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 separate 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, they, just as he, can not have
real life by themselves.
And it is just this error of men who have awakened 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 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 consequently
he should serve them as he serves his own good.
(Confused.)
_May 17, Y. P._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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