What is life? Hundreds of the most profound philosophers, many scientists and experienced physicians have asked themselves this question, but to no avail. The veil that shrouds the eternal cosmos and the mysterious origin of life has never been lifted in such a way as to satisfy serious and sincere science. The more the people of official knowledge tried to penetrate its dark folds, the more this darkness deepened, and the less they saw, for they are like a treasure seeker who roamed all the seas in search of what was buried in his own garden.
But what then is this science? Is this not biology, or is it perhaps the study of life in a broader sense? No. Is it physiology or the science of organic functions? Also no; for the first of them leaves this problem as a difficult enigma of the Sphinx; and the latter is a science of death rather than life. Physiology is based on the study of the functions of various organs, and these organs are necessary for the manifestation of life, but what this science calls living matter is, in fact, dead matter. Each molecule of living organs contains the germ of death, and begins to die as soon as it is born, so that the molecule that will be its successor could live only in order to die in turn. An organ, a natural part of any living being, is only a medium for some special function during life and a combination of such molecules.
The vital organ (like the whole organism) puts on the mask of life and thus hides the constant decay and death of its parts. Therefore, neither biology nor physiology is a science or even branches of the science of life, but the essence is only the science of the visibility of life. While true philosophy stands like Oedipus before the Sphinx of life, hardly daring to utter the paradox contained in the answer to the riddle proposed, materialistic science, arrogant, as always, never for a moment doubting its own wisdom, hypnotizes itself herself and many others, making them believe that she had solved the magnificent mystery of being.
However, in reality, has she even approached her doorstep? Of course, she will never be able to help spread the truth by trying to mislead herself and other careless people and claim that life is just the result of a complex combination of molecules. Is the vital force really a “phantom,” as Dubois Reymond calls it? For his caustic remark that "life", as something independent, is only an asylum ignorantiae [refuge of the ignorant] for those who want to find themselves shelter in abstractions, when a direct explanation is impossible, approaches with much more reason to those materialists who interfere with people to see the real facts by placing pompous and difficult to pronounce words in this place. Is it any of the five divisions of life so pretentiously named - archebiosis, biocrosis, biodieresis,biokenosis and bioparodosis, 1 ever helped Huxley or Haeckel to study more fully the mystery of the origin of even the simplest ant, not to mention man?
Absolutely not. For life and everything that relates to it belongs to the legitimate possession of the metaphysician and psychologist, and physical science cannot have any claims to all this. “What was, is what will be; and what was, has already been named - and it is known that this is a MAN”- this is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. But "man" in this case has nothing to do with the physical man, at least not in its esoteric meaning. Scalpels and microscopes can reveal the secret of the material parts of a person's shell: they can never cut a window into his soul to open even the smallest space on any of the more extensive horizons of being.
And only those thinkers who, following the Delphic precepts, cognized life in their inner personalities, those who carefully studied it in themselves, before trying to trace it and analyze its reflections in their more external shells, were rewarded with some success. Like the fiery philosophers of the Middle Ages, they jumped over the appearances of light and fire in the world of consequences and concentrated all their attention on gaining secret powers. Then, tracing them to a single abstract cause, they tried to comprehend the MYSTERY, each of them as much as his intellectual abilities allowed. Thus, they established that 1) the seemingly living mechanism, called a physical man, is only fuel, the material that life feeds on in order to manifest itself;and 2) that thanks to him, the inner man receives, as payment and reward, the opportunity to accumulate additional experiences of earthly illusions, called lives.
One such philosopher today is undoubtedly the great Russian novelist and reformer, Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. We will see how close his views are to the esoteric and philosophical teachings of higher theosophy, having carefully read some excerpts from a lecture he read in Moscow before the local Psychological Society.
In discussing the problem of life, the count asks his audience to admit something impossible as an argument. He says:
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“Let us assume for a moment that all that modern science seeks to know about life, it has already learned and knows it today, that this problem has become as clear as day; it is now quite obvious how organic matter, by simple adaptation, could arise from inorganic matter; it is just as clear how natural forces can be transformed into feelings, will, thought, and that in the end all this is known not only to the city student, but also to every rural schoolboy.
Further, I know that such and such thoughts and feelings arise from such and such movements. Okay, but what's next? Can I, or not, make such movements and control them in order to evoke the appropriate thoughts in my brain? This question - what are the thoughts and feelings that I create in myself and in other people, still remains not only unresolved, but even unaffected.
Yet this is precisely the question that is the only fundamental question of the main idea of life.
Science has chosen as its object some of the manifestations that accompany life, and, taking 2 the part for the whole, has called these manifestations the integral whole of all life …
This question, inseparable from the idea of life, is not where life comes from, but why a person should live this very life: and only starting from this question, one can hope to approach the solution of the problem of being.
The answer to the question “why should we live?” Looks so simple to a person that he will hardly consider it worthy of attention if he touches it.
… One should live in the best possible way - that's all. At first glance, it seems very simple and well-known to everyone, but it is not at all as simple and known as one can imagine …
The idea of life first appears before a person as the most simple and self-evident thing. However, as soon as a person begins to search for this life anywhere in the so-called body, he immediately meets with insurmountable difficulties. Life is not in the hair or in the nails; not in the legs or arms, which can be amputated; it is not in the blood, in the heart or in the brain. She is everywhere and she is nowhere. This is the case: life cannot be found in any of its places of residence. Then man begins to seek life in time; and again, it looks very simple at first … And yet again, he will not begin his pursuit before realizing that the situation here is again much more complicated than he thought. I have lived for fifty-eight years, as the church record of my baptism states. But I know,that of these fifty-eight years I have slept over twenty. How then? Have I lived these years or not?
Subtract those months when my mother was pregnant with me, as well as those that I spent in the arms of my nanny - would you also call this time life? Again, about the remaining thirty-eight years, I know that I slept through a good half of them, moving from place to place; so I can no longer say in this case whether I lived during this time or not. I could live a little and grow a little. And again man discovers that in time, as in the body, life is everywhere, and yet nowhere. And now the question naturally arises: where, then, this life, which I cannot find anywhere? Now - I want to know … But it just so happens that in this direction, what seemed to me so easy at first, seems impossible today. No doubt I was looking for something else, not my life. Thus, since we had to search,where is life - if we should have done it at all - then we should have conducted these searches not in space and not in time, not as a search for some cause or effect; we had to look for something recognizable within ourselves, completely different from space, time and causality.
All that remains for us in this case is self-knowledge. But how do I recognize life in myself?
This is how I get to know her. To begin with, I know that I live; and that I live, wanting everything that is good for myself, and I want it from as long as I can remember, to this day, and from morning to evening. Everything that lives outside of me is important in my eyes, but only to the extent that it contributes to the creation of what creates my well-being. The universe is important in my opinion only because it can bring me satisfaction.
Meanwhile, something else is connected with this knowledge of my existence. I feel that other knowledge closely related to life is inseparable from life; namely, that in addition to myself, I am surrounded by a whole world of living creatures, which, like myself, have the same instinctive understanding of their special lives, and that all these creatures live for their own purposes, which are alien to me; that these creatures do not know and do not seek to learn anything about my claims to some kind of exceptional, special life, and that all these creatures, in order to achieve success in their goals, are ready at any moment to destroy me. But that's not all. Observing the dying of creatures similar to me in everything, I also know that including me - this beautiful ME, the only one in which life is represented - also awaits a quick and inevitable destruction.
All this looks as if there were two “I” in a person; and they could never live together in peace; as if they were in an eternal struggle and were always trying to drive out one another.
One "I" says:
- I live alone, as I should live, yet the rest only seems to live. Therefore, the whole raison d'etre [meaning] of the universe is to make it more convenient for this Self to live.
The other "I" answers:
- The universe does not exist at all for your sake, but for its own tasks and purposes, and it is little concerned with knowing whether you are happy or not.
Life after that is darkened!
One "I" says:
- I only want to satisfy all my desires and needs, and that is why I need the universe.
The other "I" answers:
- All animals live only to satisfy their desires and needs. These desires and needs of animals are met at the expense of other animals and at the expense of them; hence the endless struggle between animal species. You are an animal, and therefore you must fight. And yet, no matter how successful you are in your struggle, the rest of the struggling creatures will sooner or later prevail over you.
It gets worse! life is filled with nightmare …
But the worst thing is that one "I" says:
- I want to live, live forever.
And the other “I” answers this:
- Without a doubt, you can die in a few minutes, just as all those you love will also die, for both you and they - all of you undergo destruction with every movement of your lives, thus bringing closer suffering, death, everything something that you hate and fear more than anything else.
It couldn't get worse …
It is impossible to change this state … You can not move, not sleep, not eat, not even breathe, but no one can not think. I think, and this thought, my thought, poisons my life, as a certain person, at every step.
A person can begin a conscious life no earlier than this consciousness begins to repeat to him incessantly, without respite, over and over again, the same thing.
- To live the life that I see and feel in my past, the life that animals and many people lead, to live in a way thanks to which you became who you are now, is no longer possible. If you tried to do this, you would never be able to avoid the struggle with the whole world of creatures who live just like you - for their own personal goals; and in the future, these creatures will inevitably kill you …
And there's nothing you can do about it. There is only one thing left, and this always has to be done by the one who, starting to live, transfers his goals outside himself and seeks to achieve them … But no matter how far he places them from his personality, as soon as his mind becomes clear, none of these goals can satisfy him.
Bismarck, who unified Germany and is now ruling in Europe (if in his mind there is at least some understanding of the consequences of his activities), must understand how his personal chef understands, preparing a dinner that will be eaten with gusto at the appointed hour - the same unauthorized the contradiction between vanity, vanity and stupidity of all that he did, and the eternity and rationality of what always exists. If they just look at it, they will both see it with equal clarity; firstly, that the preservation of Prince Bismarck's dinner in the inviolability, as well as of powerful Germany, occurs solely for the following reasons: the first - thanks to the police, and the second - thanks to the army; and only as long as both of them remain under close supervision.
Because there are hungry people who would gladly eat this dinner, and peoples who would gladly become as powerful as Germany. Secondly, that neither Prince Bismarck's dinner, nor the power of the German Empire, not only do not correspond to the goals and purpose of universal life, but that they are in blatant contradiction with them. And thirdly, that both the one who cooks the dinner and the power of Germany will very soon die, and that dinner and Germany will disappear just as soon. And only one universe will remain, which has never given a single thought to either dinner or Germany, and the least thought about those who “cooked” them.
As soon as a person's intellectual state increases, he comes to the idea that no happiness associated with his individuality is an achievement, but only a necessity. Individuality is only that initial state from which life begins, and the final limit of life …
I may be asked: where does life begin, and where does it end? Where does the night end and where does the day begin? Where on the seashore do the dominions of the sea end, and where do the dominions of the land begin?
There is day and there is night; there is land and there is sea; there is life, and there is absence of life.
Our life, as soon as we become aware of it, is a pendulum-like movement between two extremes.
One extreme is a kind of absolute indifference to the life of an infinite universe, an energy aimed only at satisfying the needs of its own individuality.
The other extreme is a complete rejection of this individuality, the greatest concern for the life of the infinite universe, in complete harmony with it, the transfer of all our desires and good will from ourselves to this infinite universe and all creatures that are around us.
The closer to the first extreme, the less life and happiness, the closer to the second - the more life and happiness. Therefore, a person is constantly moving from one goal to another, that is, he lives. THIS MOVEMENT IS LIFE ITSELF.
And when I talk about life, know that the idea of it is inextricably linked in my concept with the idea of conscious life. Like any other person, I do not know any other life except conscious.
We call life - animal life, organic life. But this is not life at all, but only a certain state or condition of life that manifests itself for us.
But what is this consciousness or reason, the need for which excludes individuality and transfers the energy of a person outside and into the state that we consider to be a blissful state of love?
What is the Conscious Mind? Whatever we can define, we must define it with our conscious mind. Therefore, how are we going to define the mind?..
If we have to define everything with our mind, it follows that the conscious mind cannot be defined. And yet we all not only know him, but this is the only thing that is given to us to know for sure …
This is the same law as the law of life of the entire organic, animal and plant world, with the only difference that we see the implementation of a reasonable law in the life of a plant. But the law of the conscious mind, to which we obey, just like a tree is subject to its own law, we do not see, but we fulfill it …
We have determined that life is what our own life is not. This is where the root of the error is buried deeply. Instead of studying the life that we are aware of within ourselves, unconditionally and undoubtedly - since we cannot know more about anything - in order to ponder it, we observe something that is devoid of the most important factor and ability of our life, namely, intelligent consciousness … In doing so, we behave like a person who is trying to study an object from the shadow or reflection that it casts.
If we know that the particles of a substance obey during their transformation of the activity of the organism, we know about this not because we observed or studied it, but simply because we have a certain similar organism, united with us, namely, our animal organism which we know so well as the material of our life; that is, the one by whose name we are called to work and manage, subjecting him to the law of reason …
A person loses faith in life and passes from this life to another, which is not life, not before he becomes unhappy and sees death … A person who perceives life as he finds it in his mind knows neither suffering nor death: for all the joy in life for him consists in the subordination of his animal principle to the law of reason, and to do this is not only in his power, but it inevitably happens in him. We know about the death of particles in an animal being. We know about the death of animals and man as a kind of animal; but we do not know about the death of the conscious mind, and we cannot know anything about it precisely because the conscious mind is life itself. And Life will never be Death …
Animals lead a happy life, not seeing death and not knowing about it, and die without realizing it. Why, then, did man receive the gift of seeing and knowing her, and why is death so terrible for him that it truly torments his soul, often forcing him to commit suicide because of the terrible fear of death? Why it happens? Because a person who sees death is a sick person, one who has violated the law of his life and no longer leads a conscious existence. He himself became an animal, an animal that, moreover, violated the law of life.
A person's life is the pursuit of happiness, and what he strives for is given to him. The light that has arisen in a person's soul is happiness and life, and this light can never become darkness, since it exists - truly, for a person there is - only this single light that burns in his soul."
We have translated [from Russian into English] this rather extensive passage from the summary of Count Tolstoy's excellent lecture, because his words sound like an echo of the most subtle teachings of the universal ethics of true Theosophy. His definition of life - which in an abstract and concrete sense must be followed by every sincere Theosophist, in accordance with and to the best of his natural abilities - is a short summary of both the alpha and omega of practical psychic, if not spiritual, life. There are phrases in the lecture which will seem to the average Theosophist too vague and, perhaps, imperfect. However, he will not find in it a single sentence to which even the most demanding practical occultist could object. It can be called a treatise on the alchemy of the soul.
For this "only" light in a person, which burns forever and can never become darkness by its internal, inherent nature, although the "animal nature" outside of us can remain blind in relation to him - this is the "light" about which vast volumes were written by the neo-Platonists of the Alexandrian school, and after them by the Rosicrucians and, in particular, the alchemists, although to this day the true meaning of their writings is a deep mystery to most people.
It is true, Count Tolstoy is neither an Alexandrian nor a modern Theosophist; even less is he a Rosicrucian or alchemist. But what the latter concealed under the specific phraseology of fiery philosophers, deliberately mixing cosmic transformations with spiritual alchemy, all this was transferred by the great Russian thinker from the realm of metaphysical life to the realm of practical life. What Schelling would define as the awareness of the identity of subject and object in the inner ego of man, what connects and connects the latter with the universal soul - what is only the identity of subject and object on a higher plane, or an unknown Deity - all this is a graph Tolstoy connects together, without leaving the earthly, material plane.
He is one of a select few who start with intuition and end up with near-omniscience. The development and manifestation of the highest SELF of a person, whom the count has reached, is the transmutation of base metals (animal matter) into gold and silver, or the philosopher's stone. The Alkahest of the common alchemist is the All-geist, the all-pervading divine spirit of the supreme initiate; for alchemy was and is, as few know today, as much a spiritual philosophy as it is a physical science. Anyone who knows nothing about one of them will never know much about the other. Aristotle, teaching his student, Alexander, said about the philosopher's stone: “This is not a stone. He was and is everywhere, and in every person, he is called the goal of all philosophers "- as" Vedanta "is the pinnacle of all philosophies.
In concluding this essay on the science of life, we can say a few words about the eternal riddle that the Sphinx offered mortals. To fail in solving the problem contained in it means to condemn oneself to certain death, since the Sphinx of life devours the slow-witted who lived only in his “animal body”. The one who lives for himself, and only for himself, will undoubtedly die, as the higher “I” informs the lower “animal self” in this lecture. There are seven keys to this riddle, and the Count reveals this secret with one of the highest. For, as the author himself beautifully put it, speaking of "Hermetic philosophy":
The real secret, the closest and at the same time extremely distant from any person to which he must be initiated, or disappear as an atheist, is himself. For him, there is an elixir of life, to drink which, before opening the philosopher's stone, means drinking the drink of death, while he bestows true immortality on the adept and epopt. He can cognize the truth as it really is - Aletheia, the breath of God, or Life, the conscious mind in man.
This is the "all-dissolving alkahest", and Count Tolstoy perfectly coped with this riddle.