Mental emptiness - reasons, how to deal with it? About despondency Spiritual emptiness what to take in tablets.

We are tormented by spiritual thirst
I dragged myself in the sultry desert.
Pushkin

What follows from all this? Or rather - since we are not engaged in reasoning and theories here - what have we actually come to? What do we have left and how do we live?

All the idols that we previously enthusiastically served and whose service made sense of our lives have lost their charm and cannot attract our soul, no matter how many people around us still give them their strength. We are left with only a thirst for life - a full, living and deep life, some last, deepest demands and desires of our spirit, which we not only do not know how to satisfy, but we do not even know how to express them.

For the negative result of our review of spiritual wanderings cannot satisfy us in any way. There was an era in our spiritual past when this negative result seemed to many of us to be a great positive revelation. This is perhaps the last, most imperfect

and the lifeless idol that the soul encounters on these paths. This is the specter of complete, perfect personal freedom. We have already met him and pointed out that, compared to the tyranny of moral standards; he seduces us with a hint of some kind of life truth. But this temptation is brief and too easily exposed as a lie; only the most naive, inexperienced souls can succumb to it for a while. To seek nothing, to serve nothing, to enjoy life, to take from it everything that it can give, to satisfy every desire, every passion, to be strong and daring, to dominate life - this sometimes seems tempting; and, as indicated, there was a brief era - it can be called the era of Nietzsche - when this seemed to many the highest wisdom in life.

We do not need to refute this imaginary wisdom with any abstract arguments. I think it can be said about most of us that we are no longer the same and this temptation does not affect us. Freedom from everything in the world - what do we need it for if we don’t know what we are free for? Will it give us much, are all the pleasures and raptures that the simple unbridledness of elemental desires gives us so great? We have grown old mentally and look skeptically not only at “ideals”, but also at all the so-called “blessings of life”. We know well that every moment of happiness is more than redeemed by suffering or the melancholy of satiety; we know that there is immeasurably more sorrow in life than happiness and joys, we have experienced poverty, we clearly see the inevitable end of all life - death, in the face of which everything becomes equally illusory. In a word, we have too vivid a feeling meaninglessness

life , to get carried away by the bare process of life itself. And the word “freedom” in this sense seems even offensively inappropriate to us. Is he free who staggers from side to side without meaning or purpose, wandering without a path, driven only by the desires of the current moment, the meaninglessness of which he is well aware? Is he free who does not know where to go from spiritual idleness and spiritual poverty? In the face of such “temptations,” one involuntarily recalls with bitterness the old stupid, but symbolically meaningful joke: “Carrier, free?” - “Free.” - “Well, then shout: long live freedom!”

A joyful passion for life, transgressing the usual boundaries and the usual order, a genuine - always temporary - intoxication with the revelry of passions, resulting not from despair, but from an excess of strength, perhaps, apparently, only when in the depths of the soul there is a living belief in some final durability and inviolability of life. Just as a child rages and riots, still proceeding from a sense of the unshakable firmness of parental authority, the calm comfort of his home, and becomes childishly serious and quiet in a foreign environment, when his soul is full of anxiety and uncertainty, so do we all, experiencing shaking of the spiritual soil under our feet, we have lost the ability for childish carelessness, for the boldness of exuberant fun - for what the Germans call the untranslatable beautiful word “Uebermut”. To enjoy the joyful intoxication, you need to have a home and be sure that you can sober up peacefully in it. Otherwise, only rampant despair is possible, that bitter, heavy drunkenness to which Marmeladov indulges, because he has “nowhere to go.”

What we are looking for and yearning for is not freedom, but strength and stability, not chaotic wandering across endless distances, but peace in our home. We are tossed around by the stormy waves of life, and we dream of setting foot on an unshakably solid shore. Or, even more accurately, we are hanging in the air above the abyss, because we have lost the internal connection of our spirit, our personality with existence, and we want to restore this connection, to rest on solid spiritual ground. We suffer not from an excess, but from a lack of spiritual power. We are exhausted in the desert, our soul is not looking for a meaningless expanse of detachment from everything, but, on the contrary, a close, final merger with something unknown that can fill, strengthen, and saturate it once and for all.

Our soul is poor and hungry. Losing faith is not an easy matter, overthrowing the idols that we and our fathers worshiped so long and passionately is not child's play. It was probably just as scary, desolate and sad for our ancestors, the ancient Slavs, when Perun was thrown into the Dnieper along with the rest of the idols, and they did not know who they should now serve and who to ask for help in troubles. For renunciation of idols is not a blatant betrayal, it is not a renunciation of faith and a fall into a riot of wickedness: it is a sign of a change of faith, and if a new faith has not yet been found, then the fall of the old one is itself already a sign of a passionate search for it, a painful longing for it.

It is good for him who, in this melancholy, in these torments of spiritual hunger and thirst, has a close, kindred soul - it doesn’t matter, friend, mother or wife - to whom he can pour out his languor or with whom he can at least

take a break from it, because often we cannot fully express what torments us, not only to the person closest to us, but even to ourselves. And woe to the lonely!

However, we all have one dear being: this is our homeland. The more unhappy we are, the more empty our souls are, the more acutely and painfully we love her and yearn for her. Here we at least feel clearly: the homeland is not an “idol”, and love for it is not an attraction to a ghost; homeland is a living, real being. We love her not because of the “principle of patriotism”; we do not worship her glory, nor her power, nor any abstract signs and principles of her existence. We love her, our dear, ancient, primordial mother; she herself is now unhappy, dishonored, sick with a serious illness, deprived of all greatness, all noticeable merits and virtues that are indisputable to outsiders; she is spiritually sick along with all of us, her children. We can now love her only with that “strange love” in which the great, so spiritually close to us, yearning Russian poet, “a wanderer persecuted by the world with a Russian soul,” confessed. This “strange love” is now the only true, simple love for us - that all-forgiving love for which “it is not good for good, but good for good.” In the heat of political passions - those now imaginary, ostentatious passions for most of us, which we ourselves inflate in ourselves in order to drown out the spiritual emptiness, and about which the same poet almost a hundred years ago so bitterly said: “and reigns in there is some kind of secret cold in the soul when the fire burns in the blood,” - in this foggy child we often forget our

true love and involuntarily renounce the unfortunate mother - the only treasure left for us on earth.

We flaunt her shame, we grin maliciously at her suffering, we even try to exaggerate both her sorrows and the depth of her moral decline, because we cannot reconcile ourselves with the false path she has taken. We place on others and on her the same responsibility for her sins and misfortunes, which lies equally on all of us, her children, we are often ready to identify her soul, so dear and dear to us, which - we know this - is imperishable, with outrage and abomination her vicious rapist children now abusing her. But all this happens in a superficial, ostentatious layer. our soul. Our true attitude is revealed not in words, not in conscious reasoning and assessments, but in that melancholy, in those tears of tenderness with which we think about our native fields and forests, about our native customs and listen to the sounds of our native song. Then we know that there is no country in the world sweeter, more beautiful than our homeland.

Which sorcerer do you want?
Give me the robber's beauty -
Let him lure and deceive,
You won't be lost, you won't perish,
And only care will cloud
Your beautiful features.

Yes we know:

You are still the same - forest and field,
Yes, the board is patterned up to the eyebrows.

If only we could help our homeland to resurrect, renew itself, and appear to the world in all its beauty.

honey and spiritual strength - we, it seems, would find an outcome for our melancholy, even if for this we had to give our lives!

But here it is precisely we who feel the hopelessness of our situation, the hopelessness of our dreams. And not at all because “the Bolsheviks are still holding out,” that we do not know the means to overthrow them and that there is no end in sight to their rule. Who else believes that the salvation of the homeland lies in the simple “overthrow of the Bolsheviks”, that the “Bolsheviks” are some kind of superficial, accidental evil that is enough to be eliminated externally for truth and happiness to reign in Rus' - who still lives by faith in this political idol, still intoxicated by the revolutionary intoxication with reverse content — he does not know our melancholy and that is not why these lines are written. But, unfortunately, we know very well that you cannot help anyone, including your homeland, if you yourself are helpless, that a beggar cannot enrich anyone, and a sick person cannot become anyone’s healer. We know that we ourselves are sick with the same disease as our homeland, no matter how different the symptoms of this disease may be, and that we will only be healed together - if we are healed! We will direct her to a new, right path no earlier than we find it for ourselves. And because love for loved ones does not save us, which only softens, but does not quench our spiritual longing, so the most sincere, most ardent and selfless love for our homeland does not save us. Faith in it itself, without which love is unthinkable, is rooted - we clearly feel this - in some other, deeper and more comprehensive faith, in which we must still strengthen ourselves, which we must with indisputable and. to find unshakable evidence in your soul,

but which we still don’t have. Although love in itself does not need any justification, without this faith it is still deprived of some final strength, some deepest justification. Were there not enough peoples who perished from external misfortunes or from spiritual decay? Why are we, Russians, better than others, and why can’t we disappear in this global earthquake? Maybe Russia is a mirage like everything else around us? In our spiritual emptiness we cannot find a convincing refutation of this nightmarish fantasy.

No, we feel this, without faith in something primary, fundamental, unshakable, without the last, deepest stronghold on which our spirit could lean, no earthly attractions and hobbies, no love and affection can save us.

On these paths, in this hopeless and hopeless wandering of the soul through the vast, endless desert, when melancholy and spiritual thirst reach the utmost acuteness and become as if unbearable, a meeting of the soul with the living God takes place.

This meeting is inexplicable and happens differently for everyone. It either shocks the soul unexpectedly, or is prepared in it by a slow process of enlightenment. It cannot in any way be “generally necessarily” justified for someone who has not yet experienced it himself, whose soul is not prepared for it; it itself cannot even be described. But somehow I told

to think about what it has in common for all people, about the forces of the soul that push towards it, and, most importantly, about its great consequences for the fate of the soul - it is still possible.

The easiest way, perhaps, to understand how and why this meeting occurs is to try to understand what we are actually looking for, what we need and what we are yearning for.

We feel within ourselves some indestructible, powerful spiritual impulses that remain unsatisfied. What exactly are they? What do we need?

It should not be said that we are looking for a “shrine” that we could worship, genuine “ideals” that we could serve. These lofty words sound cold and unconvincing to us, and after all our experience we are suspicious of them. For us, in our current state, there is something inauthentic about them, some kind of ear-grabbing falsehood: they remind us of that idle talker from Ostrovsky’s characters who loved to repeat: “everything is lofty and everything is beautiful, Anfisa Pavlovna...”.

What we are looking for, on the contrary, is something very real and simple - if you like, even something very crude and imperfect - but genuine. We are looking for real life, vitality and strength. It is not clear to us whether we should serve anyone or anything at all, and in any case we do not know what we should serve. But that we want and must live - we understand this well enough and there is no need to prove it. Meanwhile we are not living; sources of life are drying up, the food reserves with which we hitherto supported life have run out or are running out, we can barely sleep

We are saved from death by gnawing on the dry crusts left to us from the past. We are dying. And therefore we are not looking for “service”, not “ideals”, not morality - we are looking for simply salvation, personal salvation. Let the moralists see in this only egoism, let them preach to us whatever they want, we know that this deepest thirst for self-preservation does not need any justification, for it has for us the self-evidence of the last, decisive authority. We know that a drowning person has the right to demand help and that when you see him you cannot start talking about serving ideals, but you just need to pull him out of the water.

We drown because the soil on which we tried to stand turned out to be an unsteady, sucking swamp, and we are looking for solid ground under our feet. We cannot rely on any “ideals” because they turned out to be ghosts; Instead of supporting our spirit, they take it captive, demand from us suicide, belittlement and perversion of our lives in their name. And we cannot rely on ourselves, on the thirst for life alone or on the inner strength of life in us, for this is precisely what it means to hang in the air. No, we need genuine soil - spiritual reality, which would be something other than our own “I”, and precisely because of this could support it, and at the same time something deeply related to it, close, identical in content , which therefore would not take anything away from him, would not be hostile to him, but would only give everything and help him in everything. We need to cling, forever cling to someone's friendly chest, hold on to someone's powerful and beneficent hand. What can save us is not an “ideal”, not some moral

judgment and not words and reasoning. Only love can save us - but the love of such a being and for such a being that would not be as weak, helpless and poor as ourselves, which itself would already stand firmly on its own feet and would be rich enough to give water and food our spirit. We are powerless children, lost in an alien environment, and we are looking for a father or mother. Our spirit has become torn from its roots and is now withering; and he frantically seeks to reconnect with these roots and bury them deeply, deeply into the primordial maternal womb of his native spiritual soil, in order to bloom again and begin to bear fruit. In order not to feel the mortal emptiness in the depths, so to speak, at the last end of our spirit, it is necessary that it does not have this end, it is necessary that it be directly connected with the infinite spirit. In order for our life not to dry up, it is necessary that it be nourished from within by the eternal source of life.

You just need to fully understand the meaning and subject of your search in order to find what you are looking for. And here what easily happens to us is what the modern English writer Chesterton tells about himself with complacent irony:

“I have been searching for the truth all my life, and I thought that no one knew it, and I tried to be at least a few years ahead of my century; but one day I realized that I was behind the truth exactly nineteen centuries."

After all, in fact, already nineteen centuries ago the truth was announced to the world - moreover, the Living Truth itself was revealed to the world, and exactly that very thing was revealed to people that we are now so painfully and seemingly hopelessly searching for. We are tired of all the reasoning and ideas, we have lost faith in them and become spiritually impoverished. And Christ said: “Blessed are you

the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” We are not seeking moral judgment, but simply salvation from spiritual destruction. And He said: “I came not to judge, but to save the world.” We long for a love that could sustain us, and He declared that God is love, that we have a Father - an eternal and almighty Father who loves his children and will not refuse anything to anyone who asks. We are looking for a truth that could spiritually illuminate us, a genuine path in life that would not destroy our life, but would be an expression of the true, deepest power of life that lurks within us and languidly cannot find an outcome. And He said: “I am the way, the truth and the life» - and in these three words he expressed, gave us that inexpressible, genuine, last thing we strive for. We are tired, worn out by the heaviness and emptiness of life, and He answers us: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” We are looking for a ministry that would not kill our soul, but would give us joy and peace, and He gives us “an easy yoke and a light burden.”

It’s amazing how these familiar, old words that we are accustomed to hearing since childhood and which, precisely because of this, usually sound to us without much meaning - how these words precisely, simply and inhumanly expressively answer our need, contain exactly what they are talking about. we cry out and that we ourselves are often unable to express not only to others, but also to ourselves. Who has once felt this with the utmost clarity, with a strength corresponding to the significance of the content, who has perceived it as in hopeless trouble, when we consider ourselves already lost, we perceive the voice of a friend, encouraging us and proclaiming salvation to us - who has absorbed

into oneself this image of God, fully aware of all human needs. God, who himself took upon himself all the sins and suffering of the world, will no longer be confused by any doubts; he is simply not interested in abstract, spiritually blind philosophical reasoning about religion, or historical guesses about the “true” personality of Christ, or about the origin of faith in Him . If there were a person who would reveal our own soul to us with complete, final clarity - without asking us anything, he would explain to us everything that we ourselves do not understand about it, and would find words of consolation and healing that give us how to If this is what we need, we would know with complete clarity that we have a true friend and mentor, infinitely rich in spirit. And if he did this not with just words, but with his whole life, with his whole being, revealing to the world in his personality the embodiment of the highest, absolute truth - so that this truth, once expressed and revealed in all its fullness in a living personal form, lives in our own soul, as its eternal beginning, as an unshakable support and an inexhaustible source of life - we would know for sure that our mentor and savior is the Eternal, Divine Spirit himself, that He is always with us and with us, that He did not die and cannot die. And we know it .

Now that this has been revealed to us, we understand the very meaning of our quest, our longing. We are looking for salvation, looking for true and eternal life, that last, deepest source of life, which at the same time is light, joy and peace. And - repeating the words of St. Augustine: how could we look for Him if we did not have Him? After all, a search that does not find satisfaction in any way

in what goods and values ​​of the world, presupposes a vague vision and aspiration for something different, a perfect, comprehensive and eternal life. But where could such a quest come from in our spirit, if it itself were entirely of earthly, worldly origin, if beyond what is sensually known to us there was nothing else, no mysterious depths and beyond? What is that force that drives us from one aspiration to another, not allowing us to stop at one, what makes us renounce our idols and expose their emptiness and evil, what beats us in indomitable waves, breaking all chains and flooding everything? limited forms, all the shores with which earthly life constrains our spirit? Where does this strength come from in us, where does this senseless belief in the boundlessness and supreme value of our spirit come from, if it is only a small helpless human soul, a product of heredity, environment and upbringing?

You just need, as Plato said, to be able to “turn the eyes of the soul,” you just need to look carefully into your own soul and be able to feel even only your own melancholy and dissatisfaction like discovering a new deepest ontological reality in the last depths of our own spirit, in order to directly verify that the object of our search is not a ghost, but a true reality, and not something distant and unattainable, but something infinitely close to us, always present with us: for that eternal source of life and light of which we are looking for, - he himself is the force that drives us to search for him. About these vague, foggy, powerless searches you can

to say the same thing that the great mystics knew and expressed about prayer: that it itself is grace sent by God, that God hears us before we turn to him, and Himself draws us to call upon Himself. In these searches it is discovered that in our soul already lives - vaguely and unknown to ourselves - the image of the true God, as the God of life, the God of truth and love. We feel emptiness in the depths of our souls, we painfully experience the isolation of our spirit, as if its inner end is exposed - like how the exposed end of a nerve reacts with excruciating pain to any external touch. But why is this? Because we know that our spirit must sit firmly and closely with its roots deep in the spiritual soil; we, therefore, know or foresee that this soil, this infinite reality of spiritual life is . And at that very moment when we consciously understood, that we know this - at this very moment and by the power of this knowledge itself, we already feel real contact with it, we already live in it and with it.

We now also clearly understand why all the idols we used to worship had to fall and what their fall meant. We experience it so painfully, as if it were the devastation of the soul, the death of all vital forces and impulses in it. We see now that in fact it is only liberation, cleansing the soul from ghostly and dead similarities of life - a purification absolutely necessary for the immersion of the soul in the eternal and all-encompassing source of true life and at the same time, unknown to us, carried out by the waters of this source that have already seeped into our soul.

All our dreams aimed at the future and its self-initiated human creation, all the “ideals” and “norms”, which, as such, we ourselves contrast reality - all these are ghosts, shadows and false semblances of existence, devoid of roots in Existence, in true life. Truly existing is not a dream that arises out of nothing in the solitary human soul and is still to be realized in the future; Truly existing is also not - somewhat paraphrasing Hegel's words here - only an "idea" that is so weak that it does not exist, but only "should be." Existence is true, infinitely complete, eternal Being, it is living endless life and truly real, omnipotent, creative power of love. She creates new life, she improves us and the whole world, not from wretchedness, not from the emptiness of non-existence, yearning for filling, but from the endless excess of reality, pouring out on all the weak beginnings of being and forcing them to blossom and bear fruit. And Existence is not a dead scheme, a formula that pretends to be life, an abstractly prepared part of the living flesh of existence, which wants to exhaust it and therefore fatally gives birth only to death and hatred, which destroys all living things. Existence, being true life, is infinite love, healing all the ailments of our limited existence, making up for all its shortcomings, even resurrecting the dead - calling and encouraging everything dead to plunge into living water and be reborn in it, to become alive.

In the end, only that which had to die died, because it had no life in itself, but was only a dead and ghostly semblance of life - a mirage and wandering that beckoned us.

giving light. From now on there is nothing terrible for us in this death; it cannot bring despondency to us. - And in general, nothing can instill despondency in us from now on. Through the depths of our hitherto devastated spirit, we have finally reached solid, unshakable ground on which we now firmly stand with both feet. Through the endless darkness, a light flashed to us, which from now on internally illuminates us.

At the first moment, this meeting with God, this feeling of the soil under our feet and the discovery of inner light does not change anything for us in everything else, in the external world, in our relationships with people and with earthly life. We have only found in our souls a source of inexhaustible joy, a sense of strength and peace. We have found an eternal Friend and Father, we are no longer alone and forsaken; in silence, alone with ourselves and God, we enjoy the joy of love, in comparison with which all the failures, disappointments and sorrows of external life are no longer significant, insignificant.

Among the random bustle,
In the muddy stream of life's anxieties
You own a joyful secret
Evil is powerless; we are eternal; God is with us.

We listen to ordinary human conversations, interests and passions, the ordinary beggarly worries of human life with the complacent and ironic smile of a person who knows about himself a great secret that completely changes life and gives it new meaning and direction. We know: people consider themselves beggars, they are full of heavy worries, gloomy, exhausting and bitter struggle for existence and do not know that they are owners

a huge inheritance, immeasurable wealth, forever providing them with a joyful and tranquil life. But we know about this treasure, we have already come across it, and therefore we well understand how ridiculous and empty their worries and worries are.

This inner treasure, this gift of immeasurable love initially only opposes, as inner being and inner wealth, all external life and the environment. Moreover: this inner light is often so dazzlingly bright that everything else dims before it. Everything seems to us insignificant, uninteresting, insignificant compared to our inner wealth. We, perhaps, are like selfish lovers who, for the sake of the happiness of their love, forget everything else and become indifferent to all people and to all life's interests.

But this is only a temporary, transient disturbance of spiritual balance from too much strength and brightness of the impression. The event that happened to us leads to further enlightenment and development; the force to which we have joined must reveal its true creative nature. This event is - the inner revelation of the soul , the cessation of her isolation, her cold and enervating existence in herself. And this power is the power of infinite love, the power of true life. And therefore the soul must continue to open up further and gradually, through its original connection with God, feel the same close, internal connection with all people and the whole world. And the living discovery of eternal and endless love is like the last basis and being our and all existence must

lead to the same thing: through God we gradually learn to love everything, since it is a revelation of true being; The power of eternal love, which at first only aroused in us love for ourselves, must continue to give birth in us to love for everything and everyone. In the Philokalia there is a beautiful image of Abba Dorotheus: just as points of different radii - the farther from the center, the farther from each other, and the closer to the center, the closer to each other - so people gradually come closer together to the extent of one’s overall approach to the absolute center of existence and life—to God. I also remember another image, mentioned by many religiously enlightened thinkers: just as the leaves of a tree are separated and, as it were, isolated from each other, not directly touching each other, but in reality they live and turn green only by the power of the juices passing into them from one common trunk and roots, and feed on the moisture of the common soil, so people, being externally isolated creatures, closed from each other, internally, through their common connection with the all-encompassing Source of life, are merged into an integral single life.

So, instead of the whole multitude of “ideals”, principles and norms that led our soul onto false paths that led to dead ends and tortured it, we are faced with only two commandments, sufficient to comprehend, enrich, strengthen and revitalize our life: immeasurable, boundless love for God as the source of love and life and love for people, growing from the feeling of the unity of human life, rooted in God, from the consciousness of brotherhood, justified by our common filial relationship to the Father. And these two are remembered

These messages are expressible and were expressed as one: we are commanded to strive for perfection, to become like, to the extent possible, our Heavenly Father as the Perfect source of love and life. And these two - or one - commandments do not appear to us from the outside, with the cold and incomprehensible authority of moral “norms” or instructions. We internally understand them as necessary ways of our salvation, the preservation of our lives. We are not tried as criminals, over whom an indifferent judge pronounces a sentence in the name of a cold legal law that does not delve into our spiritual needs. We are judged by the voice of our Father, who loves us and guides us on the path of salvation; from this inner judgment we simply learn which path we take to life and which one to death, where is our salvation and where is destruction.

And from now on, much of what previously seemed to us to be a dead idol and was actually exposed by us as an idol, in a different form and with a completely different meaning, begins to resurrect in our soul, as a living force and as a reasonable path and rule of life. First of all, the whole area of ​​morality. We did not understand why we were obliged to destroy and cripple our lives for the sake of some abstract principles, and our spirit, thirsting for freedom and life, protested against this oppression. And indeed, we are sufficiently convinced that the irreligious morality of principles, the morality of duty and the categorical imperative is an idol that only destroys and does not improve life. But now we are discovering within ourselves a new living source of morality that is meaningful and understandable to us. To the question: why are we obliged to do this and that that we do not want, and must suppress the natural desires of our soul,

we can now answer ourselves internally. We can give the example of a patient who, for the sake of recovery, really must take bitter medicine and condemn himself to limiting the strongest desires of his body; or the example of a drowning man who, in order to get out of the sucking depths to the shore and thereby save his life, must strain all his strength, try, no matter how difficult it is, to keep his head above the water and swim not with the current, which drags him into the abyss, but against the current .

All morality - we understand this well - is nothing more than such hygiene or the technique of saving, preserving one’s life - self-evidently reasonable rules for protecting that “treasure in heaven”, which is the only source, the only means of our existence and about which we are in our We so often forget about natural blindness and frivolity. This task - not to lose the treasure we have once acquired, not to be separated from it again, not to bury the gifted talent in the ground, but to grow it and enjoy its benefits - this task is not always easy for us: it requires constant vigilance and struggle from us. with our blind lusts, courageous willpower, often brutal persistence. And yet it is a joyful and meaningful task, the efforts of which are immediately rewarded a hundredfold and which, therefore, despite all its difficulty, is easy to accomplish.

In the light of the knowledge we have acquired of true existence, a whole new world is now gradually revealed to us, or at least we foresee - the sphere of the spiritual foundations of life; and in this world a strict, rigorous pattern reigns - no less precise than in the world of physics.

zical, although of a different order. This is what the brilliant Christian thinker Pascal called ordre du coeur or logique du coeur - “order” or “logic” of the human heart. The main features of this order are predetermined by the covenants of Christianity, they are simply revealed in Christianity, which is the absolute truth of the human soul; It is in this sense that one must understand Tertullian’s subtle saying that “the soul is by nature Christian.” This “order of the heart” cannot be violated with impunity, for it is the condition of meaningfulness, the strength of our life, the condition of our spiritual balance and therefore our very existence; it can just as little be violated as little can the laws of bodily health, the normal order of organic life, or the laws of mechanics and physics be violated with impunity. This spiritual order of existence, the comprehension of which is “temptation for the Jews and madness for the Greeks,” that is, it seems something unacceptable for those who know only the external norms and political ideals of life, and meaningless for those who know only the life of the natural world, is for a sighted person, absolute, strict truth, justifying his entire life and providing it with the highest rationality. Morality, being abstractly unprovable, as self-sufficient knowledge, naturally, with absolute necessity, with the complete predetermination of its structure, follows from the religious understanding of life. Being a living, humane morality of love and salvation, it is at the same time a strict morality of asceticism, self-restraint and self-sacrifice, for its fundamental law precisely states that one cannot save one’s soul without losing it, and that one cannot gain the kingdom of heaven except by carrying his cross. For wide is the gate and space-

narrow is the way that leads to destruction, and narrow is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life. And we now understand the destructive lie of immoralism, which gives a person the freedom to perish and feeds a sick soul with sweets when it needs bitter medicine to recover. We even understand the relative value of the ordinary unenlightened, heteronomous — contrary to Kant - morality, for until a person sees the light, some external rules are inevitable, limiting his arbitrariness and protecting him from evil, no matter how inevitably imperfect these means are and no matter how often, being perceived as self-sufficient higher principles, they themselves degenerate into evil.

And yet this living religious morality is deeply different in its internal structure from the dead morality of duty and the “moral ideal.” For it is all imbued with a living sensation of the presence of a real source of life and at the same time an awareness of the imperfection and weakness of man’s natural being; and all of it is a radiation of love, the desire for salvation. Therefore, in it, hatred of evil never degenerates into hatred of the very essence of life and of individual specific people. Religious asceticism is a blissful asceticism of salvation, and not a frenziedly cruel asceticism of moral fanaticism. In this state of mind, a person tries to be mercilessly strict with himself , for he really wants to be reborn and is afraid of losing the great treasure that has been entrusted to him; but, feeling his own sinfulness, he will not judge others harshly and will try to be not their judge, but their helper. For he lives not by the morality of judgment, but by the morality of salvation; and he knows well that, on the one hand, all people are equally undeserving

live the great blessings that God bestows on them, and, on the other hand, they are equally children of God who will not be abandoned by their Father. For a true believer, hypocrisy and the fatal division of life into official-ostentatious and intimate-genuine moral life are unthinkable; after all, the matter is about personal salvation, about satisfying the deepest and truest need of the soul, and here there is no impoverishment and drying out of the soul, but there is its immeasurable enrichment and blossoming. Improvement here is a great personal happiness, which is more likely to shyly hide from people in the recesses of the soul than to brazenly impose itself on people. And in all this the spirit of love breathes, as the very essence of life and salvation: therefore, the cold, hostile to the living human soul and the severity of external moral struggle alienated from it is unthinkable here, but only loving help in awakening the true light in the souls of the brothers. Here it is immediately obvious that the growth of good is not a mechanical result of the extermination of evil and, even less, the extermination of evil people, but the fruit of the organic internal cultivation of good itself in oneself and others. For evil is nothingness, emptiness posing as fullness; it disappears, only replaced by the fullness, essentiality, and deep reality of good.

And in the same way, in this blessed light, the lost ideals of human relations and the universal human social order are resurrected for us with a different meaning and content. We, of course, cannot return to the old idols and now understand their falsity even better: we cannot believe in any absolute order of social order, we cannot bow to any political forms and doctrines.

us. We know that the kingdom of true life is not of this world and can never be adequately and fully realized under the conditions of an inevitably sinful and imperfect earthly life. But at the same time, we know with complete clarity the paths along which our relations with people and the development of society should take. We recognize, first of all, as the fundamental law of our moral world, the mutual guarantee that connects us with the whole world. Conscious of the unity of existence rooted in God, we clearly see our responsibility for the evil that reigns in it, and we also clearly understand the impossibility of our salvation outside of common salvation. Just as a single leaf on a tree cannot turn green when the whole tree dries up and rots, because the whole tree as a whole is connected by a community of life, so in universal human life there is an internal solidarity that cannot be violated with impunity. From here follows the basic internal rule of love for people and solidarity with them in the name of our own salvation.

But we also know what exactly the true good of human life consists of, and therefore from now on we will not be seduced by any utopias of social paradise, equality of distribution and universal material satiation, nor internally related to them, although the opposite in content, dreams of the soulless power of state power , about earthly greatness and military glory. We know the true, spiritual foundations and goals of life and well understand both the inevitable hierarchical nature of human life that follows from them, the need to subordinate the worst - the best and everyone - to the general law of life, and the need for respect for every human person and a fraternal attitude towards it.

The new instinct of spiritual health and self-preservation - which can be revealed and comprehended by more knowledgeable people into a whole system of hygiene of spiritual being - guides from now on our entire life - both our personal relationships with people and our attitude towards issues of public life.

When, guided by this immediate sense of living, genuine truth, we look around at present social life and the ideological forces operating in it, we feel that we cannot identify with any of the dominant trends in it. We, of course, repulse with disgust the cynicism, arrogance and unprincipled unbelief, which in the forces now ruling in Rus' tramples the truth and mocks it; and we cannot in the slightest degree make spiritual concessions to him, take a spiritually half-hearted, compromise position, arising from the desire to simultaneously fence ourselves off from pure evil, and not lag behind the “spirit of the times”, in which this evil and madness are dominant force. On the other hand, we cannot sympathize with all those who, whether from a sincere motive or from Pharisaic pride, guard their purity, surrounding themselves with a wall of hatred for everything that exists and with morbid exaltation indulging in the fanatical cult of socio-political idols, long since defeated - who still, although with the opposite content, confuses religious faith with abstract morality, and morality with political “principles.” For us, the spiritual universe essentially does not fit into a linear dimension from right to left, and the cult of the “right” is for us the same idolatry as the cult of the “left”. Among the whirlpool that has captured us, when they collapse

old, familiar forms of life and unknown new ones are maturing, and when at the same time the strength of the human spirit is tested, we realize the need for a strict distinction between the eternal and the temporary, the absolute from the relative. The unusual nature of life, its looseness and instability, the novelty of living conditions require us to combine the greatest, unshakably persistent devotion to eternal principles, subject to desecration and doubt, with spiritual breadth and freedom, with a sensitive, unbiased attitude to the real structure of life and its needs. This combination of firm fidelity to the truth with complete spiritual freedom, the readiness to martyrdom in the name of truth - with tolerance towards people, with the inclination, without fear of contamination, to enter into living communication with them amid all the reigning evil - this combination is given only to the religious spirit that has comprehended living life. eternal truth and overshadowed by its gracious spirit. With the same denial, but also with the same tolerant love for the erring human soul, we treat both unbelievers and idolaters and go our own way.

And - in order to end here, in the end, with this list of incalculable spiritual wealth that we have acquired - we now find the correct attitude not only to individual people and social orders and currents, but also to collective, supra-individual living organisms. What we previously at best only vaguely sensed, we now understand and see: namely, that these supra-individual wholes are living spiritual beings who have their own value and whose fate determines our personal fate. Through what happened

overcoming the internal isolation of our soul, through its opening and communion with the all-unified living basis of being, we immediately internally join the super-temporal unity of people who, like us, live in God and with God - to the super-individual soul of the church as the unity of holiness and religious life , as the eternal guardian of sacred truths and traditions. From the very perception of eternal existence and living closeness to the Divine directly follows the perception of the church as the living universal soul of humanity, as a conciliar personality, through the connection with which we participate in the universal, cosmic sacrament of Communion with God. In her we have the true mother's womb of our entire spiritual life. And in the fullness of our concrete earthly life, we become familiar with the super-individual soul of our homeland, we not only feel, but also meaningfully understand it as a living being, as our own mother, and we know the connection of our life with her life, the interdependence of our and her salvation. We understand that she, like the whole world, like ourselves, is dying from blindness, from the whirlwinds of anger and hatred swirling in the world, that there is no outcome from this death in any political fanaticism, but there is an outcome only in spiritual revival, in the growth of an internally meaningful, loving attitude towards life. We no longer place responsibility on only those whom we consider our political enemies, and we no longer boast of our own civic virtue. We understand our common sinfulness before our homeland, our guilt in its death, in the birth of blindness and satanic malice, we are full of love and pity for the concrete, living soul of the people, who have fallen now, like ourselves, and we realize how difficult it is for her -

and we, together with her, must rise spiritually after this fall. But together with faith in the living God, which gives us faith in ourselves and in people, we also gain strong faith in our homeland.

Now we are grateful to God for the entire path we have traveled, no matter how difficult it may be. The world and our soul had to go through both the worship of idols and the bitterness of gradual disappointment in them in order to be cleansed, freed and gain true fullness and spiritual clarity. The great world turmoil of our time is not happening without reason; it is not the painful trampling of humanity in one place, not a senseless heap of aimless atrocities, abominations and suffering. This is the difficult path of purgatory traversed by modern humanity; and perhaps it will not be conceit to believe that we, Russians, who have already been to the last depths of hell, having tasted, like no one else, all the bitter fruits of worshiping the abomination of Babylon, will be the first to pass through this purgatory and help others to find the path to spiritual resurrection.

What needs to be done now to revive the Christian faith and the Russian Church on our land? Any answer to such a global question will necessarily be either too incomplete or abstract

This answer, I think, can be heard in the living voice of a man whose life itself was a constant questioning about the fate of Orthodoxy and the Russian people - Protopresbyter Vitaly Borovoy. His word in the early 2000s, in which we tried to carefully preserve everything from beginning to end, even intonation, is brought to the attention of the readers of “The Table”. Better to say "close attention": the published transcript of his speech requires slow and thoughtful reading and reflection. Discussing the tragic (!) issue of modern church enlightenment and education, Father Vitaly succinctly, accurately and sharply raises the related issues of church prayer, the language of worship, relations between church and state, the modern ministry of the priest and the church’s potential for creating a harmonious common life in the country.

Prot. Vitaly (Borovoy)

On Christian enlightenment and theological educationin the modern Russian Orthodox Church

I was asked to talk about my library. I'm realist. What can I tell you about her? Indeed, I have been collecting all my life. At first, when I came to work in the West, they gave me gifts because of my poverty. Thanks to all these people, of course. Then, when I started earning money myself, they stopped giving gifts, but I bought. I need books now for work, and after me many will also need them. I would like to quote one Belarusian proverb (I am Belarusian): “Once upon a time there lived a monk, he had many books, he collected them all his life, but he did not know what was in them.” Books should be read, not talked about.

We live in vile times, but we must remain as we are

Let me move on to the topic that was stated, because... Christian enlightenment and theological education- a sore and tragic question now. We live in vile times, but we must remain as we are.

I am a wood grouse: it can be difficult to stop, and monologue is bad. Therefore, let me move on to what I outlined in the introductory part, so that after it there will be time for the most interesting part - answering questions.

Once upon a time we (Russia) were proud and believed that we were Holy Rus'. The second half of the 19th century showed the weakness of “Holy Rus'”. The Church - Holy Rus' - could not cope with new problems, remaining, however, faithful to its traditions and faith. The old was preserved, and that’s good, but new problems arose in life. They had to be solved. The Church was not ready to solve them. As a result of this, they first lost the intelligentsia, its middle part, but the masses. The intellectual pinnacle of world culture has been preserved, and the pinnacle of spirituality [in] the intelligentsia has been preserved. But this is the elite! And the ordinary intelligentsia fed on unbelief and Western sources. Then we lost workers and youth. The result is a revolution. The leadership of the revolution was not connected with Russia. They wanted to build a new society, but suppress Russianness. What happened - we know from ourselves. The system spoke for itself: both good and bad. The internal contradictions of the system destroyed it, and that’s good. But there is reality - people who are left from this system. [Therefore] the spiritual task that is urgent now is the enlightenment of the people.

The priests are not ready, they need to be raised and trained. And the task is tragic - to educate the people!

Education cannot be replaced by ersatz (Sunday schools, etc.). [The problem] needs to be solved seriously and deeply. The priests are not ready, they need to be raised and trained. And the task is tragic - to educate the people! We are used to serving God and the people. Previously, when everything was prohibited, my conscience was calmer. Now everything is possible. We rushed to restore the churches, we are triumphant about the numbers (200 bishops, 18 thousand churches, 300 monasteries, etc.). Achievements? Yes. And this must be respected. Not perfect, but they did it. And who [now] is in these churches and monasteries?

Our science has always been at the level, it was taken into account in the West, especially with the fundamental sciences and technology. The humanities lagged behind. I know a lot of specific things from my parishioner, Academician Vinogradov, the creator of the Moscow mathematical school. He often asked me: “Oh. Vitaly, speak more quietly, more modestly...” But the spiritual emptiness must be filled.

We must go to the youth. Walk skillfully, because young people should not “overeat” (neither Orthodoxy nor Marxism)

Our youth are not bad, and have not been bad, [they] are higher than in the West, morally better. In the West, the general flow of spiritual life is lowered, the spiritual level there is lower.

Some of the youth turned to God on their own, without our merit. We must go to the youth. Go skillfully, because young people should not “overeat” (neither Orthodoxy nor Marxism). Young people who have suffered through Orthodoxy become conservative. The bulk of young people came out of interest. But among young people, spiritual relaxation does not last long. We also need food for the mind. Atheism called itself scientific, appealed to intelligence and reflection. And now young people are not only sentimental, but also seek food for thought in religion. The Church is conservative; it does not answer their questions. I speak pessimistically, but it’s better for me to say it myself than for others to tell me the same thing.

The most important thing now is education! Faith and service must be explained. Maybe new things will not be in demand for another 100 years, but they must grow: quietly, without noise, without conflicts.

Education is very valuable and very important. Everything needs to be explained, but explained clearly.

Language! All languages ​​are sacred if the thoughts of the Holy Scriptures are conveyed. There is no need to change anything, you need to explain, and explain clearly. Serve in a way that is clear! Bishops and priests are only primates, but the people of God serve! The primate says only one prayer about himself, the rest are all on behalf of the people of God. And the choir speaks and sings on behalf of the people. But the people themselves must sing, speak, the main thing is to understand what they answer “Amen”. [To do this] you need to speak a language understandable to the people.

I was raised in Old Church Slavonic, it’s mine. When I serve in Old Church Slavonic, my soul sings! And when I had to serve in Greek, I suffered and did not pray, because I was afraid of making a mistake. But for a Greek, on the contrary, his soul probably sings in his native language. People don't need to change their language right away. I am against modernism of any kind, but it must be made clear.

Any government wants to “have” the church because it is a dangerous organization

The church is not a museum, but a living organism. And since it is a living organism, it develops. It is necessary for the people to accept everything new, but this takes time. For 50 years before the revolution they prepared for the renewal of the church. They asked the bishops, there are several volumes. And who knows them, who read them? Now everyone is afraid of the people. And me too. And the proposals in the volumes that I spoke were different, even to the point of “closing all the seminaries and tearing down the foundations, preparing everything anew.” And this was proposed then.

Any government wants to “have” the church, because it is a dangerous organization. State control over the church is always and everywhere. It's a matter of methods. We act rudely. In the West they manipulate intelligently, politely and intelligently.

By 1980, Khrushchev wanted to “show the last butt.” The revolution of 1917 was a paralysis of power. All sorts of trash always comes out at this time. The renovationists have discredited themselves and the cause [of renewal]. They were manipulated by the state and then imprisoned. The result was confusion and failure of the update. Smart people took power in the revolution. The Soviet government won, and the renovationists died in Siberia. Now conservatives are speculating, the very word “renovationists” is alarming, but this is just conservative speculation.

Our crime is that we are not preparing a language update

Now is not the time to introduce the Russian language. There will be time for it, but [it] needs to be prepared. Our crime is that we are not preparing a language update.

It is reasonable that the church is conservative, but we need to prepare an understanding people. We must prepare without shouting, without publicity, so that the people understand the service.

Theological education must train new priests who understand modern problems. You also need to understand scholasticism, you need to know the foundation, but new problems have arisen on the previous foundations. For example, ecology. The West is working in this direction. Not very good, but it works.

The people not only need to learn faith, but also help them cope with the new problems of life. The duty of the church is to help society renew itself and cope with new challenges. The church is not on the sidelines. She serves the people and God, without interfering in politics, and helps people unite as equals into a friendly family, [because] it is easier to live together.

On the eve of the First World War, Russia was moving at such a pace that it was catching up and overtaking the West and the United States. If not for the cataclysm of the revolution, Rus' would have been more advanced than the USA and the West.

If the church fulfills its functions, the friendship of peoples will develop in the right direction

It's clear that life is always better together. If the church fulfills its functions, the friendship of peoples will develop in the right direction. The historical merit of the church is the unification of Russians, the development of culture.

Prayer is not a model, but a duty. In the church, prayer is organized, and we ourselves in the church must be organized. The guardian of the faith is the people of God. The hierarchy leads, teaches, and the people correct!

To the question “Who are the best theologians in the world now?” answered: “Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Yannaras, the late Schmemann, Meyendorff.” “What about Russian theologians?” I thought and thought and didn’t name it.

When asked (already in the corridor) about Fr. Georgiy Kochetkov replied:

“There is nothing to talk about here. O. Georgy is doing a great and necessary job. And it does well. There is nothing to discuss - we need to help. And he was placed in unbearable conditions. We need to create conditions so that he can do the main thing.”

Early 2000s

Reference:

Protopresbyter Vitaly Borovoy (1916–2007). Deputy Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, teacher of graduate school at the DECR, rector of the Cathedral of the Epiphany (Elokhovsky) Cathedral in Moscow (1973–1978), since 1984 - honorary rector of the Moscow Church of the Resurrection of the Word. In 1996–2007, Father Vitaly was a member of the Board of Trustees of the St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute.

In 1962–1966 and in 1978–1985. he represented the Russian Orthodox Church MP at the World Council of Churches (WCC), served as rector of the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Geneva, participated in the work of all assemblies of the WCC, and was the only observer from the Russian Orthodox Church who was present at all meetings of the Second Vatican Council in 1962–1965. In the memory of his contemporaries, Protopresbyter Vitaly remained one of the most enlightened clergy of his time, who cared about preserving the noble appearance of Russian Orthodoxy.

What to do when the joy of finding God gives way to despondency from the feeling of losing Him? Why does an emptiness suddenly appear in the soul after a spiritual uplift? How to survive this period and not leave the Church? Metropolitan Athanasius of Limassol answers these questions in his conversation with parishioners.

Metropolitan Afanasy - spiritual son of Elder Joseph the Younger (disciple of Elder Joseph the Hesychast). He was connected by bonds of spiritual friendship and communicated closely with many other famous Athonite ascetics.
In his metropolitanate in Cyprus and in other dioceses, he conducts active pastoral activities: in churches, universities, on the radio he conducts conversations on spiritual, sometimes very difficult, topics: about mental prayer, about the fight against thoughts, about passions, about purity of heart, about commandments. The conversations are especially interesting because the Bishop speaks from his own monastic experience.
The conversation “Spiritual dryness and despondency” was conducted by the Bishop for the parishioners of the cathedral church in the city of Limassol.

Metropolitan Athanasius of Limassol

Today we will remember with you the 28th verse of the 118th Psalm: My soul has fallen asleep from despondency, strengthen me in Your words.

This is a special topic in spiritual life. Changes cannot but occur in a person’s internal state, and sometimes what the Prophet says happens: My soul takes a nap from despondency. Today we will talk about th O what we should do and how to behave during these changes.

There is one trap that we easily fall into when we want to strive - this is our desire to monitor our feelings. What I mean?

As you all know, the following usually happens: when a person begins to go to church, at first he experiences a state of Divine grace, which is given to him freely. During this period, a person experiences divine joy; he feels his heart playing, moved by love for God; he collects his mind with ease; passions in him recede, are tamed; divine enlightenment dawns on his soul.

Naturally, all this gives rise to pleasant, joyful feelings in our soul. Then we feel very good, we feel extremely wonderful. We really feel like we are in Paradise, tasting the joy of Paradise.

However, an hour comes in which a certain change occurs: instead of all of the above, we suddenly feel abandoned, we feel darkness, gloom in our souls, we feel that God has abandoned us or that we have abandoned Him, we again feel the oppression of passions, confusion of thoughts. We no longer want to pray, our being resists prayer, does not find peace in the work of God, through force we convince ourselves to go to church, etc.

A person perceives this resistance and change very hard. Often he becomes upset and mourns: “Why do I feel this way? Why am I facing all these difficulties when there was nothing like this before?” He begins to look for reasons: maybe this is the case? maybe that? in another?.. But the truth is not that a person made a mistake somewhere. The truth is that man must learn to live, so to speak, more firmly.

As the ever-memorable Elder Paisios said, God is like a good farmer who planted a small tree and waters it every day, since the tree needs a sufficient amount of moisture in order to take root, take root and grow. But gradually the farmer begins to water it less often: first every other day, then every two days, every three, every four, every other week, once every two weeks, once a month.

He does this in order to help the tree take root deep into the soil so that it receives real moisture directly from the ground. After all, if it grows by A my surface, then when the winds, showers and bad weather come, it will not be able to resist, it will be uprooted and fall.

Therefore, according to God’s providence, man undergoes this educational abandonment by God (abandonment is only apparent), the pedagogical purpose of which is for man to take deep roots and endure.

For this reason, our soul often crosses the desert, experiencing a period of dryness. Just as during a drought everything around is dry, there is not a drop of water anywhere - a difficult period for nature - so it happens with the human soul.

And during this period, a person must be extremely vigilant so as not to lose courage, first of all. He must know: we believe in God and love Him not because God gave us those pleasant, joyful feelings that we had at the beginning, but because - and we are absolutely sure of this - that God is always next to us, and He deserves that we perform all our feats in order to be close to Him.

By striving in this way, we remain faithful to God, even if our very being resists us. Our being gives arguments in its favor: you do this and that, but there is no result, or: you try to do something, but internally you experience great difficulties from it, although you used to do it with pleasure.

The Prophet David in one of the psalms says that his enemies asked him: Where is your God?(Ps. 41, 4, 11). A person asks himself: “Where is my God? Doesn’t God see how I suffer, how I seek Him, how I search for Him, that I am a complete desert?” God, as it seems outwardly, is silent and leaves man alone.

In reality this is not the case. This is simply a subjective experience of the person himself.

Great faith is required during this period. A person must resist, saying to himself: “For the love of God I will remain in my place.” He should not retreat and turn back: “Okay, since I’m doing it and don’t see any results, then I’ll stop and won’t do anything else. After all, God does not answer me. After all, He does not respond. After all, I have already struggled so much, but have received nothing from Him. I’ll give it all up.”

God wants to protect us from the “grocer feeling,” that is, from the feeling that we are buying grace. After all, that’s why it’s called grace, because God gives it freely. We don't buy it. We do not let it circulate between us and God. God just gives it to us. Not by any law that we fulfilled, not by our works, but by His love and mercy He saved us, and by His grace, given to us freely, came our salvation and our eternal unity with Him.

At the same time, during this difficult period, we must be attentive and do everything possible so as not to abandon our rule. That small rule that each of us makes every day helps us to resist. Let it be a small prayer that we perform in the evening or in the morning, our short fast or something else that we perform (communion, confession) - we must strive to observe all this exactly, even if now, in difficult times. period, we don’t see any results from this.

If we preserve all this, if we remain in our place and, despite the pressure of events and thoughts, remain persistent and continue to fight, then we will be sure that God will return to us again (although in reality He is always near us). And then the person will begin to bear sweet ripe fruit on time(Ps. 1, 3).

Not in the blink of an eye, as we imagine in the first period of spiritual life, when we first know God and after a week we consider ourselves to have already reached the Divine measure. In spiritual life a person matures gradually and succeeds age and grace(Luke 2:52), and builds the entire spiritual edifice on humility.

The period of dryness is the best period of our spiritual life. And we must always keep this in mind.

When we experience a period of dryness, we are experiencing the best period of our lives, because at this time a person lays the right foundation. This time humbles a person, humiliates his soul even to death, and his soul descends to hell. And then a person sees that his deeds are nothing, and he himself is nothing, zero. But he should not fall into hopelessness from this humiliation, but should hold on to this conviction: the only thing that remains for me is faith and hope in God.

When he strives in this way, then love comes, which is higher than faith and hope, and the person already enjoys in the love of God. He is enjoying himself, but before that he has gone through a long period of dryness - a test that sometimes lasts for many years. Abba Isaac the Syrian writes about himself that for almost thirty years his soul did not feel the action of grace.

The Lord is a good teacher. As a teacher, when he sees that a child has a desire to learn, but is somewhat lazy and naive, he begins to push him to study, makes him read more, assigns him more lessons, sometimes even frightens him by saying that such and such studies better. The teacher sees how his student is progressing, he knows his capabilities, and therefore, if he leaves him without attention, then, in fact, he will harm him. The teacher pushes him to acquire more O greater knowledge.

This is what God does, who sees the inquisitive soul of a person, sees that sometimes we have a good aspiration and desire, but we do not have the strength or will, we do not want to do more, laziness and other similar things paralyze us. And God, with his “pedagogical techniques”: dryness, trials, sorrows, temptations, thoughts, arranges it so that a person is in constant spiritual wakefulness and moves forward.

I always remember two sayings: one from an ancient elder, the other from a modern one.

The word of the ancient elder was as follows. Once a brother asked a monk who had achieved a great measure of unceasing prayer: “How were you able to achieve such a great measure? Who taught you to pray? And he, smiling, answered: “Demons. They taught me to pray." - “But how is it possible that demons teach us prayer?” - "Yes. They raised such unbearable attacks against me that I was constantly forced to remain awake, spiritually sober with prayer on my lips and in my mind, because as soon as I left prayer a little, thoughts, wishes, images immediately invaded me and enslaved me sin."

Another elder, contemporary to us, Father Ephraim of Katunak, always told us at every meeting: “Be careful, do not leave a void between your mind and God.” For many years I could not understand these words. What do they mean? They mean that our mind should be so connected with God, with the memory of Him, that in our communication with Him there is not a single crack through which thoughts, desires, passions can enter at any moment, in other words, that which separates, separates us from the Lord.

This watchfulness is the means which really helps us to have strong roots to stand in the difficult period of drought, and keeps us in contact with grace throughout our lives. We must remain faithful to God. A faithful person is not only one who is doing well and therefore believes in God and calls on Him. The faithful is the one who, in a period of dryness, when everything in him resists, when everything says otherwise, when his soul feels nothing, unconditionally believes that God will not leave him: God is here, He will not leave me to die during this drought .

The Fathers compare this state of mind with the forty-year wandering of the Israelites in the desert. God led them out of Egypt and they wandered for forty years in the Sinai desert and could not reach the Promised Land, Palestine. She was nearby - at a distance of two months on foot. But the Israelites walked for forty years in the land is empty, impenetrable and waterless(Ps. 63:2). There they were subjected to many disasters, hardships, and trials. And yet they remained faithful. When they began to grumble that they were better off in Egypt and therefore should return there, disaster befell them all. Scripture says that after this the Jews began to say: It is better that our bones fall in this desert than that we return to Egypt.

You know, sometimes I hear things like this: “Before I started going to church regularly, I felt much better. I had no thoughts, I didn’t judge anyone, everything was fine with me, everything was clear to me, but now I don’t understand anything.”

Our previous life begins to appear to us in a better light than our current one. Now, when we go to church, our situation, it seems to us, has become more complicated: we feel nothing, we judge all day long, everything is upside down for us - in general, we do not lead a good spiritual life.

We already look differently at people living outside the Church, saying to ourselves: “Look, these people who don’t go to church, how calm and serene they are, their life is sheer joy, everything is in order with them both at work and in family, they are so joyful and sociable.” A change occurs in our mind, it suddenly seems to us that life without Christ is better than our life, and this pulls us to turn back.

Here we are required to make a decision: it would be better for us to die in the desert of this God's test and leave our bones in it, than to return to our former life to enjoy the joy that, as it seems to us, is there.

There is no doubt that a person, enduring all this, experiences mental suffering. But if he manages to overcome the obstacles of his desires, images and fantasies about himself and humble himself before God, then he finds the key to rest. This key is prayer with tears.

Tearful prayer brings peace to a person who has deep humility. I’m not talking about tears combined with complaints and discontent, when a person begins to argue and say “why?”, for example: “Why, my God, have you forsaken me? Why don't you help me? Why did you leave me alone, and now I’m sinning? Why did I get to such a bad state?” A lot of these “whys” are born. But if a person despises all this, closes his eyes to it, falls on his face before God, opens his heart to Him with tears and pours out all his pain in prayer, then he finds great consolation.

So great that after the period of testing has passed, summer begins for a person, that is, a new good period. And a person with nostalgia remembers the past and the sweet consolation that God gave him, while he had no human consolation.

Let us be confident that God will not despise our prayer. He will not despise our groaning, our trial. During this period of dryness, genuine inner spiritual work occurs in a person.

If a person does not experience a state of dryness, if he does not pass tests, it means that God has not yet begun His work with him. This means that everything a person does is still immature and raw; he has not yet entered the oven to be baked.

In the verse of the psalm we quoted, the prophet David says: My soul takes a nap from despondency. One of the most terrible arrows of the tempter against us, against our soul, is this.

Dejection paralyzes the spirit, and a person does not want anything. Everything seems unpleasant to him. Like a sick person who loses his appetite and doesn’t want to eat: they bring him rice porridge with milk - “I don’t want”, they bring him fish - “I don’t want”, they bring him the best food - “I don’t want”. Everything seems bitter, bad, disgusting to him. He doesn't want anything, he has no appetite. If you give him something, he will eat it only through force.

The same thing happens to a person’s soul out of despondency. It produces in a person what the prophet speaks of - dormancy. When you doze, you sit down in a chair, a sleepy numbness comes over you, you stretch out and indulge in this doze.

This is despondency - an arrow that hits you, and you fall into numbness with your whole being: both spiritually and physically. After all, our body cannot resist: it begins to hurt and react somehow. Dozing from despondency is one of the most powerful weapons that the devil uses against a person who struggles spiritually in prayer, teaching, hesychia, and the love of God.

Where does despondency come from? One of the main reasons is worldly worries. They embrace us all, fight, rob us - but we don’t understand it. The tempter endlessly throws worries, worries, worries at us - so that we cannot stop. From them a person gets tired physically and mentally and then has no appetite for spiritual activity.

He can't have it. If by evening you are already in a broken state, what can you do then? And so day after day, day after day. In the end, this fatigue robs a person of the time and disposition to look at himself at least a little.

Yes, of course, we all have certain responsibilities, but let’s not add something extra to them that will take up our time and steal the last remaining strength. Moderation and simplicity in the life of a Christian are the main grounds for having a O greater ease in our communication with God.

And the answer today to the consumer society in which we live is that this is the custom of the Church: the Church uses the world, but the world does not use the Church. You are the master of things, not their slave. You are the owner of your time and your things, and not a slave to those things that actually tear you apart and leave you no opportunity to do what you should do.

The devil will not fight a spiritual person directly, that is, he will not tell you: “You know, go and enter into an unlawful relationship and commit a sin.” After all, if he says this, it means he will enter into a fight with you.

But first he will come closer and look: “So, what is he doing here? Ah, he is very vigilant, watches himself, prays, fasts, strives…” The enemy will first of all find a way to divert you from what you are doing. He will find a lot of trouble for you, keep you busy with something, just so that you stop praying and rush to other things. He will create conditions for you to give up your spiritual life, and as soon as you become weak, he will grab you and force you to do what he wants.

The enemy will break you like a piece of straw. You have no strength, because you have lost prayer, participation in the sacraments, confession. You are careless. Negligence and despondency will expose you and lead you to the brink of falling. Willy-nilly, everything will end in a fall.

This dormancy of despondency must be fought. The prophet David speaks about this further: confirm me in Your words. That is, confirm me in faith. After all, when faith wavers, then a person no longer resists the sinful offer.

Confirm me in Your words also means “Lord, show us the need to have the words of God within us.” Just like we have a food pantry in our home and when times get tough, we can live off the supplies from that pantry.

Elder Paisiy Svyatogorets

Or, as Elder Paisios said: “Look, work well spiritually in order to receive a spiritual pension, so that when you can no longer work, an envelope with a receipt will come to you.”

What did he mean by this? So that when everything is in order with you spiritually, you strive zealously, and during trials, during periods of spiritual dryness, you have spiritual savings collected from teachings, from the words of God, from prayer, and endure everything steadfastly. So that the tempter, the enemy, the thought cannot convince you by saying: “Look - there is nothing.” But why suddenly not? Yesterday God was with me. Yesterday He spoke to me in my heart. Yesterday I rejoiced with Him. Is He not even today? Eat. Yesterday's God, today's God, tomorrow's God are the same God.

Therefore, prayer, teaching in the word of God, in the works of the holy fathers is a certain contribution of spiritual values ​​that we have within ourselves, so that in times of difficulty we can feed from it. The struggle that we wage during a favorable period is the food that we will remember when trials come, saying to ourselves: “Look, God does not abandon us. This test will pass, and the Lord will come again, the day will come again.”

There is day and there is night: 12 o'clock at night and 12 o'clock in the afternoon. There has never been a time when the night did not pass. Except for our last night. But if this is not our last night, then the day will definitely come. The time of day will change. The same is true in spiritual life. The night will pass and the sun will rise. The test will pass, and after it we will see sweet fruits.

I’ll repeat it again and end here: The most correct spiritual activity occurs in a person during periods of testing and dryness. That is when spiritual activity takes place.

Which fruits become sweet? Those who grew up without water. The sweetest watermelons and melons are “waterless” ones, which are not filled with water like others. They are sweet and aromatic because they grew up in difficult conditions. It's the same with a person. He who is “baked” in difficulties and remains faithful to God does not give in, he says: “I don’t want chocolate from God, I want God Himself. I will find God in these trials. I won't run away from Him. I won't give up my place. Even if I have to die here, I will fall in the fight, but I will not turn back for anything.”

When a person says so and remains in such a dispensation, exerting all his strength, despite the pressure of the tempter, then God truly rejoices and rewards this person. This man is truly a fighter, an athlete. Athlete of Christ. And he will taste abundant, beautiful and sweet fruits when the time of temptation has passed.

Note:

1 Word 31: “Know, child, for thirty years I fought with demons, and after the twentieth year I did not see any help for myself. When I had lived through the fifth of the last ten, then I began to find peace. And over time it increased. And when the seventh year passed, and the eighth year came after it, the repose extended to a much greater measure. During the thirtieth year, and when it was already coming to an end, the peace became so strong that I don’t even know the extent to which it increased.” And he added: “When I want to get up to perform God’s service, I can still accomplish one more glory; and as for the rest, if I stand for three days, I am in amazement with God and do not feel any labor.” This is the kind of insatiable peace generated by a arduous and long-term undertaking!”

Translation of the sisters of the Novo-Tikhvin Monastery

Sometimes you get so tired of constantly worrying, suffering, and experiencing emotions that you feel cold and empty in your soul. Psychologists do not consider this feeling normal; it may indicate a serious mental disorder. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s like you’re living and not. Where does the abyss come from? How to get rid of the terrible emptiness and feel happy again?

Causes

Often a person himself does not notice when he experiences a period of crisis, during which his entire inner world begins to collapse, forming a black hole. People around you often don’t notice how bad it is for a person who seems to be living an ordinary life, but in fact it’s dark and “damp” inside. Factors leading to this condition can be identified:

• Strong. Constant routine, eternal bustle lead to moral exhaustion. Unnoticed by everyone, mental strength begins to dry up.
• Stress. After a serious loss or sudden life changes, it is very difficult to recover, so it appears, which over time leads to emptiness.
• Shock. Although this condition is similar to stress, it should not be confused with it. A person experiences shocks due to betrayal, betrayal, when a beautiful fairy-tale world, like a fragile construction set, collapses in one moment.
• Lack of purpose. If the completed tasks are not replaced by others, it becomes very difficult. Probably everyone has experienced this feeling when you achieve a goal (no matter how difficult it may be), after which life becomes boring and less interesting.
• Acute period. When a lot of things fall on a person at once, after a while you can feel emptiness and emotional burnout.

What is accompanied by spiritual emptiness?

Unfortunately, everything ends in melancholy, indifference, depression, apathy. The person seems to live out of hopelessness. If measures are not taken in a timely manner, everything can end in suicide.

Mental emptiness leads to the fact that a person is indifferent to everything - he is not interested in the world around him, withdraws into himself, and stops contacting people. Due to the devastation of his soul, he neglects his appearance, his home, and his friends often abandon him. In order to prevent tragedy, it is important to understand that the soul has been burned by experiences that, it would seem, are already in the past, but do not go away and interfere with life.

What to do?

Gradually you need to fill the void. Of course, this is quite difficult to do, but if you want to live fully again, then it is possible. Think that it is better to be a soulless creature or a real person who knows how to rejoice, cry, and sincerely love. You need to overcome yourself, get angry and fill the empty space.

Follow these steps:

• Don't be afraid to complain. Surely you have relatives and friends, you don’t need to keep everything to yourself, cry, talk it out.
• Learn to trust. Close people will not wish you harm, they will always console you, listen, give valuable advice, and understand.
• Find out the reason. Perhaps you need to change locations, get away from all the hustle and bustle. Sometimes it is enough to think alone, in a new environment. A house outside the city helps a lot. Here you can trim trees, plant flowers, and get rid of dry grass. By doing all this work, you will begin to notice how you are cleansing your soul, pulling the pain out of it.
• You need to pump up your emotions, for this you can do an extreme sport that will raise your adrenaline level. You can read a heartbreaking book, watch a melodrama. For some, it’s enough to enjoy beautiful nature, the sunrise, or just fall in love.

How to fill the spiritual emptiness?

It is important to understand that emptiness affects different aspects of life. Therefore, it is necessary to act correctly. Your soul must be repopulated with:

• The world of feelings, personal life. A person cannot live fully without tenderness and passion. Don't be afraid to start a new relationship, even if your previous experience was unsuccessful. Open your soul, perhaps you will find your true loved one, with whom you will feel happy again.
• Relationships with loved ones. Sometimes the daily bustle leads to the fact that a person does not have enough time to communicate with loved ones. You shouldn’t give up on your relatives - visit your grandparents, parents, brother, sister, have a heart-to-heart talk. These people truly love you and can motivate you.
• Job. Often a person is saved by his favorite activity. If your job hasn’t brought you happiness before, find yourself and do what you’ve wanted for a long time. Don't look at work as hard work, approach it creatively. It motivates you.
• Hobbies. Don't refuse to attend different events. Find a hobby that excites you. This way you will get fresh emotions.

It turns out that in order to fill the emptiness in the soul, you just need to gather your strength, learn to enjoy life, and get pleasure from it. You must do everything to fill your life with bright colors and feelings, then harmony will appear in your soul.

A person gradually rises, acquiring altruistic properties. Having achieved the property of “giving,” he begins to “receive for the sake of the Creator.”

If before this he acquired additional, altruistic properties, now, with the help of the acquired altruistic properties, he begins to correct (not destroy!) the very essence of his being - he does not destroy the desire to enjoy, but corrects the intention for the sake of which to enjoy.

Gradually correcting egoism for altruism, a person, accordingly, rises until he receives everything he should receive, according to the root of his soul. The entire light, the entire amount of pleasure that the Creator wants to give to creations is called the common soul of all creations.

The light predetermined for each of us (the soul of each of us) is part of this common soul. And everyone should receive this part as their desires are corrected.

A person can feel the Creator (his soul) only in his corrected desire to enjoy. If a person has completely corrected his vessel from egoistic to altruistic, then this vessel completely merges with the light, because it has acquired its properties. Thus, a person becomes equal to the Creator and completely merges with him in properties. At the same time, a person experiences everything that is in the light that fills him.

There are no words in our language to describe this condition. Therefore, it is said that the entire sum of all pleasures in this world is a spark from the endless fire of the soul’s pleasure from merging with the Creator.
You can move up the steps of the spiritual ladder only according to the law of the middle line. The principle of this state can be briefly described in words -

- “rich is he who is happy in his possession”:
- as much as he understands in the commandments is enough for him, and the main thing for him is that he can fulfill the desire of the Creator with these actions, feeling as if he fulfilled the desire of the Creator in all its subtleties, and at the same time he is happy, as if he got the best lot in the world.

Such a feeling is born in a person if he places the Creator above himself as the King of the universe. And therefore he is happy that out of many billions the Creator chose him by showing him through books and teachers what He wants from him. This spiritual state is called the desire to bestow.

But this is not yet the perfection of a person, because during this work on himself a person does not use his mind and is called “poor in knowledge”, since he knows nothing about the connection of his actions with their spiritual consequences, i.e. acts unconsciously, not understanding what he is doing, acts only by faith.

Therefore, in order to consciously act spiritually, a person must make a lot of effort, feel that the thought must be “for the sake of the Creator.” And then he begins to feel that he is not rising spiritually at all, but on the contrary, every time he does something he sees that he is increasingly farther from the real intention - to give the Creator pleasure to the extent that the Creator wants to give him pleasure by doing this.

In such a state, a person should accept knowledge no more than that which will allow him to continue to remain happy with perfection, as before. And this state is called the midline. And gradually adding knowledge, the left line, he achieves complete perfection.

MIDDLE LINE

Right line

Let's look at the work in the middle line again. A person must begin his spiritual ascent from the right line, a feeling of perfection in the spiritual, happiness from his lot, a desire to fulfill the desires of the Creator free of charge and selflessly. And how much pleasure does he have in his spiritual quest? It is enough for him, because he believes in the personal control of the Creator, in the fact that it is the Creator’s desire that he feel this way in his spiritual quest. Whatever his condition, it comes from the Creator. And with just this awareness of spiritual control and perfection, he is happy, feeling his perfection, and in joy he thanks the Creator.

Left line

But in this state there is no left line, when a person must check his condition. And this internal work is opposite to the work of the right line, where the main thing is the elevation of the spiritual and the Creator, without any connection with oneself and one’s condition. And when a person begins to check what he really is, how serious his attitude to the spiritual is, how perfect he himself is, he sees that he is immersed in his petty egoism, and for others, for the Creator, he is unable to budge. And to the extent that he discovers evil in himself, realizing that it is evil, to the extent that he strives to get rid of this evil, to that extent he must make an effort to overcome it and offer a prayer for help, for he sees that he himself is not able to do anything with help yourself.

Thus, two opposite lines appeared in man: the right one - feels that everything is in the power of the Creator and therefore everything is perfect, and therefore does not desire anything, and therefore he is happy. The left one feels that he himself has absolutely nothing to do with the spiritual, has not comprehended anything, that he remains, as before, in the shell of his egoism and does not ask the Creator for help to somehow get out of this state.

But after he has seen all his evil in himself and despite this, having rejected common sense, which dissuades him from the hopeless work of correcting selfishness, he still thanks the Creator for his condition, believing that he is in perfection, and therefore happy, as before checking his condition, he moves forward along the midline. And constant control is necessary - not to “go too far” with self-criticism of the left line, in order to constantly be in the joy of the middle line - only then does a person ascend into the spiritual “with both feet.”

If a person truly desires to deserve the Creator’s revelation, then:

1) this desire must be stronger than all others, i.e. so as not to feel other desires. And besides, this desire must be constant for him: since the Creator himself is eternal, and His desires are unchangeable, so a person, if he wants to get closer to the Creator, must be like him in this property, i.e. an unchanging desire that his desires should not change depending on circumstances;

2) must master altruistic desires to “give” one’s thoughts and desires to the Creator until one earns the light of faith, which gives a person confidence;

3) must deserve perfect, absolute knowledge of the Creator. The result of a person’s actions depends on his spiritual level, but if the light of the Creator shines, then there is no difference between the stages, since the vessel of the soul and the light of the soul together are simultaneously received by a person from the Creator, and therefore the knowledge received is perceived as perfect.

The higher a person climbs the spiritual ladder, the simpler the laws of the universe, because the main, basic categories are simple, not composite. But because a person does not feel the roots of creation, but perceives their distant consequences, he sees the laws of creation in our world as consisting of conditions and limitations and therefore perceives them as extremely confusing.

To feel like a created creature is to feel separated from the Creator. Since, due to our egoistic nature, we instinctively and naturally move away from what causes us suffering, the Creator uses this to lead us to good: He removes pleasure from the material world around us and gives pleasure only in altruistic actions. But this is the path of suffering.

The Path of Consciousness is different: although there are pleasures in our world, but by faith in the purpose of creation, above reason, i.e. contrary to what our body and mind claim, we can come out of egoism and self-love, and then begin to experience love for the Creator, feeling that it is mutual. This is the path of peace and joy, the belief that the long path is actually short, without experiencing suffering. The reward lies in the fact that the Creator gives a person good thoughts and desires. A person should also receive faith from fellow students and from books, but after he has felt faith in himself, the feeling of the Creator, he must tell himself that the Creator gave it to him.

TIME TO WORK ON YOURSELF

First, from above they give a person a spiritual feeling, lift him up, and then comes the time of work, effort - to stay at this level with one’s own strength. The main effort should be in feeling the value of the spiritual elevation received. As soon as a person begins to neglect what he has received and self-enjoy it, he begins to lose this level.

It is said that those who want to get closer spiritually are helped by giving a soul, light, a part of the Creator. A person begins to feel that he is part of the Creator! Since a person is 100% selfish, he himself will not want a connection with the Creator. He can only want this if he is sure that it is for his good. That is, not only does a person see his evil and understand that only

The Creator can help him, but it still won’t give him the strength to ask the Creator. It is necessary to realize that in rapprochement, in connection with the Creator, his salvation. The resulting correct relationship between faith and knowledge is called spiritual balance, the middle line. The person himself determines the state in which he wants to be.

In this case, man can already exist as a spiritual object, since he consists of the correct proportion of faith and reason, called the middle line, through which man achieves perfection.

Due to the hiddenness of the Creator, each of us makes incredible efforts to achieve the standard of existence accepted in our society, blindly following the inner prompt, the constant whispering from within our egoism. We, like blind instruments of egoism, rush to carry out his instructions, otherwise he will punish us with suffering, spur us on, and we will resign ourselves and involuntarily, and then without even thinking, we will fulfill his will. Our egoism sits in us, but it has already become so ingrained in us that we take it for our nature, for our desires. It permeates all the cells of our body, makes us evaluate all our sensations in accordance with its desires, makes us calculate according to its program how much it will receive from our actions. A person does not even imagine that it is possible to remove this influence of egoism from oneself, to cleanse oneself, as in a science fiction film, to eject from oneself, similar in shape to our body, an egoistic cloud that permeates us, dressed in all our flesh. We will be left without egoistic desires, and then the Creator will give us his altruistic desires.

But while this egoistic being is inside us, we cannot imagine what gain will come from this, and on the contrary, altruistic thoughts and desires seem to us unacceptable, absurd, frivolous and cannot control our society, not to mention the universe.

But this is only because our thoughts and desires are under the control of egoism. For an objective assessment of what is happening to him, a person must strive to feel egoism as something extraneous, as his internal enemy posing as a friend, or in general as himself (we even identify ourselves with his desires), try to feel it as something extraneous, located in dumb by the will of the Creator. Such human actions are called awareness of evil. By creating us, the Creator set the goal of our eternal existence with Him, but we must achieve this state through our own efforts, so as not to feel a sense of shame for undeservedly received eternal absolute pleasure.

Therefore, the Creator created a world opposite to itself, creating the opposite property - the desire for self-gratification, egoism - and endowed us with it. As soon as a person feels the effect of this property and is born in our world, he immediately ceases to feel the Creator.

This concealment of the Creator exists specifically to create in us the illusion of free will in choosing our world or the world of the Creator. If, despite our egoism, we saw the Creator, we would naturally prefer, without any doubt, the world of the Creator to our world, as giving pleasure and the absence of suffering.

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

Freedom of will and choice can exist precisely in the absence of a sense of the Creator, in the state of His concealment. But if a person, from the moment of birth, experiences the absolute, all-suppressing influence of egoism to such an extent that he completely associates it with himself, then how can he freely, regardless of egoism, decide what to prefer? How does the Creator create a neutral state for choice? And in general, what could be the choice, if our world is full of suffering and death, and the Creator’s world is full of pleasures and immortality, what remains for a person to choose?

The connection between a person and the Creator, starting from the lowest, our initial level, to the highest, where the Creator himself is located, can be likened to the steps of a spiritual ladder.

All steps of the spiritual ladder are located in the spiritual worlds. At its highest level is the Creator himself, and its lowest level concerns our world.

A person is at the lowest rung of the spiritual ladder, since the initial egoistic level of a person is not connected with the last rung of the ladder, which is still completely altruistic. The sensation of a higher spiritual level is possible when the properties of a person and this level coincide, and the degree of sensation is proportional to the coincidence of properties.

The ability to feel the highest level is due to the fact that on the ladder all spiritual steps are not only arranged sequentially from bottom to top, but also partially enter and penetrate each other: the lower half of the highest is inside the upper half of the lowest. Therefore, within us there is a part of the lower, final stage, but usually we do not feel it.

The higher level above us is called the Creator, because it is she who is our Creator for us, gives birth, animates us and controls us. Since we do not perceive this level, we claim that the Creator does not exist.

If a person is in such a state that he sees with his own eyes the supreme control of the Creator of all the creations of our world, he loses all possibility of free will, faith, choice of action, since he clearly sees only one truth, one force, one desire, operating in everything and everyone .

Since the Creator’s desire is to give man free will, it is necessary to hide the Creator from creatures.

Only in a state of concealment of the Creator can it be affirmed that man himself unselfishly strives to merge with the Creator, to act for the benefit of the Creator.

All our work on ourselves is possible only in conditions of the Creator’s concealment, since as soon as the Creator reveals himself to us, we immediately automatically become His slaves, completely in the power of His greatness and power. And it is impossible to determine what a person’s true thoughts actually are.

Therefore, in order to give man freedom of action, the Creator must hide himself. But in order to create the opportunity for a person to break out of the slavery of blind submission to egoism, the Creator must reveal himself, because a person submits to only two forces in the world - the power of egoism, the body, or the power of the Creator, altruism, the spirit.

Thus, a sequence of states is necessary: ​​the hiding of the Creator from man, when a person feels only himself and the egoistic forces ruling within him, and the revelation of the Creator, when a person feels the power of spiritual forces.
But since the properties of the highest are felt by a person as egoistic, he feels that there is nothing attractive in the spiritual, promising pleasure, inspiration, confidence and tranquility.

And here the opportunity arises for a person to demonstrate free will and, contrary to what he feels, tell himself that the absence of pleasure, taste, which he feels in the highest, in the spiritual, is a consequence of the fact that the highest has specifically hidden himself for the benefit of man, because there is no in a person there are necessary spiritual properties with which one can feel the highest pleasures, since selfishness rules over all his desires.

The main thing is, in states of decline and emptiness, to find the strength (by asking the Creator, by studying, by good actions) to affirm that this state was given specifically to overcome it. And the fact that he does not feel pleasure and life in spiritual aspirations is specially done from above in order to give him the opportunity to choose to say that he does not feel spiritual pleasure, because he does not have suitable, altruistic properties, and therefore the highest is obliged to hide from it its true properties. Therefore, a person must remember that the beginning of the sensation of the highest is precisely in the feeling of spiritual emptiness.

And if a person is able to assert that the highest object is hiding himself due to the discrepancy between their properties, and asks for help in correcting his egoism, raising his request, then the highest object partially reveals himself (raises his own, showing his true qualities, which he previously covered with egoism, and the corresponding pleasures.A person begins to feel the greatness and spiritual pleasure that the highest object feels from the presence of these spiritual altruistic properties.

The Almighty, as it were, lifts a person to himself, to his spiritual level, by allowing a person to see his greatness, the greatness of his altruistic qualities. A person, seeing the greatness of the spiritual in comparison with the material, rises spiritually above our world. The feeling of the spiritual, regardless of a person’s will, changes his egoistic properties to altruistic ones - properties of the highest.

In order for a person to be able to completely master the upper first stage, the highest one fully reveals himself, all his spiritual qualities. At the same time, a person feels the Supreme as the only, perfect ruler of everything and comprehends the highest knowledge of the purpose of creation and its management. The person clearly sees that it is impossible to act differently. Now his mind obliges him to do this.

SPIRITUAL ELEVATION

Spiritual ascent consists in the fact that each time a person discovers greater evil in himself, he asks the Creator to give him the strength to cope with evil. And each time he receives strength in the form of more and more spiritual light. Until he reaches the true original size of his soul - all his corrected egoism, completely filled with light. Interference can only be overcome with the help of the Creator. Because a person can work only if he sees benefit for himself in any form.

And since our body, heart, and mind do not understand how they can benefit from altruism, then as soon as a person wants to do the slightest altruistic action, he does not have the strength to act either with his mind, or with his heart, or with his body. And he has only one thing left - to ask the Creator for help. And thus, involuntarily, he approaches the Creator until he completely merges with him.

A person has no right to complain that he was not born smart enough, strong or brave enough, or that he does not have any other qualities like other people, because if he does not follow the right path, then what is the use of the best inclinations and abilities? . Perhaps he will even become a great scientist, he will even be an expert on everything, but if he does not achieve connection with the Creator, he will not fulfill his destiny, like everyone else. Because the main thing is to reach the level of a righteous person - because only in this case can a person use all the inclinations he has in the right direction and not waste his strength, and all, even the weakest and mediocre, abilities given to him by the Creator precisely for this purpose, all of them use it for a higher purpose.

If a person is in a state of spiritual decline, then it is useless to persuade him to cheer up, to tell him learned wisdom - nothing he hears from others will help him! Neither stories about what others have experienced and felt and advise - this does not cheer him up at all, because faith in everything has completely disappeared, including in the comprehension of others.

But if he tells himself what he himself said and experienced at a time when he was in a state of spiritual upsurge, when he was full of life, and not spiritually dead, as now, if he remembers his aspirations, his spiritual achievements, this can make him cheer up . By remembering that he himself believed and walked the path of faith above reason - if he remembers this and arouses his own sensations - with this he can help himself get out of the state of spiritual death. Therefore, a person must rely on his own memories and experience; only they can help him get out of spiritual decline.

There is no other way to go beyond the framework of our nature into the spiritual world than by acquiring the morality of the heavenly world. It is the opposite of ours, since everything that we comprehend, feel, everything that gives us a picture of what we call our world, the framework of our world - these concepts are from the egoistic mind and the egoistic heart.

Therefore, only by changing them to the opposite - faith instead of reason and giving instead of receiving - can you enter the spiritual world.
But since we possess only those tools with which we were created - reason and egoism - and our mind only serves our egoism, then only from the outside, i.e. from the Creator, we can receive other instruments of reason and feelings.

For this purpose, he “attracts” us to himself, while at the same time showing that we ourselves are not able to remake ourselves. And inevitably we must seek and create a connection with the Creator, which is the key to our spiritual salvation. But as a result of our spiritual elevation, we constantly receive a higher mind, more and more at each stage. And we must constantly increase the strength of our faith so that it is greater than reason, otherwise we will again fall into the power of selfishness. And so on until we completely merge with the Creator.