Leo Tolstoy

Biography

(1828 -- 1910)   Russian author, one of the greatest of all novelists. Tolstoy's major works include War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After finishing Anna Karenina in 1877 Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works. "I wrote everything into Anna Karenina," he later confessed, "and nothing was left over." In the 1880s Tolstoy wrote such philosophical works as A Confession and What I Believe, which was banned in 1884. He started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader than an artist.

Q: I lead an active life, but underneath it al I sense a vague dissatisfaction. None of my activities seem to have any real meaning. Maybe I am trying to run away from myself. Does life have an authentic purpose? How is it discovered?

Tolstoy's Answer: I knew not the light, and I thought there was no sure truth in life; but when I perceived that only light enables men to live, I sought to find the source of the light . . . And when I reached this source of light I was dazzled with its splendor, and I found there full answers to my questions as to the purpose of the lives of myself and others.

Q: Several of us in town have formed a study group for weekly exploration of mystic and esoteric principles. May we have a helpful idea for our first discussion?

A: True religion is the establishment by man of such a relationship to the Infinite Life around him, which, while connecting his life with Infinite Life, and directing his actions, is also in agreement with his reason and with human knowledge.

Q: We have been taught that knowledge of what is truly right is already within us, and when awakened, we need no other authority. What is a specific instance of this?

A: The rule for doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you, calls for no miraculous proof, neither does it require faith, because the rule is convincing in itself both to reason and to human nature.

Q: I used to think I could find myself by chasing madly around from one exciting event to another, but thanks to these studies I realize that a thousand zeros still add up to zero.

A: There comes a time when, on the one hand, a vague awakening consciousness stirs the soul, the consciousness of the higher law and the sufferings a man endures form the contradictions of life, compel him to renounce the social order and to adopt the new&And this time has now arrived.

Q: Would you say that growth towards peace consists in making right choices, like choosing to understand our minds instead of choosing to dislike ourselves?

A: Each man in his perception of truth is like a traveler who walks by aid of a lantern whose light is cast before him; he does not see what as yet has not been revealed by the beams, he does not see the path he has left behind&but at any given step he sees that which the lantern reveals, and he is always at liberty to choose one side of the road or the other.

Q: People feel helplessly whirled about by the existing social structure, with its burdensome laws and taxes, crimes and uncertainties. What declaration of independence can be given to those who feel caught in the whirlpool?

A: If you did not desire your present position, you would not be doing everything possible to maintain it. If you cease doing those things which maintain your position, you will lose at once that position which you claim is forced upon you and which is your burden&It is impossible for any man to be placed against his own will in a condition which is contrary to his conscience.

Q: Please explain the remedy. (To our evils hardness or heart, covetousness, wrath, pride and ambition, etc.)

A: It is in the recognition or non-recognition of these principles that a man finds or fails to find freedom.

Q: Where do people go wrong in thinking about God, Truth, Reality?

An idea aboug God is not God. -- Tolstoy

A: An idea about God is not God.

Q: I am encouraged by a discovery I made in a book of deep wisdom. It said that new life can begin only when the pressure from frustration and despair reaches the cracking point. Does this mean that our cracking is a cracking open, that it is the very exit from our ego-prison?

A: It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in the old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable&he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.

Q: May I have the full details of this? (To: "The world is imprisoned by its own activity. Hinduism)

A: The man who spends his life in sensual acts performs acts that depend upon temporary causes beyond his control. Of himself he does nothing, but it seems to him that he is acting independently. In reality, all that he imagines he is doing by himself is done through him by a higher power; he is not the creator of life but its prisoner. But the man who devotes his life to the recognition and practice of the truth revealed to him unites himself with the source of universal life, and accomplishes not personal or individual acts that are in themselves causes of all else, and have an endless significance.

Q: I have never heard a truth which calls for a greater reverse in my thinking--a healthy reverse, I know. Because of this, will you please review the basic facts about man-made attempts to improve the world?

A: However much we have dulled ourselves with hypocrisy, and dulled ourselves with the self-suggestion resulting from hypocrisy, nothing can destroy the absolute certainty of that simple and clear truth that no exterior effort can provide us with security.

Q: Most of us insist upon doing things the hard way, but maybe we can do otherwise when it comes to life as a whole. What is the simple and direct way to the new life?

A: There are some men--but the smaller number--who instantly, and as though by prophetic intuition, perceive the truth, surrender themselves to its influence, and live up to its precepts. Others--and they are the majority--are brought to the knowledge of the truth and the necessity for its adoption, by a long series of errors, by experience and suffering.

Q: If people were to cange inwardly, by receiving truth, it would make a profound change in our exterior ways of life. What would happen to our ways of earning a living, to our relations with each other, to our medical and scientific programmes?

A: They would be different, richer, and higher, but would not at all be discontinued. What would be destroyed is whatever is false in them, while whatever is true in them would blossom and grow stronger.

Q: Maybe I have the wrong viewpoint towards my escape from psychic prison. Will you please explain how this might be so?

A: In fearing to make an effort to escape from conditions that are fatal to us, because the future is obscure and unknown, we are like passengers on a sinking ship, who crowd into the cabin and refuse to leave it, because they have not the courage to enter the boat that would carry them to the shore.

Q: Each member of our study class takes home the same idea for private examination and meditation. The results are then shared at the next meeting. May we have a good idea for next week?

A: Whoever you are, who read these lines, think about your position and your duties, not upon your position as landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, clergyman, priest, or soldier, which people temporarily call you, nor of the imaginary duties which these positions impose upon you, but think about your real and external condition as a human being.

Q: The habit of self-questioning has been praised by men who have found the way out for themselves. Please show us how a despairing man might phrase his self-inquiry.

A: But maybe I have overlooked something, or misunderstood certain ideas. It cannot be possible that this condition of despair is natural to man.

Q: I can see why inner freedom is everything. We must refuse to be captured by the surrounding social swindle, which passes for decency.

A: A horse which is harnessed to a wagon along with other horses is not free . . . The same situation is true of man.

Q: Please supply a first step towards personal newness.

A: Man's life begins only with the appearance of rational consciousness.

Q: So much of our anguish comes from demanding the unnecessary.

A: All the ills of mankind appear, according to Lao-Tse, not from man's neglect of the necessary, but because he does what is unnecessary. If men would practice what Lao-Tse calls non-action, they would be free not only of their personal difficulties, but also of those residing in every form of government.

Q: We want to be sane, sensible, unpretentious men and women. However, our own negative nature deceives us into thinking this to be impossible. Show us how to challenge this false counsel.

Tolstoy's Answer: This power demands of us what alone is certain and rational and possible . . . which is possible only in the truth, and, therefore, in the recognition of the truth revealed to us, and the profession of that truth.

Q: When I first attended lectures on higher truths, I heard about the practice of positive doubt. The principal point was that a man must begin to doubt the rightness of his ways if he is ever to see the light. This connects with the idea that man is unaware of his psychic sleep. May we hear more about this helpful practice of honest doubt?

A: As a man in his sleep doubts the reality of his nightmare and years to awaken and return to real life, so the average man of our day cannot, in the depths of his heart, believe the terrible condition in which he finds himself -- and which is growing worse and worse -- to be a reality. He yearns to attain to a higher reality, the consciousness of which is already within him . . . Our average man has but to make a conscious effort and ask himself, "Is not all this an illusion?" in order to feel like an awakened sleeper, transported from a hypocritical and horrible nightmare-world into a living, peaceful, and joyous world of reality.

Q: So we must choose genuine self-change over the mere appearance of goodness?

A: Men, attracted by habit to the existing order, shrink from attempting to change it, therefore they agree to consider this doctrine as a mass of revelations and laws that may be accepted without making any change in one's life: whereas the doctrine . . . is not a doctrine of rules for men to obey, but unfolds a new life-conception, meant as a guide for men who are now entering upon a new life, one entirely different from the past.

Q: What fundamental understanding can establish us in new powers in the most efficient manner?

let them apply one hundredth part of the energy now used by them in outward concerns to those in which they are free -- to the recognition and profession of the truth that confronts them... -- Tolstoy

A: Men have but to understand this: they must cease to care for material and external matters . . . let them apply one hundredth part of the energy now used by them in outward concerns to those in which they are free -- to the recognition and profession of the truth that confronts them, to the deliverance of themselves and others from the falsehoods which conceal the truth. Then the false system of life which now torments us, which threatens us with greater suffering, will be destroyed at once without struggle, then the Kingdom of Heaven, at least in that first stage . . . will be established.

Q: The mystics point out that unenlightened man is split into dozens of separate and contradictory parts which battle endlessly with each other. Observation proves the truth of this. What technique can bring a man together into oneness, wholeness?

A: Man need not perform any acts or exploits, but has only to make an intense effort at consciousness.

Q: Esotericism seems to call for a totally new kind of rebellion; not the usual rebellion which asserts itself egotistically in public for selfish gains, but rebellion against all forms of falsehood, including our own self-punishing errors. Please confirm.

A: I have no inclination to assault myself; it would be of no use. You may do it yourselves if you choose.

Q: When we see public authorities squabbling with each other from opposite corners, it is apparent that most human beings do not really understand what life is all about. How can an individual seeker refuse all this childishness and advance to a conscious perception of life?

A: The worst of human errors spring in most cases from the fact that men who stand on a low intellectual level, when they encounter events of a higher order, instead of trying to rise to the higher level from which these events can be rightly viewed, and making an effort to understand them, judge them by their own low standards, and the less they know of what they speak, the more arrogant and fixed are their judgments.

Q: If only we could see the real facts about the higher life and this low-level society. What a relief from false guilt!

A: Who has hired you as a nurse to this sick society?

Q: These teachings reveal how we exhaust ourselves in useless tasks, like trying to impress others. Please tell us about a truly worthwhile task.

A: The decrease of the general cause of suffering -- illusion -- is the only pleasant work which lies before a man, and gives him that true happiness in which his life consists.

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