WORLDVIEW

Despite my understanding of the danger of spirituality, my worldview remained the same.

To overcome the worship of spirituality, one must prioritize love for God. For me, the natural and correct way to know God was still the same direct path – moving up the slopes of the mountain towards its summit. I still believed that to get closer to God, one needed to elevate the spirit and delve into subtle planes.

However, after the publication of my subsequent books, I began to face problems again, and life-threatening situations arose. I understood that I was internally dependent on spirituality, but I couldn't overcome this dependence. It turned out that my model was false, or rather, primitive and in need of development.

I went through this realization for a long time and painfully. Only when it finally happened did I begin to approach an understanding of the main commandment of blessedness: «Blessed are the Poor in Spirit». Until now, theologians claim that the «poor in spirit» are those who realize the deficiency of their spirituality. From my point of view, this is a misconception and a lack of understanding of what Christ taught. Apparently, Christ had the following in mind.

By his nature, man is a soul that has come from God. The development of the spirit, consciousness, and the development of the body begin later. Therefore, a person should primarily live with the soul, through their feelings.

Development is not a transition from bad to good, it is not a shift from darkness to light. Understanding the world is not a straight line along which we look back with disdain and bow to what lies ahead. It turns out that development is an expansion of the worldview. It is not a movement from the past to the future, but a broader embrace of the past and the future. It is a circle, it is a pulsation, it is a sphere. This is an entirely different perception of the world.

Development is not the spiritual elevation of a person, but the expansion of the possibilities of their soul.

My model of development initially included only two components: material and spiritual, and I believed that development is a movement from one to the other. At the initial stage, this was correct, but later this idea should transform into the idea of soul's unfoldment, the idea of uniting opposites, that is, uniting the material and the spiritual. After all, happiness is not about moving from bad to good, but about balancing the bad and the good, the left and the right, finding love and harmony in the soul.

Since God is love and He breathed the soul into humans, only our soul can experience the feeling of love. The body and spirit are secondary, and they are only reflections of this love. Worship of the body and spirit can close a person off from love and unity with the Creator.

I remember how difficult and painful this insight was...

THE BIBLE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPIRIT AND SOUL

I tried to find what the Bible says about the relationship between spirit and soul. I didn't find much. The Apostle Paul wrote about this in his Epistles. For me, it was completely unclear because many of his statements are contradictory. It's not surprising that the Apostle Peter spoke of there being "something hard to understand" in these Epistles.

Apparently, the Apostle Paul did not have a clear understanding of where to go with his teachings. In the teachings of Christ, a clear system of beliefs and goals was formed, but the Apostle Paul, who enthusiastically spread and promoted Christianity, as it turns out, did not understand the key principles of the teachings of the one he called his Teacher.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle Paul wrote: «For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart».

In one of the books, I read that in Indian philosophy, the concepts of soul and spirit are considered related, and in their highest manifestation, they are one and the same. The Apostle Paul essentially says the same thing: spirit and soul are one, at some level they are inseparable. The statements of the Apostle Paul likely correspond to the truths presented in the Vedas and the worldview accepted in Judaism.

I recall how I carefully studied the words of the Apostle Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: «However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven». Here, the apostle directly points to the primacy of the soul.

However, in the same Epistle, he provides a completely different picture: «For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God». «But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one».

From these statements by the Apostle, it follows that the spirit, spirituality, is more important than the soul. But if the spirit is more important than the soul, then this is a completely different worldview and a different model of development.

The Apostle Paul says completely contradictory things. Perhaps he meant that in the soul, both divine and animal elements are combined - that is, the soul can have both higher and lower manifestations. In some cases, the soul is lower than the spirit, and in others, the opposite. But since the Apostle Paul could not explain what the soul is, his statements remained unclear and open to various interpretations.

So what is the spirit, and why is the spirit more important than the soul? Perhaps the Apostle Paul was guided by common sense. A spiritual person is one with a high level of consciousness and understanding, one who reads Sacred Scriptures and is internally oriented correctly. If you ask yourself whether an intelligent person can be soulful, the answer is undoubtedly yes. But if you think about whether a foolish person can be spiritual, the answer is not so clear. It turns out that developed consciousness, spirituality, and spiritual elevation of a person are much more significant than soulfulness, which is warmth of feelings.

Now, reflecting on these lines of the Apostle, I understand that it is very difficult to define the concepts of spirit and soul. The reason is that within the framework of pagan, linear thinking, which cannot reconcile opposites, we perceive a person as a whole and do not see that a person is a union of opposites.

Our brain consists of two hemispheres that work as opposites, creating a common picture of the world. To move forward, two opposite processes are required - excitation and inhibition. The process of perceiving the world also includes processes of excitation and inhibition - that's dialectics.

In the soul, there are our animal nature, instincts, and memory of the past. What we call consciousness is the experience of our life. And what can be called the subconscious, the soul, contains the experience of all our lives, all our ancestors, and this experience can span millions and billions of years. In addition, the soul contains knowledge not only about the past but also about the future.

The soul is primary in relation to the spirit. The soul develops through striving towards God. Spirituality is a byproduct of soul development. On the external level, spirit and soul are separated.

When religion speaks of a person's spiritual life, it actually refers, I think, to the manifestations of his soul in terms of higher feelings. A spiritual person is one who is oriented towards his soul in its highest manifestations. In other words, a spiritual person is a soulful person for whom the main thing is the striving for God. But the word «spirituality» confuses many people.