more valuable than
anything else in man. You must preserve and cultivate this reason within yourself.
If we can’t restrain ourselves from an act we know is bad, it’s only because we
allowed ourselves to think about it first. We didn’t restrain our thoughts.
Incorporeal thoughts rush about in the distance. They quietly prowl deep within. He
who subordinates them to his will and restrains them is freed from their temptations.
Buddhist Wisdom
494
Our habitual thoughts color everything we encounter with their own particular hue.
These thoughts are false and they pervert significantly greater truths. Our habitual
thoughts appear to each of us as something stronger than the house we live in. We carry
them everywhere like a snail carries the shell it lives in. Lucy Mallory
People speak of moral or religious doctrines and about the conscience as if they were
two separate guides for an individual. In reality there is only one guide: conscience, the
consciousness of the voice of God that lives within us. This voice clearly decides for every
person what he should and shouldn’t do, and this voice can always be summoned within
every person through the power of thought.
495
A person can learn to read and write, but grammar doesn’t teach him whether or
not he should write a letter to a friend or a complaint about someone who’s offended
him. He can learn music, but music can’t teach him when he should sing or play and
when he shouldn’t. It’s the same with all activities. Only his reason can show him how
and when to act and how and when not to.
By giving us reason, God gave us the ability to discern what we need most of all. By
giving us reason, it’s as if He said to us: “In order for you to avoid evil and enjoy the
happiness of life, I’ve instilled a divine part of My Very Self within you; I gave you reason.
If you apply it to everything that happens to you then nothing in this world can obstruct
you or slow you down on the path I’ve designated for you, and you’ll never grieve about
your fate or other people, you’ll never start judging them or imitating them. So don’t
reproach Me for not giving you enough. Is it really not enough that you’re able to live
your life rationally, peacefully and joyfully? Based on a Passage by Epictetus
496
Fruits are born from seeds. In the same way, deeds are born from thoughts.
Just as bad fruit is born from bad seeds, so bad deeds are born from bad thoughts.
The way a farmer picks out the good, genuine seeds from the seeds of weeds, and out of
the good seeds he selects the best ones, saves them and looks them over again is how a
rational person behaves with his thoughts: he drives out the empty and bad ones and
holds on to the good ones, preserves them and sorts through them again and again.
If you don’t drive out bad thoughts and preserve the good ones, you won’t be able to
keep from doing bad things. Good deeds only come from good thoughts. Value good
thoughts and search for them in the writings of wise people, in sensible conversations,
and in yourself.
A fruitful prayer is the restoration in your consciousness of the memory of that
higher conception of the meaning of your life that you’ve attained in your very best
moments.
Great thoughts come from the heart. Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues
497
May 27
There is No Evil
Only when a person lives an exclusively physical life does suffering seem evil. If a
person considers his life the enlightenment of his spiritual self and freedom from sins,
then suffering becomes a blessing, because without suffering there can be no
enlightenment.
All that Providence sends to each creature isn’t simply useful to that creature; it’s
useful to it at the very moment it’s sent. Marcus Aurelius
Accept everything unpleasant that happens to you the way a sick person takes
medicine. Medicines are bitter and distasteful, but a sick person takes it happily and is
glad it exists. In the same way, be glad when trials and afflictions are sent to you,
knowing that they are of use to your soul.
Nothing can better show you how to create joy out of physical suffering and
humiliation better than the words of Francis of Assisi when he and his disciple
approached a monastery exhausted and drenched. He said that if they could stand at
the monastery gates in the rain while the gatekeeper showered abuse on them and still
maintain love for all people as well as the gatekeeper in their hearts, then they would
know perfect joy.
498
When a shallow-‐minded person thinks about the misfortunes that so mightily
oppress humanity, he often loses hope that life will improve and becomes dissatisfied
with Providence, which directs the order of the world. This is a huge mistake. Even if
Providence allots the most difficult path for us in our earthly lives, it is supremely
important that we be satisfied with our path so we don’t lose our courage amidst life’s
burdens and, most importantly, so we don’t dump all the blame on fate and lose sight of
our own guilt, which is the sole cause of all evil. Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
I cannot imagine anything that brings consciousness of the life of one’s soul as much
as when sufferings of the body are met joyfully.
Misery and suffering only torment a person who’s separated himself from the life of
the world and considers himself innocent, failing to see his own sins through which he
himself has brought suffering into the world. As a result, he rebels against the sufferings
he endures for the sins of the world that exist for his own spiritual benefit.
In order to recognize evil a person has to taste its fruit, i.e. not to learn with his mind
but with his back, to learn evil through experience, to bang on the walls that obstruct
the true path so that he can follow it.
499
Hopeless is the position of someone who blames fate rather than himself for his
adversities, and thereby maintains his self-‐satisfaction.
“We’d be kind and gentle if they wouldn’t tease us; we’d be pious if we weren’t so
busy; I’d be patient if I were healthy; I’d astonish the world if I were famous.”
If we can’t be kind and holy in the situation we find ourselves in, then we can’t be
kind and holy in any situation.
We’re placed in difficult situations so that we can resolve and overcome them with
our kindness and firmness. We’re placed in gloomy situations so that we can illuminate
them with the divine light of inner spiritual work. Sorrow is sent so that we can patiently
and trustingly endure it. Danger is sent so that we can exercise our courage.
Temptations are sent so that we can defeat them with our faith. Harriet Martineau
If you’re afraid of something, know that the cause of your fear is not outside you but
within you.
500
May 28
Life Exists Only in the Present
We aren’t busy enough in the present only because we grieve over the past and fret
over the future. The past is gone and the future doesn’t exist. There is only the present.
Good people forget the good they’ve accomplished. They’re so busy with what they’re
doing that they don’t think about what they’ve already done. Chinese Proverb
It’s a very common mistake to think that the present moment isn’t the critical,
decisive moment. Write in your heart that each day is the best day of the entire year,
each hour is the best hour, and each minute is the best minute. It’s the best because it’s
the only one that’s yours. Based on a Passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson
You ponder over how to live your life in the best possible way, but in order to live
your life in the best possible way you have to remember that your entire life is in the
present and try to act in the best possible way in each moment of the present.
501
We often say and think, “I can’t do everything I should under the conditions I find
myself in now.” This is quite unfair. Inner effort, which is the essence of life, is always
possible. You might be in prison, sick, or deprived of all possibility of external activity,
but your inner life continues: you can reproach, condemn, envy and hate others, and
you can replace these feelings with good ones. Every minute of your life is yours, and no
one can take it from you.
The longer a person lives, especially if he lives a good life, the more the meaning of
time and questions of the future lose their significance. The older you are, the faster time
passes, and questions of what will be become more and more trivial, while the question
of what exists right now becomes more and more important.
It’s amazing that the infinity of time and space is often presented as evidence of the
power of human reason, yet there’s no more obvious evidence of the weakness and
limitation of human reason than the fact that man cannot imagine anything outside
time and space, that very time and space which are in essence nonsense and contrary to
the demands of reason. Time is supposed to specify the limits of a sequence while space
specifies the limits on the arrangement of objects, yet in both cases there are no limits.
502
As soon as you begin to think about the future, you begin to guess. You get to the
point where, as soon as you start guessing, you believe in signs and oracles. To believe in
such things is the beginning of madness, and it can’t be otherwise, because it’s madness
to place your life in the future.
There is no before or after. That which will happen tomorrow is really already a part
of eternity. Angelus Silesius
We must honestly and impeccably fulfill the work assigned to us whether we hope
that someday we’ll become angels or believe that in the past we were slugs. John Ruskin
503
May 29
There is No Death
Live for the century and for the day. Work as if you’re going to live forever, and treat
people as if you’re going to die at any second.
In order to live without suffering you have to have hope for joy in the future. What
kind of hope for joy can there be, when there’s only old age and death ahead of us? How
can it be done? Like this: reckon your life not in physical but in spiritual blessings. Don’t
seek education, wealth and honor, but become kinder, more and more loved, free
yourself from your body more and more, and then old age and death will cease to be a
source of fear and misery, but rather the very thing you desire.
It’s terrible when a person who imagines his life is in his body sees that his body is
being destroyed, especially when he’s suffering as well. For a person who understands
that his life is in his soul, the destruction of the body is only the strengthening of the
soul, and suffering is a necessary condition of that strengthening.
504
I’m conscious of myself as gradually dying. What is this process of dying? Dying is,
in the beginning, the growth of lust that darkens consciousness, and then becomes
greater and greater understanding of the meaning of life, and in the end is the silencing
of lust and attainment of enlightenment. So all in all, the process of dying and mortal
life is nothing other than greater and greater enlightenment. I am conscious of this.
Therefore, in order to live according to the law of my life, according to its will, I must
believe that my life consists of this enlightenment.
Everything in life is simple and interrelated: one phenomenon explains the next.
Death is the only exception. Death is completely outside all this; it destroys it all, and
people generally don’t think about it. This is a major mistake. On the contrary, you have
to make death a reality so that your life contains a piece of the solemnity and
incomprehensibility of death and your death contains a piece of the clarity, simplicity
and comprehensibility of life.
505
The consciousness that’s most important and necessary for a religious life (and all
people have long known this) is consciousness that we’re not standing still and not
simply moving but flying somewhere with incredible speed. If you know and understand
this, you have a completely different relationship to life than someone who doesn’t. It’s
only when people forget this that they start grabbing onto all that’s flying by, trying to
hold onto it all with their hands. But you can’t grab ahold: your hands will be torn off.
You have to remember that we’re flying, not standing still.
We’re here like passengers on a huge ship, and the captain has a list of who gets off
when and where that we’re not privy to. As long as we’re still on the ship, we can’t do
anything but follow the rules of the ship and spend our time with our comrades in
peace, love and harmony.
Live as if you must say farewell to life at this very moment, as if the time you still
have is an unexpected gift. Marcus Aurelius
It’s as irrational to fear death as it is to wish for it.
Before I reached old age I tried to live well; in old age I’m trying to die well; in order
to die well, you have to die willingly. Seneca
506
May 30
After Death
People sometimes ask me what will happen to their soul after death. We don’t know
and we can’t know. One thing’s for sure: if you go somewhere you’ve certainly come from
somewhere else. It’s the same with life. If you’ve come into this life, then you came from
somewhere. From where or from whom you came, that’s where you’re going as well.
The body consists of walls that hold the spirit captive and keep it imprisoned. The
spirit continually tries to break free from these walls, and the entire life of a rational
person consists in tearing down these walls, in freeing the spirit from the prison of the
body. Death liberates a person completely. So for a person who lives a genuine life, death
is not only not terrible, it’s joyful.
Time conceals death. As long as you live in time, you can’t imagine its termination,
and death is the termination of time.
Everything is a blessing. All misfortunes reveal to us the divine, the immortal, and
the self-‐sufficient within us that form the foundation of our lives.
507
Old people lose their short-‐term memory, but memory binds what happens in time
into a single “self.” For an elderly person the self of this world is gone and a new one
begins.
This life is a transition from one form to another, and therefore it’s a renunciation of
a previous form and entrance into a new one. We have to create this new form. The life
of this world is raw material for the new form.
Our life is a constant creative process. We’re incessantly changing our form and
creating a new one. When this process of creation stops for a moment or even reverses
itself, destroying the existing physical form of our body, this only means that it’s
creating a new form that’s invisible to us. We see what’s outside of us, but we don’t see
what’s happening within us.
508
The more deeply you understand your life the less you’ll believe it’s annihilated by
death.
Even if I were mistaken in my belief that the soul is immortal, I’d still be happy and
content with my error; and as long as I were to live no one would have the power to take
away this certainty, which gives me the peace of complete contentment. Cicero
People say, “How can we live without knowing what awaits us?” However, as long as
you’re alive and think of the manifestations of love within you rather than what awaits
you, only then does true freedom and life begin.
509
May 31
Life is a Blessing
We can’t say that life isn’t a blessing, because we know of no greater blessing than
life. Therefore, if life doesn’t appear to be a blessing to you, the fault is yours, not life’s.
What are you rushing around for, you unhappy soul? You’re looking for happiness
and so you run here and there, but happiness is within you. It’s pointless to search for it
in other places. If happiness doesn’t dwell within you, you won’t find it anywhere.
Happiness is within you so that you can love everyone, not because of something and not
for the sake of something, but to live in the lives of all people rather than your own life
alone. Searching for happiness in the world without using the happiness that’s in your
soul is like going to a distant muddy pool for water when you live next to a fresh
mountain stream. Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
If a person is unhappy with his situation, he can change it in one of two ways: either
improve the conditions of his life or improve his spiritual state. The first isn’t always
possible, but the second is. Ralph Waldo Emerson
510
This world isn’t a joke or a vale of trials and a passageway to a better, eternal world.
It’s one eternal world among many: a splendid, joyful world and one in which we not
only can but must exert effort to make more splendid and joyful for ourselves and for all
those who will live in it after us.
If life doesn’t seem to you to be a great, unearned joy, this is only because you’re
reasoning incorrectly.
511
Know and remember that if a person is unhappy it’s his own fault, because God
didn’t create people so they could be unhappy but only for their own happiness. People
are only unhappy when they want what they can never have; they’re happy when they
want what they can. What can people never have even if they wish for it, and what can
people always have if they want it?
People can’t always acquire that which is outside their control: that which doesn’t
belong to them or that which others can take from them. None of this is within a
person’s control. People have control over only that which no one can take from them.
The first category contains all worldly happiness: wealth, honor, and health. The
second category is our soul, or spiritual existence. God gave us control over precisely
what we need most of all for our happiness because nothing, no worldly happiness gives
true joy but merely deceives. We find true joy only in exerting effort to get closer to God,
and this effort is within our control.
God is not our enemy. He behaves toward us like a kind father. He only withholds
from us that which can’t give us any happiness. Epictetus
512
A person begs others and God to help him. However, he can only help himself,
because his only help is in living a good life. And only he can do that.
That which we call the happiness and unhappiness of our animal self is outside our
control, but the happiness and ills of our spiritual self depend only on us: on our
submission to or defiance of the will of God.
You search for paradise, you want to be where there’s no suffering or conflict. Free
your heart, make it pure and bright, and you’ll already be in the paradise you’re looking
for.
513
June
June 1
Faith
A worker was living in town, but he finished the job he was hired to do and so he
headed home. On his way out of town he met a passerby. The passerby said, “Let’s travel
together. I’m going to the same place as you, and I know the road well.” The worker
believed him and they set off together.
They walked for an hour, then two, and it seemed to the worker that the road wasn’t
the one he took to town. He said, “I don’t think this is the road.” His companion said,
“This is the shortest road. Trust me, I know the way well.” The worker took him at his
word and followed him. And the further they went the worse the road became and the
more difficult it became to walk. And the worker spent and ate everything he’d earned
and he still hadn’t arrived at home. But the further he went, the more he believed that it
was the right road, and finally he convinced himself that it was. He convinced himself
because he didn’t want to turn around and go back, and was all the time hoping that
the road would lead him home. And so the worker ended up far from home and
penniless.
This is what happens to people who don’t listen to the voice of the spirit within them,
but instead believe the words of others about God and His law.
514
A person knows the law of God only when he does what he considers the law of God.
True faith doesn’t lie in knowing which days are fasting days or when to go the
temple to read prayers, but in living a good life in love with all and treating others as
you would yourself at all times, not just on holy days.
Don’t be afraid to discard all the unnecessary, physical, visible and tangible from
your religion. The more you purify your spiritual core, the more clearly you’ll see the true
law of life.
One thing is inescapably necessary: to surrender to God. Keep yourself in good order
and let God untangle the knot of the world and its fate. That which must be will be. That
which will be will be a blessing. In order to complete life’s journey, you need nothing
more than the knowledge that good is good and that you must accomplish it.
Based on a Passage by Henri Frédéric Amiel
Society can’t be good and rational without a common religion. Activity in such a
society will lie in the application of the foundations established by this religion. Where
there’s no common religion the will of the majority rules, and this consists of constant
fickleness and oppression of the minority. People can be forced to live without religion,
but they can’t be persuaded to live without it. Without religion the majority will become
tyrants, not mentors of society. Based on a Passage by Giuseppe Mazzini
515
You often see people sacrificing everything, even their lives, for the sake of
superstitions—duels, wars, suicide, religious fanaticism—but rarely see people who
spend their whole lives conforming to truth because it’s easy to give your life up under
the influence of hypnotism caused by the approval of the mob, but it’s very difficult to
uphold your confidence in the truth so much that you’re prepared to live only for its
sake.
When rainwater runs along troughs it seems to us that it flows from them. But the
water comes from the sky. It’s the same with the teachings of Christ and other wise, holy
people: it seems as though the teaching comes from them, but it comes from God.
Based on a Passage by Ramakrishna
516
June 2
The Soul
All people live through the spirit, but not everyone knows it. And when a person
doesn’t know it, he’s afraid of everything. But if a person begins to believe that his life is
in his soul he no longer has anything to fear, because no one can do any harm to a
person’s soul.
Not only can no one do any harm, but on the contrary, all that people living a
physical life consider evil is always a blessing for our souls, for it brings us closer to our
goal—and to perfection.
We have responsibilities to those close to us, and every person has a responsibility to
himself, to the spirit that lives within him. This responsibility is not to sully, not to
debase, not to silence this spirit but rather perpetually cultivate it.
Do what your body demands of you—attain glory, honor, wealth—and your life
will be a hell. Do what your soul demands of you—attain humility, mercy, love—and
you’ll have no need of any heaven. Heaven will be in your soul.
517
In all of life’s important questions we’re always alone and others can only very rarely
understand the true story of our life. The essence of our life’s story is our relationship to
the spirit living within us, our greater or lesser consciousness of it, and the attention we
pay to its dictates.
No matter where fate casts you, your essence, your soul, your life’s foundation,
freedom and strength will be with you. There are no external joys or greatness that are
valuable enough for a person to silence consciousness of this spirit within him, to
dissolve his union with it and to destroy the unity of his soul through an internal
disruption with himself.
Tell me what you would buy for the price of such a sacrifice? Marcus Aurelius
In order to understand the true meaning of things, you have to move from the seen
to the unseen, from all that is physical to the spiritual.
In order to see the true light as it is, you have to become a true light yourself. Angelus
Silesius
518
Our soul occasionally demands that we act to the detriment of our body in order to
obey some sort of incorporeal demand. At first this seems astonishing, but anyone who
has experienced it needs no further proof of the existence of their soul.
God said, “I was a treasure known to no one, and I wished to be known, so I created
man.” Muhammad
If someone doubts that life is something spiritual and that the body is merely an
essential condition of the spirit, then let him think about what his self is. Indeed, my self
is certainly not my body nor consciousness of my body in the present moment, but the
consciousness of everything that unites all my memories into a single whole. My body’s
sensations collect these memories, but it is certainly not my body that recognizes and
controls them.
519
June 3
One Soul in All
A person will find happiness only in serving those close to him, and he finds
happiness in service because by serving others he unites with the spirit that lives within
everyone.
It’s a tragedy when a person frees himself of ties with those around him and says of
another, “he’s a rotten, hopeless person,” and stops seeing him as his brother. Such a
person doesn’t just sever his ties with one other person but with all people.
Drive from yourself all that keeps you from seeing your bond with all that lives, and
search for that which strengthens and supports this bond.
There is no bad deed that will come back to punish the perpetrator alone. No one
can sequester himself from others enough to keep the evil within him from seeping into
everything. Our deeds, both good and evil, are like our children: they don’t live and act
according to our will but according to their own. George Eliot
520
Someone asked the English sage Channing what the most important part of Christ’s
doctrine was. He replied: “The most important part of Christ’s doctrine is his belief in
the greatness of the human soul. Christ saw God in humanity and therefore loved all
people, no matter who they might or might not be. Jesus didn’t look at the external in
man; the body was invisible to him. He saw through the robes of the rich and the rags of
the poor and perceived the soul of man and its spiritual, immortal nature. In the most
fallen, corrupted person he saw an essence that could transform into an angel of life,
that could become exactly what he was.”
A branch that’s broken off from its stem is separated from the entire tree. In the
same way, a person who’s in conflict with someone has separated himself from all
humanity. However, someone else’s hands break off the tree’s branch, while a person
himself breaks off relations with his neighbor through his hatred and malice without
realizing that he’s breaking off relations with all humanity. Marcus Aurelius
A person often fails to understand what he is. A person doesn’t understand himself
as long as he fails to understand what is in him, in all people, and in God. If a person
doesn’t understand this, how can he properly understand his own life? Krishna
521
June 4
God
In bad times you don’t feel God, you doubt Him. And salvation is always the same
and always reliable: think about nothing but God and His law and fulfill it—love
everyone—and your doubts will instantly disappear and you’ll find God again.
Even if a person doesn’t know he’s breathing air, when he’s suffocating he does know
that he lacks something he can’t live without. The same thing happens to a person when
he loses God, although he doesn’t know why he’s suffering.
We feel the absolute necessity of recognizing God most clearly when we reject Him,
when we forget Him.
I can’t understand God, but I know Him, I know the direction to him. In fact, of all
my knowledge, this is the most reliable.
Intellect that can be comprehended isn’t eternal intellect. A being that can be named
isn’t an eternal being. Lao Tsu
522
We don’t so much recognize God with our reason as feel ourselves under His
authority, much like the feeling a baby experiences when he’s in the arms of his mother.
A baby doesn’t know who’s holding him, who’s keeping him warm, and who’s
feeding him, but he knows that it’s someone, and moreover he knows that he loves the
one under whose authority he finds himself. It’s the same thing with all humanity.
If a person considers something great, it means that he’s not looking at things from
the heights of God. Angelus Silesius
That which is incorporeal within me I call the soul; that which is incorporeal in the
world I call God.
Why am I separated from everything else in the world, and why am I aware of
everything I’m separated from and at the same time feel that I’m just one part of it?
Why do I change incessantly? I can’t understand any of this, but I can’t help but think
that there’s a point to it all and I can’t help but think that there’s a being who
understands it all and knows why it all exists.
523
June 5
Life is Union
God’s will is that things be good not just for me but for everyone. And there’s only
one way for things to be good for everyone: everyone must want blessings for each other
rather than themselves.
If you ask someone who he is, no person could give an answer other than “I am me.”
And if all people are “me,” then this “me” is the same in all people. And so it is.
God lives in every person, and there’s no soul in which it’s impossible to awaken
consciousness of Him. Awakening this consciousness leads a person irresistibly to union
with God and humanity.
Although a person might be able to live without others physically, spiritually he can’t
live alone. His soul strives to unite with other souls and with the Source of all. Each
person is physically separated from others and from the Source of all, but he can’t be
separated spiritually. He’s conscious of himself as united with all beings and with the
Source of all.
524
In striving for superficial union with a select group of those they know, people often
destroy the one true inner union. By uniting into families, classes, nations and states
people merely erect indestructible barriers to true unity.
True unity can never be attained by preferring some people to others but only
through each person’s desire to achieve our Father’s perfection. Only this desire, which
destroys all artificial divisions of people, will bring all of us to true and indivisible union.
The more a person lives for his body, the less opportunity he has for companionship
and union with others. The life of each separate being consists of freeing itself from that
which separates it from others: from the flesh. The more a person recognizes this, the
easier it is for him to find companionship with all other beings in the world and the
more indestructible is the happiness of his life.
There’s no comfort either for a person who lives among people while seeking worldly
goals, or for a person who lives alone while seeking spiritual goals. Comfort only comes
when a person lives among people for the satisfaction of his spiritual demands.
525
June 6
Love
“And one of them, a legalist, testing him, asked him, ‘Teacher! What is the greatest
commandment in the law?’ Jesus told him, ‘Love your Lord God with all your heart and
all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the
second is the same: love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the law and all the
prophets are affirmed by these two commandments.’” Matthew 22: 35-‐40
To love God with all your heart and all your mind means to love the divine source of
life that gives life to you and all people.
When we love all people our souls feel a special joy and we fear nothing and desire
nothing. Why? Because love is God. And by loving we unite with Him and all that lives
in the world. How could we want or fear, when we’re one with God and the entire world?
A flower’s petals fall when the fruit begins to grow. In the same way, your weaknesses
will drop away when the consciousness of your spirit begins to grow within you.
Even if darkness filled all space for a thousand years, as soon as light penetrates it
space will become enlightened. In the same way, no matter how long your soul has been
consumed by darkness, it will become enlightened just as soon as your spirit opens its
eyes within you. Ramakrishna
526
He who demands of life nothing more than the betterment of his essence—moral
perfection in the sense of inner satisfaction and religious submission—surely fulfills the
purpose of both his own life and the life of all humanity and receives the blessings
available to all. Henri Frédéric Amiel
You can’t order someone to love. Love is an elevated manifestation of the soul, and
therefore nothing can call it forth. Love calls forth everything else. You can only love
God, and man has this ability. As soon as he’s free from temptations he involuntarily
loves God—truth, goodness, and love—more than anything else. This is why people
say: “Love God and your neighbor.” In other words, be kind to your neighbor because
you love God.
527
There is love of that which is greater than you, when you adore a beloved person.
There is also love, the most necessary kind of love, when you place yourself in another
person who’s suffering through compassion: the desire not to be that person and at the
same time the realization that you are in him. The first kind of love—love for the holy,
for the best people—can turn into envy but is easy for people to assimilate. The second
kind of love—love for the suffering—must be supported with all the strength of your
soul, so that it won’t turn into revulsion.
In the first kind of love we feel bad that we’re not like the one we love: we’re bad,
they’re good. In the second kind of love we feel bad that they’re not like us: we’re healthy
and whole and they’re sick and crippled; we’re good, and they’re evil.
In the latter case it’s particularly important to try to develop within yourself the
same feelings toward the spiritually ill—the corrupt, the deluded, and the proud (this
is particularly difficult)—that you have toward the physically ill: not to become angry
with them, not to argue with them, not to judge them, and if you can’t help them to pity
them even more than you pity the physically ill for the grievous spiritual mutilations
they bear and which are no easier, but even far more painful than physical ones.
528
A person loves others with true love not because he profits from it but because in love
he finds happiness.
Try to love those you didn’t love before, those who’ve criticized you, who’ve offended
you. If you can do this you’ll experience a new joyful feeling. Just as light is brighter after
darkness, so the light of love will burn more brightly and joyfully within you once you
free yourself from enmity.
Don’t worry whether or not others love you. Love them, and they’ll love you.
Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
529
June 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
You can never be sinless, but you can become less sinful with each year, each month,
and each day. This practice of becoming less and less sinful is every person’s true life
and true happiness.
Two women went to an elder for a lesson. One considered herself a great sinner. In
her youth she had betrayed her husband and continually tormented herself over it. The
other one, who had lived her whole life according to the law, didn’t reproach herself for
any particular sin and was satisified with herself.
The old man questioned the women about their lives. The first one tearfully
confessed her great sin. She thought her sin was so great that she didn’t expect him to
forgive her. The other one said that she wasn’t aware of having committed any
particular sins.
The old man told the first woman, “Servant of God, go and find me the largest stone
you can carry and bring it here. And you,” he said to the woman who didn’t see any
great sins in herself, “bring me as many stones as you can carry, all little ones.”
The women left and fulfilled the elder’s order. One brought back a large stone, and
the other brought back a bag full of little ones.
530
The old man looked the stones over and said, “Now do this. Take the stones back and
put them in exactly the same places where you found them, and once you’ve returned
them all, come back to me.”
The women left to fulfill the elder’s order. The first one easily found the place she
took the large stone from and returned it. The other woman couldn’t remember from
where she took each little stone, and so she returned to the elder with her bag, having
failed to fulfill his order.
The elder said, “This is how it is with sins. You easily returned the big, heavy stone to
its former location, because you remembered where you took it from. But you couldn’t
because you couldn’t remember where you took the little stones from.
“It’s the same with sins.
“You remembered your sin, endured the reproaches of people and your own
conscience, learned humility and thus freed yourself from the consequences of your sin.
“You, on the other hand,” he said to the woman who brought back the little stones,
“having committed little sins, forgot them, didn’t repent for them, became accustomed
to a life of sin and, while judging the sins of others, became more and more bound up in
your own.”
531
A child doesn’t yet feel his spirit within him, and so he doesn’t experience what
happens to an adult when two conflicting voices speak at the same time within him. One
says: consume what you have yourself. The other says: give it to him who asks. One says:
repay evil with evil. The other says: forgive. One says: believe what they say. The other
says: think for yourself. And the older a person becomes, the more often he hears these
two contradictory voices. One is the voice of the body; the other is the voice of the soul.
And it’s best for a person to wish for what the soul wants.
It’s bad when a person thinks he’s sinless and therefore doesn’t need to work on
himself, but it’s just as bad when a person thinks that he was born sinful and will die
sinful and so there’s no point in working on himself.
532
In the first part of life a person’s body alone grows, and so he considers himself
nothing but the body. Even when the consciousness of his incorporeal self awakens
within him, he still fulfills the desires of his body that contradict the desires of his soul,
and in this way harms himself, falls into error and sins. However, the longer a person
lives, the louder the voice of his soul speaks and the more the body’s desires and the
soul’s desires grow apart. Eventually the time comes when the body ages, grows weak
and demands less and less, while the spiritual self grows stronger and stronger. Then, so
that they need not recant their former lives, people who’ve become accustomed to
serving their body come up with temptations and superstitions that allow them to live in
sin for a time. However, no matter how people try to defend the body against their
spiritual self, the spiritual self is always victorious, if only in life’s final moments.
If you become infected with some sort of passion, remember that this passion isn’t
your soul, but something completely contrary to it, something that conceals your true
soul from you, and that you can free yourself from it.
533
June 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
People should learn from animals how to treat their bodies. As soon as an animal
eats enough to satisfy its body it settles down. No matter how much a person satisfies his
hunger, he keeps dreaming about more and more sweet foods and beverages.
If people didn’t dream about splendid homes, clothes, and food, all the world’s poor
would no longer be in need, and the rich would no longer fear for themselves and their
wealth and would no longer be envied and hated by the poor.
It would seem as though reason is what people need most in their lives, yet how
many fear not to smother this reason for the sake of pleasure with tobacco, wine and
vodka.
The ancient Greek sage Pythagoras didn’t eat meat. When someone asked the Greek
writer Plutarch why Pythagoras didn’t eat meat, Plutarch replied that it didn’t surprise
him that Pythagoras didn’t eat meat, but on the contrary it surprised him that there
were and continue to be people who have so many ways of feeding themselves with
grains, fruits and vegetables, and yet venture to capture a living being, cut its throat and
eat it.
534
If it remains only a body, as is the case with children, the body is unpretentious
and always happy with whatever it’s given. However, when reason comes to life within
the body but remains too weak to conquer it, the body becomes capricious, constantly
dissatisfied, and demands more and more.
It’s hard to imagine the beneficial transformation that would occur throughout
human society if people would stop intoxicating and poisoning themselves with vodka,
wine, tobacco and opium.
The reduction of your needs: that’s what you should develop in yourself and
strengthen yourself to achieve. The fewer needs you have, the happier you’ll be. It’s an
ancient but far from recognized truth. Georg Lichtenberg
535
June 9
The Sin of Lechery
The sexual instinct has been placed within man and all animals for a great purpose:
the perpetuation of the species. Therefore it’s a sin to think that this instinct was given to
us merely for our pleasure.
Just as people should learn from animals about abstention from food—to eat only
when you’re hungry and not to overeat once you’re full—so too should people learn
from animals about sexual relations. Just as animals do, you should abstain until
reaching maturity and enter into sex only when desire overwhelms you, and abstain
from it once a child is conceived.
As with everything in life, you shouldn’t aim for a variety of external goals in
marriage, but only one inner goal: to live well. And in marriage, more than in any other
affair, you must have no other goal than the one legitimate goal that justifies marriage:
giving birth to children and raising them.
536
Think ten, twenty, one hundred times before you marry. To bind your life to another
person in sexual union is the most significant and consequence-‐laden act, which only a
human being can perform.
If a person knows no other happiness than personal gratification for himself alone,
then infatuation will appear to be the pinnacle of happiness. However, once a person
becomes a Christian even to the most feeble degree and experiences love for God and his
neighbor, it’s impossible for him not to look down upon infatuation as a feeling from
which it would be best to free himself.
537
What should a young man and woman do concerning the sexual question? What
should guide them?
They should remain pure and aim for greater and greater chastity in thought and
desire.
What should a young man and woman do if they fall into temptation and their
minds are consumed with thoughts of aimless love or love for a particular person?
The same thing: they shouldn’t allow themselves to fall, remembering that such a fall
won’t liberate them from temptation but will only increase it, and continue to strive for
greater and greater chastity.
What should people do when they become overpowered in the struggle and fall?
They shouldn’t look upon their fall as a permitted pleasure the way people today
look upon it when they justify it through marriage, nor as a occasional treat that can be
repeated with others, nor as a misfortune when the fall happens with someone inferior
and without ceremony; rather, they should see their first fall as entrance into an
indissoluble marriage.
What should a man and woman who have entered into marriage do?
The same thing: they should work together toward liberation from lust.
538
It’s impossible for marriage to be a service to God and others. If people who’ve gotten
married think that through their marriage they’ll serve God and humanity by
continuing the race, they’re wrong. Instead of marrying in order to increase the number
of children, it would be much simpler for people to support and save those millions of
children who are perishing everywhere from need; and I don’t even speak of spiritual,
but physical nourishment.
539
June 10
The Sin of Parasitism
The most joyful labor is working the land.
What is the best food? That which you grew yourself. Muhammad
It’s unfair to take from someone more labor than you’ve given him. Since it’s
impossible to judge whether you’ve given someone more than you’ve taken, and
moreover since at any minute you could weaken and fall ill and will need to take while
you don’t have the strength to give, to be fair you must always try to work as much as
possible while you still have the strength.
Rich or poor, weak or strong, any person who doesn’t work is a scoundrel. Therefore,
it’s good for every person to be able to work. A poor person needs to work in order to
feed himself, while a rich person needs to work in order not to feel guilty all the time.
Based on a Passage by Jean Jacques Rousseau
540
In time, all people will recognize the truth that progressive people everywhere long
ago understood: namely, that a person’s greatest virtue lies in submitting to the laws of
the highest Being. “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” This is the first law we
recognize concerning ourselves. The second law is to cultivate the earth from which we
came and to which we shall return. A person understands and lives his life best of all
when he performs this cultivation and when he loves animals and plants as he should.
John Ruskin
One of the greatest advantages of a life of labor over a life of idleness is the
earnestness and firmness of thought of working people in contrast to the scattered,
motley and childish thoughts of those who sit idle.
There exists work that is unnecessary, bustling, audacious, angry, and which
interferes with others and draws attention to itself. Such work is worse than idleness.
Useful work is always quiet, measured, and unnoticed.
Cooking, sewing, cleaning, and tending to children are usually considered
exclusively a woman’s responsibility, and it’s even considered shameful for a man to do
these things. On the contrary, it’s shameful for a man, often an idle man, to spend time
with trifles or do nothing at all while a tired, often weak, pregnant woman strains
herself to cook, clean and nurse the children.
541
June 11
The Temptation of Wealth
A rich person lives badly both because he can never rest out of fear for his wealth,
and because the wealthier he becomes the more problems and work he faces. But the
main reason is that he can only associate with a handful of people who are as wealthy as
he is. He can’t associate with the rest of humanity, the poor. If he associates with the
poor, the sin of his wealth will become too apparent.
Wealthy philanthropists fail to see that what they fictitiously bestow upon the poor
they’ve ripped from the hands of those who are often even poorer.
If a person saves a drowning man only under the condition that the person he saves
gives him nearly all he owns, that’s quid pro quo. Since the drowning man values his life
more than his possessions, can we say that the person who rescued him is good?
Everyone says that the biggest scoundrel is someone who saves people only under such
conditions. However, this is how the possessions of all poor working people are taken.
For their labor and for their property the poor are merely given the means of
subsistence. Based on a Passage by Samuel Salter
The beggar is the necessary supplement to the millionaire. Henry George
542
You can’t establish the brotherhood of Christ where people are prevented from
respecting and loving one another by ignorance, poverty, slavery and debauchery on one
side, and culture, wealth and power on the other. Giuseppe Mazzini
Owing to a lack of self-‐confidence people go to great lengths to support the current
order of things. They become so befouled by material interests that they look upon
manifestations of the human soul as expressed in its relation to others only from the
point of view of their own material situation. Their respect is gauged by the wealth of
this or that person, and not a person’s inner dignity. However, a truly enlightened
person is ashamed of his possessions and his money out of respect for his rational self.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I see all around me a conspiracy of the wealthy, searching for personal profit under
the name and pretext of the common good. Thomas More
543
Men’s and women’s bodies, and even more so their souls, must not be bought and
sold. If this is true, then in the same way land must not be bought, for it is a commodity
essential for the maintenance of the human body and soul. John Ruskin
What will happen to poverty if every person searches first of all for the kingdom of
God and His truth? In other words, if every person willingly submits to the law of God
and directs himself toward the conscientious fulfillment of his responsibilities as defined
by this law?
Poverty is the daughter of injustice and covetousness; it is criminal contempt for
man’s holy responsibilities; it is such a collective and continual violation of man’s
responsibilities that in consequence of the terrible obscuration of our conscience we’ve
even become accustomed to the idea that poverty is a necessary condition of the order of
things. So, may Your Kingdom come, Lord; may a quarter of the human race not remain
naked; may the world not be home to enemies who hate and threaten one another, but a
home to brothers who rush to one another’s aid. Multiplying daily, the sons of God will
rally to destroy evil, tear down the temple of Satan and erect Your temple on its ruins.
Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
544
June 12
The Sin of Ill Will
You’ve heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. (Exodus 21:24). But I
tell you: Do not resist evil. If someone strikes your right cheek, offer him your left one.
And if someone takes you to court for your shirt, give him your jacket as well. And if
someone compels you to accompany him for one mile, accompany him for two.
Matthew 5:38-‐41
If one person can decide that he must do evil to someone in order to do good for
many others, then this other person can decide in the same way that he must do evil to
the first person in order to do good for many others. And so everyone will commit evil
against each other and consider themselves in the right: exactly what’s happening in the
world today.
If we could put ourselves in other people’s shoes, then we’d frequently rid ourselves
of feelings of hatred that we experience toward them, and if we’d put other people in our
place, our sense of pride would often diminish.
545
There’s no more just and rapid way to calm someone’s anger than to tell someone
who’s angry that the person he’s angry with “is truly unhappy!” For just as rain
extinguishes fire, compassion extinguishes anger. Let every person who’s inflamed with
anger toward another and has thoughts about causing him anguish realize that he’s
already done it and see this person suffering spiritually or physically, or in a struggle
with need and poverty, so he can say to himself: this was caused by my actions. If
nothing else can silence his anger, this can. Arthur Schopenhauer
There are people who love to get angry. They’re always busy with something and
always happy when they have a chance to interrupt someone who’s come to them on
some sort of business and insult him. Such people are very unpleasant. However, you
must remember that they’re very unhappy, because they don’t know the joy of a kind
disposition in their soul, and so you must not become angry with them, but rather pity
them.
546
A person is pitiable if he’s poorly dressed, cold and hungry, but you should pity a
person if he’s a liar, drunkard, thief, outlaw or murderer much more. The first person
suffers physically, while the second suffers in his soul, the most valuable thing in the
world.
It’s good to pity a poor person and help him, but it’s best to refrain from judging a
dissolute person and pity and help him instead.
By treating your neighbors the way they deserve to be treated we only make them
worse. By treating them as better than they really appear to be, we encourage them to be
better. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
547
June 13
The Temptation of Pride
A person’s true self is spiritual. And this self is the same in everyone. So how can
there be any inequality between people?
The main business of life is the improvement of your soul. A proud man always
considers himself perfectly good. How can he improve if he’s so good? This is why pride
is particularly dangerous. It interferes with a person’s main task in life: to become better.
A person can’t help but be right when he validates himself, his divine self, but when
with righteous confidence proper to his divine self he validates his animal, or his
vainglorious, or ambitious, or exclusive self, he’s appalling.
If a person loves himself alone, he certainly becomes proud.
Pride is merely love for yourself alone.
548
For many people, the word love has nothing to do with the meaning we all give to the
word love. For them, it’s not an act of kindness that gives happiness to both the lover
and the beloved. In the imagination of such people, who see their life in their animalistic
individuality, love is frequently the very feeling that causes a mother to deprive another
child of its mother’s milk by using its mother as a wet nurse for her own child; the
feeling that causes a father to steal the last crust of bread from a starving man to feed
his own children; the feeling that causes a man who loves a woman to suffer from his
love and causes the woman to suffer by tempting her, or to crush both of them through
his jealousy; it’s the feeling that causes some people of a single beloved brotherhood to
harm others in order to defend that brotherhood; the feeling that causes a person to
torture himself because of a “favorite” occupation and through this occupation cause
pain and suffering to all around him; the feeling that causes some people to hate seeing
their fatherland insulted and to cover the land with dead and wounded from their own
nation and others. These feelings aren’t love, because the people who experience them
don’t recognize the equality of all people, and without the recognition of the equality of
all people there can’t be true love.
549
“He who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who
loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37)
You say that out of love for your family, your children, and their lack of life’s
necessities you must act against your conscience. However, these acts against your
conscience, the acts of a father and educator of children, will harm your children far
more than any privation could.
For a Christian, family can never be used as a justification for unkind acts for the
simple reason that Christ never preached about the family and marriage.
The Wedding at Cana was no more a discourse on marriage than the tale of
Zaccheus was a discourse on tax collecting. The family is a consequence of the animal
life of man, and therefore its consequences must be dealt with in a Christian manner,
but it can never be a justification for further deviations from Christ’s teachings about
love for all.
550
We often judge people: we call one good, another evil, one we call stupid, another
brilliant. Yet, we can’t really do this: a person flows like a river. Each day he’s one thing
then another. He was stupid, and he’s become intelligent. He was evil, and he became
good, and vice versa. It’s impossible to capture a person as he truly is. You’ve condemned
him and he’s already someone else.
The temptation of pride can only be annihilated through recognition of the unity of
the spirit that lives in everyone. Once a person understands this, he can’t consider
himself or those he loves superior to or better than anyone else.
The lighter and more insubstantial an element is, the more space it occupies. It’s the
same with pride.
551
June 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
A person must serve one of these two: God or himself. If he serves God he must
struggle with sin. If he serves himself, there’s no need to struggle with sin. He only needs
to do what everyone else does.
The advantage of serving God over serving people is that when you serve people you
involuntarily want to appear in the best light and become upset if you appear bad.
Before God none of this happens. He knows you, who you are, and no one can praise or
slander you to Him, and so you don’t need to try to put on appearances but just be
better than you are now.
Looking over the history of humanity, every now and then we notice that the greatest
absurdities become undoubted truths for some people, that entire nations have become
martyrs to primitive superstitions and have humiliated themselves before mortals like
themselves who are often idiots or voluptuaries, whom they imagine to be God’s
representatives. We see that huge masses of people have placed themselves in slavery,
suffered and died of hunger so that people who live off their labor can have idle and
luxurious lives. And the reason for this hegemony of error has always been the desire to
follow public opinion, to do what the majority considers good rather than what your
own conscience demands.
552
Disrespect for tradition causes 1/1000th the amount of evil that’s caused by respect
for customs, laws, and institutions that have no reasonable justification in our day.
Just as love of food is an essential condition for a child’s development, vanity is a
necessary condition for development when a person gets older. However, both
conditions are placed in human nature far in excess of what is needed for a person’s
upbringing.
It’s good to be berated, but it’s even better to be useful, and both can converge. If you
censure people for their own good, you’ll be both berated and useful.
553
We can profit greatly from reprobation, and even more so if the reprobation is made
maliciously. Like sulphuric acid, which eats the impurities out of every cranny, a
malicious judgment draws attention to all that is vile within us and puts it on display.
You’d never notice it yourself, but malicious judgment lets you see your weaknesses.
Yes, how harmful is all praise, and how useful is condemnation when you’re able and
willing to make use of it.
A wise person mourns his inability to do the good he wishes to, but doesn’t mourn
the fact that people don’t know him or falsely judge him. Chinese Wisdom
554
June 15
The Temptation of Punishment
The study of love, not for the sake of recompense, not because it’s important for you
and for your soul to endure evil and to repay evil with good, but because only good can
stop evil, suffocate it, and keep it from going further. The true study of love is powerful
because it suffocates evil and prevents it from flaring up.
“Then Peter came forward and asked, ‘My Lord! How many times should I forgive
my brother who has sinned against me? Seven times?’ Jesus told him, ‘I do not tell you
seven times, but seven times seventy times.’” (Matthew 18:21-‐22.)
To forgive doesn’t mean to seek revenge or to repay evil with evil; it means to love. If a
person believes this then it doesn’t matter what his brother did; all that matters is what
he himself must do. If you want to correct a neighbor who’s in error, tell him briefly that
he’s acted badly. If he doesn’t follow your advice, don’t blame him, but rather blame
yourself for not being able to tell him properly, and no matter what don’t judge him.
Asking how many times you must forgive your brother is like a man who knows that
drinking wine is bad and has decided never to drink again asking how many times he
must refuse wine when it’s offered to him. If I decide not to drink, then I won’t drink no
matter how many times it’s offered. It’s the same with forgiveness.
555
Punishment is a concept which humanity has begun to outgrow.
Punishment attached to upbringing, the arrangement of society, or religious
consciousness not only fails to improve children, society and everyone who believes in
punishment beyond the grave, but has created and continues to create innumerable
disasters, making children callous, perverting society, and with the promise of hell
depriving virtue of its primary foundation.
Just as rulers consider man’s right to murder a proven fact, so do revolutionaries.
There are lines of reasoning according to which it’s possible to know precisely who to kill
for the general good.
For those who are neither rulers nor revolutionaries, these lines of reasoning can’t
help but appear strange simply because according to the same reasoning that rulers are
certain that it’s useful to kill revolutionaries, revolutionaries are certain that it’s useful to
kill many rulers, if not all of them.
556
People recognize power based on violence and submit to it because they’re afraid
that if there were no such power then evil people would harm good people and commit
outrages against them. The time has come for people to realize that this fear has no
basis. It has no basis because that’s precisely what’s happening now under
contemporary governments, where evil people continuously harm good people and
commit such outrages against them that it’s hard to imagine that violence and injury
could be worse without them.
If it’s fair to say that good people wish for an end to predation, cruelty, murder and
all the crimes that darken human happiness, then they need to understand and
remember that this can’t be achieved by war and retaliation. Everything gives birth to
that which resembles it, and as long as we oppose the violence and crimes committed by
evil people by means that aren’t completely antithetical to their way of behaving—as
long as we do as they do—we’ll merely incite, encourage, and foster in them the seeds of
the evil that we claim we want to eradicate. We’ll merely diversify the manifestations of
evil. Adin Ballou
Most esteemed by God is he who forgives someone who has done him wrong when
the wrongdoer is in his power. Muhammad
557
June 16
The Superstition of Violence
Only a person who doesn’t believe in God can believe that people who are just like
him can arrange his life so that it will improve.
The superstition that some people can arrange the lives of others, and arrange them
through violence, is particularly dangerous because those who become entranced by this
superstition cease to distinguish good from evil. Where it’s possible to turn people into
soldiers and order them to kill their brothers in order to arrange society well, there’s no
divine law and anything is possible.
558
Social life is based on consciousness, not science. If there’s no honesty, no respect for
truth, no respect for responsibilities, no love of one’s neighbor—in a word, if there’s no
virtue—everything is in danger, everything crumbles. There’s no societal organization
that can support a building that has no foundation. A state founded upon calculations
alone and held together by fear is a structure both foul and impermanent. The
foundation of any social structure is the common morality of the people and a sufficient
level of virtue, and its cornerstone is duty. Those who quietly fulfill this responsibility
and provide good examples with their deeds are the salvation and support of that
brilliant, unconscious light. Seven good men could have saved Sodom, but thousands
and thousands of good men are needed to save a people from depravity and death.
Based on a Passage by Henri Frédéric Amiel
There are no conditions that can cause murder to cease being the most foul and
blatant violation of the law of God, as expressed in all religious teachings and in the
conscience of every person. Nevertheless, murder is considered an essential part of every
governmental organization.
If people would wish to save themselves instead of saving the world, to free
themselves instead of freeing humanity, how much they would accomplish toward
saving the world and freeing humanity. Alexander Herzen
559
The more people believe that they can be led toward a change and improvement in
their lives by something external acting all on its own and separate from their will, the
more difficult it becomes to achieve this change and improvement.
A dreamer frequently predicts the future correctly but he doesn’t want to wait for it.
He wants to bring it closer through his own efforts. What nature requires thousands of
years for he wants to see accomplished in his lifetime. Gotthold Lessing
By fulfilling his inner purpose, by living for his soul, a person involuntarily aids in
the improvement of society in the best possible way.
560
June 17
The Superstition of Government
If a stranger were to come to you and say, “give me such-‐and-‐such amount of
money,” or, “on such-‐and-‐such a day abandon your family and all your work and wait
for my orders,” you’d never give him money or do all he ordered you to without asking
who this person was who’s ordering you and why you should do what he orders you to.
When government officials order you to do the same thing, you never ask who these
people are who are issuing orders and why you should do it, and you do all all you’re
told to without question. Why? Because within you is the superstition of government,
and you blindly believe in it.
If a person believes that God lives within him, he can’t believe that it’s possible to
arrange others’ lives through violence. And it’s terrible to say, but almost all people who
live under governments believe in the arrangement of others’ lives through violence and
therefore don’t believe in God.
It’s terrible to say, but it’s true and can’t be otherwise.
561
If once upon a time governments were needed for something, that time has long
since passed, and governments, especially the governments we have now, are simply
dangerous. Modern governments with their armies are reminiscent of the tale about the
watchman who remained stationed in the place where there once was a bench where a
long-‐dead empress used to sit when she went for a stroll.
Law is a relatively recent phenomenon; humanity lived through many centuries
without any written laws. At that time, human relations were regulated by simple
customs, traditions, and conventions; their antiquity instilled people with respect for
them, and each person assimilated them from childhood just as he learned to hunt for
food, raise cattle or grow crops. But once society began to divide itself more and more
into two antagonistic classes, where one sought to rule and the other sought to escape
the first party’s domination, yesterday’s conqueror hurried to make the status quo
permanent and sanctified it, using all that the defeated peoples were used to respecting.
Law appeared with the blessings of the priests and defended by force of arms. However,
its days are numbered. Everywhere you find people who don’t wish to submit to the law
when they have no idea where it came from, what its value is, and why they should
submit to it and respect it. Pyotr Kropotkin
562
This is what Machiavelli taught rulers concerning the fulfillment of their
responsibilities: “In reality, rulers have no need to possess . . . good qualities, . . . but each
of them without fail must pretend that they possess all of them. I say further: true
possession of these qualities is harmful to the personal happiness of a ruler, while the
pretence and facsimile of possessing them is extremely useful. So, it’s most important
that a ruler speak so that he appears merciful, truthful, philanthropic, religious and
sincere; to actually possess these qualities is harmless only in those cases where a ruler
with such qualities can silence them and behave in a completely contrary manner when
circumstances require it.
“No one could doubt that it’s impossible for rulers, especially those who have just
acquired power or who rule newly created kingdoms, to act in accordance with the
demands of morality. In most cases, to maintain order in a kingdom they generally have
to act against the laws of conscience, kindness, philanthropy, and even against religion.
Rulers must possess flexibility so that they can change their convictions to correspond
with circumstances and, as I said previously, remain on an honest path wherever
possible but where circumstances demand resort to dishonest methods.
“It’s particularly important that a ruler give the impression of piety. If he does so the
people, who for the most part only judge things superficially (since the ability to judge
things in depth is possessed only by a few), will be easily fooled. Hypocrisy is essential for
a ruler, since the majority judge things by how they appear, and only a very small
minority are able to distinguish appearance from reality; and even if this minority
understands the ruler’s true nature, they won’t dare to state their opinion, as it opposes
563
the opinion of the majority. They’ll be afraid of encroaching on the dignity of supreme
power that the ruler represents. Furthermore, since a ruler’s actions are never put on
trial, he’s judged by the results of his actions and not the actions themselves. If a ruler is
able simply to preserve his life and power, then any means he might use to achieve these
goals will be considered honest and praiseworthy.”
“When among one hundred people one rules over ninety-‐nine, it’s unjust, it’s
despotism. When ten rule over ninety, it’s also unjust, it’s oligarchy. When fifty-‐one rule
over forty-‐nine (and only theoretically, since in reality it’s once again ten or eleven of
that fifty-‐one), then it’s completely just, it’s freedom.”
Could there be anything more ludicrous in its obvious absurdity than such
reasoning? Nevertheless, this reasoning drives the main activities of all the reformers of
governmental organization.
If my soldiers started to think, not a single one would remain in my army.
Frederick II
564
How often you meet people who oppose war, prisons and violence, and at the same
time apathetically participate in the very acts they condemn.
If a person of our time wishes to live a moral life, he can’t study the goals and results
of the apparently innocent acts he performs closely enough. For example, when eating a
cutlet he should know that this cutlet is the body of a murdered lamb, ripped from its
mother; and if he receives a salary in an arms factory, or for service as an officer, or as a
tax collector, he should know that he receives money for his participation in
preparations for murder or in the theft of the fruits of the labor of the poor, and that
participation in these deeds is a foul and immoral activity, even though it’s disguised.
In our age the greatest and most harmful crimes aren’t those that are committed
occasionally, but those that are committed every day without being recognized as crimes.
Don’t console yourself with the idea that you’re not a persecutor or murderer
because you don’t see the people you persecute and murder and you have many friends
who act the same as you do. You can say “I’m not a murderer or persecutor” only until
you learn where the money in your hands comes from. Once you find out, there can be
no justification—not before people, for you can always justify yourself before others—
but before your conscience.
565
June 18
The Superstition of the Church
The only law that can truly be God’s law is one that is the same for all people.
Believe in God, serve Him, but don’t try to know Him. You’ll get nothing for your
labors except confusion. Don’t even worry about whether He exists or not; serve Him as
if He always was and is everywhere. Philemon
One of the superstitions that most confuses our metaphysical knowledge is the
superstition that the world was created, that it came out of nothing and that there’s a
Creator-‐God.
Actually, we have absolutely no basis for the concept of a Creator-‐God and no need
for one (the Chinese and Indians don’t have this concept); additionally, the concept of a
Creator-‐God and guardian is incompatible with the Christian God the Father, God the
Spirit, a part of which lives in me and constitutes my life, which I must evoke and
display in order to fulfill the meaning of my life: the God of Love.
The Creator-‐God is indifferent and permits suffering and evil; God the Spirit rescues
us from suffering and evil and is always perfect goodness.
There’s me, recognizing the world using the tools of sensation that were given to me
and knowing God the Father within me, but I do not and cannot know a Creator-‐God.
566
They say that God created man in His image, but rather one should say that man
created God in his image. Georg Lichtenberg
Someone who performs an act that in and of itself has no moral significance in an
attempt to draw merciful God’s attention directly upon himself and thus attain his
desires is mistaken in his belief that you can achieve supernatural results through
natural means. Such efforts are normally called witchcraft, but since witchcraft is
connected with an evil spirit and these efforts are performed with good intentions—
despite the fact that they’re irrational—we call them superstitions. Only in the mind of
an irrational person can man have a supernatural influence on God for the simple
reason that no one knows if such acts please God. If instead of acting spontaneously to
gain of God’s blessings, i.e. instead of behaving well, a person tries to make himself
worthy by using certain formal methods and appealing to supernatural assistance,
thinking that he’ll make himself more receptive to moral rectitude and be more likely to
achieve his good intentions by fulfilling rituals that have absolutely no immediate value,
then he’s counting on something supernatural to supplement his natural weakness.
Such a person, believing that acts that have no moral value and are not worthy of God
can act as a means or a condition for the fulfillment of his wishes directly from God, is
wrong in thinking that he can conjure supernatural Divine aid for himself through
professions of faith and the fulfillment of various church rituals that have nothing to do
with morality and which are accessible to the foulest person who possesses neither
physical nor moral rectitude. Immanuel Kant
567
When we want to sincerely discuss an important matter with someone, we try to
speak to him one on one so that no one can distract us or interfere with us. So how can
we talk with God when we’re among people? Among people it’s difficult to escape empty
talk. We lose our train of thought and worry about what they think of us, especially
when people gather on a holy day. This is why it’s said in the Gospels:
“And when you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites, who love to pray in the synagogues
and on street corners in order to show off before the people. Truly I say to you: they’ve
already received their reward. When you pray, go into your room and lock your door,
and then pray to your Father secretly, and your Father, Who sees what is hidden, will
reward you.” (Matthew 6:5-‐6)
Prayer is simply reminding yourself who you are and what the purpose of your life is.
You can remember and think about this only when you’re alone and nothing
external distracts you. If you can’t gather your thoughts, it’s best not to pray, simply
repeating words with your tongue alone.
If you pray, you’re doing it for yourself alone. So don’t think you’re pleasing God.
Only obedience to God pleases Him.
568
There is evil in the world because people don’t believe in the eternal law of life that’s
inherent upon everyone. The reason they don’t is because from childhood some people
have told them that Christ was born of a virgin, others that Muhammad flew into
heaven, and others that there are three Gods and so on, and that this is the essence of
faith.
When people realize that these are all empty fabrications they reject faith entirely,
not realizing that these fabrications merely conceal the truth, and not being able to
discern faith on their own they remain without any faith at all, and instead of the
eternal, universal law of life they only recognize human laws.
They say that true believers constitute the church. We can’t say whether there are
any true believers or not. Each of us wants to be a true believer and each of us tries to
become one, but no one can say of himself or others who believe just as he does that they
alone are true believers, because if one group of people can say that they’re the true
believers, other groups can say the same thing.
569
Humanity is slowly but indefatigably moving forward toward an increasingly clear
consciousness of the truth concerning the meaning and purpose of life and the
establishment of life in harmony with this clarified consciousness. Therefore, a person’s
understanding of his life and the life of humanity is constantly changing. People who
sense the truth better than others in accordance with the higher light that appears in
them establish their lives in harmony with this light. Those who are less conscious of the
truth cling to old ways of understanding life and old ways of living and try to maintain
them.
So in the world there are always people who try to maintain an archaic,
anachronistic understanding of life and old patterns of life that are no longer useful
alongside those who point out a new, progressive expression of truth and try to live
according to it.
Of all religious deceptions the cruelest is the inculcation of false faith in children.
This happens when a child asks those older than him, who’ve lived prior to him and who
have the ability to recognize the wisdom of those who came before them, about the
world, life, and the relationship between the two, and they tell him what people thought
a thousand years ago, things that no adults believe or can believe anymore. Instead of
giving him the necessary spiritual nourishment he asked for, they give him poison that
ruins his spiritual health and from which he can recover only with the greatest efforts
and pains.
570
June 19
The Superstition of Science
It’s neither shameful nor harmful not to know something. No one can know
everything. But it’s shameful and harmful to pretend you know something you don’t.
If everything that’s called science were true then all sciences would be useful. But
since people’s empty arguments often pass for science, we must carefully distinguish
that which should be studied from that which shouldn’t.
It’s not the quantity of knowledge that’s important, but the quality. You can know a
lot without knowing what you most need to know.
When a true scholar understands the demands of reason he endeavors to bring
them to fruition. When an average scholar hears of the demands of reason he sometimes
fulfills them, and other times he doesn’t. When a bad scholar hears of the demands of
reason he sneers at them. If some people didn’t sneer at reason, it wouldn’t be reason.
Lao Tsu
571
In Germany, the study of the natural sciences has finally reached the point of
absurdity. Even though for God an insect and a human are of equal value, our reason
doesn’t see it this way. There’s so much man must put in order before he can reach the
birds and moths. Study your soul, teach your mind care in judgment, teach your heart
serenity. Learn to recognize man and arm yourself with the courage to speak the truth
for the benefit of those close to you. Sharpen your mind with mathematics if you find no
other means to do so, but beware of the classification of insects and such superfluous
knowledge that’s completely useless and literally goes on forever.
“But” you say, “God is eternal in the insect, just as He is in the sun.” I readily agree.
However, He is immeasurable in the sands of the sea, the variety of which no one has yet
systematized. If you don’t feel any particular calling to find pearls where this sand lies,
then stay here and cultivate your own field, for it demands all your attention.
Furthermore, don’t forget that your brain’s capacity is limited. In the place where you
keep some story about a butterfly you might have found space for the thoughts of sages
that could inspire you. Georg Lichtenberg
572
We expect a teacher to turn his student into a sensible person, then a rational one,
and finally into a scholar.
This method has the advantage that, even if a student never reaches the final stage
(as is usually the case in practice), he still benefits from his studies and becomes more
experienced and intelligent, if not for academia, then for life.
If this method gets turned inside-‐out, then the student gets ahold of something
resembling reason before he develops sound judgment and takes away from his
education derivative knowledge that’s merely been glued to him, so to speak, but has not
taken root within him. Meanwhile, all his spiritual abilities remain as fruitless as they
ever were, but are now terribly spoiled by his imaginary education. This is the reason
why we frequently meet scholars (more precisely, people who’ve been trained) who
display very little intelligence, and why more empty heads come out of the academy than
from any other social class. Immanuel Kant
With all people of our day who turn to science with straightforward, simple
questions concerning life rather than for the satisfaction of idle curiosity or to play a role
in science by writing, debating, and teaching, it often happens that science provides
answers for thousands of different, very clever and wise questions, but gives no answer
to the one question for which every reasonable person seeks an answer: the question of
who I am and how I should live.
573
Exposing a lie is far more beneficial than clearly expressing the truth.
It’s better never to read a single book than to read many books and believe
everything that’s written in them. You can be intelligent without ever having read a
book, but if you believe everything that’s written in books, you can’t help but be a fool.
574
June 20
Effort
All human affairs can be divided into two categories. One type of affair is such that a
person doesn’t and can never know if any value will come out of what he does. The other
type is such that a person knows well what the result will be, why he’s doing it, and that
no one can stop him.
When a man sows wheat he doesn’t know if it will end up in his hands, if hail will
destroy his harvest, or if a drought will make it whither. He builds a house and doesn’t
know if he’ll live in it or if the house will burn, or if he’ll need to sell it. He herds cattle
and doesn’t know if he’ll make any profit from them or if he’ll lose them all. He doesn’t
even know if he himself will be alive tomorrow. Today he’s alive and well, but tomorrow
he might fall ill and die.
But no one and nothing can stop a person from working on learning how to love
people, how to be kind, how to live a good life, and how to fulfill God’s Will. No matter
what happens to a person, if he’s busy with these matters and keeps working on them,
he’ll continue to succeed more and more.
What sort of affairs should a person exert more energy on: worldly affairs or his own
soul?
575
True life consists in becoming better, living for your soul, and coming closer to God.
This doesn’t happen all by itself; it requires effort. And this effort gives joy.
When a person does good because he’s used to doing good, he’s not yet living a good
life. A good life only begins when a person exerts effort to be good.
A person should know that every effort he makes to free himself from sins,
temptations and superstitions will always bear fruit, not just for him but for the life of
the world. So every person should know that without effort the Kingdom of God, which
every human heart longs for, will never arrive.
A person’s virtue isn’t measured by his extraordinary acts, but by his daily effort.
Blaise Pascal
He who places his life in the light of awareness and serves it in order to avoid
reckless situations in life will never know the torments of conscience, will never fear
solitude, and will never chase after the bustling crowd. Such a person lives a higher form
of life and neither runs from people nor chases after them, for he has sufficient work—
joyful work—within himself. He’s not concerned whether or not his spirit will be
imprisoned in its carnal shell for long. He has one concern: to free himself from the evil
within him and to live rationally in his associations with others in this world.
Marcus Aurelius
576
No matter how far a person has fallen, he can always see the perfection toward which
he must direct himself and can always grow closer to it.
A good life can only be lived by a person who constantly thinks about it.
A person must develop his potential for good. Providence didn’t place it within man
in a ready state; it’s merely potential. To make oneself better, to work on oneself, that’s
what a person must aim for and achieve. Immanuel Kant
Fight for truth all your life and God will fight for you. The Book of the Wisdom of
Joshua the Son of Sirach, 4:322
2
4:32 refers to the Russian text. In the English version of Wisdom of Joshua, this saying
is verse 28 of Chapter Four.
577
June 21
Self-‐Renunciation
The more a person renounces his physical self, the more the God within him is
revealed. The body conceals God in man.
Learn to see good in all people except for yourself, and likewise learn to judge
yourself and no one else.
You can’t force yourself to love. You can only cast aside that which interferes with
love. What interferes with love is love for one’s physical self.
The ability to renounce oneself is the only faithful guide for the limited yet rational
and free human being. Only self-‐renunciation creates the possibility of acting in a truly
moral fashion. Without self-‐renunciation there’s nothing within a person that raises
him above the animals other than the tragic ability to become lost in confused
rationalizations and an undisciplined mind.
Based on a Passage by Jean Jacques Rousseau
578
Self-‐renunciation is valuable, necessary and joyful only when it’s religious, when a
person renounces himself, his body, in order to fulfill the will of the God that lives within
him.
If a person understands his purpose but doesn’t renounce his personal self, he’s like
someone who’s been given the keys to the inner rooms of a house but not the key to the
doors leading outside.
There are people who consider it their right to expect an immediate reward or a
word of gratitude as soon as they do something good for their neighbor. Others,
although they don’t count on an immediate reward, still consider the people they did
something good for indebted to them. However, truly good people don’t expect rewards
for their good deeds and don’t remember them. They don’t forget them because they
don’t want to remember them but because they do good deeds for their soul. They forget
about their good deeds the way an ordinary person forgets about his breathing.
Just as a good fruit tree produces its fruit and gives it to anyone who passes, so good
people are ready to serve anyone they meet simply because they feel joy in service.
579
While a person’s alive, he’s like a rain cloud: it pours water onto meadows, fields,
forests, gardens, ponds, and rivers. When a rain cloud pours out its water, it refreshes
and gives life to millions of grasses, grains, bushes, trees, and then becomes bright,
transparent and quickly disappears. It’s the same with the life of a good person: he helps
many, many people, makes their lives easier, points them in the right direction, comforts
them and, becoming radiant, he dies and goes to where there is only the eternal,
invisible and spiritual. It’s good to understand this.
Self-‐renunciation is the rejection of the egoism of your physical self and the
affirmation of the egoism of your spiritual self.
580
June 22
Humility
Man’s blessing is in brotherly, loving union with others. Pride interferes with this
union more than anything else. Only when a person is humble can he treat all people in
a familial, loving manner.
The more a person is satisfied with himself, the more dissatisfied he is with others
and with what happens to him, and because of this he estranges himself from a good
life. In contrast, the more humble a person is, the more dissatisfied he is with himself,
the more satisfied he is with people and all that happens to him, and the better his life
is.
A person who’s in love with himself has few rivals. Georg Lichtenberg
A wise man was told that people considered him a bad person. He said, “It’s good
that they don’t know everything about me or they would have said much more.”
581
When you meet a bad person, don’t think about how you’re better than him, but
how within you are the same bad qualities you see in him and maybe something even
worse.
Only someone whose heart is humble can recognize the truth. Humility doesn’t
awaken envy.
The flood washes away the trees, but the reeds remain.
A wise man once said, “My child, don’t grieve if people don’t value you, because no
one can take away from you what you’ve accomplished or give you what you haven’t. An
intelligent person is satisfied with the respect that he deserves.”
Be benevolent, respectful, friendly, concerned with others’ interests, and happiness
will come to you as naturally as water flows downhill. Vishnu Purana
Pride is the opposite pole of humility, but even before a person reaches pride the
absence of humility deprives him of spiritual joy and recompenses him for this
deprivation with nothing but disappointment.
582
A wise man was asked: “What can a person do to increase his virtue, correct his
shortcomings and be able to see the mistakes of his mind?”
The wise man answered: “An excellent question. In order to increase your virtue, you
have to place your responsibility to do what you must above all else and never think
about the benefit that might come from it. In order to correct your shortcomings, you
have to stop thinking about others’ shortcomings. In order to see the mistakes of your
mind, you have to be humble and not trust yourself.” Chinese Wisdom
It’s impossible to consciously be humble. There’s only one way to be humble: don’t
think about yourself, but rather think about service to God and others.
A worker does his job well only after he understands his position. Christ’s teaching
takes possession of a person only after he clearly understands that his life belongs not to
him but to the One Who gave it to him and that the goal of his life isn’t in man but in
the will of Him Who gave it to him. Therefore, a person can do nothing great. He can do
evil by not fulfilling His will, but if he fulfills it he merely does what he should.
583
June 23
Honesty
If people tell you that you don’t need to reach the truth in all affairs because you’ll
never find the complete truth, don’t believe them and beware of them. They’re your
worst enemies.
They only say this because they don’t live by the truth and they know it, and they
want others to live as they do.
Love truth and hold up everything you’re taught to the truth. This is the only way to
avoid the terrible deeds caused by the superstitions of the church, government and
science.
People who realize that they don’t live according to the truth frequently concoct ways
to construe their bad lives as good. Such people cease to understand the difference
between truth and falsehood.
The worse people’s lives are, the more they surround themselves with external
affectations: fine clothes, temples, palaces, parades, social events, church services,
processions, séances, and speeches. Don’t fall for any of this and know that all such
external affectations serve only one purpose: to conceal lies.
584
Every person can and must use all that’s been developed by the collective reason of
humanity, but at the same time he must confirm the material that’s been developed by
humanity with his own reason.
A person is divine to the same degree that he’s honest. The invulnerability,
immortality and greatness of divinity come to a person along with honesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It would seem that the more tangled a person’s life is, the more he needs to rely on
his reason to find a way out. In real life it turns out the other way around: a person who
feels all the complications of his life but doesn’t know how to sort them out turns to the
people around him for the answer. These people tell him, “The main thing is not to
think, and if you can’t stop thinking, drink.”
585
People often make the mistake of assuming that the lower ability of the human
mind, which acts only in the realm of physical and temporal phenomena, is the primary
means of understanding that can solve all questions, including the question of a
person’s inner spiritual world. However, the thought process of the mind is a lower form
of activity that can’t see anything outside the temporal and spatial conditions that
conceal the essence of things from man. Therefore, those who make this mistake have a
conception of life that is always false, unclear, contradictory and complicated. A person’s
conception of life can be correct only when he realizes that the knowledge that reveals to
him the truth outside spatial and temporal phenomena is the foundation of his
knowledge. In fact, all knowledge begins with this knowledge.
586
Be your own lamp, be your own guard, be your own refuge. Let truth be your light.
Let truth be your refuge. Find your support in truth alone. Buddhist Suttas
The more necessary something is, the more harm it can cause if abused. The majority
of human disasters are a result of the abuse of reason.
The truth is brief; a lie is always long-‐winded.
587
June 24
Restraint in Word and Deed
In order to respect others as much as yourself and act toward them the way you’d
like them to act toward you—and this is the main point of life—you have to control
yourself. And in order to possess self-‐control, you have to make a habit of it.
Never praise yourself, never judge, and never argue.
According to the teaching of Lao Tsu, the greatest good is inaction. This is a great
truth that people too often forget. If we’d understand this lesson’s obligatory nature,
we’d realize that you can’t start doing good while you’re still committing evil that’s
directly opposed to the good you wish to perform. For example, a landowner can’t help
starving people; a king, ruler, or military man can’t oppose murderers and violence; a
person who spreads religious superstitions can’t establish faith among the people, and
so on.
We’re so accustomed to evil that the spot where good hasn’t yet begun but where
there’s no evil either is for each of us the first milestone on our path to the ideal we must
strive for. And the most terrible evil of all is the fact that people, filthy up to their ears in
evil and yet imagining that they can do good for others, don’t exert the slightest effort to
drag themselves out of that evil.
588
The importance of self-‐restraint in speech can be seen by the fact that if you relate
the truth with anger or passion you won’t convince anyone no matter how obvious to
you the truth you’re relating is. Relate the truth with kindness and the stupidest person
in the world will understand you.
Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction of your desires (in merrymaking, in luxury),
if not with the intention of completely rejecting all such things, then from the desire to
give yourself the ability to be forever happy. By deferring pleasure, this frugality in
relation to life will make you truly richer.
As with everything ideal, the consciousness that satisfaction is in your power is
vaster and more fruitful than any feeling of satisfaction gained through enjoyment,
because when the source of the satisfaction disappears so does the feeling.
Immanuel Kant
It’s good to agree with a friend that you’ll part as soon as one of you starts criticizing
someone close to you. If you don’t have such a friend, make that agreement with
yourself.
589
No matter how thin and transparent a lie that emerges from the contradiction
between our life and our consciousness might be, although it becomes thinner and more
diffuse it never disappears. It continues on, binding us to our current state and keeping
us from achieving new ones. Just as you need electricity to transform a compound from
gas into liquid and not just the mixture of the gases, it’s obvious that you need
something more than the external, unconscious flow of events in order to achieve the
revolution for which humanity is prepared. This something more is simply not doing
that which you consider wrong.
When the soul sleeps or rests, the body involuntarily submits to the feelings that the
actions of those around it evoke. If people yawn, it yawns; if people get excited and
angry, then it gets excited and angry; if people are moved to tears, it starts crying too.
This involuntary submission to external influences is the cause of evil acts that
contradict the demands of your conscience. Be on guard against such external
influences and don’t submit to them.
590
June 25
Restraint in Thought
Don’t think that only certain extraordinary people can be wise. All people need
wisdom, and so therefore all people can be wise. Wisdom is knowing what the business
of life is and how to fulfill it. In order to understand this, only one thing is needed: to
understand that thought is a great affair and, therefore, to think.
In order turn a bad life into a good one, first of all you have to try to understand how
your life became bad and what you need to do to make it good. So in order to make your
life better first of all you have to think, and then act.
We can attain wisdom by following one of three paths. The first, the path of
experience, is the hardest. The second, the path of imitation, is the easiest. The third, the
path of reflection, is the noblest. Confucius
It doesn’t matter whether it’s expressed or not, every thought a person dwells on will
without fail either poison or aid his life. Lucy Mallory
591
If when looking back on your life you notice that it’s become better, kinder, and freer
from sins, temptations and superstitions, then know that you are indebted only to work
on your thoughts.
We think our lives are good or bad based on what happens to us: whether or not the
wheat grows, whether or not our house burns down, whether I’m healthy or ill, whether
or not I received an advantageous position or an inheritance. However, this is wrong.
Our lives are good or bad only based on what’s happening in our souls. If there are
evil thoughts in a person’s soul, then his life will be bad. A bad life follows bad thoughts
as surely as the wheels of a cart follow a horse.
If there are good thoughts in a person’s soul, joy will follow him like a shadow. If a
person recalls insults, is envious of another’s happiness, or is easily angered, his life
cannot be joyful.
If a person thinks in his soul about someone who’s offended or robbed him like this:
“he offended me, he degraded me, he robbed me, but that’s his affair. My affair is to love
God and people,” his life will always be joyful.
592
The source of every sin is in your thoughts.
Wisdom is achieved through inner work in solitude and the same work on yourself
when in the company of others.
When a person clearly understands his place in the world, then the mood of his soul
becomes tranquil. When the mood of his soul becomes tranquil, all spiritual agitation
ends. When spiritual agitation ends, his soul becomes completely peaceful. A person
who possesses indestructible spiritual peace is suited to work on his thoughts. Such a
person is receptive to all that is true and proper. Confucius
At the pinnacle of his consciousness, a person is alone. This solitude can be difficult.
Irrational people save themselves from the weight of this solitude through idle
diversions, and so they immediately descend from that pinnacle to a lower place. A
person living a spiritual life holds his place on this height by union with God and
communion with Him: prayer.
593
June 26
There is No Evil
If we believe that our true happiness consists of becoming better and better, then
nothing that we call evil, none of our sorrows and sufferings can deprive us of our
happiness, because our sorrows and sufferings can’t interfere with our becoming better.
Quite the opposite: sorrows and sufferings almost always help people become better.
How wonderful is the old proverb that God sends suffering to the one He loves. For
someone who believes it, suffering isn’t suffering at all but a blessing, because it frees
him and brings him closer to God.
What’s better: to submissively bear suffering that’s been sent to you, to suffer for
your own sake, for the benefit of your soul, or to imagine a person who’s the cause of
your suffering and condemn him? How often people choose the second course, and in so
doing deprive themselves of the beneficence of suffering, rendering it intolerable.
594
People say, “Senility, the return to childishness, is the annihilation of a person’s
conscious life.”
I recall a story about John the Apostle after he fell into senility. According to the
story, all he kept saying was, “Brothers, love one another!”
A one-‐hundred year old man, barely able to move, with tears streaming from his
eyes, would only mumble the same three words over and over, “Love one another!” In
such a person the animal dimension of his existence barely glimmers, for it’s been
entirely consumed by a new attitude toward the world, a new living being that can no
longer fit in a human body.
For a person who sees life as it truly is, speaking about the decline of life due to
illness or old age and lamenting over it is like a person who’s come into the light
bemoaning his shadow’s disappearance as he draws closer to the sun’s rays.
People grow only through trials. It’s good to know this and accept the troubles that
befall us with this in mind, to relieve the weight of our cross by gladly placing it on our
back.
595
The sufferings of animals, children, and people who refuse to submit to suffering are
pitiable. A rational person can always reduce if not completely annihilate the power of
suffering with the thought that suffering is necessary and that there isn’t a single joy
that suffering doesn’t lay the foundation for: rest and joy after labor, the feeling of
health after illness, the taste of food after hunger. Joy inevitably follows every hardship.
In the same way, the sufferings of a person approaching death are followed by the joy of
the peace of death. We only complain about suffering when we fail to see the happiness
that awaits us.
Illness weighs us down, but illness is an essential, beneficial condition of life, for
illness is our only preparation for death and the transition to another life (or if not the
only one then one of the most important common conditions that prepare us for death).
Therefore it is sent to children, adults and the elderly alike, because people of all ages fall
ill in the face of death.
If we feel weighed down by illness, this simply means that we aren’t living as we
should in this life, which is simultaneously both temporal and eternal, but are living
only a temporal life. Illness is a preparation for the transition, and therefore lamenting
over illness is like a farmer lamenting over the rain.
A person is never closer to God than when he’s in trouble. Make use of such
situations so that you don’t lose the opportunity to draw close to the only one who can
give you eternal happiness.
596
June 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Don’t worry about what will happen tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow. There
is only the present. Live for that, and if your present is good, then it will be good forever.
Make use of your vessel (your body): it might break tomorrow. Talmud
The main question of our life is simply: will we, in this short time that’s been given to
us, do what the One who sent us into this life wishes? Will we do it?
It’s important to live in the present because only in the present can you exert effort,
and the whole purpose of true life is to exert effort.
People say: “Man isn’t free, because everything he does has its cause in the past.”
However, a person always acts only in the present, and the present is outside time; it’s
merely the point of contact between the past and the future. Therefore, a person is
always free in the present moment.
597
We can understand the concept of free will far better than the concept of cause and
effect. We could also turn this argument around and say that the concept of cause and
effect must be quite incorrect, since if it were correct we couldn’t possibly have free will.
Georg Lichtenberg
Time and space don’t exist. Both of them are necessary merely so that we can
understand objects. Therefore, it’s a major mistake to think that theories about stars
whose light hasn’t reached us yet or about the composition of the sun millions of years
from now and so on are important. Such theories aren’t merely insignificant; they don’t
even concern anything real. Only our thoughts and feelings are real.
598
Time is the human capacity to imagine multiple objects in one and the same space,
something that’s possible only through the notion of sequence. Space is man’s ability to
imagine multiple objects at one and the same time, which is only possible by placing
things side by side.
Time and space may be defined as human abilities, but they have no meaning as
characteristics of objects. It would be completely reasonable to say that I have the ability
to see all that I see in time and space, but it would be completely unreasonable to say
that things, all the world, truly exist in time and space, and therefore I’m going to ask
questions about the origin of things—the entire world—at earlier and earlier stages in
time, on and on without end, as well as a second series of questions about the nature of
things further and further into the future without end.
Nevertheless, people have taken this most ridiculous proposition that things that
comprise the world truly exist in time and space, and have turned it into so-‐called
positive science.
You can only fight bad habits today, not tomorrow. Confucius
The free divine power of life only appears in the present, and therefore the activity of
the present must have divine attributes: it must be rational and good.
599
June 28
There is No Death
If you recognize that your life is in your soul and not your body, then there is no
death, only freedom from the body.
The reason death doesn’t appear in the form that it’s capable of is that we, as living
beings, are really incapable of thinking about it. Immanuel Kant
The consciousness of Everything, confined within the boundaries of the body of an
individual human being, strives to increase its boundaries. This is the essence of the first
half of a person’s life. In the first half of life a person loves things, people, etc. more and
more, going beyond his boundaries, and transfers his consciousness to another being.
But no matter how many things or people he loves, he can’t truly go beyond his own
boundaries and only at the moment of death does he see the possibility of their
destruction. It’s something like what happens when a butterfly emerges from a
caterpillar. Here we’re caterpillars: first we’re born, then we sleep in a cocoon. We’ll
recognize the butterfly within us in another world.
600
People say, “Only the maintenance of my personal individuality is true immortality.”
Yet my personal individuality is what torments me and is more poisonous than
anything in the world.
Indeed, haven’t we already resurrected once from a condition in which we knew less
about the present than we now know about the future? Our current state is related to
our future condition in the same way that this prior condition is related to our current
one. Georg Lichtenberg
Where do people go when they die? Most likely, they go where people come from
when they’re born. People come from God, from the Father of our lives; it is from Him
that every life comes, past, present, and future. When people depart, they return to Him
as well. So in death a person simply returns to the One from Whom he came.
A person leaves his house, works, rests, eats, enjoys himself, works once again, and
when he gets tired he returns home.
It’s the same in life: a person is sent by God, labors, suffers, finds comfort, and when
he’s suffered enough he goes back home.
601
People see how in this world both plants and animals are born, grow, strengthen,
bear fruit, and then become weak, deteriorate, grow old and die.
A person sees the same thing happen to his body, and when he looks at others when
they die he knows that his body will grow old, deteriorate and die, like everything that’s
born and lives on this earth.
However, besides what he sees in other beings and in other people, every person
knows of something within himself that doesn’t deteriorate or grow old, but on the
contrary becomes better and stronger the longer he lives; every person knows his own
soul within him.
No one can know what happens to our souls when we die. We know only one thing:
only that which is physical deteriorates, rots and decomposes, but the soul is non-‐
physical, and so what happens to the body cannot happen to it. Therefore, death is
frightening only to a person who lives for his body alone.
There is no death for a person who lives for his soul.
When a child is born, it cries. When a person is dying, he mourns. In both cases,
you should rejoice: for each one it’s a birth, and the most important moment of birth.
The only difference is that for a child it’s just after he enters onto this side, while for a
dying person it’s just before he goes back to the other side.
602
June 29
After Death
Where do we go after death? Where we came from. There, what we call our self
doesn’t exist. That’s why we don’t remember where we were before this life and how long
we were there. If we return there after death, then after death there won’t be what we call
our self either.
Because of this, there’s no way for us to understand what our lives will be after
death. The only thing we can say with assurance is that, just as things weren’t bad for us
before we were born, they won’t be bad after we die.
We sense something in our souls that’s alien to death. Focus your thoughts only on
that which is incorporeal, and you’ll understand something within you that never dies.
The best people are children, who are fresh from there, and the elderly, who are
ready to go there.
How can I be afraid of death, when I’ve died every day, every hour, and after every
day and hour I found a better life? Angelus Silesius
603
Nothing that is born can escape death, just as nothing that dies can escape birth.
Therefore, you shouldn’t complain about that which is inescapable. Your former state is
unknown, your current state is obvious, your future state cannot be known; what is
there to worry and fret about? Some people look upon the soul in wonder, others speak
about it and listen in amazement, but no one can know it.
The door to heaven is open to you just as much as you need it to be. Free yourself
from worries and anxiety and direct your soul to the spiritual. Let your actions be
directed by your own will and not circumstances. Don’t be among those for whom
reward is the goal of their acts. Be aware, perform your duty, and put aside thoughts
about consequences, so that it’s all the same to you whether your actions produce
pleasant or unpleasant results. Bhagavad Gita
Socrates once said that if death is the same state in which we find ourselves when we
sleep, losing consciousness of life, then we all know that there’s nothing terrifying in this
state. If death is a transition to a better life, as many people believe, then death isn’t evil,
it’s a blessing.
604
People fear death and want to live as long they can; but if death is a tragedy, then
what difference does it make if you die in thirty or three hundred years? Is a condemned
man to take joy in the fact that his comrades are going to be executed in three days, but
he won’t be executed for thirty days?
A life that completely ends in death would be death in and of itself.
Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
If I understand not simply with my mind but with all my inner experience that life,
the significance and the happiness of my self, consists only of the liberation of the
overwhelmed, stifled, and befogged spiritual foundation of my life, if I understand this
and live for the sake of achieving this liberation, then what can death appear to be other
than the complete liberation of my spiritual source from what conceals it: liberation
from the limitations of the flesh? Therefore, for a person living a spiritual life, death
can’t be terrible, but rather desirable as the total manifestation of that toward which
he’s been heading all his life.
605
June 30
Life is a Blessing
It is said in Christ’s teachings: “Come to me, all those burdened with labor and
burdens, and I will set you at ease. For my yoke is a blessing and my burden is light.”
These words mean that no matter how difficult a person’s life may be, no matter what
tragedies befall him, he only needs to understand and accept into his heart the true
doctrine of Christ—that life is union of the son with God the Father—and all evil will
immediately vanish. All a person needs to do is to realize that his life is a union of love
with all living things and with God, and his life will instantly transform from a torment
into a blessing.
Unite your will with God's will, and no matter what happens to you you'll find the
happiness your heart desires.
606
Human life is gradual unification of a person’s spiritual essence, which his body
holds in isolation, with the source of which it feels itself a part. Whether a person
understands it or not and whether he wants it or not this state of being that we call life
involuntarily works toward this union. The difference between people who don’t
understand this process and don’t want to fulfill it and those who understand it and
wish to live in harmony with it is that the lives of those who don’t understand it are filled
with unending suffering while the lives of those who understand it are filled with
unending, ever-‐increasing happiness.
The former are like stubborn animals that their owner ties to a shed where the
animal can find shelter and food. The animal suffers in vain, chokes itself, and tries to
resist its owner. However, it will still be led to where all the animals need to go.
The latter are like an animal that understands its owner’s will and goes freely and
joyfully wherever its owner leads it, knowing that by fulfilling its owner’s wishes nothing
but good can happen.
Past sadness becomes a pleasant memory right alongside past, present and future
joys. Therefore, only present and future sorrows can torment us. Joy has the
overwhelming advantage in our world, since we’re constantly trying to gain happiness
and in many cases we’re able to foresee with sufficient certainty that we’ll achieve it,
while we can see sadness that awaits us much less frequently. Georg Lichtenberg
607
You should take joy when you consider that the beauty of life is immeasurably
greater than what our senses are able to take in, but you should grieve over the thought
that man has done much more evil than his soul is capable of comprehending or his
hands are capable of mending. John Ruskin
A person ruins his stomach and then complains about his dinner. It’s the same with
people who are dissatisfied with life.
We have no right to be dissatisfied with life. If it appears that we are, it only means
we should be dissatisfied with ourselves.
All the confusion and constant whirling of human life nevertheless ceaselessly
increases people’s love and therefore increases their happiness.
608
July
July 1
Faith
God is the spirit, and you must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Based on the
Gospel of John 4:24
You have yet to recognize that the source of life exists right now in your body, so why
do you search for it, imagining that you’ll find it somewhere else?
A person who does this is like someone who lights a candle in broad daylight.
Know yourself and you’ll find what you’re looking for. Vamana Purana
A religion that teaches that it’s to your advantage to reject the present life for eternal
life is false. Eternal life is already present in this life. Vamana Purana
There is only one true religion, although there can be many different creeds.
Immanuel Kant
609
What we need, what our age demands in order to find a way out from the filth of
egoism, doubt and denial in which it is immersed is a religion in which our souls will
stop getting lost striving for personal goals, one that we can all follow together and in
which we recognize one source, one law, and one goal.
Humanity repeats in various formulas and to varying degrees the words of the
Lord’s Prayer, “May Your Kingdom come on Earth as it has in Heaven.”
Giuseppe Mazzini
There is much that is good in the Quran, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian
books, and in the writings of the Stoics, and in the Bible, the Upanishads, and the
Gospels, but what we need most and can understand best are the thoughts of the
religious thinkers who are closest to us.
Religion doesn’t have a single tradition. There’s no single authority that sanctions it
and there’s no single faith that comprises it. Whoever says this has a very poor
understanding of religion. Religion didn’t begin with Christianity. Man recognized
religion when the first spiritual questions confronted him and he won’t rest until they’re
resolved. Just as there is only one ocean, so there is only one religion, although we only
call those who belong to our church believers. Theodore Parker
610
I feel with particular intensity that in all that he does or can do splendidly,
exceptionally and with kindness, man is only the organ and instrument of something or
someone greater. This feeling is religion. A religious person shivers with holy joy in the
presence of acts accomplished through him and not by him. He entrusts his voice,
hands, will, and agency to these acts, trying respectfully to obliterate himself so he won’t
distort the higher cause of the power that’s utilizing him at the moment to accomplish
his affairs. He loses his individuality; he annihilates himself through the delight he feels.
His self must disappear when this power acts through him. This is how a prophet hears
his call, how a young mother feels her child move within her womb. As long as we feel
our self we’re limited, self-‐absorbed prisoners; when we’re in harmony with the life of the
world, when we respond to its call, our self disappears. Henri Frédéric Amiel
Do you, unfortunate person, really think that your cries can be praise of the silent
Godhead? Angelus Silesius
611
July 2
The Soul
If a child doesn’t know he has a heart, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one. It’s the
same with spiritual strength. Just because a person doesn’t recognize the spiritual
strength within him, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Some fish in a river once heard that fish can only live in water. And so, having heard
this, the fish were surprised and began asking each other if anyone knew what water
was. Then a wise fish said, “They say that in the sea lives an old, wise, and learned fish
who knows everything. Let’s go to him and ask him what this water is.” So the fish went
to the place in the sea where the wise fish lived, and they asked him what this water was
and how they could recognize it. The wise fish said, “Water is that by which we live and
in which we live. That’s why you don’t know water, because you live in it and by it.”
In the same way, people don’t know God because they live by Him and in Him. Sufi
Wisdom
Man doesn’t know himself. That which he considers himself, for the most part, isn’t
him. Only when a man understands that he lives through his soul and not his body does
he recognize himself.
612
Man is a continually changing spiritual being that’s separated from all other beings.
Change in a human creates the concept of motion; separation from other beings creates
the concept of matter. The relation of one’s own movement to external movement creates
the impression of time; the relation of one’s individual body to the bodies of other beings
creates the impression of space. Therefore, neither time nor space exists. They’re nothing
but impressions of individual beings’ relationships to one another.
If motion exists—and we are conscious of motion in life—then motion can only be
relative to something stationary. This stationary entity is our spiritual self, which
contemplates the motion of life.
Every being moves along with everything else and at the same time is immobile in
the form of consciousness. In this contradiction lies life.
613
I hear steps approaching my door. I ask, “Who’s there?” and a peasant boy says, “It’s
me.” “Who’s ‘me’?” “It’s me.” He’s surprised that I could ask him who this me is. He’s
surprised because he feels within himself that the same thing that’s within everyone, and
he thinks it must be known to all. He answers concerning the spiritual me, while I ask
about the window through which I see this me.
In order to lead your life well you don’t need to know what God is, what will become
of the world and so on. Good is only good when it’s done with no expectation of reward
but only for its own sake, and therefore you can do good without thinking either about
God or eternal life. Just begin doing good and you’ll see that the force that inspired you
to do good and gives you joy in doing good is the God that lives within you.
If a person doesn’t feel the power of God within him, it doesn’t prove that the power
of God doesn’t live within him but only that he hasn’t learned to perceive it there.
People often forget that that they must honor man within themselves before
anything else. Man’s greatest characteristic is his ability to merge with limitless spiritual
life when he achieves peace of mind and this allows him to enter into communion with
the Source of reason. Yet people instead prefer to beg each other for a mug of stagnant
water so they can partake of spiritual nourishment from the source right away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
614
July 3
One Soul in All
An Indian sage once said, “In you, in me, and in all beings lives one and the same
spirit of life. You become angry with me and can’t stand my being near you, but in vain.
We are one. Therefore, don’t be proud, no matter how high your station.”
Children are the wisest people in the world. A child senses that the same thing living
within him lives within every person. He doesn’t value a person’s title, but that single
entity that lives within everyone.
If a person wants to distinguish himself from others through wealth, honor, or rank,
no matter how much he acquires he’ll never be satisfied and he’ll never be happy and at
peace. If he would understand that within him lives the same thing that lives within all
people, then all people would become his brothers and he’d be happy and at peace with
his place, because he’d understand that within him is something greater than anything
in the world.
615
Why do we feel particularly strong emotions when we see a person dying? Because
we feel that it’s not a part of someone else’s life, but a part of our own, that is changing
or vanishing.
Love evokes love in others. This means that if God awakens within you, He awakens
the very same God in others.
All people are parts of a single body. When one part suffers, all the others suffer too.
Saadi
616
July 4
God
It is not you who lives. That which you call yourself is lifeless. It is God who gives you
life. Angelus Silesius
There’s only one way to revere and know God: fulfill the duties he expects of us. Only
when we do good, fulfilling God’s will and living a good life, do we know God. Without a
good life it’s impossible to know God.
My spiritual self doesn’t want to be in a body. Therefore, it’s not in the body by its
own will, but by the will of some higher power.
That will is what I understand as and call God.
We know that things exist outside of us because we possess the senses of sight,
hearing, and touch. For someone who lacks these senses there’s no external world. In the
same way, for a person who lacks consciousness of the spiritual nature of his self, God
does not and cannot exist.
Don’t think about serving God with your deeds; before God all deeds are nothing.
You must not serve God, but become Him. Angelus Silesius
617
People who live a bad life say there’s no God. They’re right: God, the highest
perfection, exists only for those who look for Him and draw near to Him. For those who
turn their backs on Him and walk away from Him God does not and cannot exist.
It’s impossible to worship or glorify God. You can only serve Him in silence.
Angelus Silesius
God is a spirit: something undefined and unnamed. All attempts to define God are
sacrilege.
618
July 5
Life is Union
As long as a person is alive he always wants one thing or another, and people first
dream up this, then that, then a third thing, amusements, glory, wealth, and a thousand
other things and they’re never at peace. But really, a person only wants one thing: not to
be separated from others, but to come closer and closer to all people. And there’s only
one thing that can unite a person with all people: that which is the same in everyone.
That which is the same in everyone is the spirit of God.
If two people go from Moscow to Kiev, no matter how far they are from each other—
let’s say one is just entering Kiev and the other just left Moscow—they’re still going to
the same place and sooner or later they’ll meet. But no matter how close two people are
to each other, if one is heading to Kiev and the other to Moscow, they’ll never meet.
As it is with travel, so it is with people’s lives. A holy man, if he lives for his soul, and
the weakest, most sinful person, if he also lives for his soul, both live the very same life
and sooner or later they’ll meet. But if two people live together and one lives for his body
while the other lives for his soul, they can’t help but grow further and further apart.
619
In union is strength—everybody knows that. So why be weak when you can be
strong? Place all the effort you put now into being stronger, more honored, and better
than others into rejecting all that interferes with union and be united in spirit with
everyone and you’ll be stronger than the strongest.
Frequently people, especially young people, become gravely sick at heart because
they’re alone and no one loves them. Recognize your spiritual unity with everyone, reject
everything that separates you from others, and this feeling of anguish will transform
into joy.
No matter where you are, use all your strength to strive for union with each other.
Don’t wait for God to unite you. Quran
Physical lust both unites and divides animals. Humans are likewise united and
divided by physical lust. However, in addition to physical passions, humans also have a
spiritual life, and this life never divides, but always unites.
620
July 6
Love
To understand whether someone’s act is good or bad, you only need to ask yourself:
does this act increase or decrease people’s love for one another? If it increases love then
the act is good, and if it decreases love it’s bad.
Love your enemies and you will have no enemies. Teachings of the Twelve Apostles
Only perfection is worthy of love.
In order to experience perfect love, we either have to ascribe perfection to an
imperfect subject or love perfection: God. And since God is in every living thing, we can
love God in all that exists: the perfection that lies within them.
To transform bitterness from the trials of life into peace of mind, ingratitude into
beneficence, outrage into forgiveness, all through the expression of love: this is the holy
alchemy of great souls. And this transformation must become so common and so simple
that it seems natural to people and something that’s unworthy of praise. Henri Frédéric
Amiel
621
Love destroys death and transforms it into an empty shadow; it transforms life from
nonsense into something meaningful, from unhappiness into happiness.
“Martha, Martha! You worry and fuss about many things, but there’s only one thing
you need. Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from her.” (Luke
10:41-‐42)
The good part, which cannot be taken away from anyone, is simply to love, love and
love.
“Love God your Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. This is
the first and greatest commandment.
“The second, which is the same as the first, is: love your neighbor as yourself.” This is
what a lawgiver once said to Christ. And Jesus replied: “You have correctly stated how
one should behave,” i.e. love God and your neighbor, “so live this way.”
Love is true life itself.
“We know that we go from death to life, because we love our brothers,” one of
Christ’s disciples said. “He who fails to love his brother resides in death.”
Only a person who loves is alive.
622
There are two types of love:
According to the first, I simply love people without knowing love for the single
spiritual source residing in everyone.
According to the second, in all people there is only one thing I love: that single,
universal spiritual source.
In the first case, love is not only temporary but frequently changes from love into the
opposite feeling, since the people we love are constantly changing and can transform
from someone we like into someone we don’t.
In the second case, our love toward that spiritual source increases, for its presence in
all people becomes clearer and clearer as we grow morally. Fyodor Strakhov
What happens when a person recognizes his self as the God living within him, rather
than his individual, personal being?
First, by consciously rejecting desire for happiness for himself alone, he’ll either stop
taking happiness from others or will do it less; second, by recognizing his personal self
as God, who wishes happiness for all that exists, he’ll wish happiness for all people, for
all that lives, and not just himself.
Epicureanism leads to despair. A philosophy of responsibility is more hopeful.
However, salvation lies in the harmony of responsibility and happiness, in the union of
personal and divine will, in the belief that this higher will is governed by love.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
623
July 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
You can’t force yourself to love if you don’t love. However, just because you don’t love
it doesn’t mean love doesn’t exist within you, but only that something inside you is
interfering with love. No matter how many times you turn over a corked bottle and
shake it, nothing will come out of it if you don’t remove the cork. It’s the same with love:
free your soul from what obstructs it and you’ll love everyone, even those you didn’t love
before. Only our sins interfere with us being what we can and must be.
To sin is a human affair, but to justify sins is a devilish affair.
People try to gain freedom through wealth so that it will protect their bodies from
any adversity that might befall them. This path is not only unreliable but always
mistaken. The methods people use to protect themselves from possible restraints on
their freedom—violence against others, wealth, high positions, a good reputation—
these very methods deprive the person who uses them of the freedom he seeks. In their
attempts to protect their freedom, people deprive themselves of it. In order to make sure
no one puts me in prison, I build a prison and lock myself away.
624
Temptations aren’t incidental occurrences: you go about your business and
suddenly there’s a temptation. Rather, it’s a condition that accompanies a moral life. In
order to live, you must always live among temptations. It’s like walking through a
swamp, where you’re constantly wallowing in it and constantly pulling yourself out of it.
When young people start off their lives they go out onto new, unfamiliar roads and
find other unfamiliar roads, smooth, alluring and pleasant, on both their right and left.
Just set out on one of them and at first it will seem so pleasant and good to follow them
that you’ll wander until you forget how to return to the original road, and you’ll wander
farther and farther until you perish.
625
It’s not only superstitions—of community, state, church and science—that are
promoted through indoctrination. The subordination of people to temptations is also
almost always accomplished with the aid of indoctrination: the imitation of what others
do in brilliant, festive events. Therefore, temptations and superstitions are always
recognizable by the excessive festivity and splendor that accompanies them. If you
recognize them, take care not to fall under their power.
People often feel powerless to free themselves from sin. This is because they’re
already bound by temptations. A person who values his fame, wealth, or notoriety can’t
free himself from the habits of passion, which are supported by his entire way of life.
In order to free yourself of sins, you have to free yourself of the temptations that
support them.
626
July 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
If one person owns an excessive amount of property, then many others are going
without what they need.
If you want to live peacefully and freely, don’t make yourself accustomed to excess,
but wean yourself as much as possible from anything you can do without.
Man not only can but must be free. He’s unfree to the degree to which, living an
animal life, he surrenders himself to slavery.
The desires of a fool grow incessantly and wrap themselves around him like a
parasitic vine. Whoever becomes covered by this base, poison-‐filled hunger becomes
enveloped in suffering, which entwines around him like a parasitic vine.
For the person who defeats this hunger—this hunger, which is all-‐powerful in the
world—all sufferings drop away from him as drops of water roll off a lotus leaf.
Buddhist Wisdom
627
The sin of serving the body, like all sins and errors, carries with it the consequences
of the error: evil instead of the happiness that was expected. These consequences educate
the sinner. However, the sin of service to the body is so common and so rarely recognized
as sin in our world that people devise ways to sin without consequences. You can overeat
and then take digestive medicines; you can pass your life in idleness and make use of
gymnastics and massages; you can remain in your home and use special heating
systems and ventilation. The sin remains as before; its consequences have merely been
cast far away, just as deliverance from sin has been cast far away.
We’ve become so accustomed to the sin of serving the body that we no longer see it,
and in attempting to do what we think will give our children happiness we accustom
them from their earliest years to gluttony, luxury, and sloth; we prepare them for
grievous suffering by corrupting them.
As an intelligent person doesn’t surrender to voluptuousness but rather struggles
with it, so any person can learn from experience that the more he satisfies the body’s
demands the weaker his spiritual strength becomes, and vice versa. All great wise and
holy people have been masters of self-‐restraint and chastity.
628
July 9
The Sin of Parasitism
“Earn your bread with the sweat of your brow.” This is an immutable physical law.
Women have been given the task of painful childbirth, while men have been given the
task of physical labor. A woman can’t free herself from her law. If she tries to raise a
child that isn’t hers it will always remain someone else’s child, and she’ll never know the
joys of motherhood. It’s the same with a man’s labors. If a man eats bread that someone
else worked for, he deprives himself of the joy of labor. Timofei Bondarev
Agriculture is not simply one among many occupations that people are capable of,
it’s an occupation that all humans are capable of. It is the occupation that gives people
the greatest freedom and the greatest happiness.
A man is ashamed when he’s advised to work as hard as an ant, but it’s twice as
shameful if he doesn’t follow this advice. Talmud
629
Manual labor is a duty and a joy for all, while the activity of the mind is an
exceptional activity that becomes a duty and a joy only for those who are called to it. This
calling can only be recognized and proven through sacrifice. Scholars and artists must
sacrifice their peace and prosperity in order to surrender to their calling.
The majority of idle people’s activities, which they consider labor, not only fail to
lessen the labors of others but pile new labors upon them. Such is the case with all
voluptuous amusements.
It would be most helpful if wealthy people would, even just for a short time, depart
from the state their lives have fallen into, in which they can easily exploit the labors of
others for the gratification of their exaggerated and warped physical demands, and live
for a time in very simple conditions and satisfy their greatly reduced needs. If they did
so, they’d see the horrific amount of sin that occurs in our world. If a person would
simply live like this, he’d clearly understand the gratuitous cruelty of the people of our
day, which condemns the majority to pointless, harmful labor for the gratification of his
noxious habits.
630
When a person who has little property, but who’s acquired it through his own labor,
helps another to the best of his ability, he’s performed the type of charity that’s most
acceptable to God. Muhammad
Don’t take another’s property and don’t squander your own labor, for he who allows
others to feed him rather than feeding himself is a cannibal. Eastern Wisdom
People look for pleasure, running here and there, because they feel the emptiness of
their lives but don’t yet feel the emptiness of the new amusement that entices them.
Blaise Pascal
631
July 10
The Temptation of Wealth
He who lives well in the world, but seeing his brother in need closes his heart to
him—how can Divine love be within him? My children! Let’s love, not in word nor in
speech but with action and truth. (First Epistle of John, 3:17-‐18).
And in order for a rich man to love not in word or speech but in deed and truth, he
must give to the poor, as Christ said. And if he gives to the beggar, no matter how much
property he has, he will soon cease being rich. And as soon as he ceases being rich, what
Christ said to the wealthy young man will happen to him: he will no longer have that
which stops a rich man from following him.
Don’t consider poverty a burden, consider overindulgence a burden.
Wealth is sinful first of all because it’s acquired and retained through the needs of
the poor.
Righteous wealth can only exist where no one is in need. So where there are
hundreds of poor people for every wealthy person, as in our society, there can be no
righteous wealth.
632
A society cannot be arranged well if it is divided between the wealthy—the rulers,
and the poor—the subjects.
It should seem obvious that the more a person gives to others and the less he asks for
himself the better his life is, and that the less he gives to others and the more he asks for
himself the worse his life is. However, people of our time don’t reason in this way. They
come up with the most diverse and clever rationalizations, just not the one that
naturally presents itself to any honest person. According to their reasoning, there’s no
need to restrain yourself from luxury. You can pity the workers’ condition, make
speeches and write books supporting them, and at the same time continue to exploit the
labor that you can clearly see is killing them.
Charitable organizations can be useless or harmful; they might even be beneficial
(although this is extremely rare), but they can never be ethical. Such organizations
merely demonstrate clearly that the people who found them completely lack not only the
feeling, but even the concept of compassion and the sense of charity that results from it.
633
The callousness of the wealthy isn’t as savage as their compassion.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
When a rock falls on a pitcher, the pitcher suffers, and when a pitcher falls on a
rock, the pitcher suffers. Either way, the pitcher suffers. Talmud
All wealth is sinful and vile, but there is no wealth more sinful or disgusting than
wealth founded on ownership of land. That which is called the right to land ownership
deprives half the people of Earth of their lawful and natural heritage.
634
July 11
The Sin of Lechery
An honest marriage is good, but chastity is better.
Sexual desire is always disgusting and repulsive to man’s spiritual nature. Preserve
this feeling of revulsion. It’s in your soul for a reason: deliverance from great evil.
In order for sexual relations to cease being immoral and cruel, our society must first
of all change its view of sexual love so that men and women don’t consider sexual love
something elevated and splendid, but see it for what it is: a person’s fall from natural,
elevated spiritual life to base, animal life.
As a result of the false meaning our society has given to sexual love, the birth of
children has lost its value. Instead of being the goal and justification for marital
relations it has become an obstacle to a pleasant continuation of sexual relations.
Therefore, as a result of the advice of practitioners of medical science, methods of
depriving a woman of the ability to give birth are proliferating in and outside of
marriage. This is criminal: first, because it frees people from care for and labor over
children, who serve as redemption for sexual love; and second, because it’s extremely
close to the crime most repugnant to the human conscience: murder.
635
In our society, a false doctrine has arisen that’s common to and supported by all
classes: sexual intercourse is essential for health, and since marriage isn’t always
possible, sexual relations outside marriage without any commitment whatsoever beyond
a monetary payment is completely natural and must be encouraged. This belief has
become so widespread and ingrained that parents, in accord with their doctors’ advice,
arrange debaucheries for their children; governments, whose only purpose is to concern
themselves with their citizens’ moral health, regulate debauchery, i.e. regulate an entire
class of women who must physically and morally perish for the satisfaction of men’s
imaginary demands. As a result, single men indulge in debauchery with a completely
clean conscience.
Struggle with sexual lust is the most difficult struggle in life, and there’s no age
except early childhood and extreme old age when a person is free of it. Therefore, don’t
be weighed down by it and don’t hope that you can place yourself in a state where it will
disappear. Don’t be weak for a minute. Remember and use all measures available to
weaken this enemy. Steer clear of that which agitates either your body or your soul and
try to stay busy at all times.
636
Blessed is childhood, which gives a glimpse of heaven amid the cruelties of the world.
Those eight hundred thousand daily births that statistics speak of compose a sort of
outpouring of innocence and freshness that struggles not only against the extinction of
the species but also against human corruption and the worldwide infection of sin. All
the good feelings that are evoked when a person is near a cradle and children compose
one of the secrets of great Providence; if you squash this fresh dew, the maelstrom of
egotistical passions will dry out your soul like a fire.
If we were to imagine that humanity was comprised of billions of immortal souls
whose number would neither increase nor decrease no matter where we are or who we
are, great God! Without a doubt, we’d become a thousand times more intelligent but a
thousand times worse. Knowledge would accumulate, but all virtues, which are born of
suffering and loyalty to family and society, would be dead. There would be no
compensation.
Blessed is childhood for the happiness it gives on its own and for the good it creates,
neither realizing nor desiring it, but only obliging and allowing itself to love. Thanks to
this alone we’re able to see a tiny piece of heaven on earth. Blessed too is death. Angels
require neither birth nor death to live; but for humans both are obligatory. Henri
Frédéric Amiel
637
July 12
The Sin of Ill Will
Train yourself to do no evil either to people or any other living beings, and the more
you become accustomed to it the better your life will be among people and animals.
Tease people and animals and you’ll never get past the obstacles between you and them.
Love people and animals and you’ll experience overwhelming joy from being with them.
A cow, a horse, any kind of animal, no matter how hungry it is, won’t leave the pen if
the gate opens inward. It might die of hunger, but it will never figure out that it has to
back away from the gate and pull it toward itself. It will keep pushing against it, and by
pushing against it the animal will seal the gate ever more tightly. Only man understands
that you can’t push against it, and that in order to move you often have to take a step
backwards. Only man knows that if someone offends you it’s best not to do what you
want: retaliate against the person who offended you. On the contrary, you should try to
make him see reason, so that what is good and necessary is the result. Man’s reason
teaches him this.
This is why reason is man’s most valuable possession. A person must not lose this
reason, especially when the feeling of malice towards others arises in him.
638
A sinless person’s resolve is to cause no sadness to any person regardless of how
great the benefit he would acquire from it might be.
A sinless person’s resolve is to do no evil to someone who did him evil.
Even a person who causes someone to suffer, even someone who hates a person for
no reason will experience perpetual sorrow in the end.
The punishment of people who commit evil is that any great good done on their
behalf will make them ashamed of their actions. Thirukkural
He who can make good and beautiful speeches is not a wise man; only he who is
patient, free from hatred and free from fear is truly wise. Buddhist Wisdom
In order not to harbor ill will toward others in your heart, you must remember that
if people act badly and show no shame for it, it’s because they don’t realize the evil they
do is evil and so they aren’t guilty. Just remember this and you’ll never get angry with
anyone.
639
People often try to convince themselves that they notice other’s shortcomings, but in
doing so they only expose their own weakness.
The more intelligent and kind a person is, the more he sees the good in people, and
the stupider and more evil a person is, the more he sees others’ faults.
Every time a person offends you and you feel ill will toward him, remember that all
people are equal children of God, and that no matter how unpleasant someone is, the
soul within him is the very same soul that lives within you.
If a person can’t forgive his brother, he doesn’t love him. True love has no limits, and
there’s no amount of offense that it cannot forgive if it’s true love.
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July 13
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
A sin doesn’t stop being a sin because many people do it and even brag about it.
The first rule for living a good life is to think only of how you can make it better
rather than thinking about what people think of you. Shu King
I have to behave according to my own opinion, not the opinions of others. This rule is
uniquely necessary both in everyday life and in mental life. This law is hard to follow
because you’ll always find people who think they know your responsibilities better than
you do. When you live in the world it’s easy to follow the rules of the world, and when
you’re alone it’s easy to adhere to your own rules, but a person is truly great if he can
maintain the independence of his solitude among the crowd. Ralph Waldo Emerson
641
Enlightenment rescues a person from the immaturity that he himself encourages.
Immaturity consists of a person’s inability to use his own reason without another’s
guidance. He doesn’t encourage this immaturity when his reason fails him but rather
when his decisiveness and courage to use his reason without the guidance of public
opinion fails him. Immanuel Kant
Whoever doesn’t think for himself falls under the influence of another person who
does his thinking for him. Surrendering your thinking to someone else is a more
humiliating slavery than surrendering your body to someone. Think and act on your
own and don’t worry about what others say about you.
Whoever is ashamed of that which is not shameful and is unashamed of the
shameful follows false opinion and enters upon the evil path of destruction.
Buddhist Wisdom
642
The state of our consciousness is more important to us than the judgment of the
entire world, for we live in our consciousness uninterruptedly and permanently. Your
happiness and unhappiness doesn’t depend on how others act toward you but on how
you act toward yourself. Improve yourself and your soul and you’ll do the very best you
can both for yourself and for others. Lucy Mallory
Look at how basely people behave and you’ll be astonished at their lack of dignity.
However, you’ll only be astonished until you recall that true consciousness of human
dignity is only possible for a religious person. People without religion try to replace the
consciousness of their human dignity with prestige, and prestige becomes their religion.
643
July 14
The Temptation of Punishment
People in positions of authority try to do the impossible: correct evil with evil acts.
They use punishments, prisons, and executions in order to correct bad people. However,
they want to remain evil themselves, since only evil people could lock others up in a cell
or execute them. The only thing that results from all of this is that evil people try to
correct other evil people, and so those people become worse and worse and corrupt those
who would correct them
You want to reform people because you think they’re bad, but they could judge you
to be bad by using the very same right you claim when you judge them. Why should you
correct them? Perhaps they should be correcting you?
Violence creates only the impression of justice, but it deprives people of the
possibility of living justly without violence.
It’s an amazing thing: there are people who consider it their calling to reform other
people’s lives. Can it be that these people who reform others are so good they have no
need to work on themselves?
644
Every person faces a choice: submit to laws composed by others and enforced by
violence or live according to the demands of his own nature. Laws enforced by violence
prevent people from living according to their own nature, because their foremost
characteristics are reason and love, and both are opposed to violence.
Why has Christianity, as well as all other faiths, become so misinterpreted, and why
has morality fallen so low? One reason: faith in the beneficence of systems of coercion.
The goal of a person who wishes to live according to Christ’s law is to fulfill the law
that has been revealed to him: this law is to love God and one’s neighbor. Love of God is
expressed by relating to others the way we’d like them to relate to us, and therefore a
person who wishes to live according to Christ’s law fulfills this law first of all and doesn’t
worry about the state of his own life or the lives of others.
Not only should external conditions of life not be artificially organized, but every
effort should be made to flee from all external organizations, because nothing kills the
internal as well as the external, and nothing amplifies hypocrisy, pride, and disrespect
toward others like ascribing significance to the external forms of life.
645
The superstition of using violence to arrange human society is as terrible as it is
enduring. People raised in a coercive system no longer ask themselves if it’s necessary or
just but recognize it as something inescapable, without which life is inconceivable.
A properly trained mind doesn’t focus on the creation of new principles for worldly
or spiritual power, but on the recognition of every person’s moral dignity. This kind of
thinking will promote human progress incomparably better than all the unfortunate
attempts of the blind to lead the blind, through which they all fall into the pit of
dogmas, authority and moral systems. James Yates
Like all superstitions, the superstition of governmental organization creates in its
adherents the conviction that it is no longer open for discussion. So people who live
under governments talk of freedom without allowing themselves to question
governmental organization, which is fundamentally antithetical to basic freedom.
What an amazing inconsistency: the death penalty and war are considered essential
conditions of life by people who call themselves Christians.
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July 15
The Superstition of Violence
Force does not subdue man, it only aggravates him. And therefore it is obvious that
people’s lives cannot be reformed by violence. We use violence as revenge, and we simply
justify it to ourselves by saying we’re doing it to reform people.
Not just Christ, but all the sages of the world—Brahmins, Buddhists, Taoists, and
the Greek sages—taught that rational people repay evil with good, not with evil. But
people who live by evil say that this is impossible and that doing this will make life
worse, not better. And they’re right for themselves, but not for everyone. In worldly
affairs things would indeed get worse for them, but for everyone else things would get
better. Those who suffer from violence but at the same time participate in it need to
understand this.
The doctrine that a person can never and must never use violence lies in the fact that
any person can be considered good by some and evil by others. Therefore a person can’t
oppose what he considers evil with violence because his belief in another’s evil is subject
to doubt (since others consider that person good). However, violence used to oppose
what one person considers evil, be it beatings, mutilations, deprivation of freedom, or
death, is certain evil.
647
Everyone knows that violence and murder shock people, and motivated by a primal
instinct they start to strike out against violence and murder with violence and murder.
Although this course of action is close to being bestial and irrational, in and of itself it’s
not foolish and contradictory. However, this isn’t the case when it comes to justifying
this type of behavior. As soon as governments or revolutionaries try to justify such
behavior with rational arguments, a conglomeration of sophisms immediately becomes
essential in order to conceal the stupidity of such attempts.
Justifications of this type are always founded on the supposition of some imaginary
bandit who has no human qualities and who torments and murders innocent people.
This imaginary beast serves as the foundation for the rationalizations of all perpetrators
of violence about the necessity of violence, as if such a bandit could be found who was
incessantly murdering the innocent. However, such a bandit is the most exceptional,
rare and even unimaginable phenomenon. Most people could live for hundreds of years
without ever meeting such an imaginary brigand. Why do I have the right to base my
life on such a fabrication? When we consider real life rather than fantasies we see
something else entirely. We see people, we even see ourselves, committing the cruelest
acts, not alone like some fictional outlaw, but always in concert with others, and not
because we’re beasts that possess no human qualities but because we’re enticed by
delusions. Furthermore, when we think about life we see that the cruelest acts—the
slaughter of people, hangings, beheadings, solitary confinement, ownership of property,
and judgment in courts—that none of this is the result an imaginary bandit but, on the
contrary, is perpetrated by the very people who found the laws of their lives on the
supposition of this imaginary bandit. So when considering life no person could fail to
648
see that the cause of evil in people is not an imaginary bandit but people’s delusions,
which result in one of the cruelest evils: perpetrating actual evil in the name of fictional
evil. Therefore, when a person understands this and directs his energy toward the source
of evil and devotes his efforts to the eradication of delusion in himself and others, he sees
before him such an enormous and necessary activity that he can’t even understand why
the fiction of a bandit whom he almost certainly will never stumble across ever
motivated him. And if he does stumble across him, in all likelihood he’ll treat the bandit
in a completely different manner than people who, having never seen a criminal, have
invented him in order to justify their criminal lives.
The doctrine that any kind of revenge is incompatible with love is so obvious that it
naturally flows from the meaning of the doctrine.
This is so much the case that if it had never been a part of Christian doctrine that
every Christian must repay evil with good and love those who hate him and his enemies,
every person who understood the doctrine would come to this same conclusion on his
own.
649
The security and happiness of society is provided only by the morality of its
members. Morality is founded upon love that excludes violence.
Kindness conquers all and is itself invincible.
You can resist anything, but you can’t resist kindness. Jean Jacques Rousseau
650
July 16
The Temptation of Pride
Your true happiness lies in uniting with people, and the more people the better.
When a person severs his attachments to others he deprives himself of happiness,
because the more he sets himself apart the worse his life becomes.
People often consider love of family and nation to be a virtue. There’s a great
temptation to believe this. There’s nothing wrong with loving your family or your nation,
and this happens with everyone. But it’s only harmless as long as you do no evil to others
because of your love for your family or nation. If love for those close to you causes you to
do evil to those who aren’t, as when people rob others for the sake of their family, or
fight with other nations and kill people for the sake of their nation, it’s no longer a virtue
but a great vice.
Spiritual life differs from worldly life in that a person who lives for his soul can never
be satisfied with himself no matter what good he’s done. He realizes that he’s only done
what he had to, and even then far from all he could, so he can only reproach himself. He
can never praise himself or feel self-‐satisfied.
651
People’s hostility toward each other hurts them so much that in order to deceive
themselves and lessen the suffering caused by their lack of unity they think up reasons
why they must erect barriers between each other. One of these excuses is the idea that
I’m better than other people and so it’s beneath me to associate with them; a second is
that my family is better; a third is that my class is better; and a fourth is that my nation
is better than others.
Four temptations encourage human sins and torment people: pride, covetousness,
severing your attachments to others, and concern over worldly fame. If not for these
temptations people would live happily. How can you escape these temptations as well as
the main temptation and the father of them all: pride? It’s difficult to escape them
because they’re inside each of us. There’s only one way: we must each work on ourselves.
People often think that state laws can help, but this can never be, because those who
write the laws—government officials—are people too, suffering from the same
maladies and particularly from pride. Therefore, you can’t count on the government or
its laws. You can’t hope that your rulers will extinguish the temptation of pride from
their souls before you, their subjects, extinguish this deep-‐seated root of evil within
yourselves. While it lives in your heart, how can you expect it to die in the hearts of
others? Therefore, the only thing you can do for your own happiness and the happiness
of others is to destroy the pride within you, the source of all temptations. No
improvement is possible until every person begins to improve himself. Based on a
Passage by Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
652
As long as people consider themselves citizens subject to one or another government
and not as universal brothers there will be no peace between them.
It’s good if you respect yourself because the spirit of God lives within you, but it’s a
tragedy when you take pride in what is human in you: your intelligence, education,
fame, wealth, even your good deeds.
All you have to do is watch any military parade and see the drunken grandeur of the
top official accompanied by his staff: all on splendid, finely adorned horses, in special
uniforms with their medals of honor, riding in front of the silently fawning soldiers to
the sound of harmonious and solemn music—just look at all this, and you’ll
understand that at such moments the top official, and the soldier, and all who stand
between them, being in this state of intoxication, can all commit acts that they’d never
commit under any other circumstances. However, the intoxication people experience at
such events as parades, spectacles, religious ceremonies, and coronations are intense,
transitory phenomena, while there are other, chronic and perpetual states of
intoxication which test both people who possess any sort of power, from king to
policeman, and people who submit to this power in a state of drunken servility, a
condition that they justify in the same manner that all slaves have always justified and
continue to justify it: assigning superior value and dignity to those whom they obey.
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“If anyone comes to me but doesn’t despise his father, mother, wife, children,
brothers and sisters and his own life as well, he can never be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
In this verse, “despise” doesn’t mean that Christ condemned the family or taught hatred
of the family, but only the same lesson stated in Luke 12:8: that Christ and his disciples
and imitators were close to one another and loved one another due to their connection
with God and with therefore each other, and not due to family ties.
These verses usually tempt people who equate the life of a dissolute person with that
of a respectable family member, but they don’t consider the possibility that there can be
such a thing as the life of a true Christian as well. For such a person the family is no
longer a superior condition but more often the opposite: an impediment to the true
Christian life Christ revealed.
654
July 17
The Superstition of Government
I’m alive; I’m still alive today, but it’s quite possible that tomorrow I’ll no longer exist,
that I’ll go back where I came from. While I’m alive, I know that as long as I live in love
with others all is well, I’m at peace, I’m happy, and that as long as I’m alive I want to love
and be loved. Then all of a sudden people show up and say “come with us to rob,
execute, murder, and wage war. This will improve your life, and even if it doesn’t it will
be good for the government.” A rational person who still has all his senses would reply,
“What? What sort of government is this? What are you saying? Leave me alone. Don’t
talk to me about such stupid and abominable things.”
Those in power say that government is something holy, something that must be
obeyed, and that therefore the people who run the government are themselves holy. Let’s
take a look at these holy people. Let’s look at their predecessors. There’s not much that’s
holy there. On the contrary, all those people are very, very bad, and of course it’s
impossible for them not to be bad, since all their business—waging war, executing
people—can only be done by the very worst people.
655
People do great evil because of love for themselves; they do worse evil for the sake of
their families; people commit the most horrible acts of evil for the sake of their
governments. And what’s most amazing of all is that the people who commit these
deceptions, frauds, espionages, extortions and horrific murders in wars are proud of
their evil acts.
People diligently bind themselves together so that one person or a handful of people
can move them all. Then they hand the rope that binds the mob they’ve created to
whoever happens by and they’re astonished that their lives are bad.
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Where is Christ? Where is his doctrine? Where can you find it among the Christian
peoples? In constitutions? He’s not there. In laws, permeated with the spirit of unjust
inequality? He’s not there either. In morals, permeated with egotism? He’s not there.
Where is Christ’s teaching? It’s in the future, which is being prepared through hard
work in the depths of human nature. It’s in motion, agitating the nations from one end
of the earth to the other. It’s in the aspirations of pure souls and righteous hearts. It’s in
the consciousness of all who realize that the current state of affairs can’t continue,
because it’s evil, a denial of mercy and brotherhood. It’s the legacy of the tribe of Cain,
something already rejected, waiting for a blow from God to smash it to pieces.
Murder is always murder, no matter who allows it or how it’s justified. Therefore,
those who kill or prepare to kill are criminals, no matter what you call them: judges,
generals, or kings. You must not approve of these people or admire them but pity and
shame them.
657
All you need to do is abandon established customs and superstitions and look at the
position of every person who lives under a government, whether it be a despotic or the
most democratic government, and you’ll be horrified at the degree of slavery in which
people live while imagining that they’re free.
No matter where he was born, over every person stands a group of people unknown
to him who establish the laws of his life: what he must and must not do. The more
comprehensive the governmental structure, the tighter the net of laws. He receives
orders how and to whom he must swear allegiance, in other words promise to fulfill all
the laws that will be created and proclaimed. He receives orders how and when to marry
(he can marry only one woman, but can make use of brothels). He receives orders
concerning divorcing his wife and the maintenance of his children; he is told which
children are legitimate and which are illegitimate; he is told whom he must bequeath his
property to and how he must transfer it. There are laws concerning how and by whom
he can be judged and punished for violation of laws. He is ordered to appear in court as
a juryman or a witness when needed. There are laws concerning how old others must be
before he can exploit their labor and even the number of hours in a day his laborers can
work and the kind of food he must give them. There are laws telling him how and when
he must inoculate his children against diseases and the measures he must take and
undergo when an illness strikes him, a member of his family, or one of his animals. He’s
told which schools his children must attend. The dimensions and durability of the home
he plans to build are subject to laws. The kinds domestic animals he may keep—horses
and dogs—are defined by laws. There are laws instructing him how he can use water
and where he can go in the wilderness. Punishments for failing to fulfill any of these
658
laws are fixed. It’s impossible to tally up all these laws upon laws and rules upon rules to
which a person must submit, and the ignorance of which not even the most liberal
government will forgive, even though it’s impossible to know them all.
Placed in this position, a person must surrender the greater part of his labor for
some business of which he knows nothing or for payment on a debt that his father or
grandfather incurred every time he purchases something he needs: salt, beer, wine,
cloth, iron, kerosene, tea, sugar and most other things. Likewise, he must hand over a
part of his labor every time he moves from one place to another, every time he receives
an inheritance or has any minor business with his friends or family. In addition, the
government demands a significant portion of his labor for the piece of land he occupies
either as his residence or to grow his food. Thus it is that the majority of his labor, if he
lives by his own labors and not those of others, is taken as taxes, duties, and by
monopolies instead of being used for the relief and betterment of his and his family’s
condition.
That’s the least of it: under some governments, once a man comes of age he’s ordered
into the military, the cruelest form of slavery, to go fight for a number of years. In other
governments, such as England and America, he must hire people to do this for him.
And people in this situation not only fail to see that they’re slaves, but take pride,
considering themselves free citizens of the great states of Britain, France, Germany, and
Russia. They take pride in it the same way a lackey takes pride in how important the
masters he serves are.
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When a person whose spiritual powers haven’t been weakened or perverted is faced
with demands from the government—taxes, military service, etc.—it would seem
natural for him to ask himself, “Why should I do all this? I want to live my life in the
best manner possible. I want to work, feed my family, and decide for myself what’s
pleasant, useful, and necessary. Leave me in peace with your Russia, France, Germany,
and Britain. Let whoever needs it respect these Britains and Frances, but I don’t need
them. You can take whatever you want from me by force, you can kill me, but I don’t
want to take part in my own enslavement and I won’t.”
It would seem natural to behave like this, but no one has yet said it and not one
person acts this way yet. However, such a relation to government must come and will
come, and I think it will be soon.
For a rational person the entire world is his homeland. He’s happy everywhere and
always, because his happiness is in his soul. He’s never an exile, but he always feels
himself to be a wanderer. When he leaves the land of his birth he doesn’t abandon his
homeland but only exchanges one homeland for another. Wherever he settles is his
homeland. Grigory Skovoroda
660
The life of all humanity moves as does the life of an individual as he passes from age
to age, and just as there are periods we’ve clearly defined as infancy, childhood, youth
and adulthood even though a person’s transformation occurs unnoticed, in the same
way in the life of humanity definite signs of different ages change imperceptibly. Thus,
in our day we are witnessing a transformation from one age to another. It’s close, right
at the door, as Christ said.
Impurity of the body is only annihilated by purity; it’s the same case with human
societies. Let human societies become spiritually pure and healthy and the parasites that
feed on them, the churches and governments, will drop off on their own the way insects
fall from a healthy body.
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July 18
The Superstition of the Church
A person who never thinks about faith believes that the only true religion is the one
he was born into. But just ask yourself what would have happened if you had been born
into a different religion? A Christian into a Muslim family, a Buddhist into a Christian
family, a Christian into a Hindu family. Can it be that only we belong to the true faith,
and all others live in falsehood? A religion doesn’t become true just because you
convince yourself and others that it’s the one true religion.
When a person can no longer believe in the religion into which he was born and
stops believing in it, people tell him, “You should be ashamed that you don’t believe in
the religion of your fathers and grandfathers.” This is like saying, “You should be
ashamed that you’re making new clothes when you have the worn out clothes of your
fathers and grandfathers that don’t fit you.”
You can tell truth from lie first of all by the fact that the truth is always simple and
brief, while a lie is always tangled, complicated and long. Apply this rule to the teachings
of the churches and to the teachings of the Gospels, Buddha, Epictetus, Baba, and
others, and you’ll see where the truth is.
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The most harmful lie is one that’s cunning, elaborate and wrapped in solemnity and
splendor, as a religious lie usually appears.
The church’s primary and most horrifically malevolent activity is directed at
deceiving children, those very children about whom Christ said, “Woe to him who
tempts so much as a single one of these little ones.” From the first moment a child’s
consciousness awakens they begin to deceive him, solemnly inculcating in him things
they themselves don’t believe, hypnotizing him until the deception becomes a habit in
the child’s nature. They diligently deceive children in the most important matter of life,
and when the deception becomes so much a part of his life that it’s hard for him to
break free of it, they expose him to the entire world of science and facts, which can’t be
reconciled in any way, shape or form with the beliefs that have been implanted within
him, and they leave him to unravel the contradictions if he can.
If you were to take up the task of hypnotizing a person so that he wouldn’t be able to
reconcile two contradictory conceptions of the world instilled in him with a healthy
mind, you couldn’t come up with a more effective method than the one employed
against every young person educated in our so-‐called Christian society.
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The one true religion is comprised of nothing more than rules: those absolutely
essential moral sources that we are conscious of ourselves and which, consequently, we
understand with our reason. Arbitrarily established decrees designed to define morality,
which can be numerous and quite different from one another, exist only to serve the
goals of the church. It’s religious delusion to recognize such decrees of faith, which are
established in one nation but don’t represent a worldwide religion, as fundamental and
mandatory rules for serving God. The result is false service to God: an imaginary
veneration of God that results in the commission of actions directly opposed to true
service. Immanuel Kant
Faith is established from within, not from without.
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In the face of the obvious falsity of church teaching in our time, extraordinary
superhuman effort is required to keep people submissive to the church. The churches
are exerting such effort, and it’s straining them more and more. Putting aside all other
nations, in Russia crude, primitive violence is used to keep people submissive to church
authority. People who reject the external expressions of the faith and talk openly about
it are either punished directly or deprived of their rights. Those who hold firmly to the
external forms of the faith are rewarded and given special rights. This is how the
Orthodox Church behaves, but all churches without exception use all possible means,
including the most important method, which is currently called hypnosis.
From architecture to poetry, all the arts are directed toward influencing people’s
souls and stupefying them, and this activity continues incessantly. This need for a
hypnotizing influence on people is particularly obvious in efforts to make them stupid
enough for service in an army of salvation, which employ new and unfamiliar devices
such as trumpets, drums, songs, banners, uniforms, processions, dances, tears and
dramatic performances.
However, what’s striking is that these are merely new devices. Aren’t the old devices
of temples with special lighting, gold, pageantry, candles, choirs, organs, bells,
vestments, maudlin prophecies etc. the same thing?
You often have to reproach people for excessive obedience. This is as much a natural
and fatal vice as is distrustfulness. Blaise Pascal
665
If you compare what one nation considers indisputable truth with what another
nation considers truth, the all-‐powerful lie people believe in will become more obvious
than anything in the world.
One nation believes the truth is that God is one, and another believes God is three; in
one nation you have to stand and pray on Sunday to please God, in another you have to
sit on Friday, and in a third you have to squat on Saturday; in one you must fast at
certain times and in a certain fashion, in another you have to fast in an entirely different
way; in one salvation is achieved in one way, in another it’s achieved differently.
He who wishes to be human must free himself from the religion he was taught in
childhood. He who wishes to acquire the eternal must search for it himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
666
Prayer understood as internal, formal worship of God and therefore a means of
winning a benefit for yourself is a superstitious delusion, because it’s nothing more than
a declaration of wishes to a being that has no need of any declarations. We literally
accomplish nothing with such prayers, and we fail to fulfill a single one of the
responsibilities that God’s commandments have placed upon us and, consequently, we
don’t really serve God.
A heartfelt desire to please God in all our actions—in other words, to accompany
our actions with a state of mind in which we are serving God when we perform them—
this is the spirit of prayer that can and must dwell firmly within us. To clothe this desire
in words and formulae, even if spoken internally, is perhaps at the very most nothing
more than the price of enlivening this state of mind within ourselves. Immanuel Kant
667
July 19
The Superstition of Science
A Persian sage once said: “When I was young I told myself, “I want to learn all the
sciences.” And I learned almost everything that people know. But when I got old I looked
at everything I knew, and I saw that my life had passed me by and I knew nothing.”
It’s better to more or less know the laws of life than to study lots of useless sciences.
The laws of life keep you from committing evil and direct you toward the good.
Knowledge of useless sciences only leads to the temptation of pride and interferes with
your ability to clearly understand the necessary laws of life. Seneca
Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them all.
Henry David Thoreau
668
False sciences and false religions always express their dogmas in grandiloquent
language that seems great and mysterious to the uninitiated. Academic discourses are
frequently just as incomprehensible to the scientists themselves as they are to others, like
the speeches of professional religious scholars. Using Latin terms and formidable words,
a scholarly pedant often makes the simplest thing as unintelligible as the Latin prayers
of priests are for their uneducated parishioners. Mystery is not a sign of wisdom. The
wiser a person, the simpler the language is in which he expresses his thoughts.
Lucy Mallory
Science has now become a distributor of diplomas for the use of other people’s work.
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Socrates lacked the very common weakness of expounding in his lessons on the
nature of everything, searching for the origin of what the Sophists call nature, which
goes all the way to the primal cause of the creation of the heavenly bodies. He said, “Do
people really believe that they understand everything that’s important for a person to
know and that now they can study things that have little impact on human life? Or do
they dare to neglect the things that the gods have made them subservient to, and
instead delve into the mysteries that pertain to them?”
He was particularly astonished at the blindness of those false teachers who were
unaware that the human mind can’t penetrate all mysteries. He said, “This is why all the
people who imagine that they can dare to expound on such mysteries diverge
dramatically in their fundamental opinions. When you hear them all at once it seems
you’re among madmen. And really, what are the distinctive signs of an unfortunate
person who’s in the grips of madness? He’s afraid of that which isn’t frightening and
doesn’t fear that which truly is.” Xenophon
When we read the huge amount of material that’s been given to us before we’re
ready, often in excess, our memory generally becomes the master of our feelings and
tastes. Therefore, we frequently have to concentrate in order to return to the primal
innocence of our own feelings and realize that we’re surrounded by the trash of others’
ideas and opinions, so that we can begin to feel and speak for ourselves and, I’m almost
ready to say, so that we can begin to exist at some point. Georg Lichtenberg
670
If the fine arts don’t touch upon moral ideas common to all humanity, which alone
can unite people, then such arts serve merely as entertainment to silence people’s
dissatisfaction with themselves. However, the more they escape through the arts the
more they need them, and they incessantly make themselves less useful and less
satisfied. Immanuel Kant
There are two unmistakable signs of true science. The first is internal: the person
who serves science does so not for personal gain but as a sacrifice in order to fulfill his
calling. The second is external: the scientist’s work, whose goal is people’s happiness, is
comprehensible to everyone.
Cast out from your heart and mind the thought of knowing all that is in heaven and
on earth. Very little exists that we can ever understand, either of the paths of Providence
or of the laws of existence. However, this small amount is enough, completely sufficient;
trying to achieve more will bring us no happiness. Be assured that beyond the
boundaries of the actual needs of our humble existence and the kingdom that each of us
has been designated to govern with imperturbable composure—ourselves, our
thoughts, words, and actions—all excessive labor increases madness, and all excessive
knowledge increases suffering. John Ruskin
671
July 20
Effort
It’s easy to commit evil acts: those that bring us misery. That which is beneficial and
good for us can only be achieved with difficulty and effort. Buddhist Wisdom
If a man lives by the rule that he’ll do whatever he wants, he won’t be doing what he
wants for long. A genuine deed is always the one you must labor for in order to
accomplish it.
You say: “It’s not worth the effort. No matter how hard you try you never reach
perfection.” However, your job isn’t to reach perfection but only to free yourself more
and more from sins, temptations and superstitions. And only through effort can you
gain this freedom.
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If there are people who don’t study, or who study but fail to learn, they shouldn’t
despair and give up. If there are people who don’t question the enlightened about things
they’re ignorant of, or who do ask but fail to become more enlightened, they shouldn’t
despair. If there are people who don’t reflect, or who do reflect but don’t gain a clear
understanding of the source of goodness, they shouldn’t despair. If there are people who
can’t distinguish good from evil, or who do distinguish it but can’t fully understand
what they see, they shouldn’t despair. If there are people who don’t do good, or who do
but don’t put all their energy into their efforts, they shouldn’t despair. For that which
others do once they do ten times, and what others do one hundred times they do a
thousand times.
No matter how unenlightened a person is, if he truly follows this rule of persistence
he’ll certainly become enlightened, and no matter how weak he is he’ll certainly become
strong. Chinese Wisdom
673
When people think about human life, they say: “Yes, it would be fine if all people
would simultaneously realize that all that is bad is unnecessary. Let’s say one person
turns away from evil and refuses to take part in it. What will this do for the common
good, for the life of all? Changes in human life are made by society, not by individuals.”
This is fair: one swallow doesn’t make the spring, and one person can’t change the
overall condition of humanity. However, there are times when the expression of one
person’s opinion is the expression of truth, not just abstract truth incomprehensible to
the mob but the truth clearly expressed and obvious to everyone but which hadn’t been
recognized before simply because no one had expressed it. And no one expressed it
because someone had to be the first to say it.
Liberation lies not in the external forms of life, not here, not there; but the Kingdom
of God within us exists and is maintained through our efforts. The Kingdom of God is
only achieved through people’s awakening to a higher understanding of life.
Salvation comes only through exerting effort toward awakening. All you have to do
is force yourself to wake up like you do when you’re having a nightmare, when the
danger passes and disappears and salvation comes: you shudder, wake up and see that
what terrified you was nothing but a dream.
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Don’t think that life lies in the accomplishment of extraordinary feats.
For a good life you don’t need achievements but rather continual effort toward
freeing your spiritual source and merging it with all that’s in harmony with it.
The reward for virtue is found in the effort placed into performing a good deed.
Cicero
God gave animals all they need, but he didn’t give this to man; man has to obtain
what he needs. Man’s highest wisdom isn’t born with him; he has to work for it to
achieve it, and the greater his effort the greater his reward. He can’t approach perfect
wisdom if he doesn’t exert extreme effort. Tablets of the Bab
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Moral effort and the joy of consciousness of life alternate in the same way as physical
labor and the joy of rest do. Without physical labor there is no joy of rest; without moral
effort there is no joy of consciousness of life.
Respond to hatred with kindness. Examine difficulty when it’s still easy. Pay
attention to the great when it’s still small. The world’s most difficult undertakings
originate when they’re easy to achieve. The greatest undertakings arise when they’re still
insignificant. Lao Tsu
676
July 21
Self-‐Renunciation
You look for one thing for yourself, then another. Stop and ask God to do with you
what He wants, and you’ll immediately find exactly what you need. Angelus Silesius
If a person lives for his soul, renunciation costs him nothing. He can’t help but
renounce his physical self, because the more he renounces the better he feels.
You can convince yourself that your life is in rank, wealth, and glory, and find your
happiness in the acquisition of that which you consider your life.
You can also convince yourself that you shouldn’t be concerned with yourself, but
rather that you should find your happiness in devotion to others in every interaction
with them, from the simplest conversation to the most important worldly matters. Just
start to do this and you’ll feel your life become fuller, freer and more joyous.
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In order to succeed in your struggle with sins, temptations and superstitions, you
must have a clear idea of what sort of spiritual state counteracts them and destroys sin.
Humanity has always struggled with sin, and the struggle continues today. Meanwhile,
sages in every nation teach people the spiritual states they need to establish within
themselves to successfully combat sin, just as other sages did in the past. There are three
states in which a person cannot be defeated by sins, temptations or superstitions:
renunciation of physical desires defeats sin, humility defeats temptations, and truth
defeats superstition.
The more luxurious and comfortable a person’s life, the further he is from the joy of
renunciation and the harder it is for him to find it. Wealthy people are almost totally
deprived of it. For a poor person, every break from his own work to help his neighbor,
every slice of bread given to a beggar brings the joy of renunciation.
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Death, death, death awaits you every second. You live your life with death always in
sight. If you work for your personal future, you know for yourself that one thing awaits
you in the future: death. And this death destroys everything you worked for. Therefore,
living for yourself can have no meaning whatsoever. If your life is to be rational, its goal
can’t be personal life in the future. In order to live rationally, you have to live in a way
that death can’t destroy your life. From the day of his birth, death inescapably awaits a
person; in other words, his is a meaningless life and a meaningless death unless he finds
a life that death can’t destroy. And Christ revealed this true life to the world. He showed
people that alongside personal life, which is pure delusion, there’s another true life that
gives people happiness, a life that each person knows in his heart. This is the life of love.
Christ’s teaching is a doctrine of the transparency of personal life, its renunciation and
the transference of the meaning and goal of individual life and the life of all humanity
into the life of the son of man.
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Once a long time ago there was a terrible drought. All the rivers, streams, and wells
ran dry, the trees, bushes and grasses dried up, and people and animals started dying
from thirst.
One night a little girl left her home with a ladle to find some water for her sick
mother. She couldn’t find water anywhere and finally lay down from exhaustion in a
grassy field and fell asleep. When she woke up and grabbed her ladle, she almost spilled
it. It was filled with clean, fresh water. The girl was overjoyed and wanted to take a
drink, but she was afraid there wouldn’t be enough for her mother and ran home with
the ladle. She was in such a hurry that she didn’t notice a small dog in her path,
stumbled over it and dropped the ladle. The dog sadly bit her. The girl picked up the
ladle.
She thought she’d spilled it, but no, it was standing upright and all the water was
still in it. She poured some water into her palm and the dog licked it all up and became
overjoyed. When the girl picked up the ladle, it had changed from wood to silver. She
took the ladle home and gave it to her mother. Her mother said, “I’m going to die no
matter what; it would be better for you to drink it,” and gave the ladle to her daughter.
At that instant the ladle changed from silver to gold. The girl couldn’t resist any longer
and wanted to take the ladle, but suddenly a pilgrim walked in and asked if he could
have something to drink. The girl swallowed her spittle and gave the ladle to the pilgrim,
and suddenly seven huge diamonds jumped out of the ladle and a large stream of clean,
fresh water came pouring out of it.
The seven diamonds rose higher and higher, went up into the sky and became the
Great Bear. Based on a Passage from the English Journal “Herald of Peace”
680
If you want to achieve knowledge of the universal self, first of all you must recognize
yourself. In order to recognize yourself, you must sacrifice your personal self to the
universal self. Based on a Passage from “The Voice of Silence”
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July 22
Humility
The weakest in the world can conquer the strongest. The low and humble can defeat
the lofty and proud. Very few in this world understand the power of humility. Lao Tsu
True humility is difficult to achieve. Our heart becomes troubled at any thought of
scorn and humiliation. We try to conceal everything that could lower us in the eyes of
others; we try to conceal it from ourselves. If we’re bad, we don’t want to see ourselves as
we really are. But no matter how difficult humility is to achieve, it can be. Let’s try to
keep clear of everything that interferes with it. Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts
and Precepts”
A person who’s perfecting himself in humility is like a person digging himself out
from underground. The higher he rises, the more light surrounds him.
Humility is acquired by greater and greater weakening of your physical self and the
elevation of your spiritual self. This process continues until death.
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The more a person searches within himself, the more insignificant he sees himself to
be. Therefore, the more a person searches within himself, the more humble he becomes.
Let’s search within ourselves so we can be humble. We’ll learn our weaknesses, and this
will give us wisdom. William Channing
A Christian cannot be either a teacher or a student; he’s always one and the other at
the same time. Therefore he always moves forward, and he’s never finished working on
perfecting himself.
Every one of you, think of yourself as a student and a teacher. Don’t think you’re too
old to study, that you’re fully mature and educated, and that your character and soul
are already as they should be and can’t become better. For a Christian there’s no
graduation: he’s a student to the grave. Based on a Passage by Nikolai Gogol
Any good that I say or do comes not from me but only through me. A higher power
acts and speaks through me, and as soon as something good comes through me I
imagine that it means that I’m a good person.
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The earth appears great, but in comparison to the sky it’s a grain of sand.
So what could possibly be great within you?
God alone is great. Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
Overconfidence is a bestial characteristic; humility is a human characteristic.
According to St. Francis of Assisi, perfect joy is found in the ability to suffer an
unearned reproach and endure all the physical anguish that comes with it but feel no
hostility toward the source of the reproach and the suffering. This is joy in the
consciousness of true faith and love, the kind that can’t be destroyed by others’ evil acts
or your own suffering.
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July 23
Honesty
It’s impossible to maintain any kind of falsehood without creating another
falsehood. We should remember this and fear all lies, no matter how harmless. The
trivial can lead to the important.
There’s no greater misfortune than when a person begins to shy away from the truth
so that he won’t see how bad he is. Blaise Pascal
Nothing turns a person away from the truth like unthinking imitation of what
everyone else does. We’ve all become accustomed since childhood to mindlessly imitate
what others do. The more a person uses his reason to examine his daily acts that are the
result of imitation, the more rational and free his life will be.
685
All people live and act partially according to their own thoughts and partially
according to the thoughts of others. The degree to which people live according to their
own thoughts and those of others is one of the main distinctions between them. People
of the second category use their thoughts as a mental game and treat their own reason
like a flywheel removed from its belt, and when they act they obey custom, tradition,
laws, and mainly public opinion. People of the first category consider their thoughts the
prime mover of their activities and subject custom, tradition, laws, and public opinion to
verification by their reason, and try to let only that which they consider truth for
everyone at all times to direct their actions.
Human life is a process. Once a person is conscious of being alive he sees that his life
moves, and that it moves according to a law that lies within him. At the same time, he
recognizes that reason, which manifests itself within him, is a new law that exists within
his very self and that he can and must direct his life according to this law. Life’s
movement and the force of this movement doesn’t depend on man, but as soon as
reason appears within him he can direct this movement. But it often happens that
instead of using his reason to direct the motion of his life, a person uses it to justify the
direction his bestial inclinations choose. The result of this corruption is a bestial life and
a useless waste of reason.
686
More and more clearly humanity hears the voice of reason. The ancient deception
that demanded faith in something that has no rational explanation has already been
carried away by the wind and we can never return to it.
People used to say: “Don’t use your reason; just believe what we decree, for your
rational mind will deceive you. Faith alone will reveal the joy of life to you.” People tried
to believe this and they did believe, but communication with others showed them that
other people believe in something completely different and claim that this something
different gives man greater joy. It became necessary to decide which faith is the most
correct, and only reason can do that. People understand everything through reason, not
through faith. A person can deceive others, claiming that he understands something
through faith rather than reason, but as soon as a person knows of two faiths and sees
people professing another faith exactly as he professes his, he’s placed in the inescapable
position of having to decide the issue through reason. If a Buddhist learns of Islam and
remains a Buddhist, he’s no longer a Buddhist because of faith but because of reason. As
soon as he finds out there’s another faith, only reason can answer the the question of
whether or not he should abandon his own faith or the one he’s found. And if, having
discovered Islam, he remains a Buddhist, his former blind faith in Buddha must rest
upon rational foundations.
Trying to instill spirituality in a person through faith while bypassing reason is like
trying to feed a person by bypassing his mouth. People’s relations with one another
show them the common foundation of cognition, and people can no longer return to
their former delusions; and a time will come and already has come when the dead will
hear the voice of the son of God, and once they hear it they’ll come to life. It’s impossible
687
to silence this voice, because it isn’t the voice of any one person but the voice of truth,
which beckons each individual and all humanity.
People understand reason as a series of diverse and complicated mental activities,
and therefore they frequently doubt the veracity of decisions made by reason. However,
there’s one activity of reason that’s indubitable, and it is in fact a negative activity: the
examination of what people tell me is the truth. I’m told that God is both one and three,
that he flew up to Heaven, that this bread is his body and so on, and I examine this
through reason and conclude without doubt that all of it is irrational and, as far as I’m
concerned, does not exist. You can’t say that everything that exists is rational, or that
anything that’s rational necessarily exists, but I must say that anything that’s irrational
doesn’t exist for me.
Don’t fear exposing your delusions to reason, for reason will show you the easiest
way to liberate yourself from them.
A lie is an intentional distortion of the truth that can only be accomplished for the
sake of achieving the goals of your animal self.
A person often lacks the strength to free himself from the lies of societies he lives in,
but he can always condemn lies and himself if he participates in them.
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Truth might not always show us what we should do, but it always shows us what we
shouldn’t do or what we should stop doing.
A person can conceal something that lies before his eyes in two ways: he can turn his
eyes toward something more appealing or he can cover his eyes. In the same way, a
person can conceal things his conscience reveals to him in two ways: Externally, he can
turn his attention to all sorts of occupations, concerns, amusements, and games, while
internally he can cover the very organ of perception. For people with dull, limited moral
senses external diversion is sufficient to conceal the revelations of conscience about the
impropriety of their lives. However, for people of morally acute senses this is frequently
insufficient.
External methods don’t completely conceal a person’s consciousness of the
dissonance between his life and the demands of his conscience. Conscience interferes
with life, and so in order to be able to live, people resort to the reliable internal method
of obscuring their consciences by poisoning their minds with stupefying substances.
Some people live in contradiction to the demands of their consciences, and they lack
the strength to make their lives agree with these demands.
Amusements, which should divert a person’s consciousness from this dissonance,
either fail or lose their potency. So in order to be in a condition to continue to live despite
the revelations of their consciences concerning the impropriety of their lives, they
temporarily stop the activity of the organ through which the revelations of conscience
appear, just like a person who deliberately covers his eyes in order to conceal something
he doesn’t want to see.
689
July 24
Restraint in Deed
Just refrain from doing what you shouldn’t and you’ll do all that you should.
He who surrenders to passion, who seeks gratification, will find his passion
becoming stronger and stronger, and will bind himself in chains.
He who defeats passion is happy with all that others fail to find happiness in, breaks
his chains, and is always joyful and at peace. Buddhist Wisdom
Just look at how people live in today’s world: look at Chicago, Paris, London, all the
cities, all the factories, railroads, cars, armies, cannons, fortresses, temples, publishing
houses, museums, twenty-‐story buildings etc., and ask yourself: What should people do
first of all in order to live well? There’s one sure answer: first of all they need to stop
doing all the unnecessary things they’re doing now. And in our European world ninety
percent of what people do is unnecessary.
690
Some say that Christianity is a doctrine of weakness because it doesn’t prescribe
actions but mainly restraint from acting. Christianity is a doctrine of weakness! This is
quite a doctrine of weakness: its founder died a martyr on a cross without renouncing
his beliefs and his followers include thousands of martyrs, solitary people who looked
evil in the eyes and rose up against it. Both those who had Christ put to death and
modern governments know what this doctrine of weakness really is, and they fear it
more than anything. They feel that this doctrine fully and truly destroys the entire
system that supports them. It requires far more strength to restrain oneself from evil
than it does to accomplish the most difficult task that we would consider good.
For true progress in life, extraneous bustling activity is not only unnecessary, but
also harmful. Idleness without entertainment supplied by other people’s labor is a most
difficult condition if you don’t occupy yourself with work on your soul. Therefore you
only need to avoid luxury and the labor of others and you’ll have no need to fear this
idleness. The main danger to humanity isn’t idleness, but doing what’s unnecessary and
harmful.
Who is wise? He who learns something from everyone. Who is rich? He who is
satisfied with his lot in life. Who is strong? He who restrains himself. Talmud
691
In order to accomplish acts that are in harmony with their conscience, people of our
time need to exert effort. However, this effort is still not enough for people of our time to
change their lives so that they harmonize with their conscience. Just as a liquid cooled to
below its freezing point requires a shock to transform it into its inherent crystal form, so
for humanity there needs to be moral effort, effort that brings about the Kingdom of
God, in order to change life into its inherent form.
All the majority of people need to do is understand that they’re not pagans but
Christians, that they no longer believe in pagan but in Christian principles which they
recognize in their conscience in order to instantly annihilate the maladies and
contradictions which physically and morally torment humanity and make way for the
Kingdom of God, which was foretold nineteen hundred years ago, the Kingdom of God
not in the sense of a perfection of all life but in the sense of the creation of perfection as
far as humanity is currently capable of attaining.
This effort is not an effort of motion, an effort of discovery of a new perspective on
the world, of new ideas or the completion of new, extraordinary acts. The effort needed
to bring about the Kingdom of God or a new form of life is a negative effort, an effort
not to follow the flow, to restrain ourselves from actions that are not in harmony with
our inner consciousness.
And this effort is made essential for the people of our time by the cruelty of life and
the clarity and universality of Christian consciousness.
692
July 25
Restraint in Word
Stop talking as soon as you notice you’re becoming irritated or that you’re irritating
the person you’re talking with. The unspoken word is golden.
A stupid person is best off staying quiet. But then if he knew this, he wouldn’t be
stupid. Saadi
Every person carries God within him. He can express consciousness of his divinity
through the word. How then can he be careless with his words?
As soon as we become angry during an argument, we’re no longer arguing for the
truth but for ourselves. Thomas Carlyle
Criticizing people to their faces is bad because it offends them, while criticizing them
behind their backs is bad because it deceives them. The best thing to do is not to look for
the bad in others and ignore it, but rather to look for the bad in yourself and try to
correct yourself instead of others.
693
A word is an expression of thought, and a thought is a manifestation of divine
power. Therefore, a word must correspond with what it expresses. It can be neutral, but
it cannot and must not be an expression of evil.
It’s easy to notice the mistakes and shortcomings of others, but it’s difficult to notice
your own. At the same time, noticing others’ shortcomings and talking about them is
harmful for both the person you’re talking about and yourself. Noticing your own
shortcomings is useful not only because it keeps you from judging others, but also
because it allows you to correct your mistakes. Therefore, as soon as you feel the urge to
judge someone, ask yourself if you have the same fault, or one that’s even worse.
Judgment of another person is always inaccurate, because no one can ever know
what has transpired and is transpiring in another person’s soul.
Time passes, but the spoken word remains.
694
July 26
Restraint in Thought
If a person couldn’t think, he wouldn’t understand why he lives. If he couldn’t
understand why he lives he wouldn’t know the difference between good and evil.
Therefore, there’s nothing more valuable to a person than to think clearly.
I had a thought, but then I forgot it. Well that’s no problem, it was only a thought. If
it had been a million rubles I’d tear everything apart until I found them. But it was just a
thought. However, giant trees grow from tiny seeds. Indeed, one person or even millions
of people perform one or another act as the result of a thought, and yet we think that
thoughts are insignificant.
The same thing happens with our best abilities, including the most important
one—reason—as happens with all our abilities: if we don’t use them, we forget that
they exist. And so those who don’t exercise their reason lose consciousness of it within
themselves.
695
This is what Confucius once said about the significance of thought:
“True education teaches people the highest good, human renewal and maintenance
of this condition. In order to acquire the highest good all people’s lives must be good. In
order for the people as a whole to be good, there must be good in the family. In order for
there to be good in the family, your own inner life must be good. In order for your inner
life to be good, your heart must be set aright. In order for your heart to be set aright, you
must be conscious of your thoughts.”
The epochs of our lives are defined by things we willfully accomplish but fail to
notice: marriage, finding a job, etc. However, our thoughts, which accompany us on our
walks, at night, when we eat, and particularly those thoughts that comprise our past, tell
us: “Don’t act like that, it would be better to act differently.” And all our subsequent
actions serve these thoughts like slaves: they fulfill their will. Henry David Thoreau
A thought appears to be free, but there’s something within a person that’s more
powerful and able to control it.
Observe yourself in your thoughts, observe yourself in your words, and guard
against anything bad in your actions. By observing purity on all three of these paths
you’ll follow the path laid out by the wise. Buddhist Wisdom
696
If a person didn’t know his eyes were capable of sight and never opened them, he’d
be rather pathetic. Just as pathetic is a person who doesn’t understand that he’s been
given the power of thought in order to endure hardships peacefully. If a person is
rational, it’s easy for him to endure any hardship: first, because his reason tells him that
all hardships pass and become good; second, because a rational person can always make
use of any hardship. Nevertheless, instead of looking hardship in the eyes, most people
try to turn away from it.
Wouldn’t it be better to take joy in the fact that God has given us the power to
refrain from grieving over things that are beyond our control, and to thank Him for
subordinating our souls only to that which is within our power: our reason. He hasn’t
made our souls subordinate to our parents, or our brothers, or wealth, or our bodies, or
death. By His goodness, he has subordinated our souls to the one thing that depends on
us: our thoughts.
So, we must observe our thoughts and secure their purity with all our strength.
Based on a Passage from Epictetus
When among people, don’t forget what you learned in solitude, and when in solitude
contemplate what you learned when you were among people.
Prayer clarifies our relation to the source of all. It clarifies our connection with
others, our responsibilities to them as children of one and the same God. It settles
accounts with all our actions and focuses our attention on our dark past so that we can
avoid our past mistakes in the future. Talmud
697
July 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Never put off a good deed if you can do it now, because death doesn’t take into
account whether you’ve done what you should or not. Death waits for no one and
nothing. Therefore, there’s nothing more important in this world for you than what
you’re doing right now.
If we could only remember more often that we’ll never recover lost time and never be
able to undo a bad deed, we’d do more good and less evil.
Others will appreciate the results of your actions. Just try to keep your heart pure
and truthful now, at this moment. John Ruskin
Your life is unhappy, and you think it’s because you can’t live the way you’d like to,
that it would be easier to do what you think you need to if your life were different. This is
false. You have everything you wish for. No matter where you are, you can do what you
need to at every moment of your life.
698
“Memento mori”3 is a wonderful saying. If we would remember that we’ll die one day,
our lives would possess a completely different meaning. A person who knows he’s going
to die in thirty minutes won’t do anything vain, stupid or, most of all, bad in that last
half hour. But isn’t the half-‐century that might separate you from death the same as
thirty minutes? Time doesn’t exist at the moment of death, and it doesn’t exist now.
If you can spiritually ascend above time and space, you’ll find yourself in eternity at
every second. Angelus Silesius
When you think about all the people who’ve already died, how you might die soon
and how easily your life could end, you involuntarily think: “Am I really here on Earth
for this short time so that I can lie, blunder, commit all sorts of stupid acts and then
disappear?”
This is just like an actor who only has a cameo role for which he’s long prepared, who
dresses, puts on makeup, and then when he goes on stage acts shamefully and ruins the
entire play.
3
“Remember Death.”
699
Life manifests itself in time and space, but time and space doesn’t define it. Life is
defined only by the degree of submission of your animal personality to reason. Defining
life according to time and space is the same as defining the height of an object by its
length and width.
An object’s extension in height as it moves along a plane is a precise analogy to the
relation of true human life to the life of animal individuality, or true life to life within
time and space. The extension of an object upward is independent of its motion along a
plane and can’t be increased or decreased by such motion. It’s the same with the
definition of human life. True life always appears in a personality but it’s not dependent
upon it and can’t be increased or decreased by one or another manifestation of
personality.
The temporal and spatial conditions in which the human animal personality finds
itself can’t influence true life, which consists of the subordination of one’s animal
personality to rational consciousness.
A person who wants to live has no power to destroy or stop the temporal and spatial
motion of his existence. However, true life is the achievement of happiness through
submission to reason, independent of these apparent temporal and spatial movements.
Human life consists of nothing more than this greater and greater achievement of
happiness through the exertion of reason. If there’s no increase in effort, then human
life follows the two visible paths of time and space and is nothing but a solitary being. If
there’s motion into the heights, if there’s greater and greater submission to reason, then
a relationship is established between these two forces and reason, and the result is
movement to a greater or lesser degree which elevates a person into the realm of life.
700
Temporal and spatial forces are defined and finite forces that are incompatible with
the conception of life. The power of aiming for happiness through submission to reason
is a force that rises to the heights: it is the very force of life, for which there are no
temporal or spatial limits.
All young people are inclined to live in the future rather than the present (which is
the only life that exists, no matter what it might be). And if a young person’s life is going
so badly that his real life is unpleasant and completely contradictory to his wishes, he
totally disregards the present and lives entirely in the future: in that which doesn’t exist
and very possibly may never exist.
701
July 28
There is No Evil
Everything that we call evil, every sorrow will improve our souls if only we accept
them as we should. And the improvement of your soul is the whole business of life.
“Truly, truly do I say to you: you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices; you
will be sad, but in your sadness will be joy. A woman giving birth endures pain because
her hour is approaching; but after she’s given birth she no longer remembers the pain
because she’s so joyful that a child has been born into the world.” John 16:20-‐21
There’s a tale about a man whose punishment for his sins was that he could never
die. I can confidently state that if his punishment had been that he could never suffer,
that punishment would be just as terrible.
What we consider happiness and unhappiness for our physical self is outside our
control: loss, illness, and death. But that which is good or bad for my soul is dependent
upon me. If I submit to God’s will, all will be good for me regardless of external
circumstances.
702
A fire both destroys and warms. It’s the same with illness. When I’m healthy I’m not
just happy, I’m lighthearted and merry. When you’re healthy you try to live well, and
you exert effort to do this, but no matter how hard you lift one side of a weight the other
sides hold it down. In illness, all the weight of earthly temptations is relieved and
everything is achieved easily. And as you know from experience, it’s terrible to think that
as soon as the illness passes the weight will once again fall down upon you with all its
might.
Just as our bodies would burst if atmospheric pressure were to stop, so if all the
pressure of need, heavy labor and the vicissitudes of fate were to stop pressuring human
life, human arrogance would increase, perhaps not to the point of exploding, but at least
to the point where unrestrained folly and even insanity would appear.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The worse a person’s physical condition, the better his spiritual condition becomes.
Therefore, things can never be bad for anyone. The spiritual and the physical are like
two ends of the arm of a scale. The more weight there is on the physical side, the higher
the spiritual end rises, the better it is for the soul, and vice versa.
703
Search for the cause of your sufferings within yourself. Occasionally these sufferings
are a direct consequence of your sins, and you’ll see that clearly. Sometimes you fail to
see it, but only when you limit your life to your own personal self and are unconscious of
all that has lived and continues to live as one with you.
Illness strikes every person, but instead of trying to cure himself of his illness a
person should find the best way to endure the condition in which he finds himself.
When you feel yourself weak and ill, remember one thing: if you can’t do anything
good, then use all your effort to avoid doing anything bad.
704
July 29
There is No Death
When a person lives a good life he’s usually happy and never thinks about what will
happen after he dies. A man who considers his happiness to be the fulfillment of God’s
will and fulfills it is just as happy. This is because death can’t take away the happiness of
anyone who fulfills God’s will.
If a person considers his life to be in the present, there can be no question for him
about his life in the future, either before or after his death.
If a person lives a strictly spiritual life, then death isn’t terrifying. For him, death is
simply the soul’s liberation from the body. He knows that nothing can annihilate that
through which he lives.
How good it is to live while remembering death, while remembering that you’re
passing through and that you must work while you’re on your way.
705
He who sees the meaning of life in self-‐improvement can’t believe in death—the
cessation of improvement. Self-‐improvement can change forms but cannot come to an
end.
Having reached the highest level of development in the body—maturity—a person
aims for the achievement of new, wider boundaries, but achieving them is impossible
within the restraints he finds himself under, and so the life of the body ends.
Death alone frees me, and therefore I say that death is the greatest thing I know of.
Angelus Silesius
The words and actions of a dying person have tremendous power over people, and
therefore no matter how important it is to live well, it is perhaps more important to die
well. A foul, rebellious death weakens the influence of a good life; a pleasant, humble,
and steadfast death redeems a bad life.
706
July 30
After Death
The soul doesn’t live at home in the body but like a wanderer on a journey to a
distant refuge. Kural
We often try to imagine death, the journey there, but it’s impossible, just as it’s
impossible to imagine what God is like. All we can do is believe that death, like
everything else that comes from God, is good.
We know that when thunder cracks lightning has already struck, and so the
thunder can’t hurt us. Nevertheless, we always jump when thunder cracks. It’s the same
with death.
We know that physical death only destroys the body, but not the life of the soul.
Nevertheless, we live in deluded terror of death. For someone who doesn’t understand
the meaning of his life, it seems as though everything ends with death, and so he’s
frightened and hides from it, just like a stupid man hides from thunder when there’s no
way the thunder can hurt him.
No one knows what death is. However, everyone fears it, thinking it to be the greatest
of evils, when it might be the greatest blessing. Plato
707
All human life from birth to death is like a single day in life from the time you wake
up till the time you fall asleep.
Think about how you wake up in the morning after a sound sleep and how at first
you don’t realize where you are, how you can’t figure out who’s standing in front of you,
who’s walking around or who’s waking you up, and how you don’t want to get up and
have absolutely no energy. Then think about how you come to your senses little by little,
and you start to understand what’s around you, begin moving, then your thoughts
starting coming to you, and you get up and get to work. Doesn’t exactly the same thing
happen with a person when he’s born and little by little awakens to life? At first he
doesn’t understand anything and is powerless, but little by little strength and reason
come to him and he begins to understand his world and his life. The only difference is
that when a person sleeps and then wakes up it all happens in a single morning, while
when a person is born and grows up it happens over months and years.
The later life of a person also resembles the life of a single day. After he wakes up a
person works, runs around, and as the day progresses he gets more and more energetic.
This goes on till midday, when his energy begins to wane. As evening approaches he gets
more and more fatigued and finally wants to rest. It’s exactly the same with life.
In youth a person is lively and energetic, but by midlife he no longer has so much
energy, and as he approaches old age he begins to feel weak and his desire to rest
gradually increases. And just as a person lies down and begins to lose his ability to think
clearly when night approaches and goes somewhere where he’s no longer aware of
himself—sleep—so after youth, maturity and old age a person gets tired, wishes for
708
rest, desires less, thinks less, lies down and feels his thoughts begin to scatter and finally
goes somewhere where he no longer senses himself: he dies.
So a person’s awakening is a minor birth, day to night is a minor life, and sleep is a
minor death.
The two phenomena are identical. The only difference is that we remember life
before we woke up quite easily, while we don’t remember life before we were born.
However, there was life then, and it couldn’t be otherwise, for if something is created, it
had to be created out of something.
Do our lives end with physical death? This is a question of the greatest importance,
and you can’t help but think about it. Depending on whether we believe in immortality
or not, our actions will either be rational or irrational.
Therefore, our primary concern should be to answer this question: Do we cease to
exist in physical death or not. If not, then we are truly immortal. Then we understand
that within us is something that dies and something that doesn’t, and it’s clear that in
this life we should concern ourselves with that which is immortal, and not that which
dies. Based on a Passage by Blaise Pascal
The voice that tells us we’re immortal is the voice of God, who lives within us.
709
Everything on earth has its end. The most powerful and joyful fall from their
greatness and joy and turn to dust. The entire terrestrial globe is nothing more than a
giant tomb, and there’s nothing on its surface that will not disappear into this
subterranean grave. Springs, streams and rivers flow to their appointed goals and never
return to their happy sources. They all rush forward to be buried in the endless depths
of the ocean. That which was here yesterday is gone today; that which is here today will
be gone tomorrow. The cemetery is filled with the dust of those who were once full of life,
who were kings, who ruled peoples, supervised councils, led men into war, conquered
foreign lands, demanded worship, and became puffed up with vanity, grandeur and
power.
But their fame passed like black smoke from a volcano, and nothing remains of
them except a few mentions on the pages of chronicles.
The great, the wise, the bold, the beautiful—alas, where are they now? They’ve all
been absorbed into the soil, and what happened to them will happen to us, and it will
happen to those who come after us.
But take heart, everyone—you famous warriors, my true friends and loyal
subjects—we’ll all go the Heaven where all is eternal and there’s no decay or
annihilation.
Darkness is the sun’s cradle, and there must be night’s darkness for the stars to
shine. From the Last Testament of Nazahualcoyotl
710
July 31
Life is a Blessing
Our lives would be better than anything we could ever imagine if only we’d live as
God wants us to.
Take the greatest blessings—wealth, honor, health—and a person will still be
unhappy is he doesn’t live according to God’s will. But deprive a person of everything
that’s considered good fortune—property, fame, health—and nevertheless he’ll be
happy as long as he lives according to God’s will.
Human life is the pursuit of happiness. What man strives for has been given to him:
life that can never be death and blessings that can never be evil. Evil is a dream, a
deception.
He who makes his goal the liberation of his spiritual self from the sins of the body
can never be dissatisfied, for what he desires is constantly being achieved, and it’s within
his power to contribute to this achievement.
711
This is what Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in the second century: “When will you
cease being flesh and become the eyes of man? When will you understand the blessing
of love for everyone? When will you use your reason to free yourself from a life of sorrow
and lust and stop forcing others to serve your life and death in order to gain happiness?
When will you understand that true happiness is always within your power and doesn’t
depend on others?”
To be happy, to have eternal life, to live in God, to be saved: all of this is one and the
same thing. It’s the solution to the problem of life. And this happiness will grow and a
person will feel greater and deeper acquisition of heavenly joy. There are no limits to this
happiness, because this happiness is freedom, omnipotence, and the complete
satisfaction of all desires. Henri Frédéric Amiel
A wise person doesn’t try to change his situation, because he knows that fulfilling
God’s will—the law of love, which gives the greatest joy of all—is possible in any
situation.
712
In order for human life, full of physical sufferings and subject to termination at any
second, not to be a foul joke, it must possess a meaning that will keep life’s significance
from being destroyed by sufferings, or by the length or brevity of one’s life.
And there is such a meaning in human life. The meaning is to live for the sake of
spiritual joy, which is always attainable. “My yoke is a blessing.”
Don’t build, but sow. If you build, nature will hinder you and destroy the fruits of
your labors, while if you sow, nature will help your efforts and make all that you planted
grow. It’s the same thing in the spiritual realm: do what is in harmony with the life of
the world and not that which agrees only with your own desires, and you’ll feel
unassailable strength and indestructible happiness within yourself.
713
August
August 1
Faith
In every religion—Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam—there is both truth
and falsehood.
Try to find the truth in the religion you were born into. The truth in every religion is
comprehensible, simple and clear. And this comprehensible, simple and clear truth is in
all religions.
The stronger your faith, the stronger your life.
What am I? What must I do? What awaits me? These are every person’s three
central questions. The most important of these three is the second—what must I do?—
because if a person knows what he must do he knows what he is. And if he knows what
he is, he knows what he can hope for. If a person knows that his duty is to love everyone,
then he knows that he himself is nothing but love. And knowing that he himself is love,
he knows that the only thing awaiting him is happiness.
714
Don’t silence your reason, as false teachers tell you that you must in order to
recognize true faith, but rather purify and exert it, use it to test every lesson that the
teachers of faith present.
People not only try to make the expression and transmission of truth impossible,
they try to make it impossible even to discover and meditate on it by handing young
children’s minds over to the manipulation of the clergy, who dig such deep furrows for
fundamental thoughts to travel that in most cases they become firmly established and
entrench themselves for a person’s entire life. Arthur Schopenhauer
God’s law of love for God and one’s neighbor is so simple and clear that every person
feels it in his heart as soon as his reason develops. Therefore, if there were no false
doctrines, all people would adhere to this law and the Kingdom of God would appear on
Earth.
However, false teachers have always taught people everywhere to recognize God in
that which is not God and have taught them something other than God’s law as the law
of God. People have believed these false teachings and alienated themselves from the
true God and from the fulfillment of His true law, and as a result people’s lives have
become more and more difficult and joyless.
Therefore, don’t believe in any doctrines if they’re not in harmony with love of God
and your neighbor.
715
Tales of miracles can never confirm truth. If not in tales but before my very eyes a
man rose from the dead, ascended into the sky, and assured me from there that 2x2=5
or that people can kill one another, I still wouldn’t believe him.
A person is as naïve as a grown-‐up child if he can seriously believe that once upon a
time some sort of superhuman beings explained to the human race its essence, its
purpose and the purpose of the entire world. There is no revelation other than the
thoughts of wise people. Therefore, it might seem like there’s no difference between
relying on your own thoughts or those of others, since the thoughts that are relayed to
us as religion are nothing more than human thoughts. Yet people are generally inclined
to rely on the thoughts of others as if they came from some supernatural source rather
than a human one. However, if we take into account all people’s intellectual inequalities,
then perhaps the thoughts of one person might seem to be a supernatural revelation to
another. Arthur Schopenhauer
716
August 2
The Soul
In order for you to be a real person, you must understand that God lives within you.
We’re astonished by huge mountains, the height of the sun and the stars. But all
these great things are nothing in comparison with something everyone knows about.
They’re nothing in comparison with your soul.
The most powerful thing in the world is something that can’t be seen, heard or felt:
the human spirit.
Spiritual power is in everything, but its greatest known manifestation is in man. In
order for it to function, a person must recognize it. A person who’s capable of creating
the best inescapably creates the insignificant and evil if he doesn’t recognize it.
If a person understands that all he sees around him, all this endless world, definitely
exists, then how can he not recognize something that not only exists but which also
allows him to recognize everything else: his spiritual source?
Our life is our consciousness of ourselves as eternal and infinite: a spirit outside time
and space, restricted by the conditions of temporal and spatial phenomena.
717
Just like every other person, my life is the consciousness of myself as a spiritual and
therefore endless and limitless being. I recognize what I am through the boundaries that
restrict me from everything else, and I can only envision these boundaries as material
existence. These boundaries are my body and all that surrounds me. I recognize the fact
that I am a spiritual and therefore an eternal and limitless being as I watch the changes
and movements that take place within me and around me: motion that unites me with
everything and comprises the essence of life. Just as material existence can’t occur in
isolation since it simply separates me from everything else—eternal and endless
existence—so changes and movement that occur within my boundaries and beyond
them don’t exist in isolation but are simply what unites me, separate from everything,
with that from which I’m separated. Since material existence only occurs because I’m
isolated, if I didn’t exist there would be no material existence. In the same manner,
movement exists only because I’m united with All, and so if I wasn’t united with All,
there could be no motion. Therefore I imagine myself as a material being in motion.
Conscience is the consciousness of our spiritual source, and only when consciousness
is in harmony with our conscience is it a faithful guide in human life. Yet how often do
people consider conscience what the people around them think is good and bad rather
than their own consciousness of their spiritual source.
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How joyful it is to recognize God within you. In this alone is life. Recognize within
you that being which is free, rational, loving and therefore holy. How can you not take
joy in that?
The more you believe in God and understand Him, the more you distance yourself
from Him as the source of everything, and at the same time the more He merges with
you in your soul.
There is only You and me. If there weren’t the two of us there would nothing in the
world. Angelus Silesius
719
August 3
One Soul in All
All living things fear suffering, all that lives fears death. See yourself not only in
other people, but in every living thing. Don’t kill or torment anything.
All that lives, just as you live, wants the same thing you do. See yourself in all living
things. Buddhist Wisdom
The kinder and more rational a person is, the more he recognizes himself in others.
A stupid, unkind person thinks that all other people are alien to him. A wise and kind
person knows that the most valuable thing within him is also within every other person.
True wisdom teaches that the foundation of the thoughts and feelings of wise and
holy people is the same as it is in the simplest people, and that the qualities wise and
holy people demonstrate are the same qualities that ordinary people employ in the most
mundane of their daily activities.
Wise and holy people, the teachers of humanity, simply manifest that which is
common to all people. The light they emit is nothing more than the revelation of the
power that’s hidden within every human being.
720
If a person considers his true self to be his animal being, he’ll imagine God as a
physical being ruling over the world. However, God doesn’t rule over anything; He
simply lives invisibly within everyone.
I can only convince another person of something through his own thoughts. This
means that I must believe that he can reason in the same way that I do. Similarly, I can’t
encourage a person to do good without assuming that he loves the good as much as I do.
In both circumstances it’s as if I know in advance that what’s in my soul is in the soul of
every person. Immanuel Kant
We are all children of one Father, and so it is unnatural not to love your neighbor.
721
It’s impossible to love anything transient, temporary, or mortal. Love is a great affair,
and all that’s transient is insignificant. Loving that which is mortal is like building a
house on water. So what can you love? Only the eternal that’s within you and within all
people.
Thou shalt not kill doesn’t refer only to the killing of people, but to the killing of
anything that lives. And this commandment was written in the human heart long before
it was written on Sinai.
True compassion begins only when you imagine yourself in the place of the person
who’s suffering and experience true pain.
722
August 4
God
All questions will be answered only when you recognize the source of everything:
God.
Life ceases to be terrible only when you live with God. Without Him life is always
terrible.
723
Like a man who’s been kept in a cell with frosted windows all his life will call the
frosted windows the sun—the only thing that allows light from the sun into the
chamber—so we define our understanding of God with the name of the most elevated
feeling or most elevated human quality that takes our divine inspiration higher. Namely,
we call God either love or reason (if we express Him in words).
And just as the prisoner becomes able to distinguish the true sun from the frosted
windows it was illuminating once he’s released from his cell, so the human soul is better
able to unite directly with the essence of Divinity once it attains a degree of liberation
from the material captivity of the body.
Until this happens, people who respect their reason most of all will equate God with
reason and call Him reason, while people who value love most of all will equate God with
love and call Him love.
Finally, people who believe in neither reason nor love, and as a direct result blindly
and unquestioningly believe in the authority of other people, will equate God with a
human personality. Fyodor Strakhov
God is an X, and even though the definition of this X is unknown to us, without it we
not only can’t solve an equation, we can’t even compose one. Life is finding the solution
to this equation.
724
When a mathematician was asked what he thought about God, he said, “I’ve never
had any need for that hypothesis.” I would answer in the reverse: I would say that
without this hypothesis I would never be able to think rationally about anything.
If you ever get the notion that all you ever thought about God is wrong and that
there is no God, don’t let it fluster you, but realize that this has happened and does
happen to everyone. Don’t think that if you’ve stopped believing in the God in which you
once believed, it’s because there’s no God. If you no longer believe in the God you once
did, this is simply because there was something false in your belief in God, and you need
to try to have a better understanding of what you call God.
If a savage stops believing in his wooden god, it doesn’t mean there’s no God, but
only that God isn’t made of wood.
We can never fully understand God; we can only increasingly understand the source
of all. Therefore, if we reject a lower conception of God, this is useful to us. It allows us to
achieve a better and higher understanding of that which we call God.
I love only one thing, and I don’t know what it is. But I love it because I don’t know
what it is. Angelus Silesius
725
August 5
Life is Union
A person’s life consists of one thing: making himself better each year, month and
day. And the better people become, the more they unite with each other. And the more
people unite, the better their lives become.
The Roman sage Seneca says that all that we see, all that lives, everything, is a single
body. We’re all parts of this body—we’re like its hands, feet, stomach, and bones. We
were all born in the same way, we all have the same desire for goodness, and love toward
each other has been placed within us all. We all know it’s better to help one another
than to kill one another. We’re like bricks in the same arch: if we don’t all support each
other, we’ll all die.
If all people came together as one there wouldn’t be what we understand as our lives,
because our lives are nothing more than the process of uniting more and more. And in
this process of uniting is the one true blessing of our lives.
726
You thrash about and struggle, all because you want to swim in the direction you
choose, while right there next to you an endless stream of love flows ceaselessly away
from everything, always in the same eternal direction.
When you’ve suffered enough in your efforts to act for yourself, save yourself, and
arrange your life, abandon the direction you’ve chosen and throw yourself into this
stream. It will carry you, and you’ll merge with everything and feel peaceful and free.
A person can never know the purpose of his life. He can only know the direction his
life is heading, and knowing this is easy: everything that divides is contrary to the goal,
while everything that unites is in harmony with it.
The law that tells you to treat others the way you’d like them to treat you is not only
just but beneficial, because it clears away everything that divides people.
People are unhappy because they all live for themselves. If they’d only live according
to the law that all the wise of the world have taught—treat others the way you’d like
them to treat you—how happy they would be!
727
No matter how people ruin their lives, with each century and with each year life
becomes better and better, and it becomes better and better because people feel and
recognize their unity with one another more and more.
This is how we grow. In every human thought there already lies a higher idea; in
whatever character a person manifests now a higher character is being prepared. A
teenager discards the dreams of childhood, an adult discards the ignorance and stormy
passions of youth, and an elderly person discards the egoism of adulthood and
increasingly becomes a universal soul. He elevates himself to the highest and most
steadfast level of life. External relations and conditions are extinguished and he merges
with God more and more, until the final garments of egoism drop away and he unites
with All, merges his will with the universal will and takes part in the life of the entire
world. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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August 6
Love
To love people we find pleasant isn’t love. True love exists only when you love in
another person that which lives within you.
One and the same thing lives in all people as well as in you, and therefore true love
can only exist when you love everyone, and not just people whose company you enjoy.
There’s a fable about love that goes like this:
“There was a man who lived without ever thinking or worrying about himself. He
thought and worried only about his neighbors.
“The life of this man was so amazing that invisible spirits came to love his good life
and rejoiced over him.
“Once one of these spirits said to the rest: ‘This man is holy, but what a strange thing
that he doesn’t know it. There are very few people in the world like him. Let’s ask him
how we might serve him, or what he might like us to give him?’ ‘Good idea,’ the other
spirits said. And so one of the spirits, inaudibly and invisibly but distinctly and
comprehensibly, said to this good man: ‘We see your life and your holiness, and we want
to reward you as much as is in our power. Tell us what you want. Maybe something to
alleviate the poverty of all the people you know and worry about? We can do that. Or
would you like us to give you the power to cure people of their illnesses and suffering, so
that those you pity won’t die an early death? We have this power. Or would you like all
729
the people of the earth—men, women and children—to love you? We can do that too.
Tell me what you desire.’
“The holy man said, ‘I don’t want any of that, because it befits only the Lord God to
rescue people from what he sends us: need and suffering, illness and early death. I’m
afraid of people’s love.
“‘I’m afraid that people’s love will tempt me and interfere with my real concern:
increasing love for God and people within me.”
“All the spirits said, ‘This man is blessed with genuine sainthood and truly loves
God.”
Love gives and wants nothing in return.
Just forget about your foul little self, stop wishing for good things to happen to you
alone, stop judging people, stop envying them, stop wishing them ill, and you’ll feel God
awaken and shine within you. Just be pure glass, and through this glass God will shine
unceasingly and your joy will know no end.
Before a person can be in a condition where he can love—to do good by sacrificing
himself—he must stop hating. In other words, he must stop doing evil and preferring
some people over others for the sake of his own individual happiness.
A true Christian wishes good not only for his neighbor but for his enemies, and not
only his enemies but God’s enemies as well. Blaise Pascal
730
We think we love a person when they attract us, praise us or do something good for
us. However, this isn’t love; it’s either bias or an exchange of benefits. They praise us,
and we praise them. They do something good for us, and we pay them back in kind.
There’s nothing wrong with this feeling, but it isn’t love. We love with true love only
when we love a person because the same spirit of God that lives within us lives within
them, not because they attract us or because they’ve done something good for us.
Only when we love others in this way can we love as Christ taught: not to love only
those who love us, but those who do bad things and harm us and others throughout the
world: our enemies.
This is the only kind of love that doesn’t diminish when people are evil or when they
hate us. On the contrary, it becomes stronger and more enduring. It becomes stronger
because the worse people are and the more they hate us, the more we feel sorry for them
and the more we love them. This kind of love is more enduring than preferential love
and love of those who love us because there’s no change the person we love can undergo
that can make us stop loving him.
731
If I feel bound by my body, my spiritual self feels free, and therefore I constantly try
to free myself from the walls that separate me from the rest of the world. How can I free
myself? Only by surrendering my life to the beings that live beyond those walls that
separate me from them, by loving these beings so that love will destroy the boundaries
and unite the one who loves with what was separated from him.
Through love a person destroys the walls that separate him from others. First he
destroys the walls between him and those close to him, and then between him and those
who are more distant. Complete freedom is possible only at death. Greater and greater
union with everyone is all that’s possible, and this continual approach toward complete
union with everyone is a person’ life and happiness.
There is innate happiness that depends upon external and physical causes:
inheritance, fine food, and success, for example. This sort of happiness is very pleasant
for the person who experiences it and for others, but this happiness can disappear.
There’s also the kind of happiness that comes from inner spiritual work. Such happiness
is less attractive, but the first kind of love might not just disappear but even turn into
anger, while not only can the second never disappear, it continually increases and gives
greater and greater joy.
732
Maintain your purity so that God’s power can grow within you. Your life and
happiness lie in this growth of God’s power.
Christian love comes from consciousness of the unity of the divine source within you
with all people, and not just all people but all that lives.
Not only can true love, not in word but in deed, never be stupid, but this love alone
gives true insight and wisdom.
733
August 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Sins, temptations and superstitions have to exist, for without them there would be
no life. Human life is nothing more than the act of freeing yourself from them. And
freeing yourself is joyful, because the freer a person is from sin, the more love there is
within him. And joy and happiness come from love.
This is what Christ meant when he said that temptations must come into the world.
But woe to him through whom they enter.
Sins, temptations and superstitions: this is the ground that should be covered with
seeds of love, so that they can sprout.
If a person doesn’t defeat sin but gives in to it, he’ll inevitably fall into temptation,
and defeating temptation is more difficult than defeating sin. Temptations will draw
him into superstition, and liberation from superstitions is hardest of all.
The cause of sin is the body; the cause of temptation is others’ opinions; the cause of
superstition is falsehood.
734
People aren’t punished for their sins, they’re punished by their sins. This is the
gravest and surest punishment.
A person might be a cheat and a wrongdoer and live his entire life and die in wealth
and honor, but this doesn’t mean he’s escaped punishment for his sins. Punishment will
come, not somewhere on the other side where no one has ever been or ever will be, but
here. Here a person already faces punishment: with each new sin he distances himself
more and more from true happiness—love—and becomes more and more miserable.
It’s like a drunkard: whether or not people punish him for his drinking he’s already
certainly punished, not just by headaches and hangovers, but by the fact that the more
he drinks the more his body and soul deteriorate.
When a person chooses not use his reason to examine his behavior or, what’s worse,
uses his reason to justify his behavior, his soul becomes incapable of recognizing the evil
that he does.
735
August 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
To sustain life your body doesn’t need much, but we spoil our bodies endlessly.
I don’t even speak of the soul, but for your body it’s one hundred times better not to
eat until you’re full, sleep until you’re fully rested, or warm yourself up completely than
to overeat, oversleep, or get too warm.
The lives of the poor are better than the lives of the rich because the rich are more
strongly bound to sin than the poor. The sins of the rich are deceitful and tangled and
it’s difficult to deal with them. The sins of the poor are straightforward and so it’s easier
to escape them.
Sins of satisfying the body are inoffensive in children, and such sins aren’t yet
repulsive in young people.
When adults, and especially old people, concern themselves with sweet food, fancy
clothes, accommodations, and parties, such sins are revolting.
It’s better for your clothes to fit your conscience than your body.
736
The more you envelop yourself in needs, the more you submit to slavery, because the
more you need the more you limit your freedom. Complete freedom comes when you
need nothing, and the next best thing is to need just a little. John Chrysostum
People rarely die of hunger, but people often grow ill and die when they eat
sumptuously and don’t work.
Therefore it’s good to eat after you’ve worked and gotten hungry, but it’s a sin to eat
when you haven’t worked and have no appetite.
No one ever got drunk or smoked a lot so they could perform a good deed: to work,
solve a problem, look after the sick, or pray to God. The majority of evil deeds are
accomplished in an intoxicated state.
Drugging yourself might not be a crime in and of itself, but it’s a preparation for all
sorts of crimes.
737
August 9
The Sin of Lechery
Man is constructed so that he must eat to live and procreate to perpetuate
human life. So if a person eats and drinks only when he’s hungry or thirsty he becomes
healthy and strong and food is beneficial and pleasant for him. If a man eats and drinks
when he’s not hungry or thirsty he becomes weak, falls ill, grows old before his time, and
food becomes a deadly torment for him.
It’s the same thing with marriage. If people get married when the time comes—
when the man can’t live without a wife and the woman can’t live without a husband—
then marriage becomes profitable and joyful for the husband and wife, and they’ll have
healthy children.
If a couple gets married before the proper time comes there will be no joy in the
marriage either for the husband or the wife, and if they have any children at all the
children will turn out badly.
Therefore it’s wrong for men to think of women or for women to think of men
before the time comes to marry.
And the later this time comes, the better.
738
To ask whether it’s beneficial or harmful for people who have no plans to live
together as man and wife to have sex is like asking if it’s beneficial or harmful for a
person to drink someone else’s blood.
It’s untrue that total restraint from sexual relations is contrary to human nature.
Sexual restraint is possible and provides more happiness than the happiest marriage.
A marriage, a true marriage devoted to the creation and raising of children, is an
uninspired way of serving God: service to God through your children. “If I haven’t done
what I could and should have done, then my children can do it for me.”
It’s because of this that when people enter into marriage with the goal of having
children they always experience a sense of solace and relief. They feel that they’re laying
some of their own responsibilities on their future children. However, this feeling is only
just when the spouses are determined to raise their children so that they won’t impede
God’s plan but rather work for Him. The idea that you’ll do all you can to make sure
your children can serve God if you’re unable to give yourself over to His service
completely is an idea that gives marriage and child rearing religious significance.
739
If the purpose of a meal is nourishment of the body, then a person who eats two
meals in a row might get greater pleasure but he won’t attain his goal, since the stomach
can’t digest two meals. If the goal of marriage is to create a family, then a person who
wants to have several husbands or wives might get a lot of pleasure, but there’s no way
he’ll have a family. Correct nourishment and a proper family can only happen when
people don’t eat more than their stomachs can digest and when they have only as many
husbands or wives as they need to raise children, and this is only possible when a
woman has one husband and a man has one wife.
Having surrendered once to sexual promiscuity, a person involuntarily, by necessity,
gets involved in a series of other vices that cripple his entire life and create hatred,
debauchery and despair instead of a peaceful, happy and love-‐filled life, which is the life
intended for us and which is possible on Earth. In other words, they create the hell that
people call life and from which they increasingly seek relief in ceaseless intoxication with
wine, tobacco, and all sorts of so-‐called “diversions,” or in complete freedom through
suicide. Evgeny Popov
740
The struggle with one’s awakening sexual awareness is difficult and arduous, and
it’s difficult and arduous not so much on its own as because in our society it’s dealt with
in a savage, mindless and immoral manner. Not only does a young man receive no
support in this struggle, all his comrades and society at large use every possible means
to drag him into trial and temptation, which in our society are more than common.
Therefore, there’s little hope that a solitary man can resist using the power of his moral
sense when he’s in society.
How many men have lost their purity and innocence not because they were enticed
and tempted by some woman, fell in love with her and succumbed, but who succumbed
and defiled themselves because they calmly decided to, in part because of assurances
from doctors that it was necessary for their health, in part because of their friends’
mockery of their virginity, in part because of their own desire to experience a pleasure
they hadn’t tried yet, and primarily to stop being a “timid little girl” and become a
“grown man,” imagining that the essence of being a grown man lies in depravity.
Evgeny Popov
741
Among the wealthy, where children are considered an obstacle to pleasure, an
unfortunate accident, or a kind of pleasure of their own, and when children are born in
a specific number decided upon in advance, such children aren’t raised with an eye to
the tasks of human life that await them as rational and loving beings, but only in terms
of the satisfaction that the parents can derive from them. As a consequence, most such
children are reared like animals, since the parents’ main concern isn’t preparing them
for a life worthy of a human being, but (and they’re supported in this effort by a false
science called medicine) in how to best feed them, aid their physical growth, keep them
clean, blemish-‐free, satisfied, and beautiful (if the lower classes don’t do this it’s only
because they don’t have the opportunity, but their perspective is the same). And in these
coddled children, as in all overfed animals, an unconquerable sensuality appears at an
unnaturally early age that brings terrible suffering to these children when they become
adolescents. Fine clothes, literature, shows, music, dancing, sweet food, all the
circumstances of their lives from ornate boxes to novels, tales and poems further agitate
this sensuality. As a result, the most terrible sexual vices and maladies become the
normal conditions of raising a child of either sex, and they frequently remain with the
child into adulthood.
742
August 10
The Sin of Parasitism
Don’t make anyone do something you can do yourself. Let each person keep his
own doorway clean. If everyone does this, the whole street will be clean.
There are only three ways to acquire wealth: work, beg or steal. Workers get the
least because too much goes to beggars and thieves. Henry George
One of the greatest physical joys is rest after labor. All the entertainments dreamt up
by rich and idle people can’t compare with this joy.
What a terrible mistake it is to think that people’s souls can live a noble, spiritual life
while at the same time the body remains idle and lives in luxury. The body is always the
soul’s first disciple. Henry David Thoreau
Work is not a virtue, but it is an indispensable condition for a virtuous life.
743
Property, along with the right to defend it and the government’s role in providing
and recognizing it, is not only unchristian but the most anti-‐Christian institution
possible. A Christian’s duty is to live to serve others, not for others to serve him.
O Lord! Keep me in poverty throughout my life and let me die a poor man.
Muhammad
744
A people freed from what Christ called the blindness of wealth and satisfied with
their daily bread, asking from God only that which He gives to the little birds, who
neither sow nor reap—these people live a true life, a life of the heart, more than those
who are buried in desires and the worries of this world. This is why we have to search
among them, among the common people, for feats of heroism. If we discard the common
people, what will happen to the covenant of duty: the only thing that preserves society
and comprises the greatness and strength of nations? When the nation weakens, who
will regenerate and animate it, if not the common people? And if the illness is incurable,
if the people must die, where will the young stalk designated to replace the old tree come
from, if not from the common people once again? This is why Christ addressed himself
to the common people and why the people recognize him as a messenger from his
Father, praise his name, proclaim his rule and submit to him. Princes of the church—
the scholars—cursed him and killed him. However, despite all their violence and
cunning, despite his execution, Christ was victorious among the people. The people
established his kingdom on Earth, and it will spread throughout the world through the
people. A new life will be born through the people, that divine embryo that the violent
rulers, already full of horror at their imminent demise, would smother if they could.
Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
745
August 11
The Temptation of Wealth
Honest people are never rich. Rich people are never honest. Lao Tsu
The joy of wealth is fragile and deceptive.
A poor person isn’t someone who has little, but someone who wants more than he
has. Seneca
If rich people are able to be benefactors to the poor through their wealth, this is
because the government protects a handful of people, creates material inequality and as
a result makes charity necessary. This being the case, does the help given to the poor by
the wealthy, who love to brag that they’re being of service, deserve to be called charity?
Immanuel Kant
The pleasure of the wealthy is purchased with the tears of the poor.
746
Material charity is only a good deed when it’s a sacrifice. Only then does the
recipient of a material gift also receive a spiritual gift.
If it’s not a sacrifice but something out of your surplus it only embitters the recipient.
The help that the wealthy openly give the poor is at the very most an act of courtesy,
but it can never be charity. A person asks you how to get to such-‐and-‐such place and out
of courtesy you stop and answer. Another person asks for five kopeks, five or fifty rubles.
If you have an extra five kopeks or rubles, or an extra hundred rubles, you give it to him.
This would also be an act of courtesy, but such acts have nothing in common with
charity.
How perverse must be the way the world is arranged when wealthy people who live
off the labors of the poor—are housed, fed, and clothed by the poor—can think that
they’re the benefactors of the poor!
747
August 12
The Sin of Ill Will
No matter how harmful anger is to others, it’s most harmful to the person who’s
angry. And anger is always more dangerous than who or what you’re angry with.
There are people who love to get angry, and they get angry and harm others without
any reason at all. You can understand why a greedy person offends others: he wants to
control property so he can become rich himself, and he harms people for his benefit. An
evil person harms others without it benefiting him in any way. Such people are close to
being insane. Based on a Passage Ascribed to Socrates
It’s hard to defeat a bad disposition and ill-‐feelings toward someone, but it can be
done. And if you succeed just once, you’ll experience such joy that you’ll want to try it
again.
748
When you become angry with someone, you usually search for a justification for
your feelings, acknowledging or noticing only evil in the person you’re angry with. This
only intensifies your ill feelings and the suffering they create. You have to do the
opposite: the angrier you are, the more diligently you must search for everything good in
the person you’re angry with, for what justifies the actions of the person you’re angry
with, and this will not only weaken your anger and the suffering tied to it, it will also
grant you great satisfaction.
You must never reproach a person for his inconsistencies or call him stupid. You
must not say that they’re ridiculous, but on the contrary you should always assume that
there’s something reasonable in their essence and try to find it. You have to find the false
ideas that deceive him and in this manner, having clarified the reason for his errors, you
can encourage his faith in his own rationality. And in fact, how can we persuade a
person if we don’t believe he possesses reason? The same applies to rebukes for bad
behavior: such rebukes must never escalate to complete contempt. You must never deny
the moral sensibility within a person and never assume that he’s incapable of becoming
a moral person, because such an assumption is contradictory to the conception of a
human as a moral being who can never lose his potential for good will. Immanuel Kant
Sometimes you can’t help but be angry with someone. However, you can always
restrain yourself so that you don’t reveal your anger in word or deed.
749
August 13
The Temptation of Pride
A bad wheel makes more noise, an empty ear of grain stands taller. It’s the same
with bad and empty people.
It’s hard to love all people equally, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to do it.
All good things are hard to accomplish.
Shouldn’t we strive for a societal structure in which moving up the ladder of society
doesn’t captivate people but rather frightens them? For such elevation deprives a person
of one of life’s main blessings: equal relations with all people.
Based on a Passage by John Ruskin
What a terrible quality: self-‐satisfaction, pride. It’s the petrification of a person, a
condition in which a person deprives himself of the greatest joy in life: free and friendly
intercourse with all people.
750
A person is good and kind when he’s satisfied with himself, but a person can only be
truly satisfied with himself when God is satisfied with him. Yet knowing this joy of
satisfaction, many people try to feel satisfied because either they themselves or their
sycophants are pleased with them, not because God is satisfied with them.
Self-‐love is the beginning of pride. Pride is the failure to restrain self-‐love that’s gone
out of control.
If you’re stronger, richer, or more educated than others, then try to serve people by
using that which you have in excess in comparison to them. If you’re strong, help the
weak; if you’re intelligent, help those who aren’t; if you’re educated, teach the
uneducated; if you’re rich, help the poor. However, proud people don’t think like this.
They think that if they have something others don’t, they shouldn’t share it with people
but simply lord it over them.
People who preach morality but restrict your responsibilities to your family and
homeland are preaching egoism. No matter how much they insist upon these
restrictions, it’s still harmful to both you and others. Family and homeland are two
circles included within a larger circle: humanity. They’re two stages you have to pass
through and not places you should remain. Giuseppe Mazzini
751
To love has the general meaning of wanting to do good. This is how everyone
understands love, and it’s impossible to understand in any other way. So I love my child,
wife, friends, and fatherland, or in other words I wish happiness for my child, wife,
friends, and homeland more than other people’s children, wives, friends and
homelands.
However, like all living beings, people live off each other, consuming one another in
both a literal and metaphorical sense. And as a rational being man must know that any
physical happiness gained by one person only comes at the expense of another. In this
jostling and struggle of animal interests a person must decide in whose name his love
should manifest itself. In the name of which love should he sacrifice another love? Who
does he love most and for whom does he want to do the most good: his wife or his
children, his wife and children or his friends? How can he serve his fatherland without
violating his love for his wife, children and friends?
The lawgivers posed these very questions to Christ: “Who is our neighbor?”
There’s only one answer: Love God in people. And since the God in all people is the
same, you must love and serve all people equally.
752
In our age of international communication, preaching love for one’s nation and
readiness to attack another nation or protecting the nation from invasion by waging
war is practically the same thing as preaching to villagers that they should love only
their village and that every village should organize military bands and build fortresses.
In our time, when people are already united through communication, trade,
manufacturing, science, art, and, most importantly moral conscience, love for one’s
fatherland only, which used to unite the people of a single country, no longer unites but
divides people.
753
August 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
He who lives for his soul will never worry about whether people praise or condemn
him for what he does.
It’s good when people take up studying for themselves so that they can become
smarter and kinder. This kind of studying is useful. When people study for others, in
order to appear educated, study is not only useless but dangerous. It makes people less
intelligent and less kind. From a Chinese Source
Nothing silences the voice of your conscience more effectively than the thought that
the majority, and not your conscience, is correct.
You don’t rock a baby in the cradle to relieve him of what’s making him cry but so
that he can’t cry. We do the same thing with our conscience when we subordinate it to
other people’s opinions. We can’t calm our conscience, but we achieve what we have to:
we stop hearing it.
754
“No one puts a patch made of unshrunken cloth on an old garment, for the newly
sewn piece will rip away and the hole will become worse.
“And no one pours fresh wine into old skins, for otherwise the skins would burst and
the wine would spill out and the skins would be ruined. So they put fresh wine into new
skins and both are preserved.” (Matthew 9:16-‐17)
This means that in order to live better and to continue to make your life better—
which is the entire purpose of human life—you can’t stick to your old habits; you have
to establish new ones. You can’t do what people consider good, but rather establish new
habits for yourself without worrying whether people will consider them good or bad.
No one errs alone. Every person who errs distributes his error among his neighbors.
Seneca
755
A person is in great danger if he binds himself to sins with responsibilities that make
it difficult to free himself from those sins. He’s ashamed to admit his sins, and to free
himself of them would destroy his place in public opinion. Whoever fails to stop at the
first stage of sin goes all the way to the last. Richard Baxter
Be prepared to be branded a fool, an imposter, knowing that in any case it will
happen. Be ready to dirty your hands, so you won’t be afraid to undertake filthy work
and live for something other than people’s praise. This is all easy to say, but once you’ve
become accustomed to living only for praise, it’s terribly difficult. However, you have to
work for anything that’s hard, and this work comes in two forms: teaching yourself to
despise people’s judgments and learning to live for the sake of those deeds you must do
despite people’s condemnation.
756
August 15
The Temptation of Punishment
People do great evil to themselves and to each other simply because weak, sinful
people have taken upon themselves the right to punish others. “Vengeance is mine, I
shall repay.” Only God can punish, and he does so through the very person to be
punished himself.
People come up with justifications for inflicting punishment, when really they almost
always punish out of the desire to do evil to someone who committed evil against them.
757
The meaning of the words, “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth,’ but I tell you: don’t resist an evil person. And he who strikes you” and so on is
crystal clear and needs no explanations or interpretations. It’s impossible not to
understand that Christ, rejecting the previous law of violence—an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth—also rejected the organization of life based upon that law and
established a new law of love for all people without distinction; he established a new
universal framework no longer founded upon violence but upon the law of love for all
people without distinction. Some people, understanding this doctrine in its true
meaning and foreseeing the annihilation of all their advantages and privileges as a
consequence of applying this doctrine to life, crucified Christ and his disciples and
continue to crucify his disciples to this day. Others, also understanding this doctrine in
its true meaning, went to their crucifixion and continue to go to their crucifixion,
bringing the time of a new structure of the world based on the law of love nearer and
nearer.
The doctrine of non-‐resistance to evil with violence isn’t some sort of new law, but
simply the recognition of people’s error in permitting any deviation from the law of love.
It’s simply recognition of the fact that granting permission to commit violence against
one’s neighbor, whether in the name of revenge or in an imaginary defense of oneself or
one’s neighbor from evil, is incompatible with love.
758
Among the nations wars are fought, constitutions and laws are written, great wealth
is accumulated, railways are constructed, millions of books are written and published,
and criminals are punished. Although most fail to realize it, all this effort makes people
conscious of the fact that all they do is wrong, that the use of violence is unnatural to
human beings and particularly Christians, that you can use violence against inanimate
nature or animals but not another person, and that there’s only one salvation from all
these calamities: recognition of the law of love in its full meaning, which excludes the
possibility of revenge.
Nothing brings people joy like being forgiven for an evil deed and being repaid with
good, and nothing is as joyful as doing it.
759
Is it possible to look without the pain of revulsion at the fields of battle, military
hospitals in which mutilated people are cut to pieces, the motley sumptuousness of
military uniforms, and the triumphant warriors, spattered with blood, which are all a
part of people’s lives? Is it possible to look without pity and contempt at the fights,
scuffles, duels, hatred, vengeance, litigiousness, and the never-‐ending squabbles of
humanity in love with war and revenge, which are so much a part of our daily lives?
How base and contemptible it all is in comparison with the spiritual heroism, moral
fearlessness and glorious self-‐sacrifice of a true follower of Christ who repays evil only
with good. Adin Ballou
Christ’s entire doctrine is love of others. To love others means to treat them as you’d
like to be treated. Since no one wants to be subjected to violence, in order to treat others
as you’d like them to treat you under no circumstances should you commit violence
against them. Therefore, if we claim to be exhorting and fulfilling Christ’s doctrine and
yet believe that a Christian can commit violence against others, we’re doing the same
thing as shoving a key into the wrong part of a lock and saying we’re using the key as
designed. Without recognizing that a person can never use violence against others
under any circumstances, all of Christ’s teachings are just empty words.
In such a conception of his doctrine you can torture, rob, and execute people and kill
thousands in war, as people who call themselves Christians currently do.
760
August 16
The Superstition of Violence
Just because it’s possible to subordinate people to justice through violence, it doesn’t
follow that to subordinate people through violence is just. Blaise Pascal
In our day it’s difficult to find a man who for the greatest rewards—money or even
to avert a major catastrophe—would be willing to kill a defenseless man. Yet when a
man is sentenced to death the meekest, most peace loving among us consider it
necessary to kill defenseless people, and are willing to kill men during war as well. Why?
Because people have fallen for the superstition that some people can dispose of the lives
of others.
No matter what kinds of tragedies human sins and passions cause, evil can’t be
corrected by laws based on state violence, because as long as a person submits to others
rather than to his conscience, his conscience will fail to act.
761
Violence is a tool, an instrument that ignorance employs to force its followers to
commit acts that contradict their nature, and just like trying to force water to flow
uphill, as soon as the tool stops acting its effects stop as well. There are only two ways to
direct human behavior. The first is to influence people’s inclinations and convince them
by rational argument. The second is to force people to act against their inclinations and
better judgment. This second method always exploits ignorance and its consequence is
always disappointment. When a child cries for his rattle, he wants to attain it through
violence. When parents beat their children, they use violence to force them to behave
well. When a drunken husband beats his wife, he does it with the intention of correcting
her through violence. When a criminal is punished, it’s done with the intention of
improving the world with violence. When one man sues another, he does it in order to
get justice through violence. When a priest talks about horrors and the tortures of hell,
he does it in order to lead his listeners to heaven through violence. When one nation
fights a war with another, the goal is to attain a desired goal through violence. And it’s
an amazing thing: to this very day ignorance has led and continues to lead humanity by
the same path of violence that always results in disappointment. Abram Combe
If we were to ask how best to enable a person to completely free himself from moral
responsibility and to commit the most heinous acts without feeling any culpability, it
would be impossible to devise a more effective means than the superstition that one
person can organize the lives of others through violence.
762
When people are young they believe that the purpose of humanity lies in gradual
perfection and that it’s possible and even simple to correct all of humanity and destroy
all vices and misfortunes. These dreams aren’t ridiculous; on the contrary, there’s much
more truth in them than in the judgments of the elderly who are bound by temptations
after having led their entire lives in a manner contradictory to human nature and who
advise people to hope for nothing, search for nothing, but just live like animals.
The only mistake in the dream of youth is that instead of perfecting themselves and
their souls, young people try to perfect others.
Make the business of your life the improvement and perfection of your soul, and be
assured that only in this way can you effectively improve society.
True life doesn’t occur where there are great external changes, where people travel
about, encounter one another, and fight and kill each other, but where tiny unnoticed
changes occur: in people’s souls.
763
August 17
The Superstition of Government
As long as people recognize the power of the state over them and its right to tax,
judge, punish them and declare war, they will always be slaves.
Everyone sees that the state causes tremendous evil through its taxation, courts,
executions and wars. Everyone also sees that in order to free themselves from this evil
they need only stop supporting the government in its evil acts. Why don’t people free
themselves from the evil of government? Because of the superstition of government. And
from superstition there is one salvation: truth.
The custom of replacing a king with his son rather than anyone else makes it
obvious that a king doesn’t need to be good and wise to rule his people, because no
matter what kind of person the eldest son is, he’ll be the next king. To recognize the
children and descendants of a deceased king as your king or commander is like
replacing a driver or conductor with the children and descendants of your driver or
conductor rather than with someone who knows his job.
764
There’s a fable by Voltaire in which Micromegas, a being from another planet, talks
with humans:
“Oh, you rational atoms in which the eternal being expresses his art and his power,
you doubtlessly enjoy pure happiness on your terrestrial globe because, being so
immaterial and so spiritually developed, you must pass your lives in love and
meditation, the true life of a spiritual being.” All the philosophers shook their heads at
this, and one who was more outspoken than the rest said that except for a small number
of respected individuals, all the population consisted of fools, villains and pitiful
wretches.
“We’re more physical than we need to be if evil comes from physicality, and we have
too much spirituality if evil comes from spirituality,” he said. “So, for example, right now
thousands of fools in hats are killing thousands of other beings in turbans or are being
killed by them, and this is how it’s been since time immemorial on Earth.”
“What do these little animals fight about?”
“About some little piece of dirt no bigger than your heel,” the philosopher answered.
“And not a single one of the people who cut each other’s throats has any stake in this
piece of dirt. The only question is whether or not this scrap belongs to a person they call
Sultan or a person they call Caesar, even though neither one has ever seen this bit of
land. And of all the animals who cut each other’s throats, almost no one has ever seen
the animal for whose sake they kill each other.”
“Wretches!” the being from Sirius shouted. “Could you imagine a more insane
madness? To be honest, I’d like to take three steps and crush the anthill of these absurd
murderers.”
765
“Don’t bother to do that,” he answered. “They’re attending to that themselves.
However, you shouldn’t punish them; you should punish the barbarians who sit in
palaces and order the murder of others and command people to triumphantly thank
God for it.”
In addition to corrupting its subjects, a government always corrupts its leaders.
Every privilege and every privileged position kills a man’s heart and mind. A person who
enjoys political or economic privileges is corrupted in both heart and mind. This law,
which knows no exceptions, relates to entire nations as well as classes, societies and
individuals. Mikhail Bakunin
If you take a look at history, you’ll find that one of the primary reasons for
humanity’s continual suffering has been the establishment and existence of
governments.
766
In its true meaning, Christianity destroys government. This is how it was understood
in the beginning, it’s why they crucified Christ, and it’s how people who don’t need to
justify a Christian government have always understood it. Only since the time when the
heads of governments nominally and superficially accepted Christianity did people
begin to come up with all those impossible, well-‐spun theories, according to which
Christianity can be reconciled with governmental violence. However, any sincere and
serious person of our time can’t help but see how obvious it is that true Christianity—
the doctrine of humility, forgiveness of offense, and love—is incompatible with the
external might, violence, executions and wars of governments.
But if it’s fair to say that Christianity is incompatible with governmental violence,
then one question naturally presents itself: is human happiness more dependent on a
governmental form of life or the destruction of government and the establishment of
Christianity in its place? Every Christian society of our time must answer this question.
Humanity will soon surpass the stage of development in which government is
relevant. Mikhail Bakunin
767
Divine wisdom constructed the world so that people wouldn’t be enslaved and
despotism would be impossible just as long as people understood God’s wisdom.
However, in opposition to God’s wisdom the world’s rulers established the wisdom of
their prince: the devil. And the devil taught them infernal trickery in order to
consolidate their despotism.
He told them, “Here’s what you must do. Take the strongest among the young men
from every family, give them weapons and teach them how to use them and they’ll wage
war against their fathers and brothers, since I’ll instill in them the idea that there’s glory
in it.
“I’ll make two idols for them, which they’ll call honor and allegiance. The law of these
idols will be unquestioning obedience.
“Then they’ll worship these idols and blindly submit to this law because I’ll pervert
their minds, and you’ll have nothing to fear.”
So the people’s oppressors did everything the devil told them to, and the devil did all
he promised the people’s oppressors.
Then men chosen from the nation raised their hands against their own people in
order to kill their brothers, imprison their fathers, and even forget what they carried
within their own hearts. And when people said to them, “in the name of all that’s holy,
think of the injustice and cruelty you’re being ordered to commit,” they answered, “we
don’t think, we obey.”
And when people said to them, “don’t you even feel love for your fathers, mothers
and brothers?” they answered, “we don’t love, we obey.”
768
And when people spoke of God and Christ, they said, “our gods are honor and
allegiance.”
There has never been a greater temptation than this.
But this temptation is approaching its final day.
Just a bit longer, and the devil will disappear along with the people’s oppressors.
Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
The court’s only goal is to preserve society in its current state and in order to do so it
executes those who stand on a higher level and wish to elevate society as well as those
who stand beneath it.
A king once asked a holy man: “Do you ever think about me?” The holy man
answered: “When I forget about God I do.”
769
August 18
The Superstition of the Church
There are many false laws of God. There’s only one true law.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but
only the one who fulfills the Will of my heavenly Father.” Matthew 7:21
You’ll please God and receive His blessings only by fulfilling His will, but never
through prayers.
However, people frequently fail to do what they’ve been commanded to do: they live
evil lives, offend and hate their brothers, befoul the Divine spirit within them with
debauchery, envy and drunkenness, and then they think they can ask God to reward
them with their words and prayers. They’re like a worker who doesn’t do the job his
employer has assigned him but sings his employer’s praises and then expects to be paid.
You’ll never recognize God if you believe everything people tell you about God.
770
The majority of the pagans couldn’t accept Christianity as Christ preached it
because it destroyed the pagan life of enslavement of the majority by a few. Then the
church teachers altered Christianity so much that it was acceptable to paganism and
they turned it into the main justification for the enslavement of the majority by a few.
Some people—the very best and most enlightened—yielded to this deception at first,
but then they began to understand more and more that they’d been deceived and
became embittered with the Christianity that had been dressed in church garb and grew
to hate it. Then true Christianity began to remove these clothes, alien to its essence, a
little at a time. However, the people who’d been deceived by the church remembered all
the evil that it had subjected them to and continued to reject Christianity, failing to
recognize it in its true meaning, and continued to think of it as church Christianity.
If we’ve been sent into this world by a wise being, then without a doubt we should try
to do the best we can in these circumstances to keep ourselves from being blinded by
revelations. Every person undoubtedly knows what he needs to know in order to attain
happiness without any revelation beyond that which he possesses in his own being.
Georg Lichtenberg
People ask for fresh bread, fresh butter, fresh eggs and so on, because they
understand that the fresher food is the more healthful and nourishing it is. However,
when the matter touches upon religion, then the older the spiritual food is the more it’s
valued. Lucy Mallory
771
The Catholic catechism states:
“The Church is a society of believers, founded by our Lord Jesus Christ, propagated
throughout the world and subordinate to the power of its lawful shepherds and our holy
father the Pope,” understanding their lawful shepherds to be a human institution with
the Pope at its head and comprised of specific people bound together by a specific
organization.
The Orthodox catechism states:
“The Church is a society founded by Jesus Christ on Earth, united into one entity by
divine doctrines and sacraments, under the direction and control of a hierarchy
established by God,” understanding the hierarchy established by God specifically to be
the Greek hierarchy, comprised of specific people found in certain locations.
The Lutheran catechism states:
“The Church is holy Christianity, or the community of all believers under Christ, its
leader, in which the Holy Spirit offers, communicates and provides Divine salvation
through the Gospels and the sacraments,” implying that the Catholic Church has gone
astray and fallen, and that the true tradition is preserved in Lutheranism.
For Catholics, the holy Church corresponds to the Roman hierarchy and the Pope.
For the Orthodox, the holy Church corresponds to the institution of the Eastern and
Russian hierarchy. For the Lutherans, the holy Church corresponds to a community of
people who recognize the Bible and the catechism of Luther. For thinking people, all of
these churches are nothing more than institutions of deception.
772
In 1682 the English Doctor Layton, a respected man who wrote a book critical of the
Archbishop, was tried and sentenced to the following, which was inflicted upon him as
punishment. He was brutally flogged, then one of his ears was cut off and one of his
nostrils was ripped apart. Then the letters SS—sower of sedition—were branded on his
cheek with a hot iron. After seven days he was flogged again even though the wounds on
his back hadn’t healed yet, his other nostril was ripped apart and his other ear was cut
off, and the same stamp was burned onto his other cheek. All this was done in the name
of Christianity. John Davidson
Religion comes from God, but theology comes from the devil. Based on a Passage by
François d’Esherny
The hierarchy of a church’s governance can be monarchical, aristocratic or
democratic, but this only addresses its internal structure. In any form, the church itself
remains despotic. Any organization that considers a decree of faith to be its
fundamental law is ruled by a clergy that believes it has the right to ignore reason and
science because it’s the only organization that has power and is the protector and
interpreter of the will of an unseen lawgiver and, possessing this power, need not
persuade but merely dictate. Immanuel Kant
773
August 19
The Superstition of Science
Don’t look on education as a crown that adorns you but as a cow that nourishes you.
Science is only important when it serves the true welfare of humanity.
Science is food for the mind, and this food for the mind can be just as harmful as
food for the body if it’s impure or sweetened, or if you don’t take it in moderation. So
you can overconsume mental food and fall ill from it. In order to keep this from
happening you have to behave the same way you would with physical food: consume it
only when you need it, when you’re hungry, only when you need knowledge for your
soul.
It’s harmful to propagate the idea that our lives are products of material forces and
are dependent on them. However, when such spurious ideas are called science and
presented to humanity as holy truth, then the harm caused by such a doctrine is
terrible.
774
A legitimate goal of science is knowledge of truths that serve humanity’s happiness.
A false goal is the justification of deceptions that bring evil into man’s world.
Jurisprudence, political economy and especially theology have such goals.
The practitioners of modern science don’t fulfill and can’t possibly fulfill their
mission because they’ve turned their responsibilities into rights.
People who think that the main business of life is acquiring knowledge are like
moths that fly into candles: they themselves die and also diminish the light.
The word scholar only means that a person has studied a lot, but it doesn’t mean
he’s learned anything yet. Georg Lichtenberg
775
Don’t fear ignorance, fear false knowledge. It’s better to know nothing than to
consider falsehood truth. It’s better to know nothing about the sky than to think that it’s
solid and that God sits in it. It’s better to know nothing about what holds up the Earth
than to think it sits on three whales.
What a huge difference there is between the sort of philosophizing in which you play
with words and the exposition of thoughts with which you prepare to live and die using
the words you say as a foundation.
The most important subject for a person to study is himself, his spiritual existence.
A person who knows all the sciences but doesn’t know himself is pathetically
ignorant. A person who knows nothing other than himself, his spiritual self, is a
completely enlightened person.
776
August 20
Effort
In order to do something correctly and well, you have to learn how to do it. Everyone
knows this. In the same way, in order to live correctly and well, you have to learn how to
live correctly and well. And in order to do this, you have to exert effort.
On King Jing Jang’s bathtub the following words were inscribed:
“Renew yourself completely every day. Do this from the beginning and again from
the beginning.” Chinese Wisdom
We can’t expect to see the Kingdom of God, but we know it’s coming. Inexorably, it’s
coming. And it will only come through our effort.
If you see that the organization of society is bad and you want to correct it, know
that there’s only one way to improve society: all people must become better. And if you
wish to make all people better, the only thing that’s within your power is your ability to
improve yourself. You can do this by exerting effort to change yourself and free yourself
from sins, temptations and deceptions.
777
Live for yourself and the improvement of your animal life and your life will be
harmful both to yourself and others. Live for your soul, try to live for the fulfillment of
the law of your life, and your life will be a blessing for both yourself and others.
“I have come to Earth to kindle a fire, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke
12:49)
Why is this fire so slow to kindle? If Christianity’s been able to endure through so
many centuries without changing society’s structure, what right do we have to think that
it will change society now? The majority of people who’ve come to understand the
necessity of recognizing the truth of Christianity nevertheless fail to make this truth the
foundation of their actions. Why? Only because people await changes in their external
conditions and don’t want to accept the fact that this is achieved through the efforts of
each individual in his or her soul, in order to establish in their souls that Divine
kingdom that should be within us.
778
We all want to accomplish tasks that we consider great. We don’t need to accomplish
great deeds; we just need to accustom ourselves more and more to doing what the spirit
of God that lives within us commands rather than what our bodies want.
In this world, every person is in a state of deception, but a disciple of Christ perceives
this deception and aims with every step, with the passing of every hour, with his every
word to escape it. All his life he endeavors to free himself and others from this deception.
And it’s wrong to think that a Christian can suddenly escape the sins, temptations and
superstitions of the world and live beyond them. A Christian’s life is a continual struggle
with sins, temptations and superstitions and liberation of his self and others from them.
This struggle is joyful, because a person who engages in this fight knows that every step
on this path brings both him and others closer to the Divine kingdom and to God.
Growth is a slow process, not a convulsive explosion. You can’t defeat sin through
feverish repentance any more than you can learn everything about one of the sciences in
an instantaneous explosion of thought. The true means of inner perfection is only found
in constant, patient effort, overseen by wise judgment. William Channing
779
Knowledge of higher perfection is within you. The obstacle to achieving it is also
within you. Your present condition is the very thing you must work on in order to
achieve perfection. Thomas Carlyle
Every once in a while you want to complain to God and ask for help like a little child.
Is this feeling good? It’s not; it’s weakness and lack of faith. That which appears most of
all to be faith—a prayer of supplication—is in fact an absence of faith: absence of the
belief that there’s no evil and that there’s nothing to ask for, that if things in your life are
bad it only means that you have to correct things, that what’s happening must happen
and that you’re simply not doing what you should.
780
August 21
Self-‐Renunciation
To love your neighbor as yourself doesn’t mean you have to try to love your neighbor.
You can’t force yourself to love. To love your neighbor means that you should stop loving
yourself most of all. And as soon as you stop loving yourself most of all, you’ll
involuntarily love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s pointless for a person to stop committing sins if he hasn’t renounced his own
personal self, in other words if he hasn’t stopped putting himself above everyone else.
The more a person recognizes his own spiritual self and the more he rejects his
physical self, the more precisely he understands himself. Brahmanic Wisdom
We only truly live for ourselves when we live for others. This might seem strange, but
try it and you’ll see that it’s true.
Will the day truly never come when people find that living for others is just as easy
as dying for them? All that needs to happen is for the spirit within them to rise to
enlightenment. Edward Browne
781
Soldiers are taught to die in fulfillment of their duties, and many easily fulfill this
responsibility. So why can’t a Christian who understands his life as service to God and
self-‐perfection—why can’t he be prepared to die to fulfill his responsibilities?
Reason is always showing people that the satisfaction of their animal selves can
never bring happiness, and it draws them irresistibly to the happiness that they’re
capable of and that can’t be contained in their animal selves.
People usually think and say that renunciation of personal happiness is a great feat
and a human virtue. Renunciation of happiness is no virtue or great feat, but rather an
inescapable condition of human life. For an animal, which has no rational consciousness
to show it the poverty and brevity of its existence, personal happiness and the resulting
perpetuation of the species is the highest goal of life. For a human being, the self and the
perpetuation of the species is merely a level of existence at which the true happiness of
his life, which does not coincide with personal happiness, is revealed to him. For a
human being, consciousness of individuality isn’t all of life but merely an essential
condition of true life, which consists in greater and greater acquisition of the spiritual
happiness that’s characteristic of man and independent of the happiness of a person’s
animal self.
782
You must reject yourself. God will value you only when you begin to hate yourself, in
other words when you reject something for His sake. Angelus Silesius
He who truly loves God doesn’t strive to make God love him. For such a person, it’s
sufficient that he loves God. Baruch Spinoza
783
August 22
Humility
The better a person considers himself, the weaker he is. The less he thinks of himself,
the more forceful he is when alone and with others.
It’s unfortunate when a person considers himself good, because someone who
considers himself good can’t perform a person’s main task: making himself better.
He who seeks education becomes more and more elevated in peoples’ eyes each day.
He who seeks virtue becomes more and more debased in peoples’ eyes each day.
He becomes more and more debased until he reaches complete humility, when he
becomes completely free and involuntarily becomes a teacher of others. Lao Tsu
For someone professing the Christian faith, the achievement of each step of
prefection prompts a demand to achieve a higher step, from which an even higher step
reveals itself, and so on without end. A rational person always feels that he’s imperfect
and never looks back at the path he’s travelled but always forward to the path along
which he still has to travel.
It’s a tragedy if he feels satisfied with the state he’s in. He’s not only stopped, he’s
started heading backwards.
784
When you’re in a conflict with someone, never look for their mistake and never wish
that they would act differently, that they would somehow change. Drive out these
thoughts if they come to you. Search only for your own mistake and try to destroy within
yourself that which caused the conflict. Try to change yourself. You have power only over
yourself and not others, so direct all your energy toward yourself and not them. There’s
only one way you can influence others: love. It’s the one way to eliminate the possibility
of all conflict. Love is only possible when in the presence of humility.
If a person feels in his soul that he’s guilty but doesn’t admit his guilt to others or to
himself he’ll gladly blame others, and particularly those before whom he’s guilty.
You can only see your own shortcomings if you use someone else’s eyes. Chinese
Proverb
785
Every person possesses a mirror in which he can see his own vices, shortcomings,
and all his weaknesses. This mirror is every person he meets. However, when we’re with
others we usually behave like a dog who barks at the mirror, imagining that he sees
another dog there instead of himself. Arthur Schopenhauer
“Know yourself” is a fundamental rule, but do you really think you can know
yourself by looking in at yourself? No. You can know yourself only by looking at what’s
outside you. Compare your strengths with the strengths of others, your interests with
their interests. Realize that there’s nothing unique within you, try to think about your
own interests as something of minor importance, and bow before others’ virtue. John
Ruskin
Nothing is as harmful to your moral perfection as consciousness of your own
successes.
Fortunately, the passage to true moral improvement takes place so imperceptibly
that a person can only see his successes after a long period of time has elapsed.
If you think that you’ve reached perfection, realize that you’re mistaken. You’ve
either stopped or you’re headed backwards.
He who knows himself best of all respects himself least of all.
786
August 23
Honesty
The consequences of lying are far more unpleasant and poisonous than the
unpleasantness we think we’re escaping when we lie or do something disingenuously.
God gave us reason so that we can serve Him. Therefore, we must observe it in all its
purity so that we can always distinguish truth from falsehood.
Whenever a truth enters people’s consciousness and replaces an error, there is a
point in time when the error becomes evident and the truth that must replace it
becomes obvious. But people who benefit from the error and those who’ve simply
become habituated to it try with all their might to sustain it. It’s precisely at such times
that it’s particularly important to proclaim the truth boldly and courageously.
Don’t give in to passions or false societal opinion. Both lead to an unhappy,
counterfeit life. The power of self-‐renunciation and humility is needed to combat
passion, while the power of truth is needed to combat public opinion.
787
Most human acts are performed as a result of imitation, suggestion, or false
education. Only a few are performed as a result of reason, and only these few allow an
individual, as well as all humanity, to come closer to true happiness.
If a person lives only according to human rather than spiritual laws and lives a
physical life only, he’ll fail to see and understand many things and will be guided by
what others do in all his actions. If a person stands in the light of a lantern but the
lantern is on a tree stump he only sees what the lantern illuminates; he can’t know what
lies beyond. If a person carries the lantern in his hand and holds it in front of him
wherever he goes, he’ll always be surrounded by light. This is the difference between a
person who lives according to human laws and a person who lives a spiritual life
governed by his inner light.
Falsehood, like cunning, is a characteristic of a person’s animal self. Children and
simple-‐minded people lie unconsciously and innocently, but the more a person develops
his reason, the more unnatural and criminal his lies become. The greater a person’s
intelligence and education, the more dangerous his lies are for him and for others.
Almost all human effort is now directed toward reinforcing superstitions and
exchanging one for another rather than freeing humanity from them. This is how
religious superstitions have been replaced in our time with scientific superstitions.
788
The more people believe that they can be led to a change and improvement in their
lives by something external, something other than their own wills, that will act upon
them, the more difficult this change and improvement becomes.
We often sincerely condemn and hate the evil in others and become convinced that
we know how to correct it, and then we become frustrated when they don’t listen to us,
while we ourselves not only fail to struggle with our own evil but don’t even see it within
us. Our entire soul is full of evil. We have the power to defeat it within ourselves but
we’re busy with other people’s evil.
Why? Only because we’re under the influence of a superstition, and in doing what
this superstition demands of us, in doing what’s been suggested to us, we don’t and
can’t think about changing our own lives.
In order to approach the study of life’s most important questions, a person must
first refute the edifice of lies that’s been constructed over the centuries, using all the
power of the human mind’s ingenuity concerning each of the most substantial of life’s
questions.
789
August 24
Restraint in Deed
Each one of us has one important piece of business to attend to. This is to live well.
Living well doesn’t mean doing good things as much as it means refraining from doing
the evil things that we can avoid. The main rule: don’t commit evil.
Worldly affairs are out of our control. If we fail at something, it means that God
didn’t need it. Let’s simply avoid doing anything that contradicts the will of God.
Don’t try to do good; rather, try to be good. Don’t try to shine, but rather try to be
pure. The human soul lives as it were in a glass vessel, and a person can befoul this
vessel or keep it clean. The light of truth will shine through the vessel to the degree to
which the glass remains clean, for both the person himself and others. Therefore a
person’s main task lies within himself: maintaining the purity of his vessel. Just don’t
befoul yourself and there will be light and goodness for others.
790
The most important effort isn’t directed toward external actions. There are too many
such acts and they interfere with the coming of the Kingdom of God more than
anything else. The most important place to exert effort isn’t in the material realm in
which we are all slaves, but in the only domain where we’re always free: in restraining all
that is opposed to love.
All the differences in our situations in this world are nothing in comparison with our
inner ability to control ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether a person falls from a boat
into the Azov, the Black, the Mediterranean Sea or the ocean; what matters is whether he
can swim or not. Strength isn’t found in external situations, but in the ability to control
yourself.
If you want to be free, learn to restrain your desires.
What’s the best thing to do when you’re in a hurry? Nothing.
A person can’t know precisely what he needs to do. He can only figure it out because
he can clearly and surely know what he shouldn’t do. By not doing that which he
shouldn’t he inescapably does what he must, even though he doesn’t know why he’s
doing what he’s doing.
791
August 25
Restraint in Word
Never listen to people who speak badly of others and good of you.
As soon as you start judging someone, remember not to say anything bad about him
if you know something bad about him for a fact, and even more so if you don’t know but
are only repeating someone else’s words.
We reconsider an action over and over: paying out a certain amount of money, the
destruction or construction of a home. However, speaking seems so unimportant that
most of the time we talk without thinking. Societal opinion is created out of words, and
societal opinion is greater than the will of rulers and governs people’s actions. Therefore,
every one of our judgments has the possibility of becoming an action that can bring
people happiness or bring them evil.
Concealing another’s shortcomings and speaking about the good in him is a sign of
love and the best means to evoke your neighbors’ love.
Based on a Passage From “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
792
If you feel it necessary to condemn your neighbor, then condemn him to his face, not
behind his back, and condemn him in a way that won’t evoke ill feelings toward you.
If you can’t silence your anger right away, restrain your tongue. Keep quiet and
you’ll calm down faster. Richard Baxter
If you want to judge me, be inside me, not beside me. Adam Mickiewicz
It’s as hard for a good person to imagine evil in others as it is for an evil person to
imagine good in others.
Truth is forgotten in an argument. He who ends the argument is the smartest one.
793
August 26
Restraint in Thought
Man is distinguished from the animals only by his reason. Some people strengthen it
within themselves and others don’t concern themselves with it. It’s really as if such
people refuse to recognize that they’re different from beasts. Eastern Wisdom
It would be a wonderful thing if reason could be poured out of a person who has a
lot into a person doesn’t have much the way water can be poured from one vessel into
another until both have the same amount. But in order for a person to accept someone
else’s reason, first of all he has to think for himself.
Anything that’s genuine and necessary can’t be acquired instantly but always
requires a long and continual struggle. This is how skills and knowledge are achieved.
The most important thing on earth—the ability to live a good life—is acquired in the
same manner.
In order to learn how to live a good life, first of all you must teach yourself to think
good thoughts.
794
A person perfects himself to the degree to which he strengthens his reason and
silences his passions. Happy is the person who consciously aids this perfection with the
power of thought and sees his happiness in it.
I praise Christianity because it expands, increases, and elevates my rational nature.
If I couldn’t remain rational while being a Christian I wouldn’t hesitate to choose
between the two. I feel myself obliged to sacrifice my property, glory and life for
Christianity, but I would never feel obliged to sacrifice my reason, which elevates me
above the animals and makes me human, for any religion.
I know of no greater sacrilege than to renounce the higher faculties that God has
given us. If we do this we set our physical nature against the divine source that lives
within us. Reason is the highest expression of our intellectual nature. It’s a
manifestation of unity with God and eternity and aims to make our souls a reflection, a
mirror of this higher unity. William Channing
All great changes in the life of an individual or of all humanity begin and are
achieved only through thought. In order for changes to occur in feelings and actions,
first of all there must be a change in thought.
795
There’s only one kind of wealth that doesn’t decrease no matter how much of it you
distribute. You can safely give this wealth away, for the more you give the more it grows.
This is the wealth of wisdom. You must work on your thoughts in order to attain this
wealth.
In essence, only our own basic thoughts are real and alive, for they’re the only ones
we truly understand. If we read about other people’s thoughts, they only become real
and alive if we confirm that they’re true. Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
It often happens that we have a thought that seems true and strange at the same
time and we’re afraid of believing it. However, if we think it over thoroughly, then we
realize the thought that seemed strange is actually the simplest truth, the kind that we
can’t help but believe if we recognize it just once.
Breadth of thought always comes at the expense of its depth, and excess of thought
is in direct opposition to sincerity of thought.
796
August 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Nothing is important except what we’re doing at the present moment, because this
moment is the only thing we can be sure belongs to us.
It’s good to forget about tomorrow, but there’s only one way to do that: constantly
concern yourself with completing the tasks of the present day, hour and minute.
797
It would be good to remember more often that our true life isn’t only the external,
physical life before our eyes that we live here on earth, but that along with this life there
is within us another inner life, a spiritual life that has no beginning or end. Our visible
physical life is like the scaffolding for constructing a building. The scaffolding itself is
necessary only as long as the building is under construction. Once the building is
finished it’s no longer necessary and it’s taken down. It’s the same way with our physical
life. It’s needed only for the construction of the edifice of our spiritual life. Once this
construction is done, the body is destroyed. When we see a huge, tall metal scaffold
around a building that only barely rises above the foundation, it seems at first as though
the scaffold and not the building is the point of the construction. When the building is
finished and the scaffold is torn down, we forget about it.
It’s good to remind each other and ourselves that just as the only purpose of a
scaffold is to construct a building, the only purpose of our body is to allow our spiritual
life, which takes shape brick by brick in the present moment, to arise.
Only when you cease being guided by the past and future and live only in the
present moment can you act with love as your sole motivation.
Life exists only in the present. We were given the ability to recall the past and
imagine the future only so that, by imagining each, we can better decide the affairs of
the present, and not so that we can regret the past and prepare for the future.
798
As we currently understand it, human life is a piece of time from the birth of a
physical being to its death. However, this isn’t human life; it’s merely one of the
manifestations of a person’s life.
A person first perceives the visible goals of his individual self as the goals of his life.
He can see these goals and so he thinks he can understand them.
Since they’re invisible, the goals that his rational consciousness reveals to him seem
incomprehensible,. So in the beginning a person abandons the invisible in fear and
submits to the visible.
A person imagines the animal demands of his life, which both he and others can see
and which fulfill themselves, to be simple and clear. The new invisible demands of his
rational consciousness seem contradictory to him, and their satisfaction, which doesn’t
happen on its own but must be achieved by the person himself, seems somehow complex
and unclear. It’s frightening and terrible to renounce visible conceptions about your life
and submit to invisible consciousness, just as it would be frightening and terrible for a
child to be born if he were conscious of his own birth. However, there’s nothing a person
can do when it’s obvious that the visible conceptions lead to death while invisible
consciousness alone gives life.
Significant, great and monumental actions that can only be completed in the future:
none of them are true actions, None of them are done for God. If you believe in God,
then you’ll believe that life is in the present and you’ll perform actions that can be
completed in the present. The closer you come to God the more you focus on the present,
and vice versa.
799
Consciousness of one’s illness, concern over curing yourself and, most significantly,
thinking that “I’m ill now and I can’t, but as soon as I’m well I’ll be able to”: all of that is
an enormous delusion. This is in essence saying: “I don’t want what I’ve been given, I
want something that doesn’t exist.” Right now it’s always possible to take joy in what
exists and to do all that’s possible using whatever strength you have.
In life, in true life there can be nothing better than what exists. Wishing for what
doesn’t exist is blasphemy.
800
August 28
There is No Evil
Only in suffering do we begin to live a spiritual life.
If God were to send us teachers, and we were certain that God had sent them, we’d
freely and joyously obey them.
In fact, we have such teachers: distress and all sorts of unfortunate events in life.
Blaise Pascal
Tribulation is the touchstone of human life. Only suffering can sharpen the human
soul. What we call happiness and unhappiness are equally useful as long as we look
upon both as trials.
It’s wrong to conceal from an ill person the fact that he could die from his illness. On
the contrary, you must let him know that his illness is bringing him close to death as
soon as you possibly can. By hiding this fact from him, you deprive him of the blessing
illness gives him: preparing him for the inevitability of death.
801
Cripples, poor people, the blind and deaf-‐mutes consider themselves less fortunate
than others. However, a person’s true happiness doesn’t come through his physical
powers but his spiritual strengths. Physical powers are different in every person, but the
poorest person in the world can be spiritually stronger than the strongest and healthiest
person. If only people understood that this is where their true blessing lies, their physical
shortcomings would cause them no pain.
It’s indubitably more important how a person accepts his fate than what his fate
actually is. Friedrich Humboldt
As the darkness of night reveals the heavenly lights, so only suffering reveals the true
meaning of life. Henry David Thoreau
Mistakes, delusions and deceptions: these comprise the soil that covers the seed of
our spiritual life, and they’re as essential for spiritual life as the soil that covers the seed
is for its life. Just as a seed won’t grow without being covered with soil, so without sins
there would be no effort and therefore no human life.
No tribulation is as great as the fear it evokes. Heinrich Zschokke
802
In order for a bullet to reach its target, it must pass through a tight, grooved gun
barrel. It’s the same with human life. A person passes through the grave suffering of
physical existence, and the greater the sufferings the more accurately and quickly he
reaches his goal. Vladimir Molochnikov
The less love there is in a person the more he’s a victim of the torment of suffering,
and the more love there is in him the less he feels the pain of suffering. A truly rational
life, in which all activities manifest themselves in love, excludes the possibility of any
kind of suffering. The torment of suffering is simply the pain people experience when
they try to break the chain of love that unites each person with the life of the entire
world.
803
August 29
There is No Death
We fear death because in the course our entire lives we only embrace a tiny piece of
life between birth and death.
If this little crumb of life is all you have, then make sure you do all you can with it.
Khalid ibn Sa’id
Human life can be imagined as motion down a corridor or a pipe; unobstructed and
easy at first, then as you grow more and more the way gets increasingly constricted and
difficult. As he travels, a person sees a wide-‐open expanse getting closer and closer, and
sees those ahead of him disappearing into this expanse.
Feeling all the tension and pressure of his journey, wouldn’t he want to get to that
expanse as quickly as possible? How could he not want to draw near to it, and how
could he fear it?
804
In order to compel yourself to behave well, think more often that you must
inescapably die very soon. Just imagine as best you can that you’re on the eve of your
death and you certainly won’t cheat anyone, deceive anyone, lie, condemn people, curse
people, feel malice toward others, or steal. On the eve of your death you can only do the
simplest good deeds: help others, comfort them, and express your love for them. And
these deeds are always the most necessary and the most joyful. This is why it’s always
good to think of death, especially when you’re in a tough situation.
All of life is simply the improvement and strengthening of your spiritual
consciousness. How can that be destroyed? We know without doubt that nothing in the
material world disappears: neither matter nor energy. How can a person think that
spiritual existence is annihilated? We think this way simply because we don’t believe in
a spiritual existence, but also because we can’t see what it turns into (as we can see
energy turn into heat, etc.) But we can’t see it because we ourselves are what changes.
Love not only destroys the fear of death but also the thought of it.
Express yourself through love and death will not exist for you.
805
If the hope of immortality is a fraud, then it’s clear who the dupes are.
It’s not the base, dark souls who’ve never considered this great idea; it’s not the
people with semiconscious and dim-‐witted natures, happy in their carnal sleep in this
life and in the sleep of future darkness; it’s not the egoists with narrow consciences and
petty thoughts and even pettier love; it’s not these people. They’re right, and they have
the advantage. The dupes are all the great and holy people whom the majority have
respected and continue to respect; the dupes are the ones who’ve lived for something
better than their own personal happiness and have given their lives for the happiness of
others.
All of those people are the dupes. Even Christ suffered for naught, giving up his
spirit for an imaginary Father, and he thought in vain that he manifested Him through
his life. The tragedy at Golgotha was nothing but a mistake. Truth was on the side of
those who mocked him and wished for his death, and now it’s on the side of those who
couldn’t care less about what this imaginary story says about human nature. Who are
we to respect, who are we to believe, if the inspirations of all the highest beings are
nothing more than cleverly constructed fables? Theodore Parker
806
This is a terrible world if all the sufferings found in it don’t bring forth anything
good. It’s some sort of evil creation, made only to spiritually and physically torture
people. If that’s the case, then this world is inexpressibly immoral in that it commits evil
without any intention of future good, but simply idly and pointlessly. It’s as if it
deliberately deceives people only to make them suffer. It beats on us from birth, mixing
in suffering with every cup of happiness and making death an ever-‐frightening terror.
And of course, if there’s no God and no immortality, then the disgust with life that some
people express is understandable. It’s awakened within them by the existing order, or
more precisely disorder: a horrifying moral chaos is what it should be called.
But if God exists above us and eternity exists before us, then everything changes. We
clearly see the good in evil, the light in darkness, and hope banishes despair.
Which of these two propositions is more likely? Can we really believe that moral
beings—humans—were put in a position where they have no choice but to justly curse
the world’s existing order when right in front of them is a way out that resolves all its
contradictions? People should curse the world and the day they were born if there’s no
God and no future life. If on the other hand both exist, life itself becomes a joy and the
world becomes a place of moral perfection and an endless increase of sanctity and joy.
Based on a Passage by Erasmus
807
August 30
After Death
He who knows others is intelligent; he who knows himself is enlightened.
He who defeats others is strong; he who defeats himself is mighty.
He who knows that he is not annihilated by death is immortal. Lao Tsu
It’s possible to look upon life as a dream and death as an awakening.
I can’t get rid of the notion that I died before I was born, and that in death I’ll return
to the same condition. To die and to return to life with the memory of one’s previous
existence: we call that fainting. To awaken with new organs that must be formed anew:
that mean to be born. Georg Lichtenberg
Death is the beginning of another life. Michel Montaigne
808
If I kill an animal—a dog, a bird, a frog, even just an insect—then, strictly
speaking, nevertheless it’s unthinkable that this being, or more precisely the primal
force that caused such an amazing phenomenon to appear before my eyes just a
moment ago in all its energy and exuberance, can be annihilated by my evil or careless
act. And on the other hand, millions of animals of every type, each instant entering life
in endless diversity, full of life and impetuosity, couldn’t have been completely non-‐
existent before their birth and then started to live after having been nothing. So, say I
watch a being vanish from my sight and depart to an unknown place while another one
arrives from an unknown place. Both beings have the same form and essence, the same
character, and differ only in the material from which they are composed. Furthermore,
this material is continually discarded and replaced by new material throughout the
course of their existence. This in and of itself makes me consider the possibility that
whatever appears in this world is one and the same being as that which has departed
from it, having undergone only a small transformation, a renovation of the form of its
manifestation, and that therefore what sleep is for an individual is what death is for a
species. Arthur Schopenhauer
Atheism is a sign of intelligence, but only to certain degree.
Atheists should talk about things that are perfectly clear, yet only a person who’s
been completely deprived of common sense can say with complete certainty that the soul
is mortal. Blaise Pascal
809
If life exists, then that which is conscious of life is the self. Life is this self. Without
the self we can’t imagine life. Therefore, when I see a person dying and the manifestation
of consciousness in this particle of a body in which it resided vanishes, I know that
consciousness has left this particle, and although I have no idea what happened to that
which was conscious, I know without doubt that this consciousness could not have been
destroyed, it couldn’t have been and it wasn’t destroyed, because it alone is all that is.
How many kingdoms are unaware of us! The eternal silence of these endless lands
terrifies me. When I ponder over the brevity of my life in view of eternity stretching
before me and after me, the insignificance of the space that I occupy, and even the space
that is within my field of vision and which disappears into the endless immensity of still
other fields about which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, then I fall into
horror and marvel at the fact that I’m in one place rather than another, for there’s no
reason why I should be here rather than there, and why I should exist at this moment
rather than at an earlier or later time. Who put me here? By whose order and command
was I destined to occupy this precise place at this precise time?
Life is the memory of a single fleeting day spent as a guest. Blaise Pascal
810
August 31
Life is a Blessing
A wise man is always happy.
A holy man once said this prayer to God about people: “O God! Be kind to the evil,
since you’ve already been kind to the good. Their lives are happy because they’re good.”
Saadi
Try and maybe you’ll succeed in living your life satisfied with your fate if you believe
that your only happiness lies in increasing love.
People pray to God for help with what’s outside them, while God is ready to help
them with what’s within them. And so they want God to help them with what they want,
and not with what God wants to help them with.
There are only a few true blessings. True blessings and good fortune are only those
that are blessings and good fortune for all.
Therefore, you should only wish for that which is in harmony with the common
good. He who directs his actions toward this goal will himself be blessed.
Marcus Aurelius
811
A person’s true happiness doesn’t depend on what happens to him. It’s a big mistake
to think that happiness requires external conditions. We’ve been given the ability to find
happiness independently of any sort of external circumstances.
We’ve been given the possibility of spiritual life, spiritual perfection, increasing love
within ourselves, drawing close to God, and in these things we find the only true
happiness. And this ability can’t be stopped or even limited. All you have to do is believe
in spiritual life and direct all your powers toward it. It’s like a bird’s wings. You can and
must live an exclusively physical life and work in it, but as soon as you hit an obstacle
you open your wings, believe in them, and fly.
In this life we’re all like unbroken horses that have been led out and put into a
harness and shafts. At first you struggle; you want to live for yourself and your will
compels you to snap the shaft and tear at the harness. However, you can’t break free and
simply tire yourself out. And only after you get tired do you forget about your own will,
submit to a higher will and haul the cart, and only then do you find peace and
happiness.
812
Everything that people consider misfortune and evil come about because they think
their physical individuality truly exists—John, Peter, Martha, Natalie—when physical
individuality is merely a limit within which the genuine, real, eternal All exists. It’s a
deception similar to a drawing that depicts a person by using empty space surrounded
by tree branches. A person can be conscious of himself as that which is limited by the
body, or he can be conscious of himself as that All that is confined within the body. In
the first case he’s a slave, powerless and subject to all sorts of adversities; in the second
he’s free, omnipotent and knows no evil.
813
814
September
September 1
Faith
Christ said, “love each other as I have loved you, because everyone will know that you
are my disciples if you love one another.” He didn’t say “if you believe in this or that,” but
“if you love.” Religion can be different for different peoples at different times, but love is
always the same.
My religion is to love all living things. Ibrahim of Cordova
True worship of God only exists when a person doesn’t expect any rewards from
Him. Agni Purana
We’ll be able to say that the Kingdom of God has come only when church religion
begins to change, step by step, into a common rational religion. This change is still far
away, but it’s coming. That which is destined to enlighten the world and take possession
of it is already in an embryonic form and this embryo can’t help but grow. In the life of
the world a thousand years is like a single day. We must patiently wait and work so that
this will be come to be. Immanuel Kant
815
If you have no faith of any kind, know that you are in the most dangerous situation
possible.
There’s nothing more unworthy of a rational being than to cry over the fact that
what our fathers considered true turned out to be false.
Wouldn’t it be better to search for new foundations for unifying humanity to replace
the old ones? Harriet Martineau
Faith is an essential characteristic of the soul. A person has no choice but to believe
in something. He inevitably believes because in addition to the subjects he knows he also
has relationships with things he can’t know, although he knows they exist. The
relationship to these unknowable subjects is faith.
The Christian world has become an animal, bestial place from which it would appear
there’s no way out. There’s one salvation from this tragic situation: establishment of the
doctrine of love in word and, most importantly, adherence to the Divine law that’s
professed in all religions and which false faith has concealed in all of them.
816
September 2
The Soul
When I think about myself I have a harder time understanding my body than I do
understanding my soul. I will never understand everything about my body, but I know
everything about my soul.
“The one who sent me here is trustworthy, and what he told me I am telling the
world.” No one understood what Jesus told them about the Father. He told them: “When
you lift up the son of man, then you will see that it is me, and that I don’t do anything of
my own accord; rather, as my Father has taught me, thus do I speak.” John 8:26-‐28.
To lift up the son of man means to recognize the human soul and elevate it above the
body.
The external, material world is not what we perceive it to be. For creatures with
senses and cognitive abilities that are different than ours, the world appears as
something completely different than the world we perceive. Therefore, we can never
understand all that is material in this world. The only thing we can fully understand is
our spiritual nature, which is certainly the same in all creatures.
817
When the world came into existence, reason became its mother. He who is aware
that the foundation of his life is spirit knows that he stands beyond all danger. When he
closes his mouth and closes the gates of his senses at the end of his life he experiences no
anxiety whatsoever. Lao Tsu
You can instantly escape any difficult situation if you simply realize that God lives
within you.
I am not only not “me”—a John or a Peter made of flesh and alive from birth to
death—but as a body I’m nothing more than a link between my ancestors and my
descendants. This “I,” my physical self, is only a momentary flash of something. If
something within me truly exists, then it’s obviously not my physical self.
818
Until we know what lies within us, what’s the point of learning what lies beyond us?
And really, can you know the world without knowing yourself? Can a person who’s
blind at home see while he’s at a friend’s? Grigory Skovoroda
A drop of water that falls into the sea becomes the sea. A soul that unites with God
becomes God. Angelus Silesius
When you do something for yourself or for others with a definite goal in mind, your
action is always weak and its results are doubtful. When you do something for your soul
without any visible goal, your action is always overwhelmingly powerful and quickly
achieves its aim, because anything you do for your soul is no longer done by you but by
the spirit that lives within you.
819
September 3
One Soul in All
He who knows God sees Him in all creation. Agni Purana
Man isn’t superior to the animals because he can torture them, but because he can
feel the same source of life that is not just in man but in all living things is also in him,
and therefore he feels sympathy not only for people, but also for animals.
When you hear about foreigners living in far-‐off lands whom you’ve never seen and
most probably never will see, when you see pictures of them and think, “all these
countless people live the same individual life as I do,” ask yourself: “What is my relation
to them? None of these people know me and I’ll never know them. But is there really no
bond between us at all? And shall we die, never having known one another? This can’t
be.”
And in truth, it can’t be. As strange as it may seem, I feel and know that there’s a
bond between me and all the people of the world both living and dead, although I can
neither see nor understand it. I feel that they need me and I need them, and that I live
through them and they live through me.
820
We sense most acutely that we’re one with all people; we sense less acutely that we’re
one with animals; we sense our unity with insects even less. However, all you have to do
is think about their life and you’ll feel that the same spirit that lives in your soul also
lives in theirs.
You can wean yourself from feeling compassion for people, and you can accustom
yourself to feel compassion even for insects.
The more compassion there is in a person the better and happier his life is.
Before you begin to love, or more accurately in order to love, you must know what
you can and should love.
What you can and should love is the spirit that lives in all people and in all life.
A fly is nothing but a fly, but as long as it’s alive the same thing that’s within it is is
within me. It’s the same thing that’s within a tree, the same thing that’s within a stone,
although I can feel something within the tree while I can only imagine what’s within the
stone.
The joys that the feeling of compassion for animals gives a person will purchase
many times over the pleasures he deprives himself of when he refuses to eat meat and
hunt.
821
September 4
God
Moses said to God, “Where can I find You, Lord?” God answered, “If you’re searching
for me, you’ve already found Me.” From an Arabic Source
Someone asked a man, “How do you know God exists?” He answered, “Do I really
need a candle to see the dawn?”
Every person has periods of doubt. The thought enters his head, “Do I understand
God correctly? Is it in fact God? What if there’s nothing?” Don’t dwell on such thoughts.
They come because God is infinite, and we’re eternally growing closer to Him. When you
find yourself doubting, search for a new, deeper understanding of God, and you’ll find
Him, and in place of doubt your faith will only grow stronger.
Trying to prove God’s existence by asserting that it would be good if He existed is
like trying to prove the existence of your own body by asserting that it would be good if
it existed. The existence of God isn’t merely as certain as the existence of your body; His
existence is incomparably more irrefutable.
822
When you’re in a good, cheerful frame of mind and turn to God you understand
and perceive Him to the full extent of your comprehension: you see in Him both the law
and the source of life. However, when you’re spiritually and intellectually weak you don’t
see and feel God as something great and distant, but as something small and close, and
so you pray to Him simply: “Lord, help me.” And he’s still the same, and it’s just as
proper to address Him in this way.
There’s a being that contains within itself everything, and without which there would
be neither heaven nor earth. This being is calm and incorporeal. Its nature is called love
and reason, but the being itself has no name. It is the most distant, and it is the closest.
Lao Tsu
Life is motion in time. Motion in time cannot exist where there are no boundaries,
and therefore the concept of motion in time cannot relate to God. The concept of any
sort of action is incompatible with the concept of God, and therefore the creation of the
world is incompatible with God.
823
In all ages and among all peoples there has been the belief that some sort of invisible
force pervades and preserves the world.
This invisible force lives in the visible world. This force is everywhere, it exists now, it
has always existed, and it always will exist.
In ancient times people called this force universal reason, nature, life, or eternity;
Christians call this force the Spirit, the Father, Lord, reason, truth.
The visible, changing world is like the shadow of this force.
Just as God is eternal, so the visible world, His shadow, is eternal. But it’s only a
shadow. Only this invisible force, God, truly exists. Grigory Skovoroda
Everything that’s been said about God and everything that can be said about Him
will never satisfy you. That which a person can understand about God but can’t express
is what every person needs, and only this gives him life.
Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
824
September 5
Life is Union
People have different bodies, but everyone has the same spirit. If a person lives for
his body he’ll always be alone. Not only that, but by living alone he’ll also be in conflict
with others. If a person lives for his soul he’ll unite with people more and more, and
uniting with people is the most important thing in life.
If you can’t unite in spirit with everyone don’t lose heart, for nothing happens right
away. The more you live for your soul the more you’ll unite with others, and uniting with
other people is the purpose and most important thing in life.
There is only one sign of what is good and what is evil. If it unites people—not just
some, but all people—it’s good. If it divides them, it’s evil.
Life is constantly changing: the physical power that divides people incessantly grows
weaker while the spiritual power that unites them grows ever stronger.
825
What is good and what is bad?
When a wolf eats a lamb, it’s bad for the lamb but good for the wolf and the wolf
cubs.
A rich man falls ill and dies; for him and his friends it’s bad, but for his heir it’s
good. So the very same event can seem to be good to one person and bad to another.
People call things that make them happy good and things that make them unhappy
bad. Even events like the inundation of a large city by lava from a volcano, or the
collapse of an entire city, or a failed harvest—none of these worldly events can be called
good or bad, because we don’t know how things would have turned out if they hadn’t
happened. Maybe something even worse would have occurred.
A good, rational person sees God’s power in the smallest and most insignificant acts.
Such a person always respects himself and others, and never disdains any acts; rather,
in all acts, even the most insignificant matters he tries to display that spiritual power
that’s one and the same in all people and which therefore unites them all.
826
Love is striving for union with a beloved subject. If you love everything, then you
strive for union with everything. Love for everything is God, the God who lives in all our
souls.
It only seems as though humanity is engaged in trade, negotiations, wars, science,
and art. Actually, humanity only engages in one activity that’s important and necessary:
understanding the moral laws according to which it lives and which unite people. And
this understanding of the moral law that unites people is not only humanity’s most
important activity, it’s the only activity worthy of humanity.
827
September 6
Love
The best of people is he who loves all his neighbors and does good for them without
concerning himself with whether they’re good or bad. Muhammad
A horse is saved from its enemy by its speed. It’s not a tragedy for a horse if it can’t
crow like a rooster, but if it loses what it’s been given: its speed.
The most valuable thing to a dog is scent. It’s a tragedy if it can’t smell, not if it can’t
fly.
Likewise, a person isn’t bad off if he can’t overpower a bear, a lion, or evil people, but
it’s a tragedy if he loses the most valuable thing he’s been given: his spiritual nature, his
ability to love.
There’s no reason to pity a person if he dies or loses his money, if he has no home or
property, because none of those things belong to man. But there’s reason for pity if a
person loses his one true possession, his highest blessing: his ability to love. Based on a
Passage by Epictetus
“Be perfect like your Father in heaven” means: try to liberate the Divine source
within you. The more you liberate it, the more blessings you’ll receive.
828
Some say that a person can act only for his own benefit, and therefore he can’t
sacrifice his own happiness for the happiness of others. This would be a fair assessment
if in sacrificing his physical happiness he didn’t receive incomparably greater happiness.
My innate insight tells me that I want blessings and happiness for myself, for myself
alone. Reason tells me: all people, all beings want this. All the beings that search for
their personal happiness just as I do are clearly going to crush me. Therefore, I can never
find happiness. My desire for happiness is my life, and yet reason tells me that I can
never acquire that which I desire.
The problem seems insoluble. However, the solution is as simple as can be and comes
all on its own.
I can only be happy when all people stop wishing for their own happiness and
searching for it and start wishing for happiness for others more than for themselves: in
other words, when they start loving each other.
I’m a human being, and therefore in order to find happiness I must love others.
And all a person has to do is reason in this manner and want to love others and the
voice of his heart will tell him that he can do it and that this is what he wanted all along
and wants right now, and that this is what all people want, although many don’t yet
realize it.
829
Love extricates a person from himself, from his individuality. So if his individual self
suffers, love rescues him from suffering.
We often confuse our desire for others’ love with love for them, but these two feelings
have nothing in common. Your desire for love from others might never be satisfied. You
want them to love you and they berate you. However, this isn’t the case with your
genuine love for others. If you possess this kind of love, your life will be filled with
happiness, and no one will be able to take your happiness away.
Among all the people in the world today, is there anyone who hasn’t at least once,
particularly in childhood, known that blessed feeling of wanting to love everyone: your
neighbor, your father, mother, brothers, evil people, your enemies, dogs, horses, even the
grass? You want one thing: for everyone to live well, for everyone and everything to be
happy, and most of all you want to be the one to make everyone happy, to sacrifice
yourself and your entire life so that everything will be good and joyful. This is true love,
which is the essence of human life.
830
It’s no accident that it’s been said that the entire law is to love God and your
neighbor. Love for one’s neighbor is an individual case: you might have a neighbor or
you might not. God is always there, and a person alone in the desert or locked in prison
can fulfill the law by loving God and all His manifestations, even though they only
appear as memories, ideas, and thoughts.
Cleanse your soul of all that befouls it and love alone will remain. And in searching
out its object, this love won’t be satisfied with itself but will select as its object all that
lives, as well as that which gives life to all: God.
831
September 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Freeing yourself from sin is the true purpose of life. A person lost in sin finds them
the joy of his life. A rational person finds his joy in freeing himself from sin.
To repent means to recognize your sins and to prepare for battle with them, so it’s
best to repent while you still have all your strength.
You have to pour the oil on the flame while the wick is still burning.
Pleasure, luxury: this is what you call happiness. But I think the greatest happiness
is having no desires, and so in order to find this greatest happiness you first have to
teach yourself to have need of little. Socrates
We shouldn’t live for our body, but rather address its needs only when we have no
choice. Epicurus once said, “If you live in agreement with nature you’ll never be poor; if
you live in agreement with the customs of society you’ll never be rich. Nature doesn’t
demand much; the prevailing customs demand excess.” Seneca
832
Christ said, “Temptation must come into the world.” I think that the meaning of this
saying is that knowledge of the truth alone isn’t enough to turn people from evil and
draw them to the truth. In order for most people to understand the truth they must be
led by temptation to the final extreme of delusion and the suffering that results from it.
If a person is incapable of thinking rationally he’s like an animal and can’t be held
responsible for any good or evil he might do. However, every person eventually develops
his reason enough to decide what he should and shouldn’t do. Then, instead of
understanding that people were given reason so that they can determine what’s good
and what is evil and, having understood, doing good and avoiding evil, many people use
their reason to justify the evil that they’ve become accustomed to doing and that they
enjoy.
This use of reason is what is called temptation.
When a person becomes conscious of a sin and frees himself of it he experiences one
of the greatest joys in life.
833
September 8
The Sin of Lechery
A marriage is an agreement between two people only to have children with each
other. Whoever violates this agreement commits a sin and as a result his own life will
become worse.
Until you annihilate your carnal attachment to woman to the very root you will be
tied to the earth like a calf is tied to its mother.
People inclined toward lust run back and forth like a rabbit in a trap: forever bound
by the ropes of cravings, they fall into suffering again and again, all their lives. Buddhist
Wisdom
Sex is one of the greatest sources of human suffering and, most importantly, the evil
that people commit against each other. Therefore, from ancient times humanity has
attempted to make sexual relations as harmless as possible. Laws and rules which if
violated would lead to a person’s destruction were created out of the sum of human
wisdom. If you allow your impulses to guide you in this complex, difficult and important
matter, you’ve rejected human reason and have descended to the level of beasts.
834
No living thing can suppress its lustful impulses; with a few exceptions no human
can either. It has to be this way since lust ensures the continuation of the human race,
and therefore humans will have sexual relations as long as the higher will requires the
existence of the human race.
However, sexual relations are permissible only as the fulfillment of God’s will: the
continuation of the species. Beyond this goal it’s a sin, and in terms of the consequences
the sinner faces it might be the gravest sin of all.
If a child is born to you, he is yours, and the woman who gave birth to him is your
wife.
In our society, love between a man and a woman is extolled as the highest poetic goal
toward which humans aspire (a fact proven by all of our society’s art and poetry), even
though this love is simply a result of physical attraction. So young men dedicate the best
years of their lives to peering at women, searching for the best love objects and taking
possession of them in the form of relationships or marriage, while women and girls
entice and engage men in affairs or marriage.
Because of this, people’s best abilities are wasted on unproductive and even harmful
work. This is the cause of the majority of the mad overindulgence of our lives. This is the
cause of idleness in men and shamelessness in women who copy the fashions of
depraved women that evoke the animal nature of their bodies. This is repulsive and fatal
to young people.
835
September 9
The Sin of Parasitism
People have helped each other for millennia. Without such help people wouldn’t
survive. But help must be mutual, and our world is arranged so that some people help,
while others exploit this help.
If a person is idle, someone else is working harder than he needs to. If a person
overeats, someone else is hungry.
Idle people created all sorts of stupefying and intoxicating substances to be smoked
or drunk for various reasons, but in part as an escape from the boredom of idleness.
Idleness is the source of boredom and boredom is the source of sin.
Work and pleasure, when properly alternated, bring joy to life. However, this isn’t
the case with every kind of work or every kind of pleasure.
836
Forcing others to work to fulfill your own needs is as irrational as a working man
destroying his coworkers’ tools in order to preserve or improve the tool he himself ruined
and that was supposed to produce the work he and his coworkers were ordered to do.
When a person frees himself of labor by compelling others to work for him he not
only deprives himself of true happiness, he also deprives himself of that worldly,
physical happiness reserved for men who perform the natural physical labor required to
fulfill their needs.
A working person receives true satisfaction from rest. An idle person experiences
continual anxiety instead of the relaxation he hopes to achieve, and as a result of this
artificial idleness he destroys the very source of satisfaction—his health—and weakens
his body. This makes him unfit for work and consequently deprives him of the product
of labor—true relaxation—and allows savage illnesses to take root within him.
These are the consequences of idleness for a sinful person. For those near him the
harmful consequences of his sin are first of all, as a Chinese proverb says, the fact that
“if one person is idle then another is dying of hunger;” second, that simple-‐minded
people who don’t know the dissatisfaction idle people experience try to imitate them,
and instead of feeling kindness and sympathy toward them they experience envy and
rancor. Every person who struggles with the sin of idleness should understand this.
837
September 10
The Temptation of Wealth
Someone walked up to him and said, “Good teacher! What good acts should I
perform in order to gain eternal life?”
He told him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. If you
want to gain eternal life, observe the commandments.”
He said, “Which ones?” Jesus said, “Don’t kill, don’t fornicate, don’t steal, don’t bear
false witness, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself.”
The young man said, “I have observed all these commandments since I was a boy.
What else do I need?”
Jesus told him, “If you wish to perfect yourself, sell all your property and give it to the
poor, and you will have a treasure in Heaven. Then come and follow me.”
Matthew 19:16-‐21
A Chinese proverb says: “It’s unfortunate when a poor man envies a rich man, but he
can be forgiven for it. However, it’s unforgivable when a rich man revels in his wealth
and doesn’t share it with the poor.”
838
Solomon said, “Don’t steal from the poor, because they’re poor.” Nevertheless, this
“robbery of the poor, because they’re poor” is a most common event. The wealthy
constantly exploit the needs of the poor to force them to work for them or buy what
they’re selling at the lowest price.
Robbery of the wealthy on the highways because they’re wealthy is far less common,
because it’s dangerous to rob the rich. However, you can rob the poor without any risk.
Based on a Passage by John Ruskin
It’s true that wealth is the accumulation of labor; but normally, one person performs
the labor while another accumulates. And this is what educated people call “division of
labor.” From an English Source
From the very beginning and before any legal acts were decreed, all people possessed
the land. In other words, they have the right to live where nature or circumstance has
placed them. Immanuel Kant
People who own land condemn in word and deed those who take others’ property.
Do they really fail to see that as soon as the word theft is mentioned they should
burn in shame for having incessantly stolen people’s most inalienable property rather
than condemning and chastising others for what they themselves are guilty of through
and through?
839
We must recognize that we find ourselves in a strange situation due to our worship
of Mammon. We say that we live in society, but nevertheless we preach division and
isolation. Our lives are not sustained by mutual assistance but by mutual enmity, which
we call honest competition. We’ve forgotten that all human relations cannot be reduced
to cash payments. A rich factory owner asks, “What business is it of mine that the
workers are starving? Didn’t I hire them fairly on the market and pay them what their
contract stipulated right down to the last penny? What more duty do I have to them?”
Yes, worship of Mammon is a dismal faith. When Cain murdered Abel because it was to
his advantage and was then asked, “Where’s your brother?” he answered, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” This is exactly what the factory owner says: “Didn’t I give my brother
his salary? I gave him everything he deserved. What more do you want?”
Thomas Carlyle
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs will be the kingdom of Heaven.” The poor in
spirit aren’t those who have nothing but those who don’t value wealth and don’t want it.
A rich person relies on his wealth, while a person who’s poor in spirit relies on God.
True wealth is not wishing for more than you need. He who has little isn’t poor;
rather, a poor person is someone who wants to possess more and more.
If a person has nothing but believes that “the righteous will live,” then in his poverty
he’s richer than kings. Grigory Skovoroda
840
There’s something worse than injustice: insincere virtue, love and service to God,
which you meet so often in the false Christian world. By either imagining or pretending
that they’re fulfilling the law of love, people release themselves from the demands of
justice and turn their own injustice into self-‐satisfied villainy. People donate to churches
and the poor, they engage in philanthropy, while all that they give was purchased with
the blood and tears of their brothers.
A rich man has fifteen rooms for three people and he won’t let a poor man spend the
night in his home and get warm.
A peasant has a fifteen-‐foot wide hut for seven people and he gladly takes in a
stranger.
841
September 11
The Sin of Ill Will
Whenever two people argue they’re both at fault, because while they’re arguing they
feel no love for one another. Therefore, the argument will end only when one of them
remembers that the person he’s arguing with is his brother, a person he should love, not
argue with.
Everyone wants to be happy. When a person’s angry with someone or even an
animal he’s no longer happy. Therefore, if a person wants to be happy, he can’t become
angry.
The human soul doesn’t turn away from truth, moderation, justice and kindness
voluntarily, but rather through coercion. The more clearly you understand this, the
gentler you’ll be with others. Marcus Aurelius
842
When you see people who are constantly dissatisfied with everyone and constantly
criticizing everything and everyone, you want to tell them: “You really weren’t given life
so that you can gripe about the absurdity of life, criticize it, get angry and then die. This
can’t be. Think it through: you shouldn’t get angry but rather work to correct all the evil
that you see.
“There’s no way you can eliminate all the evil you see with anger, but only with the
feeling of goodwill toward all that you can summon from within yourself at any time.”
As soon as you have unkind feelings toward someone, try to understand why that
person is doing what you find unpleasant. As soon as you understand, you can no
longer be angry with him. You can no more be angry with him than you can with a
falling stone.
Be wary of malice being implanted within you when unkind acts are directed toward
you. There is no more visible sign of a person’s success on the path of goodness than
when he restrains his anger and refuses to repay an unkind word with an unkind word,
or refuses to strike back at a person who’s offended him.
843
How can you defeat a bad mood? First of all, humility: when you recognize your own
weakness, how can you can you be irritated when someone points it out to you? It might
be ungracious on their part, but they’re right. Then, reasoning: ultimately you’ll remain
the same as you were, and if you had too much respect for yourself then you only have to
change your opinion about yourself; our neighbor’s rudeness shows us as we really are.
However, the most important step is forgiveness. This is the only way to keep from
despising a person who acts unkindly toward us and offends us. Forgiveness means
doing good for them and defeating your anger with kindness. You won’t change them
with a victory over your emotions, but you’ll restrain yourself. Henri Frédéric Amiel
All anger is the result of powerlessness. Jean Jacques Rousseau
844
September 12
The Temptation of Pride
“The greatest among you will serve you all. For he who exalts himself shall be
debased, and he who debases himself shall be exalted.” (Matthew 23:11-‐12).
The person who will be debased is the one who evokes a high opinion of himself in
others, for when a person is considered good, intelligent, and kind he’ll no longer try to
become better, smarter, kinder. Why should he become better when he’s already so
good?
The person who reproaches himself will become exalted, because a person who
considers himself bad will try to be better, kinder, and more rational.
A proud person acts like someone who walks on stilts so that he doesn’t have to walk
on his feet. He stands higher, his feet don’t get dirty, and his steps are longer, but the
problem is that you can’t go very far on stilts before you tumble into the dirt, become a
laughingstock and fall behind everyone else.
It’s the same with proud people. They fall behind those who don’t raise themselves
up higher than their true stature and, what’s more, they frequently stumble and make a
laughingstock of themselves.
Only someone who doesn’t realize that God lives within him can consider some
people more important than others. All people are equal for someone who knows that
the same spirit of God that lives within him also lives within every other person.
845
When a person loves some people more than others, he loves with human love. For
Divine love all people are equal.
To consider yourself better than everyone else is bad and stupid. We all know that.
To consider your family better than all other families is even worse and stupider, but
frequently people not only fail to realize this but they see virtue in it. To consider your
nation better than all others is worse than anything that can possibly be, but not only do
people not consider it bad, they consider it a great virtue.
The more you boast, the more shame you bring upon yourself.
An ancient sage once said that the greatest wisdom was to know yourself. A proud
person is the farthest of all from this wisdom. He can’t know himself because he doesn’t
want to know himself as he really is.
Only people who don’t realize that the purpose of life is to strive for perfection can be
proud. If a person understands life as a struggle for perfection, he’ll always feel infinitely
far away from perfection no matter how well he lives and so he can’t ascribe any merit to
himself and feel proud.
846
The bonds of family and homeland cannot and must not diminish a person’s love.
From the day he’s born a person is surrounded by a small group of people so that the
tenderness those people show him will evoke love for humanity from within him.
However, when affection for one’s family and nation becomes exclusive, then instead of
serving as the heart’s teacher, these bonds become its grave. William Channing
Pride not only defends the person himself but also all his sins, because it hates
criticism and pushes aside any cure, and hides and justifies sin instead. Consciousness
of sin, which humbles a person, is more useful than a good deed that inflates his pride.
Richard Baxter
The proverb, “they greet you according to your clothes, they accompany you
according to your mind,” demonstrates how far we still are in our Christian world from
recognizing the equality of all people. It would seem that a Christian should greet all
people the same way, regardless of their clothes. If any distinction should be made, then
it should be that you should treat a poorly dressed person with more respect, based on
the natural assumption that he needs more respect, attention and concern.
847
September 13
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
If you want to be at peace, try to please God and not people. Different people want
different things; today they want one thing, tomorrow another. Never try to please
people. God always wants the same thing, and you know in your heart what it is.
Not only should you refrain from praising yourself, you shouldn’t let anyone else
praise you. Praise smothers the soul, for it misdirects concern for your soul to concern
for worldly glory.
How often do we see a good, intelligent and honest person who knows the
illegitimacy of his actions—for example war, eating meat, ownership of land he doesn’t
use, criminal courts, etc.—peacefully continue to commit acts he knows are bad. Why is
this? Because he acts in order to please people, and this desire is stronger than his
conscience and reason.
848
What formidable power there would be in our actions if we were to completely forget
about how people will judge them. Nothing weakens an action like concern over how
others will judge it.
If we only knew why people praise us and why they castigate us, we’d stop valuing
others’ praise and fearing their condemnation.
Seek the best person among those who condemn the world.
Only concern over others’ opinions can explain the mindless accumulation of
unnecessary wealth and the exaltation of oneself over others, both of which divide people
against each other.
Only concern over others’ opinions can explain the most astonishing human action:
lying. A person knows one thing and says another. Why? There can be no other
explanation than that he thinks people will praise him for it.
849
September 14
The Temptation of Punishment
To punish in Russian means to educate.4 Education can only take place with good
words and good examples. To repay evil with evil isn’t education, it’s depravity.
What should you do if a person becomes angry with you and commits evil against
you? There’s a lot you could do, but there’s one thing you certainly shouldn’t do: don’t
commit evil. In other words, don’t behave as he did.
4
The Russian verb “nakazat’” originally meant to correct through stern edification, and
still carries the meaning “to correct.” The root “kazat” is basic to many Russian words:
skazat’: to say; prikazat’: to order; ukazat’: to indicate, etc.
850
The kingdom of Heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves.
As he started examining his books, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was
brought to him. He couldn’t pay, so the king ordered him to sell himself, his wife,
children, and everything he owned, and pay up. Then the slave fell down before the king
and, bowing before him, said, “Lord, have patience with me, and I’ll pay you everything.”
The king felt sorry for the slave, forgave his debt and let him go his way. On his way out
the slave ran into one of his comrades who owed him one hundred dinars. He grabbed
the man and choked him, saying, “give me what you owe me.” His comrade fell to his
feet and pleaded with him, saying, “have patience with me, and I’ll pay you everything.”
But the slave refused and had his comrade put in a dungeon until he could pay his debt.
His comrades, seeing what happened, were deeply upset and went to the king and told
him all that had transpired. The king had the slave brought to him and said, “Evil slave!
I forgave you your entire debt just because you asked me. Doesn’t it behoove you to have
mercy on your comrade as I showed mercy to you?” And growing angry, the sovereign
handed him over to his jailers to be tortured until he paid his entire debt.
In this very fashion will my heavenly Father deal with any one of you who doesn’t
forgive his brother for his sins from the bottom of your heart. Matthew 18:23-‐35
851
It’s difficult to follow the doctrine of non-‐resistance, but is it easy to follow the
doctrine of conflict and retaliation? To answer this question, look at the history of any
nation and read a description of one of the hundred thousand battles that those people
conducted for the sake of the law of conflict. Billions of people have been killed in these
wars, and in a single one of these battles there was more destruction of life and more
suffering than there would have been in a thousand years had people followed the
doctrine of non-‐resistance to evil. Adin Ballou
If people think there’s no way to live as a society other than by using violence against
others rather than persuasion, this means they want to do to people what they do to
horses when they put blinders on them so they’ll walk in a circle more submissively. Just
as a horse has eyes that it needs in order to live as it should, so people have reason,
which they need in order to live as they should.
People say that you have to repay evil with evil because if you don’t then evil people
will rule over the good. I think that it’s the opposite: only when the evil rule over the good
do people think that repaying evil with evil is permissible, as is the case now in all
Christian nations. Evil people rule over the good right now precisely because it’s been
ingrained in everyone that it’s useful to commit evil against others.
852
People say that if we stop threatening evil people with punishment and end the
current order of life everything will be destroyed. This is the same as saying: the river is
swelling, so everything will be destroyed. No, ships will come and true life will begin.
The terrible evil that the false law of God creates can’t be seen any more clearly than
in the horrible, beastly law of revenge written in books falsely ascribed to God: “an eye
for an eye,” created once upon a time by barbaric people and accepted today by
Christians as the expression of God’s will. Things that an animal, a child, a fool, or
occasionally an adult under the influence of pain and anger might do: this is recognized
as a lawful right for everyone and is ascribed to God. A rational person, who can’t help
but see that all evil is destroyed by that which is opposed to it, just as fire is extinguished
by water, suddenly does the exact opposite of what his reason tells him, and a law that’s
supposedly divine tells him he must act this way.
853
September 15
The Superstition of Violence
One of the most dangerous superstitions is the belief that some people can force
others to live not by their own wills, but by theirs. Mothers and fathers believe in this lie
concerning their grown children, as do governments, revolutionaries and churches.
You can only teach someone who wants to learn from you. But frequently people
teach those who don’t want to learn and would rather be the teacher. Nothing but evil
can come from this sort of instruction.
You teach others how they should live and what they should do, but you know that
you yourself live badly and don’t know how to correct your own life.
854
We’ve become so used to thinking that one group of people can arrange the lives of
others that it doesn’t strike us as strange when some people start telling others what
they should believe or how they should act. People can give such orders and submit to
them only because they fail to recognize every person’s internal essence: the divinity of
their souls, which is always free and incapable of submitting to anything other than its
own law: its conscience and the law of God.
This delusion is dangerous not only because it tortures the people who submit to
authority and perverts those who issue orders, but also because it estranges both groups
from consciousness of the divinity of the human soul.
“Let’s restructure societal forms and society will prosper.” It would be nice if it were
so simple to achieve human happiness. Unfortunately, (or rather fortunately, since if
one group of people could arrange the lives of others, then these other people would be
most unfortunate and unhappy), fortunately, this isn’t so: human life doesn’t change
because of a revision in external forms but only through each person’s inner work on
himself. All attempts to influence external forms or other people will only alter the
external appearance of those people’s conditions, pervert them, pervert their lives and
the lives of those who surrender to this deadly delusion, as all politicians, kings,
ministers, presidents, members of parliament, revolutionaries, and liberals do.
855
The desire to arrange the lives of others always begins simply as a justification for
violence. Its true purpose is revealed later on.
Every superstition destroys true faith. The superstition of governmental organization
is no exception.
If people would simply free themselves from the superstition that it’s possible for one
group of people to organize the lives of others, then government would become
impossible.
If there were love, governmental violence couldn’t exist. If governmental violence
didn’t exist, there would be love.
856
September 16
The Superstition of Government
People say that government has always existed, and therefore we can’t live without
government. First of all, government hasn’t always existed, and if it did exist and does
exist, that doesn’t mean that it must always exist.
It’s astonishing that kings so easily believe that they’re everything and the people so
firmly believe that they’re nothing. Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
In our day people are already beginning to understand that the time of government
has passed and that they cling to it only because they’ve been deceived and habituated
to it, but they can’t free themselves from it because they’re all entangled in it in one way
or another.
In creating governments, people try as hard as they can to compel their passions to
serve the common good.
However, this is simply hypocrisy, a false image of love; in essence, it’s simply hatred.
This vile human foundation has merely been concealed, but it hasn’t yet been expelled.
Blaise Pascal
857
As people we must understand that we’re all children of one Father and that our
mission is to fulfill here on earth the one common law: that each of us must live for
others rather than for ourselves; that the goal of life isn’t be more or less happy, but to
become more virtuous and to help others become so too; that to fight against injustice
and error wherever we encounter it is not only our right but our duty—the duty of our
entire life, which we cannot escape or destroy without falling into terrible sin.
Giuseppe Mazzini
Anarchy doesn’t mean the absence of government, but only the absence of
institutions that force people to submit to violence. It would seem that a government of
rational beings could not and must not be structured otherwise.
From the beginning of the history of society to our time government has always and
everywhere oppressed people. Does it follow from this that oppression is inextricably
bound to human society? Of course not. Just as government was once a necessary evil in
the past, it’s just as necessary that it will be completely destroyed sooner or later.
Mikhail Bakunin
858
We often call laws the wisdom of our ancestors, but this is wrong. Laws are just as
often the result of our ancestors’ passions, cowardice, envy, narrow selfishness and love
of power. It’s not our responsibility to slavishly follow them but to consider their actions
and discover their mistakes. William Godwin
It’s written in the Old Testament that the Jewish people’s misfortune was due to their
belief in false gods instead of the one true God. In chapters eight and twelve of the First
Book of Samuel, Samuel accuses the people of adding one more sin to all their previous
ones: that in place of God, their only King, they made a human a king so that he could
save them. “Don’t believe in ‘togu,’ in emptiness,” Samuel told the people. “It won’t help
you and it won’t save you, because it is ‘togu’: empty. Hold fast to the one God so that
you and your king don’t perish.” The same should be said to people in our time.
859
September 17
The Superstition of the Church
From early childhood the stupidest and most unkind teachings of an evil God, of
devils, miracles, the creation of the world, the resurrection of Christ and so on are
pounded into children’s heads under the guise of the law of God. They’re taught to
believe things that are inconsistent with reason. Believing in falsehood, children lose the
ability to distinguish the rational from the irrational and to retain rational ideas while
rejecting irrational ones. They’re like barrels that have holes poked in their bottoms, so
that they can no longer hold water.
860
In 1415 Jan Hus was declared a heretic and sentenced to death without the spilling of
blood, i.e. by fire, because he exposed the false faith of the Catholics and the evil deeds of
the Pope.
They executed him in an orchard outside the city gates. When they took Hus up to
the place of execution, he fell on his knees and started praying. When the executioner
ordered him to take his place at the post, Hus stood up and loudly proclaimed:
“Jesus Christ! I am going to my death for preaching your words. I will humbly
endure it.”
The executioners stripped Hus and tied his hands behind the post. Hus’s feet were
on a platform. They piled wood and straw all around him. The wood and straw went up
to Hus’s chin. Then the Imperial representative walked up to Hus and said that if he
would renounce all that he had said, he would be forgiven.
“No,” he said, “I’m not guilty of anything.”
Then the executioners lit the fire. Hus said the prayer: “Christ, Son of the Living God,
have mercy on me.” The fire rose high, and Hus quickly fell silent.
This is how people who called themselves Christians affirmed their faith.
Isn’t it clear that this isn’t faith but superstition?
861
You could say that all human life consists of only two activities: acting in accordance
with your conscience and concealing the admonitions of your conscience from yourself
so that you can continue to live a bad life. Some people follow the first course, others the
second. There’s only one way to follow the first path: become morally enlightened,
increase the light within yourself and pay close attention to your behavior. There are two
ways to conceal the admonitions of your conscience: one is external, and one is internal.
The external method is to engage in occupations that divert your attention from the
admonitions of your conscience. The internal method is to darken your conscience itself
with false laws of God.
862
Christ’s goal was the transformation of man’s inner being, and this conflicted with
the business of the Pharisees, who were only interested in externalities. He reproached
them for destroying God’s commandment with their fables. When the breath of life
abandons those who carry the responsibility for educating others, when the
establishment loses its initial force and weakens, two things occur: the customs of
external worship become more complex and elaborate, and people ascribe to them an
imaginary reality by arguing that external rituals can replace true virtue and free people
from fulfilling the actual law. And among societies that have been subjected to such a
disastrous doctrine, a sort of false conscience takes shape. Entire nations observe an
abstract faith, often with great fervor, and also neglect with a tranquil mind the most
sacred responsibilities and turn them into perversions that possess their entire lives.
They wash their hands before they eat their daily bread and polish their copper pots, but
out from their hearts come mountains of the sins that Christ enumerated. Christ spoke
against this: “Descend into your heart so that you can tear out every evil root. The
external isn’t important. Both good and evil are found within.” This is what Christ
taught. He who teaches anything else is not teaching as Christ taught and is not a
disciple of Christ, but rather using the name of Christ for evil ends in order to deceive
others; he is one of the false prophets about which Christ himself said, “Guard
yourselves against those who come to you in sheepskin but who are cunning wolves at
heart,” and further, “All those who say, ‘Lord! Lord!’ and who pray with their tongues
but through their actions dwell in evil will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
863
Only people without faith—those who have no faith in the spiritual foundation of
life and who’ve accepted external forms as faith—can be impatient. They’re impatient
because they fail to understand that true faith is independent of human will. Because of
this the most faithless people, from the Pharisees who tormented Christ to the present
secular authorities, have always persecuted and continue to persecute the faithful, but
this persecution never weakens the faith of the faithful; it only strengthens it.
True worship is free from superstition. When superstition enters into it, then
worship itself is destroyed. Christ showed us what true worship consists of. He taught us
that out of everything we do in our lives, there is one light and happiness for everyone:
our love for each other. He taught that we can gain happiness only when we serve others
and not ourselves. Blaise Pascal
Those who fight against lies and religious superstitions often take comfort in the
amount of superstitions they’ve destroyed. This is wrong. You can’t rest until everything
that contradicts reason and demands faith is destroyed. Religious superstition is like
cancer: if you operate, you have to remove it all. If one small bit remains, it will all grow
back.
864
Some people prioritize the observance of official rules that demand public adherence
as a required part of religion not simply as a means for awakening a moral spirit but as
an external condition through which a person can directly please God more effectively
than by living a good life. In fact, the former, which is what has been historically
considered faith, can only conditionally please God and is subordinate to the latter,
which is the only thing that can please God in and of itself. When people do this, they
transform service to God into a fetish that they themselves have created and engage in a
false form of worship that undermines all attempts to create a true religion.
Immanuel Kant
In our day, the recognition of ancient religious legends as indisputable truth is the
source of the greatest human tragedies and miseries.
Miracles—tales of the violation of the laws of nature in the past, present and
future—are not only useless since they can’t convince anyone, they’re always harmful in
that they divide people.
How stupid a person is when he drinks from a puddle when a clear spring runs
right by his home. Angelus Silesius
865
September 18
The Superstition of Science
Only he who acts well is educated. Hitopadesha
Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he didn’t think he knew what he didn’t.
Nothing interferes with true knowledge like a person’s belief that he knows that which
he doesn’t.
The superstition of science is essentially the same as the superstition of religion:
scientists, having called scientific superstitions science in the same way that the clergy
called religious superstitions the church, convince themselves and others that everything
they assert is irrefutable truth. As strange as this superstition is, it exists, and having
replaced religious superstition in our time it is one of the main reasons for the
perversion of the thoughts of people who consider themselves educated.
The difference between material and intellectual poison is that most material
poisons are repulsive to the taste, while intellectual poisons in the form of newspapers
and books often appear pleasant.
866
Scientific progress has no effect on moral purification. In every nation we know of,
scientific progress has corrupted morals. That which we now consider offensive is a
result of confusing our fickle, delusional knowledge with true higher knowledge. You
can’t help but respect science in its abstract sense: science in general. However, our
science today, that which madmen call science, deserves nothing but mockery and
contempt. Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
There’s no one more confused about the concepts of religion, morality and life than a
scientist; and what’s even more astounding is that notwithstanding its truly enormous
successes in the study of the conditions of the material world, science in our day is not
only utterly useless in people’s lives but frequently results in great harm.
The rapid acquisition of knowledge attained at the price of an insignificant amount
of personal effort is never particularly fruitful. Such scholarship frequently flies away in
the wind without producing any results.
You often meet quite superficial minds that know an astonishing amount. That
which a person acquires through his own efforts follows him like a trail of reason along
which he can travel under different circumstances. Georg Lichtenberg
867
It’s harmful to eat when you’re not hungry and use artificial means to make yourself
hungry. It’s even more harmful to give in to lust without having any irrepressible urge
by deliberately inciting it. Most harmful of all is to force yourself to think when there’s
no need and to artificially push yourself into intellectual activity, as people do when they
use their intellectual abilities to improve their social standing.
When studied for their own sake alone and developed without a governing
philosophical principle, the experimental sciences are like a face with no eyes. They
represent one of the occupations appropriate for people of limited abilities who are
deprived of greater talents that would only interfere with such painstaking research.
People of such limited abilities focus all their attention and all their efforts on a single,
limited scientific field, where they can therefore attain complete knowledge while
remaining totally ignorant of all other fields. You could compare them to workers in a
watchmaker’s shop, where some only make gears, others only make springs, while still
others only make chains. Arthur Schopenhauer
868
September 19
Effort
If a person studies the law of God but doesn’t exert effort to fulfill it, he’s like a
farmer who plows the land but doesn’t sow.
It’s written in the Gospels: “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” This
doesn’t mean that Christ commanded people to be just like God; it means that each
person should exert effort to move closer to perfection. Pure perfection is God. Man’s
task is to move closer to that perfection, and this moving closer is the life of man.
Within you, deep within you is a spring of kindness. Just like a spring of water, the
more you unearth it the stronger it will flow. Marcus Aurelius
As we move forward in spiritual life we see more evil in ourselves than we saw before.
We’re even surprised that we didn’t see all the filth within us sooner. However, there’s no
need to be surprised or to despair. On the contrary, you should be joyful. The fact that
we see all the evil that’s within us is an indication that we’re advancing, that we’re
becoming better, not worse, than we used to be.
869
Free union of your soul with others’ souls and with God, achieved through your own
efforts, gives unending and ever-‐increasing happiness. The efforts a person exerts to
achieve union with others and with God are like the steps an animal takes in order to go
where his master calls him.
Never-‐ending fulfillment of inconspicuous responsibilities with simple, morally
elevated feelings strengthens your character to the point where it acts courageously and
forcefully amidst the bustle of the world and on the execution block. Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Destroy one vice and ten will disappear. Édouard Rod
May a person not think lightly about evil, telling his heart: it will certainly never
touch me. A vessel of water is filled drop by drop; a fool is completely filled with evil by
committing evil a little at a time.
May a person not think carelessly about good, telling his heart: I don’t have the
strength to be good. Just as water fills a vessel drop by drop, a person striving for the
good will be filled with goodness bit by bit every time he does good. Buddhist Wisdom
870
A person is born to remake all that man has made previously, to expose deception,
to reestablish truth and goodness, reflecting the great nature that embraces us all and
never sleeps in the distant past for even a minute but recasts itself each hour, giving us a
new day with every morning and a new life with every hour. Ralph Waldo Emerson
“He who is patient will be saved in the end.”
So often a person despairs and stops, and even turns back, when only a bit of effort
is needed to reach his goal.
871
September 20
Self-‐Renunciation
To completely renounce yourself means to become God. To live exclusively for
yourself means to become a beast. Let’s distance ourselves from beastly life and move
closer to Godly life.
We do true good only when we don’t notice that we’re doing good. And we don’t
notice it only when we completely forget about ourselves and live in others.
When a person is full of life, he’s tender and flexible. When he’s dying, he becomes
hard and dry.
All things—grass, as well as trees—are tender and flexible while they’re imbued
with life. When they begin to die, they harden and dry out. Therefore rigidity and
inflexibility are the companions of death, and so it isn’t the physically strong who will be
victorious. When a tree dries up it’s doomed to die. The strong and the mighty lie below,
while the tender and the flexible lie above. Lao Tsu
872
Liberating yourself from selfishness—something that every person must do—is
difficult because you need selfishness in order to live. When you were a child it was both
necessary and natural, but as your reason develops it should weaken and disappear.
A child doesn’t feel the reproaches of conscience because of his selfishness, but once
his reason begins to function selfishness becomes a burden. As he goes on through life it
becomes weaker and weaker, and as death approaches it disappears entirely.
Just as self-‐renunciation seems impossible to a person who’s still living in the
delusion of personal life, it seems impossible to a person who lives a spiritual life to live
only for himself.
A person can renounce his personal life only for the sake of divine life. Renouncing
personal life for any other reason is merely a semblance of self-‐renunciation, a mistake,
or a calculated act.
873
In the parable of the tenants in the vineyard, Christ explains how people fall into the
sin of lying to themselves and compelling themselves to accept a specter of life—their
personal life—as true life.
The people who were living in the vineyard that the owner had tended imagined that
they were the owners of the vineyard. Because of this false proposition they acted
senselessly and cruelly and ended up being banished and excluded from life. In the
same way, we all imagine that our lives are our personal property, that we own them and
can use them as we wish without any responsibilities to anyone. As a result of this
illusion, we inescapably act just as senselessly and cruelly, suffer tragedies and end up
excluded from life. Just as the tenants of the vineyard either forgot or didn’t want to
admit that they’d been given the vineyard fully prepared, fenced off, with a well already
dug, and that someone had done all this work and therefore expected them to continue
the work, people who live for themselves have forgotten or don’t want to recognize all
that was done for them before they were born and continues to be done all through their
lives and therefore what is expected from them.
According to Christ’s teaching, just as tenants living in a vineyard that they didn’t
prepare should understand and feel that they have an unpaid debt to the owner, people
should understand and feel that from their birth till their death they’re always indebted
to someone: those who lived before them, those who live now, those who will live in the
future, and that which was, is, and will always be the source of everything. They have to
understand that they confirm this responsibility every hour of their lives, and that
therefore a person who lives for himself and denies this responsibility—that binds him
to life and the source of everything—deprives himself of life.
874
Just as you have to aim beyond the target to hit it, in order to be just you have to be
selfless. In other words, you have to be unjust toward yourself. If you simply wish to be
just you’ll be biased in favor of yourself and unjust toward others.
There comes a time in every person’s life when he understands for the first time the
frailty of physical life and realizes the inevitability of self-‐renunciation.
875
September 21
Humility
Everyone loves humble people. We all want to be loved, so why not try to be humble?
When you feel sad, remember all the bad things you’ve done and continue to do and
your sadness will appear to be deserved; it will become less painful and will even stop
being a misfortune and become an incentive to try for perfection.
There are two types of people: some are very pleasant to be around, and others are
very unpleasant to be around. Pleasant people are righteous but consider themselves
sinful, while unpleasant people are sinful but consider themselves righteous.
Based on a Passage by Blaise Pascal
Frequently the simplest, most ignorant and uneducated people fully, consciously
and easily understand true Christianity, while the most educated people continue to
stagnate in foul paganism. This is because the former possess humility while the latter
are deprived of it.
876
I’m having a hard time and I ask God for help, but it’s my job to serve God, not His
to serve me. Just remember this and your problems will become easier to deal with.
Remember all the bad things you’ve done. This will help you avoid doing more bad
things. If you recall all the good things you’ve done, it will cripple your ability to do good
in the future.
Just recognize that you’re not the master but a servant and your searching, anxiety,
and dissatisfaction will instantly transform into certainty, tranquility, peace and
indestructible joy.
We’re so far from perfection that no matter how different our lives may be, the
distance to perfection is the same for us all. Therefore, a rational person is naturally
dissatisfied with himself.
877
Many people possess the shortcoming of wanting to be the teacher of others when
they really should remain students for quite some time. Eastern Wisdom
If you want to find an example to copy, look for it among simple, humble people.
True greatness, which not only refrains from putting itself on display but isn’t even
conscious of its own greatness, is only found among such people.
You think that you’re something very important. Just rise above yourself and you’ll
see what a worthless and pathetic creature you are. Angelus Silesius
878
September 22
Honesty
In order to learn how to speak the truth to others you have to learn to speak the
truth to yourself. And in order to speak the truth to yourself you have to stop worrying
about how people will judge you and think only of your soul.
Honesty might not be the most important virtue, but I can say with complete
confidence that without honesty there can be no virtue.
Only when a person can honestly examine his soul and recognize the good and bad
in it without any pretence can he begin to work on himself and wean himself off the bad
and train himself to do good.
Only delusions and lies require artificial support. Truth can stand alone. Therefore
the true word has no need of superficial, solemn ceremonies. Only lies need such devices.
879
In real life an illusion only distorts reality for an instant; in the abstract domain an
error can rule for millennia. With the help of its slaves, whom it’s deceived, it can place
its iron yoke on entire nations, silence humanity’s noblest impulses and shackle those
who see the truth. It’s an enemy against which the wisest minds of all time have waged
an unequal war, and humanity’s domain has been carved only out of what they’ve won.
If it’s true that you must search for truth even where you can’t see any use for it because
its value might be discovered in an unexpected place, then you must search out every
error and eradicate it with the same zeal even where you don’t foresee it causing any
harm, for every error is infused with poison and its potential for harm could easily
manifest itself at any moment, just when you don’t expect it. There are no harmless
errors, and even more rarely are there honorable and holy errors. In consolation to those
who dedicate their lives and energies to the noble and challenging struggle with error of
whatever kind, we can confidently say although error will do its work like owls and
bats—at night—before truth appears, once exposed an error can no more oust a
recognized truth clearly and fully expressed and occupy its place without hindrance
than owls and bats can frighten the sun’s light and drive it back where it came from.
Such is the power of truth: its victory is difficult and painful, but once it’s accomplished
it can never be taken back. Arthur Schopenhauer
880
We lie in order to conceal our sins, but our lie only adds another sin onto the one
that we want to conceal.
We arrange our lives contrary to our physical and moral nature and are fully
confident only because we all think that this is the most genuine life. We vaguely sense
that everything that we call our governmental system, our religion, our culture, our
sciences and arts, that all of this isn’t as it should be and that none of it can save us from
our misfortunes but only make them worse. However, we don’t make the effort to free
ourselves from all these doctrines because we think that humanity, which has always
recognized such doctrines, can’t live without them.
If a chick in an egg were to be granted human reason and be as unable to use it as
people of our day, it would never break through the eggshell and never learn about life.
If the greatest good and perfection is given through love of truth, then what must be
the position of those who fear the truth?
881
There are people who, foreseeing the consequences of true faith, reject it. Such people
are already under the power of the great deceiver and want to be deceived further. They
want to believe in the justice of their error with each further effort. John Ruskin
Physical and spiritual struggle is the same in all people, and so they all fall into the
same mistake. Finding themselves in the same mistake, they then confirm each other’s
error and accept it as indisputable truth because the majority share in it.
To feed the hungry, to dress the naked, to visit the sick: all these things are good
deeds, but all of them are incomparable to the good deed of liberating your brother
from an error.
882
September 23
Restraint in Deed
It’s worse to redo something than not to finish it. It’s worse to hurry than to be late.
Our conscience reproaches us more painfully for what we’ve done than what we
failed to do.
Whenever you really have the urge to do something, stop and ask yourself if what
you want to do is good or not.
An internecine war is taking place within man between reason and passion. A
person could have some sort of peace if within him there was only reason but no
passion, or only passion without reason. But since both are within him, he can’t escape
the struggle; he can’t be at peace with one without battling the other. And this battle is
essential, for in it is life. Blaise Pascal
If you feel you don’t have the strength to restrain yourself from a physical desire, the
reason is certainly because you didn’t restrain yourself when you were still able, and the
desire has become a habit.
883
No matter how many times you fall before you attain victory over your passions,
never lose heart. Every effort in the struggle weakens passion’s strength and makes
victory over it easier.
Normally, when a person recognizes the truth he finds himself in a worldly situation
that’s obviously far away from this truth. He finds himself bound to the people of the
world by the ropes of sin, which wrap around him and paralyze him. Such a person
immediately realizes that, no matter what, his primary task is to escape the conditions in
which he finds himself as quickly as possible and put himself in a situation in which he
and the people around him can clearly see that he’s living in harmony with the truth he
recognizes.
But this is the wrong way to address the situation: your conscience doesn’t demand
that you place yourself in this or that situation, but that you live without destroying your
love for God and your neighbor. And this is possible in any situation. All you need to do
is refrain from doing anything that might damage love for God and your neighbor.
884
When you’re going through a period of spiritual decay you have to treat yourself like
someone who’s ill. Most importantly, don’t move and don’t undertake anything.
Every person, even someone who’s just reached adulthood, should think about his
life. And for every time he regrets not doing something that he should have and that
would have turned out well, he regrets doing something he shouldn’t have and that
turned out bad hundreds of times.
885
September 24
Restraint in Word
Nothing encourages idleness like empty conversation. If people would keep quiet
rather than talk about trifles to drive off the boredom of idleness they wouldn’t be able
to stand idleness and would work.
Think first, then speak, but stop before someone says “that’s enough.” A person is
above the animals in that he can talk, but he’s beneath the animals if he just babbles
whatever comes into his head. Saadi
Silence is good for a person.
He who talks much will not escape sin.
If a word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.
If silence befits the wise, it befits the ignorant more. Talmud
He who vilifies me behind my back fears me; he who praises me to my face despises
me. Chinese Proverb
886
Wean yourself from using your words to condemn others and you’ll feel an increase
in your ability to live in your soul; you’ll feel an increase in life and happiness.
If you speak, your words should be better than silence. Arabian Proverb
If you want to be intelligent, learn to ask rationally, listen carefully, answer calmly,
and stop talking when there’s nothing more to say. Johann Lavater
Heed the words of an intelligent person, even if the subject isn’t in his area of
expertise. A person can learn even if the lesson is written on a wall. Saadi
We’re disgusted by bad, ugly physical acts—gluttony, fighting, adultery, murder—
and yet we’re unconcerned with crimes committed with words: condemnations, insults,
and the conveyance, publication and composition of harmful, corrupting ideas. And yet
the consequences of a crime committed with words are much more grievous and
significant than crimes of the body. The only difference is that the evil caused by deeds is
immediately noticeable, while the evil caused by words appears only in the distant
future, far away from where they were spoken.
887
September 25
Restraint in Thought
A person’s fate depends only on how he understands his own life.
In order to free yourself from sins, temptations, superstitions and deceptions you
must first of all free yourself from them in your thoughts. The beginning of liberation is
in the mind.
Our thoughts, good or bad, send us either to heaven or hell in this life, not in the sky
or beneath the earth. Lucy Mallory
Most people live without thinking. They waste so much of their strength in the
struggle for existence that they don’t have any time to think. They simply accept what is
as what should be. This is the main reason they have trouble recognizing the truth.
888
In comparison with the world around him, man is nothing more than a fragile reed,
but he’s a reed that’s been granted reason.
It takes almost nothing to kill a person, and yet man feels himself greater than any
creature, greater than anything on earth, because when he’s dying his reason allows him
to be conscious of the fact that he’s dying. He can understand his insignificance before
nature. Nature isn’t conscious of anything.
Our advantage lies completely in our ability to think. Our thoughts elevate us above
the rest of the world. If we appreciate and sustain our power of thought, it will enlighten
our lives and show us what is good and what is evil. Blaise Pascal
Wisdom is endless. The further you delve into it the more necessary it becomes.
A person can always become more and more rational, and happy is he who puts all
the powers of his reason into this task.
889
Everything is uncertain, foggy and fleeting; only that which is rational is impervious
to any power.
Thought is the clarification of truth, and so bad thoughts are merely unfinished
thoughts.
True prayer is important and necessary for the soul, for when you truly pray, when
you’re alone with God, your thoughts reach the greatest power they can can achieve.
Life always begins where the search for truth begins. As soon as the search for truth
stops, life stops as well. John Ruskin
890
September 26
There is No Evil
There are two types of misfortunes. Some you can escape and others you can’t. You
must fight against the first type with all your strength, while you must patiently endure
those you can’t escape and recognize that they’re useful to you.
You shouldn’t surrender to whatever suffering comes your way. You have to say to
yourself, “You, suffering, want me to surrender, to say to myself that I’m unhappy. No.
Pressure me all you want. I will endure it all, and in suffering itself I will find
consolation.”
Life is a school in which failure is a better teacher than success.
Solomon ben-‐Joseph ibn-‐Ajub of Granada
The harder you try to push your cross away the heavier it becomes.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
891
The very thing that makes us grieve and seems to interfere with our ability to
conduct our life’s business is in fact the very business of our life. You’re suffering from
poverty, illness, slander, humiliation? If you simply pity yourself you’ll feel like the
unhappiest of the unhappy. But if you make yourself understand that the business of
your life, that which you were called to do, is precisely to endure poverty, illness and
humiliation in the best possible manner, you’ll immediately feel courage and certainty in
place of sadness and despair.
There is a blessing in serious illness. The blessing is that when the body weakens, you
feel your soul more fully.
892
Only in a storm is the navigator’s art fully revealed, only on the battlefield is the
warrior’s courage tested. A person’s fortitude is only known through his reaction to
difficult and dangerous situations in his life. Samuel Daniel
A person becomes unhappy only because he doesn’t recognize that timeless element
that lives within him regardless of his all his efforts to bury it under the temporal.
Based on a Passage by Thomas Carlyle
When you’re dissatisfied with everyone around you and with your own situation,
retreat into the consciousness of your purpose in the world like a snail retreating into its
shell and wait until the conditions that put you into that position pass, and you’ll once
again be in shape to carry out the business of your life.
893
September 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Ask a wise person: what is the most important task? Who is the most important
person? What time in life is the most important?
A wise person will answer: “The most important task is to love all people, for this is
the purpose of every human life.”
“The most important person is the one who you’re dealing with at this very moment,
for you don’t know if you’ll ever have dealings with any other person.”
“The most important time is now, because it’s the only time a person has power over
himself.”
Our actions in the present, at this very minute, belong to us. That which results from
them belongs to God. François de Sales
When I say, “I can’t do that,” I’m expressing myself incorrectly. I should say, “I
couldn’t do that before.” I don’t know and can’t know what I can and can’t do at each
moment in the present. And it’s good to be aware that a person can’t know that.
894
An instant is only an instant. It seems so inconsequential that a person lets it slip
away, and yet it is only in that instant that his entire life rests; it is only in that instant
that he can exert the effort that will create the Kingdom of God within and beyond him.
If life is outside of time, then why does it manifest itself in time and space? It’s
because only in time and space, when a person is separated from everything else, can
there be movement: the striving for expansion, enlightenment and perfection. If there
were no division into parts there would be no motion, there would be no life. If God were
to speak in a common language, He would be immobile and alone. Now He lives, he lives
through us, through all the world’s beings.
Let’s not make plans and imagine the consequences of our petty labors that amount
to no more than an ant’s. If we’d simply stop commiting mean and brutish deeds or at
least commit fewer of them right now, that would be good enough.
895
To live and act only for the satisfaction of momentary personal desire without
thinking of other beings and the future is immoral. The more fully an act affects the
majority of other beings and the further into the future these effects are dependent on
the act, the more moral the act is. An action is completely moral only when it’s
interrelated with everything. Such an act can only be one that’s accomplished in the
name of God.
You must live only in the present. You must direct all your efforts toward the present
moment. The past and future are only necessary to clarify what’s needed in the present.
You must wish only for that which is being accomplished right now. To place your hopes
in the past is regret, remorse; to place your hopes in the future is simply to dream and to
plan; to wish in the present is life itself and fulfillment of God’s will.
896
September 28
There is No Death
The further people live from the fulfillment of God’s will, the more they fear death:
the moment when they can’t escape His will. For people who fulfill God’s will in life,
fulfilling His will in death is no horror.
If life is a blessing then death is a blessing too, for without it there can be no life.
Dying will be joyful only when you do away with your isolation from the world, when
you feel all the horror of separation and the joy, if not of union with the entire world,
then at least in escape from the prison of earthly separation, where you but rarely
commune with people through fleeting sparks of love. Once you do this you’ll feel like
saying, “Enough of this cage. Let’s have a different, more essential relationship with the
world. And I know that death will give this to me.”
Death is the destruction of the organs of union with the world, which give us the
notion of time. Therefore, the question of the future has no meaning in relation to death.
897
A person who’s spent his entire life striving to subdue his passions, and whose body
interferes with this task, can’t help but take joy in his liberation from the body. And
death is truly nothing more than this liberation. Indeed, the perfection we’ve spoken of
so often consists in distancing the soul from the body as much as possible and teaching
it to prepare itself and focus on itself beyond the body. Death gives this very freedom. So
isn’t it strange that a person spends his entire life preparing to live so that he can be as
close as possible to mortal existence, and then when the goal is in sight, he’s unhappy.
Therefore, as sad as I am to part with you and to cause you pain, I can’t help but greet
death as the manifestation of all I strove for in the course of my life.
From Socrates’ Last Counsel with his Disciples
No matter how unsure you are about how you should act, imagine that you’re going
to die tonight, and all doubt will instantly disappear. It will immediately become clear
what your duty is and what your personal desires are.
There’s no point in thinking about death; you have to accept death in your life. Then
all your life will become solemn, significant, truly fruitful and joyful. If we accept death
we can’t help but do the work that we were assigned in this life, because when you
acknowledge death you can’t seriously work on anything else. And when you work this
way, life becomes joyful and that bogeyman—the fear of death, which poisons the lives
of those who don’t accept the fact of death—will disappear. The fear of death is
inversely proportional to a good life. For a saint this fear is null.
898
You will die so soon! And yet you can’t free yourself from hypocrisy and passions,
you can’t refrain from the prejudice of thinking that the external world can harm you
and that you can’t be gentle towards all. Marcus Aurelius
Some believe they’re God’s children and that their lives don’t end with death. Others
don’t believe in anything but physical life.
Who will work better in a home: the homeowner’s son who knows that he’ll always
live in the home or a hired laborer who’s here today and gone tomorrow?
Just as the homeowner’s son will concern himself with his father’s affairs, so a person
who believes in eternal life will work toward the good of all and find his happiness there.
A person who doesn’t believe in eternal life will serve himself alone and will therefore
destroy the common good and fail to find his own happiness as well.
899
September 29
After Death
When we die, one of two things will happen to us: either that which we consider
ourselves will transform into another individual being, or we’ll cease being an individual
being and merge with God. One or the other will happen, and in neither case is there
anything to fear.
900
Physical death annihilates that which the body contains: the consciousness of
temporal life. But this happens to us repeatedly every night when we fall asleep. The
question is whether physical death annihilates that which unites all successive
perceptions into one: my personal relationship with the world. In order to confirm this,
first of all we have to prove that this particular relationship with the world that unites all
successive perceptions into one was born along with my physical existence, and
therefore dies with it. And this is impossible to prove.
When considering the foundations of my consciousness, I see that the attraction to
one subject and aversion to another, which everyone perceives and which results in some
subjects remaining within me and others disappearing (the degree of my love of good
and hatred of evil) and which unites all my perceptions into one, creating my personal
relationship with the world and my identity as an individual, is not the result of some
external cause but rather the fundamental cause of all other events in my life.
Considering the essence of these observations, it seems to me that the causes of the
characteristics of my “self” can be found in my parents’ characteristics and the
conditions that influenced them and continue to influence me. But if I look into this
more deeply, I can’t fail to see that if my particular “self” is found in the characteristics
of my parents and the conditions that influenced them, then it is also in the
characteristics of all my ancestors and the conditions of their existence into infinity, in
other words outside time and space, so that my particular “self” came into existence
outside time and space, the very thing that I perceive.
Life is indestructible. It is outside time and space, and therefore death can only
change its form as it appears in this world.
901
No one can convince you to believe in immortality, and you can’t force yourself to
believe in immortality. In order to believe in it, you have to understand in what sense
your life is immortal, and live accordingly.
Nothing confirms the indestructibility and timelessness of our lives, nothing enables
the peaceful acceptance of death like the thought that, when we die, we don’t take on a
new form but simply return to the one we were in before we were born. We can’t even
say “the form we were in,” but the form that’s as natural for us as the one we find
ourselves in now.
A dying person has trouble understanding the living world, but when you see him
you get the feeling that he can’t understand the living not because he’s been deprived of
understanding, but because he understands something else that the living can’t
understand and which consumes his entire being.
902
One of two things is true: death is the total dissolution and annihilation of
consciousness or, as tradition says, it’s only the transformation of the soul and its
migration from one place to another. If death is total annihilation of the consciousness
and similar to deep, dreamless sleep, then death in undoubtedly a blessing if a person
would recall a night spent in dreamless sleep and compare it to other days and nights
with all their terrors, worries and unfufilled desires that he experiences both awake and
asleep, and I’m certain that any person would find dreamless sleep considerably more
pleasant than most days and nights. And so if death is such a slumber, at the very least I
consider it a blessing. If death is a migration from this world to another, and if it’s true
that all the ancient wise and holy people will be found there as tradition says, then what
greater blessing can their be than to live among such beings? I wouldn’t wish to die once
but a hundred times to end up in such a place.
And so, judges and citizens, I don’t think there’s any point in fearing death, and I
think we should remember one thing: for a good person there is no evil either in life or
death. From Socrates’ Speech to the Court
Although I can’t prove it with absolute certainty, since I can feel within myself a free,
rational source that transcends the physical shell in which it exists, I can’t help but
believe that my soul is immortal. From Socrates’ Last Counsel with his Disciples
903
Death is simply one step in our continual development. Our birth was one such step,
the only difference being that birth is the death of one form of existence, while death is
the birth of another form of existence.
Death is a joy for a dying person. In dying, you cease to be mortal. I can’t look upon
this change with horror, the way some people do. In my opinion, death is a change for
the better. Indeed, aren’t we mad when we speak of preparing for death? Our business is
to live. He who can live will also be able to die. Isn’t this true? . . . I want to live; our soul
never tells us that we’ll die one day. Feelings die, but feelings have created death. So why
should rational beings be worried? Theodore Parker
Does change really frighten you? Nothing in this world can ever be accomplished
without change. You can’t boil water without transforming firewood. You can’t nourish
your body without the conversion of food. All life in this world is nothing more than
change. Understand that the change that awaits you is significant merely because it’s a
necessary part of the order of nature. The only thing you should concern yourself with is
avoiding actions that are contrary to true human nature and acting according to its
guidance. Marcus Aurelius
904
September 30
Life is a Blessing
If there is a good God and He created the world, then he certainly created it so that
there would be blessings and happiness for all, and therefore so that our human lives
would be good and happy.
If there’s no God, then let’s live so that all human lives will be good and happy. In
order for all human lives to be good and happy, we have to love one another; there must
be love. But God is love, so once again we come to God.
If you want true happiness, don’t search for it in far-‐off countries, in wealth, in
honor, don’t ask others for it, don’t bow before them and don’t struggle with them for
the sake of happiness. You can acquire property, high rank and all sorts of unnecessary
things through such methods, while that which every person needs can’t be acquired
from people, it can’t be bought or begged for. However, it’s given for free. Know that
anything you can’t acquire on your own isn’t yours and isn’t necessary. That which you
need you can always acquire on your own, through your own good life.
There’s only one blessing in the world, and it’s the only thing we need. What is this
blessing? A life in love. And acquiring this blessing is simple.
Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
905
Fate overwhelms us in two ways: by denying our desires and by fulfilling them. But a
person who only wants what God wants escapes both misfortunes. Everything serves to
bring him happiness. Henri Frédéric Amiel
Good fortune satisfies the demands of a person who lives only in this world from
birth to death; happiness satisfies the demands of the eternal essence that lives within a
person. A rational person seeks happiness, not good fortune.
A man has wandered off the path and comes to a river that blocks his way, and he
says that the person who sent him deceived him. He stands on the river bank wringing
his hands in despair, and rather than going back to the path to learn that there are
bridges and all sorts of comforts for his journey everywhere, he prefers to throw himself
into the river and perish in it while he curses the person who sent him. This is what
happens to people who’ve abandoned the easy and joyful path of life. They’re dissatisfied
with life and often destroy themselves simply because they’ve left the one true path that
always leads to happiness and don’t want to admit their mistake.
God’s will is accomplished in every circumstance whether I fulfill it or not, but I have
the option either to act in opposition to this will and deprive myself of the joy of
participating in it or to be its conductor, to draw it into myself as much as it can inhabit
me in the form of love, and to live through it and experience inextinguishable joy.
906
God has entered me, and through me he searches for His own happiness. What
could be happiness for God? Only being Himself. Angelus Silesius
The continual striving for the future and the desire to live at a faster pace is an
indication that our true happiness is ahead of us. However, happiness can never be
achieved in this life. This reveals that the happiness a person can actually achieve
consists in the continual approach towards true happiness.
Life is always a blessing for someone who believes that his life consists in freeing
himself from evil, because what he believes his life to be is constantly being
accomplished.
If you believe in God, then you believe that all that happens, everything, is a blessing:
suffering, illness, etc., that all this is simply the preparation for new, unanticipated joy.
Therefore a person is joyful to the degree to which he believes in God.
907
October
October 1
Faith
A person cannot be truly joyful and calm if he doesn’t have firm faith.
If a person lives in distress, the reason is always the same: the absence of religion. It’s
the same for human societies.
Life without religion is an animal’s life.
If you want something, if you fear something, then it means that you don’t know the
God of love within you. If you knew Him you wouldn’t be able to wish for anything
because all the desires of the God who lives within you are always being fulfilled, and
you wouldn’t fear anything, because nothing can frighten God.
908
Christ is a great teacher. He preached the true universal religion of love of God and
one’s neighbor. But you mustn’t think that God won’t send an even greater teacher in
the future. We don’t diminish Christ’s greatness by believing this; rather, we confirm
God’s omnipotence. There will be such great teachers, and when they come the old
struggle will resume and once again the living prophet will be killed because the people
have deified the last teacher.
This is what happened to Christ. If he aligned his teaching with what people at that
time considered the truth, then he would have simply been a poor Jew, and the world
would have lost a precious treasure of religious life: the joyful news of a single, universal
and true religion.
So, what if he had said, as others did: “No one can be greater and more trustworthy
than Moses?” He would have been nothing, and God’s spirit would have abandoned his
soul. But he communed with God rather than with men and obeyed his hopes rather
than his fears. He labored for the people, with the people and through the people, he
had faith in God, and pure as the Truth he feared neither church nor state and didn’t
hesitate even though Pilate and Herod teamed up for the sole purpose of crucifying him.
It always seems to me that I hear the voice of this exalted spirit, which tells all of us:
“Fear not, my poor brother, and grieve not. The Good that is within me is possible within
you as well. God is as close to you as He was to me once, and He is just as rich with truth
and is just as ready to inspire every person who wants to serve Him.” Theodore Parker
909
True religion is a relationship a person establishes with the infinite life around him
that binds his life to this infinity and guides his actions. Therefore, in all religions the
essence of the answers to the questions “why does man live?” and “what should he do?”
are the same.
The essence of every religion is simply the answer to the question: why am I alive and
what is my relationship to the infinite world around me? There isn’t a single religion,
from the most sublime to the most primitive, that doesn’t have as its foundation the
establishment of this relationship of a person to the world around him.
It’s not the content of great teachings as divine revelations (for this is what’s called
theology), but the content of all our common responsibilities as immutable
commandments of behavior that comprise the essence of every religion.
Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
Even if he’s not aware of it, a person without religion—without some sort of
established relationship with the world—is as impossible as a person without a heart.
910
October 2
The Soul
“Who are you?” “I’m a person.” “What kind of person? What distinguishes you from
others?” “I’m the son or daughter of such-‐and-‐such parents, I’m old, I’m young, I’m rich,
I’m poor.”
In each of us a distinct person lives: a man, a woman, an old man, an old woman, a
boy, a girl. And in each of us, in each distinct person, lives the same higher spirit, so that
each of us is John, and Mary, and the higher spirit. And when we say, “I want,”
sometimes it means that this John or this Mary wants something and sometimes that
the higher spirit that lives within John and Mary wants something. Because of this John
and Mary often want something that the higher spirit living in them doesn’t.
It’s impossible to understand God with your mind. We know He exists only because
we know Him not through our mind but through our entire being; we know Him
because we’re conscious of Him within us.
911
True, rational life consists of recognizing the source of your actions in a spiritual
source that is without any other source, and allowing this source to rule your life.
Those who fail to recognize this spiritual source allow the physical connection of
cause and effect to rule their lives, that very same connection that’s so complex that we
can never know it. We can never know it because each effect is the effect of a prior effect.
Therefore people who fail to recognize their spiritual source will never have a firm
foundation for their actions.
Consciousness of your separation from everything and at the same time
consciousness of your dependence upon everything is the foundation of life. Realizing
this, how can we think human life as well as all animal life is nothing but a
manifestation of a material source?
Spirit and flesh are what a person considers his own and are what people are
incessantly concerned about. However, know that you yourself, your essence, is in your
soul. Remember this, elevate your soul above your body, keep it free of all worldly filth,
don’t permit the flesh to smother it, don’t think that your life is in your body but live for
your soul, and you’ll live well. Marcus Aurelius
912
The voice of our passions can be louder than the voice of our conscience, but their
cries are quite different than that calm yet authoritative voice with which our conscience
speaks. And no matter how powerful our passions might be, they nevertheless grow
timid before that quiet, profound and persistent voice. It is through this voice that the
Eternal and immutable one that lives within us speaks. William Channing
My consciousness is confined in time and space, but is independent within itself. It’s
free, although it can be expressed and manifest itself in time and space.
If your eyes gaze too much into the material world they go blind and lose their ability
to see God and your true self. Angelus Silesius
Sometimes a person is tormented and other times is heartened by the contradiction
he so vividly recognizes between something endless, great and omnipotent he’s
conscious of within himself and something restricted and weak that he feels within
himself.
913
October 3
One Soul in All
The more clearly a person understands that his self isn’t in his body but in his soul
and that this self in his soul is the same self in all people, and the more often he thinks
about it, the easier his life becomes and the better he conducts the business of his life.
God lives in all, and all live in Him. Anyone who understands this can’t treat any
living thing with contempt.
The consciousness of unity that flows from the consciousness of the universal
spiritual source gives people both the greatest inner, personal happiness, and the
greatest external, communal happiness. Therefore, fear all that interferes with this
union and search for all that helps bring it to life.
If you’re no longer living an exclusively physical life but a spiritual one as well, you
become conscious of your union with the souls of all people, and recognizing this union
you feel a pain similar to physical pain when you part with someone. Just as physical
pain protects the integrity of the body, so spiritual pain protects the integrity of the soul.
914
Every true act of beneficence, every act of selfless help in which a person forgets
himself and thinks only of the needs of another, is an amazing an inexplicable act if we
refuse to recognize the unity of all that exists. Indeed, the smallest act of charity that has
no goal other than to lessen the needs pressing on another person is only possible
because the person who gives is aware that what appears to him as a poor beggar is in
fact he himself. Arthur Schopenhauer
The more intelligent and kinder a person is the more he notices kindness in others.
Blaise Pascal
Respect every person, but respect every child a hundred times more and take care
not to damage the chaste purity of his soul.
915
October 4
God
The more a person fulfills the will of God, the more he knows Him.
If a person doesn’t fulfill the will of God he doesn’t know God at all, even if he says he
knows Him and prays to Him.
The more angry you become, the more God is angry with you.
God is a sphere whose periphery is nowhere and whose center is everywhere.
Timaeus of Locri
916
No one can fail to recognize himself as part of something infinite. This infinite
something a person recognizes himself a part of is God. For unenlightened people,
which includes the vast majority of so-‐called scholars who understand nothing other
than the material world, God is a being that is endless within time and space. Such a
conception of God is quite absurd, but nevertheless they have their God, absurd but
nevertheless theirs. For enlightened people, who understand that the source and essence
of life isn’t material but spiritual, God is an endless, boundless being that a person
recognizes in himself and in all that lives within the restricted boundaries of time and
space.
Humanity has always and will always recognize such a God as long as people are
people and not animals.
First of all a person becomes aware of his body, which separates him from everything
else. Then he becomes aware that what is really separated is his soul, the spiritual source
of his life. Finally he becomes aware of what it is that this spiritual source of life is
separated from: he becomes conscious of God.
917
It’s amazing that I couldn’t see before the undeniable truth that beyond this world
and our lives there is Someone, Something that knows the reason why this world exists
and why we pop up, expand and disappear in this world like bubbles in boiling water.
It’s undeniable that something is happening in this world and that something is
happening with all living beings, and is happening with me, with my life. Otherwise,
why would there be this sun, these springs and winters, why would their be these
sufferings, births, deaths and villainies? What would be the point of all these individual
beings that apparently have no meaning for me and at the same time live and guard
their lives with such energy, and who are tightly bound to life? More than anything,
these beings convince me that they’re needed for some sort of affair, rational and good,
but incomprehensible to me.
Prove the existence of God! Can there be a more stupid concept: prove the existence
of God?! Proving God’s existence is the same as proving your own existence. For whom?
To whom? Why? Nothing exists except God.
918
According to Christian doctrine, a person recognizes God within himself as a desire
for the well-‐being of all that exists: love. Additionally, according to Christian doctrine a
person is conscious of God beyond himself in all that exists.
Conscious of the spiritual and indivisible existence of God within his individual body
and seeing the existence of the same God in all that lives, a person can’t help but ask
himself: “Why did God, a single, indivisible spiritual being, confine Himself in separate
creatures’ bodies and in the body of each human being? Why did a single spiritual
being, so to speak, divide Himself up within himself? Why did the divine being confine
Himself to the conditions of separation and physicality? Why did the immortal confine
Himself in the mortal and bind Himself to it?”
There can only be one answer: whoever did this did it because this division was the
only way to pursue the good and manifest it.
Therefore, God is that essence of life which a person is conscious of within himself
and which he recognizes in all the world as the desire for and manifestation of all that is
good.
God says, “I pervade all time and all space, and at the same time I am encased in the
heart of every person. All people search for me even as I embrace every person, and there
is no one who can live without me.”
919
October 5
Life is Union
Try to live a good life for your own sake and you’ll feel the joy of greater and greater
union with the whole world.
If a person only lives a physical life, it’s the same as if he locks himself in prison. Only
life for the soul can unlock the prison door and release a person into the common life of
all.
Many different voices call us away from the main business of our lives: union with all
that lives. Only the lone, soft voice of conscience tells us to keep working at this task.
Don’t silence this voice but rather heed it, for it alone will lead you to true happiness.
920
When it’s confined within boundaries, the consciousness of everything strives to
expand those boundaries. So it is in the first half of human life. In the first half of his
life, a person tries harder and harder to love people and all things, in other words to
expand his boundaries and transfer his consciousness into other beings. But no matter
how much he loves, he can’t escape his boundaries, and in the second half of his life he
no longer tries to expand his boundaries but instead tries to destroy them. It’s similar to
the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. In this world we’re caterpillars: first
we’re born, then we sleep in our cocoon, and only at the end of our lives do we become a
butterfly, ready to soar.
When a person lives a physical life, he’s unaware that God lives through him. As
soon as reason awakens within him he sees it, and once he sees it he unites with God,
and by uniting with God he unites with his fellow human beings.
Life seems an insoluble riddle to a person only until he becomes conscious of his
unity with the souls of all people.
Why is it that a person feels such inner turmoil when he’s had a falling out with
someone? It’s because we all feel that the thing within us that makes us human is the
same in all of us. Therefore, when we fail to love others and break with that which is the
same in everyone, we break with ourselves.
921
You want to acquire as much satisfaction as possible for your body? Well, how much
longer is your body going to live? Worrying about satisfying your body is like building a
house on ice. What sort of happiness can there be in such a life, what kind of peace?
Won’t you be constantly concerned that sooner or later the ice will melt, that sooner or
later you’ll have to abandon your mortal body?
Move your house onto firm ground: put your effort into that which never dies:
improve your soul and bring it closer to perfection. In this lies true happiness.
Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
It seems that there are two aspects to the business of life: on the one hand is the
acquisition of the highest spiritual good for yourself and on the other is the
establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the promotion of good for the entire
world. But in both cases you achieve the same thing: liberation of the divine light within
you that’s been placed in every person’s soul.
922
All our miseries and sufferings are simply the result of acknowledging our physical
self, which doesn’t exist and never did. The only thing that exists is the Source of
everything—God—and I am merely a manifestation of Him. The more conscious I am
of this (and this life irrepressibly leads to this consciousness) the more joyful and
comprehensible my life becomes. I’m merely a niche through which life flows. I am
nothing, that which flows through me is Everything, and I can merge with that which
flows through me. It is in this merger that the one true and great happiness lies.
Good will—the desire to serve others while forgetting about yourself—isn’t good
because it creates or fulfills something, nor is it good because it allows you to accomplish
some goal you’ve set for yourself. It’s good only in and of itself; the very desire to do good
makes it good. If we examine good will on its own, without making any comparisons, we
can see that it has far greater value than any sort of beneficial potential it might possess.
This value is greater than even the accumulation of all its potential benefits. If due to the
vagaries of fate such good will is completely deprived of its ability to fulfill its desires, if
under extreme exertion it accomplishes nothing and only good will remains (of course,
not as a simple desire but as the use of all means within our power), then in such a case
good will still sparkles like a diamond for its own sake, as something that possesses its
full value within. Immanuel Kant
923
October 6
Love
Do battle with sin, make peace with the sinner. Hate the evil in a person, but love the
person himself.
The Apostle John said, “Brethren, let us love one another. Love is from God, and he
who loves is born of God and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God,
because God is love.”
It seems hard to love all people. But every activity seems hard until you learn how to
do it. People learn all sorts of things: to sew, weave, plow, mow, forge, read, and write. In
the same way, we have to learn to love all people.
And it isn’t hard to learn, because love for one another is planted in every person’s
soul, as it is said in the Gospels:
“No one has ever seen God anywhere, but if we love one another, he will reside within
us.”
And if God—love—resides within us, then learning to love can’t be hard. We only
have to try to get rid of that which interferes with love and not allow it to come to the
surface. Just start to do this and you’ll soon learn the most important and necessary
science in the world: love for others.
924
If a good deed is done with some goal in mind, it’s no longer a good deed. You truly
love only when you don’t know why and for what purpose.
The most delicate shoots blaze their trails through solid earth, through cracks in
rocks; it’s the same with love. What wedge, what hammer, what battering ram can
compare with the power of love? Nothing can withstand it.
At first a person lives for his temporal, ephemeral being and achieves a sort of
satisfaction. Then you become conscious of the instability of the foundation you’re
building on and you begin to understand that the only firm substance is your spiritual
being, which has no need of what you do for yourself, for your body (on the contrary,
these activities harm it), and a person starts to feel that there’s only one thing that’s
necessary and important: satisfaction of the spiritual being that never dies. Only love
can satisfy that being.
925
True love is only love for one’s neighbor, equal and identical for all. You must compel
yourself to love all those you don’t much care for or even those you hate, and end your
exclusive love for those you love too much. In the case of the former, you don’t do
enough, and in the case of the latter you do too much. Having too little love for some
people or not loving them at all while having exclusive, excessive love for others is the
cause of most of the world’s suffering.
It’s difficult to love. You must not merely love but be love; and if you become love,
then you’ve become God. Angelus Silesius
People often say they don’t understand what it means to love God. To love God
means to love the highest good that we can imagine.
926
“And one of them, a legalist, testing him, asked him, “Teacher! What is the greatest
commandment in the law?” Jesus told him, “Love your Lord God with all your heart and
all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the
second is the same: love your neighbor as yourself. In these two commandments lies the
entire law of the prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-‐40)
Love for your neighbor without love for God is like a plant without roots. Love for a
person without love for God is love for those who love us, people we like, people who are
beautiful and pleasant to be around. Such love can vanish and this kind of love can
often change into animosity. When you love your neighbor because you love God, you
love those who don’t love you, those whom you don’t like, those who are physically ugly
and repulsive. Only such a love is firm, never grows weak, and gets stronger as time
passes.
Love gives a new face to that tired old world in which we now live as pagans and
mutual enemies. It warms the heart so much that people will quickly see how easily the
vain politics of government officials and the huge armies, navies, and rows of fortresses
will disappear, and people will simply wonder in astonishment how their ancestors
could work so long on these foul activities that no one had any need of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
927
October 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Imagine if people lived an exclusively animal life and didn’t struggle with their sins.
What a terrible life, what hatred towards others, what debauchery, what cruelty there
would be! Only when people recognize their sins and struggle with them can they live
together.
A person wearing clean shoes walks on tiptoe, carefully avoids dirt, but as soon as he
missteps and soils his shoes he becomes less careful, and when he sees that his shoes are
covered with dirt he recklessly splashes through the mire, getting filthier and filthier.
In the same way, a young person who hasn’t yet committed any evil or depraved acts
takes care and guards against everything that’s bad, but there comes a time when he
makes a mistake, and then another, and he thinks, “it doesn’t matter if I’m careful or
not, it’s going to happen anyway,” and he descends into all sorts of vices.
Don’t let this happen. If you get your shoes dirty, clean them and be more careful. If
you sin, repent and be on guard against sin even more.
928
When a person commits a sin and realizes it, he can follow one of two paths. He can
recognize his sin and think about how not to repeat it, or he can disbelieve his
conscience and observe how people look upon the sin he committed and continues to
commit.
As soon as a person starts along the second path he finds himself on a paved road.
“Everyone is like this, so why shouldn’t I do what everyone else does?” Travelling along
this road paved by sins is called temptation. But to every person who lives in temptation
there comes a time when he feels the evil of temptation and asks himself: “Really, is
everyone acting properly?” And here he once again finds two paths. He can judge for
himself whether or not what everyone does is good or bad, or he can ask himself: “Why
doesn’t anyone consider what they’re doing bad?” And in answer to this question he
recognizes the established religion, according to which everyone is doing exactly what
they must. These religions (superstitions) keep people living badly more than anything
else.
929
People who recognize God as the Creator and the world as God’s creation are always
asking: “Why did God create people so that they have to sin and can’t help but sin?”
Asking this question is like a mother asking why God created her so that, in order to
experience the joy of children and family, she has to experience the pain of childbirth
and then feed and raise the child. Wouldn’t it be simpler if God just automatically gave
mothers finished sons and daughters without childbirth, nursing, work, worries, anxiety
and the joys of motherhood? No mother would ever ask for this, because if she’s a good
mother the joy of motherhood lies in childbirth, feeding and raising her children.
It’s the same with human life: sins, the struggle with them and victory over them are
the meaning, essence and joy of human life.
The Buddhists identify five main sins: murder, theft, fornication, dishonesty and
intoxication. The means to defeat them are restraint, meekness, diligence, humility, and
faith.
When the good exposes people who are mired in sins, temptations and superstitions,
they often sincerely consider it evil. This is why they consider refusal to join the military
or to serve in the courts outrageous and criminal, and why they consider humility and
love for one’s enemies ridiculous and contemptible.
Nothing more obviously reveals how dangerous it is for a person to become
accustomed to sins, surrender to temptations and believe superstitions than this.
930
If a person is unhappy, what should he do first? Complain about others or some
circumstance? Fill the world with complaints and reproaches? Of course not. All
teachers of morality have advised people not to blame anyone but themselves. An
unhappy person must first of all recognize that he’s unhappy because he’s behaved
irrationally. If he had had confidence in nature and its laws, nature and its immutable
laws would have granted him blessings, abundance and happiness. Moreover, he didn’t
follow the laws of nature, and drained of its patience nature left him without consolation
and told him: “Not on this path, my son, will you find well-‐being, but along another;
abandon this path.” All moralists have advised people to repent of their sins first and
foremost and tell themselves: “No, I haven’t been rational enough; I abandoned the
Divine laws and followed imaginary, false laws: the devil’s laws. This is why I’ve come to
this state.”
In essence, the same thing happens to unhappy nations. Thomas Carlyle
931
October 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
The most common sins are those committed for the body’s pleasure, and there’s no
one who hasn’t committed them. All human life consists in the liberation from such
sins. The sins of the body are like a layer of soil covering seeds. Without soil no seed can
grow. In the same way, without bodily sins the human soul cannot grow.
Living only for your body is dishonest and wasteful. Living only for your body means
doing the same thing as a worker who takes his employer’s money and instead of buying
what the employer tells him to and what he needs for his work squanders it on his own
enjoyment.
God gave us our souls so that we can fulfill His Divine Will and so that we will be
happy, and we waste this Divine soul on the service of our bodies. And we fail to fulfill
God’s will, and we do evil.
932
Much evil is done to us by our worrying about pleasing the body, but the very worst
of these evils is that a person, if he’s worried about satisfying his body with food, home,
clothing, and pleasures, only diverts his energy from the one activity that brings him
happiness: increasing love within himself for God and others. Instead, he increases love
for himself more and more, and he who loves himself cannot love God and others.
There is a cursed trinity: drunkenness, eating meat, and smoking. If this trinity
didn’t exist, human life would be completely different. Arnold Hills
Wealth will make your body happy, but the more you cater to your body the more it
demands, and so you have to increase your wealth further. Furthermore, the desires of
the body grow so quickly that no amount of wealth can keep up with them. The body
always demands more than wealth can provide.
The sin of serving the body takes on many forms, but its most common form is
gluttony.
Mature people can’t help but sense all the filth of this sin, and as a result there’s no
sin that’s more diligently and skillfully concealed by every means people can come up
with. Splendidly decorated tables, lights, flowers, and decorated dishware!
933
When people see brightly lit homes, endless fields, throngs of servants, silver vessels
and extensive wardrobes they try to acquire more and more in every possible way. As a
result, the wealthiest become a cause of misery for those with less and those with less
cause misery for the people with even less than them. At the same time, if rich people
didn’t collect and squander wealth there would be no teachers of avarice for the less
wealthy and the poor. Furthermore, passion for wealth engenders worry, envy, deceit,
hatred, curses, and countless other barriers to virtue—carelessness, lechery,
covetousness, and drunkenness—more than any sort of tyranny. It turns free men into
slaves and worse than slaves, for they’re not slaves of other men but of the most terrible
of passions and spiritual illnesses. Such a person ventures after much that’s offensive to
God and others out of fear that someone will wrest his dominion away from him. A
bitter, servile, satanic dominion! The greatest tragedy is that when we find ourselves in
such an unhappy condition we kiss our shackles. Living in a dungeon, surrounded by
darkness, we have no desire to go out into the light, but instead bind ourselves to evil
and take delight in our illness. So we can’t free ourselves and end up in a worse situation
than people who work in mines because we experience the same labors and miseries and
yet don’t enjoy their fruits. Worst of all, if someone were to try to rescue us from this
painful enslavement we not only wouldn’t let him, we’d even get angry and resent him,
and so we’d seem no better than madmen and even far more miserable than madmen,
for we don’t want to part with our madness. Is this really what people were born for: to
dig in mines and gather gold? No, the Lord created you in his image so that you can
fulfill His will. John Chrysostum
934
October 9
The Sin of Parasitism
Getting used to a life of idleness is worse than all life’s disasters. Therefore it’s
important to the highest degree that children learn to work from an early age.
You shouldn’t be ashamed of any sort of dirty work, but only of the dirtiest of dirty
lives: a life of physical idleness.
He who doesn’t grow his own food from the land but buys it at the bazaar is like an
orphan or an infant. Various foster-‐mothers feed such a child, and he’ll never be as well
off as a child whom his own mother nourishes. The person who grows his own food from
the land is just as well off as a child who’s fed by his own mother.
Based on a Passage From the Talmud
It is not enough to be busy! What are we busy about? Henry David Thoreau
Nature knows no cessation in its movement and punishes all inactivity.
Johann Goethe
935
In our world, human life is arranged so that people receive the greatest
remunerations for the most harmful labor: serving in the police, the military, the courts,
and banks; working for publishing houses, military depots, confectionaries, tobacco
processing plants and drugstores; for commerce, singing, dancing, etc. Meanwhile, the
smallest remunerations are received for working the land. If you ascribe importance to
financial remunerations, then this is very unjust. If you direct your attention to the
joyful consciousness of the value of labor and its effect upon physical health and its
natural appeal, then it’s completely just.
Food, clothing, houses and merrymaking are all sinful when they deprive some
people of true happiness through overindulgence and others through a lack of
satisfaction.
Always remember the great and immutable truth that what you own cannot be
owned by anyone else, and that every little piece of any substance that you enjoy or make
use of represents a piece of a human life. John Ruskin
An indubitable condition of happiness is labor. First of all, it must be free and
enjoyable, and second it must be physical labor, which gives you deep, restful sleep and
a good appetite for the simplest of foods.
936
October 10
The Sin of Lechery
For a human being, a creature granted reason, lust is a low, bestial feeling. Therefore
you shouldn’t indulge in this feeling but rather fight against it with all your might.
For true happiness a person, man and woman alike, is best off remaining celibate as
much as he or she can. You can purchase freedom from celibacy through an honest
marriage: creating and raising children. Turning your back on celibacy without creating
and raising children is a sin that distances people from true happiness more than all
other sins.
All disasters born of sexual relations, of amorousness, come only because we confuse
carnal lust with our spiritual life—it’s terrible to say—with love. We don’t use our
reason to denounce, differentiate and separate physical love from spiritual love, but
rather to decorate it with the peacock feathers of spirituality.
937
Since there are no established rules of any kind for marriage in the true Christian
teaching, people of our Christian world, sensing that the institution has no foundation
in Christian teaching and at the same time failing to see Christ’s ideal of complete
chastity that church doctrine has concealed, enter into marriage without any guidance
at all. Because of this, a phenomenon occurs that seems strange at first: among people
who recognize religious doctrines far less advanced than Christianity but which possess
precise superficial rules for marriage, family bonds and marital fidelity are
incomparably stronger than among so-‐called Christians. Among people who recognize
religious doctrines far less advanced than Christianity cohabitation, polygyny and
polyandry are defined and limited within clear boundaries and they don’t experience
the total debauchery and polyandry free of all rules that’s concealed behind the façade
of monogamy that reigns among people of the Christian world.
Only because the clergy officiate over a flamboyant ceremony called a church
wedding for the majority of young couples do people of our world naively believe that
this ceremony frees them from the demand of chastity and allows them to engage in
unrestrained and unregulated sexual relations.
938
There’s no human crime against moral law that people conceal from one another
with as much rigor as the crime known as sexual lust, and there’s no crime against
moral law that’s so commonly shared by all people and that grips them in the most
varied and horrific forms. There’s no crime against moral law that people look upon in
so many different ways, some seeing the act as a terrible sin and others seeing the same
act as a normal commodity or pleasure. There’s no crime on account of which so much
hypocrisy is displayed. There’s no crime that more accurately reveals the moral state of a
person, based on his or her attitude towards it. Finally, there’s no crime that’s more fatal
to individuals and to the progress of all humanity.
One of the main reasons for debauchery is the strange superstition established by
the wealthy classes that seducing a poor girl or a poor woman isn’t even 1/1000th as
significant as seducing people of the wealthy classes.
939
October 11
The Sin of Ill Will
If in rage you wish to harm someone, whether you succeed or not, as a result of your
rage you are certainly committing evil against yourself rather than achieving the good
you could do for yourself if you would try to suffocate the rage within you and bring out
good feelings toward your brother.
They say that a good man can’t help but be angry with bad people. If this is true,
then the better a person is, the angrier he must be. In reality, however, it’s the other way
around: the better a person is the gentler and kinder he is with all people. This is
because a good person remembers how often he himself has sinned, and if he wants to
be angry with others, first of all he has to be angry with himself. Seneca
If it seems to you that someone is guilty before you, you can do one of two things: try
to avenge yourself or try to forgive. If you succeed in avenging yourself, a painful feeling
of remorse will remain with you. If you succeed in forgiving and forgetting, your soul will
be peaceful and joyful. Which should you do?
The more a person lives for his soul, the fewer obstacles he’ll encounter and therefore
the less he’ll become angry.
940
Ninety-‐nine percent of all speeches and texts come about only from a desire to justify
the evil that we’ve done. Law, politics, diplomacy, economics, most philosophy and all
theology, all of this was created and continues to exist only for the sake of justifying evil
that people want to embrace.
If a person scolds and insults you, don’t succumb to it, don’t go down the path onto
which he wishes to divert you, don’t do as he does. Marcus Aurelius
“When you want to beat the devil that’s in a man, take care not to touch the God
that’s in him.” This means that when you judge someone don’t forget that the spirit of
God lives within him.
941
If I know that the sin of anger deprives me of happiness I can no longer consciously
be at enmity with others; I can no longer take joy in my anger and be proud of it as I
once could; I can no longer foment and justify it by believing myself to be important and
intelligent and others insignificant, lost and senseless. As soon as I realize I’ve given in to
anger I can no longer fail to see my own guilt and search for a way to make peace with
the person I’m angry with.
But this isn’t enough. If I now know that my anger is an unnatural, morbid state of
mind that’s harmful to me, then I also know what brought me to this condition. My
failure to recognize others as people equal to myself is what brought me to this condition
as well as with my own sins. I now see that separating myself from others and looking
upon others as a “cancer” and as senseless is one of the main reasons for my ill will
towards them. Recalling my past life, I now see that I never allowed hostile feelings to
arise towards people whom I considered better than me and never offended them, but
the smallest unpleasant act of a person whom I considered worse than me would evoke
my anger and make me insult him, and the greater I considered myself before such a
person the easier it was for me to insult him. Sometimes even some insignificant
pettiness that I’ve imagined in a person was enough to make me insult him.
942
October 12
The Temptation of Pride
Remember that the goal of the collective life of humanity is union and that therefore
every time you distance yourself from union with all people and include yourself in a
handful of individual groups you grow farther and farther away from the goal of
everyone’s life: union with everyone.
If a person is proud of his external distinctions, thinking that they elevate him, he
makes it clear that he doesn’t understand his own inner dignity, in comparison with
which external distinctions are like candles in the light of the sun.
If you see a person who’s so sure he knows so much that he has to teach others, you
should realize that he has nothing to teach because he either knows very little or knows
lies and considers them true.
Overconfidence is an amazing characteristic. No matter what a person’s abilities
might be—intelligence, education, all sorts of talents, even a good heart—if a person is
overconfident, all these qualities become shortcomings.
943
Exclusive love for members of your family might be the reason for unkind acts, but it
can never be a justification.
Patriotism is love for one’s fatherland and one’s people, and patriotism is considered
a virtue. However, we forget that while love for our fatherland might be a virtue in a
non-‐Christian world, in a Christian world everyone, all people without exception, are
brothers, and therefore any exclusive love is not a virtue but a vice.
944
The inequality that people establish between themselves is one of the main reasons
they go astray from a good life. Some—those in whom it’s been ingrained that they’re
cloaked with special significance and are above others—become so intoxicated by their
imaginary significance that they no longer feel responsibility for the acts they commit.
Others—those who’ve been persuaded that they’re insignificant beings who must
submit to those above them—lose consciousness of their responsibility for their actions
as a result of this continuous state of debasement and the intoxication of servility. The
people in the middle, as a consequence of partly submitting to those above and partly
considering themselves above others, are simultaneously intoxicated by power and
servility and so they lose consciousness of their human dignity.
When you deal with another person try to remember that neither can you be better
than him nor can he be better than you.
In no way is pride consciousness of human dignity. Pride elevates or debases a
person based upon external success or failure, while consciousness of human dignity is
always the same under all circumstances.
945
October 13
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
One of the most dangerous and harmful sayings is, “so be it.”
We spend nearly all our time and money trying to be like everyone else. Neither for
our minds or our hearts do we waste so much. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s good to accustom yourself to doing good deeds that no one will ever know about.
Such deeds strengthen your soul.
We’re not content with our true inner life. We want to live another imaginary life in
people’s thoughts, and in order to do so we force ourselves to appear as something we’re
not. We labor endlessly, decorating this imaginary being, and we neglect the real one. If
we possess serenity, constancy, generosity, we try to make it known as fast as possible, so
that we can ascribe these virtues to the imaginary being.
We’re willing to deprive ourselves of these qualities in order to ascribe them to the
imaginary being. We’re prepared to become cowards in order to be branded as brave.
Blaise Pascal
946
A good person’s comfort is in his conscience, not on others’ lips.
In order to show off in front of others, sometimes you praise yourself and sometimes
you berate yourself. If you praise yourself, no one will believe you. If you berate yourself,
people will think you’re even worse than you say you are. Therefore, it’s best to say
nothing about yourself and concern yourself with the judgment of your conscience
rather than the judgment of others.
If the masses hate someone, you must carefully investigate why they do before you
make any judgment. If the masses passionately love someone, you must also carefully
investigate before you judge. Confucius
I’m upset that I can’t see the consequences of my actions during my life, and at the
same time I’m upset that I can’t find an instance of my activity in which I’m absolutely
sure that my desire for human glory isn’t the reason. I have just what I need, and yet I
complain.
Reason’s greatest strength in the battle against the temptation of worldly glory is
consciousness of the instability, falsity, fortuity, and uselessness of people’s approval and
the firmness, truthfulness, inevitability, and beneficence of the approval of God, who
lives within you.
947
October 14
The Temptation of Wealth
He told them a parable: A certain wealthy man’s field produced a good harvest, and
he thought to himself, “Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger
ones, and put all my grain and all my property there. And I’ll say to my soul: Soul! You
have lots of property to last many years. Take it easy, eat, drink, and be merry.” But God
said to him, “You stupid man! This very night I am taking your soul. Who’s going to get
what you’ve prepared?” Luke 12:16-‐20
People love to say, “This is my home, my field, my money, these are my sons.” But
they never think about the fact that a person can’t own anything, since everything
belongs to God. Based on a Passage in the Talmud
The rich and the poor seem to complement each other. A wealthy class implies a
destitute class, and outrageous luxury is necessarily tied to horrific poverty that forces
disenfranchised people to serve outrageous luxury. The wealthy are thieves, and the poor
are the ones who’ve been robbed. This is why Christ always expressed sympathy for the
poor and disgust for wealth. According to his teaching, it’s better to be robbed than to
be a robber. And in the kingdom of truth he preached about, both wealth and poverty
will be equally impossible. Henry George
948
Thinking that wealth makes life easier is like thinking that carrying a heavy bundle
makes walking easier. Sergei Gavrilov
We need so many resources and so many comforts of which our ancestors knew
nothing in order to feel happy. And yet, are we happy? If a few people are happier, most
are unhappier as a result. By increasing the resources in the lives of a few, we force the
majority to be and to consider themselves unhappy.
There can be no happiness if it is obtained by taking happiness from others.
Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
949
It would seem that, knowing all the tortuous poverty of the working class who are
dying from privation and excessive labor (and it’s impossible to be ignorant of this fact),
wealthy people who exploit this situation and live off the labor of human lives couldn’t
be at peace for a single minute if they weren’t beasts. At the same time, wealthy liberals
and humanitarians who deeply sympathize not only with people but also with animals
incessantly exploit the same labor and try to become richer and richer. They exploit
more and more of the very same labor and, while exploiting it, remain completely
tranquil.
This happens because whenever people act badly they always concoct
rationalizations that define their evil acts not as evil acts but as the consequences of
immutable laws beyond human control. In ancient times these rationalizations were
called the mysterious and immutable will of God, which assigned some people to the low
calling of labor and others to a high position where they could enjoy the blessings of life.
When there were slaves in ancient times, it was asserted that God defined people’s
status—slaves and masters—and that both classes should be satisfied with their
position, since things would be better for the slaves in the next world and the masters
should be merciful to their slaves. Then when the slaves were freed, it was asserted that
God entrusted wealth to some people so that they could use part of it for good deeds.
This explanation satisfied both the poor and the wealthy (especially the wealthy) for a
long time. However, the time came when this explanation was found unsatisfactory. So
then a new explanation appeared in the form of political science, which discovered laws
that demonstrated that the division and exploitation of labor depended on supply and
demand, on capital, rents, paid labor, value, profit, etc.
950
In a short time there were as many books, brochures and lectures on this doctrine as
there were theological treatises and sermons on the previous doctrine.
The conclusion of this scholarship was that if there are many thieves and bandits in
society who steal the fruit of working people’s labor, it isn’t because bandits and thieves
behave badly but because there are immutable economic laws that can be changed only
through slow, precise study, through evolution, and therefore according to this
scholarship people who are bandits, thieves or their accessories, who employ theft and
banditry, can calmly continue to enjoy their stolen wealth and property.
Even though they don’t know the details of these comforting scholarly explanations
just as most of their ancestors didn’t know the details of theological explanations that
justified their position, most people of our world know all the same that there is such an
explanation and that scholars, intelligent people, have conclusively proven and continue
to prove that the current order of things is as it should be, and that therefore they can
live peacefully in this order without trying to change it.
This is the only possible explanation for the amazing dissimulation in which the
good people of our society find themselves, sincerely wishing good for animals and yet
consuming the lives of their brothers with a clean conscience.
951
It’s difficult if not impossible to find the rational limit of our desire for possessions.
Indeed, each person’s satisfaction in this regard depends not on absolute quantity but
on a specific relative quantity, namely on the relationship between a person’s demands
and his possessions. Therefore, property in and of itself means as little as a numerator
without a denominator. A person can be completely satisfied if he lacks possessions that
never come to mind as desires and which therefore he can never be deprived of. On the
other hand, another person who possesses a hundred times more than the first feels
unhappy because he doesn’t have what he wants. Arthur Schopenhauer
There’s only one precious wealth that no one can take from you. It is the increase in
your love of God and others. Material wealth impedes this spiritual wealth.
952
October 15
The Temptation of Punishment
Repay evil with good and you destroy all the satisfaction the evil person sees in evil.
People are rational beings, and therefore they should be able to see that revenge
can’t destroy evil. They should realize that the only deliverance from evil is that which is
opposed to evil: love, and not revenge, no matter what it’s called.
Great is the virtue of the king when he’s kind to his slave, but much greater is the
virtue of the slave when he refuses to recognize the evil he suffers and preserves affection
and good will towards all humanity in his heart. He doesn’t hate his oppressors and,
being powerless to oppose their oppression, even pities them for their insolence and
pride. Buddhist Suttas
Fear of punishment never stopped a single murderer. A person who wants to kill his
neighbor out of vengeance or need doesn’t think much about the consequences. A
murderer is always sure that he’ll escape the consequences. If it were announced one day
that there would no longer be any punishment for murder, the number of murders
wouldn’t increase. Quite the opposite: it would decrease, since criminals would no longer
be corrupted in prisons. Pyotr Kropotkin
953
Centuries, or perhaps just decades from now, our descendants will gape in wonder
at our courts, prisons, and executions the way we gape today at torture and burning
people alive. Our descendants will say, “Why couldn’t they see all the senselessness,
cruelty and maleficence in what they were doing?”
Non-‐resistance to evil through violence is an essential condition of love; without it,
love stops being love. All morality is founded on the law of love.
Therefore, the rejection of this essential condition of love destroys the possibility of
any kind of morality.
To say, “I recognize morality, but I think that non-‐resistance to evil through violence
is surely an exaggeration” is like saying “I recognize that the sum of the square of the
right angles is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, but the idea that all right angles
are equal isn’t quite right but something of an exaggeration.”
954
People say that war, capital punishment and all sorts of bloodshed will never stop as
long as men continue to fight each other. They doubt that it will happen someday and
even assert that war is a necessary condition of nature and therefore it can never be
eliminated. The immediate conclusion of all this is that nature itself compels and forces
man to attack and defend the way he does now, and that there’s no hope that humanity
will ever free itself from the yoke of the terrible necessity of war.
What blasphemy!
This is false: there is no such law of nature, there is no necessity that compels man to
harm his neighbor, just as there’s no law of nature that has compelled man to descend
into compulsive drunkenness throughout the ages. If a man can quit drinking he can
quit fighting, he can be cured of the madness of war, he can be convinced of the
necessity of restraining himself from harming others with punishments, threats and
self-‐defense. Adin Ballou
The small degree of order found in our society isn’t a result of courts, lawyers,
investigators, jailers, executioners, soldiers and judges who punish others, but a result of
people’s love for one another despite the corruption that all these government officials
produce.
955
It’s an amazing thing: people who accept Christ’s teaching are upset about the rule
that forbids them from using violence under any circumstances.
A person who admits that the meaning and purpose of life is in love is upset when
he’s shown a faithful and indubitable path to this purpose. This would be like a sailor
being upset that he been shown a faithful path to sail through reefs and underwater
rocks. “Why these restraints? I might need to get hung up on a reef.” This is exactly
what people say when they resent being told that they’re forbidden to use violence and
repay evil with evil under any circumstances.
We’re amazed how corrupt Christianity has become and how little it manifests itself
in our lives, if at all. However, it really couldn’t be any different in a pagan world with a
doctrine that demands true equality of people: all people are children of God, all people
are brothers, and every life is equally sacred. True equality not only demands the
elimination of castes, titles and privileges, but also the elimination of inequality’s
primary weapon: violence. True equality will never be achieved through civil action, as
people think; it will only be achieved through love of God (good, truth) and people. Love
of God and people cannot be ingrained into people through civil actions.
The fact that people can fall into the bestial delusion that freedom, brotherhood and
equality can be brought about through executions, threats of punishment and violence
doesn’t prove that humanity is on the right path, but only that the way in which these
deluded people are trying to bring about equality is wrong.
956
October 16
The Superstition of Violence
If the time and energy that people waste on organizing the lives of others were spent
in battle with their own sins, then the very thing that people wish to create—a better
structure of life—would very quickly be achieved.
If we saw someone who, instead of covering his roof and closing his windows every
time he saw a storm, went outside and stood in the wind and rain and got angry with
the clouds, yelled at them, ordered some to go left and others right—if we saw such a
person, we’d certainly say he was mad. But we do the same thing. We don’t worry about
eradicating the sin within us, but we get angry about the evil that comes from other
people. Delivering ourselves from the evil within us is just as much within our power as
covering our roof and closing our windows, while eradicating evil from the world is as
much outside our power as commanding the clouds. If instead of teaching others, we’d
try to make ourselves better, even just occasionally, there would be less and less evil in
the world and life would become better and better for everyone.
957
One of the most malignant superstitions is the belief that some people can organize
other people’s lives. If people would free themselves from this superstition, then taxes,
courts, prisons, executions and wars would cease to exist.
What parents do to their children, educators to their students, and rulers to their
subjects—force them through violence to submit—is the same thing people do to trees
when they trim them or cut off their branches. The trees look the way the people want
them to only for a short time, and then they grow back the way their nature dictates.
958
As long as people are unable to resist the temptations of fear, ignorance, greed,
ambition and vanity, which enslave some and corrupt others, they’ll always form a
society of brutes and liars on the one hand, and victims of brutality and lies on the
other. In order to escape this fate, each person has to exert moral effort on him or
herself. People realize this in the depths of their souls, but they want to somehow avoid
putting in the effort to achieve that which can only be gained through effort.
Discovering your relationship to the world through your own effort and sticking to
it, establishing your relationship to others based upon the eternal rule of doing unto
others what you would want them to do unto you, smothering within yourself the foul
passions that subjugate us to others, not being anyone’s ruler or anyone’s slave, not
making pretences, not lying, and not backing away from the demands of the higher law
of your conscience out of fear or desire for profit—all of this demands effort. Imagining
that the establishment of external forms can lead all people along some sort of hidden
path to all sorts of justice and goodness and doing what all the people of some single
party tell you to do—run around, argue, lie, put on pretences, abuse people, and fight
each other while making no effort to control your own thoughts to achieve justice and
goodness—all this happens on its own, without any effort necessary.
People want it to be this way, and they convince themselves that it is. And so the
theory of the improvement of society by means of altering external forms appears.
According to this theory, people can achieve the fruits of effort without exerting effort,
just as church doctrine teaches that through prayers for self-‐perfection, faith in
forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ or grace that’s given through sacraments
people can attain a righteous life without any effort. This theory has caused and
959
continues to cause horrible tragedies and more than anything else impedes the true
progress of humanity.
Using violence to force people to do what you think is good is the best way to instill
in them revulsion for what you think is good.
Everyone knows that all violence is evil. So to wean people from violence we, as people
who demand superficial respect, can’t come up with anything better to achieve this goal
than the most horrible methods: prisons and executions.
A person who uses violence is more of a slave than a person who endures it.
Salvation from the evil arrangement of the world is possible only through the
propagation of true faith among the people.
960
October 17
The Superstition of Government
There is the law of God, written in the heart of every man, and the law of man,
written on paper. If the law of God doesn’t correspond to the law of man, if the law of
God says “all men are brothers, love everyone,” and the law of man says, “those people
are enemies, do evil to them, kill them,” which law should you follow?
One of humanity’s most dangerous superstitions is the belief that a large group of
people, sometimes millions, can call themselves people of a single nation or a single
state. People kill and rob each other because of this superstition. The only way to deliver
yourself from this superstition is to consider yourself a child of God. If you do this, you
can’t separate yourself from all the people of the world; you must consider everyone your
brothers, living according to the law of God alone.
961
Bandits predominantly rob the rich; governments predominantly rob the poor and
protect the rich, who aid them in their crimes. Bandits risk their lives in their business;
governments risk virtually nothing. Bandits never force people to join their band;
governments collect the majority of their soldiers by force. Bandits divide their spoils
more or less equally; governments divide their spoils unequally: the more a person
participates in their organized swindles, the more he receives. Bandits don’t consciously
corrupt people; governments corrupt entire generations of children and adults with
false religious and patriotic teachings in order to attain their goals. But most
significantly, not one of the cruelest bandits—not Stenka Razin, nor Cartouche—can
be compared in terms of cruelty, mercilessness and sophistication of their tortures not
only with our most infamously cruel ruler-‐villains—Ivan the Terrible, Louis XI, the
Elizabeths and so on—but even with our contemporary constitutional and liberal
governments, with their executions, solitary confinements, punitive battalions, exiles,
repression of rebellions and slaughters in war.
Just as with the churches, it’s impossible to feel anything other than reverence or
disgust for governments. As long as a person fails to recognize what a church is, he can’t
feel anything other than respect for this institution. It’s the same thing as long as he fails
to recognize government for what it really is. As long as it guides him, he has to think
that he’s being guided by something original, great and holy in order to assuage his self-‐
esteem. However, as soon as he understands that this guiding institution is neither
original nor holy but simply a deception made by evil people who, under the guise of
leadership, exploit it for their own personal aims, he can’t help but feel disgust for them.
962
It might be possible to justify the subjection of an entire nation to a handful of
people if these ruling people were, I won’t even say the best people, but at least not the
worst, if even once in a great while not the best but at least decent people were to rule;
but alas, this is not the case, it never has been and it never will be. Rulers are always the
worst, most insignificant, cruelest, most immoral and, most of all, the most dishonest
people. And this is no accident, but a general law, an essential condition of power.
For someone who lives in a dream, governmental power is an essential condition for
human life consisting of several sacred institutions that comprise the limbs of a living
body. For a person who’s awake, so-‐called governmental power is nothing more than a
group of people who’ve ascribed to themselves some kind of fantastic significance that
has no rational justification, and who use violence to achieve their personal desires. For a
person who’s awake these people are deluded men, for the most part open to bribery,
who commit violence against others, much like bandits who rob people on the road and
commit outrages against them. Neither the antiquity of this violence, the extent of the
violence, nor its organization can change its essential nature. For a person who’s awake,
there’s no such thing as government and therefore no justification for all that’s done in
the name of government through violence, and it’s impossible to participate in it.
Governmental violence will never be annihilated through external means, but only
through people’s awakened consciousness of truth.
963
Perhaps the institution of government was necessary in some previous human
circumstances. Perhaps it’s even necessary now for a few. However, people can’t help but
foresee circumstances in which violence will only interfere with their peaceful lives. And
seeing and foreseeing this, people can’t help but strive for the manifestation of these
circumstances. The way to bring this order about is internal perfection and refusal to
participate in violence.
Don’t be a servant of one person or a handful of people. If you’re a servant of all, you
become a friend to all. Based on a Passage by Cicero
Someone who fears nothing and is ready to lay down his life for the truth is far
stronger than someone who fears everything and who holds the lives of others in his
power.
If you want to save yourself from other people’s power, submit to the power of God. If
you recognize yourself as under God’s power, people can never do anything to you.
964
October 18
The Superstition of the Church
The kingdom of God on Earth is something all people desire. (“May Your kingdom
come”). Christ brought us closer to this kingdom, but people have created a kingdom of
popes instead of the kingdom of God. Immanuel Kant
Faith doesn’t mean knowing what was or what will be, or even what is, but only one
thing: knowing what each person must do.
Every time the value of a person or a word is exaggerated the rights of the soul are
violated, and this makes a courageous reader put down the New Testament and take up
pagan philosophy. This isn’t because Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius are better, but
because they don’t ruin a person’s freedom; because they simply forward their thoughts,
while the New Testament ascribes things through external means where they can’t be
ascribed. Humanity shouldn’t tolerate the Gospels being placed in such a
disadvantageous position any more. The goal of our century is to ascribe all these
writings to a single source as human property. And every inspired author can only win
from such an end to his being worshipped as an idol. Ralph Waldo Emerson
965
A religion that has nothing to give hands out a counterfeit note for life after death.
In our day most people simply imagine that they profess Christianity and hold
themselves to Christian morals. In reality, they merely follow pagan morals and call this
morality the law of God, thereby establishing an ideal for education of the younger
generation.
If you wish to judge a tree, do as Christ says and look at its fruit, and you’ll see that
the fruits of all churches have been evil, that the consequence of their activities has
always been the perversion of Christianity, and you’ll have no choice but to admit that
no matter how good some people who participate in these churches might be, the works
of the church in which these people participated were not Christian. The goodness and
virtue of those who served churches were the goodness and virtue of people, not of the
causes they served. All these good people—like Francis, John Chrysostom, Thomas à
Kempis and others—were good people regardless of the fact that they served a cause
that was hostile to Christianity, and they would have been better and more virtuous if
they had abandoned the erroneous cause they were serving.
966
There can be three kinds of false faith that allow us to destroy the boundaries of our
reason in order to achieve the supernatural. The first false faith is faith in the possibility
of understanding through experience that which, according to the law of experience,
cannot occur: belief in miracles. The second false faith is the belief that we can morally
perfect ourselves through something our reason cannot accept: belief in sacraments. The
third false faith is the belief that a person can evoke through supernatural means an
occult force through which the Godhead will influence our morality: belief in grace.
Immanuel Kant
The church’s perversion of Christianity has moved us farther from the manifestation
of the Kingdom of God, but like a bonfire silenced for a time by a pile of wet branches,
the truth of Christianity has already dried out the wet twigs and has begun to overcome
them and burst forth. The true meaning of Christianity is now visible to all and its
influence is already more powerful than the lie that conceals it.
967
For nations, as for individuals, freedom from preconceptions doesn’t create freedom
from barriers to the comprehension of the whole truth, but simply replaces a lower
guide for life with a more elevated one. Many impoverished souls lose the source of their
support when this change occurs. But there’s nothing bad or harmful in this. This is
simply growth. A child has to learn to walk on his own. At first, a person who’s been
deprived of a superstition he’s grown accustomed to feels himself lost and homeless.
However, being deprived of this external support drives a person into himself and this
strengthens him in and of itself. He feels that he’s face to face with God. He reads the
meaning of a doctrine not written in any book but in his own soul, and his little chapel
grows into the majestic cathedral of heaven’s vault. Ralph Waldo Emerson
968
Those who serve churches of all confessions, particularly in recent times, try to pose
as partisans of Christian progress. They make concessions, they wish to correct the
abuses that have crept into the church and say that despite these abuses we can’t reject
the principle of the Christian church, which alone can unite and act as the mediator
between man and God. However, this isn’t true. Not only have churches never united
anything, they’ve always been one of the main causes of disunity among people, of
people’s hatred for one another, of wars, bloodbaths, inquisitions, St, Bartholomew’s Day
Massacres and so on. Churches will never serve as mediators between man and God, as
such mediation is unnecessary and directly condemned by Christ, who revealed his
doctrine directly to every person. The churches establish dead forms in place of God and
not only do they fail to reveal anything, they lead people away from God. The churches,
which came into existence as a result of confusion and which have supported this
confusion through their own immobility, can’t help but persecute and drive out all
understanding of Christ’s doctrine. They try to conceal it, but this is impossible, since
every movement forward on the path Christ revealed destroys them.
969
Orthodox religious systems in any form are responsible to a great degree for the
chaos and corruption that appear in our worldly affairs. In the case of the evil that
permeates people’s daily lives, church preachers of all denominations generally proclaim
in their meetings and sermons that this isn’t religion’s affair; rather, it’s the affair of
commerce, politics or finance. They say, “Religion must concern itself only with the
matter of man’s salvation in his future life; it only requires that people believe that
through Jesus alone can they find heavenly bliss. The believers will go to Heaven and the
sinners will go to Hell.”
Such doctrines, along with the doctrine of the fall of man, of redemption and
physical resurrection, usually muddle the little remainder of thought that Orthodox
people use to think about religious issues, and chaos, which then appears in their
religious lives, is naturally reflected in social life. Lucy Mallory
Listen to the profound discontent with the contemporary forms of Christianity that
permeate society and are expressed in murmurs and occasionally embittered sadness.
Everyone awaits the arrival of the Kingdom of God. And it’s approaching.
Albeit slowly, a purer form of Christianity is gradually taking the place of that which
is called by its name. William Channing
970
October 19
The Superstition of Science
I love peasants; they’re not educated enough to judge wrongly.
Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
A scholar is someone who knows a lot from all sorts of books; an educated person is
someone who knows what’s in vogue in society; an enlightened person is someone who
knows the purpose of his life and what he must do. Don’t try to be a scholar or an
educated person, try to be enlightened.
Don’t fear ignorance, don’t fear doubt, don’t fear studying, fear one thing: asserting
that you know what you don’t.
Never be ashamed to ask about something you don’t understand. F. Albitis
971
Astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry and all the other sciences, taken together
or separately, each elaborates its own corner of life without reaching any results
concerning life as a whole. Only when they were in a primitive state of development,
indistinct and undefined, did some of these sciences try to focus on covering all of life’s
phenomena, and there they floundered as they came up with new concepts and terms.
Such was the case with astronomy when it was astrology and with chemistry when it was
alchemy. The same happens now as well with experimental evolutionary science which,
by examining one or just a few sides of life, claims to study all of life.
Experience contributes to the understanding of truth in relation to nature, but in
relation to moral laws experience is the cause of error. Therefore, it’s a great mistake to
think that the laws of correct behavior can been derived from observing what people do.
Immanuel Kant
972
There are the same deceptions in scholarship as there are in religion, and they have
the same source: the desire to justify one’s weaknesses. Academic deceptions are just as
harmful, and perhaps even more harmful than religious deceptions. People fall into
error and live badly. Once people understand that they live badly they really should try
to change their lives and start to live better. But along comes scholarship in various
forms: political, economic, religious, jurisprudential, criminal, historical, and the one
that’s most in fashion today—sociology, which studies the laws according to which
people should live—and it turns out that people’s bad lives aren’t their fault but the
result of laws, and that people need not stop living badly and change their lives from
bad to good, but merely believe that all the bad isn’t their fault but the result of the laws
that scholars have discovered and written about, and continue to live their bad lives.
This deception is so irrational and so contrary to conscience that people would never
accept it if it didn’t appease their bad lives.
973
In every social class you regularly meet people with intellectual prowess who lack any
scholarly experience. Natural intelligence can reproduce any level of education, but
there’s no education that can reproduce natural intelligence, even if it provides a person
with a wealth of examples and facts (historical knowledge) and definite causes (the
natural sciences). It might all be forwarded in a simple, accurate overview, but in the end
no one will acquire a more accurate, in-‐depth perspective on the true nature of all these
facts, cases and causes. An uneducated person who possesses insight and quick
perception of everything can get by without all this. One instance from his experience
teaches him more than a thousand facts a scholar knows but doesn’t clearly understand
can teach him, because the small bit of knowledge the uneducated person possesses is
living, and he’s judged all the evidence he’s aware of with his trustworthy good sense,
and one such piece of evidence can take the place of a thousand similar ones for him.
On the other hand, much of what a typical scholar knows is dead, as it contains
empty words (if it’s not entirely comprised of them), often expressed in abstract
concepts that acquire meaning only through a visual conception of the individual
phenomenon they’re focused on, and which must contain the aggregate of all other
conceptions. If the idea is meager, then such a mind is like a bank whose assignations
have exceeded its resources ten times over and ultimately falls into bankruptcy.
Arthur Schopenhauer
974
It’s worth the effort to study whether or not it’s harmful to make children too
polished in their education. We still don’t know man well enough to provide
implementation of this contingency, if one might express it in this way. I’m convinced
that if our pedagogues succeed in achieving their goal—I want to say that if they
manage to bring children completely under their influence—then we’d never have a
single truly great person. No one teaches what is most necessary in life.
God forbid that a human being, whose teacher is all of nature, should be turned into
a piece of wax onto which some professor can stamp his grand image.
Georg Lichtenberg
Astronomers’ observations and measurements teach us much that’s amazing, but
perhaps the most important result of their research is the fact that they’ve revealed the
abyss of our ignorance. Without this knowledge, human reason would never be able to
imagine the enormity of this abyss, and meditating upon it can cause a great change in
our understanding of our reason’s ultimate purpose. Immanuel Kant
975
“There’s grass on the ground. We can see it, but from the moon we couldn’t. On the
grass are filaments, and in these filaments there’s nothing more.” What arrogance!
“Complex bodies consist of elements, but the elements are indivisible.” What
arrogance! Blaise Pascal
It’s strange to think that the sciences will someday become hostile to religion. If
science is conceited it will be hostile not only to religion but to truth. True science not
only is not hostile to religion, but it even blazes a trail for it. John Ruskin
976
October 20
Effort
Nothing weakens a person more than hope in something other than his own effort to
find salvation and happiness.
Life without moral effort is sleep.
A good person concerns himself with doing what he must more than with what
happens to him. Such a person tells himself: “To do what I must is my duty; what
happens to me is beyond my control. And no matter what happens to me, nothing can
stop me from doing what I must.”
If you want happiness, fulfill the will of God. You can only fulfill the will of God
through your own effort. This effort will not only reward you with a joyful life, but effort
itself will make you conscious of your participation in God’s cause.
977
The greatest transformations in this world aren’t accomplished suddenly or in
explosions, but in small, imperceptible changes. It’s the same thing with a good life. A
bad life isn’t made better instantaneously, but bit by bit, in barely perceptible acts of
effort.
True, the path of self-‐improvement is difficult, but it’s not difficult in and of itself.
It’s difficult because we’ve surrendered to vice for so long, and this has complicated our
path to improvement. In this struggle, we suffer to the degree to which vice has
succeeded in taking root within us. We’re wrong if we think that God is to blame for the
necessity of this struggle, since if there were no vice within us there would be no struggle.
In other words, the reason for the struggle is our own wickedness. At the same time, our
salvation lies in this struggle, and if God were to rescue us from it we poor souls would
remain immersed in vice. Blaise Pascal
978
He who sees his life is bad and wishes to begin to live better shouldn’t think that he
can start living better only after he’s changed his entire life. Improvement of your life
can and must occur through changes within yourself and your soul, not through
changes in the external world. This inner work is possible at any time and place, and
there’s a great deal of this sort of work to be done. Only when your soul changes to the
point where you’re no longer capable of continuing to live as you’re accustomed will you
change your life, not when you think that you can change your life if your change your
circumstances: leave home, drop your former occupations and choose new ones, etc.
The longer I live, the more work there is before me. We live in an important time.
Never before has so much work stood before humanity. Our age is an age of revolution
in the best meaning of the word: not a material, but a moral revolution. A greater
concept of social organization and human perfection is being produced. We won’t live to
see the harvest, but there is great joy in sowing with faith. William Channing
979
October 21
Self-‐Renunciation
When a person’s young it seems to him that his happiness is in the joys of the body.
But the longer he lives, the more he needs to turn away from the joys of the body, and if
he turns away from them for the sake of his soul, he realizes new spiritual joys. And
these joys become greater and greater the more he turns away from the joys of the body.
The renunciation of physical pleasures gives the same joy to the soul that the
satisfaction of passion and lust give the body.
Only when we die in the body for our own sake do we resurrect in God.
It’s difficult for a young person to renounce the life of the body. But the fact that
something’s difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. Therefore, no matter how young
you are, no matter how difficult it may seem to you, know that self-‐improvement is the
law of your life, and that the greater your self-‐renunciation the greater your happiness.
Trees give away their fruit and even their bark, leaves and juice to all who need them.
It’s good for a person who does the same. However, there are few who understand this
and act accordingly. Krishna
980
All good and kind acts are accomplished only when a person forgets about himself.
The world exists only because people perform such acts. If a mother didn’t forget
about herself when she gives birth, feeds and raises her baby, not one child would
survive. No family could survive if the father didn’t forget about himself as he works for
his family. It makes no sense to work for yourself alone, because no one can know if he’ll
ever be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor. However, the people who need what he’s
working for will always be able to enjoy it.
What you give away is yours and what you hold onto belongs to others.
If you tear something away from yourself and give it to someone, you’ve done good
for yourself, and this good will always be yours and no one can ever take it from you.
If you hold on to something someone else wants, you’re holding onto it only for a
time or until the time comes for you to give it away, and this time will surely come when
death arrives.
981
If you don’t want to be a slave, if you want to be free, then be prepared at every
moment to give back to God what He gave you: your life.
This seems terrible, but don’t we in fact see people destroying their lives every day,
not for God’s sake, but in order to please their bosses, superior officers, risking their
lives, getting drunk, adopting harmful habits, some in fights, some out of boldness,
some in war, in order to please their leaders. If a person can destroy his life for the sake
of such insignificant things, how could you not be prepared to sacrifice your life to the
one who gave it to you? If you want to be free, have no fear of death. If you’re afraid of
death you’ll be a slave among slaves all your life, even though you might have all possible
worldly distinctions and wealth.
If you’re going to try to cater to others so that they’ll be grateful, you’re wasting your
time. If you’re going to do good for others on behalf of God without thinking of yourself,
then you’ll be doing good for yourself and others will be grateful.
God remembers the one who forgets himself, and God forgets the one who
remembers himself.
There’s a special kind of spiritual pleasure in renouncing yourself for the sake of
someone else’s welfare, in the very act of dedicating yourself to another being.
982
October 22
Humility
There’s nothing stronger than a humble person, because by rejecting himself a
humble person unites with God.
If you want a good reputation or at least not a bad reputation, don’t praise yourself
and don’t let others praise you.
We don’t know and we can’t know what we live for and how our actions serve the life
of the world, but we do know that if we do what the power that sent us into this world
wants us to do and we do it with love and humility, our lives will be good. A horse in his
harness can’t know what he’s hauling and where he’s hauling it to, but if he’s humble
and hauls it he knows that he’s working for his master and that all is well. In the same
way, people know that if they do the task that’s been assigned to them—to increase love
in themselves and other people—then all is well.
Christ said, “My yoke is happiness, and my load is light.” That which we must do is
simple and brings us happiness.
983
We’re often proud that we’ve done well, we’re proud of what we’ve done, and we
forget that God lives in each of us and that in doing good we merely convey something
that He’s doing through us, not something He’s placed within us.
God acts through me, and I become proud. That would be like a stone that sits in the
way of a spring being proud that water flows through it and quenches the thirst of men
and beasts. But, someone might say, the stone could be proud that it’s clean and doesn’t
pollute the water. However, this is false. If it’s clean, that’s only because the same water
has washed it and continues to keep it clean. Nothing is ours; everything belongs to God.
There’s nothing in the world gentler and more pliable than water, and yet when
water falls upon something hard and rigid, nothing is stronger than water. The weak
will conquer the strong. The gentle will conquer the brute. The humble will defeat the
proud. Everyone in the world knows this, but no one wants to comply with it. Lao Tsu
How difficult it is to love and sympathize with proud, presumptuous, ostentatious
people. This makes it obvious how important humility is. More than anything else it
evokes the most precious thing in life: people’s love.
As soon as you think that you’ve risen far above others you’re ready for the pit.
984
Weeds kill the crop; vanity weakens man. Only the gentle gift of humility is fit for a
great reward. Buddhist Wisdom
Only a person who doesn’t consider himself wise can truly be wise, and only a person
who always sees God before him can be someone who doesn’t consider himself wise.
Some of your friends condemn you, and some of them praise you. Become closer with
those who condemn you and distance yourself from those who praise you. Talmud
The words “come and dwell in us” are splendid. In these words is everything. A
person has everything he needs if God dwells in him. In order for God to dwell in you,
you need to do only one thing: make yourself smaller so that there will be room for God.
Therefore, in order to have all that you need you must first of all become humble and
provide space in your soul for God.
Don’t fear humiliation if you’re able to accept it with humility, for it will be
compensated for many times over by the spiritual joy that comes with it.
Try not to hide shameful memories of your sins in dark corners, but on the contrary
try to keep them forever ready to be used when you’re called upon to judge someone else.
985
October 23
Honesty
Don’t think that it’s easy to tell the truth. When we’re alone we know the truth, but
as soon as we're around people and we want to please them our words become confused,
we involuntarily tell lies, or don’t say everything, or say things that never happened, or
leave out things that did happen. Beware of this. Truth is more valuable than anything.
We prefer truth to lies, but when it’s a matter touching on our lives, we often prefer
lies to the truth because lies justify our bad life while the truth exposes it.
People who accept a religious lie become so unaccustomed to distinguishing truth
from falsehood that they begin to lie in other areas without realizing it.
Mathematical sciences are useful in that they teach people to think independently of
desire. However, there’s nothing more harmful than political, juridical, and especially
religious and false philosophical scholarship: they teach people to think unclearly
without ever reaching conclusions, to confuse things and manipulate them. People who
pass through these schools lose their ability to control their thoughts.
986
Truth isn’t a virtue in and of itself, but it’s an essential element of all virtues.
There are conscious lies, in which a person knows that he’s speaking falsely but he
chooses to do so because it’s beneficial to him. There are also unconscious lies, in which a
person would like to tell the truth but he can’t.
Lies are harmful in all worldly affairs: to sell something old as something new,
something rotten as something fresh, to promise to repay a debt knowing full well you’re
not going to, and so on. However, none of these lies amount to anything in comparison
to lies in spiritual affairs: to pass something off as God that isn’t God, to convince people
to believe in salvation for their souls through something that gives no blessing to their
souls, to pass off something as sinful and bad when it’s actually righteous and good, and
so on. The primary evil of falsehood is found in such acts.
987
There is no sinless person, and there is no person who’s completely righteous. The
difference between people doesn’t consist in one being completely sinless and the next
being drenched in sin and falsehood, but in one striving to be less sinful and more
righteous, and another not striving.
The tendency to believe what people say is both good and evil. This tendency is
specifically what makes it possible for society to move forward, and it is this tendency
specifically that makes this motion so slow and tortuous. Thanks to it, the people of each
new generation inherit the knowledge that’s been passed on to them without any work
on their part, although it was acquired through tremendous effort, and because of this
each new generation becomes enslaved to the mistakes and delusions of its predecessors.
Henry George
988
October 24
Restraint in Deed
Sometimes you feel spiritual strength within you, and sometimes you feel corporeal
and weak. Be careful in such times. Try not to start anything and restrain yourself from
everything you feel like doing.
If a man defeats a thousand times a thousand people in a battle while another man
defeats himself, the latter person has conquered more. It’s better to conquer yourself
than the whole world.
No one, no god can turn the victory of someone who’s conquered himself and rules
himself into defeat. Dhammapada
Self-‐restraint doesn’t mean the suppression of or failure to develop energy, nor does
it mean the suspension of good, for example in the display of love or faith, but on the
contrary it means strength and energy that inhibits a person from doing what he
considers wrong. John Ruskin
If you’re arguing with someone, try to stop, do nothing and say nothing, but only
think about how the dispute started, and frequently all you have to do is think and
you’ll realize you’re arguing over nothing.
989
The longer I live, the more my reason and experience convince me of the wisdom of
“inaction.” People say that even with wild animals the best thing to do is to lie down and
remain still. Evil, deluded people should fear stillness and silence most of all, since this is
how the silence of God, which sees all our evil deeds, manifests itself.
One of the most common causes of our mistakes is the idea that it’s shameful not be
doing something and that artificial activities must be deliberately created. These made-‐
up activities almost always lead us into sins, temptations and superstitions. All we need
to do is follow the natural path that the demands of our physical and spiritual nature
lead us along. Otherwise, we heap concern about satisfying our physical nature on
others while the demands of our spiritual nature are so silenced by a false life that we
don’t recognize them, and we think up all sorts of activities that no one needs and that
are frequently harmful.
True human strength doesn’t lie in bursts of energy but in indestructible calm.
The more you hurry the less you succeed.
People’s sufferings, which result from a false conception of life, have so come to a
head, while true blessings, which result from a true conception of life, have become so
clear and obvious, that in order for people in our day to change their lives to be in
harmony with their conscience they don’t need to undertake anything or do anything,
but merely pause, stop doing what they’re doing now, focus and think.
990
October 25
Restraint in Word
Beware of destroying people’s unity, of summoning from within them bad feelings
toward one another with your words.
If one out of one hundred times you regret not saying what you should have,
certainly ninety nine out of one hundred times you regret speaking when you should
have remained silent.
With what can language in the mouth of man be compared? It’s the key to a
treasury of wisdom: when the door is locked, no one can know what’s there, whether
there are precious stones or worthless goods. While according to the teaching of the wise
silence is useful, free speech is more necessary if it comes at the right time. Two things
demonstrate poor reasoning: remaining silent when you should speak, and speaking
when you should keep quiet. Saadi
How often is silence the wisest of answers. Let your tongue rest more than your
hands.
Silence is the best answer to ignorance. Turn your tongue back seven times before
you start to speak. You should either stay silent or say something that’s better than
silence.
991
If your speech is good, there’s nothing better; if your speech is foul, there’s nothing
more loathsome. Talmud
He spent all his life among the wise and couldn’t find anything better than silence.
Talmud
I said: “I will watch my tongue as I travel my path so that I don’t sin against myself
with my tongue; I will curb my lips as long as the wicked are before me.” Psalm 38:25
Turn away from slander and perjury. May your tongue always serve as an
instrument of truth. Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
The best tongue is the one that’s carefully restrained; the best speech is the one that’s
carefully considered. When you speak, your words should be better than silence.
Arabian Proverb
Questions aren’t solved in arguments but in investigations within yourself, when you
challenge yourself with all your might.
5
The citation refers to the Russian Orthodox Bible. It corresponds to Psalm 39, verse one
in the western Bible.
992
He who listens attentively, questions rationally, answers calmly and stops talking
when he has nothing more to say is in command of the qualities that are most needed in
life. Johann Lavater
A person’s morals are seen in his relationship to the spoken word.
A person who stays silent easily ascends toward God; dissipation and empty
conversations attract boredom and irritability.
Based on a Passage from “Pious Thoughts and Precepts”
The less you talk the more you work.
993
October 26
Restraint in Thought
Try not to think about things you consider bad. Epictetus
Much worse than a bad deed are the thoughts from which all bad deeds arise. You
can repent over a bad deed and avoid repeating it. Bad thoughts give birth to bad deeds.
A bad deed only makes the road to other bad deeds smooth, while bad thoughts carry
you down that road.
The happiness of our lives depends on how we direct our consciousness.
Consciousness directed toward the animal self enfeebles true life, strengthens passion
and sets it afire, produces greed, conflict, hatred, and the fear of death; consciousness
directed toward the spiritual self awakens, raises, and frees life from passion, conflict,
hatred, and liberates love. Transferring consciousness from the animal to the spiritual
self is accomplished by the power of thought.
Most of life’s problems can be solved like an algebraic equation: reduction to the
simplest form of expression. You must exert as much mental effort as possible in order
to arrive at this simplest form.
994
It is the spiritual that guides the physical, and not vice versa. Therefore, if a person
wishes to change his condition he has to work on himself in the spiritual domain: the
domain of thought.
Any person can attain wisdom, be he young or old, intelligent or stupid, educated or
ignorant. All people need wisdom, and therefore anyone can be wise. Wisdom is
achieved in order to establish the law of God in your thoughts, the law we know in our
conscience and which is greater than human laws and our own desires.
A disorderly thought does to our mind what a disorderly person we’ve invited to live
with us does to our home. Lucy Mallory
The effort a person must exert to free himself from sins, temptations and
superstitions is accomplished first of all in his thoughts.
In this struggle, a person’s primary helper is his ability to connect with the
intellectual work of all the wise and holy people who lived before him in this world. Such
intercourse with the thoughts of the wise and holy is prayer: the repetition of the words
people use to express their relationship to their souls, to others, to the world and its
source.
995
It’s good to change your prayer: your way of expressing your relationship to the
world. A person is continually growing and changing, and therefore he has to change
and clarify his relationship to God. He has to change his form of prayer as well.
Every great idea must pass through three stages before it can enter the
consciousness of humanity. The first stage: “This is so ridiculous it’s not worth
considering.” The second stage: “This is immoral and contrary to religion.” The third
stage: “Everyone has already known this for a long time.”
In vain shall you search for the answers to the questions concerning the meaning of
your life in the outer world. The answers to all these questions lie within you, albeit in
embryonic form. You must cultivate your answers by living a good life. This is the only
path to wisdom. Lucy Mallory
996
October 27
Life Exists Only in the Present
Each of us could die at any minute, and so we can’t turn away from our life’s
business: service to God and others. We must live and serve God and others now, every
minute of our life. Serving God and others means increasing love in ourselves and
others, and we can do this at any time and under any circumstances.
Man lives only in the present moment. Everything else is either already gone or may
never be. Marcus Aurelius
We think about the future and prepare for it. However, the future is totally
insignificant, because the only thing that’s important is accomplishing the task of love,
and this task can only be accomplished now, regardless of circumstances. Therefore, it
doesn’t matter what the future holds or even if it will ever come to be. All that’s
important is to do what we must now, in the present.
If you examine the past closely, you’ll see that it’s connected with such a complex
interplay of conditions and causes that the human mind feels powerless to explain it.
The future is completely unknown and can’t be revealed. What remains for man?
Only the present: that which he indubitably knows and feels to be his own.
997
The more distant the consequences of a person’s act are, the better, greater and more
honorable that act is.
An act accomplished without any consideration of its consequences but only with the
thought of fulfilling the will of God is the very best act that a person can perform.
The life of Christ is particularly important as an example of the impossibility of a
person seeing the fruits of his labors. Moses could enter the Promised Land with his
people, but Christ could never see the fruits of his teachings even if he were still alive.
We, on the other hand, want to receive a worldly reward for fulfilling the will of God.
It’s impossible to believe in a future life. You can only believe in life in the present
and believe that this life is real and indestructible.
998
You, who could die at any moment, sign death sentences, declare war, go into battle,
judge others, torture them, rob the workers, live in luxury among beggars and teach
weak people who believe in you that this is the way it must be and that this is their
responsibility, all the while taking the risk that at the very moment you’re doing all these
things a bacteria or a bullet could enter into you, and you’ll start to wheeze and die and
be forever deprived of the chance to correct and change all the evil that you’ve done to
others and—most importantly—to yourself, having destroyed the life that was given to
you just once in all eternity for a pittance, while accomplishing none of what you were
indubitably supposed to do. Your entire life is only in the present, and you disregard it
for the sake of some sort of imaginary past and future. What foolishness!
If I weren’t a separate entity I wouldn’t experience time and space, just as God
doesn’t experience them. However, as soon as I become a separate individual I can’t help
but understand myself and other beings exclusively through time and space.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that I must believe that my life exists in time and space.
Within me is my spiritual self, which manifests itself in the present and lives outside
time and space. I believe my life exists in this spiritual self.
999
People say, “This planet will continue to revolve after it becomes a waterless and
airless globe from which humanity has vanished along with plants and animals,” and it
seems to them that this is the most obvious proof of humanity’s insignificance. On the
contrary, nothing more clearly demonstrates humanity’s greatness. Indeed, one of two
things must be true: either this reasoning is the reasoning of a worm that can’t think in
any terms other than that of time and space, which means that all its reasoning is
nonsense, or that the being that reasons about the destruction of the world is something
that exists outside time and space, and therefore cannot be destroyed.
1000
October 28
There is No Evil
Simply know and believe that all that happens to you is leading you toward your
true, spiritual happiness, and you’ll meet illness, poverty, disgrace—everything that
people consider disasters—not as disasters but as things that are necessary for your
happiness, the way a farmer accepts rain his fields need even though it drenches him,
the way a sick person accepts bitter medicine.
Frequently salvation comes precisely when it appears as though all is lost.
Instead of hauling when it’s harnessed, an ill-‐tempered horse struggles, suffers, gets
his back whipped, and pulls the load all the same. The same thing happens with a
person if he doesn’t endure grief as a trial, but considers it an unnecessary evil and
fights against it.
Everything is a blessing. That which we call tragedy merely opens for us the divine,
the immortal, the self-‐sufficient, which constitutes our essence. The worst disaster from a
human point of view—death—reveals to us our true self in its entirety.
1001
Illness, loss of a limb, bitter disappointment, loss of one’s property, loss of one’s
friends all seem to be irrecoverable losses at first. However, the years expose the
profound healing power that lies in such losses. Ralph Waldo Emerson
We get angry over our circumstances, we grieve, we want to change them, and yet all
possible circumstances, including those that seem the most grievous, are in essence
nothing other than the very material we’ve been called to work on and which gives us the
true happiness of our lives.
When we feel ourselves physically weakest, we can be spiritually strongest.
Lucy Mallory
All tragedies, in both the lives of individuals and of all humanity, aren’t without
value and lead both individuals and humanity, albeit in a roundabout way, to the only
goal that lies before all people: the manifestation of the spiritual source of each person
within himself and in all humanity.
Evil is good we don’t understand.
How often we torture ourselves not over what’s happened but over what might.
Thomas Jefferson
1002
October 29
There is No Death
Nothing is more certain than death, than the fact that it will come for each of us.
Death is more certain than tomorrow, than the coming of night after day, than the
coming of winter after summer. So why do we prepare for tomorrow, for the night, for
winter, but we don’t prepare for death? We must prepare for it, and there’s only one
preparation for death: a good life. The better your life, the less terrible death seems, and
the easier death will be. For a saint there is no death.
As fire melts wax in a candle, so the life of the soul destroys the life of the body. The
body burns in the fire of the soul, and it’s totally consumed at death. Death destroys the
body the way construction workers destroy the scaffolding when a building is finished.
The building is the spiritual life and the scaffolding is the body. The person who has
constructed his spiritual building rejoices when he dies, because the scaffolding of his
physical life is being torn down.
Rational life is like a man who carries a lantern out in front of him to light his way.
Such a man never reaches the end of the lighted path, since the light is always in front of
him. Rational life is like this not only in the fullness of life but also at the time of death,
since the lantern continues to light the way to the last minute and disappears with the
person who holds it just as peacefully as it accompanied him throughout his life.
1003
My physical life is subject to suffering and death, and no effort on my part can save
me from either one. My spiritual life is not subject to either suffering or death. Therefore,
my only salvation from suffering and death lies in transferring my consciousness into
my spiritual self, in merging my will with God’s will.
Fear of death is unnatural to a rational being. In man, fear of death is the
consciousness of sin.
The only thing we know for certain is that death awaits us. “The life of man is like a
swallow flying through a room.” We arrive from no one knows where and depart for no
one knows where. An impenetrable fog lies behind us and a murky fog lies before us.
When our time comes, what difference does it make if we ate tasty food or didn’t, if we
wore soft clothes or didn’t, if we left a big inheritance behind or left nothing at all, if we
reaped laurels or were despised, if we were considered educated or ignorant, compared
with the question of whether or not we used the talents that our Lord entrusted us with?
What value can any of that have when our eyes grow dark and our ears go deaf? We
can be at peace in that moment only if we not only preserve the spiritual talents that
were entrusted to us but develop them to the point where the destruction of the body no
longer appears terrible. Henry George
1004
When you arrived in this world, you cried while everyone around you rejoiced. Let it
be that when you leave this world everyone around you cries, while you alone smile.
Indian Saying
When a person is cured of a life-‐threatening illness, it’s like when a cart that has to
be pulled through a bog is dragged back in the wrong direction. It still has to pass
through the bog.
Someone who fears death is a sick person who’s violated the law of his own life by
failing to live rationally.
1005
October 30
After Death
The longer each person lives, the more life reveals itself and the more things that
were unknown become known. It’s this way until death itself. At death everything that a
person can merely become acquainted with during this life is fully revealed.
Death is a change in our body, the greatest and final change. We all experience
many changes in our bodies: once we were naked little pieces of meat, then we became
infants, then we grew hair and teeth, our teeth fell out and new ones grew, a beard
began to grow, then our hair turned gray and fell out. Yet we were never afraid of any of
these changes.
Why are we afraid of the final change?
Because no one has ever told us what happened to them after this change. But really,
when a person leaves our town and doesn’t write, no one says that he ceased to exist or
that things are bad for him where he went. They only say that we have no news of him.
It’s the same thing with those who have died: it means only that we know nothing about
what will happen to us after this life. But the fact that we can’t know either what will
happen to us after death or where we were before this life began only shows that we
haven’t been given the ability to know because we don’t need to know. We know only one
thing: our life doesn’t consist of changes in the body, but in that which lives in the body.
The soul lives in the body. And for the soul there’s neither a beginning nor and end.
1006
Just because one person walks slowly past me before he disappears from my field of
vision while another person walks past me quickly, I don’t believe that the person who
walked past me more slowly went farther than the person who walked quickly. I only
know one thing: if I see them walk past my window, whether quickly or slowly, I know
that they were both walking before I could see them and will continue walking after I no
longer can.
We’re so used to thinking of our instrument—our body—as ourselves that its
destruction seems terrifying, but all you have to do is get used to thinking of yourself as
that which functions through this instrument and there can be no fear, and at the
moment of death there will only be consciousness of discomfort that your former
instrument is being taken away before you receive your new one.
Every person feels that he’s more than something that was once non-‐existent and
then was brought to life by someone else. Because of this feeling, he’s certain that death
might bring an end to his life but certainly not his existence. Arthur Schopenhauer
1007
An animal can’t envision its inevitable demise and therefore doesn’t know the fear of
death. A human often feels the fear of death. Can it be that man’s possession of reason,
which reveals to him the inevitability of death, can make his position worse than that of
an animal? This would be true if a person were to use his reason simply to envision his
death rather than to improve his life.
The more a person lives a spiritual life, the less terrifying death is. If a person lives a
purely spiritual life, death can’t frighten him. For such a person death is simply
liberation of the soul from the body. He knows that there can be no death of that
through which he lives.
Death is the same as birth. At birth a child enters into a new world and begins a life
completely different from the one he lived in his mother’s womb. If a baby could relate
what he experienced when he left his previous life and prepared for birth into this life,
he’d say that he experienced the same fear that we feel at the approach of death.
What is an acorn if not an oak stripped of its branches, leaves, trunk, roots, all its
forms and all its features, in whose essence and generative strength, which is capable of
recapturing all that it discarded, is concentrated? Therefore, this impoverishment is
simply an external contraction. To return to eternity means to die but not be
annihilated; it means to return to your potentiality. Henri Frédéric Amiel
1008
October 31
Life is a Blessing
A wise man once said: “I wandered the whole earth looking for happiness. Day and
night I searched restlessly for it. Once, when I had fallen into total despair, a voice inside
me said: ‘Your happiness is within you.’ I obeyed that voice and found true, unchanging
happiness.”
He who brings his life to spiritual perfection can never be dissatisfied, because
whatever he wants is always within his power. Blaise Pascal
The joy of life can be felt by animals, children and holy people: animals, because they
have no reason that can be falsely used to deprive themselves of this joy; children,
because their reason hasn’t been perverted yet; holy people, because life gives them
exactly what they wish: the possibility of perfection, the increase of love, growing closer
to God and uniting with Him.
A person should always be joyful. If your joy ceases, look for your mistake.
5.
We should incessantly thank God that he’s made everything that brings us joy easy
and everything that deprives us of joy difficult.
1009
The days will always be clear for someone whose thoughts ascend into heaven, for
above the clouds the sun is always shining.
Without the limitations of time and space we wouldn’t exist and the joy of our lives,
which consists of expansion and enlightenment, wouldn’t exist either. Therefore, we
shouldn’t complain about our limitations but take joy and be grateful for them.
Don’t think that perplexity concerning the meaning of life and a failure to
understand it is something elevated or tragic. A person’s perplexity concerning the
meaning of life is like the perplexity of a person who suddenly finds himself among
people busy with constructive labor. The perplexity of this person, who doesn’t
understand what’s going on and who fidgets among busy people, isn’t something
elevated and tragic; it’s something ridiculous, stupid and pathetic.
People who claim that this world is a vale of tears, a place of trials and so on, and
that the other world is a world of bliss, are in essence asserting that all of God’s infinite
world is glorious or that in all of God’s world life is magnificent except for one place and
time, namely the place and time where we live. What a terrible coincidence this would
be. Really, isn’t this an obvious misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of a
person’s life?
1010
Just as a person who’s unaccustomed to luxury and finds himself accidently
dropped in the middle of it and who, in order to elevate himself in others’ eyes, acts as if
he’s used to luxury and not only doesn’t marvel at it but shows disdain for it, so an
irrational person who considers it a sign of an elevated ideology to show disdain for the
joys of life acts as if he’s bored with life and that he can imagine something better.
How strange and ridiculous it is to ask God for blessings. You shouldn’t ask Him for
anything but simply fulfill His law. My only relationship with God should be to express
gratitude to Him for the happiness that He’s given me. An employer situates his
employees so that as long as they fulfill his orders they’ll receive the greatest blessings
they can imagine, and yet they ask him for something. If they ask, it only means that
they’re not doing what they’ve been assigned to do.
1011
Often the very thing we don’t want brings us happiness, and what we do want
brings us misery once it comes true.
A house burns down and the family relocates in a new town and grows rich. Your
horse falls and has to stop hauling carts, so you go into town as a laborer and there
you’re lucky enough to find a place where you can earn twice as much as you did
hauling carts. You fall ill and you can’t go work in the mine with the other laborers, and
this one time the mine collapses and the workers are crushed. Things like this happen in
all walks of life. Therefore you can never know if what happens will be for good or ill.
Anyone who believes in God believes that everything that happens to a person is a
blessing. Evil can only come to someone through his own actions, not through what
happens to him.
1012
November
November 1
Faith
A landowner once had a worker. He lived in the landowner’s house and saw the
owner several times a day. The worker did less and less and finally became so lazy that
he didn’t do a thing. The owner noticed this but said nothing. He simply turned his
back on the worker when he would run into him. The worker realized that the owner
was unhappy with him and got it into his head to make up with him without going back
to work. The worker went to the owner’s friends and acquaintances and asked them to
make it so that the owner wouldn’t be angry with him. The owner found out, summoned
the worker and said: “Why are you asking people to intercede on your behalf? You’re
always right here with me, you can tell me yourself what you need.” The worker didn’t
know what to say and walked away. Then the worker thought up something else: he
collected the owner’s eggs, caught the owner’s chicken and brought it all to the owner as
a present so that the owner wouldn’t be angry with him. This time the owner said: “First
you ask my friends to intercede for you when you could have spoken to me yourself. Now
you try to gain my favor with gifts. But everything you have here is mine anyway. And
even if you brought me your own eggs, I don’t need your gifts.” Then the worker thought
up a third plan: he wrote poems praising the owner and started walking by the owner’s
windows shouting and singing the poems, calling the owner great, omnipresent,
omnipotent, father, all-‐merciful, benefactor. So the owner summoned the worker again
1013
and said: “First you wanted to satisfy me through other people, then you try to buy my
kindness with gifts, and now you come up with something even more outlandish: you
came up with the idea of shouting and singing about how I’m omnipotent, merciful, and
so on. You shout and sing that I’m this and that, but you don’t know me and can’t know
me. I don’t need intercession from other people on your behalf, or your gifts, or your
praise about something you can’t understand. I only need your work from you.”
What the worker did is the same thing people do when they pray to holy intercessors
and ask them to intercede for them before God, or what they do when they want to gain
God’s favor with icon candles and all sorts of offerings, or when they build temples or
sing hymns to praise Him.
Christ’s teaching tells us that between God and his people there can be no
intercessors, and that God doesn’t need gifts but rather our good deeds. In this is the
entire law of God.
Only a good life will satisfy God. Therefore, trying to satisfy God with anything
besides a good, pure, kind, humble life, all of that is a lie and false service to God.
Based on a Passage by Immanuel Kant
The Buddha once said that a man firmly established at the foundation of all religion
is like a man who brings a light into a dark house. The darkness immediately dissipates
and it becomes light. Simply persist in your search for the truth and full enlightenment
will be accomplished within you.
1014
If a person thinks that we must maintain the conception of religion that reveals itself
to us at this time, he’s very far from the truth. The light we’ve received wasn’t given to us
so that we could perpetually stare at it, but so we could use it to uncover new aspects of
the truth. Based on a Passage by John Milton
The worshippers of utility have no morals other than the morality of profit and no
religion other than the religion of material gain. They found the human body mutilated
and emaciated by poverty, and in their thoughtless zeal they told themselves: “Let’s heal
this body; once it’s strong, fat, and well nourished its soul will return.” However, I assert
that you can heal this body only by healing the soul first. The seed of illness lies within it,
and physical ailments are simply the external manifestations of this illness. Today,
humanity is dying from the absence of a common faith and common ideas that bind the
spiritual to the physical. Because of the absence of this religion of the soul, which now
exists only as empty forms and lifeless formulae, because of a total lack of a sense of
duty and the ability to sacrifice himself, man has become a savage and has fallen,
prostrate in the dust, and has erected an idol to “utility” on an empty altar. Despots and
princes of this world have become its high priests. They’ve brought the abominable
morality of profit into the world, proclaiming: “Every man for his own people, every man
for himself.” Giuseppe Mazzini
1015
If you examine the causes of the tragedies from which humanity suffers, starting
with the superficial causes and proceeding to the more fundamental ones, you’ll arrive
at the cause of all human tragedies: uncertainty or falsity in man’s established relation
with the world and its source. In other words, false religion.
Humanity never stops advancing. This forward motion can only take place in faith.
The foundations of God’s law never change, but man’s understanding and application
of them to his life can’t help but change.
All evil in the world exists only because people believe in a false law rather than the
true law of God. People’s lives can improve only if they reject false laws, recognize the
true law and live according to it.
I praise you, Lord of Heaven and Earth, for concealing these things from the wise
and intelligent and revealing them to children. Yea, Father! For such is Your good will.
Matthew 11:25-‐26
1016
November 2
The Soul
The soul is glass. God is light in the glass. In your body is both glass and light.
Angelus Silesius
He who is united with God cannot fear God. God cannot do evil to Himself.
Angelus Silesius
We take measure of the Earth, the Sun, the stars, the depths of the oceans, crawl in
the bowels of the earth after gold, search for rivers and mountains on the moon, discover
new stars and determine their size, fill in canyons, build clever machines; not a day goes
by when there isn’t a new invention. My God! What aren’t we capable of! What’s beyond
our abilities?! But all the same there’s something, the most important thing, which we
lack. What it is, we ourselves don’t know. We’re like little children: they feel that they’re
unhappy, but they don’t know why.
We’re unhappy because we know much that’s superfluous, but not that which is
most necessary: knowledge of ourselves. We don’t know who lives within us. If we knew
and remembered what lives in each of us, our lives would be entirely different.
Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
1017
Just as I need God so God needs me. Angelus Silesius
Asking “does God exist?” is the same as asking “do I exist?” I know God within
myself. That by which I live is God.
Only that which is invisible and impalpable, that which is spiritual and of which we
are conscious within ourselves, truly exists. All that is visible and palpable is a product
of our senses and therefore merely a semblance of reality.
We only live when we remember our spiritual self, and this happens when our spirit
struggles with the body’s desires.
If I burn in the divine fire, God will impress His image upon me. Angelus Silesius
1018
November 3
One Soul in All
Christ’s doctrine is that all people are children of one Father and therefore are all
brothers and sisters.
The longer people live, the more they understand that their life is only real and
happy when they recognize their unity with the same spirit that lives in all.
To be united with people is a great blessing, but how can I achieve it? What should I
do in order to unite with everyone? There are so many people, and they’re so diverse. If I
unite with my family, what about everyone else? So I unite with my friends, with all
Russians, with all my coreligionists, everyone who’s close to me in spirit. Then what
about the people I don’t know, from different nations and different faiths? There are so
many people, and they’re all so different. How can this be?
There’s only one way I can do it: forget about people, don’t think about uniting with
them, but think about uniting with the spirit that lives within all people and within me.
And by uniting with that I unite with all people, no matter who they are, where they are
and when they lived.
1019
At first glance, all beings see themselves as separated from all other beings. However,
the notion of each being separated from the rest is nonsense. Only the consciousness of
one’s unity with All gives meaning to life. When imagined as completely separate, as
lived for oneself only, a person’s life is completely nonsensical. Such a person is
completely mad.
We live in truth only when we understand our lives as individual parts of a common
life.
How easily everything becomes clear when people stop establishing countless goals
for their lives which result in conflict among them, but only one goal, in which they all
help each other. And there is such a goal. The goal is for each person to live as much as
possible through the spiritual source that’s been placed within them all and that doesn’t
divide people but unites them.
1020
Why does one person feel sorry for another, or feel sorry for an animal? Only
because he senses that what gives him life—his spiritual source—is the same in all
people and all animals.
If things are going badly for you, you’ll find no better refuge than in your very self, in
your spiritual source.
All human tragedies are a result of human blindness, of man’s inability to see the
God who lives within him.
1021
November 4
God
A person understands his life in its true sense only when he feels God within him
and sees Him in all people.
If a person doesn’t know God within himself, he doesn’t know any God at all.
He who knows himself knows God.
God exists—in my opinion this can only refer to the notion that in preserving my
free will I feel compelled to act in accordance with truth. That’s the only way that I
understand God. Our heart recognizes God; it’s impossible to make God comprehensible
through reason. Reason alone, without the heart, can never reach God. Once the heart
recognizes God, then reason can search for Him. Georg Lichtenberg
You can only understand and feel God when you clearly understand the irreality of
all material existence.
When an insoluble question torments you, you feel like a sick part of a healthy body.
You feel like an infected tooth in a healthy body, and you ask the entire body to help this
one part.
The entire body is God; the one part is you.
1022
For me, God is what I strive for, and my life consists of this striving. Therefore, God
exists for me. However, there’s no way I can understand or name what it is that exists. If
I were to understand Him I’d reach Him, and I’d have nothing to strive for and therefore
no life. I can’t understand or name Him, but at the same time I know Him and I know
the way to Him; and of all the things I know, this is the most reliable bit of knowledge I
have.
It’s strange to think that I can’t know Him but at the same time I’m frightened
whenever I feel He’s not with me and only feel secure when I’m with Him. It’s even
stranger to think that I don’t need to know Him any more or any better than I know
Him now. I can get closer to Him and I want to get closer to Him, for this is the essence
of my life, but approaching Him doesn’t increase my knowledge of Him one bit, and it
never can. Every time I imagine that I consciously recognize him (for example, that He’s
the creator, that He’s merciful or something like that) I’m drawn away from Him and
can’t come closer to Him. For me, even the preposition “He,” when referring to God,
infringes upon God somewhat. The term “He” somehow disparages Him.
1023
God said to Moses, “Why do you ask about My name? If you can see the motion of
this world, if you can see what always was, what is and what will always be, then you
know Me. My name is my essence. I am existence, I am all that is. He who wishes to know
My name doesn’t know Me.” Grigory Skovoroda
God is the freest, most powerful, most perfect thing that we can imagine. Human life
consists of approaching what we call God. Approaching Him means increasing freedom,
strength and goodness within yourself.
When the blinding sun isn’t out you can see the countless, eternally magnificent
stars and you can’t doubt their existence. However, when the sun rises you no longer see
them. In the same manner you, as a human being, can’t see God as long as you’re
blinded by the temptations of this world, but He exists and will inevitably be revealed to
you.
1024
November 5
Life is Union
We find life difficult and dull without others because in people we sense something
our bodies distance us from, and we don’t want to be a severed particle. We want to to
be united with what we’re separated from.
All people want and strive for one thing only: to live well rather than badly.
Therefore, from the most ancient times wise and holy people have always and
everywhere meditated on this and taught people how they should live so that their lives
can be good rather than bad. And all these wise and holy people in different places and
at different times have taught one and the same thing.
The teaching is short and simple.
It consists in the fact that all people live by means of the same spirit and that all
people are the same, although in this life they’re all separated by their bodies. Therefore,
if they understand that the same spirit gives them all life, they unite with one another in
love and are happy. If people don’t understand this and think that their individual
bodies give them life, then they fight with each other and make themselves unhappy.
Therefore, the teaching consists in doing what unites people and not doing what
separates them. This teaching is easy to believe, because it’s in the heart of every person.
1025
If a person is honest he’ll never be satisfied with himself. He’ll always be dissatisfied
because he knows that he needs to be united with all people, but he feels that he’s
separated from them all the same. Both his dissatisfaction and his striving for unity
contribute to his spiritual growth as well.
It’s impossible to do anything great, important or praiseworthy in worldly life. All
worldly acts are nothing in comparison with the one great and essential act that a
person performs when he unites in love with God and others more and more.
You want to serve God to bring about His Kingdom and you undertake various
activities, but when you think about what you can actually do you’ll understand that
only one thing can help bring about the Kingdom of God: living so that nothing in your
life interferes with people’s uniting with each other. In order not to interfere with this
union you must try to come closer to God. Everyone is united in God.
1026
To live a Godly life means to live for the good of your true Self: not the “self” that’s
separated from all other beings, but the one that is the same in everyone.
In Russian, when we speak affectionately to someone, we sometimes say, “my soul.”
What a wonderful expression. When I say to another “my soul” I’m saying that I
recognize my soul in him. Therefore I love that person because my soul is within him.
Through the motion of his consciousness, man has been granted the ability to
interact with the consciousness that exists in all other beings: humans, animals, and
plants. There is no motion for God: everything exists and nothing changes. For man,
this motion is potential, and the consequence of change and union with everything gives
joy.
1027
November 6
Love
If you don’t love people, everything is confused, everything is difficult. Just try to love
and everything will immediately become simple and easy.
Do good to your friends so that they’ll love you even more. Do good to your enemies
so that they’ll become your friends. Cleobulus
In the Gospel it says, “Love your God with all your heart and all your soul, and love
your neighbor as yourself.” But people say, “We understand what it means to love our
neighbor as ourselves, but what does it mean to love God, whom we neither see nor
know?” But this isn’t true; we see and know God. We see and know God in other people
and in ourselves. Therefore, to love God means to love that which is one and the same in
all people and in us.
To love God means to place higher than all else that which is one and the same in us
and in all people.
1028
In order for a person to know what he should do, he has to pay attention to the will
of God, which has been placed within him. God’s will is that all beings, everything that
lives on earth, should live well. God is love, as the Gospels say. Therefore, when it
coincides with God’s will, man’s will is love and desires good not just for himself but for
all things in the world.
Therefore, a person only needs to do that which is in harmony with God’s will, and
the only thing within man that is in harmony with God’s will is love.
1029
Among the Chinese lived several sages: Confucius, Lao Tsu, and one other, the little-‐
known sage Mozi. Mozi taught that it’s essential to instill in people respect for love alone
rather than for physical strength, wealth, power, or courage. He said, “People are raised
to value wealth and glory most of all, and throughout their lives they worry only about
how to gain more glory and wealth. However, they should be raised to value love above
all else, so that they spend their lives concerned with teaching themselves to love all
people.”
No one paid any attention to Mozi. Confucius’ disciple Min Sun argued with Mozi
and said that it’s impossible to live by love alone. The Chinese followed Min Sun. Five
hundred years later, Christ taught people the same thing Mozi had taught, but
somewhat better, more forcefully, and more comprehensibly than Mozi had. And now,
although no one argues against the doctrine of love, all the same no one fulfills this
doctrine. But the time will come—and it is approaching—when people will have no
choice but to fulfill this doctrine, because if they don’t they’ll suffer more and more, but
mainly because this doctrine has been placed in every person’s heart and it alone gives
happiness to all.
1030
Without love, a person is thrown into the world alone among strangers and enemies.
Love unites him with all Earth’s beings of the past, present and future; it unites him
with God.
7.
No one can be good and righteous if he doesn’t wish for his brother what he wishes
for himself. Muhammad
8.
It’s difficult to accustom yourself to pitying people for the things that make them
truly pitiful—the loss of morality, purity of reason, and good habits—rather than
pitying them for what they themselves complain about: the loss of property, family,
beauty, health, and worldly fame. However, true love lies in this sympathy for deluded
people.
9.
Only love can free your soul from the prison of your body.
10.
People say, “I don’t know what it means to love God.” But who can understand what
it means to love anyone or anything? Only a person in love can understand what it is.
If a person doesn’t know what it means to love art or science, how can you explain it
to him, if he doesn’t know what art or science is?
1031
How can you explain what it means to love God to a person who not only doesn’t
know what God is but even takes pride in his ignorance?
The moral law written in the Gospels, “love your neighbor as yourself,” will never
come to pass until people fulfill it. This law is as incontrovertible as the law of gravity or
the laws of chemical compounds or any other physical law.
We can imagine that once upon a time physical laws weren’t common to all
manifestations of nature either and fluctuated and developed, but finally became
incontrovertible. It’s the same thing with the moral law: we’re developing it now.
Human love allows us to love someone who loves us and whom we find pleasant, but
only divine love allows us to love an enemy. If we love with human love we can easily go
from loving to hating, but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can
destroy it. It is the essence of our souls.
It’s impossible to know if what’s happening to a person will turn out to be beneficial
or harmful to him. There’s only one act that can always be counted on to be helpful.
What is this act?
Love for others. Love always faithfully increases a person’s happiness in life.
1032
Do good without worrying about who you’re doing it for. No matter who you do it
for, it will certainly bring results and return to you as invisible joy in your soul.
People who don’t understand what true life is always direct their energy toward the
struggle for survival, the acquisition of pleasure, deliverance from suffering and
distancing themselves from inevitable death.
However, the desire for pleasure increases the intensity of this struggle; it increases
the sensation of suffering and brings death closer. Such people have only one means to
hide from the approach of death: to increase pleasure more and more. But there are
limits to pleasure, past which these people pass into suffering and greater and greater
fear of death as it advances upon them.
For people who don’t understand life, the main reason for these sufferings is that
they consider pleasure something that can’t be equally distributed among all people but
must be taken from others through force. This violent seizure from others of what they
need destroys the possibility of goodwill toward all, the state of love that alone gives true
happiness.
Therefore, the more intensively a person tries to acquire such pleasures, the more
difficult it becomes to acquire the one happiness available to man: love.
1033
Some people say, “go into yourself and you’ll find peace.” This isn’t completely true.
Others, on the contrary, say, “go out of yourself, try to forget yourself, and you’ll find
peace in diversions.” This is wrong if for no other reason than the fact that you can’t
escape from things such as illness in this manner.
Peace and happiness are neither within us nor outside us; they are in God, who is
both within and outside us.
Love God both in God and in your neighbor and you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Blaise Pascal
God wanted us to be happy, and in order to accomplish this he placed the need for
happiness within us. However, He didn't want just some people to be happy, He wanted
us all to be happy together. This is why people who strive for personal happiness rather
than happiness for everyone are always unhappy. People can only be happy when they
love one another.
1034
When a person searches for happiness in anything other than love, it’s as if he’s
searching for a path in the dark. Once he realizes that his happiness and the happiness
of all living beings is in love, then the sun of truth rises for him, he sees his path and can
no longer grab at things that don't bring him happiness.
He who does good for another person does good for himself, not in the sense of
consequences but in the very act of doing good, since consciousness of doing good is the
highest reward a person can receive.
Living beings destroy one another, but at the same time they help each other. Life
isn’t sustained by the desire for destruction but by the feeling of reciprocity that the
language of our hearts calls love.
No matter how much I observe the development of life in this world, all I see is the
principle of mutual assistance. All history is nothing more than a greater and greater
revelation of this one principle of mutual harmony among all living beings.
1035
November 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
Never be timid before sin, never say to yourself: “I can’t help sinning, I’ve become
used to it, I’m weak.” As long as you’re alive, you can always struggle with sin and can
always overcome it, if not now, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then the day the after; if
not the day after, then certainly before you die. If you turn away from the struggle before
it begins, you’re turning away from life’s main affair.
He who sins for the first time forever feels his guilt. He who repeats the same sin over
and over looks upon sin as something permitted.
Carnal sins diminish with the years, but on the other hand the temptations of pride,
human glory, self-‐interest, malice and vindictiveness become stronger, and the
superstitions of the arrangement of others’ lives, government, the exclusiveness of one’s
nation, the false law of God and false science become stronger still.
In order to act, people must feel that their actions are useful and just. If their acts are
useless and unjust, people sense the uselessness and injustice of their actions and
deliberately create a busy, bustling life for themselves so that they no longer hear the
voice that exposes them.
1036
I wish I could persuade people to search for truth and free themselves from the
passions that prevent them from finding the path to truth. I know how passions and
lust darken one’s reason, and I would like it if people despised these beastly inner
characteristics that blind them when they’re searching for their path and stop them
when they’re travelling along it. Blaise Pascal
Young people don’t understand that the true goal of life is union through love, and
they make the main goal of their lives the satisfaction of the body’s lusts instead. This
would be all right if this delusion remained merely a delusion of the mind, but the
problem is that satisfying the body befouls the soul, and a person who’s befouled his
soul through a lustful life has already lost the ability to find happiness in love within
himself. It’s like a person who, in order to acquire pure drinking water, befouls and
defiles the pitcher he has to put the water into.
1037
Sins, temptations and superstitions have always existed; they exist now and always
will exist as long as humanity does. Life is merely motion toward perfection through the
gradual liberation from sins, temptations and superstitions. If they didn’t exist, a person
would achieve complete perfection and there would be no life.
As long as people—rational beings—have existed, they’ve distinguished good from
evil and used their ability to make this distinction to struggle with evil and search for the
true and proper path, and slowly but relentlessly they've progressed along this path.
Various temptations and superstitions have always stood in the way and blocked the
path. Their purpose is to convince people that they shouldn’t follow the true path but
simply live the way they always have.
1038
November 8
The Sin of Lechery
If people get married when they don’t need to, they do the same thing as a
person who hasn’t stumbled but falls down anyway. If you stumble and fall, there’s
nothing you can do about that, but if you haven’t stumbled, then why would you
deliberately fall down? If you’re able to live your life in chastity, then it’s best not to
marry.
The Pharisees came up to Christ and, testing him, said to him, “is it allowed for a
man to divorce his wife for any reason?”
He answered them: “Haven’t you read that in the beginning the Creator created man
and woman?”
And he said, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and binds himself to
his wife, and they become as one body. So they’re not a couple any longer, but one body.
So, that which God unites, man cannot divide.” Matthew 19:3-‐6
Any man who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and
any woman who divorces her husband commits adultery. Luke 16:18
The desires that most firmly seize us are lustful desires, those which can never be
satisfied, and which the more we try to satisfy, the more they grow.
1039
Family life for a man and woman is good when they love each other and raise
children, but life is even better for a man and woman if they live their lives in chastity,
serving God and others.
The best weapon in the battle against lust is consciousness of your spirituality. All a
person has to do is recall who he is and lust will appear before him as it truly is: a
humiliating, bestial quality.
It’s not in vain that a person feels shame when the subject of sex arises. Preserve this
shame. It’s the voice of God in your soul.
One of the most faithful signs of resoluteness concerning moral issues is how strict a
person is with himself concerning sexual issues.
1040
Many a young man would be horrified at the thought that he might marry a woman
who once belonged to another man, and at the same time would consider it completely
normal that his bride not be allowed to make the same demand of her future husband.
A young man lives in sexual debauchery, and a young woman from a good family
doesn’t suspect a thing. Thousands of young women enter into marriage pure but
deceived. Albert Heim
A marriage that leads to children should only happen when the partners’ sexual
relations are healthy. Nevertheless, people often look upon marriage as a hospice for
those mired in debauchery who aren’t worried in the least about the fate that awaits
their spouses and children. Albert Heim
The urges that arise from sexual lust are just like fireflies over a swamp: they trick us
and lead us into the swamp, and then they disappear. Arthur Schopenhauer
1041
November 9
The Sin of Overindulgence
Everything that the body truly needs is easily acquired. Only that which is
unnecessary is acquired with great difficulty. Based on a Passage by Grigory Skovoroda
Neither wine, nor opium, nor tobacco is needed in people’s lives. Everyone knows
that wine, opium and tobacco are harmful to both the body and the soul.
At the same time, the labors of millions of people are wasted in order to produce
these poisons.
Why do people do it?
They do it because they’ve fallen into the sin of serving the body, but they see that the
body can never be satisfied. So they come up with substances like wine, opium, and
tobacco, which put them in such a condition that they forget that they’ll never get what
they want.
It’s good to have what you want, but it’s better not to want anything other than what
you have. Menedemus
No one ever repented for having lived too simply.
1042
Look at how a slave wants to live. First of all he wants to be given his freedom. He
thinks that without it he can neither be free nor happy. He says, “If I were free I’d be
completely satisfied: I wouldn’t have to serve and cater to my master, I could talk to
whomever I wish as an equal, and I could go wherever I want without asking anyone for
permission.”
But as soon as he’s freed he immediately starts looking for someone whose favor he
can worm his way into, since his master no longer feeds him. To do this he’s ready to get
involved in all sorts of villainy, and once he settles down to work for some wealthy man
he falls into slavery once again.
If such a person starts to get rich he immediately takes on a lover, and he becomes
her slave. So he starts suffering and crying. When things get particularly difficult, he
remembers his former days of slavery and says:
“Things weren’t so bad when I lived with my master! I didn’t have to worry about my
own affairs: he gave me clothes, shoes and food, and when I was sick he took care of me.
And now look at all my misfortunes! I used to have one master, and now look how many
I have! Look how many people I have to cater to!”
But the slave won’t come to his senses. He wants to become rich and to do so he
endures all sorts of adversities, and when he gets what he wants it turns out that once
again he’s become entwined in all sorts of unpleasant concerns. Epictetus
1043
A wise man once said, “Thank God that he made what’s necessary easy, and all that’s
unnecessary difficult.” This is particularly true concerning food. The food a person
needs to stay healthy and fit for work is simple and cheap: bread, fruit, roots and water.
You can find all of this anywhere. What’s difficult is raising cattle and pigs, making ice
cream in the summer, and preparing all sorts of artful dishes.
And not only are all these artful dishes difficult to make, they’re also harmful.
Therefore, it’s not healthy people who eat bread with porridge and water who should
envy the ailing rich with their artful dishes, but the wealthy who should envy the poor
and learn from them how to eat.
If you don’t have what you love, try to love what you have.
1044
November 10
The Temptation of Wealth
What an amazing superstition it is that wealth brings happiness. Will people
never free themselves of it?
People strive for wealth a thousand times harder than they strive for reason,
although it would seem that everyone is capable of understanding that what’s within a
person is more important for his happiness than what he owns.
Based on a Passage by Arthur Schopenhauer
Among good, industrious people you should be ashamed of your poverty. Among
evil, idle people you should be ashamed of your wealth.
It’s impossible to do good with wealth. In order for a wealthy person to be able to do
good, he first of all has to give away his wealth.
The self-‐satisfaction of the wealthy is bad, but the envy of the poor is no better. How
many poor people there are like that, condemning the rich while doing to people who
are poorer than they are the same things that they condemn the rich for.
1045
One of the most common and critical mistakes people make in their judgments is to
believe that what they love is good. People love wealth, and so even though the evil of
wealth is obvious they try to convince themselves that it’s good.
The worst of thieves isn’t someone who takes for himself what he needs but someone
who holds onto what he doesn’t need and refuses to share it with those who need it. This
is exactly what the wealthy do.
There is no more pointless activity than the acquisition, retention and accumulation
of wealth.
1046
In human life, true greatness is almost always accomplished unseen. There’s a very
good chance that a great feat is being performed, a magnanimous sacrifice is being
made or a lofty idea is being created silently and secretly before our eyes, and we don’t
even suspect it. I think that such greatness happens frequently among people whose
names we never hear and whom we will never know. I’m convinced that among the so-‐
called simple people you meet heroic endurance in times of suffering, simple truth, firm
faith and true generosity that sacrifices what the giver truly needs more often. Most
importantly, you find among simple people a true understanding of the meaning of life
and death more often than you do among the wealthy.
Based on a Passage by William Channing
In the soil and sunlight, in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in mineral deposits
and in the forces of nature we’re only beginning to exploit, an inexhaustible wealth
exists through which people guided by reason can satisfy all their material needs.
There’s no need for poverty in nature, even for the poverty of the cripple or the infirm,
for by his very nature man is a communal animal, and if there was no poverty that
reduced men to the state of beasts, familial love and communal sympathy would supply
every person who’s incapable of providing for himself with what he needs. Henry George
1047
1048
November 11
The Sin of Parasitism
White hands love other people’s labors.6
There once were two brothers. One served the King, while the other fed himself by his
own labor. The rich brother said to the poor one:
“Why don’t you come serve the King? You wouldn’t know hard labor.”
The poor brother answered:
“Why don’t you work? You wouldn’t know the humiliation of slavery.”
The wise say that it’s better to eat your own bread in peace than to wear a gold belt
and serve another. It’s better to knead lime and clay with your own hands than to put
them on your chest as a sign of submission. Saadi
Without manual labor there can be no true health. Without manual labor there can
be no healthy thoughts.
If you want to constantly be in a good mood, work until you’re tired but don’t
overwork. Idle people are often dissatisfied and angry. The same thing happens with
people who overwork.
6
Although it is not labeled as such in Tolstoy’s text, this saying is actually a Russian
proverb. In Russian culture, the expression “white hands” is shorthand for an aristocrat.
1049
Nothing reveals the falsity of our lives more clearly than people who take pride in the
fact that others do their work for them. They take pride in that which they should be
ashamed of.
Labor is a demand. Deprivation of labor causes suffering, but labor can never be a
virtue. Turning labor into a virtue is as much of an abomination as turning feeding a
person into a virtue and an honorable act.
People who take pride in their industriousness are often cruel.
There are two stupid proverbs: “Labor will make you hunchbacked but it won’t make
you rich,” and “Righteous labor won’t build you a stone palace.” These proverbs are
stupid because it’s better to be hunchbacked than unjustly wealthy, and righteous labor
is far better than a stone palace.
1050
People have been created to work, and when they pass work off onto slaves and free
themselves of it they suffer from boredom, empty conversation, deterioration of their
muscles, inability to work, clumsiness, cowardice, loss of fortitude, and illness. And how
many joys do idle people deprive themselves of: they deprive themselves of working in
nature, of intercourse with their comrades in labor, of the satisfaction of rest and food
when it serves to replenish what they’ve expended, communion with animals, and the
consciousness of their labor’s fruitfulness.
A poor widow’s modest contribution is not only just as valuable as the gifts of a
wealthy person, but only this modest contribution is true charity.
Only poor working people can know the joy of charity. Rich, idle people are deprived
of this joy.
1051
November 12
The Sin of Ill Will
Anger is bad for the person at whom you’re angry, but primarily anger is
harmful to the person who becomes angry.
The best drink in the world is when you already have an insulting word in your
mouth, and rather than releasing it you swallow it. Muhammad
You say you’re surrounded by bad people? If this is what you think, it’s a certain sign
that you yourself are very bad.
1052
If you’re so happy that you always say only what’s true, reject what’s false, doubt only
what’s doubtful, and desire only what’s good and useful, you’ll never become angry with
evil and thoughtless people.
“But they’re thieves and swindlers!” You say.
But what is a thief or a swindler? In fact, it’s a person lost in delusion. Certainly, you
should pity such a person, not get angry with him. If you can, convince him that he’s
harming himself by living the way he is and he’ll stop committing evil acts. And if he
still doesn’t understand, then there’s no surprise that he lives badly.
But you say that such people must be punished.
If a person’s eyes are infected and he goes blind, you wouldn’t say he needs to be
punished. So why would you want to punish a person who’s been deprived of something
more valuable than his eyes: the ability to live rationally? You shouldn’t become angry
with such people, but rather pity them.
Pity such unhappy people and try to make sure their delusions don’t enrage you.
Remember how often you yourself have sinned, and rather be angry with yourself for
holding so much unkindness and malice in your soul. Epictetus
A deep river doesn’t feel resentment when someone throws a stone into it. In the
same way, if a person becomes resentful when someone offends him, he’s not a river but
a puddle.
Let’s remember that we all return to the earth, and so let’s be humble and mild.
Based on a Passage by Saadi
1053
To be moral means to be free in your soul. People who constantly get angry with
others, who are incessantly fearful of one thing or another and who give in to their
passions can never be free in their souls. He who cannot be free in his soul looks without
seeing, listens without hearing, and eats without tasting. Confucius
Evil doesn’t produce its fruits immediately in this world but, like the Earth, brings
them forth in their own time. And these fruits are horrific. From the Laws of Manu
The greatest virtue is to do no evil even to one’s enemies.
He who plots the destruction of another certainly destroys himself.
Commit no evil. Poverty can never serve as a justification for evil. If you commit evil
you’ll become even poorer.
People can escape the consequences of their enemies’ wrath, but they can’t escape the
consequences of their own sins. This shadow will follow on their heels until it destroys
them.
Let him who wishes not to live in grief and sorrow do no evil to others.
If a person loves himself, let him commit no evil, no matter how insignificant it
might be. From the Kural
1054
November 13
The Temptation of Pride
If a person is good and kind but fails to admit his errors and tries to justify
himself, he can very quickly turn from a good person into the most terrible villain.
It’s easier to enlighten the world’s stupidest person than to enlighten a proud
person.
Christ revealed to people what they already knew: all people are equal, because one
and the same spirit lives in them all. However, from time immemorial people have
divided themselves into royalty, aristocracy, the wealthy, laborers and the poor, so that
even though they know they’re all equal they still live as if they were ignorant of this fact
and say that people can’t be equal. Don’t believe this. Learn from children. A child
doesn’t respect a king any more than an ordinary person. Do the same. Meet all people
with love and kindness and treat everyone equally. If someone exalts himself, don’t
honor him any more than others. If some disparage others, then try particularly hard to
honor those who’ve been disparaged as much as you honor other people. Remember
that in everyone lives the same spirit of God, and we know of nothing greater than this.
1055
Proud people are harmful only to themselves in that they deprive themselves of the
greatest blessing of all: companionship with others. For other people they’re not
harmful, they’re simply useless.
You can understand why people might consider themselves unequal, since one
person might be stronger and bigger than another, or smarter, or bolder, or more
knowledgeable or kinder than someone else. However, people aren’t generally
categorized in this way and ranked higher and lower according to these criteria. People
are considered unequal because one is called a prince and another a peasant; one wears
expensive clothes and another wears bast shoes.
You can’t exalt one person above others. You can’t do this because a person’s
strength is in his soul, and no one knows a person’s soul but God.
People who exalt themselves above others aren’t as guilty of creating human
inequality as people who consider themselves less than those who exalt themselves.
1056
All people who are bound to a government transfer responsibility for the acts they
commit onto each other: the peasant who’s drafted as a soldier transfers it to the
nobleman or merchant who’s become an officer; the officer transfers it to the nobleman
who occupies the position of governor; the governor transfers it to the official’s son who
occupies the position of minister; the minister transfers it to the member of the royal
family who occupies the position of king; the king transfers it back onto the ministers,
noblemen, merchants and peasants. Not only do people relieve themselves of
consciousness of responsibility for the acts they commit, they lose moral consciousness of
their responsibility because by participating in the government they so continuously,
restlessly and thoroughly convince themselves and others that they’re not all the same
but differentiated from one another “like one star from another” that they start to
believe it.
In this inequality, in this elevation of some and denigration of others lies the primary
cause of people’s inability to see the stupidity of the way their lives are currently
arranged, and the cruelty and criminality of this deception, which some commit and
others endure.
1057
November 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
The main difference between people consists in the degree to which they live by
their own thoughts and those of others.
When people say, “you have act as others do,” it almost always means that you have
to act badly. Jean de La Bruyère
You can wear yourself out but no one will be amazed. Proverb
Prefer the company of a stranger who loves the truth to the company of a friend who
doesn’t.
The more people believe in one and the same thing, the more careful you need to be
in how deeply and attentively you examine it.
False shame is the Devil’s favorite tool. The Devil needs it more than false pride. He
can only encourage evil through false pride, but he can paralyze goodness through false
shame before societal opinion.
1058
When it’s difficult or almost impossible to understand why a person is acting as
strangely as he is, you can be sure that the reason for his actions is a desire for worldly
glory.
No sin holds people in its power so long, no sin conceals the vanity of worldly life so
enduringly, sometimes to the very end, and no sin distances people from the meaning of
human life and its true blessings like concern for worldly glory, no matter how it
manifests itself: in petty conceit, ambition, or love of fame.
This sin is particularly powerful because it fuses itself onto the notion of service to
others, and when a person seeks other people’s approval he easily deceives himself in
thinking that he’s doing all he does not for himself but for the benefit of others, whose
approval he achieves. Because of this, it is one of the most insidious and dangerous sins.
People free themselves from this sin only through tremendous effort and enormous
spiritual exertion.
1059
Christ once said, “Woe to you if everyone speaks well of you.”
The meaning of these words is that you shouldn’t establish an external goal for
yourself: pleasing people, adapting and fitting in with the majority of their imperfect
and conflicting tastes, desires and caprices. Instead, you should establish an inner goal
for yourself: pleasing God, listening to and aligning yourself with the one common law
of all the peoples of the world.
And just as masons can construct a building only when they hew out stones into
rectangles and not by adapting them to the irregularities and peculiarities of other
stones, so people will succeed in establishing the kingdom of God only by perfecting
themselves according to the universal laws of kindness and truth and not by educating
themselves and their children according to the conflicting and fickle demands of
worldly glory. Fyodor Strakhov
A wise man once said, “Live alone.” What this means is that you should work out
the question of your life with yourself, with God, and not based upon the advice of other
people and faith in them.
1060
November 15
The Temptation of Punishment
Without the prohibition of repaying evil with evil, all Christianity’s teachings are
empty words.
The evil from which people think they’re defending themselves by violence is
incomparably less than the evil they commit against themselves when they use violence
as a defense.
People who fail to understand the essence of Christ’s teaching are particularly
astounded by the precept of nonresistance to evil through violence. They think that if
people were to follow this precept evil people would be victorious, good people would
perish pointlessly, and humanity would be deprived of the possibility of life.
“You can’t help but oppose evil, because otherwise people’s lives wouldn’t be
provided for and evil people would destroy the good,” say those who possess a profane
conception of life. And they’re right for those who only know and believe the law of
violence.
Nonresistance to evil is an absurdity for the profane conception of life, but for the
Christian conception, in which people believe in the law of love, resistance to evil is an
absurdity that can never be justified.
1061
It’s remarkable that people who fail to understand Christ’s doctrine are quite
sickened when they’re reminded of the law of nonresistance to evil through violence.
Being reminded of this law is especially unpleasant to them because it directly demands
something that destroys the entire order of life they’ve become accustomed to. Therefore,
when this essential condition of love is mentioned, people who don’t want to change the
way of life to which they’ve become accustomed say it’s something special and
independent of the law of love and use every possible means to recast and deny it.
Should Christ’s words about love of those who hate you, of your enemies, without
any exception, be understood as they were spoken and expressed or in some other way?
If they should be understood differently, then someone should explain how they should
be understood. But no one ever does this. The clergy are silent on this question. What
does this mean? It means that all these people who call themselves Christians want to
conceal from themselves and others the essence of Christ’s doctrine, because if people
understood it as they should it would change the entire structure of their lives, and the
current structure is profitable to them.
1062
“Self-‐preservation is the first law of nature,” say the rejecters of the law of non-‐
resistance.
I tell them, “I agree. So what are the consequences?”
“The consequence is that from the law of nature comes self-‐defense against
everything that threatens one with extinction, and from this comes the conclusion that
struggle and the consequence of every struggle, the death of the weakest, is the law of
nature, and this law undoubtedly justifies war, violence, and judicial revenge. So the
direct conclusion and consequence of the law of self-‐preservation is that self-‐defense is
legal, and therefore the doctrine of non-‐resistance through violence is wrong, since it
contradicts nature and is inapplicable to the conditions of life on earth.”
I agree that self-‐preservation is the first law of nature and that it motivates self-‐
defense. I agree that people, following the example of the lower organisms, usually fight,
harm and even kill each other under the pretence of self-‐defense or revenge. However, I
see in all this merely that despite the fact that their higher human nature has been
revealed to them people, the majority of people, all the same continue to live according to
the law of animal instinct and thereby deprive themselves of the most effective method
of self-‐defense—the repayment of evil with good—which they could employ if they’d
follow the human law of love instead of the bestial law of violence. Adin Ballou
1063
If violence was a true and infallible method of self-‐preservation then it would
preserve human life and protect it from violence, and by applying this method of self-‐
preservation to life such results would be achieved.
Are these the results of applying the law of revenge for the last seven thousand years
or even longer without cessation? By the most conservative estimate, fourteen billion
people have been killed in the name of the law of revenge through wars and executions,
and all these victims, created by the doctrine of struggle for the sake of self-‐preservation,
have failed to bring about the desired result. How many unspeakable tortures, pains,
miseries and tragedies has humanity endured by pursuing the goal of self-‐preservation
along this path, how many more victims are produced even now as a result of this
inhuman law, and all in vain!
Indeed, don’t all these cries and tears, all the misery and bloodshed lead us to the
conclusion that the law of revenge and struggle is nothing more than a savage
consequence of blind instinct, dark ignorance and barbaric superstition?!
Indeed, don’t people understand that the law of struggle and revenge isn’t a method
of emancipation but a most evil enemy of humanity, the destroyer of the human race?!
Adin Ballou
1064
The clergy openly reject the obligatory nature of the doctrine of non-‐resistance; they
teach that it isn’t binding and that there are circumstances when you must deviate from
it. At the same time they don’t dare to say that they fail to recognize this simple, clear
law, which is inseparably bound to Christ’s entire doctrine—the doctrine of meekness,
humility, submissive bearing of one’s cross, self-‐renunciation and love of one’s
enemies—a law without which the entire doctrine becomes nothing more than empty
words.
It is for this reason and no other that we see the amazing phenomenon that, despite
the fact that such Christian clergymen have been preaching Christianity for nineteen
hundred years, the people of the world continue to live like pagans.
1065
November 16
The Superstition of Violence
Nothing interferes with the improvement of your own life like concern over
organizing of the lives of others, about the correction and improvement of other people’s
lives.
Each person knows for himself how difficult it is to change his own life to be as he’d
like it. When it concerns others, then it seems that it’s only a matter of ordering and
frightening them and they’ll become the way we’d like them to be.
People often live badly because they worry about arranging other people’s lives
rather than their own. They think that their life is only a single life and so its
organization isn’t as important as the arrangement of the lives of many, or the lives of
all. But they forget that they’re able to organize their own lives, while they can’t arrange
the lives of others.
1066
As with any superstition, people can only free themselves from the superstition that
one person can force others to live according to his will only by understanding what true
faith is. As soon as a person understands that the entire business of both his life and the
lives of all people consists in making oneself better, he immediately begins to concern
himself with what he can: the arrangement of his own inner life, and not the lives of
other people.
When a person creates for himself all sorts of responsibilities for structuring other
people’s lives, he involuntarily neglects his responsibilities to himself and his soul, and
yet these are the only ones that matter.
All a person has to do is stop trying to solve external questions and place before
himself the one question that’s truly innate to a human being—how can he live his life
better—and all external questions will be solved in the best possible way.
1067
The main harm caused by the superstition of structuring other people’s lives: as soon
as a person allows the possibility of understanding and seeing what’s good for a large
group of people and believes that he can bring about this good, there’s no limit to the
evil he can bring forth in the name of this proposition. In past times tortures,
inquisitions and slavery were founded on this proposition. In our day it’s the foundation
for courts, prisons, land ownership, executions and wars, as a result of which million
perish.
In order not to fall into this superstition, a person must understand and remember
that he hasn’t been called to structure the lives of others and that he has no power to do
so, that he and all people have been called to accomplish only one task: to achieve inner
perfection, the one thing they always have power over and the only thing that can
influence other people’s lives.
There’s no governmental system that can correct evil as long as people remain as
they are now.
As soon as you begin organizing other people’s lives through violence you
inescapably organize them to your own advantage.
The less a person is satisfied with his inner life, the more he takes part in external,
societal life.
1068
November 17
The Superstition of Government
There are two types of responsibilities: one to people and one to God. Human
responsibilities-‐-‐for example, the responsibility of a king, a governor, an elder, a soldier
and so on—exist only for a time. Responsibility to God lasts throughout life, from birth
until death. You can refuse human responsibilities, but you can never refuse your
responsibilities to God.
Some people live, eat, work, marry, raise children, and then other people come to
them and tell them that they should give part of their property to them, become soldiers
and do whatever they say. Even though the first group of people greatly outnumbers the
second group, they not only tolerate this but help the second group themselves. How can
this happen? It happens because people believe that there’s a system it’s absolutely
impossible to live without, and that people who control this system (the system is called
government) can establish laws that they must obey instead of the law of God.
The only people who see the powerful of this world as great are those who stand
before them on their knees. If only people would get up off their knees and stand on
their feet they’d see that the people they thought were great are no different than they
are.
1069
People say that governmental systems are just because they’re established by the will
of the majority. However, first of all, this is false: governmental systems aren’t
established by the will of the majority but by force. Furthermore, even if they really were
supported by the majority, that still wouldn’t make them just.
Not only does one person have no right to control the majority, the majority has no
right to control one person.
Know that when people particularly extol and glorify some sort of affair, that affair
is bad.
Anything that’s good and necessary for people in and of itself needs no praise, but as
soon as an affair becomes bad in and of itself while people still want to engage in it, they
extol and glorify it in an excessive fashion. This is the case with all official duties.
Government creates criminals faster than it punishes them. Our prisons are stuffed
full of criminals that the government has perverted with its unjust laws, oppressive
monopolies and all its institutions. First we create a multitude of laws that generate
criminals, and then we create a pile of laws in order to punish people for these crimes.
Benjamin Tucker
1070
When a government makes demands of any true Christian that violate his
conscience, he must say: “I can prove neither the necessity nor the harm of government; I
only know that, first of all, I have no need of government, and second, that I cannot
perform any of the acts that are necessary to sustain the government.”
The main evil of a governmental system isn’t the destruction of lives, but the
destruction of love and the creation of divisions between people.
If a traveler were to see on some distant island people whose homes were equipped
with loaded weapons and were patrolled night and day by guards, he’d certainly think
that only bandits lived on that island. And indeed, isn’t this the case with the European
governments?
How little influence religion has on people, or else how far we are from true religion.
Georg Lichtenberg
If you accept false and onerous laws and submit to them, not only can you never
establish truth but you can’t even reduce falsehood.
1071
November 18
The Superstition of the Church
The lesson of Christianity in its true sense is so clear that little children
understand it. The only people who fail to understand it are those who don’t want to live
a Christian life.
In order to understand true Christianity you must first of all reject false Christianity.
“Don’t call yourselves teachers, for you have one teacher—Christ—and you are all
brothers. And don’t call anyone on earth father, for you have one Father in heaven. And
don’t call yourselves mentors, for you have one mentor: Christ.” (Matthew 22:8-‐10).
So taught Christ. He said this because he knew that there were people in his time
who taught the people a false law of God and that there would be such people in the
future. He knew this and told his followers not to listen to them, because their teaching
is unnecessary and harmful, because it obscures the simple and clear doctrine that was
revealed to all people and lodged in every person’s heart.
This doctrine is to love God as the greatest good and truth, to love your neighbor as
yourself, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
1072
It’s impossible to assess or measure the harm that false religion has created and
continues to create.
Religion is the establishment of man’s relationship with God and the world and the
determination of man’s purpose that results from this relationship. What can a person’s
life be if this relationship and the purpose that results from it is false?
To ask God for material things—rain, health, deliverance from enemies and so
on—is impossible first of all because at the very same moment others might be asking
for the exact opposite, but most of all it’s impossible because in the material world we’ve
been given what we need. You can pray for God’s help in living a spiritual life, a life
where no matter what happens to us it’s all for our good. Praying for physical and
external things is a sign that people don’t understand Christianity.
Church doctrine, which is violently instilled in generation after generation with the
cooperation of government and whose preachers live in a manner that resembles
Christian life less and less, is ever losing all semblance of Christian teaching. At the
same time, thanks to mass communication, the development of universal of education
and study of the Gospels, as well as mutual assistance, people are beginning to
understand more and more the deception that frauds have blinded them with, and the
truth that’s becoming ever clearer is calling to people and uniting them in a single,
universal Christian brotherhood.
1073
From Christianity’s earliest days, the Apostles and the first Christians
misunderstood Christ’s teachings so much that they taught those who accepted
Christianity that the most important thing was to believe in Christ’s resurrection, the
miracle of baptism, the descent of the Holy Spirit and so on, but never or at least very
rarely mentioned Christ’s moral teachings, as is apparent from all the speeches of the
Apostles in the Acts.
Belief in miracles that, in their opinion, confirmed the truth of their
pronouncements was the most important thing, while belief in Christ’s actual doctrine
was of secondary importance and was often completely forgotten or misunderstood. For
example, we see in the Acts the execution of Ananius in the name of Christ, the teacher
of love and forgiveness.
A person is wasting his energy if he tortures himself with repentance instead of
using of his spirit to change his way of life for the better while there’s time and,
moreover, he becomes a victim of an even worse consequence: he thinks that by
repentance alone he’s settled his responsibilities and has released himself from the
responsibility of working toward self-‐perfection, which he’d work twice as hard on if he
wanted to proceed in a rational manner. Immanuel Kant
Faith isn’t trust, but the consciousness of truth within you. Therefore, anyone who
believes what he’s been told doesn’t yet have faith.
1074
The Creed is studied and read like a prayer in churches, while according to church
doctrine the Sermon on the Mount is read once a year as just another passage from the
Gospels, and even then it’s only read on weekdays. This is how it has to be, for people
who believe in an evil and insensitive God—one that damned the human race, doomed
his son to be a sacrifice and sent a portion of humanity into eternal torment—can
never believe in the God of love. A person who believes in a Christ-‐God who will come in
glory in the future to judge and punish the living and the dead can never believe in the
Christ who commanded people to turn the other cheek to an offender, to refuse to judge
others, to forgive and love one’s enemies. A person who believes that the Old Testament
was divinely inspired, and who believes in the sainthood of David, who ordered the
murder of an old man on his deathbed for offending him when he couldn’t kill him
himself since he was bound by an oath (1 Kings 2:8), and other similar vile acts the Old
Testament is filled with, could never believe in the moral law of Christ. A person who
believes in the church’s doctrine that Christianity is compatible with executions and
wars could never believe in the brotherhood of all people.
Most importantly, a person who believes in salvation through faith in redemption or
sacraments no longer has the ability to believe in the fulfillment of Christ’s moral
teachings in his life.
A person who’s learned the church’s sacrilegious doctrine that he can’t save himself
through his own efforts but must use other means will inevitably flee to those means
and not to his own strength, which he’s been convinced it’s a sin to rely upon. The
church’s entire doctrine, with its redemption and sacraments, excludes Christ’s doctrine
in its true sense.
1075
If people would simply understand the meaning of all they accept as true without
any foundation, they’d have to doubt all they believe. However, it turns out quite the
opposite: people who proclaim the most unlikely superstitions, these people are most
determined and convinced that all they say is indubitable truth.
Nineteen centuries ago, when beastly inequality was developing in society, when the
masses were plunged into hopeless slavery, an obscure, uneducated carpenter rose up
from a little Jewish village and, disregarding the orthodoxy and rituals of his age, began
to preach to peasants and fishermen the good news that God is the father of men, that
all men are equal and brothers, and taught his disciples to pray for the coming of the
Kingdom of God on Earth. Professors of the institutions of higher learning derided him;
orthodox preachers cursed him. He was labelled a dreamer, a scandal-‐monger, a
“communist.” Finally, educated society became frightened and crucified him between
two bandits. But his word traveled on. It was transmitted by refugees and slaves and
began to spread despite all prohibitions and persecutions until it transformed the world
and amidst ancient civilization a new one arose. Then the privileged classes united once
again, hung up the image of the son of the people in courts and on the graves of kings,
blessed falsehood with his name and perverted his teaching into a defense of societal
injustice. However, once again these great ideas—that God is the father of all people,
that all men are brothers, and that a life in which no one is overworked and no one
suffers from want is possible—has begun to awaken in the minds of the common
people. Henry Georg
1076
We know nothing of our future, and we should never try to learn anything about it
other than that which is rationally bound to moral motivations and goals. To achieve
such a goal, a person must have faith that there’s no single good deed that wouldn’t
have consequences for the person who does it in both this and his future life, and that
therefore no matter how unfit a person might consider himself at the end of his life, he
must not stifle his determination to accomplish so much as the smallest good deed that
he’s still able to accomplish, and that he has grounds to hope that such a deed,
proportionally to the degree to which good intentions govern him as he acts, will
nevertheless have a greater value than those vacuous effacements of sins that don’t
reduce a person’s guilt and don’t make up for a lack of good deeds in the least.
Immanuel Kant
Just as a fire can’t be a little bit hot and a little bit cold but is only a fire when it
burns, so the truth can’t be a little bit true and a little bit false but only completely true
when it reveals to us the way things are and not the way we’d like things to be.
1077
November 19
The Superstition of Science
Those who know little talk a lot. He who knows more talks less. This is because the
person who knows little considers everything he knows to be important and wants to tell
it to everyone. He who knows a great deal also knows that there’s much more remaining
for him to learn, and so he speaks only when it’s needed for the benefit of others. Based
on a Passage by Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
Knowledge humbles the great, astonishes the ordinary, and puffs up the petty.
A person’s knowledge doesn’t become important because he calls his knowledge
science. The only thing that has been and will be important is that which is necessary for
the happiness of all people, not just one person.
It would seem that in order to acknowledge the importance of activities called
scholarship you’d have to prove that such activities are useful. Scholars generally claim
that since they’re studying general subjects, their activities will surely be useful sooner or
later.
1078
We live in an age of philosophy, science and reason. It seems as though all the
sciences have come together to enlighten the path of human life for us. Huge libraries
have been opened for all; everywhere gymnasiums, schools and universities give us the
ability from childhood to employ the wisdom of people who lived over the course of
millennia. It would seem that all of this would contribute to the education of our minds
and the fortification of our reason. So, have we become better or wiser from all of this?
Do we know the path and purpose of our mission any better? Do we know our
responsibilities or, most importantly, the happiness of our lives any better? What have
we acquired from all this vain knowledge, other than enmity, hatred, confusion and
doubt? All religious teachings and sects argue that they alone have found the truth.
Every writer alone knows where happiness lies. One tells us there’s no body, another tells
us there’s no soul, a third tells us that there’s no connection between body and soul, a
fourth claims that man is an animal, and a fifth argues that God is merely a mirror.
Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau
1079
Our current level of knowledge is insufficient to understand even the life of the
human body. Look at what you need to know for this: a body needs space, time, motion,
warmth, light, food, water, air and much more. Everything in nature is so intricately
connected that it’s impossible to understand one thing without studying the rest. It’s
impossible to understand the parts without understanding the whole. We’ll understand
the life of our body only when we’ve studied everything that it needs, and in order to do
that it’s essential to study the entire universe. But the universe is endless, and man
cannot achieve knowledge of it. Therefore, we can never fully understand the life of our
body either. Blaise Pascal
More harmful to true knowledge than anything else is the use of concepts and words
that aren’t completely clear, and this is exactly what so-‐called scholars do when they
create unclear, artificial and imaginary words for the sake of an obscure concept.
1080
Socrates constantly told his disciples that in proper education each discipline should
only be followed to a specific point, past which one shouldn’t go. He said that in
geometry it’s sufficient to know enough to be able to correctly measure a piece of land
you’re buying or selling, or to divide an inheritance into pieces, or to distribute work
among laborers. He said, “It’s so simple that with just a little effort you’ll have no trouble
with any sort of measurement, even if you tried to measure the entire world.” However,
he didn’t approve of employing large amounts of effort on such disciplines, and
although he himself knew them he nevertheless said that they could occupy a person’s
entire life and divert him from other valuable disciplines, while they themselves are
completely unnecessary. In astronomy, he said a person should wish to know enough
about the heavenly bodies to determine the hours of the night, the days of the month
and the seasons of the year, to be able to follow a path, to hold one’s course on the open
sea and to change the guards. He added, “This discipline is so simple that any hunter or
sailor, really anyone at all who wants to study it, can master it.” However, he most firmly
condemned studying this field to the point where a person learns the different orbits the
heavenly bodies follow, measures the sizes of the planets and stars, their distance from
the earth, their motions and variations, because he saw no use in such knowledge. He
held such a low opinion of these activities not because of ignorance, since he himself
knew these disciplines, but because he didn’t want pointless study to waste a person’s
time and energy that could be used for the activity of greatest value to a person: his
moral perfection. Xenophon
1081
It’s better not to know much of what it’s possible to know that to try to learn
something that can’t be understood.
Nothing corrupts and weakens a person’s mental powers and stimulates his conceit
as much as soaring in the realms of the unknowable. To pretend to understand
something you don’t is worse than anything.
Wisdom is a great and vast subject; it demands all the free time that can be
dedicated to it. However many questions you succeed in answering, all the same you’ll
have to torment yourself over a multitude of other questions that require investigation
and solution. These questions are so vast and so numerous that they demand that you
expel all that’s unnecessary from your consciousness in order to grant every bit of space
to the mind’s work. Should I waste my life on words alone? It frequently happens that
scholars think more about discussions than about life. Observe what evil excessive
philosophizing gives birth to, and how dangerous it can be to the truth. Seneca
1082
November 20
Effort
A good life is granted only to someone who strives for it. And nothing interferes with
a person making the effort to create a good life. We all need to understand and
remember this.
Never say about a good deed: “It’s not worth the trouble to try; it’s so easy that when
I feel like it, I can do it.” Never think or talk this way. All good deeds, even the very
smallest, are accomplished through effort, and this effort gives new strength for living a
good life. All bad deeds diminish this strength.
1083
We think that true labor can only be expended on something visible—building a
house, sowing a field, feeding the cattle—and that working on our soul, something
invisible, is unimportant: something you can choose to do or not do. However, any sort
of work other than work on your soul is trivial. This one activity—working on freeing
your soul from your body in order to make it more spiritual and filled with love each
and every day—is the only true labor. All other work is useful only when we’re carrying
out the primary work of our souls.
Don’t lose heart and don’t grieve if you don’t accomplish all the good that you
wanted to.
If you’ve fallen into temptation and become worse than you were, try to endure your
trial meekly and return to the place you were before, and if you can, go even higher. This
is the business of life. Marcus Aurelius
If there’s something that’s great and good for you, it won’t come when you try to
summon it the first or second time; it won’t come easily, without labor. Porphyry said
that the road of the Gods consists of steep ascents and thorny paths. Ralph Waldo
Emerson
1084
There’s no external method people use to lull themselves to sleep that deprives them
of the ability to exert internal effort (which is the simplest and most reliable way to free
themselves) as much as directing the minds they’ve been given toward what in our day is
called science.
If a person isn’t lulled to sleep by luxury, he’s lulled to sleep by the superstition of
religion. If he escapes from the superstition of religion, he inevitably falls for the
superstition of science, the most inconspicuous, cunning and therefore the most brutal
and corrupting superstition. When he imagines himself in possession of the final limit
of scholarly wisdom, a person who’s fallen for this superstition loses all ability to exert
inner effort. This inner effort is the only thing that can free him, but the doctrine he’s
internalized tells him it’s an illusion.
Such a person thinks he’s simply one of the manifestations of the material world and
has no interest in the question of what he must do in this world, but rather in how he’s
subject to the imaginary laws of this material world.
The business of the wise is to become God. The business of the fool is to become dust
and dirt. Angelus Silesius
Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it shall be opened
to you. For every petitioner shall receive, every seeker shall find, and every person who
knocks shall have the door opened for him. Matthew 7:7-‐8
1085
Reason can only become clear in a good person. A person can be good only when
reason becomes clear within him. For a good life you need the light of reason, and for
the light of reason you need to live a good life. One helps the other. Therefore, if reason
doesn’t help a good life, it’s not true reason, and if life doesn’t help reason, it’s not a
good life. Chinese Wisdom
They say that one swallow doesn’t make the spring. However, does it mean that
because one swallow doesn’t make the spring that a swallow that feels the spring and is
expecting it will never fly but just wait? If every bud and blade of grass waited like this,
spring would never come. In the same way, in order to establish the Kingdom of God you
can’t worry about whether you’re the first or the thousandth swallow; you must do what
you need to in order to bring it about as long as you feel the approach of the Kingdom of
God, even if only you alone feel it.
1086
November 21
Self-‐Renunciation
Jesus told his disciples: “If you want to follow me, repudiate yourself, take up your
cross and follow me. For he who wants to save his soul—his life—will lose it; and he
who loses his soul for my sake will save it. What good does it do a person if he obtains
the whole world and harms his soul? What ransom will a man give for his soul?”
Matthew 10:24-‐26
Heaven and earth are immortal. They’re immortal because they don’t exist for their
own sake. Therefore they’re immortal. It’s the same with man. If a person renounces his
own self and seeks nothing for himself, he becomes immortal.
Based on a Passage by Lao Tsu
For the life of each individual person as well as the life of all people together there’s
only one law: if you wish to improve your life, you must be prepared to sacrifice it.
True life begins only when true self-‐renunciation begins. Thomas Carlyle
1087
Understanding your duty in its complete purity is not only more natural and
incomparably simpler, clearer, and more comprehensible in practice than any
motivation whose source is connected to happiness and striving for it (which always
demands a lot of artificiality and many flimsy arguments). It’s also far more powerful
and persistent before the court of common sense and promises greater success than any
motivation whose source is self-‐interest, as long as you derive your understanding of
your duty from common sense, which is completely independent of self-‐serving
motivations.
Consciousness of what you’re able to do because you must opens the depths of the
divine gifts that allow you to feel the greatness and loftiness of your true purpose just as
clearly as a holy prophet. If people would pay more attention to this and accustom
themselves to dissociating virtue entirely from all the benefits that serve as rewards for
fulfilling their duty and see virtue in all its purity, and if unceasing exercise of virtue
(the process of encouraging the fulfillment of frequently neglected responsibilities)
would be turned into a principle of personal and societal education, then the moral
condition of humanity would improve. The reason that history hasn’t produced positive
results in moral education is that the false proposition of incentive connected to duty
seems too weak and distant and that a more tangible incentive derived from expectation
of reward in this world and in the world to come from the fulfilment of duty works more
powerfully on the soul. However, a person’s consciousness of a spiritual source within
him that evokes self-‐renunciation is far stronger than any reward that can urge him to
fulfill the law of goodness. Immanuel Kant
1088
Man is conscious of the destructive nature of the sins of sloth, gluttony, lechery and
hostility and sincerely struggles with them. People close to him can help him. However,
all these efforts are in vain. All a person has to do is simply forget himself and—what
an amazing thing—he can free himself of all these seemingly unconquerable sins
without any effort at all. Nothing more obviously demonstrates the powerful and
beneficent influence on life that self-‐renunciation produces for the sake of the only thing
a person can achieve, which every person can achieve: consciousness of one’s spiritual
nature.
We suffer from our own selves, from the demands of our self, and we all know
there’s one way to stop this suffering. But we want to forget it and so we look for oblivion
in various activities: art, science, wine, or smoking. But there is no true oblivion. And
there’s no true oblivion because oblivion isn’t found in fun or intoxication, but only in a
life lived for God, in consciousness of one’s service of God. Some people either don’t
know this or have forgotten it, and they live an egoistic life and then complain and are
surprised that their lives are bad.
1089
“God says, ‘Man! Simply follow my laws and you will become like Me; Say “let it be”
and it shall be.’” (Muhammad)
In other words, if a person lives in complete harmony with the world and the laws of
nature, then his will is in harmony with the will of God and he’ll receive whatever he
desires. Abdullah Al-‐Mamun Suhrawardy
A person who renounces his separate personality is powerful, because his personality
conceals the God within him. As soon as he casts off his personality it’s no longer he who
acts but God.
1090
November 22
Humility
If a person does not humble himself, he will not retain virtue within himself. Talmud
As water cannot be held in the heights, so kindness and wisdom cannot appear
among the proud. Both seek low places. Persian Wisdom
The main task of every person’s life is to become kinder and better. So how can you
become better when you already consider yourself so good?
The very shortcomings that we find troublesome and intolerable in others are
absolutely weightless within ourselves: we don’t feel them. When people talk about
others and paint them in a terrible light, they don’t realize they’re describing
themselves.
Nothing would correct our shortcomings more quickly than to have the ability to see
ourselves in others. Seeing our shortcomings at a distance, seeing them as they really
are, we would hate them as we should. Jean de La Bruyère
1091
A person deprived of humility is inclined to constantly reproach others. He only
looks at their mistakes while his own passions grow and grow, taking him further and
further away from his own improvement. Buddhist Wisdom
Water is fluid, soft and malleable, but if it falls on something hard, rigid and
unyielding, nothing can stand against it: it sweeps away homes, tosses huge ships like
splinters, and erodes the land. Air is even more fluid, softer and more malleable than
water, and it’s stronger when it falls upon something hard, rigid and unyielding. It rips
up trees by the roots, lifts the very ocean up into huge waves and drives water into the
clouds. The tender, soft and malleable conquers the hard, rigid, stern and unyielding.
It’s the same in people’s lives. If you want to be unconquerable, be tender, soft and
malleable. Based on a Passage by Lao Tsu
Humility grants a joy that is inaccessible to the self-‐satisfied and the proud.
1092
All we have to do is think and we’ll always find within ourselves some sort of guilt
before humanity. It might be something as small as the crime of exploiting certain
advantages that result from people’s inequality in society, for the sake of which others
experience greater deprivation. If we do this, it will make it more difficult to displace the
thought of our duty with narcissistic thoughts about our self-‐worth. Immanuel Kant
Rivers and seas rule over all the valleys through which they flow because they are
beneath them.
Therefore, if a holy person wishes to be above the people he must strive to be beneath
them. If he wishes to rule them, he must be behind them.
And so if a holy person lives above the people, they don’t realize it. He’s ahead of the
people, but they don’t suffer from it. Therefore the world continuously praises him. He
fights with no one and no one in the world fights with him. Lao Tsu
A person who considers himself master of his life cannot be humble, because he
thinks he’s obligated to no one. A person who considers his purpose service to God can’t
help but be humble, because he never feels that he’s fulfilled his responsibilities.
In order to learn humility, you have to catch your proud thoughts when you’re alone.
1093
November 23
Honesty
Don’t disregard truth even in the most unimportant trivialities. How you say
something and whether or not the person you say it to likes it is of no value. What’s of
value to you is that you say that which truly is.
It’s not reason’s task to teach man to love God and his neighbor. This is situated in
the human heart alongside reason. Reason has been given to man in order to show him
the difference between truth and falsehood. All man needs to do is cast out falsehood
and he will learn all he needs to learn.
Nothing can change a determination arrived at through reason. All that we know we
know through reason. Therefore, don’t believe anyone who tells you that you must reject
your reason. People who say this are like someone who advises you to extinguish your
one and only lantern when you’re trying to find your way in the dark.
1094
What sort of cloud envelops the world? Why is it so bleak? What contaminates it?
What is the great danger that lies within it?
This is the danger: people fail to live according to the divine reason that’s been given
to each of them and live according to the common, perverse reason that people have
developed for justifying their passions instead. People suffer and search for salvation.
What will save them? Only respect for their reason and adherence to it. Based on a
Saying from “Eastern Wisdom”
Occasionally the way a person defends a strange, irrational position—religious,
political, or scientific—can be astounding. If you look closely, you’ll see he’s defending
his own position.
As soon as someone tries to use a complex argument to explain an act, you can be
certain that act is bad.
Decisions of the conscience are straightforward and simple.
1095
One of man’s most evil characteristics is his love and respect for himself and his
desire for personal happiness. For it will turn out bad for him if he loves himself alone:
he wants to be great and sees that he’s nothing, he wants to be good and sees that he’s
bad, he wants people to love and respect him and sees that he’s repulsive to others
because of his faults and that they detest him. And when such a person sees that his
desires are unfulfilled he descends into the most criminal of affairs: he begins to hate
the truth that goes against him and wants this truth to be hidden from others. Since he
can’t do that, he tries to distort the truth as much as he can, both for himself and for
others. In this way, he hopes to conceal his faults both from himself and others. But by
hiding them he merely makes them bigger and stronger.
Based on a Passage by Blaise Pascal
All inane beliefs are perpetuated most of all by the justifications they provide for the
foul acts of people who profess those beliefs.
In order to live a good life you have to place truth above everything else, so that you
don’t fear speaking the truth even if the truth harms you as you speak.
1096
What is reason? Everything we define, we define only through our reason. So how
shall we define reason?
If we define everything through reason, then we can’t define reason in the same way.
However, not only do we know what it is, it’s the only thing we know without doubt and
which we all know in the same way.
It’s easy to live among people if you live like everyone else, and it’s easy to live alone if
you live according to your conscience. It’s good to teach yourself to live with others not as
they live, but as your conscience wants you to live. In order to learn how to do this, you
have to free yourself from superstitions.
Just as a fire started on a prairie or in a forest will keep burning until it’s consumed
everything dry and dead and therefore fit to burn, a truthful word spoken aloud will
continue to act until it’s annihilated all the falsehood that surrounds and conceals the
truth on every side and is fit for annihilation. A fire smolders for a long time, but as
soon as it flares up it very quickly consumes all that can burn. In the same way, a
thought asks to be released for a long time but finds no expression, but all it has to do is
find a clear expression in words and lies and evil are very quickly destroyed.
1097
November 24
Restraint in Deed
In our modern world, people think that freedom is to be found in licentiousness,
while true freedom is found in the conquest of your self and your will so that in the end
you achieve a moral condition in which you are always the true master of your self at
every moment. On the other hand, licentiousness of desires only leads to slavery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Most often we find ourselves repenting not for what we failed to do, but for what we
shouldn’t have done.
For each time you commit evil against yourself and others because of what you failed
to do, you commit evil ten thousand times because of something you did.
A stone can’t turn into something dangerous; it can’t even turn itself into something
useful. A person can. You should remember that.
1098
People come up with their own inventions to bring about the Kingdom of God, and
the more they try the farther and farther away the Kingdom slips from them. If they’d
simply stop doing what they know is evil—killing, stealing, fornicating, cheating,
quarreling, and slandering—the Kingdom of God would come all on its own.
All that seems to us to be luxurious, sophisticated, magnificent, and marvelous, all
that comes easily, just as if it happened on its own. You have to put great effort into
trying to avoid doing what is unnecessary: in other words, doing things simply.
Every great act is achieved imperceptibly, humbly and simply. It’s impossible to sow,
build or think under bright lights, clatter and pageantry. Great, genuine acts are always
simple and unpretentious. In the same way, effort in restraining yourself from evil is
imperceptible, and these imperceptible efforts will bring you happiness.
Be on watch for the birth of evil. The voice of your soul reveals this birth: it becomes
uncomfortable and ashamed.
1099
Inaction isn’t weakness and submission. On the contrary, it’s the manifestation of
the greatest strength, the acceptance of God’s will into yourself. The bustle of life,
energetic worldly activity is for the most part a sign of weakness and submission.
Attendants to a king are one type of bustling actors, and there’s no more slavish
condition than theirs.
At times when people have observed inaction, there was justice and geniality. When
the cunning of ambition began, enmity in families began as well. When the similitude of
respect for one’s parents and the similitude of parents’ concern for their children began,
an inner affliction also began: the inner affliction the similitude of devotion and loyalty
to the rulers. Lao Tsu
Rejoice! Rejoice! The purpose of life is joy. Rejoice at the sky, the sun, the stars, the
grass, the trees, animals, people. If this joy is disturbed it means that you’ve made a
mistake somewhere. Find your mistake and correct it. Most often this joy is disturbed by
money and ambition. Both are satiated by labor. Flee from self-‐centered labor,
torturous, heavy labor. Working for someone else’s benefit is not labor. Be like children:
be forever joyful.
1100
November 25
Restraint in Word
People learn how to talk, when the most important science is how and when to
remain silent.
Rarely, if ever, do we regret remaining silent, but how many times do we regret what
we’ve said? And we’d regret it even more if we knew all the consequences of our words.
The greater your desire to speak, the greater the danger that you’ll say something
stupid.
Say only that which you clearly understand, otherwise remain silent.
Accustom your tongue to the words: “I don’t know.” Eastern Wisdom7
He who can remain silent even when he’s in the right is truly strong. Cato
7
This quote is originally from the Talmud, Brachot 4A. Many thanks to Rabbi Moshe
Goldman for this information.
1101
In his “Diary of a Writer,” Dostoevsky cites a Turkish proverb: “If you’ve set out for
some goal and begin to stop along the road to throw rocks at every dog that barks at
you, you’ll never reach the goal.”
Irony is a foul weapon; it’s pathetic to throw, but it’s as deplorable as violence.
Dull, limited people do stupid things far less often than intelligent people. Why is
that? Fyodor Dostoevsky
He who talks a lot does little. Folk Saying
1102
November 26
Restraint in Thought
Work on purifying your thoughts. If you have no evil thoughts, you’ll commit no evil
acts either. Confucius
It’s more important to know what you shouldn’t think about than what you should.
You can’t fight off an evil thought when it enters your head, but you can understand
that the thought is evil. If you know that it’s evil, then you can refuse to give in to it. The
thought comes to me that such and such person is bad, and I can’t help but think it.
However, if I understand that the thought is malign I can recall that judging people is
wrong, that I myself am bad, and once I remember this I can restrain myself from
judging others even in my thoughts.
Contemplation is the path to immortality, while hastiness of thought is the path to
death. He who is awakened to contemplation never dies; he who thinks recklessly and
who has no faith resembles a dead man.
Wake yourself. Then, having sovereignty over yourself and penetrating yourself, you
will be unchangeable. Buddhist Wisdom
1103
In the bustle of life, surrounded by the excitement of temptations, we don’t have any
time to look for ways to resist our desires. Establish your goal when there are no
temptations, when you’re alone. Only in this way will you have the strength to struggle
with temptations before you succumb to them. Jeremy Bentham
The most valuable quality of thought is the ability to think freely and completely
independently of thoughts of the advantages or disadvantages of your situation.
When examining religious questions, the most important questions in life, in all of
man’s life, try to remain independent of what’s suggested to you from within, as well as
from considerations that result from your situation. Rather, be ready to follow the truth
no matter where it leads you. Truth can lead nowhere except to love and genuine
happiness.
It’s sad to see people worrying more about how to live under the circumstances they
find themselves in, which are completely outside their control, than about choosing their
own circumstances and occupations based upon their own reason and conscience. If a
person has been convinced beforehand that the work he’s been told to undertake is just,
then he’ll no longer consider whether or not this work really is good or not; he’ll only be
concerned with how to complete it successfully. However, if he were to look into the
essence of this work himself, he might change his course of action entirely. Blaise Pascal
1104
Friendship between individuals as well as between nations is not achieved through
expressions of the desire to form these relations, but rather through the striving of each
individual as well as each nation toward recognition and fulfillment of truth in life. Only
when there is such striving will people truly and firmly become friends, even if they
never think about friendship. Truth inexorably unites them. Truth is attained through
mental effort.
Great thoughts have no need of people’s praise. They are powerful and therefore
move people whether or not they want to be moved.
Christ said: if you pray, do it alone. Only then will God hear you. God is within you,
and in order for Him to hear you, you need only expel everything that conceals Him.
God wants our relationship with Him to be the continual fulfillment of His will
throughout our lives. But life’s temptations and our passions continually divert us from
this fulfillment at every moment. And so, recognizing this, we seek refuge in an external,
verbal expression of our relationship with God, in prayer, in an attempt to call up within
ourselves the living consciousness of our dependence upon Him. Such prayer reminds us
of our sins and our responsibilities and saves us from temptation, if in the moment of
temptation we succeed in calling up within ourselves a prayerful mood.
1105
November 27
There is No Evil
Don’t argue about how evil came into the world. Evil only comes from you yourself.
A person who’s young and inexperienced doesn’t know what older people have
learned through experience. He doesn’t know that things that are unpleasant, difficult,
everything that we call trouble, all of those things are true blessings. All of those things
are merely trials that confirm how strong we are in what we know and profess. And if
we’re not strong, then we need these trials to make us stronger.
1106
Once he makes it to old age, a reasonable person feels that his body can no longer
accomplish one percent of what it could when he was thirty, but nevertheless he doesn’t
grieve much over it and barely notices it, just as he didn’t notice and grieve over his
height and strength in childhood. He knows that his body, whether healthy or ill,
whether strong or barely able to move, both then and now can be used to serve himself
or God. However, when he was younger he didn’t know that it’s disadvantageous to use
his body to serve himself, while he now knows that the body exists only to serve God. He
knows that in serving God it doesn’t matter if you can lift five hundred pounds or barely
nod your head. He now knows that in order to serve himself he needs greater health and
strength, but that to serve God he not only doesn’t need physical strength, but
frequently such strength is actually an impediment.
If people would only change the meaning of their lives from the achievement of
external goals in space and time to service to God, everything that’s called happiness
and unhappiness in this earthly life would disappear.
It’s repeated insincerely so often that suffering is necessary and sent by God that
we’ve stopped believing it. However, this is the simplest, clearest and most indubitable
truth. He who has learned this through life experience can’t help but believe that the
more difficult his suffering—if only he can accept it in a Christian spirit—the fuller,
stronger, more joyful and more substantial his life will be.
1107
There are people who, when depressed or angry, are delighted with their state of
mind and even take pride in it. This is like a person who, having dropped the reins of
the horse that’s carrying him over a mountain, keeps flogging it.
Thinking that external causes can influence a person’s inner state is a very common
and harmful delusion. The body’s condition—fatigue, hunger, illness—influence the
inner state of a person who’s conscious of the spiritual foundation of his life only in the
sense that it weakens his ability to act; it doesn’t change the direction of his actions. Only
people who live an exclusively external life (children, nonreligious people) change their
entire relationship to life as a result of external causes and fall into depression or anger
and begin to condemn and hate those whom they used to love and praise.
Never think that your situation is such that you can’t do as much as any other
person towards the fulfillment of God’s will. Every person, in any situation, can do the
very best, can do that which is better than anything else.
1108
November 28
Life Exists Only in the Present
If someone teaches that you must live for a future life in this life, don’t believe him.
We only live and experience this life, and therefore we must direct all our energy
toward living this life, toward living every moment of this life, as best as we possibly can.
True life exists only in the present. That which was is no more; that which will be also
doesn’t exist; only the present is real. More than anything we must try to live well right
now.
Time is behind us, time is ahead of us. It is not here with us.
As soon as you start thinking about what was or what will be, you forget what’s most
important: true life in the present.
If your self-‐esteem suffers when you recall that in the past you disdained wisdom,
failed to live as wise people do and acquired absolutely no notoriety as a wise person,
don’t grieve. If you don’t pass for a wise person, all the better. Be satisfied that you can
begin to live as your conscience demands now, at this very minute. Marcus Aurelius
1109
One certain condition of human labor consists in the fact that the farther away the
goal of our ambitions lies and the less we hope to see the fruits of our labors, the greater
and more comprehensive our success will be. John Ruskin
The reward for a good life, like life itself, is outside time: it lies in the present
moment. Do good now, and your life will be good now. The consequences, in the worldly
sense, could be either good or bad.
“Live for the evening, live for the century” means that you should live as if every
moment is your last and you only have time to do what’s most important, and at the
same time you should live as if you’ll continue what you’re doing forever.
Some people say, “We can’t live if we don’t know what awaits us. We have to prepare
for what’s coming.” This isn’t true. A good, genuine life happens precisely when you
think only about what you should do right now for the sake of your soul. And your soul
needs only one thing: that you do what unites your soul with all people and with God.
You’re a day laborer: do your work for the day and receive your daily pay. Talmud
1110
Our life takes place as if between two walls that block our sight. The one in front of
us separates us from each coming instant; the second, behind us, separates us from each
moment as it passes. We can see only what lies between these two walls: the present
instant. This is the only thing that truly exists for us; in fact, this alone is “real.”
However, we feel constricted in this space between these two impenetrable walls and
we feel the urge to live on the other side of them too. To do this, we imagine that the
walls are transparent and that by looking through them and living in the past and
future we enhance our lives and give them meaning. But really, the walls remain as
impenetrable as they always were. We merely hang mirrors on them, and in these
mirrors we don’t see what really was or will be, but what we picture in our imagination.
Looking into the mirror of the past and regretting that we didn’t act then as we do now,
we see the reflection of what’s happening to us now. Looking into the mirror of the
future and hoping that what we wish for will happen, we once again see what’s
happening to us right now. Neither in the past nor in the future is there what we wish
for.
So, in trying to penetrate the walls of the past and future we nevertheless remain
between the same two impenetrable walls and remain ever dissatisfied. Deceiving
ourselves with mirrors that we ourselves have put in place, we don’t enhance our lives at
all and give them meaning, but on the contrary we transfer them from the reality of the
present into the imaginary realm of the non-‐existent past and future.
The more we indulge in this the more we cease to truly live and, moreover, the more
we weaken our ability to live a true, extratemporal life in the present, the only place
where there is energy, satisfaction and happiness. Vladimir Chertkov
1111
November 29
There is No Death
After Death
Death is the destruction of the vessel that contains your soul. Don’t confuse the
vessel with what’s been poured into it.
You don’t know how you entered this life, but you know that you entered as an
individual “I,” which is who you are. Then you continued on and reached middle age,
and then you suddenly neither rejoiced nor became afraid, but stopped and refused to
move from where you were, to go further, because you couldn’t see what was out there.
However, you never saw the place you came from and still you arrived here. You came
through the entrance but you don’t want to go through the exit. All your life has been
nothing but a process of going forward and forward in corporeal life. You went along,
you hurried, and suddenly you’re upset that the thing you continuously strove for has
arrived. You’re terrified of the great change that will happen to your body at death. But
a huge change occurred with you when you were born, and from that not only did
nothing bad happen, but on the contrary, such good happened that you don’t want to
part with it.
Only he who lives well truly believes in immortality.
1112
Life oblivious to death and life with the consciousness of the steady approach of
death are completely different states. One is close to animal existence, while the other is
close to divine existence.
When you’re firmly convinced and remember that hour by hour you have to discard
your external shell, your body, in other words die, it becomes easier for you to honor
justice, act honestly, and resign yourself to your fate. If you think about nothing else but
how to accept any responsibility that presents itself to you day to day and how to bear it
as your duty, you’ll meet all rumors, gossip and trials with tranquility; you won’t even
think about them. This is how a person can reach his inner world, and by living in this
way all his desires will merge into one desire: to fulfill God’s will. And it’s always possible
to do that. Based on a Passage by Marcus Aurelius
1113
Pascal once said that if we were to see ourselves in dreams as always in the same
state and in our waking hours in different states, we’d take dreams for reality and
reality for a dream. This isn’t completely fair. Reality differs from a dream in that while
we’re awake we can control our ability to behave according to our moral demands. In
dreams we often know that we’re committing heinous and immoral acts that are alien to
our nature, but we can’t restrain ourselves. So I would say that if we were unaware of a
life in which we were more able to satisfy our moral demands than in our dreams, then
we’d consider dreams true life and would never doubt that they were real. Now isn’t all
our life, from birth to death, with its dreams, just a dream that we take for reality, the
reality of which we never doubt only because we don’t know of a life in which our
freedom to follow the moral demands of our souls is greater than it is now?
The question of a future life beyond the grave is a question of whether or not time is
a creation of our intellect, whose abilities are limited by our bodies, or a necessary
condition of all that exists. There’s only one rational answer: time is a creation of our
limited intellect. Therefore, the question of when and where a future life begins has no
meaning, since through the words future and beyond the grave we express temporally
and spatially that which in reality is beyond time and space.
If there’s something in our lives that doesn’t belong to time and space, this is it.
Therefore in this sense the notion of a future, eternal life simply means that it exists.
1114
When someone is dying, he’s already partly in communion with eternity. It’s as if a
dying person speaks to us from beyond the grave. What he says gives us the impression
of a command; he seems to be almost a prophet. It’s clear that for someone who feels life
leaving him and the grave opening up, a time for great words has arrived. The essence of
his nature must appear. The divine that lives within him can no longer be concealed.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
We have no reason to think that after death we unite with God, as Christian
clergymen, Brahmins and Buddhists think. The life that we’re aware of consists of the
continual increase of love. This isn’t simply the fundamental characteristic of life, it is
life itself. Therefore, if we’re to imagine a life beyond the grave, then this life must be
fundamentally like the life we know, albeit in forms that are incomprehensible to us.
1115
November 30
Life is a Blessing
In order to be happy, you simply need to know that the happiness you wish for has
been given to you.
People put yokes on themselves that were never intended for them and harness
themselves to loads too heavy for them to pull. This inapt yoke and the heavy load is life
lived for the sake of physical happiness, either for the person pulling the load or for
others. Happiness only comes with spiritual life. Only this yoke has been made to fit
people perfectly, as Christ taught. He said, “Try it and you’ll see how fine and easy it is. If
you want to see if I’m telling the truth, just try to do as I say.”
A man was walking at night along an unfamiliar road and suddenly stumbled and
fell. As he fell he grabbed a bush and hung by it. All night long he tortured himself,
hanging by his swollen hands and expecting death at any minute. When it began to get
light, he fearfully looked down and saw that the ground was just below his feet.
This is what happens to people when they fail to understand life and suffer and
torment themselves, when all they need to do is understand that there’s nothing terrible
in life and that all they need to do is devote themselves to it and life will be good, not evil.
1116
Nothing so obviously proves that the business of life is perfection like the way the
delight of wishing for something disappears once the desire is met, no matter how
completely the desire is fulfilled and no matter what it might be unless it’s the desire for
perfection. Only one thing doesn’t lose its joyous value: consciousness of motion towards
perfection.
Only this continuous act of perfecting yourself will give you genuine, lasting and
ever-‐increasing joy. Every step forward on this path brings with it its own reward, the
reward is granted immediately, and nothing can take this reward away.
People are happy when they consider nothing theirs other than their own soul.
They’re happy even if they live among sordid, evil people who hate them, and no one can
take their happiness away from them. Buddhist Wisdom
1117
You can’t say that the purpose of life is service to God. The purpose of a person’s life
always has been and always will be that person’s happiness. However, since God wanted
to give people happiness, as they achieve their true, genuine happiness, they do what
God wants of them: fulfill His will.
If you ask: what is the purpose of evil? I would answer with the question: what is the
purpose of life? Evil exists so that there will be life. Life manifests itself as liberation from
evil.
Everything is a blessing; there is no evil. Evil only appears within time. If time didn’t
exist, there would be no evil.
Evil disperses good but doesn’t overpower it. Good both disperses and overpowers
evil. Evil is the field that good plows, the firewood that good consumes, the candle on
which the light of good burns.
1118
December
December 1
Faith
True religion is simply knowing that law which is higher than all human laws.
There is one eternal, universal religion: the belief in the God who lives within you and
beyond you, in all people and all living things.
All people perceive true religious teachings as something they’d forgotten and
suddenly remembered. True religious teaching elevates man to such a height that a
joyous world, subordinate to rational principles, opens up to him. When a person who
was raised according to a false religious doctrine recognizes the truth, he experiences
something similar to a person who’s been locked in a dark, stifling tower when he goes
up to an open square at the top of the tower and there sees a beautiful world that was
previously hidden from him.
1119
If people exist, and if that which appears to us to be the source of Everything also
exists, then there must be a relationship between that source and people. And the
relationship that existed in ancient times was no more important and binding than the
one that exists now. Today’s relationship is closer and clearer, and therefore today’s
relationship shouldn’t be verified by ancient ones, but vice versa.
The first and most ancient belief concerning abstract concepts is always the most
credible, because man’s common sense instantly grasped it. Such is the belief concerning
the existence of the universal source: God. Based on a Passage by Gotthold Lessing
1120
How amazing it is that the world only tolerates and accepts the most ancient of all
higher revelations of the truth, which are no longer timely, while it considers every direct
revelation and every original idea insignificant and often openly hates it. Henry David
Thoreau
One of the main differences between true faith and its distortion is that in a
distorted faith a person demands that God fulfill his wishes in exchange for his
sacrifices and prayers: that God serve man. In a true faith a person knows that God
demands that he, as a human, fulfill His will. He demands that man serve God.
When a person binds himself to a single idea, no matter how correct it might be,
then in essence he falls into the same state as a person would find himself if he were to
tie himself to a pillar so that he doesn’t get lost. What might be a desired truth at one
stage of spiritual growth is an obstacle to growth and a delusion at a higher stage. Lucy
Mallory
1121
December 2
The Soul
Iron is harder than stone, stone is harder than wood, wood is harder than water, and
water is harder than the air. Hardest of all is something that can’t be felt, seen or heard.
It alone has existed, still exists, and will never disappear.
What is it?
It is the spirit that lives in man.
A holy man concerns himself with what’s within him, not what’s beyond him. He
rejects the external and chooses the internal. Lao Tsu
It is consciousness of one’s spiritual self, not one’s physical self, which gives true
strength.
You can always distinguish the voice of your soul from all other voices because what
it demands is always intangible and of no earthly use, but beautiful and attainable by
your effort alone.
This is what distinguishes the voice of your soul from the voice of desire for prestige,
which often merges with it.
1122
He who has transferred consciousness of his life into his spiritual self can never
experience evil either in life or in death.
It seems as though a man constantly hears a voice behind him, but he can never turn
around and see who’s talking. This voice speaks in all languages and directs all people,
but no one has ever seen who’s speaking. If a person would simply obey this voice and
incorporate it into himself so that he can’t distinguish it from his own thoughts, he’d feel
that he and this voice are one and the same. And the more a person considers this voice
his own, the happier he’ll be. This voice reveals a blissful life to him, because this voice is
the voice of God within man. Based on a Passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Truly, truly I say to you: he who hears my words and believes in the One who sent
me will have eternal life and will not face judgment, but will go from death to life. Truly,
truly I say to you: the time will come, and has come already, when the dead will hear the
voice of the son of God and, having heard it, will come to life. For as the Father has life in
Himself, so he gave his son life in himself.” (John 5:24-‐26)
These words mean that God lives in every person.
1123
What we call life consists of two things.
The first is our consciousness of the spiritual source within us. The second is our
observation of this source’s manifestation in time and space. In reality, there’s only the
first. It alone truly exists. If it didn’t exist, nothing would. The second conception of
life—observation and manifestation in space and time—emanates from it.
We can be conscious of the former, but we can’t observe it. We can observe the latter,
but we can’t be conscious of it.
Don’t think and say, “I’m alive.” You should think and say: “It is not I who live, but
the spirit of God who lives within me. That which I call myself is simply a fissure that
differs from other fissures through which this spirit lives.”
Opposites converge.
It always seems to us that what’s physical and palpable is clearest, most
comprehensible and truly exists. However, all this is the most unclear,
incomprehensible, contradictory and unreal.
1124
December 3
One Soul in All
Everything is difficult and muddled when each person searches for his own goal.
Everything suddenly becomes simple and easy when all people search for the same
thing: not to serve themselves, but to serve the spirit that lives in us all.
Remember that the same spirit that lives in you lives in every other person, and
therefore don’t just love but honor as holy the soul of every person as much as your own.
It’s easier to endure misfortune when its cause is unrelated to the action of others:
things like illness, floods, and earthquakes. However, it’s particularly hard for a person
when he suffers because people, his brothers who should love him, torment him, deprive
him of food and freedom, torture and even kill him instead. People, all people, are the
same as me. It seems I don’t want that to be true and I end up tormenting myself. This is
particularly painful.
1125
Do we understand our spiritual brotherhood? Do we understand that we all come
from the same source? Do we recognize that the very same spiritual source in the souls
of all other people is the same one that’s in ours? The fact is that this alone provides true
freedom and happiness.
In order to change the human condition people must create new respect for one
another. As long as people look upon each other as they do now—almost like cattle—
they’ll never stop treating each other in a beastly fashion and will continue through
violence or cunning to use people as tools for the achievement of their goals. There can
be no brotherhood among people as long as they fail to understand their unity and the
great purpose for which they were given life. People nowadays look upon such ideas as
fantasies. However, recognition of this simple Christian truth would create a revolution
in all society and establish human relationships that they couldn’t even imagine now.
None of us could envision the changes that would take place if people would embrace
each other’s spiritual sources more and more and understand the purpose of the soul of
even the most insignificant human being. Then the insults, pain and oppression that we
don’t even notice now would shock us more than the greatest crimes now do. Then every
person would be sacred in the eyes of man. Then no person would be able to abuse his
neighbor, because he’d see the divine within him. Yes, we need a new revelation about
the spirit that lives within us, not one about heaven or hell. Based on a Passage by
William Channing
1126
If people understood that they don’t live individual, separate lives, but the life of all,
they’d realize that when they do good for others they do good for themselves.
People often think that if they free themselves of God they’ll be free. It’s quite the
opposite: only a person who has united with the God who lives in all people is truly free.
1127
December 4
God
You don’t need to love people, but you need to love God, Who is within all people.
If your eyes went blind from the sun, you wouldn’t say there’s no sun. Likewise, you
shouldn’t say there’s no God because you get confused and perplexed when you want to
understand the beginning and cause of everything.
Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
1128
I know neither my soul nor the source of everything—God—through definitions,
but by a completely different path. Definitions destroy comprehension of these ideas
within me. I acquire knowledge of them only because I’m irresistibly drawn to them.
I’m led to the knowledge of my soul by the question: what am I? My body isn’t me,
nor are my feelings and thoughts. So what am I? I don’t know, but I do know that I exist
and that without my “self” there would be nothing. And this self, incomprehensible to
me, I call my soul. I am I, I am my soul.
The same thing happens with the source of everything: God. Just as I’m drawn to
cognition of my soul by the question “what am I?” so I’m drawn to the cognition of the
source of everything by the question: what is this totality of which I feel myself a part?
This totality isn’t what I can see and know. What I see and know has no limit in space
and no beginning or end in time. So what is this totality? I don’t know, but what I do
know is that this miraculous totality exists. And this miraculous totality of which I feel
my self a part is what I call God.
He who cannot become a son of God will forever remain in the cowshed. Angelus
Silesius
A God that we’re able to understand is no longer God. Once we understand God we
make Him as finite as ourselves. You can never know God. God will always be
incomprehensible. Based on a Passage by Vivekananda
1129
I’m conscious of a spiritual source within myself that’s separate from all else. I
observe the very same spiritual source in other beings, also separate from all else. But if
I’m conscious of this one and the same spiritual being isolated in myself as well as in
other beings, then this spiritual source must exist in and of itself. This spiritual source
that exists in and of itself is what we call God.
Don’t be distressed if the concept of God is unclear to you. The simpler and clearer it
is, the farther it is from the truth and the less reliable it is as support.
If we can embrace God in words, such a God is not God. We can never understand
God, and yet there’s nothing we know more firmly than this incomprehensible God.
Either there’s no God or there’s nothing but God.
1130
December 5
Life is Union
The more you live a spiritual life, the more you unite with other people and with God,
and the more you unite with others and God the more peaceful and joyous your life is.
Life is difficult for those who don’t understand the meaning of their lives, and there
are such people. These people are so certain that it’s absolutely impossible to know the
meaning of their lives that they even brag about it.
But to know it is both essential and easy. Life has one meaning: to free your soul
more and more from your body and to unite with other beings and the source of
everything.
People think and say that they don’t know this only because they live contrary to the
clear and universally comprehensible meaning of human life.
We have one and only one infallible guide: the universal spirit that directs each
being to do what it must. This spirit commands the tree to grow toward the sun, the
flower to produce seeds, the seeds to fall to the ground, and it commands us to unite
with each other and with that same spirit that lives in us all.
1131
He who devotes his life to union with God only looks ahead. Only a person who’s
stopped looks back at what he’s done.
The world is structured so that if ten people work as a group rather than
individually they can accomplish many times more than one hundred people who work
separately, each for himself. These ten people have one home, one oven, and together
they can joke as they lift a heavy tree together.
One hundred people living separately have one hundred homes, one hundred ovens,
and they can’t even lift a small tree if they work alone.
So it’s clear that all human tragedies come not from bad harvests, nor fires, nor
bandits, but only from people living separately. And they live separately only because
they either don’t hear or refuse to believe the voice of love that lives in every person and
draws everyone towards union.
The further people are from God, the less they recognize their unity. If people would
live in God with all their souls, they would feel no separation from each other.
1132
The more you love someone, the less you feel your separation from him. It seems as
though he’s the same as you, and you’re the same as him.
I will never seek and never accept separate, personal salvation. I do not wish to
receive comfort alone; as I live and work, I will always and everywhere strive for the
common salvation of all beings in all the worlds. Until everyone is free, I will not leave
this world of sin, sadness and struggle. Chan Jian
Even if we didn’t want to, we couldn’t help but feel our connection with all
humanity: we’re bound by industry, trade, scholarship, and most importantly the unity
of our condition, the unity of our relationship to the world and to its Source.
1133
December 6
Love
You shouldn’t love the John or Peter or Mary in people, but rather your neighbor
and his soul. Every soul is the soul of God. This is the only love that gives joy.
People say that on the final day there will be common judgment, and that God, the
most kind, will be angry. However, nothing can come from the God of kindness except
kindness.
No matter what kind of religion there might be on earth, the only true faith is that
which asserts that God is love. And from love there can come nothing but good.
Have no fear: both during life and after life there is nothing and will be nothing
other than good. From a Persian Source
One day people will stop fighting, waging war, executing people, and will begin to
love one another. This day cannot be evaded, for within every person’s soul lies love, not
hatred, toward others.
Let’s do all we can to reach this day more quickly.
1134
Every person tries to create as much good for himself as he can. The greatest good in
this world is to be in love and harmony with everyone. How can you do this when you
love some people and don’t love others? You have to teach yourself how to love those you
don’t love. A person can learn the most complex arts, and this is easy to learn if only a
person would study it as diligently as he studies reading, writing, the sciences, trade and
games.
In order to learn how to love people whom you find offensive, every time you meet
such a person you have to try to restrain yourself from all unkind words and acts when
dealing with him. When you’re alone and you think of an unpleasant person, you have
to try to drive out all unkind thoughts of him; on the contrary, you must remember all
the good that’s in him. Just do this every time you meet an unpleasant person or have
unkind thoughts about him, and what you thought would be difficult will become easier
and easier with each passing day, and you won’t even notice that you’re becoming
accustomed to loving the people you used to consider enemies. And if you become
accustomed to loving your enemies, you’ll love everyone and discover the most joyful life
possible.
1135
Before man lies a world that existed before he did and which will remain after he
disappears. He knows that this world is eternal and that he’d like to have a part in this
eternity. Once a person is summoned into this life, he demands his share of the eternal
life that surrounds, excites, mocks and then annihilates him. He knows that he began at
some point, and he doesn’t want to end. He loudly invokes, he quietly prays for
certainty, but it continually eludes him for the sake of his own happiness. Certain
knowledge would be immobility and death for him, since the greatest motivator of
human energy is the unknown. A person can’t stand on certainty; he scampers about in
an undefined pursuit of perfection. No matter how far he deviates into skepticism, into
denial resulting from pride, curiosity, malice, and customs, he always returns to hope,
without which he cannot live.
So there’s an occasional obfuscation but never a complete loss of human striving for
perfection. This irrepressible human demand for perfection explains why a person
throws himself with such faith, with such elation, and without any rational control into
all sorts of religious doctrines that promise him immortality, proposing it in a way that
he can understand. Religions don’t give man what he searches for, and neither do
philosophical systems. The human soul fails to find peace and unceasingly submits its
demands. This soul finds itself in unending labor, in constant development and pursuit
of light and truth. Until it receives all the light and conquers the truth, it will continue to
torment man.
And it has never so engaged, never so forcefully imposed its authority upon
humanity as in our time. It has, so to speak, permeated the spirit that our world
breathes. Some individual souls who on their own wished for a societal renaissance have
1136
gradually sought each other out, called out to one another, drawn closer, united,
understood one another and created a collective, a center of gravity toward which more
people from the four corners of the earth aspire like larks flying to a mirror. I see and
recognize this new soul in phenomena that appear to negate it most of all.
The weapons of all the nations, the threats that their leaders make against one
another, the renewal of persecution of certain peoples, the hostility among members of
the same nation are evil manifestations, but they aren’t evil omens. They’re the final
convulsions of something that must inevitably disappear. In this case, the sickness is
merely the frantic effort of a living organism to free itself from a fatal illness.
Those who’ve exploited the errors of the past and hope to exploit them now and
forever are united in the goal of stopping every change. The consequences of this are all
the threats and persecutions, but if you look closely you’ll see that this is all appearance.
It’s all huge, but empty.
There’s no spirit in any of this; it’s gone on somewhere else. All these millions of
armed men who train each day for a universal war of annihilation no longer hate the
people they’re supposed to fight, and not one of their leaders dares to declare war. As for
the reproaches heard below, even ones that infect the people, a great and sincere
compassion that recognizes their justice has begun to answer from above.
Mutual understanding will inevitably come someday, and much sooner than we
think. I don’t know if it’s coming soon, since I will soon leave this world and the light
appearing over the horizon which enlightens me is already darkening my vision, but I
think that our world is entering an epoch when the words “love one another” will be
manifested without any discussion of who said it: God or man.
1137
In the beginning, this obviously won’t come about on its own. There will be
misunderstandings, perhaps even bloody ones, since we’ve been raised and taught to
hate one another, quite often by the very people who are assigned to teach us to love. But
just as it’s obvious that this great law of brotherhood must be accomplished someday,
I’m certain that the time has come when we irrepressibly desire that it be accomplished.
Alexandre Dumas fils
Love isn’t the fulfillment of a law but merely the recognition of the meaning of your
life.
God isn’t love. Love is simply one of God’s manifestations. Man is love.
The phrase “to love God” seems strange at first. How can you love an invisible,
incomprehensible being?
However, if we admit that God is love, then the phrase becomes simple and
comprehensible. To love love itself, to wish to become closer to love, to marvel at love, to
turn yourself into love, all of this is easily understood and close to every person’s heart.
And you don’t need to order yourself to love the God of love. Whether we want to or not,
whether we know it or not, all of us have always loved and will always love the God of
love.
1138
Some people say, “If I do what’s good for others, they’ll repay me with evil.” However,
if you love the person you’re doing good for, then you’ve already received your reward in
your love for him, and you’ll receive an even greater reward in your soul if you lovingly
bear the evil he commits against you.
It’s joyful to do good, and your joy will grow if you make sure that no one will ever
know that it was you who did it.
What more of a reward do you want for your good deed? You already received a
reward in the form of the joy you felt when you were doing good. Any other reward
would diminish this joy.
1139
We can do anything and find anything, but we can’t find our very selves. An
amazing affair! A person lives in the world for many years and yet he can’t see beyond
himself as long as he feels that he’s better than everything else. If a person would only
see this, it would become clear to him that his true blessing, the only time he’s truly
happy, is when his soul is filled with love for people.
It’s clear that we don’t meditate on our own, since we don’t understand this.
We pervert our minds and don’t try to comprehend the one thing we need.
If we’d just stop in our vain lives for a moment and penetrate into ourselves, we’d
understand where our happiness lies.
Our body is weak, filthy and mortal, but hidden within it is a treasure: the immortal
spirit of God. If we’d perceive this within ourselves we’d love people, and if we love
people, we’re happy. Grigory Skovoroda
1140
December 7
Sins, Temptations and Superstitions
It’s impossible to be sinless, but you can be more or less sinful. The main business in
every person’s life is to sin as little as possible.
The difference between a good person and a bad person isn’t that one has
committed many sins while the other has committed only a few, but that one recognizes
his sins and struggles with them while the other doesn’t see his sins or struggle with
them.
If a person says it’s not worth it to struggle with sins because no matter how much
you fight you’ll never be completely cleansed of them, he’s like a person who says that it’s
not worth it to eat because you’ll get hungry again. You have to struggle with sins not to
completely free yourself of them, but because human life consists in this battle alone.
The most common sins are the sins of pleasing the body, lechery, idleness, avarice,
anger, and ill will. The most common temptations are the temptations of pride,
inequality, societal organization, violence, punishment and conceit. The most common
superstitions are the superstition of government, the superstition of the church, and the
superstition of science.
1141
Bestial sins, the sins of pleasing the body, lechery, idleness, avarice and anger divide
people, and therefore everyone recognizes their harmfulness and considers these sins
evil. The temptations of pride, inequality, violence, punishment and worldly glory aren’t
always recognized as evil; sometimes they’re even considered good. Superstitions such as
the superstitions of government, church and science are never considered evil, but are
always honored as good.
While bustling away in various activities, many people imagine that as soon as they
finish their business they’ll immediately indulge in a nice break. They fail to understand
that love of intense, bustling activity is as unsatisfying as the demand for diversion, and
it’s the result of a fear of being alone, just as the demand for diversion is. Such people
imagine that they want to finish their work as soon as possible so they can find peace in
rest, but in fact they search for nothing other than agitation, anxiety, and turmoil.
It would seem easy to understand that the very hope for peace after restless activity
demonstrates that one condition for happiness is peace, and not agitation and anxiety.
Thus these people live their lives. With great effort they overcome all sorts of
obstacles to reach the alleged peace they desire. However, when this peace comes they
find it intolerable. Boredom rises up from the depths of their souls and fills them with
its poison.
1142
It’s bad when a person admits he’s filled with sin but doesn’t try to sort out what
kinds of sins they are and how they affect him. Liberation from sins is the work of life,
and therefore in order to truly free yourself from sins it’s not enough to admit you’re
filled with sins. You have to know what they are and how they affect you, and in what
ways you’re more or less sinful.
Sins are immediately visible, but it’s hard to wean yourself from them. Temptations
are harder to see, but on the other hand they’re easier to free yourself from than sins.
Superstitions are hardest of all to recognize, but as soon as you recognize their deception
you’re immediately freed of them.
1143
December 8
The Sin of Overindulgence
If people ate only when they were quite hungry and ate only simple, pure and
healthful foods, they would never know illness, and it would be easier for them to
struggle with sin.
Socrates advised his students to pay attention to what kinds and quantities of food,
drink and labor put them in the best spiritual condition. He said that if this regimen is
followed, then each person is his own best doctor.
What happens to the stomach when a person overeats is the same thing that
happens with the ability to enjoy yourself. The more people try to increase the
satisfaction of eating by concocting refined dishes, the weaker their stomachs become
and the less able they are to enjoy food. The more people try to increase their pleasure
through refined, artful games, the weaker their ability to truly enjoy anything becomes.
It’s useful to stop doing what you’re used to from time to time to be sure that you
control your habits, and not vice versa.
1144
Why is it that different peoples have different customs, but the habits of smoking
and drinking are common to the majority of people in the most diverse conditions? It’s
because all people are dissatisfied with their lives, for which they see no other purpose
than the satisfaction of their bodies’ constantly increasing demands. As a result of this
dissatisfaction the rich as well as the poor suffer together, believing their happiness to lie
in the satisfaction of the body’s demands.
The less you become accustomed to, the less deprivation you’ll experience.
1145
Entertainment! There’s no word that describes what occurs in our world less than
the word “entertainment.” It would seem that the first condition for entertainment to
truly be entertainment is that everyone participating in it is enjoying himself. However,
for every person who enjoys himself in our world there are hundreds of people who are
performing burdensome, compulsory labor in order to create the entertainment and
who watch those enjoying themselves with envy and hatred.
Since ancient times people have preached vegetarianism, but almost no one has
listened. In our time more and more people embrace it with each passing hour and year,
and soon the time will come when people not only understand but feel all the barbarity
and cruelty of murdering living beings to satisfy their gluttony.
1146
December 9
The Sin of Lechery
Once they’ve come of age, how should a young man and woman deal with sexual
life? There’s one answer: try with all your might to keep your chastity. The more
abstinent you are, the better your life will be.
What should a young man and woman do if they can’t restrain themselves and fall
into sin despite all their efforts to observe celibacy?
They must accept this fall as a sin that can only be corrected by recognizing their fall
as a marriage that is irrevocable as long as both of them are alive.
Sexual passion is the source of life’s greatest disasters and agonies. Therefore, it is
inherent in humans to try to moderate and silence it with all their strength. Yet people
in our time do all they can to enflame it, treating lust and infatuation as the most
elevated of feelings.
1147
Christ was once asked, “can a man leave his wife and take another?” He answered
that this is forbidden, that when a man joins his life with a woman’s he must unite with
her so that they become as one body. Such is God’s law, and that which God has united
no person should divide.
After Christ had spoken, his disciples replied that it’s very difficult to live with a
woman in this fashion. So Christ told them that a man was free not to marry, but that if
he didn’t marry then he must live a pure life.
It was not without reason that Christ praised children, saying that theirs is the
kingdom of Heaven and that what is concealed from the wise is revealed to the child. We
know this ourselves: if no new children were born, there would be no hope for the
coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth. All hope rests on them alone. Most adults are
already corrupted, but with each generation in every family new, innocent, pure
children appear who have the possibility of attaining complete holiness. The river is
polluted and filthy, but many pure springs pour into it.
1148
If people are drawn toward sexual relations, this is so that the perfection that one
generation has failed to attain might be achieved by the next. God’s wisdom in this
matter is remarkable. Man’s calling is to perfection: “Be perfect as your Father in
Heaven in perfect.” A faithful sign of perfection is chastity—true chastity—not only in
deed but in one’s soul: total liberation from sexual desire. If people were to attain
perfection and become completely chaste the human race would end and would have no
reason to live on Earth, because people would live like angels, who as the Gospels say
don’t marry. However, until people achieve perfection they’ll create successive
generations, and these successors will work on perfecting themselves and come closer
and closer to perfection. If people were to do what the Skoptsy do the human race would
end, and it would never reach perfection and fulfill God’s will.
The law of an animal’s life is the struggle for existence. This is also the law of a
person’s life as an animal. However, in addition to this law of struggle to which man is
subject as an animal he’s subject to the law of love, which counters the law of struggle
and distinguishes humans from animals. It’s the same concerning sex. As an animal, a
person is subject to the sexual law of reproduction, but in addition to the law of
reproduction man is subject to the law of chastity, which counters sexual desire.
Shame is the manifestation of the aspiration towards chastity, which is innate to
man. Animals know no shame.
1149
December 10
The Sin of Parasitism
Man, like all animals, has been created in such a way that he must work to keep
from dying of hunger and exposure to the elements. And for man, as for the animal
kingdom, this work is not torture, but a joy, as long as no one interferes with this work.
But some people have arranged their lives so that some do practically no work
themselves while forcing others to work for them. Then they get bored because they
don’t know what to do with themselves, so they concoct all sorts of idiocies and vile acts
in order to keep themselves busy. Other people work with all their might and become
bored with their work, mainly because they have to work for others instead of for
themselves.
Both conditions are bad. The first is bad because those people destroy their souls
with their idleness. The second is bad because those people waste their bodies through
their labors.
However, those who work are better off than those who don’t. The soul is more
valuable than the body.
When the devil is fishing for people, he puts all sorts of enticements on the hook. But
an idle person doesn’t need any enticement. He’ll bite on a bare hook.
1150
He who does nothing will always have many helpers.
An idle person’s mind is the devil’s favorite abode.
One of the most astonishing delusions is the belief that human happiness lies in
inactivity.
People are so convinced of this that they even imagine paradise as a place where
people do nothing.
The bustling activities people use to fill their idle lives interfere with their ability to
think deeply.
There’s only one possible justification for an idle life supported by other people’s
labors: that a person is using all his leisure time to sharpen his ability to think. However,
idle people diligently fill their leisure time with bustling activity so that they have even
less time to think that people who are overburdened with work.
1151
The wealthy classes, who exploit the labor of the workers and keep the people in
unceasing, grinding labor, justify their parasitism by claiming that they create the
religion, science and art that the people require. The wealthy classes undertake all of this
to give it to the people, but unfortunately what they give the people in the guise of
religion, science and art are in fact false religion, false science and false art. So instead of
repaying the people for their labor, they merely deceive and corrupt them.
No matter what sort of object you happen to be using, remember that it’s a product
of human labor, and so if you waste, spoil or destroy it, you’re wasting labor, and
sometimes a human life.
1152
December 11
The Temptation of Wealth
For a pagan wealth is both good and praiseworthy; for a true Christian wealth is evil
and shameful.
Saying “a rich Christian” is like saying “liquid ice.”
People need to find ways to enrich their souls, but they put all their effort into
thinking of how they can call more things theirs.
Don’t honor the wealthy, don’t envy them; keep your distance from them and pity
them. The wealthy shouldn’t be proud of their wealth, they should be ashamed of it.
The craving for wealth is never appeased and never satisfied. A person who possesses
it is tortured not only by the desire to acquire even more but also by the fear of losing
what he has. Cicero
1153
If a fortune is acquired through trade of goods that corrupt people, or in
speculation, or the acquisition of cheap land that increases in value because of people’s
need, or the construction of factories that destroy people’s health and lives, or through
civil or military service to the government, or any sort of business that encourages people
to fall into temptation, then the acquisition of such wealth, permitted and even
encouraged by the leaders of society and concealed by acts of charity, is incomparably
worse than the thefts, swindles, and banditries for which people are tried and punished.
Just as a person caught red-‐handed in a robbery will never convince anyone that he
didn’t strike his victim in order to steal his wallet but simply to chase away a fly, so it
would seem that the wealthy of our world should never be able to convince themselves
and others that they were unaware that people would prefer not to die of hunger
because they have no right to grow their food on the land they occupy, that they don’t
like working underground, underwater, or in scorching heat for ten to fourteen hours a
day and through the night, or in all those factories and plants, making goods for our
pleasure. It would seem to be impossible to deny what’s so obvious. Yet wealthy people
fail to see this, and just like children they squeeze their eyes shut so they don’t see
something they find horrifying.
1154
No matter how much property a person acquires he’ll never be satisfied, because he
can see people who are even richer. There’s only one way to be satisfied: be happy with
what you have and don’t wish for more.
A person in our society can’t sleep if he can’t pay for a place to lie down. Air, water
and sunlight are his only on the open road. The only right the law recognizes as his is to
walk down this open road until he stumbles from exhaustion, because he can’t stop but
must keep walking. Grant Allen
1155
December 12
The Sin of Ill Will
Understand and remember well that each person always behaves in the manner that
appears to be the best to him.
If you always remember this, you’ll never become angry with anyone and you’ll never
reproach or rebuke anyone, because if it really is better for someone to do something
that you dislike, then he’s right and can’t behave any differently. If he makes a mistake
and does something that isn’t better for him but is instead worse, you can take pity on
him, but you can’t be angry. Epictetus
Each of us only needs one thing: a heart beating within us that’s free of blame,
contempt, irritation, and ill will toward others. Therefore, every act that makes you
irritated with people and distances you from them rather than bringing you closer to
them is a waste.
Just as pain alerts you to a violation of the laws of physical life and prompts you to
stop what you’re doing, so in spiritual life ill will toward your neighbor alerts you to a
violation of a spiritual law and warns you that you must snuff out the evil feeling within
you toward your neighbor.
1156
If coldness and ill will toward someone arise within you, think of him, of his spiritual
form, and not about yourself and your righteousness.
The best defense against anger is to humble yourself rather than think highly of
yourself. The better a person thinks he is, the more easily he becomes angry, and vice
versa: the less a person thinks of himself, the easier it is for him to endure the bad deeds
of others.
1157
In order not be angry with people, it’s not nearly enough to restrain yourself from
ever speaking ill of a person. You have to address your thoughts one at a time when
you’re alone and not allow yourself to think badly of a person, list off his weaknesses or
blame him. On the contrary you must try to find his virtues and your own guilt before
him.
Second, when you’re interacting with this person you have to look for occasions
where you can agree with him, nurse these points of contact and cultivate them as much
as possible.
Third, never lose your composure when you’re in this person’s presence and never
forget that as long as he’s here your most important task lies before you: to establish the
best possible relations with him. Never forget that all else is trivial in comparison with
this.
In order to stop being angry with someone, in order to make peace, to forgive, even
to pity and love him, the best thing to do is remember a sin you’ve committed that’s as
bad as the one you’re angry with him for. If you do this and find such a sin, and maybe
one even worse, you’ll immediately forgive him and your soul will feel light and joyful.
God forbid that you should pretend that you love and pity someone when you don’t.
This is worse than hatred. But God forbid you fail to catch and cultivate the spark of
compassion and divine love toward your enemy within you when God sends it to you.
There’s absolutely nothing more valuable than this.
1158
December 13
The Temptation of Pride
A proud man is afraid of every judgment, because he feels that all his greatness is
weak and that it’s sustained only until a tiny hole is made in the bubble that inflates it.
If a person doesn’t think about the life of the entire world, it appears to him that true
life is his life and that other lives are important only to the extent that he needs them.
But if a person thinks about it he’ll see that every person envisions his life in exactly the
same way. And if every person considers his own life more important than other people’s
lives, it’s clear that all human lives are equal.
When wild grass grows amidst wheat, it draws all the moisture and nourishment
from the soil and blocks the sun’s rays. In the same way, pride consumes all of a person’s
strength and obstructs the light of truth.
If proud people only knew what those who exploit their pride for their own
advantage thought of them! The prouder a person, the more people who exploit him
consider him a fool and the more blatantly they deceive him. Pride is assuredly
stupidity.
1159
People say that equality is impossible. They should say the opposite: inequality is
impossible among people who understand the meaning of human life.
You can’t make a tall person equal to a short one, or a strong person equal to a weak
one, or a clever person equal to a dull one, or a hotheaded person equal to a cold-‐
blooded one, but you can and must respect and love the small, the large, the smart and
the dull equally.
The more unequal people are in their abilities, the more you have to try to treat them
equally.
Pride bewilders people at first. In the beginning, people ascribe the same significance
to a proud person that he ascribes to himself, but this bewilderment passes quickly.
People very soon become disappointed and begin to repay a proud person with
contempt for the deception he’s perpetrated upon them.
1160
Pride might be comprehensible if it facilitated success in the world and between
people. However, there’s no human quality more repulsive than pride.
Yet people continue to be proud.
Saying that people are unequal is the same as saying that a fire in an oven, a bonfire
and a candle are unequal. The spirit of God lives within every person. How can we make
a distinction between bearers of one and the same Divine spirit?
One fire is burning while another is just flaring up, but fire is fire, and we treat every
fire the same.
It’s the same with each person, who carries the spirit of God, burning more or less
brightly within him.
We’ve become so accustomed to inequality among people that we have to be taught
to treat all people the same. In order to learn this equal treatment, we have to figure out
once and for all how to treat every person, no matter who he is, so that we treat a beggar
and a king the same.
1161
December 14
The Temptation of Worldly Glory
An old man had a vision. He saw an angel of God descend from the sky carrying a
golden wreath, looking around and searching for someone on whom to place it. The old
man’s heart flared up, and he said to the angel of God, “how can I be worthy of this
radiant wreath? I’ll do whatever it takes to earn this reward.”
The angel said, “Look over here.” The angel turned around and with his finger
pointed to the north. The old man looked and saw a huge black cloud. The cloud
covered half the sky and descended to the earth. And there the cloud split apart and
revealed a huge horde of Ethiopians, heading for the old man. Behind them stood a
great and terrible Ethiopian, his enormous legs standing on the earth and his shaggy
head, with terrible eyes and red lips, resting against the sky.
“Fight and defeat them, and I will place the wreath upon you.”
The old man, terrified, said:
“I can and will fight with all of them, but the great Ethiopian, standing on the earth
with his head in the sky, is beyond the strength of man. I can’t fight him.”
“Foolish man,” the angel of God said. “All the little Ethiopians, with whom you don’t
want to fight out of fear of the great Ethiopian, all these little Ethiopians are just the
sinful wishes of man, and you can overcome them. The great Ethiopian is worldly glory,
for the sake of which sinful people live. There’s no need to fight the great Ethiopian—
he’s completely hollow. Overcome your sins and he’ll disappear from the earth on his
own.”
1162
Talk too much and people will laugh at you, talk too little and they’ll laugh at you
too. Be silent and they’ll also laugh at you. People feel they have to laugh at and
condemn everyone. Some people praise one person and condemn another, while others
praise the one the first group berated, and condemn the one they praised.
Never take joy in people’s praise or fear their judgment.
Do what you must and don’t worry about people’s opinions.
If you want people to speak well of you, don’t speak well of yourself. Blaise Pascal
No one demonstrates respect for and adherence to virtue as much as a person who
willingly loses his good reputation only so that he can remain faithful to his own
conscience. Seneca
1163
In every good deed there’s a bit of desire for people’s approval. However, it’s a
tragedy if an act is performed exclusively for worldly glory.
The greatest danger facing us doesn’t come from bad people trying to corrupt us but
from the mindless mob, which is pushed along like a flood at the urging of others and
carries us along with it.
The main characteristic of a life lived in God is a complete absence of concern for
people’s opinions.
Conceit and concern for worldly glory is the last garment to be removed. It’s difficult
to take it off, but it’s a terrible burden, because it interferes with your soul’s freedom
more than anything else.
1164
December 15
The Temptation of Punishment
Repay evil with good, forgive all. Only when everyone begins to do this will evil
disappear from the Earth. Perhaps you don’t have the strength to do it, but you must
realize that this is the only thing you should desire and the only thing you should strive
to achieve, for this alone will save us from the evil from which we are suffering.
In order to understand Christ’s teaching that you must repay evil with good, you
have to understand his entire doctrine in its true sense and not in the way in which
churches interpret it, with additions and omissions. Christ’s entire doctrine is that man
doesn’t live for his body, but rather his soul, in order to fulfill God’s will. God’s will is
that we love each other, that we love everyone. How can a person love everyone and do
evil to others? No matter what is done to a believer in Christ’s doctrine, he can’t do what
is opposed to love—commit evil against others.
People who don’t agree with Christ’s teaching in its true sense, who don’t believe in
repaying evil with good, often say that if we follow this doctrine it will destroy our entire
way of life and so it can’t be adopted. However, Christ’s teaching is in fact a doctrine
that inevitably destroys the foul arrangement of our lives. He taught it to the world in
order to destroy the old, foul order and establish a new, proper one in its place.
1165
When any worldly person reads the Gospel, he knows in the depths of his soul that
according to this doctrine there’s no excuse for committing violence against his
neighbor—neither in vengeance, nor in defense, nor for the rescue of another—and
that therefore if he wishes to remain a Christian he has one of two choices: either change
his entire life, which is supported by violence (i.e. committing evil against his neighbor),
or concealing the demands of Christ’s doctrine from himself. And this is why people so
easily accept the false church doctrine that replaces the essence of Christ’s doctrine with
various dogmas and allows people to consider themselves Christians while living their
lives contrary to Christian doctrine.
When speaking of Christian doctrine, worldly writers generally pretend that the
issue of the inapplicability of Christianity in its true meaning has long been definitively
proven.
“It’s a waste of time to concern ourselves with utopias; we have to study real issues.
We have to determine the relationship of capital to labor, organize labor and land
ownership, create markets and establish colonies for settlement, determine the
relationship between church and state; we have to build ships and fortresses, create
alliances, gather and train troops and prepare means of defense for the maintenance of
our nation’s dignity and ensure state security” and so on.
People say, “We have to study serious questions worthy of our attention and concern,
not fantastic dreams about a society in which people turn the other cheek when someone
strikes them, or give away their coat when someone takes their shirt, or live like the birds
in the sky. All of this is fantasy.” Yet they fail to notice that the essence of all of their
1166
questions is precisely what they call fantasy, since all these questions that people
examine and which produce conflict—from the question of the struggle between
capital and labor to the question of nationalism and the relationship of church to
state—are all in essence questions about whether there are instances when a person can
and must commit evil against his neighbor or whether such instances don’t exist and
can never exist for a rational person.
The difficulty of answering all these questions lies only in the fact that not a single
one of them can be answered individually without solving the fundamental question
that precedes them all: the question of the rationality and legality of repaying evil with
evil, which was placed before humanity nineteen hundred years ago. There was a time
when people couldn’t understand and truly didn’t understand the significance of this
question, but the series of horrific contradictions and afflictions which humanity is now
experiencing has brought people to the consciousness of the need to solve this question.
In our time it’s no longer possible to pretend that we don’t recognize this question and
need not solve it.
The answer Christ’s doctrine gives to the question of how to solve the conflicts that
constantly occur between people because people understand evil in dramatically
different ways and so in fighting it only increase it is that since no single person can
define evil beyond any doubt, no one can oppose what he considers evil with violence if
he doesn’t want to bring more evil into the world.
1167
It would seem absolutely clear that since so many people define evil according to
their own understanding that opposing evil with evil, as they all do, can only increase
evil rather than diminish it. If John considers what Peter does to be evil and considers
himself justified in committing evil against Peter, then on the same basis Peter can
commit evil against John, and as a result evil will only increase.
It’s amazing: people all understand the relationships of the heavenly bodies with one
another but they don’t understand this.
It’s been many years since people started to understand the irrationality of
punishment and began to come up with various theories of deterrence, suppression, and
correction. However, all these theories collapse one after another, since the foundation of
all of them is simple revenge. People devise all sorts of plans but never take it upon
themselves to do the one thing necessary, namely, to do nothing: to leave the person
who’s sinned to repent or not, to correct himself or not, to devise his own theory and
apply it and live a good life.
1168
What would happen if ninety-‐nine percent of all contemporary hypocritical and
frivolous preachers of Christ, convinced of the obligation of the law of love in all its
significance, were to sincerely renounce Christ? I can confidently say that in that case
the world would move significantly closer to its rebirth.
God, not man, reigns and rules over us. God has revealed the law of absolute
righteousness through the lips of our teacher Jesus. God has ordered everyone who
proclaims His teaching as expounded by Christ to apply the law of love to our actions.
Thus is it stated in the Gospels. So let the enemies of truth abandon their hypocrisy, let
them say sincerely and openly whether they believe in Christ’s doctrine or not, whether
they want to try to follow him and preserve his teachings, whether they want to fulfill
their responsibilities, relying on power from on high, or not.
If we want to be Christians, we must use all our strength to try to fulfill our
responsibilities, and then we’ll see how much strength we have and whether or not our
goal is unattainable. Let people simply try to apply the Christian law of love in all its
significance, and although at times this cross will seem heavy, their efforts will quickly
be adorned with the crown of God’s kingdom. Adin Ballou
1169
December 16
The Superstition of Violence
Arranging someone else’s life is easy, because if you arrange it badly the other
person suffers, not you.
He who is busy organizing other people’s lives has no time to think about his own.
The superstition that some people can force others through violence to live according
to their will came into existence like all superstitions: not because someone invented with
this deception, but because people began to use violence against others and then tried to
concoct a justification for their violence.
What causes revolutions and their cruelty? The violence of the ruling classes, which
teaches people the superstition of organization through violence.
People cannot exist without adapting their lives to a pattern that harmonizes with
their level of moral development. However, every such pattern in and of itself interferes
with true life. This doesn’t mean that people need to live without any definite pattern of
or plan for life—people can’t live without one—but that they not only shouldn’t place
any value on it but should actually fear it. True life exists only in people’s relationships
with each other. The form takes shape on its own.
1170
Look for the source of any common physical disaster that plagues the people of our
time, and you’ll find it in the superstition that some people can organize the lives of
others.
How much is needed to destroy governmental organization from without and how
little is needed to destroy it from within. Only one thing is needed to destroy
governmental violence: the recognition of superstition as superstition.
Why do you torture yourself in vain in your disastrous situation? You wish for
happiness, but you don’t know how to attain it. Know that only he who gives up his life
can receive it. You’ll achieve nothing without self-‐renunciation. You destroy one group of
oppressors and others appear, even worse than the first ones. You abolish laws of
slavery, and you’re given new laws of blood and even newer laws of slavery. Don’t believe
people who stand between you and the truth. What can a person do for you who rules
only with his own ideas and the law of his own will? If he has good intentions and
desires only the good, he’ll still impose his own will instead of the law and his own ideas
instead of genuine principles. This is what all oppressors desire. There’s no point in
destroying one type of violence in order to replace it with another. Freedom doesn’t exist
where this person rather than that person rules, but where no one rules. Freedom can
only exist where the law proclaimed by Christ rules: the law of mercy, the law of justice.
The law of justice teaches the equality of all people. The law of mercy teaches mutual love
and assistance.
1171
If people tell you, “Before us no one knew what justice was. Justice comes from us;
trust us and we’ll organize a type of justice that will satisfy you,” such people are
deceiving you or, if they sincerely promise you freedom, are deceiving themselves,
because they want you to recognize them as rulers, and then your freedom will become
simply obedience to these new rulers. Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
The main superstition of organization is that once it is established above all laws it
frees the organizers and those for whom life has been arranged from effort toward
personal perfection.
1172
December 17
The Superstition of Government
In our day, it’s absolutely clear to every honest and serious-‐minded person that it’s
impossible to uphold the law of Christ and the law of the State at the same time. The law
of Christ is humility, forgiveness of offense, and love; the law of the State is violence,
execution and war.
There may be nothing more absurd than the idea that a person has the right to kill
me because he lives on the other side of the river and his ruler is in a quarrel with mine,
although he and I aren’t quarreling. Blaise Pascal
Our rulers say that if it weren’t for governmental power, the most evil people would
rule over those who are less evil. But what they frighten us with has already come to
pass: the most evil people rule the less evil, and precisely because governmental power
exists. As far as what will happen when governmental power disappears, we can’t say.
We can conclude that in all likelihood if people who use violence stop doing it then
human life will become better, not worse.
1173
The various governments of Europe have accumulated a debt of one hundred thirty
billion, of which approximately one hundred ten has been acquired in the course of a
single century. This colossal debt was accumulated exclusively as a result of military
expenses. The European governments keep more than four million troops in peacetime
and can raise that number to nineteen million in times of war. Two-‐thirds of their
budgets are consumed by interest on this debt and the maintenance of armies and
navies. This is all done by the governments. If there were no governments, none of this
would exist. Gustave de Molinari
People say, “Despotism, the death penalty, the arming of all Europe, the
downtrodden state of the workers and the soldiers, all these things are terrible tragedies
and the people who condemn such state actions are correct. But how can we live without
government? What right do we, as people with limited intelligence and reason, have to
destroy the existing order of things, through which our ancestors achieved our current
high level of civilization with all its benefits simply because we think it will be better? If
we destroy government we have to have something to put in its place. If not, why should
we risk all the terrible disasters that must inevitably occur if government is abolished?”
Christian doctrine in its true sense gives the answer to this riddle. Christian doctrine
answers this riddle by moving the question into a completely different domain that’s
more real and significant for every person’s life. Christian doctrine doesn’t propose the
destruction of anything and doesn’t propose its own system as a replacement of the
former one. Christian doctrine is distinct from all social doctrines in that it speaks not of
this or that structure of society, but about what comprises evil and where every person’s
1174
true happiness lies, and therefore where the true happiness of all people lies, and by
what path a person can escape from evil and attain true, inalienable happiness. And the
path along which this happiness is acquired is clear, convincing and certain to such a
degree that once a person understands it and therefore recognizes what is evil and
where his true happiness lies, he can no longer consciously do what he sees is the evil of
his life and he can’t help but do what he sees brings him true happiness, just as water
must flow downhill and a plant must grow toward the light.
Christian doctrine simply states that human happiness lies in fulfilling the will of
the One who brought us into this world, and that evil violates that will. The demands of
this will are so simple and clear that they’re universally comprehensible and impossible
to misinterpret. The demands are included in the injunction not to do to anyone else
what you wouldn’t want done to you. If you wouldn’t want someone to force you to work
in a factory or a mine, if you wouldn’t want to be attacked and killed, then don’t do it to
others and take no part in such acts. All of this is so simple, clear and certain that a little
child couldn’t help but understand it and no sophist could refute it.
The question of what form of life will develop as a result of people acting in this way
doesn’t exist for a Christian.
Those who try to reconcile the irreconcilable for their worldly advantage can be
forced by the law of governmental necessity to betray the law of God, but for a Christian
who truly believes that following the teaching of Christ brings him salvation, such rules
can have no meaning. From a Quaker Magazine
1175
Government is authority, it is power, it is a boastful cult of force. It doesn’t act subtly,
it never tries to convert; whenever it interferes, it does so crudely. Its essence doesn’t
consist of persuasion but of dominance and compulsion. No matter how it tries, it can’t
conceal the fact that it violates the people’s will and that it it’s a constant negation of
their freedom. Even when it orders something good it distorts and debases it simply by
the fact that it orders it. Every order is a blow to freedom; as soon as it becomes an order,
good becomes evil from the perspective of true morality, from the perspective of human
dignity and freedom. Human freedom, morality and dignity consist of a person doing
good not because he’s been ordered to but because he recognizes it, strives for it, and
loves it. Mikhail Bakunin
It’s impossible to rule innocently.
No matter how stable our civilization might seem, destructive powers are already
evolving. It’s not in the deserts and the forests but in the urban slums and the highways
that the barbarians who will do to our civilization what the Huns and Vandals did to
classical civilization are being raised. Henry George
1176
December 18
The Superstition of the Church
That which is considered lofty to people is base before God. Luke 16:15
The clergy must keep the people in ignorance. If they didn’t, the Gospels are so
simple that everyone would tell them, “We understand all this quite well without you.”
Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
True religion needs no churches. Church religion is slavery.
The tight gate and narrow path that leads to life is the path of a good life. The broad
gate and wide path that many follow is the church.
This doesn’t mean that there’s something in the church itself and in its position that
destroys people, but rather that people believe that joining a church and recognizing its
statutes or fulfilling its rituals is the way to liberate themselves from their fundamental
moral obligations. Immanuel Kant
1177
When, for the sake of custom, fashion, or some other worldly consideration, people
say or profess that they believe something they don’t, or if they can’t establish any
rationale whatsoever for believing what they do, they destroy their own morality, and
since they’re dishonest with themselves they easily become dishonest with others. A
person must be spiritually faithful to himself if he wants to be happy. Being unfaithful
to yourself doesn’t mean believing or not believing, but professing a faith that you don’t
believe. An incalculable amount of moral evil has been created and continues to be
created by this intellectual lie.
Once a person corrupts and defiles the purity of his soul so much that he thinks he
believes in something that he doesn’t, he’s ready to commit any sort of crime. Can you
imagine something more toxic to morality than this?
A pious lie is like an evil deed: it gives birth to the wretched necessity that it be
perpetuated.
To the degree that a person conceals his conviction in order to protect his orthodoxy
from suspicion or distorts the normal meaning of words in order to defend his own
speech, to the same degree he befogs and distorts his reason and undermines his
character. William Channing
The more irrational and harmful an institution is, the more it clothes itself in
external grandeur; otherwise it would never attract anyone. Such is the case with the
church.
The solemnity and external splendor of church rituals are the primary signs of the
church’s irrationality and toxicity.
1178
It’s terrible to think that the churches have replaced the great, joyful and essential
truths of Christianity with foul suggestion and hypnosis, which act on the basest
qualities of the human soul.
Although there’s a difference in methods between a Tungu shaman and a prelate in
a European ecclesiastical hierarchy, (or in simple terms, the difference between a savage
Vogul who puts a bear skin over his head in the morning and recites the prayer “don’t
kill me,” and a refined Puritan and independent in Connecticut), there’s no difference in
the foundations of their faiths. They both belong to the same category of people: those
who consider service to God the belief in the fulfillment of certain specific arbitrary
decrees rather than self-‐improvement. Only those who believe that service to God
consists of striving to live well differ from the rest, as they recognize a different,
immeasurably superior foundation that unites all right-‐thinking people into an unseen
church that alone can be universal. Immanuel Kant
1179
Every church presents exactly the same evidence of its integrity and even miraculous
nature, which serves as evidence of its truthfulness, as every other. So a precise and
rigorous definition of a church (not as something fantastic that we would like it to be,
but as it is in reality) can only be: a church is a congregation of people who claim that
they’re in full and unique possession of the truth.
The assertion that there can only be one church is completely unfair. Not only has
there never been a single true church, there never can be. A church comes into existence
only where a congregation of believers has segregated itself. The false belief that the
church has always been united is due to the fact that every church calls all other
churches heresies and claims that it alone is the one true, infallible church, passed down
to us.
Only someone who doesn’t know how people lived before him and has never met
people of other faiths can believe this proposition, and as soon as he learns how other
churches were created and how they now exist and reject each other, the proposition
instantly collapses. So such a church, which the clergy and their establishments describe
as founded by Christ and unique in its truthfulness, doesn’t exist and never has.
1180
Before he died, Christ told his disciples and all people that after him there would be
false Christs and false prophets, and that they should beware of them no matter how
much they might impress them. He said that they’d be powerful and that their power
would entice people. He told people how they could determine if their doctrine was false.
He said that we could determine this in the same way we can tell a good tree from a bad
one. If in their doctrine there’s nothing about mercy and love for all without exception,
anywhere that this is missing, that cannot be true Christian doctrine and such people
are false Christs and false prophets. Christ said that there would be many of them, and
that they would appear one after another until the time came when all human societies
begin to falter, when one nation begins to topple onto another, when governments and
rulers begin to fall, and general chaos ensues. Then, Christ said, the end of the old world
will come, a new world will begin and the Kingdom of God will be established. Based on
a Passage by Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
1181
No matter how strange it may seem, there’s no doubt that only in those teachings
that are called heresies does Christianity appear and develop, i.e. become clear and
manifest. Heresies might include errors, but they can also include true Christianity.
Teachings that call themselves state teachings and which support the power of the state
and violence can’t be Christianity, since their foundation, violence, is anti-‐Christian.
Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Anglicanism can’t be Christian teachings,
because they reject one of the fundamental demands of Christianity—persuasion
through love—and in its place they use the most anti-‐Christian methods: violence, all
the way up to the greatest tortures, executions, and burnings. All churches that unite
with state power, which not without reason sectarians call apocalyptic harlots, are not
only unchristian, but are always the most vicious enemies of Christianity. Even now,
without repenting for their crimes but considering their past holy, they continue to be
the enemies of Christianity and the main obstacle to the people’s acceptance of
Christianity.
1182
When people talk about heaven as if it were a place where the holy are, they usually
imagine it somewhere high above them in the immense spaces of the universe. When
they do this they forget that our world, when seen from these immense universal spaces,
looks like one of the stars of heaven, and the inhabitants of those worlds can with just as
much right point to the Earth and say, “See that star there—it’s the place of eternal
bliss and heavenly shelter that’s been prepared for us, where we’ll end up someday.” The
point is that through a strange misunderstanding the flight of our faith is always united
with the idea of ascending upwards, so that we never think that, no matter how high we
rise, all the same we’ll have to descend back down in order to plant our feet on some sort
of different world. If you were to search for such a blessed part of this world where
disembodied spirits live, you’d have to posit it as being neither above or below you,
because you’d have to imagine a similar material totality dependent on the spiritual
composition of its parts, and not upon its distance or proximity to material objects.
The idea of miracles comes from our pride, which makes us think that we’re so
important that the Highest Being must violate all the world’s order for our sake.
Charles-‐Louis Montesquieu
The longer humanity lives, the more it frees itself from superstition and the simpler
the laws of life become.
1183
December 19
The Superstition of Science
You shouldn’t study in order to become a scholar, but only in order to learn how to
live better.
Man was given reason so that it can show him life’s path, how to live a good life, and
how to restrain himself from evil. Therefore, it’s a great sin when a person uses reason
not for what it was given to him for, but for trifles or, what’s worse, to justify his bad life.
The foul life of today’s Christians is particularly sinful because Christ’s teaching is
available to us and we’re able to communicate with all the people of the world and make
use of the teachings about life that people of each nation preach. However, we live worse
than people of ancient times who had no knowledge of Christianity and knew of no one
but themselves. The most apparent evidence of our sinfulness is the falsity of the
doctrine called science, which has diverted and continues to divert us from the path of
truth.
Don’t blindly believe writers whom the majority considers wise or holy. Divine truth
often appears in the speech of an illiterate, simple person or a child, while unreliable
and even harmful ideas often appear in books that are considered the most scholarly.
1184
The most obvious evidence that what are often considered “sciences” are not only the
most insignificant but the most abominable subjects is the existence of a science of
criminal justice, i.e. of performing the most ignorant acts, characteristic only of people at
the very lowest level of development.
A person only lives in order to facilitate his own happiness and the happiness of his
family and friends as much as his powers and position allow. In order to accomplish this
goal he takes advantage the experience of his predecessors. He studies.
To study for any reason other than this, simply to be able to restate what others have
done, means to study the lowest of sciences. Such a person can no more be called truly
educated than a catalogue can be called a book. To be a human being means not simply
knowing things but doing for future generations what our predecessors have done for
us. Should I really spend my life studying scientific history only to discover once again
what’s already been discovered in the past? There’s no harm in deliberately repeating
the same idea twice as long as it’s being expressed from a new point of view. If you’ve
come up with the idea yourself, then your revelation of that which was revealed at an
earlier time will nevertheless be useful. Georg Lichtenberg
1185
When science ceases to be what it is now—on the one hand a system of sophisms
necessary for the maintenance of an obsolete way of life, and on the other a formless pile
of random bits of information for the most part of little or absolutely no use acquired by
people for their own benefit—only then will science be a harmonious, organic whole
that possesses a definite, rational purpose, comprehensible to all, namely: to bring into
human consciousness the truths that issue from the religious consciousness of our age.
The methodological babble of the institutes of higher learning is frequently nothing
more than mutual agreement to evade difficult questions, attaching inconsistent
meanings to words because in the academy people are reluctant to use the convenient
and generally indifferent phrase “I don’t know.” Immanuel Kant
Woe to scholars who gather knowledge, and woe to self-‐satisfied philosophers and
insatiable researchers. These foul tycoons celebrate daily in their mental feasts while
Lazarus starves night and day. These people are filled with that which has no substance,
because this empty knowledge has no influence on either their inner perfection or the
perfection of society. François Fénelon
1186
December 20
Effort
The Kingdom of God will come to be through effort. This means that in order to free
yourself from evil and become good, you must exert effort.
Effort is needed in order to break the grip of evil. And if you break the grip of evil
you will do good, because the human soul loves good and does good just as long as it’s
free from evil.
Don’t think that a person can instantly free himself from evil by exerting effort.
Effort is only real when it’s continuous. If you fall, get up and keep going. And no matter
how many times you fall, don’t lose heart and don’t stop trying.
Follow the example of the silkworm: it works until it has the strength to fly. You’re in
the same position as it is: stuck to the ground. Work on your soul, and you’ll grow
wings. Based on a Passage by Angelus Silesius
Not only should you not expect quick results from your efforts toward the good, you
shouldn’t expect to ever see them. You’ll never see the fruits of your efforts because no
matter how much you progress, the perfection toward which you strive will move ahead
of you just as much. Exerting effort is not a means of achieving happiness; exerting
effort gives happiness.
1187
A special, inexpressible and joyful sensation embraces a person when his heart
opens up to the feeling of goodness. It is then that he becomes conscious of something
greater than he is. It is then that he recognizes that his essence is limitless, and that no
matter how base he is now in his evil and his weaknesses, he was born to accomplish the
greatest good, to achieve perfection, and that this goal is within his power. All that he
now holds in reverence already belongs to him, even though he has yet to bring it to
fruition. He now knows what he must strive for and what he must direct all his efforts
towards. Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am an instrument through which God operates. My true happiness lies in taking
part in His actions. I can only participate in His actions through the effort I make to
keep the instrument that He’s given me—myself, my soul—in good order, pure, and
well-‐honed.
Always move forward in the improvement of your soul, never stand still, never turn
back, and never give up. He who is satisfied with himself has stopped, turned back, and
given up.
Always be dissatisfied with yourself as you are, because where you stop, there you’ll
remain. Augustine
1188
How mistaken it is to ask God, or even other people, to rescue you from an
unfortunate situation. You need no one’s help, you need no escape from the situation in
which you find yourself, you only need one thing: to exert your own effort to free
yourself from sins, temptations and superstitions. Your situation will change and
improve only to the degree to which you free yourself from sins, temptations and
superstitions.
It’s not strength when a person can tie an iron poker in a knot, or when he can buy
up all sorts of goods, or when he can conquer an entire nation with his soldiers. True
strength, a thousand times greater than all these displays of power, is when a person
can forgive with all his soul someone who’s offended him, or when he can restrain
himself from a desire he knows is sinful, or when he can remember at any moment that
the spirit of God lives within him. Such a person is stronger than anyone else, because
the strength of God is always in him.
1189
People occupy themselves with the most diverse matters, ones they consider the most
important, but almost never occupy themselves with the one matter that was designed
for them and that includes all others: the improvement of their souls. It’s obvious that
this is the one matter designed especially for people because it’s the only activity that
poses no obstacles to a person and that always gives him nothing but happiness.
In order to achieve a good life, you must not disdain any little acts of kindness. You
must exert just as much effort on small acts of kindness as you would on the biggest
and most public good deed.
The Kingdom of Heaven becomes manifest through strength, and those who exert
themselves bring it to fruition.
1190
December 21
Self-‐Renunciation
Man’s ability to renounce his physical life clearly demonstrates that a spiritual
essence exists within him. If this weren’t the case, there would be nothing for which he
could renounce physical life.
Your life repulses you. You feel like you’re always immersed in sin: as soon as you
extricate yourself from one you fall into another. How can you rectify your life even just a
little? The most effective method is to recognize that your life is not in your body but in
your soul, and to eschew the disgusting business of physical life. Just wish for this with
all your soul and you’ll see how your life will begin to correct itself right away. It was bad
only because your spiritual life was serving your physical life.
1191
From the point of view of happiness the question of life is insoluble, since our
greatest efforts interfere with our achieving happiness. From the point of view of duty
there’s the same difficulty, for the fulfillment of duty brings peace, but not happiness.
Only divine, holy love and union with God through faith annihilates this difficulty,
for if sacrifice becomes joy, continuous, flourishing, indestructible joy, then the soul is
given sufficient nourishment, even though you can’t fully explain what it is. Henri
Frédéric Amiel
To many people it seems that if you exclude the self and love for the self from your
life, then nothing remains. It seems to them that without the personal self there’s no life.
However, it only appears this way to people who’ve never experienced the joy of self-‐
renunciation. Discard your personal self from life, renounce it, and the essence of life—
love and joy—will remain.
The greatest joy that a person can know, the state of total freedom and happiness, is
the state of self-‐renunciation and love. Reason reveals to man the only path to
happiness, and his feelings attach him to this path.
1192
Consciousness of your purpose has nothing to do with enjoying life. It has its own
particular law, the law of self-‐renunciation, and if we wish to mix the two together in
order to present this mixture as a prescription for an ailing soul, nevertheless they’d
immediately separate themselves from one another. If they didn’t, then the
consciousness of one’s purpose would have no effect. And if physical life were to achieve
some power as well as a result of the search for pleasure, as if that coincided with a
person’s purpose, then moral life would disappear forever. Immanuel Kant
People are wrong when they think and say that an external force is necessary to
fulfill life’s purpose and attain happiness. This is false: health and external forces are
unnecessary for the fulfillment of a person’s purpose and the achievement of happiness.
We’ve been given the opportunity to experience the joy of spiritual life, which nothing
can destroy: the joy of increasing the love within us. All you have to do is believe in this
spiritual life and transfer all your energy into it. It’s like the wings of a bird.
You can and must live an entirely material life when you’re laboring in the world,
but as soon as you hit an obstacle, open your wings, believe in them, and fly. And this
spiritual life is always free, always joyful, and always fruitful.
1193
When a baby is born, he thinks he’s the only thing in the world. He yields to no one
and nothing, he doesn’t want to know about anyone else, but only wants to be given
what he needs. He doesn’t even know his mother; he only knows the breast on which he
nurses. However, one, two, six months pass, and the child begins to understand that
there are other people just like him, and that what he wants for himself these other
people likewise want for themselves. And the longer he lives, the more he understands
that he’s not alone in the world and that he must either fight with others for what he
wants if he has the strength, or if he doesn’t he must submit to the way things are. And
the longer a person lives, the more he understands that it’s impossible to acquire what
he wants and that his entire life is merely temporary and can end with death at any
moment. He sees with his own eyes how death carries someone away today and will carry
someone else away tomorrow, and that the same can happen to him at any moment and
that it certainly will sooner or later. At that point a person can’t help but understand
that his true life isn’t in his body, and that no matter what he does in this world, it will
come to nothing.
And when a person understands this, he understands that the spirit living within
him doesn’t just live within him but within all people throughout the world, and that
this spirit is God’s spirit. Once he understands this, he stops living for his body and
transfers his life into the spirit of God.
1194
Transference of one’s self from the separate into the inseparable and universal is
what we forever strive for in this life, consciously or unconsciously.
The ideal of total self-‐renunciation is impossible for a living person. However,
drawing closer to self-‐renunciation is not only possible, but also necessary and fruitful.
1195
December 22
Humility
The less a person is satisfied with himself, the more others need him and the more
useful he is to them.
A good and wise person can be recognized by the fact that he considers others better
and wiser than he is.
No matter how little attention people pay to their own faults, there’s no one who
doesn’t know something about himself that’s worse than what he knows about anyone
else.
Therefore, humility is easy for anyone to acquire. Sir Charles Wolseley
Try to understand your strengths. Once you understand them, don’t be afraid of
belittling them; be afraid of exaggerating them.
In order to test yourself and annihilate your pride, it’s good to accustom yourself not
to expect or hope for approval and praise when you interact with others, but on the
contrary to expect humiliation, insults and poor opinions of you.
1196
That which is often called idiocy—behaving in a manner that evokes condemnation
and attacks by others—is undesirable to the extent to which it evokes people’s evil acts,
but is understandable and desirable as the only confirmation that what you’re doing
you’re doing for the sake of your soul and not worldly glory.
We are God’s organs. We know what we’re supposed to do, but we’ll never be allowed
to understand the ultimate reason for doing what we do. This is the essence of humility
and faith.
The deeper a person descends into himself and the more insignificant he imagines
himself to be, the higher he elevates himself toward God. Thomas van Kempen
A good person is one who remembers his sins and forgets his virtues, while an evil
person on the other hand remembers his virtues and forgets his sins.
Never forgive yourself and you’ll find it easy to forgive others.
There’s something inherent within you that is worthy of disapproval. Strive to
recognize it as soon as you can.
He who is embarrassed by his weakness in the fulfillment of his obligations is close
the spiritual power that is needed for their fulfillment. Chinese Proverb
1197
December 23
Honesty
If your life is not in agreement with truth, it’s nevertheless better to acknowledge
truth than to conceal it. We can change our lives in accordance with truth, but there is
no way to change truth. It remains as it was and will never cease to expose us.
When we look at the work of a master craftsman, it seems like all we need to do is
take up the work and we can do the same as he did. This also happens when we listen to
a person speaking the truth. We think it’s easy to speak the truth, but it only appears so.
In order to speak the truth and not lie, you have to work on yourself quite a bit. The
most important thing is to place no value on people’s opinions but rather structure your
life so that the main task is to satisfy your conscience, not people. Only then, without any
effort at all, you’ll start speaking the truth.
1198
Don’t fear other people, whether of high rank or low, whether rich or poor, whether
educated or ignorant. Respect all, love all, but fear no one. Having deliberately and
consciously chosen the truth, hold to your convictions no matter what happens. Don’t
wait for the reaction of the mob. The fewer voices there are in the corner of truth, the
higher you must raise your voice. Be certain that truth is stronger than error, prejudice
and passion, and be prepared for martyrdom. Truth isn’t a physical and temporal
phenomenon that an assembly of men have decided upon, but something changeless,
eternal, one and the same in all worlds, in unity with God and possessing His
omnipotence. William Channing
When a person uses his reason to try to solve questions such as the origin and
purpose of the world, his head starts to spin and he becomes flustered. The human
mind can’t find the truth of such questions. What does this mean? It means that reason
wasn’t given to man to answer these questions, and that the very posing of such
questions indicates an error in reason. Reason can answer decisively and truthfully only
one question: how a person should live. And the answer is clear: you should live so that
everything will be good for you and for all people.
It’s much harder to tell the truth than to lie, but it’s hardest of all to stop with one lie
and lie no more. If you’ve told the truth you need not speak any more. If you’ve lied, you
have to keep lying in order to defend yourself.
1199
A person’s perfection can be judged by the degree to which he’s freed himself from
falsehood.
A lie accomplishes only the most immediate and insignificant goals and always
harms a person’s most important and lasting goals. Lies are also terrible in that they
conceal the spiritual essence that’s the same in everyone and therefore impede the
possibility of union. You can only have bestial relations with a liar. Only the truth unites.
The truth expressed in words is the most powerful force in human life. We fail to
recognize this power only because its consequences don’t immediately become apparent.
Christ said, “My nourishment lies in manifesting the will of the One who sent me
and conducting His affairs.” And the affair that we must conduct stands before each of
us. We can never know the full purpose of this affair, but we can’t help but know what
we should do. And in order to know this, you must not blindly believe in what everyone
around you believes but use the reason that’s been given to you to confirm what they
believe.
1200
Never believe that others can show you the way to a good life and that you can’t find
it yourself. Pay attention to the inner voice of your reason alone and not to the orders
and suggestions of others.
If a person feels in his soul that he’s done something he shouldn’t and instead of
sorting out where he made his mistake tries not to think about it, he ruins his soul more
and more.
Reason points out to people their divergence from the law of life, but these deviations
seem so normal and appear so pleasant that people try to silence their reason so that it
won’t interfere with their living the way to which they’ve become accustomed.
1201
December 24
Restraint in Deed
Strength is necessary for the practice of good, but it’s even more necessary for
abstention from evil.
If you have to choose between engaging in petty or harmful activities from morning
till evening or doing nothing, it’s much better to do nothing than to engage in trifling or
harmful activities.
In order to acquire piety, there’s nothing more important than self-‐restraint. Self-‐
restraint must be a habit cultivated early in life. If it is, then it’s confirmed in virtue. For
a person who’s established in virtue, there’s nothing that can’t be overcome. Lao Tsu
You commit evil against yourself and others once because of something you failed to
do, and ten thousand times because of something you did.
1202
A good charioteer is someone who pulls the reins with all his might to restrain
galloping horses, not someone who simply holds the reigns. In the same way, a good
person isn’t someone who knows that anger is bad but doesn’t try to subdue it, but
rather someone who directs all his might toward this restraint. Buddhist Wisdom
One mistake extrinsic religious doctrines make is prescribing specific acts, sacrifices,
sacraments and prayers, while the most important aspect of a true religious doctrine is
defining what a person shouldn’t do.
The great truth of Lao Tsu is inaction: do nothing, plan nothing, but simply
surrender to what you consider it good to surrender to: surrender to that which
coincides with the river of God’s will.
1203
December 25
Restraint in Word
The less you speak the more you work.
There’s a proverb that says, “cover up someone else’s sin and God will forgive two.”
It’s true.
Listen to arguments but don’t get involved in them. May God protect you from even
the slightest expressions of impetuosity and passion. Anger is inappropriate everywhere,
but most of all in matters dealing with a just cause, for it obscures and muddies it.
Nikolai Gogol
Everyone enjoys listening to backbiting so much that it’s difficult to restrain yourself
from doing what your companions like: criticizing people.
A person’s morality is visible in his relation to the word.
If you know the truth or if you think you know it, relate it in the simplest possible
form and, most importantly, relate it in a way that doesn’t attack other people’s
opinions.
1204
When you’re in a dispute, try to make your words soft and your argument firm. Try
not to offend your opponent; try to persuade him. George Wilkins
Nothing facilitates the triumph of reason as much as the tranquility of those who
serve it. Truth suffers more often from the fervor of its defenders than from its
opponents. William Penn
I once knew an old man who deliberately dragged out his speech so that several
seconds would pass between each word. I found out that he did this on purpose because
he was afraid of committing a sin with his words.
The word brings people together, and therefore you must speak in a way so that
what you say will be understood by everyone and that everything you say will be true.
1205
December 26
Restraint in Thought
In order for a candle to emit a tranquil light, it has to be placed in a spot that’s
protected from the wind. If a candle is placed in the wind, its light will tremble and cast
strange, dark shadows. Such strange, dark shadows are cast upon a person’s soul by
another person’s evil thoughts. Based on a Passage from “The Voice of Silence”
Be the master of your thoughts if you want to reach your goal. Aim your soul’s vision
at that solitary, pure light that’s free from passion. Based on a Passage from “The Voice
of Silence”
“You do well, dear Lucinius,” Seneca wrote his friend, “that you try with your own
efforts to keep yourself in a good frame of mind. Anyone can do this. In order to, we
needn’t raise our hands to the sky and ask the temple guardian to allow us to come
closer to God so that he can hear us, for God is always close to us. He is within us. Yes,
within us lives the holy spirit, witness and guardian of all that’s good and all that’s bad.
He treats us as we treat him. If we guard him, he will guard us.”
1206
A person’s true strength doesn’t come in bursts but in quiet, inextinguishable
pursuit of the good, which he establishes in his thoughts, expresses in his words and
conducts in his deeds.
The simplest and most trivial expression of human freedom consists in the choice
between two or a few inconsequential acts: to go right or left or to stay where you are. A
more difficult and consequential expression is the choice between following your
inclinations toward an emotion and restraining yourself from it: to give in to anger or to
restrain yourself. The most difficult, important and necessary expression of freedom is
to guide your thoughts in one direction or another.
Depression is a state of the soul in which a person can’t see the meaning of his own
life or the life of the world. There’s only one deliverance: to evoke within yourself your
own thoughts or the thoughts of others that you understood in the past and that
explained the meaning of your life to you. Evoking such thoughts is accomplished
through prayer: the repetition of those elevated truths you know and can express
yourself.
You can divide intellectuals into two categories: those who think for themselves and
those who think for others. The second group is the rule, while the first is the exception.
The first group consists of self-‐sufficient scholars and egoists in the noblest sense of the
term. It’s only from them that the world receives education, for only a light that someone
kindled for himself can enlighten others. Arthur Schopenhauer
1207
Only the power of reason can bring justice to the world. Cosmic forces outside us can
never bring our ideals to fruition. If humanity, as the pinnacle of conscious beings,
doesn’t exert this effort, these ideals will never be manifested. Georg von Gizycki
The last step of reason is recognition that the number of phenomena that are beyond
its comprehension is endless. Reason is very weak if it doesn’t reach this point. You have
to be able to doubt when necessary, to assert when necessary, and to submit when
necessary. He who fails to adhere to these rules doesn’t know the power of reason. There
are people who violate these three rules: some assert everything as if it’s been proven
without knowing what can be considered proof; others doubt everything without
knowing what they should submit to; and still others submit to everything without
knowing when they should use their own judgment. Blaise Pascal
1208
Pray once an hour. The most necessary and difficult prayer is recollection of your
responsibilities to God and His law as life moves about you. If you find yourself
frightened, angry, confused, or distracted, exert effort and remember who you are and
what you must do. This is prayer. It’s difficult at first, but you can turn it into a habit.
To understand things means to enter into them and then leave them. It turns out
that first imprisonment is necessary, and then liberation; enchantment and then
disenchantment; enthusiasm and then indifference. Someone who finds himself under
the influence of enchantment and someone who was never enchanted are in the same
position—they misunderstand in the same way. We only know well what we first
believe and then deliberate upon. In order to understand you have to be free, but first
you have to be imprisoned. Henri Frédéric Amiel
1209
December 27
There is No Evil
When you’re sad, think about others who are sad and about how things could be
worse. Also remember what you’ve been guilty of in the past and what you’re guilty of
now. Most importantly, remember that what you call sadness has been sent to you as a
test, so that you may humbly and lovingly endure sadness and as a result become better.
And becoming better is the whole point of your life.
Condemnation of life is madness that leads to suicide.
In difficult times of illness, loss and all sorts of grief, prayer is needed more than at
any other time: not petitions for deliverance, but recognition of one’s dependence on the
higher will. “Not my will but Thine be done; not as I wish, but as You wish; and not what
I desire, but what You desire.” My work is in the conditions You’ve placed me in order to
fulfill Your will. Let me remember when times are difficult that this is what’s been given
to me and that this opportunity in which I’ve been granted the good fortune to do what
the higher will wishes of me will never be repeated.
1210
External obstacles can’t bring any evil to a person with a strong spirit, for evil is
everything that disfigures and weakens, as happens with animals who become angry at
obstacles. For a person who meets obstacles with the powerful spirit that was given to
him, every obstacle increases moral beauty and strength. Marcus Aurelius
When a person realizes that his own error has caused his personal suffering and
directs all his energy toward destroying this error, he doesn’t resent suffering but rather
bears it both easily and joyfully. However, when such a person is pierced by suffering
that comes from beyond any perceptible connection to his own error, then he thinks he’s
been afflicted with something that shouldn’t be, and asks himself: “What is the
purpose?” “What did I do?” And finding no object toward which he can direct his
energy, he becomes embittered before suffering, and for him suffering becomes a
terrible torment.
When a person can’t perceive the connections between the sufferings he’s
experiencing and his own life, he can do one of two things. He can either continue to
bear these sufferings as torments that have no meaning, or he can recognize that his
sufferings reveal to him his errors and the way to escape them.
If a person looks at suffering in the former way, suffering can’t be explained at all
and evokes nothing other than ever-‐increasing despair and embitterment that leads
only to suicide. If he looks at it in the latter way, suffering evokes the very things that
comprise true life: strength of reason, recognition of sins, freedom from error and
submission to the law of reason.
1211
If a person understands that evil can only exist for him in his own actions, all
external tribulations that can afflict him are nothing compared to the peace and
freedom that he experiences, knowing that no evil exists for him other than within
himself.
He who uses force against his circumstances will himself be forced by circumstances
in his turn; he who yields to circumstances will find them yielding to him.
When you see that your circumstances are disadvantageous, rather than resist them
allow them to follow their natural course, because he who fights against his
circumstances becomes their slave, while he who submits to them becomes their master.
Talmud
The suffering of an irrational life leads to recognition that a rational life is essential.
1212
Remember that the distinguishing feature of a rational being is willing submission
to his fate and not a shameful struggle with it, as is the case with animals. Marcus
Aurelius
What can we do when everything abandons us: health, happiness, love, intense
feelings, memory, the ability to work, when it seems to us that the sun is growing cold
and life seems to be losing its beauty? How can we live when there’s no hope at all? Take
narcotics or turn hard as stone? The answer is always the same: Let come what may, as
long as your conscience is clear you’ll feel that you’re doing what your spiritual essence
demands of you. You will be what you must be, and the rest is God’s business. And even
if there’s no God, holy and kind, all the same spiritual life is the key to the secret and the
pole star for continually advancing humanity, because this alone gives true happiness.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
1213
December 28
Life Exists Only in the Present
In order to live a genuine, rational life you need not control what has past or what
might be. You must live only in the present and only in the present should you exert
effort to live a good life.
There is neither a past nor a future life; we only imagine them. There is only one true
life and it alone is important and sacred.
As soon as you journey into the past or future you leave true life, and as a result
you’re alone, orphaned and enslaved.
If a person thinks about the results of what he’s doing, then he’s most assuredly
doing it for himself alone.
1214
It’s amazing how we’ve become accustomed to the illusion of our unique
individuality and separation from the world. At every moment, life forces us to feel our
connection with and dependence upon the world, to feel our lack of completeness, yet all
the same we believe that we, our separate selves, are something for which life is worth
living. And yet when you clearly understand this illusion you marvel at how you could
have failed to see that you’re not part of a whole but a temporal and spatial
manifestation of something beyond time and space and that we’re all conscious of this
manifestation in the timeless present.
Each day’s concerns are enough. Don’t waste life in doubts and fears. Give yourself
up to your work, assured that proper fulfillment of your current responsibilities is the
best preparation for the hours or ages that will follow. Ralph Waldo Emerson
1215
Our future state will always appear to be an illusion to our present state.
It’s not the length of life that’s important, but its depth. The point isn’t to perpetuate
life but to take your soul out of time, as every elevated spiritual act does. When we live a
full life we don’t ask ourselves about time. Ralph Waldo Emerson
We can never know the consequences of our actions, because the consequences of
our actions in this endless world seem endless to us. If you can see all the consequences
of your actions, know that those actions are insignificant.
1216
December 29
There is No Death
In order to prepare for death, I don’t need to fast or attend religious services, write
wills or say farewell. I only need to live life according to the wishes of the God from
whom I came and to whom I’ll return when I die.
No matter what you’re doing, be prepared to stop. So test yourself: can you pull
yourself away? Only then are you doing well what you’re doing.
Thinking of the inevitability of death teaches this.
If a person doesn’t understand what true life is, he won’t understand what death is
either.
Death can be compliance and therefore a moral act. An animal dies, while a human
must turn his soul over to his Creator. Henri Frédéric Amiel
Death is what we call the annihilation of life and the moment or hours of dying. The
former is beyond our control while the second, dying, is the final act of life and possesses
enormous significance. You must endeavor to die well for the sake of those you leave
behind.
1217
When decorations are taken from one stage to another, it becomes obvious that what
we considered reality was simply a spectacle, since we move from one spectacle to the
next. In the same way, at the moment of death it should become obvious to a person
what’s truly real. It’s because of this that the moment of death is important and
valuable.
At the moment a person dies the candle he used to read a book filled with worries,
deceptions, pain and evil flares up more brightly than it ever did before, enlightens
everything that was once in darkness, crackles, dims, and goes out forever.
Suffering and death seem to be evil to a person only when he considers the law of his
carnal, animal existence to be the law of his life. Only when he, as a human being,
descends to the level of an animal, only then does he see suffering and death as terrible.
And like scarecrows, suffering and death shout at him from all directions and chase him
down the only path before him, the path of human life that submits to the law of reason
and expresses itself in love. Suffering and death are merely a person’s violations of the
law of his life. If a person lived an entirely spiritual life he’d experience neither suffering
nor death.
1218
In extreme old age elderly people, as well as those looking on, usually think that
they’ve simply managed to live for a long time. On the contrary, in extreme old age the
most valuable and necessary life passes both for the elderly person and for others. The
value of life is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from death. It would
be good for elderly people and those around them to remember this. The last moment of
dying is particularly valuable.
From the time people began to think, they realized that nothing facilitates a person’s
moral life more than remembrance of physical death. The medical arts have taken a
false path: instead of concerning themselves with reducing suffering they’ve established
the goal of rescuing people from death and teaching them to hope for deliverance from
physical death, to distance the thought of death from themselves. In this manner, they
deprive people of the primary motivation for living a moral life.
1219
December 30
After Death
People ask: what comes after death? The answer should be: if you truly say not with
your tongue but with your heart, “May Your Will be fulfilled on earth and in heaven,” in
other words in both this temporary life and in eternal life, then there’s no point in
thinking about what comes after death. Give yourself over to the will of the Eternal
Being. You know that He is love, and therefore you can be assured that it will be good.
As he was dying, Christ said, “Father, into Your hands I give up my spirit.” If a
person says these words not just with his tongue but with all his heart, then he needs
nothing more. If my spirit returns to the One from Whom it came, then nothing can
happen to it except the very best.
Everything on earth has its beginning, development, and end. It’s the same with the
fruits of the earth and the seasons of the year. When wise people approach death they
see in death the same thing that happens to the earth’s fruits and the year’s seasons.
Mortals, you have not long to live; we’ve been granted but a few moments. But the
soul experiences no aging and will live forever. Pseudo-‐Phocylides
1220
All doctrines of morality are defined by the solution to the question of whether or
not the soul is mortal or immortal. Philosophers have developed a doctrine of morality
independent of this. They reason as if all of life is but a single hour. Blaise Pascal
A person who violates the law thinks that with death his life is completely over. Such
a person is capable of descending into any sort of evil. Buddhist Wisdom
There’s only one thing that matters to us: to know what God wants of us. I know this,
and therefore I consider it my business to learn to fulfill all that I’m so clearly
commanded to from without by words and from within by my conscience and to direct
all my powers towards it, since I know that if I dedicate all my strength to fulfilling my
Lord’s will, He’ll never abandon me and things will be as they should for me and my
soul.
1221
No matter how much we might wish that what we call the soul—the personal form
of consciousness of which we’re aware—is immortal, it isn’t and never can be, because
death is a transformation of the form of consciousness that expressed itself in my
human existence. That form of consciousness disappears, but that which was conscious
doesn’t and can’t disappear, because it’s outside of time and space and alone is what
truly exists.
I can only say about life after death that if it exists, it will begin the same way this life
began: by clarifying my place in new circumstances.
1222
December 31
Life is a Blessing
A wise man never wants to change his earthly life, because he’s always happy with
the life he’s living.
Asking God to send you blessings in this life is like sitting at a spring and asking the
spring to quench your thirst. You’ve been given every possible blessing. You only need to
be able to use them.
The better people live, the less they complain about others. The worse people live, the
more they’re displeased with others rather than with themselves.
A wise person seeks everything within himself; a fool seeks everything in others.
Confucius
1223
A person who commits an evil act suffers too. A person who performs a good deed
rejoices too. A person who exerts effort to make himself pure or impure either destroys
or saves himself.
A person is mistaken if he hopes to find happiness outside himself either in this life
and in the life to come.
Nothing external to a person can cause him ill, because if he lives according to the
law of life no evil can touch him. Let the world perish, but for a person there can be no
evil. Lucy Mallory
There’s one meaning to life: happiness. Life manifests itself in separate beings only
so that each separate being can experience happiness and rejoice. For a person, a
rational being, there can only be happiness when there’s happiness for all.
1224
People become distressed when they don’t get what they want. However, time passes
and a person looks back and recalls how things once were, and he often sees that what
he considered misfortune and failure was good fortune and, on the other hand, that
which he considered good fortune turned out to be misfortune.
It often happens like this for the body, while for the soul it always turns out like this.
If we accept what happens to us with humility, it will all be of use to our souls.
So don’t grieve over what happens to you and know that anything that happens to
any of God’s creations has been sent to him for his benefit.
It seems to me that a person must make happiness and satisfaction his first rule. I
should be as ashamed as if I had committed an evil deed when I’m dissatisfied with
myself and know that if something about me or within me isn’t in harmony, then I
shouldn’t tell others about it or complain, but rather find a way to correct whatever isn’t
in harmony as quickly as possible.
1225
There once was a man who was such a great benefactor that he wanted to do as
much good for people as he could, and he began to consider how he might do it so that
he offended no one and so that what he did would be of use to all. If he were to give out
good things by hand directly, then he’d have to determine who to give to, who needed it
more; and then he wouldn’t treat everyone equally, and those who didn’t receive
anything would say, “Why did you help those people and not us?”
So the benefactor came up with the idea of building a huge inn, and collecting into
that inn everything that might be of use to people and make them happy. And in the
inn the benefactor put together comfortable rooms, fine ovens, firewood, lighting, barns
full of all sorts of grain, cellars with fruits, tea, sugar, cider, apples, a multitude of
snacks, beds and sheets, all sorts of clothes, linens, and every kind of footwear, enough
to satisfy a hundred people or more. The benefactor did all this, and then he left and
waited to see what would happen.
Good people started to visit. They would eat, drink and spend a night, a day or two,
or a week. On other occasions people would take shoes or clothing for people in need,
and then they’d put everything back as it was before they came, so that other visitors
could make use of it in the same way, and they’d leave and simply recognize and thank
the unknown benefactor.
However, on one occasion audacious, impudent and unkind people came to the inn.
They seized everything there for themselves and started to fight over the goods. They
came to blows over the dispute, began grabbing things away from each other and
started destroying the goods simply so that others couldn’t get them. And when it got to
the point where they’d ruined everything there and began to get cold and hungry and
1226
endured each others’ insults, they started to berate the landlord for putting things
together so badly and not posting guards, for not preparing enough goods, and for
letting in so many bad people. Others said that there was no such landlord, and that
they had built the inn themselves.
And these people left the inn hungry, cold and angry, and only berated each other,
the inn, and whoever built it.
People do the same thing in this world when they fail to live according to God’s will.
They destroy their lives and the lives of others and don’t blame themselves but rather
blame each other and God for creating the world so badly, or they blame the world itself
which, in their opinion, created itself without God.
If people would simply understand that the world didn’t create itself, but that it was
created by their benefactor—God—for their benefit, and wouldn’t do what destroys
and ruins their lives, there would be nothing greater than the blessings they’d receive.
1227
People and Texts Cited by Tolstoy
Abdullah Al-Mamun Suhrawardy (1870-1935): Islamic scholar and barrister. As a result
of the publication of his book Sayings of Muhammad (1905) Tolstoy wrote Suhrawardy
and their correspondence continued until Tolstoy’s death.
Albitis, F.: 19th Century English writer, author of The Morality of all Nations (1850).
Allen, Grant (1848-1899): Canadian novelist and natural scientist.
Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821-1881): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Geneva,
author of Journal Intime, which Tolstoy highly valued.
Ananius: An early Christian who appears in The Acts of The Apostles, Chapter Five.
According to the narrative, he and his wife Sapphira sold their property in accordance
with Christian doctrine, but withheld a portion of the proceeds from Peter. Peter
condemned Ananius and he fell dead. Sapphira was questioned and met the same fate.
“Arabian Proverb,” “Arabic Source”: Tolstoy made no further notation on where he
found these quotes.
Augustine (354-430): Christian theologian and philosopher.
Baba Premanand Bharati (1858-1913): Indian writer and publisher of the journal The
Light of India.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626): English philosopher, founder of empiricism.
Bakunin, Mikhail (1814-1876): Émigré-revolutionary, a leading theoretician of
anarchism.
Ballou, Adin (1803-1890): Director of an American religious society, apologist for the
Christian doctrine of non-resistance to evil. Tolstoy corresponded with Ballou in the last
years of Ballou’s life.
Basil the Great (329-379): Roman archbishop, author of numerous religious books.
Baxter, Richard (1615-1691): Puritan theologian.
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832): English jurist and philosopher, founder of Utilitarianism.
Bhagavad Gita: Ancient Hindu sacred religious-philosophical poem in the form of a
dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna incorporated into the sixth book of the epic The
Mahabharata.
1228
Bondarev, Timofei Mikhailovich (1820-1898): A peasant in Don County, the author of
Diligence and Parasitism, or the Triumph of Agriculture, which Tolstoy highly valued.
Book of the Wisdom of Joshua the Son of Sirach: More commonly known as The Book of
Sirach, Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, a book of moral teachings written by Shimon ben
Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira c. 200-175 B.C.
“Brahmanic Wisdom”: Entries with this citation are from unidentified Hindu sources.
Briullov, Karl Pavlovich (1799-1852): Russian painter.
Browne, Edward Harold (1811-1891): Bishop of the Church of England.
Buddhist Suttas: Ancient sayings by various Buddhist teachers of India.
Buddhist Wisdom: Most sayings with this and similar attributions were taken from the
Dhammapada (see entry below).
Buka (1857-1906) Pen name of Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, author of Whom Shall We
Serve?, a book Tolstoy valued.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881): Scottish philosopher and historian.
Carpenter, Edward (1844-1929): English writer. In 1898 Tolstoy wrote the preface to
Carpenter’s article “Modern Science.”
“Cartouche”: Alias of Louis Dominique Bourguinon (1693-1721) a French bandit.
Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE): Roman politician and writer.
Celobulus (VI century B.C.): one of the so-called “Seven Greek Sages,” the Tyrant of
Lindos, on the Island of Rhodes.
Chan Jian: Chinese poet of the late Tang Dynasty (618-907).
Channing, William Ellery (1780-1842): Pastor in Boston, famous for his preaching on
moral and social themes.
Chelčicky, Peter (c. 1390- c. 1460): Czech spiritual theoretician.
Chertkov, Vladimir (1854-1936): Writer, close friend and philosophical compatriot of
Tolstoy’s. Chertkov took an active role in formulating many of Tolstoy’s sayings in For
Every Day.
1229
“Chinese Proverb,” “Chinese Saying” “Chinese Source,” “Chinese Wisdom”: There is no
information as to where Tolstoy found quotes with these attributions.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.): Roman orator.
Combe, Abram (1775-1827): British socialist and Christian reformer, associate of Robert
Owen.
Confucius (Kong Fu-Tse) (551-479 BCE): Chinese philosopher.
Considerant, Victor (1808-1893): French socialist and disciple of Fourier.
Crosby, Ernest (1856-1907): American writer and disciple of Tolstoy.
Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619): English poet, historian and playwright.
Davidson, John Morrison (1843-1916): English political writer. His 1906 book, That
Great Lying Church, touches on many of the same themes as Tolstoy in For Every Day
and his other writings.
Demophilus: Greek philosopher, a follower of Pythagoras.
d’Esherny, François (1733-1815): Swiss author in the spirit of Rousseau.
de Sales, François (1567-1622): Catholic saint, Bishop of Geneva, author of numerous
books on spirituality.
Dhammapada: Ancient monument to Indian Buddhism, containing sayings of a moral
character; considered by Buddhists to be from the First Council, which occurred in 477
B.C.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1821-1881): Russian author and contemporary of Tolstoy.
Although the two writers valued each other’s literary work, they never met.
Dumas fils, Alexandre (1824-1895): French novelist and playwright.
“Eastern Wisdom”: Entries with this citation were apparently taken from the book
Vostochnaya Mudrost’ (Eastern Wisdom), a collection of sayings compiled by Tolstoy’s
daughter Tatyana and published in 1903.
Eliot, George (1819-1880): pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, English writer.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882): American writer, philosopher and poet.
Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper (1796-1864): French writer, socialist, follower of Saint-
Simone.
1230
“English Source”: Tolstoy did not identify the text from which he took this quote.
Epictetus (late 1st Century-early 2nd Century): Greek Stoic philosopher. Epictetus’
thoughts are taken from the book The Roman Thinker Epictetus, His Life and Teachings
by V. G. Chertkov.
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536): Dutch humanist.
Farrar, Frederic (1831-1903): English cleric.
Fénelon, François (1651-1715): French writer, Archbishop of Cambrai.
Flammarion, Camille (1842-1925): French astronomer. Flammarion studied spiritual
concepts such as reincarnation from a scientific perspective.
Foster, John (1770-1843): British Baptist minister and author.
Frederick II (1712-1786): King of Prussia.
Gavrilov, Sergei Vasilevich: A peasant and author of the book The Vagabond (Moscow,
1912) from Simbirskii Province who corresponded with Tolstoy between 1908 and 1910.
The quote in For Every Day was taken from one of his letters.
George, Henry (1839-1897): American economist and political activist. Tolstoy highly
valued George’s economic theories and expounds them in his novel Resurrection.
Hitopadesha: Ancient Hindu collection of moral tales.
Gizycki, Georg von (1851-1985): German philosopher, professor at the University of
Berlin, founder of the German Society of Ethical Culture.
Godwin, William (1756-1836): English journalist, political philosopher and novelist.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832): German poet.
Gogol, Nikolai (1809-1852): Russian author. Gogol became deeply religious toward the
end of his life and, much like Tolstoy, almost completely abandoned literature for
moralistic writing.
Goldstein, Mikhail (1853-1905): chemist and journalist, assistant professor at St.
Petersburg University, 1891-1901.
Heim, Albert (1849-1937): Swiss professor of geology, author of Sexual Life from the
Point of View of the Natural History of Evolution, which was published in Russian
translation by Tolstoy’s publishing house “Posrednik” in 1902.
1231
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535-c. 475 BCE): Greek philosopher.
The Herald of Peace and International Arbitration: A monthly journal published in
London by the International Peace Society.
Herbert, Sir Edward (1583-1648): English philosopher.
Herzen, Alexander (1812-1870): Writer, émigré-revolutionary.
Hills, Arnold (1857-1927): English philanthropist and first president of the London
Vegetarian Society.
Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm von (1767-1835): German linguist and diplomat.
Hus, Jan (1369-1415): Czech priest and philosopher, a forerunner to the Protestant
Reformation.
Ibrahim of Cordova: Apparently a reference to the 10th Century merchant and traveler
Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub al-Tartushi, who may have lived in Cordova.
“Indian Saying”: Tolstoy did not identify this source.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826): American politician, author of works on legal questions.
John Chrysostum (347-407): Archbishop of Constantinople, known for his many
eloquent sermons.
Juvenal (1st-2nd centuries CE): Roman satirist.
K. A reference to Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921), a Ukrainian writer. The passage
ascribed to “K.” was written by Korolenko but revised by Russian philosopher Fyodor
Strakhov for Tolstoy’s Krug Chteniia (Circle of Reading), an earlier version of For Every
Day.
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804): German philosopher. Kant’s notion of the categorical
imperative deeply influenced Tolstoy’s philosophy.
Ketteler, Wilhelm (1811-1877): German theologian, Bishop of Mainz.
Krishna: Hindu divinity, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu. Quotes attributed to Krishna
are primarily from The Bhagavad Gita.
Kropotkin, Pyotr (1842-1921): One of the main theorists of anarchism.
1232
La Boétie, Étienne de (1530-1563): French writer, author of the article, “Sur la servitude
volontaire,” from which text quoted in For Every Day was taken.
La Bruyère, Jean de (1645-1696): French moralist, author of Le Caractères ou les
Moeurs de ce siècle, from which the excerpts included in For Every Day are taken.
Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320): Religious writer, Christian apologist.
Lamennais, Hughes Felicité Robert de (1782-1854): French writer, initially a strong
champion of the Papacy and Catholicism, and later an opponent of the Church in the
name of Christianity. His book Parole d’un Croyant was condemned in a Papal
encyclical.
Lao Tsu (VI Century BCE): Cbinese philosopher, founder of the Taoist religion. His
teachings are contained in the Tao Te Ching (The Path to Virtue).
Larroque, Patrice: French writer, author of the book De la Guerre et des Armes
Permanentes.
Lavater, Johann (1741-1801): Swiss pastor, preacher and thinker.
Laveleye, Émile (1822-1892): Belgian economist and political writer.
Lazarus: The reference is to the tale of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1728-1781): German playwright, philosopher and literary
critic.
Lichtenberg, Georg (1742-1799): German physicist, philosopher and satirist. He is
considered one of the best aphorists in Western history.
Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, (1715-1747): French writer and author of the
book Paradoxes mélés de Réflexions et de Maximes, from which the quotes in For Every
Day were taken.
Luther, Martin (1483-15460: German religious reformer, founder of the Lutheran
Church.
Machiavelli, Nicolò (1469-1527): Italian political writer, author of The Prince, from
which the text in For Every Day was taken.
Mahabharata: Indian national epic of around 100,000 verses, written in antiquity. It
chronicles a war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas engendered by the insatiable
greed of the Kuru King Duryodhana. In addition to extensive battle descriptions, the epic
contains many moralistic passages, including The Bhagavad Gita.
1233
Maimonides (Moshe Ben Maimon) (1135-1204): Jewish scholar and philosopher.
Mallory, Lucy: American writer, editor of the 1900 journal The World’s Advance
Thought.
Mandeville, Bernard de (1670-1733): Dutch-born English satirical writer.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180): Stoic philosopher, Roman emperor, author of the book To
Myself.
Martineau, Harriet (1802-1876): English writer, considered by many to be the first female
sociologist.
Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-1872): Thinker and advocate for Italy’s unification.
Menedemus of Eretria: c. 339-c. 265: Greek Philosopher.
Mickiewicz, Adam (1798-1855): Polish poet and political activist.
Milton, John (1608-1674): English poet, Puritan, advocate of personal freedom, freedom
of speech and freedom of the press.
Mozi (also Mo Tsu) (c. 470-c. 391 BCE): Chinese philosopher during the "Hundred
Years of Thought" period. Tolstoy most likely became acquainted with Mozi through
Pavel Boulanger, author of Mi-Ti: A Chinese Philosopher. The Doctrine of Universal
Love, published in 1910.
Molinari, Gustave de (1819-1912): Belgian political economist.
Molochnikov, Vladimir (1871-1936): Supporter of Tolstoy, Novgorod locksmith. The
text included here was taken from a personal letter to Tolstoy.
Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592): French philosopher.
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis (1689-1755): French thinker and political writer. All of
Montesquieu’s sayings translated by Tolstoy are taken from his book Penseés.
More, Thomas (1478-1535): English political writer, author of Utopia.
Muhammad (571-632): Founder of the Islamic Religion.
Nazahualcoyotl (1402-1472): Philosopher, poet, architect, warrior and ruler of the
Mexican city-state of Texcoco.
Nazhivin, Ivan (1874-1940): Writer and sympathizer with Tolstoy’s ideas.
1234
Nietzsche, Frederick (1844-1900): German philosopher. Tolstoy held most of Nietzsche’s
ideas in very low regard.
Owen, Robert (1771-1858): English socialist.
Paley, William (1743-1805): English philosopher and moralist.
Parker, Theodore (1810-1860): American religious writer, preacher of the Unitarian
Society.
Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662): French scholar and religious thinker, author of Pensées, a
book Tolstoy highly valued.
Paulson, Friedrich (1846-1908): German philosopher and neo-Kantian.
Penn, William (1644-1718): English Quaker.
“Persian Source”: Tolstoy gave no further information on this citation.
Philemon (First Century CE): Adressee of Paul’s Epistle to Philemon, one of the Seventy
Disciples (Apostles) mentioned in Luke 10:1-24.
Pseudo-Phocylides: Tolstoy incorrectly attributed the quote in For Every Day to
Phocylides, a Greek poet of the 6th Century BCE. “Pseudo-Phocylides” is a collection of
aphorisms generally believed to have been written between 100 BCE and 100 CE.
Pious Thoughts and Precepts for the Education of the Christian on the Path to Perfection
(Third Edition, 1879): A small book comprised primarily of the compositions of Russian
Orthodox Christian writers.
Popov, Evgeny (1864-1938): Writer, translator, educator, and supporter of Tolstoy.
Porfyry of Tyre (232-305): Greek Neoplatonic philosopher.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865): French writer, one of the founders of theoretical
anarchism.
Puiseaux, Madeleine (1720-1798): French writer.
Puranas: Indian epic poems that elaborate Hindu beliefs. There are eighteen basic
Puranas, which were composed at different times. The earliest manuscripts of the Puranas
have been lost. The earliest extant texts date to the 10th century. The remainder date to the
13th and 14th centuries. All the Puranas are written in verse in the form of a dialogue
between two persons, one of which asks questions that the other answers. The entire
collection of Puranas comprises some 400,000 verses. The largest, the Skanda Purana,
has 80,000 lines, while the two shortest—the Brakhma Purana and the Vamana
1235
Purana—are around 10,000 lines. Sayings from the Agni Purana, Vishnu Purana, and
the Vamana Purana are included in For Every Day.
Quran: Sacred book of Islam, narrated by Muhammad in the early seventh century and
compiled in its current form under the direction of Uthman ibn Affan in the 650s.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1835-1886): Indian religious thinker.
Razin, Stepan Timofeevich (Stenka) (1630-1671): Cossack hetman who led a rebellion
against the Moscow government in 1670-71.
Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich (pseudonym Jean Paul) (1763-1825): German Romantic
writer.
Rod, Édouard (1857-1910): French writer and moralist.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778): French philosopher. Rousseau was a major
influence on Tolstoy’s thought.
Ruskin, John (1819-1900): English writer on art, morals and society. Tolstoy considered
him one of his major influences.
Saadi (1184-1291): Persian poet and moralist, Sheikh of Shiraz.
Sa’id, Khalid ibn (d. 634): Companion of Muhammad.
Salter, Samuel (1710-1778): English writer, author of books on religious and other
questions.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860): German philosopher. Tolstoy was an admirer of
Schopenhauer’s thought throughout his life.
Seneca, Lucius Anneus (4 B.C.-65 A.D.): Roman stoic philosopher.
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950): British writer.
Shu King: A Chinese composition belonging to the so-called Five Books, which are the
foundation of Confucianism. Their origins are obscure.
Silesius, Angelus: pseudonym of the German mystical poet Johann Scheffler (1624-
1677). Angelus’ sayings are taken from the book: Angelus Silesius, Cheribunischer
Wandersmann.
Skoptsy: A cult in Tsarist Russia that believed in castration and mastectomy in order to
curb lust.
1236
Skovoroda, Grigory (1722-1794): Ukrainian philosopher.
Socrates (469-399 B.C.): Greek philosopher.
Solomon ben-Joseph ibn-Ajub of Granada (13th Century): A Jewish doctor and translator
of Arabic and Hebrew texts.
Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903): English philosopher, author of works on biology, ethics,
philosophy and sociology.
Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677): Dutch philosopher.
Strakhov, Fyodor (1861-1923): Writer and confederate of Tolstoy.
“Sufi Wisdom”: Tolstoy did not identify this source.
Tablets of the Bab: Writings of Babism, a religious movement that flourished in Persia
from 1844 to 1852 and led to the founding of the Baha’i religion.
Talmud: The primary chronicle of Jewish rabbinical writing.
Teachings of the Twelve Apostles: An ancient Christian text, dated around 100 C.E. and
compiled in Egypt. It was discovered in 1875 in a monastery in Jerusalem.
Thirukkural: A book of poetry in the Tamil language purportedly written by Thiru
Valluvar, who lived sometime between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. Tolstoy refers to
these quotes simply as “kural,” which is a two-line poetic form used in the Thirukkural.
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862): American writer, proponent of a simple, natural life.
Timaeus of Locri (c. 400 B.C.): Greek philosopher, Pythagorean.
Thomas van Kempen (1370-1471): Prior and author of religious and mystical works,
including The Imitation of Christ.
Tucker, Benjamin (1854-1939): American proponent of individualist anarchism.
Upanishads: Ancient Hindu religious texts that expound upon the Vedas, written between
700 BCE and 100 CE.
Vamana Purana: See Puranas.
Vedas: The earliest texts of the Hindu religion, written between 1700 and 500 BCE.
Vishnu Purana: See Puranas.
1237
Vivekananda, Swami (1863-1902): Indian philosopher, disciple of Ramakrishna.
The Voice of Silence (1889): Theosophic work by Helena Blavatsky.
Voltaire (1694-1778: French writer and philosopher.
Wilkins, George (1785-1865): English writer and pastor.
Wolseley, Sir Charles (ca 1630-1714): British politician.
Xenophon (434-359 BC): Greek historian, disciple of Socrates.
Yates, James (1789-1871): English theologian, Unitarian minister in Glasgow.
Zend Avesta: A gloss of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy book.
Zoroaster (8th Century BCE): Founder of the Persian religion.
Zschokke, Heinrich (1771-1848): German author.
i
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii L. N. Tolstogo, volume 47, page 37. (Further PSS).
ii
PSS, volume 49, page 68.
iii
PSS, volume 49, page 74.
iv
Alexandra Kalmykova wrote The Greek Teacher Socrates in close collaboration with Tolstoy in 1885.
The book was published by Posrednik.
v
PSS, volume 85, page 218.
vi
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii L. N. Tolstogo, volume 40, page 479.
vii
Richard Gustafson discusses this in his book Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986, pp. 447-455.
viii
Robert J. Miller, ed. The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version. San Francisco: Polebridge
Press, 1994, page 67.
ix
PSS, Volume 23, pp. 310-12.
x
PSS, Volume 37, pages 253-54. The letter was translated into English by Vladimir Chertkov.
xi
PSS, Volume 34, page 166.
1238
xii
PSS, Volume 41, page 315.
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