Say yes to goodness

For each human being there is a date, unknown to all and to himself above all, but entirely determined, after which the soul can no longer keep its virginity. If before this precise instant, eternally marked, it has not consented to being taken by goodness, it will immediately be taken by evil.

A man can give himself over to evil at any moment in his life, for one gives oneself unconsciously and without knowing that one is introducing an external authority inside oneself; the soul drinks a narcotic before it gives its virginity. It is not necessary to say yes to evil to be seized by it.

But goodness only takes the soul when it has said yes. And the fear of the nuptial union is such that no soul has the power to say yes to goodness until it is pushed urgently by the almost immediate approach of the limiting instant where its fate will be fixed for eternity. For some the limiting instant can take place at the age of five, for others at sixty. In fact, it is impossible to situate it either before or after having passed through it, for the instantaneous and eternal choice only appears refracted by the passage of time. For those who have let themselves be taken by evil long before approaching the limiting instant, this instant no longer has any reality. The most a human being can do is to keep intact within him the faculty of saying yes to goodness until he is very near to it.

Simone weil

A tale told by Socrates

Listen, then, as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth. Homer tells us , how Zeus and Poseidon and Pluto divided the empire which they inherited from their father. Now in the days of Cronos there existed a law respecting the destiny of man, which has always been, and still continues to be in Heaven,—that he who has lived all his life in justice and holiness shall go, when he is dead, to the Islands of the Blessed, and dwell there in perfect happiness out of the reach of evil; but that he who has lived unjustly and impiously shall go to the house of vengeance and punishment, which is called Tartarus. And in the time of Cronos, and even quite lately in the reign of Zeus, the judgment was given on the very day on which the men were to die; the judges were alive, and the men were alive; and the consequence was that the judgments were not well given. Then Pluto and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus, and said that the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: 'I shall put a stop to this; the judgments are not well given, because the persons who are judged have their clothes on, for they are alive; and there are many who, having evil souls, are apparelled in fair bodies, or encased in wealth or rank, and, when the day of judgment arrives, numerous witnesses come forward and testify on their behalf that they have lived righteously. The judges are awed by them, and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging; their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed as a veil before their own souls. All this is a hindrance to them; there are the clothes of the judges and the clothes of the judged.—What is to be done? I will tell you:—In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, which they possess at present: this power which they have Prometheus has already received my orders to take from them: in the second place, they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead—he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked souls; and they shall die suddenly and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth—conducted in this manner, the judgment will be just. I knew all about the matter before any of you, and therefore I have made my sons judges; two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and one from Europe, Aeacus. And these, when they are dead, shall give judgment in the meadow at the parting of the ways, whence the two roads lead, one to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartarus. Rhadamanthus shall judge those who come from Asia, and Aeacus those who come from Europe. And to Minos I shall give the primacy, and he shall hold a court of appeal, in case either of the two others are in any doubt:—then the judgment respecting the last journey of men will be as just as possible.'

From this tale, Callicles, which I have heard and believe, I draw the following inferences:—Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul and body; nothing else. And after they are separated they retain their several natures, as in life; the body keeps the same habit, and the results of treatment or accident are distinctly visible in it: for example, he who by nature or training or both, was a tall man while he was alive, will remain as he was, after he is dead; and the fat man will remain fat; and so on; and the dead man, who in life had a fancy to have flowing hair, will have flowing hair. And if he was marked with the whip and had the prints of the scourge, or of wounds in him when he was alive, you might see the same in the dead body; and if his limbs were broken or misshapen when he was alive, the same appearance would be visible in the dead. And in a word, whatever was the habit of the body during life would be distinguishable after death, either perfectly, or in a great measure and for a certain time. And I should imagine that this is equally true of the soul, Callicles; when a man is stripped of the body, all the natural or acquired affections of the soul are laid open to view.—And when they come to the judge, as those from Asia come to Rhadamanthus, he places them near him and inspects them quite impartially, not knowing whose the soul is: perhaps he may lay hands on the soul of the great king, or of some other king or potentate, who has no soundness in him, but his soul is marked with the whip, and is full of the prints and scars of perjuries and crimes with which each action has stained him, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and has no straightness, because he has lived without truth. Him Rhadamanthus beholds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment which he deserves.

Now the proper office of punishment is twofold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better and profit by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers, and fear and become better. Those who are improved when they are punished by gods and men, are those whose sins are curable; and they are improved, as in this world so also in another, by pain and suffering; for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from their evil. But they who have been guilty of the worst crimes, and are incurable by reason of their crimes, are made examples; for, as they are incurable, the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit. They get no good themselves, but others get good when they behold them enduring for ever the most terrible and painful and fearful sufferings as the penalty of their sins—there they are, hanging up as examples, in the prison-house of the world below, a spectacle and a warning to all unrighteous men who come thither. And among them, as I confidently affirm, will be found Archelaus, if Polus truly reports of him, and any other tyrant who is like him. Of these fearful examples, most, as I believe, are taken from the class of tyrants and kings and potentates and public men, for they are the authors of the greatest and most impious crimes, because they have the power. And Homer witnesses to the truth of this; for they are always kings and potentates whom he has described as suffering everlasting punishment in the world below: such were Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus. But no one ever described Thersites, or any private person who was a villain, as suffering everlasting punishment, or as incurable. For to commit the worst crimes, as I am inclined to think, was not in his power, and he was happier than those who had the power. No, Callicles, the very bad men come from the class of those who have power (compare Republic). And yet in that very class there may arise good men, and worthy of all admiration they are, for where there is great power to do wrong, to live and to die justly is a hard thing, and greatly to be praised, and few there are who attain to this. Such good and true men, however, there have been, and will be again, at Athens and in other states, who have fulfilled their trust righteously; and there is one who is quite famous all over Hellas, Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But, in general, great men are also bad, my friend.

As I was saying, Rhadamanthus, when he gets a soul of the bad kind, knows nothing about him, neither who he is, nor who his parents are; he knows only that he has got hold of a villain; and seeing this, he stamps him as curable or incurable, and sends him away to Tartarus, whither he goes and receives his proper recompense. Or, again, he looks with admiration on the soul of some just one who has lived in holiness and truth; he may have been a private man or not; and I should say, Callicles, that he is most likely to have been a philosopher who has done his own work, and not troubled himself with the doings of other men in his lifetime; him Rhadamanthus sends to the Islands of the Blessed. Aeacus does the same; and they both have sceptres, and judge; but Minos alone has a golden sceptre and is seated looking on, as Odysseus in Homer declares that he saw him:

'Holding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.'

Now I, Callicles, am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And, in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict. And I retort your reproach of me, and say, that you will not be able to help yourself when the day of trial and judgment, of which I was speaking, comes upon you; you will go before the judge, the son of Aegina, and, when he has got you in his grip and is carrying you off, you will gape and your head will swim round, just as mine would in the courts of this world, and very likely some one will shamefully box you on the ears, and put upon you any sort of insult.

Perhaps this may appear to you to be only an old wife's tale, which you will contemn. And there might be reason in your contemning such tales, if by searching we could find out anything better or truer: but now you see that you and Polus and Gorgias, who are the three wisest of the Greeks of our day, are not able to show that we ought to live any life which does not profit in another world as well as in this. And of all that has been said, nothing remains unshaken but the saying, that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life; and that when any one has been wrong in anything, he is to be chastised, and that the next best thing to a man being just is that he should become just, and be chastised and punished; also that he should avoid all flattery of himself as well as of others, of the few or of the many: and rhetoric and any other art should be used by him, and all his actions should be done always, with a view to justice.

Follow me then, and I will lead you where you will be happy in life and after death, as the argument shows. And never mind if some one despises you as a fool, and insults you, if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practice of virtue, if you are a really good and true man. When we have practised virtue together, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems desirable, or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give ourselves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds; so utterly stupid are we! Let us, then, take the argument as our guide, which has revealed to us that the best way of life is to practise justice and every virtue in life and death. This way let us go; and in this exhort all men to follow, not in the way to which you trust and in which you exhort me to follow you; for that way, Callicles, is nothing worth.

From Gorgias (Plato)

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Letter of the pious man

Now my son, may G-d place you among those that will hear and listen, and that listen and think, and that think and know and do, and not among the people who drown in error, who are drunk with the wine of foolishness, which the evil inclination has enslaved them, and ruled this world over them, and which the lusts have overpowered them, and swayed them towards the pleasures, and enticed them to the desires, and drawn them to coveting. And they, in their darkness are smitten, and swiftly move dazzled in their error, they hear but don't lend ear, they say but don't do . They sought the pleasures but fell in the frustrations, endeavored to reach the pleasing, but reached instead the hard suffering, their soul is tired, and their body is weary. Their minds are empty, and their understanding is shattered. They hoard gold to be lost and fleeting silver, which becomes an inheritance to their enemies or to their traitorous wives. They erect mansions and lie down in graves. They build and don't dwell, they amass and don't spend, each man among them buries his father and his son (i.e. someone older and someone younger than himself but does not put to heart the day of his own death ), yet still does not do religious deeds which endure forever. He forgets his end, but remembers his desires, what will you say of a middle piece, which lost both end pieces, and of a child whose parents abandoned him?

Look my son, at whose heart the Creator has broadened, and who G-d has helped him to rule over his thoughts, opened his eyes for what is good for him, showed him the straight path, and drew him close to it. People are assured of him, and he is assured of them, he is at peace with them, and saved from them. People serve their evil inclination, but he serves the G-d of heaven and earth, who grants life, who brings death, the Creator, who is gracious, and there is no god besides him.

Look at the difference between them (the men who serve their evil inclination ) and the men with pure interiors (who serve G-d) - their eyes are at rest (unlike the desirers whose eyes are always scanning to spot desirous things they enjoy and to afterwards strive to attain them ), their hearts are secure (they are not worried or pained by anything ), and in their solitude, they delight in remembering G-d, thank Him for His goodness in all their situations, who quickly grasp all forms of deep wisdom, who ripped off the veil from their eyes (the [inner] eyes of the intellect ) which prevents seeing the interior ways, and reached the true tranquility through their toil(to conquer their lusts ), their tranquility led them to delight, their desire does not distract them, nor does their long life make them procrastinate. They are zealous to prepare for the day of death, and from what is after it, they prepare, call to G-d, seek Him, hope to Him, and serve Him, They speak truth, converse righteousness, without fear of the Sultan, and without being ruled by the Satan. They are more precious (to G-d) than any man, and more guarded than any nation, their splendor and grandeur is greater than all of them, honored in the houses of G-d, and great in the eyes of men, nothing distracts them away from remembering G-d, and nothing prevents them from thanking Him, their tongue is habituated in praises and thanksgivings, and their hearts are full of purity and unity.

This world disguised itself but they recognized it, and they tread it and told of it, its deception was not hidden from their eyes, neither was its fraud concealed. This world adorned itself to them with beautiful garments (enticed them to pursue the enchantments of this world), but they considered it naked and empty, it deprived them (of livelihood to), but it was forced (to provide for them their basic need in its proper time since they trusted in G-d ), it tried to befriend them (with wealth), but they scolded it, it tried to sway them, but they distanced from it, they gazed at its evil deeds, and understood its disgraceful acts, and it has no dominion over them, and nothing with which to approach them. They are the choicest of G-d, the pure ones, and the treasured of the pious, possessors of discerning eyes, noble desires, favored deeds, who dug after G-d and became rich, did business with Him, and profited, purified their hearts and became pure, who equipped themselves with fear of G-d in the path of evil and were saved, they rode the wagon of piety and arrived, met with the eternal joy, and the delight which never erodes, were spared from the assembly of judgment, and were saved from the punishments .

And you, my son, choose the good for your soul, before the regret which will not avail, and the worry which will never end.
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Ibn Pakudah

A grindstone and an orchard

Evil can be compared to a grindstone. When we use a grindstone everyday we do not notice it getting used up, until one day we realize it has become much smaller. Evil people are like the grindstone, you do not see from the surface that it is being worn out, but actually it is wearing
out daily. Good people are like the orchid, you do not see it grow, but actually it is growing everyday. If you do evil deeds, do not imagine no one will find out.You cannot escape from cause and effect or even your own conscience.

So do not worry about not getting good results for the moment. Just look at the flowers and grass in the garden. It seems you cannot see them grow, but bit by bit, they come to full blossom. There is a saying which goes, “When one
is kind others take advantage of him, but the heavens will not. When one is evil people are afraid of him, but the heavens are not”.

Venerable Master Hsing Yun

Goodness

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not `What is the aim?' It is `What is the origin?'

'I was naked and ye clothed me.' This gift is simply an indication of the state of those who acted in this way. They were in a state which made it impossible for them not to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked; they did not do it for Christ, they could not help doing it because the compassion of Christ was in them. It was the same with Saint Nicholas who, when going across the Russian Steppes with Saint Cassian to meet God, could not help being late for the appointed time of meeting because he had to help a poor peasant to move his cart which had stuck in the mud. Good which is done in this way, almost in spite of ourselves, almost shamefacedly and apologetically, is pure. All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will. Goodness is transcendent. God is Goodness.

Simone Weil

Inner law of goodness

Have been thinking:
Have been thinking one thing: that this life
which we see around us is a movement of matter
according to fixed, well-known laws ; but that in us
we feel the presence of an altogether different law,
having nothing in common with the others and requiring
from us the fulfilment of its demands. It
can be said that we see and recognise all the other
laws only because we have in us this law. If we
did not recognise this law, we would not recognise
the others.
This law is different from all the rest, principally
in this, that those other laws are outside of us and
forces us to obey them ; but this law is in us and
more than in us; it is our very selves and therefore
it does not force us when we obey it, but on
the contrary frees us, because in following it we
become ourselves. And for this reason we are
drawn to fulfil this law and we sooner or later
will inevitably fulfil it. In this then consists the
freedom of the will. This freedom consists in
this, that we should recognise that which is
namely that this inner law is ourselves.
This inner law is what we call reason, conscience,
love, the good, God. These words have different
meanings, but all from different angles mean one
and the same thing. In our understanding of this
inner law, the son of God, consists indeed the essence
of the Christian doctrine.
The world can be looked upon in this way: a
world exists governed by certain, well-known laws,
and within this world are beings subject to the
same laws, but who at the same time bear in themselves
another law not in accord with the former
laws of the world, a higher law, and this law must
inevitably triumph within these beings and defeat
the lower law. And in this struggle and in
the gradual victory of the higher law over the
lower, in this only is life for man and the whole
world.

Tolstoy

Prayer and Solitude

The great work of the solitary life is gratitude. the hermit is one who knows the mercy of God better than other men because his whole life is one of complete dependence, in silence and in hope, upon the hidden mercy of our Heavenly Father.
The further I advance into solitude the more clearly I see the goodness of all things.
In order to live happily in solitude I must have a compassionate knowledge of the goodness of other men, a reverent knowledge of the goodness of all creation and a humble knowledge of the goodness of my own body and of my own soul. How can I live in solitude if I do not see everywhere the goodness of God,my creator and Redeemer and the Father of all good?
What is it that has made me evil and hateful to myself? It is my own folly, my own darkness, which have divided me , by sin, against the light which God has placed in my soul to be the reflection of His goodness and the witness of His mercy.
Shall I drive evil out of my soul by wrestling with my own darkness? This is not what God has planned for me. It is sufficient to turn away from darkness to His light. I do not have to run away from myself : it is sufficient that I find myself, not as I have made myself, by my own stupidity,but as He has made me in his wisdom and remade me in His infinite mercy. For it is His will that my body and soul should be the Temple of His Holy Spirit, that my life should reflect the radiance of His love and my whole being repose in His peace. Then I will truly know Him , since I am in Him and He is truly in me.


Thomas Merton ( Thoughts in Solitude)

How Levin discovered truth

Working on till the peasants’ dinner hour, which was not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fiodor and fell into talk with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the threshing floor for seed.
Fiodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it had been let to the innkeeper.
Levin talked to Fiodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not take the land for the coming year.
“It’s a high rent; it wouldn’t pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrich,” answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“But how does Kirillov make it pay?”
“Mitukha!” (So the peasant called the innkeeper in a tone of contempt.) “You may be sure he’ll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrich! He’ll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He’s no mercy on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanich” (so he called the old peasant Platon) — “do you suppose he’d flay the skin off a man? Where there’s debt, he’ll let anyone off. And he’ll suffer losses. He’s human, too.”
“But why will he let anyone off?”
“Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants and nothing else, like Mitukha, thinking only of filling his belly; but Fokanich is a righteous old man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget God.”
“How does he think of God? How does he live for his soul?” Levin almost shouted.
“Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way. Folks are different. Take you, now — you wouldn’t wrong a man . . .”
“Yes, yes — good-by!” said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home. At the peasant’s words that Fokanich lived for his soul, in truth, in God’s way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst forth, as though they had been locked up, and, all of them striving toward one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them), as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.
The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.
He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire — but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of Fiodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact?
“No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about them. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world, understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt, and are always agreed.
“Fiodor says that Kirillov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fiodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and, at a hint, I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now — peasants, the poor in spirit and the sages, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing — we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason — it is outside it, and has no causes, and can have no effects.
“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects — a reward — it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
“And yet I know it, and we all know it.
“And I sought miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!
“What could be a greater miracle than that?
“Can I have found the solution of it all? Can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.
“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goatweed. “Everything from beginning?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goatweed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over to. “What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?
“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and clouds and nebulae, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? Into what? — Eternal evolution and struggle . . . As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of utmost effort of thought in this direction I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. And the meaning of my impulses is so clear within me, that I was living according to them all the time, and I was astonished and rejoiced, when the peasant expressed it to me: to live for God, for my soul.
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.”
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or else shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys, and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.
He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.
Now it was clear to him that he could live only by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.
“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own wants? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.
“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question — it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? Could I have arrived through reason at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because that is unreasonable.

Tolstoy in Anna Karenina

Living Gold

Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as possible has no commerce with the bodily. Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native store.
If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal? Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be found in the chattel mean and mortal: what possesses these must be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and of identical substance.
Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated with body.
This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It is because we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass that it becomes difficult to recognize their divinity and immortality.
To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look: or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual substance, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of the divine.
Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word “Farewell: I am to you an immortal God,” for he has ascended to the Supreme, and is all one strain to enter into likeness with it.
If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then, too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity.
Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all that kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing itself as gold; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows that it has no need of any other glory than its own, triumphant if only it be allowed to remain purely to itself.

Plotinus

LOVE

The love of God is everywhere in nature; yet we see destruction and misery and inequalities all around us. It is a difference of focus. If we focus our mind upon all that is good and beautiful we shall see God's love in spite of all the ugliness that exists in nature and especially in human nature. In doing so we will spread a cover over it; and by collecting everything beautiful in us we will be able to give to whatever lacks beauty from the supply in our own heart. But if we focus our attention upon ugliness it will grow in us, and there will come a time when we shall not be able to see any good anywhere; everywhere we look we will only see cruelty, unkindness, wickedness, and ugliness.

One may ask if in focusing one's mind on beauty alone, one is not in danger of shutting one's eyes to the ugliness and suffering one might otherwise alleviate. The answer is that in order to help the poor one needs to be rich, and in order to take away evil from a person one needs to have so much more good. That goodness has to be earned as money is earned; and that earning means collecting goodness wherever we find it. What happens is that man becomes agitated by the abundance of goodness that he sees; being himself poor he cannot add to it, and then he is drawn towards evil. Although he may unconsciously develop in his own nature a craving for the goodness he sees, that does not help him in his agitation; his looking at evil only adds another wicked person to the whole.

The one whose eyes are focused on beauty in time will join the good; he is getting the same impressions but the result is different. Besides, by criticizing, by judging, by looking at wickedness with contempt, one does not help the one who needs it. The person who is ready to overlook, forgive, and patiently tolerate all those disadvantages that he may have to meet with, is the one who can help.

One should love for the sake of love, not for a return. When one serves, one should serve for the sake of serving, not for acknowledgment or appreciation in any shape or form. In the beginning such a person may perhaps seem a loser, but in the end he will be the gainer, for he has lived in the world while yet holding himself above the world; the world cannot touch him.

Inayat Khan

Problem of good and evil

When a pregnant woman is nearing her time, she is often taught how to relax into the pain of contractions. There is, in this process, an important and valuable lesson for all of us in dealing with painful situations in life. The lesson is simple in principle, but hard in practice. It is that relaxing into pain is far more effective than resisting pain.
Childbirth is a peculiarly appropriate situation for describing the benefits of living life by 'going with the flow', for it can be considered both literally and as a metaphor. A woman who is actually in labour and cannot but tense up at the pain of the contractions causes herself more pain over a longer period, for she retards the birth of her baby. Given this, one cannot help but wonder if it is not true quite generally that tensing against pain causes the pain itself to be worse. Certainly, many people have found that physical pain is worse if they are tense, and lessens if they can relax.
But the idea of childbirth can also form the basis of a metaphor for thinking about the 'pain' of tribulations in life. For tribulation always attends the coming-into-being of anything new, and it seems quite probable - does it not? - that 'tensing up' against the pains of tribulations is likely to 'delay the birth'. But what does 'tensing up against the pains of tribulations' mean?
It can mean both resisting change and electing to fight one's way through obstacles. In Taoism,  water is very frequently used as a metaphor. A river does not try to move the rocks out of its path, but flows round them in order to achieve its objective - the sea. But notice something: although initially the rock is not removed, over the course of time, it is worn away by the flow of water around it. The gentle action of water - the Taoist would say - eventually has the power to wear away even the hardest of rocks.
In this we see how it is that patience is a virtue. For gentle action patiently and continuously applied by the river leads eventually to the complete erosion of the rock. Patience, then, is a virtue not because of some moral nicety that says it is good to be patient, but because it is a quality which assists the attainment of objectives.
In Taoism, this thought is extended over all qualities, and, as a result, a whole worldview results. The Taoist worldview is one which accepts that progress along any way - whether that way be physical or spiritual - is bound to be met by obstacles. But, in Taoism, obstacles are accepted and the essence of its philosophy is that one should treat them as does the river its rocks - by flowing round them.
Here we have, then, a very powerful and subtle way through which we can approach the business of living.

Ray Walder