I see a man in the mirror, hear his voice and am fully convinced that he is a real man; but I approach, I want to grasp his hand and I touch the glass of the mirror and see my delusion. The same thing must come to pass in a dying man; a new feeling is born which discloses to him (through his new feeling and the new knowledge it gives him) the delusion of recognising his body as himself, and of all that he recognised as existing through the means of the senses of this body.
So that the world is certainly not such as we know it to be: let there be other instruments of knowledge—and there will be another world.
But no matter how that which we consider as the world, our attitude to the world, should change—one thing is unalterably such as we know it and is always unchanging, it is that which knows. And it knows not only in me, but in everything which knows. This thing which knows is the same everywhere and in everything and in itself. It is God, and it is that for some reason limited particle of God which composes our actual “self.”
But what then, is this God, i. e., something eternal, infinite, omnipotent, which has become mortal, finite, weak? Why did God divide himself within himself? I do not know, but I know that this is so, and that in this is life. All that we know is nothing else than just such divisions of God. All that we know as the world is the knowledge of these divisions. Our knowledge of the world (that which we call matter in space and time) is the contact of the limits of our divinity with its other divisions. Birth and death are the transitions from one division into another.
6) The difference between Christian happiness and pagan is this, that the pagan seeks happiness, prepares it for himself, awaits it, demands it—the Christian seeks, prepares, awaits and demands the kingdom of God and accepts happiness when it comes as something unexpected, undeserved, unprepared. And it is no less.
Jan. 18. Moscow.
[Dismal,] horrid. Everything repels me in the life they lead around me. Now I free myself from sadness and suffering, then again I fall into it. In nothing is it so apparent, as in this, how far I am from what I want to be. If my life were really entirely in the service of God, there would be nothing which could disturb it.
I am still writing on art. It is bad. A Dukhobor was here.
[Feb. 4. Nicholskoe with the Olsuphievs.]
I am already here the 4th day and am inexpressibly sad. I am writing badly on art. I just now prayed and became horrified at how low I have fallen. I think, I ask myself, what am I to do; I doubt, I hesitate, as if I did not know or had forgotten who I was and therefore what I was to do. To remember that I am not master, but servant and to do that to which I have been put. With what labour have I struggled and attained this knowledge, how undoubted is this knowledge and how I can forget it nevertheless—not exactly forget it, but live without applying it.