A student reflected on life's obstacles:
— A person is born weak, but then learns to walk, read, write. Driven by the cold, he builds a home for himself and sews clothes. Driven by hunger, he searches for and obtains food for himself, creating reserves for an unfavorable period. While creating something, he is forced to protect it all from his enemy neighbor. Falling in love, he achieves the favor of the object of his affection. While learning, he expands his horizons of knowledge, but multiplies his sorrow, beginning to understand more and more the imperfection and transience of what he strived for and to which he gave so much effort. Some speak of existence as the unity and struggle of opposites. Socrates spoke about achieving truth through conflict of opinions. Kant argued that, striving for complete and absolute knowledge, a person inevitably becomes entangled in contradictions. Hegel wrote about a certain universal method of comprehending contradictions... Tell me, teacher, is life a struggle?
“Struggle is rebellion, rebellion is hatred, hatred is destruction.” A person must not fight in order to win, gain the upper hand and subjugate. He must seek harmony between opposites, not pit them against each other in irreconcilable hostility to each other, but harmonize them, developing each of them. Struggle is a sharp opposition of oneself, one’s ideals in relation to the world around us. Fighting is aggression, which turns into retaliatory aggression and hatred. Fighting is an attack in the hope of suppressing the enemy, and not the desire to establish conflict-free and harmonious relations with him, aimed at mutual and mutually beneficial development. A person who has not escaped the boundaries of the sensations and psychology of an animal responds to aggression against himself with fear and flight. A person who has overcome this line, but acts within the framework of primitive egocentrism, pride and unbridled conceit, responds to aggression against himself with fear, hatred and retaliatory aggression, often even more disgusting than the aggression of the attacker. But while winning tactically, a person unconditionally loses strategically. An apparent victory turns over time into an unconditional defeat, because the damaging factor here is not the enemy’s aggression, but only one’s own hatred. The same person who has overcome his animal nature and broken out of the framework of the flesh and the carnal philosophy of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is unlikely to respond to aggression against himself with aggression. Only a perfect person can defend himself without retaliatory aggression and hatred, repaying good for evil and love for hatred. He may lose tactically, but the strategic gain here is undoubted, because the creative factor here is his own love.
As long as a person who considers himself a spiritual person fights against the material world and everything that accompanies it, as the products of evil and darkness, or a materialist fights against the spirit, as a manifestation of dark obscurantism, only evil, darkness and dark obscurantism will win. Man will lose again, because his gain is not in the struggle or opposition of two principles within him, but only in their harmonious cooperation, for spirit is the content of matter, and matter is the form of manifestation of spirit. Harmony between matter and spirit is inhalation and exhalation, expansion and contraction of the heart, masculine and feminine principles, together giving life, and separately leading only to death.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru