Reasoning eighth

THE STRUGGLE FOR A VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE CURSE

The West is fighting for the visible, the East is fighting for the invisible. The big question is what
is visible and what is invisible. Is it visible what the human eye sees or what the human spirit sees? Is it
visible what man and ox equally see with their eyes, the corneas and pupils, or what only man can see
with some internal organ of sight?
The modern west sees with the bodily organ of sight. And what does it see? It sees only the skin
of things: it sees the clothes of something that is hidden under the clothes; it sees a snail house, but it
doesn't see a snail inside the house. The East never believed the bodily eye. That must be credited to it.
In this way, it raised the dignity of man above the ox. On this rests all its refined spiritual philosophy.
What the eye didn't see and the ear didn't hear, and what didn't come to the man's mind - that is the
reality of being. Every Easterner would agree with this experience of the Apostle Paul. But few learned
westerners. Because the learned westerner built the whole tower of science on the sand, that is, on
bodily sight and hearing and smell and touch and taste. On this rests the whole Babylonian tower of
Western humanity.
The West is fighting for land, for earthly treasures above and below ground. And one who
acquires the earth, or the earthly treasure above the earth or under the earth, it proclaims him a great
man. The East glorified saints and sages, the West glorified inventors and conquerors. The polytheistic
East attributed all the greatness of its saints and sages to themselves, and little or nothing to the gods.
That is why it proclaimed its saints and sages as gods, built temples for them and offered sacrifices. It
does so to this day. And the West attributed everything to its inventors and conquerors, nothing to God.
But neither did it elevate his great men to the ranks of deities, nor did it erect altars to them. It erected
monuments of stone or metal - and that was all. But in front of the monuments, no one bowed or
prayed, lit candles or offered sacrifices… These monuments are like monuments to the dead in the
cemetery. Only that the living do not forget the dead, and not as in the East, that the dead do not forget
the living. Eroded by doubt in one God, the West could even less proclaim people as gods. However, this
is both simple and easy for the East. Both the consciousness and the conscience of the Easterners easily
come to terms with the fact that people become gods and gods become people. There are no dead for
the East, and no living for the West. In the East, the body is considered a mask and an instrument of the
spirit. When the spirit rejects the body, it still exists and lives, either without any body or in a new body.
Ancestor spirits live near their descendants. That is why altars are being built for them. All of India and
Tibet and China and Japan with many islands are adorned with such altars dedicated to spirits. These
spirits take part in the lives of bodily people, their relatives, and besides them there are countless other
spirits, who have always been disembodied. These are the spirits of mountains and waters, valleys,
caves and rocks, winds and storms, deserts and roads, moons and stars. In a word, for the Easterner, the
whole universe is filled with disembodied spirits, and it is in comparison with the spirits in the body, that
is in humans and animals, like the ocean surrounding a small island. But all this huge world of spirits, in
which all the polytheistic peoples of Asia and Africa believe, has no center. There is no one God who
could address himself with the words of the Holy Scriptures: God of spirits and all flesh. But all spirits are
unconnected, unrelated, self-willed and restless. There is no one who divides to the right and to the left,
but everything is mixed and therefore not blessed. In a word, there is no Christ, Divider and Enlightener.
 But as it is, that spiritual world, the Easterner is hastily preparing and fighting to become a
member of that world. Because for him, this visible world is just one station of the universal circle of life.
The main thing is - the invisible world. That is why the Easterner does not care about this life, nor does
he fight for this visible world, which quickly evaporates like a puddle of water under the hot eastern sun.
The West stopped producing saints and sages. It dates back to the time when popes ceased to
be saints and sages and became politicians and experts. Before that, the West was Orthodox, and it lived
with Christ and fought for the Kingdom of Heaven. But after that fate, the West wanted to fall away
from the Pope, so it fell away from Christ. Then the sight of Westerners for the spiritual world was
covered with whitewash, and instead of fighting for the Kingdom of Heaven, Western humanity began
to shamelessly fight for the Kingdom of Earth. This is the new and recent history of Europe. It stands
under these signs: to subdue and exploit. This is what Westerners speak and do. To conquer nature and
use nature, of course, not as God's creation and with God's blessing, but to conquer it as someone's
property, as an enemy, squeeze it all into the cup of current pleasure. But why all this? Doesn't a
Westerner think he's going to die, does it matter if he conquered or not? So, the Easterner in wonder
asks. No, no, a Westerner never thinks of death until he gets a temperature of 40 degrees. He has no
time to think of death. He has no time to think of life. He thinks neither of life nor of death but only of
conquest and exploitation; the conquest and exploitation of land and air, fire and water, plants and
animals, brothers and relatives, neighbors and neighboring peoples and states. He found his scientific
and cultural motto: to subdue and exploit, and he hurriedly chases after that motto. He does not see the
spiritual world around him, so he does not believe without seeing. Only spiritualism scares him
sometimes. The church does not frighten him; pope even less. But that black spiritism, that black magic
drives a cold wind in his bones. "There's something!" "There must be something!" - he whispers; he
whispers as if with some shame, or with some superficial care of conscience. Yet this does not stop him
on the busy road, nor does it silence his motto: to subdue and exploit. His "greats", inventors and
conquerors led him on that fatal path. Orthodox nations must stand above both curses, both Eastern
and Western. They must not fight for such a spiritual world as in the East, nor for the material world as
in the West. God's is heaven and God's is earth. There is a spiritual world, even more numerous than the
East knows, but that spiritual world is not arbitrary, arbitrary and chaotic, but is under the rule of Christ
God, who said: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Neither heaven nor earth can
be taken from God. This is especially clear to the Orthodox Balkans, who speak and testify every day that
- abducted is cursed. In this respect, too, the Balkans cannot stand between East and West, but above
both, to illuminate the both, to shine to both. Above East and West.