/lit/ - Literature

In a person taken as a non-deterministic person, as a spirit endowed as a spirit with freedom of self-determination, there is an opportunity to see a certain unconditionality, "divinity", as if not requiring another God. He can recognize himself as related, even consubstantial with the First Being; decide on an act of self-adoration: return to your original being. I lived in this delusion in my youth under the influence of books on Indian mysticism and because of my meetings with people from those countries where this kind of mysticism has been cultivated for thousands of years. It is not at all easy to get out of this aberration: you can always face the question of your allegedly insufficient removal of everything that is in cosmic existence. In striving for perfection, it is necessary to overcome in us the principle of personality, as a temporary form of being, which introduces limitations into all our manifestations. In a word,

I could not avoid the question: who knows? who is self-determined? And another question: if I proceeded from the beginningless principle, then how could such a deep degradation of my being take place? Why now I so hard seek divorce from the flesh, to become again what I have always been and in the order of abstract mental vision - do not cease to be?

Meditations led to peace from being distracted by the worries of earthly life, - gave me hours of intellectual pleasure, - lifted me into imaginary spiritual realms, - put me above the environment around me. Philosophically, I could not think of the Absolute Beginning - personal. The reason for this was, in part, my adherence to the general delusion of those circles in which I moved: mixing the concept of a person with the concept of an individual, while philosophically they are diametrically opposed. As a child, I was taught to pray to the Immortal Heavenly Father, to whom all my grandfathers and great-grandfathers went. Then, in childish faith ( Matthew 18: 3 ; Luke 18:17), Person and Eternity were easily combined. So, from infancy, the Christian personalism I perceived at some point became the most essential question: Being, absolute, can it be personal? My sincere "Eastern" experience was, rather, an intellectual - cut off from the heart - form: the asceticism of clever withdrawal from everything relative. Gradually I became convinced that I was on the wrong path: I was moving away from true real Being into non-being.

This period was extremely tense: the state of mind was like a small boat on a dark night on the waves - now he, the mind, ascended to the top of a certain wave, then again he was thrown down with another in anger. But the One Whom I had left as if "unnecessary" did not turn away from me to the end and He Himself sought an opportunity to appear to me: He suddenly placed before me the text of the Biblical, Sinai Revelation: "I am who I am " ( Ex. 3:14 ). Being is I , God , the Absolute Ruler of all starry worlds - personal - I am .