What does it mean to be human. What does it mean to be human? Osho Quotes

Characterization of the features of the emergence and development of the Renaissance. Study of the influence of the invention of typesetting on the development of printing in Europe. Consideration of aspects of the decomposition of the intellectual soul. Analysis of the works of the authors of the Renaissance.

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.

Hosted at http://www.allbest.ru/

Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Tatarstan

Almetyevsk State Oil Institute

Department of Humanities

Philosophy by discipline

Presentation on theme: "What does it mean to be human?"

Completed: student gr. 6111

Dunaev A.O.

Almetyevsk 2013

Introduction

Chapter 1. Human Dignity

I. Renaissance

Chapter 2

I. Reason and the path to knowledge

renaissance typography intellectual

Introduction

We live in a world created by ourselves.

I.G. Herder

Knowing ourselves, our concept of what it means to be human (both as individuals and as members of a group), plays a role in shaping our knowledge of everything else. There is no area of knowledge, experience, or behavior (and life in general) that is not influenced by people's reflections on what human being is. This is a generalization that is easy to make. To understand what people thought and think about human existence and to see what place these thoughts occupy in social life requires more effort. People's views vary in space and change over time, and their opinions and knowledge can often be quite difficult to articulate in a clear manner. Even now different people hold different ideas about human nature: it suffices to imagine the difference in the views of an evolutionary biologist writing about the "selfish gene" and a poet writing about a soul in love. Moreover, the existence of these differences of opinion is only the beginning of the difficulties that human self-knowledge encounters. It is noteworthy that a special issue is connected with the comprehension of human existence: people simultaneously act here both as a cognizing subject and as an object to be cognized, as an active agent of research activity and its passive subject. How can knowledge turn back upon itself to become knowledge about knowing? What does it mean to "know thyself" - the words, according to legend, carved over the entrance of the ancient temple in Delphi?

There is a well-established answer to such questions in the modern Western tradition, and it has a great influence. Is this a "scientific" answer, ? an answer that claims that humans are part natural world, and we can have knowledge (scientific knowledge) about them in the same way as about any other object of nature. Such a picture of the world presupposes the presence of a certain “human nature”, which we gradually reveal through biological, neuropsychological, sociological, anthropological, economic, geographical and political, etc. research. There are no insurmountable difficulties, but progressive progress in the right direction. Some optimists predict a time when, they say, there will be a unified science of human beings; however, previous attempts to achieve unity under the banner of "logical positivism", "behaviorism" and "dialectical materialism" were not crowned with success. Despite such optimism, it should be noted that the current situation in the human sciences is such that there is a great diversity of points of view and a serious lack of interdisciplinary unity. There are many different sociologies and psychologies (in plural); there is a marked divergence between cultural and physical anthropology; disagreement about whether the primary subject of study is biological organization or language, etc. Throughout the centuries there have continued to exist various modes of thought, various statements about the nature of the "science" of man. Moreover, the picture becomes noticeably more complicated if we involve religion in this issue. There is certainly a significant divergence of views here: at the same end of the spectrum of opinions? the conviction that scientific knowledge necessarily opposes religious faith (hence, human knowledge is incompatible with religious beliefs) at the other extreme? the belief shared by many that only a religious approach can achieve true knowledge of what it means to be human; between these two extremes? a whole sea of different points of view.

People argue about these things. The intellectual quality of their argument is markedly enhanced when they have historical knowledge of the origins of modern views and of the origin of the differences between them. Historical knowledge of what people of different countries and eras thought allows us not only to understand the roots of our own thoughts, but also to place them in a comparative perspective. Historical knowledge decisively determines the path along which the meaning of human self-knowledge is acquired. If we want to understand and explain the sources of different ways of life (social and personal), we need to understand the roots of the ideas with which we comprehend human existence. This is even more important in a country like Russia, which is at the center of very dynamic social change and leaps between different mindsets. Knowledge of history should give the Russian experience the necessary perspective.

The scientific study of man in the twenty-first century is divided along disciplinary lines. Each scientist is usually a specialist in his own narrow field - such as neurolinguistics, historical geography, business economics, etc. When moderns write history, they tend to write the history of their area of interest, their field, as if modern specialties were natural entities that are always present (at least potentially) in social life. The history of psychology or economics, for example, is usually written from Aristotle (if not earlier) and traced back to the present. At the same time, Aristotle himself had no concept of psychology, not even a corresponding name. Even Adam Smith, the founder of capitalist economics, writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, never treated "economics" as a discipline. Modern scientific disciplines are precisely modern. For the most part, they are social and intellectual inventions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

If we are going to trace the history of modern social science, we must choose a mode of presentation that transcends modern disciplinary boundaries. Moreover, the story should describe and explain how the disciplines and subsections of knowledge we are familiar with today were created, which is an important part of the story. In the process of writing history, we should not take any one view of science for granted; Nor can one proceed from the assumption that our present knowledge, with its internal disciplinary divisions, represents the culmination of an inevitable progress. And of course, the historian, as well as the social critic, must be clearly aware that even the very concept of progress admits of various interpretations.

Chapter 1. Human Dignity

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis (in the King James version, 1611).

I. Renaissance

The revival was conceived by scientists, politicians, artists and architects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They set themselves against the recent past and, inspired by Greek and Roman models in poetry, philosophy, art, military affairs and civil society, they proudly intended to learn from the ancients and then surpass their achievements. Subsequent generations already believed that they had freed themselves from the medieval world and were able to make up for lost time in comparison with ancient culture. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was natural philosophy (the sciences of nature) that was able to rise to the greatest extent above the legacy of antiquity and, discovering natural law in the universe, separate the consciousness of the Modern from the pagan and Christian superstitions of the Dark Ages. Meanwhile, emerging industrial capitalism, whose roots can be traced back to the commercial city-states of Italy, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London, created the basis for material conditions that the ancients could not even dream of. Nineteenth century historians, who gave the Renaissance its name, believed that it was this period that inspired modern civilization and laid its foundation. They interpreted the revival of ancient education (learning) as the first sign of the New Age (modernity).

This image of a decisive break with the medieval world was inspiring but inaccurate. Very few historians today confidently identify the Renaissance with the beginning of modernity. After all, the foundations of the New Age were consistently and firmly laid down in the complex and diverse Christian culture of the thirteenth century. In this century, St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) and other scholastics assimilated ancient philosophy (primarily Aristotelian) into the Christian theology of the Church Fathers. The first universities - in Paris, Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford, and later in Leipzig, Krakow, Vienna - established patterns of teaching and critical interpretation that instilled in students a respect for learning and reasoning. It should be noted that the Christian world was far from monolithic in matters of faith, political life, economic activity and culture; especially false are the prejudices that medieval Europe was stagnant or limited in its means of expression. In the fourteenth century, in northern Italy, the poet Petrarch, following Dante and Bocaccio, transformed a Roman-styled language into what many called a divine art. Looking further north, here Gothic architecture and its derivatives flourished from the twelfth century, and combined engineering with high spirituality in the cathedrals of Cologne, Reims and Salisbury. Roman law had already been raised from its knees by Italian and later by French commentators who were looking for a unified and rational basis for civil power. All this and more led to what nineteenth-century scholars called the Renaissance, and which ultimately determined the face of the modern world.

However, there have also been profound changes. In Mainz, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, and thus laid the foundation for printing in Europe; in 1492, Columbus reached the land that the Europeans called the New World, with enormous consequences for both the European imagination and the economy; and the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517, deprived the Christian world of the West of even a semblance of unity. We must also undoubtedly add to this list the emergence of a new natural philosophy, the Scientific Revolution (although it was more of a complex series of processes than a single revolutionary moment).

The printing press, the geographical discoveries, the Reformation in Religion and the Revolution in Science were outward events - collective achievements that transformed the common horizon of culture. At the same time, these were inwardly directed events that in many ways transformed human faith, taste and imagination. The most prominent researcher of Renaissance culture in the second half of the 20th century, Paul Kristeller believed that something new had appeared in human experience - a certain "tendency [of authors] to take seriously their own feelings and events, opinions and preferences." He saw the origins of this "atmosphere of subjectivity" in humanism - a literary movement that lay at the very core of that cultural transformation, which was devoted to the restoration, translation and reproduction of ancient texts and ancient scholarship. As the very word "humanism" implies, it was a movement that placed man at the center and celebrated his ability (inspired by ancient models) to discover great qualities in himself.

But was the continuity of ideas, values and beliefs from ancient times to modern times continuous? Can we be sure that when the Greeks wrote about the soul, science or virtue, they meant by it the same thing as the authors of the Renaissance - not to mention later generations? Neither in antiquity nor in the Renaissance was there an equivalent to the modern term "science" ("the sciences"). There has been a competition for status between different kinds of knowledge, an exaggerated interest in method, and debates about the classification of different branches of systematic knowledge. But divisions and classifications were not as they are now, and such disciplinary categories as economics or sociology were not branches of knowledge at all. The traditional curriculum consisted of the seven liberal arts (or sciences - both terms were in use). The basis was trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric; the next stage of education was the quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy.

Fascinated by the elegance of ancient Latin, as well as the moral rhetoric of Virgil and Cicero, humanists like Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) promoted learning as a necessary quality for those who see themselves as political men and seek glory for themselves and their people. Humanism flourished in the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century - some of them, like Venice or Florence, were under republican rule, in others at least they wanted their sovereigns to rule with dignity, but in both of them everyone wanted to unite state and citizen under the shadow of virtue and justice. In the literary genre of instructions to rulers, ideas about a learned person and the path to a just and prosperous state were woven together. At the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, civic humanism was already influential throughout Europe: from the court of Matthias Corvinus in Hungary to the court of Henry VIII in England. And in cities such as Prague or Augsburg, bankers and merchants also contributed to the new knowledge - they hired scientists, sent their sons to study and commissioned their own, full of dignity, oil portraits.

The emphasis in teaching students was, first of all, on Latin (less often - Greek) word formation and grammatical exercises based on the most revered antique samples. Along with grammar, the arts of poetics and rhetoric were an integral part of the training, with the aim of giving elegance and persuasiveness to the language and, thereby, increasing the social influence (social presence) of a person. The moral content of the classical texts brought to the fore questions of prudence and right conduct. Thus, humanistic education contributed to the formation of people of a certain class as responsible figures who know what is natural and right to do and feel under certain circumstances. Such education was meant for people living in this world; although all human knowledge, in the final analysis, rested on questions of faith and theology. In the meantime, the practical literature has been increasingly trying to discuss what people value in their personal life. All this education, coupled with its moral and religious aspects, built a picture of human nature. It is in this full circle of Renaissance scholarship and cultural life that we must look for the sources of what later came to be called the sciences of man. The interest of the Renaissance in rhetoric and moral philosophy assumed not so much the novelty of ideas as new forms of life: gradually the emphasis shifted more and more to the significance of individual, subjective experience and its connection with the active position of a person in civil society. Perhaps this is what should be called the basis of psychological and sociological thought.

Education and ideas did not stand still - during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, innovations were made in the teaching of logic, arithmetic and music. Only one premise really remained unchanged: education should be based on texts, the basic texts should be ancient, and the main role teacher should be reduced to their exegesis. The logical treatises of Aristotle (384-322 BC), especially the First and Second Analysts, had been known and taught in Western Europe since the twelfth century, and by 1400 they had acquired a number of commentaries, and more high levels supplemented by research and non-Aristotelian logics. In the final, most complete form of Aristotle's work on Greek were printed between 1495 and 1498; the corpus of his logical treatises was collectively called the Organon. This edition became the basis for later Latin texts, commentaries, and teaching. Students studied these texts systematically, not least in order to understand the logical reasoning used by the scholastics in the field of theology, as well as natural and moral philosophy. The debate about Aristotelian logic and its relevance to the method by which knowledge is acquired came to a head in the sixteenth century, especially at the University of Padua where the sons of the Venetian patricians studied. And although the humanist movement tended to shift the focus away from logic, the latter continued to play a large role in the curriculum of "grammar" schools as an important part of preparatory education. At the university level, the emphasis was on the study of sciences, which historians today sometimes call studia humanitatis, or humanities (humanities): grammatica, rhetorica, poetica, historia and philosophia moralis. The humanities, however, were more characteristic of civil life in the courts of European sovereigns and in the cities of Europe than they were of university life. But both here and there, the most important component of humanistic education became moral philosophy, which carries a new image of human knowledge.

During the Renaissance, as in medieval universities, studies prepared the most serious students for a more advanced education in one of the three higher professions - theology, law or medicine. Here, too, exegesis was in the first place in teaching, although this method did not exclude critical comment and debate. As the foundation of learning, theology was vital. Academic theologians, for example, have been constantly involved in debates about which areas of knowledge should be considered faith-based and which should be based on reason. It is worth emphasizing once again that what is today called the “church” has never actually been a monolithic institution and has not imposed on people religious faith- rather, human nature itself was constituted within the Christian categories of understanding and practice, and only thanks to them. At that time there did not exist and, in principle, could not exist anything that could be called a science independent of Christian culture. Very few people, even among sixteenth-century humanists, believed that reason could rise above faith. This step was taken only in the seventeenth century, and only then can we discover the elements of thought that some of the later natural philosophers hoped to turn into knowledge independent of theology.

Legal humanists tried to restore Roman law by discarding the comments added by the medieval scholastics. They understood their work as part of "civil science" or "civil wisdom", as an attempt to streamline the foundations of good government, rooted in the concept of ius gentium - the common justice of civilized people. There was also spiritual or canon law, and in addition, the law was influenced by customs and local traditions, which stimulated the law to develop through practice, as in English common law. Debate in jurisprudence about such concepts as evidence and legal capacity - coupled with the relevant questions concerning personal knowledge, personal nature and personal behavior (agency) - have made a great contribution to the systematization of ideas about human nature. Further, we must note that the concept of the law of nature (natural law - also "natural law"), which is the main category of modern scientific explanation, has, in essence, legal (as well as theological) roots.

Medicine - last but not least - existed as a profession most explicitly and directly focused on human nature. She, like the law, combined the scholastic study of texts with secular, quite material and practical issues. Everyday life. As we shall see, the combination of theoretical scholarship and practical action characteristic (again and again) of the way in which the sciences of man have developed. For the vast majority of people, of course, healing was not a scientific discipline, but a folk-domestic activity, the source of which was local oral knowledge. Medicine in the form of systematic knowledge was taught in universities mainly on the basis of Aristotelian treatises on the nature of man, among which the text widely known in Latin translation as "De Anima" ("On the Soul") was of particular importance. The works of Galen, who worked in Alexandria and Rome in the second century AD, also had great authority. Arab scholars, especially Avicenna (ibn Sina, 980-1037), added substantial commentary and new research of their own to them. The disputes in the sixteenth century between the humanists, who turned to the revised Greek texts, and the physicians (physicians), who defended the medieval and Islamic heritage, provided rich ground for thinking about what should be the relationship between sensory experience and the authority of the text as a means of obtaining knowledge. There were also disputes about whether the brain or the heart is the center of vital forces, and in these disputes a language full of references to human individuality was used (by the way, the same turns are present in our modern everyday life when we say "cold head" or "hot heart"). Physicians were supposed to understand bodily organs, humors and temperaments, to know the disturbances to which they are subject, as well as the causes by which they are caused. Medicine, being by its nature both a philosophical and a practical science, has placed a person in the center of its attention. ethnoscience did the same, albeit without a systematic and formal reflection on what she knew about human nature.

There was not even one discipline, or even one set of disciplines, that focused on human nature in the same way as the modern psychological and social sciences. Rather, "man" was the ubiquitous subject of study, and it is precisely this universal immersion of thought in the life of man that we must look for the origin of modern knowledge. Before the advent of modern disciplines, the idea of human nature was scattered between the subjects of the studia humanitatis and the three higher professions. It was also implicitly present in practical activities. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the historian cannot find a clearly delineated scientific discipline that corresponds to this idea. Human-oriented education was in abundance, and it embraced not only the material, but also the moral and spiritual worlds. Sometimes education explicitly discussed human nature (as in the medical debate about humors), sometimes one or another view of this nature was implicit (as in commentaries on the foundations of law), and sometimes there was an informal ad hoc combination of both (as in texts by rhetoric).

If we compare the Renaissance with the twenty-first century, then even though the Renaissance was a very religious period, we can discern something like a decisive step towards the establishment of a secular view of human nature and the acceptance of a new science as the path to its comprehension. It was a step emphasizing the greatness of man, made with enthusiasm for a way of life where the earthly virtues of people would be appreciated, and with a sincere belief in the achievability of ideals. For the first time, what people are like has become a subject worthy of study. It cannot be said that all of the above was completely absent from medieval society, but in the fifteenth century it began to be given much more importance. This approach reached its apogee in the famous speech of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) on the dignity of man, which was a preface to a set of theses that he hoped to propose for a public debate in Rome in January 1487. However, Pope Innocent VIII intervened and some of theses were condemned as heretical. Pico, an ardent Florentine philosopher and follower of Plato, placed man at the center of all questions related to meaning, responsibility, freedom and beauty. From his point of view, the place of man among the creatures of God is illuminated not only by the Divine light, but also shines with its own radiance. And in the mouth of God, Pico puts the following appeal to man: “You, not constrained by any limits, will determine your image according to your decision, in the power of which I leave you. I put you in the center of the world, so that from there it would be more convenient for you to survey everything that is in the world. (quoted from "The History of Aesthetics. Monuments of World Aesthetic Thought" in 5 vols. Vol. 1. pp. 506-514 trans. L. Bragina)

For all of Pico's rhetoric, the emphasis on human dignity was fraught with inherent ambivalence. In the cosmos of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the human race occupied a base position, associated with something earthly, changeable and perishable. The fall of Adam and Eve chained people into the fetters of flesh and death. Parallel to how Pico sang the brilliance and greatness of man, there were images and texts depicting human madness, despondency, torment and inevitable death. Each line of glorification and praise was accompanied by an engraving depicting a reaper with a scythe, an hourglass or a skull, mimicking a man with its dead grin. And yet, man seemed to be the most significant of created beings, balancing between the spiritual and the purely material, between the eternal and the purely temporal. But after all, didn't the Son of God become a man and promise eternal life even after the end of time? So when Copernicus placed the Earth in orbit, philosophers not only feared that he had deprived man of his central position in the universe, but also admired that by doing so man was elevated to heaven.

However, the emphasis on human dignity alone explains little about the advent of modernity. Really important in this perspective is the fact that human dignity is associated with the soul as a carrier of knowledge - and in particular knowledge obtained through feelings or, more precisely, experience. However, this thesis needs to be clarified, because even the followers of Aristotle formulated the often quoted motto: "There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses." But by the second half of the seventeenth century, sensory experience had taken on a much broader scope, becoming the standard for the reliability of knowledge. This would never have happened if it weren't for faith in human abilities and attention to what those possibilities are. At first sight it seems paradoxical that there was also a significant increase in skepticism, the best exponent of which was the French essayist, seigneur and famous mayor of the city of Bordeaux Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who offered his readers a journey through the field of conflicting claims of knowledge. But attention to feelings as a source of knowledge went hand in hand with a growing awareness of the difficulties that confront the ideal of certainty. The writers of the sixteenth century, when faced with such a problem, turned to the accounts of the soul concerning itself and its relation to the material world as the means by which knowledge should be assessed. Thus, the activity of the individual soul, directly interacting with the world, was placed at the center of scientific research.

Any consideration of the specific parts and qualities that Renaissance writers attributed to man must begin with the soul, which, according to these writers, is the essence of human nature, the beginning that gives man his dignity.

The soul was not only theological concept, which could and should be excluded from the history of modern science. Medieval Christianity gave the drama of the immortal human principle a transcendental meaning; it would not approve of any philosophy that dared to deny this principle. It should be noted that the discussion about the soul touched not only on the problems of spiritual aspirations and immortality, but also on the worldly nature of the soul. In addition, it served as an occasion to recall the pagan philosophers of Antiquity. The key texts were the works of Aristotle, known in Latin translation as "De anima", as well as a collection of works known as "Parva naturalia" ("The smallest parts of natural things"), which included, among other things, arguments about perception, memory, prophetic dreams and aging. De anima analysis remained a staple of academic learning throughout the sixteenth century. The teachers used this text to illustrate the Aristotelian way of explaining. It is from this text (along with "De sensu" from "Parva naturalia") that the terms for discussing the way in which the mind acquires knowledge were taken. It was common for philosophers to discuss such things only as long as it was quite obvious that the result would in no way affect questions concerning the immortal soul. After all, ultimately, theology remained the highest discipline.

By the sixteenth century, De anima existed in academic Greek versions, as well as in new Latin translations, and their traditions of commentary were quite different. Even at that time there were disputes about the proper translation of key concepts, and even in modern language it is almost impossible to restore either the meaning of the Aristotelian concepts themselves or their use in the early modern period. Thus, for example, in one of the standard English translations (1931), an extended table of contents was added to De anima, where the first book is described as telling "about the dignity, usefulness and complexity of psychology." However, the choice of the term "psychology" is misleading. After a brief rhetorical passage that brings the study of the soul to the forefront of scholarship, Aristotle asks philosophical questions about what we should understand by the soul, for example, whether it can be interpreted as an action without a body. Aristotle does not mention anything that can be called "psychology" (he did not use this word at all), but writes that "the soul is the cause or source of the living body ... all natural bodies are the organs of the soul." Indeed, a later and widely used redaction of the English translation of De anima silently removed references to psychology. The second book, De anima, discusses the soul as a life principle, in Aristotelian terms, a form that combines with substance to create an entity called a living being. From this naturally flowed the theme of examining (in terms of the Middle Ages) the abilities that the soul must possess in order to make possible the eating, reproduction, sensation, movement and rational characteristics of human life. This discussion was also one of the main ones within the framework of medical education, since depending on how the soul is understood, the understanding of the health and illness of people depends.

Further, Aristotle consistently considered feelings, and then logically moved from their possibilities, obvious to everyday experience, to necessary attributes souls. Finally, in Book III, he moved on to consider the relationship between such activities of the soul (the nature of action was an important topic in its own right) as sensation and reasoning. In the context of this reasoning, he considered that in English translation called "mind". This approach has caused notable controversy because it has touched on the hotly debated problem of the relationship between logical reasoning, generalization, and the contingent, specifically material reality of sensations. Scientists have often returned to this problem, wondering how the intellectual (rational) and organic (sensual) souls are related. Later, they dealt with the Christian question of the relationship of the soul to immortality - not primarily in a logical or empirical way, but rather in the form of a question of what should be the proper relationship between what is called faith and other forms of faith. knowledge.

De anima was the last and most important text for the Bachelor of Arts degree in most Renaissance universities. On the one hand, this tied the study of human nature to the study of the nature of animals: man was seen as possessing an organic soul, perhaps of a higher level, but essentially no different from the soul of animals. On the other hand, this returned the study of human nature to laborious and, in fact, purely technical philosophical and theological questions about the unity of the intellectual soul, the ability to reason and immortality. So, for example, scientists often decomposed the intellectual soul into two separate abilities - reasoning (reason) and judgment (judgment).

The topic of the soul belonged precisely to the area where scientists sought to find an intermediate link between knowledge of the body and belief in an immortal beginning. It was an area suspended between the earthly, temporal, on the one hand, and the heavenly, eternal, on the other. Thanks to the American historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy, who described how the ancient concept of the “great chain of being” was revived, such a vision of human nature has become familiar to the modern reader. The “great chain of being” was understood as a picture of the world, built in the form of a hierarchy of entities, stretching from the purely material to the extremely spiritual. The human soul, divided into organic and intellectual parts, was placed just in the middle. So the study of the soul was a central issue in every sense of the word.

Philosophers and physicians left questions about immortality to theologians and concentrated on the study of the soul as a natural entity. They did not pose the question of the relationship between body and mind in the modern sense, but tried to understand, in terms of the four Aristotelian causes (material, formal, efficient and final), how the soul makes possible the whole variety of life manifestations - from logical reasoning to digestion. They argued over many issues, some of which we recognize today as contemporary. Not the last among such questions was the question of how the sensations of external material objects penetrate into the realm of imagination and representation (mental reasoning). It also remained unclear how the soul sets the body in motion. As an answer to this question, a metaphor was usually used in which the soul was likened to the captain of the ship: the captain is not the substance of the ship, but the ship loses control (dies) if the captain is absent. Thus, Francesco Piccolomini (1523-1607), a philosopher at the University of Padua, suggested that the soul has innate principles of reasoning that allow it to orient itself in sensory images, just as the knowledge of a captain guides a ship between reefs.

Renaissance writers made many claims and counter-claims about the soul. For the most part, they were in line with the medieval commentary tradition inherited from Averroes (Ibn Rushd - Iberian Islamic scholar of the twelfth century) and Thomas Aquinas; the ideas of the latter flourished again during the Catholic Counter-Reformation at the end of the sixteenth century, especially at the Jesuit College of Coimbra (in Portugal), as a sophisticated response to both Protestants and skeptics. But humanistic education also brought new sources, placed new accents in the doctrine of the soul. A particularly notable contribution was made by the Neoplatonists, who viewed the soul as the means by which man becomes one with the universe, one with God, and—because man also reflects the divine ability to create to some extent—perfects his human qualities. The Florentine Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, with the support of Cosimo de Medici, who patronized the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), translated and studied the texts of both Plato himself and the early Christian Neoplatonists, adding to this an exotic "cocktail" from Jewish, Arabic and other sources. . All this supported in the sixteenth century a magical view of nature, based on the belief that the universe is shrouded in a network of correspondences that bind human nature and the fate of individuals in the natural world. One of Ficino's students, depicting the human soul as a simultaneous manifestation of both divine constancy and material variability, called this network "truly the nodal center of the universe." Astrology also flourished, correlating human destiny with the movements of the heavens. Exquisite moral and intellectual rhetoric linked the macrocosm of the surrounding world and the microcosm of man. Pico della Mirandola, Ficino's colleague in the Florentine Acaemia, wrote that "God the master mixed our souls from the same elements and in the same bowl where he had previously mixed astronomical (heavenly) souls." A frequently reproduced figure from a famous drawing by Leonardo points out the four outstretched limbs of a person to all four corners of the universe, thus placing a person in the center, but also leaving him in contact with the universe in which he lives. This image refers to the Latin author Vitruvius, symbolizing the harmony between man and the world, since the proportions of man ideally correspond to the proportions of the universe. The same harmonic proportions underlie the architecture of the Renaissance - this expressed the passionate desire of a person to reproduce the aesthetic principles of the world in his buildings.

Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), a prominent scholar and politician who introduced Luther's religious reforms to the universities of central Europe, perpetuated Aristotelian themes (agenda) in his frequently reprinted Protestant texts. However, unlike Aristotle himself, and much more confidently than most commentators, he not only asserted the immortality of the soul, but also described the soul more in theological terms than in the then accepted terms of natural philosophy. He argued (as did some Catholics before him) that human knowledge is limited by original sin to the limits of sensory perception - which is why it is necessary to clearly distinguish such limited knowledge from the undoubted facts of faith. Clearly aware of this fact, he conducted a comprehensive study of the functioning of both the senses themselves and the body (based on the teachings of Galen in the last question), and thereby laid the foundations of practical moral philosophy in the field of passions.

Scientific knowledge about the soul was intertwined with everyday life. For humanists, it was indeed very important that education be practical, and that is why they turned to language and rhetoric. In this they also followed Aristotle, who argued that all human behavior, like animal activity, requires appetition, the exercise of the ability of the soul to initiate movement in accordance with reason, imagination, or desire. It meant theoretical basis for a preliminary understanding of what we today call motivation, as well as for the study of moral and immoral behavior in everyday life. In the future, this part of academic research was called moral philosophy. It turned out to be an area that sought to combine the Aristotelian description of the abilities of the soul with pagan and Christian ideas about what actions are considered right.

The authority of Aristotle - he was often called simply "Philosopher" - set the general tone and theme of reflection, although in the seventeenth century he was often criticized and sometimes subjected to destructive attacks. Natural philosophers have argued that the physical world cannot be understood in Aristotelian terms. Such a position, of course, influenced the understanding of the soul. Attacks on Aristotle and on the scholasticism associated with him took on a variety of forms. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) are the two most famous founders of modern natural science. Bacon's critique was methodological, based on his conviction that learning had long since become sterile, addicted to false "idols", while true clarity comes from assertions based on experience and from the derivation of general laws from isolated examples. Galileo's criticism was not only methodological, but also substantive, and included his well-known arguments in favor of the Copernican system of the world, belief in which struck the very heart of medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy. The scientist of the next generation, René Descartes (1596-1650), had already attempted to systematically replace Aristotelianism with a new metaphysics, (i.e. a set of fundamental statements about reality) - it was a metaphysics combined with a new, mechanistic philosophy of nature.

However, even before all these attacks, the Aristotelians of the Renaissance tried in sophisticated ways to describe how knowledge - including knowledge about knowledge itself - relates to what is known in it. This was not yet a "problem of knowledge", as it was understood by the philosophers of modern times. The problem, rather, was how to understand the soul in such a way that one could explain the relationships between feelings, memory, imagination, representation and judgment, respectively, and also resolve the question of the relation of the intellectual soul to the movements of the body. The last problem required answers to questions about how knowledge of the world is possible (as opposed to the intuitive truths of belief), how minds interact with the world in their behavior, and how one soul communicates with another - as happens, for example, in state of love. Some time later (after the seventeenth century) these questions became central to the whole Western philosophy, gaining fame as an "epistemological problem" (i.e., the problem of cognition) and a "psychophysical problem" (i.e., the problem of the relationship between mind and body). But these are modern terms. And for the followers of Aristotle, these questions belonged to the area of the moral and natural philosophy of the soul (which some scientists, since the end of the sixteenth century, called "psychology"), and this area does not fully coincide with the range of problems of modern philosophy. Renaissance scholars divided this subject into questions about the organic and intellectual souls; the soul as a form of life processes and the soul as a form of reasoning. And it is difficult for us now to find equivalent concepts. Actually, there is no clear way to represent the modern concept of concsiousness in Aristotelian terms.

Chapter 2

There are two ideals of our existence: the first? a state of great simplicity where our needs are in harmony with each other, with our forces and with everything to which we are connected simply through the organization of nature, without any action on our part. Another? a state of supreme perfection, where this harmony would manifest itself between infinitely varied and intensified needs and powers, through the organization that we are able to give ourselves.

Friedrich Hölderlin, "Fragment von Hyperion" ("Fragment from Hyperion", 1794).

I. Reason and the path to knowledge

The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), being a student of the theological faculty of the University of Tübingen, lived next door to the later famous philosophers G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854). Inspired by the ideas of the bloodless but most serious revolution in philosophy, which was made by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), as well as the destructive, but no less serious French Revolution, this generation of thinkers opposed the science of man in the form in which it developed in XVIII century. They suggested looking for the basis of progress in the innate activity and intelligence of the human spirit. As Hölderlin noted in the commentary to his poem Hyperion, at the end of the 18th century there were two conceptions of the human ideal. The first was the ideal of "natural" nature, which strives for knowledge and political freedom ("enlightenment"), in order to find its expression in them and bring human life to perfection. The second ideal assumed that perfection is realized in time through the creative activity of a person, through the activities of outstanding people, through education and through the rise of cultural life. Were these two ideals complementary or incompatible? this question remained open.

It was the second ideal that inspired the new German generation of intellectuals, many of whose representatives tried to show the rational structure of the belief that the world of man is created by man himself. Their work culminated in Hegel's doctrine of human progress as the unfolding of the inner intelligence of the world, the activity of the "spirit" or what he called the "Absolute." This view had notable consequences for the history of culture and society, in some way infiltrating later formulations of both extreme nationalism (racism) and Marxism. (This does not mean that he was the "cause" of the political ways of thought mentioned.) Throughout Hegel's life, this philosophy both reflected and inspired the exclusively German views of philosophical, academic and artistic culture (individual and social) as the goal and purpose of social and political life. Just when British thinkers turned to the principle of utility to understand the organization of social life, German philosophers began to talk about how such an approach does not involve "real" values at all. If utilitarians described progress as an increase in human happiness through changes in living conditions, then idealistic thinkers described progress in terms of the cultural achievements of the spirit. Here lies the source of a cliché common among German social scientists at least until the First World War: "civilization" is possessed by both the British and the French, while "culture" is possessed only by the Germans.

Hegel's life also coincided with the rise of Romanticism in the arts and with the emergence of modern romantic concepts of statehood. If the purpose of the authors of the Enlightenment period was to hold a "mirror" in the face of human nature, then the authors of the Romantic period proposed to illuminate the road with a "lamp" of creative genius. It was a difference in theories of knowledge, and not just in matters of artistic style.

Romanticism was partly a reaction against the kind of science exemplified by Bentham's reduction of the senses to the calculation of pleasures and pains. Characteristic illustration: the English artist William Blake depicted Newton, busy with a pair of compasses and turning his back on all the richness of nature. The artistic imagination turned to the subjective world and proclaimed feeling as the source of everything that is most essential for humanity. The English poet William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous outburst of intense emotion." Writers and artists devoutly believed that language and art? painting, drama, music and poetry? transform subjective meanings into a common culture. In other words, according to the teachings of romanticism, the source of everything truly human is in the creative activity of the human spirit. Christianity, with its attention to the ways of the soul, full of divine aspirations, was quite familiar with such a train of thought, as well as with its language and symbolism. However, to early XIX V. people have already interpreted the arts themselves (and not religious activity per se) as the means by which humanity gives its deepest expression to its creative spirit. Have the arts acquired the status that religious dogma once had? they acted as an arbiter of the main values of life. Such cultural shifts may have had more of an impact on the transition from a transcendent value system to an anthropocentric one than any new knowledge of physical nature.

During the Enlightenment, the theory of knowledge was empirical, or, as Hume said, "experimental"; romantic and idealistic theories of knowledge rested primarily on the analysis of spiritual activity and reason. This division still manifests itself in the different status of empirical and theoretical forms of argumentation in modern social sciences, about which there are noticeable disagreements between the continental European and Anglo-Saxon schools. In a sense, this can be summarized as follows: if the social theorists of the continental school try to base scientific knowledge on rationally analyzed first principles, then Anglo-Saxon scientists are more inclined to recognize an empirical basis for scientific knowledge. Although, of course, the distinction between empirical and theoretical work has never been and could not be clearly defined.

The difference under discussion is well shown in the way the authors use the term "science" in the phrase "social science" differently. In English-speaking countries at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, the word "science" began to mean (often, but not always) "natural science", or at least a body of knowledge that claims to have the same explanatory structure as natural science (such, for example, , positivist sociology). However, earlier in English language, and in the languages of continental Europe (including Russian) to this day, the word "science" denoted any systematically formulated knowledge based on rational grounds and, thus, accepted as true. With this approach, disciplines such as art history, philology, and even theology? sciences (for comparison: in modern English they are denoted by the term "humanities" ("humanities")). Different word usage leaves the psychological and social sciences in limbo. Thus, for English-speakers, the current debate about whether and in what sense sociology is a science boils down to whether sociologists explain phenomena in the same way as natural scientists, and, in particular, whether they establish knowledge by methods comparable to empirical ones. In contrast, French, German or Russian sociologists, when examining the nature of their field as a science, tend to ask themselves whether sociology is a formal, rationally grounded body of knowledge. The first position is connected with the trend of empirical testing of the scientific qualities of sociology, the second? with a theoretical examination of the consistency and deductive rigor of social theory. Obviously these positions are not mutually exclusive? not at all; but the alternative emphases anchored in institutionalized practice are quite real.

...

What does the word "man" mean?

The clearest interpretation of the meaning of the name man and its purpose can be found in the books of Gurdjieff and Castaneda, in the Vedas and yoga treatises. Having studied at least part of the listed works, you will understand that to be a man means to have a destiny, a path and personal strength. To be human means to receive wholeness, worldview. To be human is to view life as a lesson, as a journey. After all, one can live as if miracles do not happen at all, or as if every moment is a miracle. If there is no time to read, then you can watch the film "Peaceful Warrior" directed by Victor Salva. In addition, the film will answer the important question: "what does it mean to be a strong person?".

We live in a society that is a whole super-system, so it is very important to know and meet many criteria. For example, such as intelligence, culture and so on. It is worth considering them in more detail.

What does it mean to be a cultured person

Culture is a certain code of conduct in a closed society. And the norms of culture can vary depending on the history of the development of this society. Thus, the familiarity adopted in Russia in relation to even an unfamiliar person, in conservative societies of Europe, will be regarded as a careless attitude. So, you show your lack of culture. That is, to be a cultured person means to conform with one's behavior to the norms of public morality of a particular society.

What does it mean to be an intelligent person

An intelligent person has always been called one whose level of education is higher than most of the representatives of the people. So, in imperial and Soviet times, intelligent people formed a whole class - the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia included poets, writers, magazine editors and correspondents, as well as part of the bohemia: actors and theater directors. It rarely included academic scientists in fundamental fields of science. But if you attribute a scientist-nuclear physicist to an intelligent person, then there will be no mistake here. The word "intelligent" itself comes from the Latin intel-lego, which means "to know, to think, to have an idea about something." Based on this, one can understand that an intelligent person in everyday life is called an intelligent, thoughtful person with a subtle sense of culture, which is reflected in his behavior in society and in interaction with other people.

Who are you? What does it mean to be human?
Outwardly, all people are the same - the same way, in general - we all have a head, arms, shoulders, fingers, etc.
Everyone has a form, an image of a person, but this does not mean that he is one. You can have the form of a person, but not be a person in essence.
Appearance doesn't make a person human. A person becomes a person, acquiring certain internal characteristics, values, qualities.
Humans are not born, they are made.
A person is valued not for form and appearance, but for content. It is the content that shows who he or she really is.
Recently, it is very often possible to find that a person is judged by the make of a car, his bank account, clothes, cell phone. But it's all coming and going.
It happens that you meet a person, communicate with him, and you are not at all interested in what he tells you. Then you start looking at his suit, tie, watch, shoes. And if a person is rich in soul, then you don’t remember at all what he was wearing.
People began to evaluate each other according to external standards, because there were few personalities rich in soul, strong will and morally stable. It's easier to buy a car to fit in with people than it is to work on yourself and become someone.
Today you are on a horse, but tomorrow, perhaps not.
Your financial position is no guarantee that it will always be so, but only high values \u200b\u200bwill help you stay on top.
The world is degrading, the meaning of life for many people has fallen to animal needs: to eat, sleep, satisfy their personal needs. Many study and work with only one goal: to earn more money to buy a better car, to live in a house rather than an apartment, to dress more expensively, to visit more elite establishments, eat better. This is not bad, but if this is the goal of your whole life - this is a tragedy!
Make the decision to be a human, a human with a capital M.
The qualities of a person that make a person a person:
1. A person always has a goal, a plan, a lead, a strategy.
2. Morality, morality, high spiritual, mental, personal qualities, character.
Character:
- the ability to control emotions, desires, feelings - self-control, self-discipline;
- firmness in life values, ideals, beliefs.
- patience, honesty, justice, mercy, faith, joy, fidelity, courage, love, etc.
3. Mind, knowledge, soundness, prudence, prudence. It is necessary to constantly develop.
The head was given to us not only to wear a hat.
Fill the reservoirs with wisdom, knowledge. From ignorance - perish, suffer, exist. Ignorance is the root of many evils.
4. Man is a creator. He is able to change the world, the surrounding reality.
If you are not living for the common good, then you are wasting your time.
Man is born to leave a mark on the earth. What footprint are you leaving today?

Delia and Fernand: We ask you to tell us about a person, since this word refers to all creatures that have a human appearance. But since their behavior often differs in the most decisive way, and their interests differ to such an extent that what is noble and good for some is ignoble and evil for others, it turns out that essential contradictions are hidden under the human appearance. In addition, we see that in ourselves sometimes one part of our nature predominates, and sometimes another. Sometimes we don't even know what possibilities lie within us, and when they reveal themselves, it comes as a complete surprise to us. How to direct these different selves of ours in the right direction so that they do not cloud our consciousness, or at least do not destroy our lives and harm others?

This question has several aspects. We will touch on some now, and others - a little later.

First of all, it is worth recalling that the being that we call man, strictly speaking, is neither single, nor even homogeneous. And since it is heterogeneous in nature, we cannot expect constancy and immutability in its manifestations. Even on a purely physical plane, situations sometimes arise when the same words are called things that are closely related, but still have differences. If, for example, I say the word "chair", an image of this object will appear in your imagination. But if I ask you whether this object is horizontal or vertical, what will you answer me? You will answer that it has both vertical and horizontal elements, and even some that are neither strictly vertical nor strictly horizontal. In addition, in addition to fixed elements, it may also contain movable elements that can be installed both vertically and horizontally. Agree that other characteristics can be given: a chair can also consist of rigid and elastic elements, etc.

The same is true of the person. In our classes, we talked about the fact that all ancient people, considering the structure of a person, divided it into various, more or less harmonious, bodies, a kind of "guides" that consciousness uses to move, depending on the need and on the accumulated experience. . And we have bodies in potential that we have to use in the future, when our evolution allows and when we have a real need for them.

From the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Indians, we learned about the septenary structure, according to which each person actually consists of seven bodies. And since these bodies are interconnected, acting in seven different dimensions or planes of nature, for clarity, they can be represented as if superimposed on one another, like scales or a diving suit. I repeat that this comparison is conditional, but at the initial stage it will help us create an appropriate image.

Anatomy shows that various systems of the physical body, such as the nervous system and the circulatory system, are very similar in form and are intertwined in many places. If we could ideally isolate the nervous system, the skeletal system and the circulatory system, then at first glance they would seem very similar in structure. However, they are different, and if we carefully examine them, we will find that they are fundamentally different - so much so that if we did not see them together, we would not be able to imagine them in direct interaction, as they really are. To the untrained eye, the point of attachment of the muscle to the large bone may appear to be a mere irregularity; the passage of an artery through the brain - one of the cerebral convolutions; a branch of the nerve node responsible for the blood supply to a certain area - something like a fiber, etc.

This is easy to understand with humility in our hearts... But if we suddenly want to know everything and our vanity (which in one way or another is a manifestation of our subconscious) begins to rudely push us forward, then, like a herd of buffaloes, we will slip past the delicate flowers. And when dust and distance hide them from us, we will ask: “Where are these flowers?” And if flowers are understood as a symbol of knowledge, it will become clear how easy it is to pass them by without noticing and even - out of good intentions - trampling them.

I advise you, dear friends, to go through life smoothly, without unnecessary running around and useless stops, as if walking and enjoying the beautiful landscape. In essence, the surrounding reality is just that.

But back to our topic. So, according to the ancient teachings that we accept - not because they are ancient, but because they are true and because no other theory in our century is so plausible - the one whom we call a man consists - "from below upwards" - of seven bodies: physical, vital, mental, mental concrete, mental spiritual, intuitive and higher, truly spiritual. Let's give a more detailed explanation of each of them.

Physical body: a programmed "robot", the most perfect electrothermodynamic machine, which, however, is no more valuable than any other machine. Our "I" is in love with it and identifies with it, as we sometimes identify with our car or beloved animal. On the physical plane, we need it, but we exaggerate this need, believing that it will always be useful and without it our further existence is impossible. We identify with this machine so much and attach such importance to it that, as a rule, we believe that all our other functions and abilities depend on it, not noticing that they are only reflected in it, just as in a braking machine is reflected driver's will to stop.

Vital body: another "robot", but not made of matter, but of energy. This body determines the interconnection of molecules and determines their functions. It is here that all the phenomena that are generally referred to as life phenomena, which characterize objective life, occur. One does not have to be a sophisticated psychic to feel it as a kind of transparent "double", a copy of the physical body. Rather, this physical body is its copy. The body dies precisely when this "double" disintegrates (I mean the immediate cause of death).

Psychic or astral body: another "robot", but much more "spiritual". This is also a kind of "double", but consisting of mental substance. Here is the source of our superficial emotions and feelings. From here come many impulses of our life, such as sudden anger or fleeting joy. This body feeds on pleasure and rejects pain, literally and figuratively. Being in the grip of the illusions of this world, it experiences feelings and in itself is changeable, fickle, fearful and insidious - not because it is bad, but because of the need to “feel”, enjoy or cause pleasure. It is the basis of sex and all the desires of the flesh. It gradually dissolves after death, except in those cases when its existence is prolonged by the too materialistic nature of a person or by states of deep "shock", the consequences of which - in the form of complexes, longing, attachment - connect physical life with the subsequent incarnation.

The mental concrete or desire body: as we continue our "ascension" we meet this "vehicle" made of mental matter. This is the basis of our selfishness, both reasonable and excessive. The root of deep joy and sorrow. A place of great desires, great love and great hatred. This is the "lowest" of our "I". All previous bodies remain machines. They do not have any awareness of their "I", with the exception of resistance to destruction. The latter, in fact, is the "self-preservation instinct" present in all beings, including those that are incorrectly called inanimate objects. The concrete mind is not really the body, but being a part of what is "below", it is the support for the next and the crown for the previous ones. Its existence is twofold. He both dies and does not die, since from one life to another, a number of subplanes remain from him, which determine the next incarnation and store the experience that helps our "I" to improve. It is the root of selfishness, aggression and fear. In addition, it is an effective engine of all kinds of actions, and above all those that are "individual" in nature. This is the last level of our "private life", in the usual sense of the word. Actually the mental body: this is our Mind, our "I". It is something that is no longer our environment and gives us the awareness of our individuality and existence apart from the existence of others. It contains sublime, altruistic thoughts, great ideas and mathematical abstractions. In it lie, waiting for their time, all our heroic dreams. Here weave a thread that, through memories, connects the best that remains of our reincarnations, both in terms of individual and in terms of conscious participation in the collective. This is our Consciousness, the inner voice that inspires or reproaches us. If our curiosity resides in concrete reason, then Reason itself is the fulcrum for our dialectical questions and answers, the basis of mystical revelations that come when ordinary arguments are powerless. Here all the contradictions that we can comprehend by reason are born and die.

Intuitive body: at these "heights" the concept of "body" is used only conditionally - not that the principles of organization do not exist here, but at this level other laws operate that we are not able to perceive as principles and goals, but can only feel intuitively. Direct Knowledge lives here, which is beyond the limits of the rational, which has not yet received its development at this stage of the evolution of mankind. In fact, what we usually call intuition is a kind of manifestation of the intuitive subbody operating within our mental body. After all, according to traditional teachings, each of these bodies consists of seven sub-bodies, which, as it were, reproduce the whole inside it as a unity of its constituent parts - like concentric rings, when some are firmly inserted into others.

Spiritual body: the place where the Will of Being resides. The beginning of our immediate existence, isolated from the Cosmic Mind. Our "I" in its highest meaning. The silent contemplator of all our actions and the final judge of ourselves. This is the God of Plato and Paul in us. This is the Osiris-Ani of the Egyptians, who is "like the growth of the gods."

The Eastern sources, which have come down to us in their fullest form and have been most thoroughly studied by now, usually endow the three higher bodies with amorphous characteristics. But the point is simply the paucity of our everyday languages, which cannot accurately convey what the sacred languages expressed. As a result, everything metaphysical disappears or loses its sound when we try to grasp it with our limited mind. It is simply that the system of higher organization defies our understanding when we look at it "from below" with a limited set of "instruments." In the same way, to the naked eye, the starry sky is nothing more than a chaotic heap of star-lights. We see the stars, located at a distance of millions of light years from us, as if in the same plane, but, nevertheless, it seems to us that they are not far away. All this is so incomprehensible when viewed with the naked eye that in the end we feel something like a rotating chaos above our heads.

The same thing happens in the microcosm, and a student observing through a microscope the complex life of myriad forms perceives it as dust, without any meaning and connection. But in the Universe everything is reasonably interconnected and subject to common harmony. Everywhere, as far as our understanding suffices, this is so, and if we cannot understand something, then this is not a reason not to believe in it.

Associating spirituality with chaos and randomness is nothing more than denying what is beyond our understanding. People tend to endow everything unknown with supernatural, fantastic qualities. But everything is in wonderful harmony thanks to the Divine Thinker, or God, whatever we call Him. If Good is the choice of the best, pure and incorruptible; if Justice is the determination of the value of each thing in its relationship with others; if Order is the location of each thing in its natural place, then Good, Justice and Order are the pillars of this beautiful Universe, devoid of any contradictions in its essence. Seeming contradictions are in fact the movers of harmony and the condition for the functioning of the Universe as a whole. He who knows the Goals understands the Principles. As the Kybalion says, "as above, so below."

D. and F.: But if we recognize the existence of this harmony, then why do we have so many contradictions that sometimes we feel and act like saints, and sometimes, on the contrary, we are controlled by evil and selfishness? Moreover, these different states can be separated by days and minutes.

Imagine these bodies as a house with seven floors connected by an elevator. In this case, we will call the person moving on the elevator Consciousness. Depending on the floor on which it stops, one or another view, one or another situation opens before it. The elevator will go exactly to the floor from which the call came, and not to another, on which it may stop in a few minutes. Oriental sages compared consciousness to a monkey jumping on the same tree from branch to branch, almost never stopping on any of them. For example, if your consciousness is directed to what I just talked about, you, in our building example, are on the fourth or fifth floor. But if at that moment someone strikes you hard, you will instantly move to the lower floor, and for some time a bruise on your body can become the most important place in the world for you.

D. and F.: Then it turns out that consciousness is in some way the eighth body, which, being mobile, can visit other bodies and be a link between them?

No. Consciousness is not a body, which is a complexly organized structure. Consciousness is the “Eye of the Soul” (corresponding in the East to the eighth aspect of Shiva), which is directed in different directions. Consciousness, in the form in which we can perceive and use it, does not consist of the material of which these bodies are composed, but is a kind of sub-body, absolutely mobile, consisting of mental substance. I repeat, I mean consciousness in the sense in which we perceive it and use it in ordinary life. In fact, we should talk about seven types of consciousness, but this is beyond the scope of this topic and is much more complicated than our question.

D. and F.: Can we somehow control this consciousness so as not to be constantly in a state of “confusion and vacillation” under the influence of either external factors or internal experiences.

Yes we can. It is noteworthy that in our century, when psychology was rediscovered and the bizarre flights of the Psyche butterfly were studied from different points of view, research has not yet established the fundamental structure and structure of our subtle part. And the knowledge gained serves only to “patching holes” in individual “traumatic” cases, and not to provide an ordinary person with the possibility of self-control. Psychologists themselves, when they find themselves in critical or difficult situations, behave as if they were not engaged in psychology, but worked, say, as watchmakers or astronomers. It's like a shoemaker without boots: for example, the least we can expect from a mechanic is that he can fix his own car. In any case, not always.

Thus, the modern science of psychology is paradoxical, and psychological research, with rare exceptions, is in fact only a heap of confusing terminology. Jung was born too early, and those who today study some of his valuable ideas are often attacked by a straightforward, materialistic science that treats the soul as an emanation of the body, inextricably linked to it in everything.

But you know simple and effective means by which, with great desire and perseverance, you can control your actions, feelings and thoughts to a great extent. If every time before you do something you ask yourself what plane this action basically belongs to and what body "directs" it, you will see that it is not so difficult to achieve self-control from self-consciousness. Socrates spoke about this, and he showed it by the example of his own death. And you need to prove it with your own life.

For example, if you know that an outburst of anger is caused by the excitement of your emotional body, above which there is another one that is responsible for the mind; if you see everything “for” and “against” and feel that everything is subordinated to the light of high spirituality, then it is quite likely that you will laugh at your own anger or, at least, like the divine Plato, you will neither act yourself nor judge others while in a state of irritation. Therefore, carefully observe yourself, study yourself and, if in doubt, turn to the Masters of Wisdom, who in their teachings have left the golden keys to our deeds. Ask yourself, for example: how would Socrates or Confucius act in my place? And the light will shine on you from within.

D. and F.: This is true, but we will proceed from the fact that we are young and are neither Socrates nor Confucius. The latter seems to have complained about the fact that he still lacked another hundred years of life to understand some of the mysteries of nature, which are spoken of in the I Ching. How can a young person who does not have enough experience cope with such situations with dignity, despite the fact that youth is characterized by impulsive actions?

This good question. But if you stop identifying yourself with your body and think about the fact that your spirit is infinitely old and that your consciousness reincarnates over millions of years, accumulating your experience ... Then what, in essence, is the difference between a young man of 20-30 years old and an old man? What do these small years mean compared to the huge number of centuries that you have lived? .. Your Soul is old and knows how to cope with many situations. If you turn to your Soul, and not to the new forms of your current personality, you will see that there is a very great potential for Wisdom in you. Diligent reading of the classics will refresh these memories, and you will be able to restrain your emotions and desires, instead of easily giving in to them.

You know that any form of life contains a war, in other words, a conflict between its constituent parts. As the Indian Bhagavad Gita teaches us, to leave the battlefield means to behave lowly, unworthily. Within ourselves, we must fight against everything that blocks our path to perfection. Dignity is a natural desire for the good and the eternal. Dignity as such is not arrogance or humility. This is the ability to determine for our consciousness exactly the place that it has the right to occupy in accordance with the long path of human development. Thus, by fulfilling your duties, you will gain access to your rights, lead a right life, and not commit actions that you would have to regret later.

I know that it will not be easy to put all this into practice all the time: the world is full of disembodied human beings who, taking on their ephemeral physical life or driven by their fantasies, create obstacles on the way. But it is appropriate to recall the ancient wisdom that says that it is better to suffer from injustice than to allow it. And since (as the Stoics, whom you have read so much) say, there are things that depend and do not depend on us, you will feel that in practical life there are situations that you are not able to change, but there are others that directly concern you, to which you can influence. In the first case, it remains only to wait for another, favorable moment, and in the second, to engage in battle courageously and actively, trying to overcome difficulties, not forgetting that before you win a war, you have to lose a great many battles.

Beware also of being overwhelmed by the pursuit of perfection, which can cause you to abandon your work and accomplishments, preventing you from achieving optimal results. Every step forward is a right step, and it is necessary to have a meek heart in order to avoid inappropriate comparisons with great ones, so that our efforts will not come to naught after the first defeats. If you cannot build a palace out of marble, at least take logs to build a small hut where you can live - it is better than living in an open field like animals.

So, we need to persistently strive for spiritual accomplishments, but at the same time do not despair and be content with what we achieve with all the strength and all the warmth of our hearts. Others will come, more gifted, who will continue our work, but our efforts will never be wasted. Even our most modest inner step towards Good is, in a sense, the step of all mankind. Not a single person is exempt from responsibility for the course of History, but, on the other hand, no one is the owner of History, its owner. We all have to create it little by little, and the best start is not that which comes from transient material values, but that which is carried out on other, less ephemeral planes of consciousness, inevitably finding its reflection in the world in due time.

If every day you overcome at least one negative impulse in yourself; if every year you cope with one vice; if every decade you manage to improve your self-control, it means that you are creating history and by your actions you help not only yourself, but also all people. Even one person who, although not in full control of himself, nevertheless knows how to restrain his aggressive impulses in time in thoughts, words and deeds, who can correctly and convincingly explain to himself and others the nature of our behavior, who proves by his very life, that man is a non-thinking animal, that he belongs to another kingdom of Nature, which considers the questions of the spirit to be primary in relation to the questions of the "sleeping spirit" or matter - such a person is an island of peace and harmony in the ocean of cataclysms of our age, as well as any other period of time subject to materialism.

Materialism is a despot that has perched on the head of millions, and everyone inwardly yearns to get rid of it, whether they realize it or not. Materialism continues to exist because people do not know themselves, their structure, they do not know Nature. Give people an example of a real culture, understanding the culture of knowledge and their correct application and then your business will not go to waste.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but this is the most important question. In the face of reality and the need for human coexistence, one illiterate person who has mastered the basics of the art of self-knowledge and self-control is worth thousands of our scholars in various areas of this illusory world. They tirelessly talk about philosophy, psychology, etc., but at the same time they operate like a simple janitor who knows nothing else but sweeping, with the only difference being that the janitor does his job well. Place such "experts" in front of a fire, or a beautiful body, or a mountain of money, and you will see how they fuss, driven by the impulse of desire, completely forgetting that they have a "body of desire" and, therefore, without making the slightest attempt restrain this desire or direct it to achieve noble goals. But then what is the point of what they know - or think they know? What is all this for? .. It's just dust, rubbish, husks. It is useless to work with such "specialists", and if we study their "sciences", it is only in order to be able to refute them. In the same way, poison is extracted from snake teeth only to make an antidote out of them and overcome the power of the snakes themselves.

What does it mean to be human. What does it mean to be human? Osho Quotes

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Similar Documents

What does the word "man" mean?

What does it mean to be a cultured person

What does it mean to be an intelligent person