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gins to use that reason of his which revealed to him the essence of all life; the desire for the good, in order to secure the good for his own separate being.
But the longer a man lives, the more obvious it becomes to him that his purpose is unattainable. And therefore, while he has not yet made clear to himself his error, even before he recognises by reason the impossibility of the good for a sepa-rate personality, man knows by experience and feeling the error of activity which is directed to the good of his own separate personality and he naturally strives that his life, his desire for the good, be drawn away from his own personality and brought over to other things; to comrades, friends, family, society.
This same reason which he desires to use for the attainment of the good for his own separate being, shows man that this good is unattainable, that it becomes destroyed by the struggle between the separate beings for the desired good, destroyed by the unpreventable, innumerable disasters and sufferings which threaten man, and above all, by the unavoidable illnesses, sufferings, old age and death which occur in the individual life of man. No matter how man might expand his desire for the good to other beings, he can not but see that all these separate beings are like him, subject to unavoidable sufferings and death and therefore,
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they, just as he, can not have real life by them-selves.
And it is just this error of men who have awak-ened to the consciousness of life that the Christian teaching dissipates, in showing to man that as soon as a consciousness of life has awakened in him, i. e. the desire for the good, then his being, his “ self “ is no longer his separate bodily being, but that same consciousness of life, the desire for the good not for himself, which was born in his separate being. The consciousness, therefore, of the desire for the good, is the desire for the good for everything existent. And the desire for the good for everything existent, is God.
The Christian teaching teaches just this, that His son, who resembles God, and who was sent by the Father into the world that the will of the Father be fulfilled in him, lives in man with an awakened consciousness (the conversation with Nicodemus.)
The Christian teaching reveals to man with an awakened consciousness, that the meaning and the aim of his life does not consist, as it seemed to him before, in the acquiring of the greater good for his own separate personality or for other such personalities like him, no matter how many they are, but only in the fulfilment in this world of the will of the Father who has sent man into the
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world it reveals also to man the will of the Father in regard to the son. The will of the Father in regard to the son is that there should be manifested in this world that desire for the good which forms the essence of his life, so that man living in this world should wish the good to a greater and greater number of beings and con-sequently he should serve them as he serves his own good. (Confused.)
May 77, Y. P.
Again I am dissatisfied with what I wrote yes-terday and which seemed to me true and full. Last night and this morning I thought about the same thing. Here are the new things which have become clear to me :
1) That the desire for the good is not God, but only one of His manifestations, one of the sides from which we see God. God in me is manifested by the desire for the good;
2) That this God which is enclosed in man, begins to strive to free Himself in broadening and enlarging the being in whom He dwells; then, see-ing the impassable limits of this being, He tries to free Himself by going outside of this being and embracing other beings;
3) That a reasoning being cannot find room for
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himself in the life of an individual, and that as soon as he becomes reasoning he tries to go out of it;
4) That the Christian teaching reveals to man that the essence of his life is not his separate being, but God, which is enclosed in his being. This God, therefore, becomes known to man through reason and love . . .
I can not write any farther; weak, sleepy.
5) And above all, that the desire for the good for oneself, love for oneself, could exist in man only up to the time when reason had not yet awak-ened in him. But as soon as reason had wakened in him, then it became clear to man that the de-sire for the good for himself a separate being was futile, because the good is not realisable for a separate and mortal being. Just as soon as reason appeared, then there became possible only one kind of desire for the good; the desire for the good for all, because with the desire for the good for all, there is no struggle but union, and no death but the transmission of life. God is not love, but in living, unreasoning beings He is mani-fested through a love for oneself, and in living, reasoning beings, through love for everything that exists.
I am now going to write out the 2 1 points from my notebooks.
i) In order to believe in immortality one has 42
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to live an immortal life here, i. e. to live not to-wards oneself but towards God, not for oneself, but for God. Man, in this life, seems to be stand-ing with one foot on a board and the other on the earth; and as soon as his reason has awakened, he sees that that board upon which he was just about to step lies over an abyss and it not only bends and creaks, but is already falling and man transfers his weight to that foot which stands on the earth. How not be afraid if one stands on that which bends and creaks and falls; and how be afraid, and of what to be afraid, if you stand on that upon which everything falls and below which it is impossible to fall?
2) Read about Granovsky. 78 In our litera-ture it is customary to say, that during the reign of Nicholas conditions were such that it was im-possible to express great thoughts. (Granovsky complains of this and others too.) But the thoughts there were not real. It is all self-decep-tion. If all those Granovskys, Bielinskys, 79 and others had anything to say, they would have said it, no matter what the obstacles. The proof is Herzen. 80 He went away abroad and despite his enormous talent, what did he say that was new, necessary? All those Granovskys, Bielinskys, Chernishevskys, 81 Dobroliubovs, who were raised to great men, ought to be grateful to the govern-ment and the censorship without which they would
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have been the most unnoticed of sketch-writers.
Perhaps the Bielinskys, Granovskys, and the other unimportant ones might have had something real within them, but they stifled it, imagining they had to serve society with the forms of social life and not to serve God by professing the truth and by preaching it without any care about the forms of social life. Let there be contents and the forms will shape themselves.
People acting thus, i. e. adapting their striving for truth to the existing forms of society, are like a being to whom wings have been given to fly, without knowing obstacles, and who used these wings in order to help itself in walking. Such a being would not attain its ends every obstacle would stop it and it would spoil its wings. And then this being would complain that it had been held back and would tell with sorrow (like Gran-ovsky) that it would have gone far if obstacles had not held it back.
The quality of real spiritual activity is such, that it is impossible to hold it back. If it is held back, then it means only one thing: it is not real.
3) Man dying little by little (growing old) experiences that which a sprouting seed ought to experience which has not yet transferred its con-sciousness from the seed to the plant. He feels
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that he grows less, but he is not conscious of him-self there where he increases; in another life. I am beginning to experience this.
4) I wrote down: “-Reason is a tool for the recognition of truth, verification, criticism.” I can’t remember very well. It seems to me, and I am even certain of it, that it is this :
Under reason is understood many different in-tellectual activities and very complex ones, and therefore the correctness of the solutions of reason is often doubted. As an answer to this doubt, I say, that there is an activity of the reason which is not to be doubted, namely, the critical activity, the activity of verifying what is told me. They tell me that God . . . etc. I submit this to the verification of reason and decide without doubt that that which is not reasonable does not exist for me. It is wrong to say that everything which exists is reasonable, or that everything which is
