1 1 ) Barbarism interferes with the union of people, but the same thing is done by a too great refinement without a religious basis. In the other, the physical disunites, and in this, the spir-itual.
12) Man is a tool of God. At first I thought that it was a tool with which man himself was called to work; now I have understood that it is not man who works, but God. The business of man is only to keep himself in order. Like an axe, which would have to keep itself always clean and sharp.
13) Why is it that scoundrels stand for des-potism? Because under an ideal order which pays according to merit, they are badly off. Un-der despotism everything can happen.
14) I often meet people who recognise no God except one which we ourselves recognise in our-selves. And I am astonished; God in me. But
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God is an infinite principle; how then, why then, should He happen to be in me ? It is impossible not to question oneself about this. And as soon as you question yourself, you have to acknowledge an exterior cause. Why do people not feel them-selves in need of answering this question? Be-cause for them, the answer to this question is in the reality of the existing world, whether accord-ing to Moses or to Darwin it is all the same. And therefore, to have a conception of an ex-terior God, one has to understand that that which is actually real, is only the impression of our senses, i. e. it is we ourselves, our spiritual “ self.”
15) In moments of passion, infatuation, in or-der to conquer, one thing is necessary, to destroy the illusion that it is the “ self “ who suffers, who desires, and to separate one’s true “ self “ from the troubled waters of passion. Sept. 15. Y. P. If I live.
To-day October 10. Y. P.
It is almost a month that I have made no en-tries and it seemed to me it was only yesterday. During this time, though in very poor form, I finished the Declaration of Faith. During this time there were some Japanese with a letter from Konissi. 129 They, the Japanese, are undoubt-edly nearer Christianity than 6ur church Chris-
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tians. I have learned to love them very much. . . .
I want to write out the whole Declaration of Faith from the beginning again. Yesterday there was a good letter from Verigin, Peter. 130
All last night I thought about the meaning of life and though there are other things to note down, I want to note down this :
The whole world is nothing else than an in-finite space filled with infinitely small, colourless, silently moving particles of matter. At bottom, even this is not so; I know that they are particles of matter only through their impenetrability, but the impenetrability I know only through my sense of touch and my muscle sense. If I did not have this sense, I would not know about impenetrability or about matter. As to motion, also, I, strictly speaking, have no right to speak, because if I did not have the sense of sight or again muscle sense, I would not know anything about motion either.
So that all that I have the right to assert about the outer world is that something exists, some-thing entirely unknown to me, as it was said long ago both by the Brahmins and by Kant and by Berkeley. There is some kind of occasion, some kind of grain of sand which causes irritation in the shell of the snail and produces a pearl (secretion, secretion in the snail). This is our whole outside world.
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What is there then ? There is myself with my representations of myself, of the sun, trees, ani-mals, stones. But what then is it that I call my-self? Is it something arbitrary depending on my-self? No, it is something independent of myself, predetermined. I can not not be myself, and not have that representation which I have, namely, that I include in myself a small part of these moving atoms and call them myself. And all the other remaining atoms I see in the form of be-ings .more or less like myself. The world ap-pears to me to consist entirely of beings which are like me or resemble me. 131
(I have become confused, yet have something to say. I am going to try when I have the strength. )
I am continuing to write out what I had to say and what I dreamt of all night, namely :
People think that their life is in the body, that from that which takes place in the body; from breathing, nutrition, circulation of the blood, etc., life flows. And this seems unquestionable; let nutrition, breathing, circulation of the blood cease and life will end. But what ends is the life of the body, life in this body. . . .
And in fact if you consider that life comes from the process of the body and only in the body then as soon as the processes of the body are ended, then life ought to be ended. But certainly this is an arbitrary assertion. No one has proven and
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can prove that life is only in the body and can not be without the body. To assert this, is all the same as asserting that when the sun has set then the sun has come to an end. One must first de-cide what is life. Is it that which I see in the others as it begins and stops, or is it what I know in myself? If it is what I know in myself, then it is the only thing that is and therefore it can not be destroyed. And the fact that in bodies before me processes end which are connected with life in me and in other beings, shows me only this, that life goes away somewhere from my sensual eyes. To go away entirely, to be destroyed, it absolutely can not be, because outside of it there is nothing in the world. The problem, then, might be this : Will my life be destroyed, can it be destroyed? And the destruction of the body of a man, is that a sign of the destruction of his life? In order to answer this question one must first decide what is life ?
Life is the consciousness of my separateness from other beings, of the existence of other beings and of those limits which separate me from them. My life is not bound up with my body. There may be a body, but no consciousness of separate-ness like for a sleeping one, an idiot, an embryo or for those who have fits.
It is true that there can be no life without the consciousness of the body; but that is because life
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is the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own boundaries. But the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own bound-aries happens in our life in time and space, but it can happen in any other way and therefore the destruction of the body is not the sign of the de-struction of life.
(Not clear and not what I want to say.) Oct. u. Y. P. If I live.
To-day October 20. Y. P. Morning.
I feel like writing down three things.
i) In a work of art the principal thing is the soul of the author. Therefore among medium productions the feminine ones are the better, the more interesting. A woman will push her-self through now and then, speak out the most inner mysteries of her soul; and that is what is needed. You see what she really loves, although she pretends that she loves something else. When an author writes, we the readers place our ears to his breast and we listen and say, “ Breathe. If you have rumblings, they will appear.” And women haven’t the capacity of hiding. Men have learned literary methods and you can no longer see him behind his manner, except that you know he is stupid. But what is in his soul, you don’t see.
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The 2nd thing I wanted to write was that yes-terday, in blowing out my candle, I began to feel for matches and did not find them, and an un-easiness came over me. “And you are getting ready to die ! What, then, are you also going to die with matches?” I said to myself. And I at once saw in the dark my real life and became calm.
What is this fear of the dark? Besides the fear at the incapability of meeting whatever ac-cident might happen, it is the fear at the ab-sence of the delusion of our most important sense, that of sight. It is fear before the contemplation of our true life. I now no longer have that fear on the contrary, that which had been fear is now peace; there only has remained the habit of fear; but to the majority of people the fear is exactly of that which alone can give them peace.
The 3rd thing I wanted to write was that when a man is put in the necessity of choosing between an act which is clearly beneficial to others, but with the thwarting of the demands of conscience (the will of God),
