The spiritual sphere of society and its problems. The Crisis of Spirituality in the Modern World

The crisis of modern society is a consequence of the narrowing of the meaning of the concept of spirituality, considering it as something exclusively religious. The need for religiosity in a person is closely associated with feelings of fear of loneliness, fear of one's own helplessness, weakness, fear of death, which have become aggravated in the process of society's transition to a new wave of its development.

“It seems to me irrefutable,” writes Freud in his work “Dissatisfaction with Culture,” that the derivation of religious needs from childish helplessness and the adoration of the father associated with it. Moreover, this feeling not only stems from childhood, but is further supported by fear of the omnipotence of fate. it is difficult to give another example of a need as strong in childhood as the need for father's protection. Therefore, the role of the "oceanic" feeling is secondary, it could only serve to restore boundless narcissism. We are able to clearly trace the primary sources of religious beliefs - up to the feeling of childish helplessness. For it may be hiding something else, but so far it is all shrouded in thick fog.

In recent years general state modern Russian society, according to statistics, looks unfavorable:

Russia is classified as one of the countries with the highest mortality rates. The mortality of men of working age is high;

50% of all deaths external causes deaths - suicides, transport injuries, murders, alcohol poisoning .. The number of victims of accidents testifies, if not to a massive unwillingness to live (psychoanalytic interpretation of such situations), then at least to the indifference of many of our fellow citizens to their own and to someone else's life;

The number of murders per 100 thousand inhabitants in our country is now almost 4 times higher than in the United States (where the situation in this respect is also very unfavorable), and about 10 times higher than their prevalence in most European countries;

In terms of the number of suicides, our country is 3 times ahead of the United States, ranking second in Europe and the CIS not only among the population as a whole, but also among young people under the age of 17 (in this case- after Kazakhstan). There are alarming tendencies towards a decrease in the average age of those who commit suicide, towards committing them in increasingly cruel ways, etc.;

Every year, 2 million children suffer from parental cruelty, and 50,000 run away from home;

Every year 5,000 women die from beatings inflicted by their husbands;

Violence against wives, elderly parents and children is recorded in every fourth family;

12% of teenagers use drugs;

More than 20% of child pornography distributed worldwide is filmed in Russia;

About 1.5 million Russian children school age do not attend school at all; children's and adolescents' "social disadvantage" covers at least 4 million people;

IN modern Russia there are about 40 thousand juvenile prisoners, which is about 3 times more than it was in the USSR in the early 1930s;

According to official data, the number of unemployed in 2008 was 5299 thousand people;

According to the corruption index for six years (from 2002 to 2008), our country moved from 71st to 147th place in the world, and the total volume of corruption turnover in Russia is estimated by experts at 250-300 billion dollars a year;

Quantitative data, in turn, can be supplemented by well-known everyday examples that express the state of modern Russian society:

Drugs are sold in schools;

Public speech - including in the media - is illiterate, replete with obscene words and jargon;

Homeless people have become an indispensable attribute of stations and other public places;

The Internet is full of films that show in detail how students beat their teachers;

Hundreds of elderly people are killed in order to take possession of their apartments;

Drunk mothers throw their babies out of windows;

There is (in the 21st century!) also such a phenomenon as the slave trade, and in the literal, and by no means in the metaphorical sense of the word;

Every year, judging by the news, Russia is slipping more and more into an era of total obscurantism. Perhaps no one will be surprised by religious ceremonies repeated with noticeable frequency, in which top officials take part, by arrivals in the country of dubious remains of long-dead people, rags called “Virgin’s belts”, “shrouds”, etc. There are widespread sects that practice, among other things, human sacrifice.

Taken together, these data form a coherent picture that testifies to the painful state of our society. And all this with an unprecedented development of science and technology.

With a problem spiritual crisis closely related to the problem of loneliness. In concept spiritual man reflected, in our opinion, the formation of a modern person in a changing environment of interaction: the globalization of communication, the loss of identity, a new virtual culture.

Thus, we see that the problem of the spiritual and moral crisis is part of the general cultural crisis of modern society, which must be addressed comprehensively.

Part III. Stormy search for oneself: problems of spiritual quest

PROMISES AND TRAPS OF THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Ram Dass

Friend tell me what to do with this world
to which I hold on and continue to cling!
I gave up sewn clothes and wear a cassock,
but one day I noticed that it was made of too good fabric.
Then I bought a piece of burlap, but still
I dangling it over my left shoulder.
I held back my sexual desires
and now I find myself very angry.
I gave up my anger and now I notice
that greed constantly gnaws at me,
I worked hard to destroy the greed
and now I'm proud of myself.
When the mind wants to break its connection with the world,
he is still holding on to one thing.
Kabir says: “Listen my friend,
very few find the way!”

Kabir. "The Book of Kabir"

In the first half of this century, the spiritual search and its trials were interesting and important only for a narrow circle of seekers. Mass culture was completely fascinated by the pursuit of material values ​​and external goals. This situation began to change very rapidly in the 1960s, which brought with it a wave of interest in spirituality and the evolution of consciousness. Among its most notable manifestations have been the widespread and often irresponsible experimentation with psychedelic substances, the rapid development of various non-drug methods of deep self-exploration, such as experiential forms of psychotherapy and biological feedback, as well as a new enthusiasm for ancient and oriental philosophical ideas and psychological practices.

This time of extraordinary fermentation of minds and rapid changes has provided many valuable lessons for a deeper understanding of the craving for the Beyond and the promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path. In addition to the well-known curiosities and excesses in this turbulent process, there were many cases of genuine spiritual awakening, leading to deep search and to a life filled with service. In a less dramatic and exalted form, this wave of spiritual ferment continues to this day.

A growing number of people seem to be experiencing a gradual spiritual awakening today, as well as more dramatic forms of transformation crisis. To recount the lessons of this turbulent period, it would be hard to find someone more knowledgeable and articulate than the psychologist, consciousness explorer, and spiritual seeker Richard Alpert (Ram Dass).

Alpert received his Ph.D. in psychology* from Stanford University and has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Universities of California. In the 60s he was one of the pioneers of psychedelic research. This aroused in him a deep interest in the evolution of consciousness and in the great spiritual philosophies of the East. During this time, he published, with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience: A Guide Based on Tibetan. Book of the Dead” **.

In 1967 his personal and professional interest in spirituality prompted him to undertake a pilgrimage to India. In a small village in the Himalayas, he found his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, or Servant of God. Since then, Ram Dass has explored a wide range of spiritual practices, including Zen meditation, Sufi techniques, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, and various yoga systems or paths to oneness with God: through emotional devotion (bhakti yoga), service (karma yoga), psychological self-knowledge (raja yoga) and activation of internal energy (kundalini yoga).

Ram Dass made a great contribution to the integration of Eastern philosophy and Western thought. With extraordinary frankness and a great sense of humor, describing all the successes and mistakes of his own search, he became a teacher and role model. He generously shared his experience and information in public conversations, lectures and professional conferences, recorded several audio and video cassettes and published a number of books.

Ram Dass is the author of numerous articles and books: Be Here Now, It's Only a Dance, Grain to the Mill, Journey of Awakening*** and Miracles of Love . Together with Paul Gorman, he is the author of the unique book How Can I Help?, intended for those who help people in crisis situations. It is written from a spiritual point of view and provides a lot of valuable information to professionals, volunteers, friends and family. Many of the solutions found in it apply to dealing with spiritual crises.

Ram Dass devoted many years of his life to serving people, which he considers his main yoga, or means of spiritual liberation. In 1973 he founded the Holy Monkey Foundation (Hanuman Foundation) - an organization to help spiritual awakening in the West and the manifestation of compassion in action. Among the activities of this organization are the Prison Ashram Project, which encourages prisoners to use their time there for spiritual practice, and the Life and Dying Project, as well as the Dying Center, where people are taught to consciously approach death and dying. Ram Dass has also provided important assistance in the work of the SEVA Foundation, non-profit organization designed to show compassion in action on a global scale. It helps to create and distribute funds and personnel for various spiritual ministry projects around the world.

Over the past twenty-five years, Ram Dass has become the cultural archetype of the authentic spiritual seeker, devoting all his time to practice and service. The following is an adapted text of a talk given by Ram Dass at the 10th International Transpersonal Conference in Santa Rosa, California, October 1988, about the promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path. In it, he talked about his own profound experience, as well as working with many people in the United States and abroad.

In the 1960s, we underwent a dramatic shift away from absolute reality. We realized that everything we saw and understood was only one kind of reality and that there are other realities. Many years earlier, William James wrote that “our ordinary waking Consciousness is nothing more than one of the types of consciousness, while next to it, separated from it by the thinnest of partitions, there are potential forms of a completely different consciousness. We can live without being aware of their existence, but if we make the appropriate efforts, they are right there in their entirety.”

Until the 1960s, organized religions were the main carriers of spirituality and moral norms in our culture. These organizations encouraged people to behave morally through fear and an internalized superego. The priest was the mediator between you and God. And it was the 60s - first with the help of psychedelics - that dealt a crushing blow to this system. This era has again made relationship with God a direct experience of the individual. Of course, Quakers, as well as other traditions, have already experienced such experiences. But from the point of view of the main current of culture, new concepts came into it, spiritual in their essence, but not connected with formal religiosity *.

For most of the time prior to the 1960s, mystical experiences in our culture were largely denied or considered "aberration." As a social scientist, I also treated him with disdain. Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of this time:

“The only courage that is required of us is courage towards the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable thing that we can face. In this sense, humanity has always been cowardly and caused endless damage to life. Experiences called visions, the whole so-called world of spirits, death - all these things, so closely related to us, as a result of daily "cleansing" are so ousted from our lives that the feelings with which we could comprehend them die off - not to mention God."

But in the 1960s, many of us were aware of something within ourselves that we had not known before. We felt that part of our being that was not separated from the cosmos, and saw how much of our behavior was based on the desire to relieve the pain that comes from our own separateness. For the first time, many of us broke out of the alienation that we have known throughout our adult lives. We began to recognize the healthy beginning of our intuitive heart compassion, which was lost behind the veil of our minds and those artificial structures that we created to explain who we are. We went beyond dualism and experienced our natural oneness with all things.

But it is interesting to what extent these ideas have entered the mainstream. public consciousness over the twenty-five years since then. When I lectured in those days, I was speaking to an audience of 15 to 25 years of age, the seekers of the time. These lectures were like a meeting of an explorer's club, and we compared the maps and routes of our travels. Today, when I give talks in places like Des Moines, Iowa, five hundred people come and I say pretty much the same things I did twenty-five years ago. I would say seventy to eighty percent of these people have never smoked weed, never taken psychedelics, never studied Eastern mysticism, but they all nod in agreement. How should they know? Of course, the reason they perceive such things is that these values ​​- associated with the shift from our narrow vision of reality towards the relativity of all reality - have now entered the flesh of culture. Today we have a much greater choice of realities, which is reflected in many new types of public educational organizations.

In order to understand what happened to us twenty-five years ago, we began to look for maps, and the best of those that were available to us at that time turned out to be oriental cards especially Buddhism and Hinduism. In most Middle Eastern religions, the cards of direct mystical experiences were part of esoteric rather than open teachings and were closely guarded. Kabbalah and Hasidism were not as popular as they are now. So in those early days we turned to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. We turned to various practices to gain new experiences or to integrate our experiences from psychedelic sessions.

In the early 1960s, Tim Leary and I hung a diagram on our wall in Millbrook, a geometric curve showing how soon all people would achieve enlightenment. True, this scheme involved the introduction of LSD into the water supply, but otherwise the situation did not seem too dramatic to us. Such was the power of the psychedelic experiences that collective enlightenment seemed inevitable and irreversible. We surrounded ourselves with other people who had been transformed, and soon we were considered a cult at Harvard, mainly because people who had not experienced this kind of breakthrough could no longer communicate with us. Passing through experiences to the other side has changed our language, thus creating an unbridgeable gap.

On yet another level, there was a kind of naive expectation that the transformation process should be completed immediately. This expectation was belied by what we read, but it seemed to us that psychedelics could work where Buddhism and Hinduism did not work.

When the Buddha, speaking of reincarnations, described how long humanity is on its journey, he cited as an example a mountain six miles high, six miles long and six miles wide. Every hundred years a bird arrives with a silk scarf in its beak and guides it once over the mountain. The time it takes for the scarf to erase the whole mountain is the time you are already on the way. If you apply this to your own life, you begin to understand that it is shorter than the blink of an eye and each birth is just a moment, like a frozen photograph. With this understanding of the time perspective, you can relax and remove the diagram from the wall.

But at the same time, most spiritual teachings speak of urgency*. The Buddha said, "Work as hard as you can." Kabir wrote:

“Friend, wait for the guest while you are alive.
Throw yourself into the experience while you are alive...
What you call "salvation" refers to the time before death.
If you do not break the bonds while you are alive, do you think that the spirits will do it for you later?
The idea that the soul is reunited with an ecstatic being just because the body is mortal is pure fantasy.
What is now is also then.
If you don't find anything now, you'll just end up living in the city of the dead.
If you make love to the Divine now, in your next life you will have an expression of satisfied desire on your face.
So dive into the truth, find out who the teacher is
Believe in great sound!”

So we had the desire to continue what we interpreted as taking the spiritual path and making it a path of achievement. There is a beautiful Zen story about a guy who came to a Zen Master and said, “Master, I know you have many students, but if I study harder than everyone else, how long will it take me to reach enlightenment?” The master replied, "Ten years." The guy said, “OK, if I work day and night and double my efforts, how long will it take me?” “Twenty years,” said the Master. The guy said something else about effort and achievement, and then the Master replied: "Thirty years." Then the guy asked: “Why do you keep adding time?” - “Because if you hold the target with one eye, then only the other eye remains for work, and it slows down immensely,” the Master replied.

In fact, this is precisely the predicament in which we find ourselves. We became so attached to where we were going that we had little time to deepen the practice needed to get there. But over the years we have grown. We have developed patience and as a result we have ceased to calculate the time. This in itself represents a huge growth for Western culture. I do my spiritual practice simply because I do it; what happens will happen. Whether I achieve freedom and enlightenment now or after ten thousand births, it does not concern me. Who cares? What else should I do?! I can't stop anyway, so it doesn't matter to me. The only concern is to be careful not to fall into the trap of your own expectations about the results of the practice.

There is a beautiful story about Nasreddin, a Sufi mystic, a loafer and a slob. Nasreddin went to a neighbor to borrow a large pot for cooking. The neighbor told him: “Nasreddin, you know that you are a completely irresponsible person, and I value my boiler very much. I can't give it to you." But Nasreddin insisted: “My whole family is gathering. I really need it. Tomorrow I will give it to you.” In the end, a neighbor reluctantly gave him a cauldron. Nasreddin very carefully carried him home and the next day stood at the neighbor's door with a boiler. The neighbor was delighted and said: “Nasreddin, this is wonderful!” He took the cauldron and found another small cauldron inside. He asked, "What is this?" Nasreddin replied: "A child was born by the big cauldron." The neighbor, of course, was very pleased. A week later, Nasreddin again came to a neighbor and said: “I would like to borrow your boiler. I have guests again. “Of course, Nasreddin, take it,” the neighbor replied. Nasreddin took the cauldron, but did not appear either the next day or the next day. In the end, the neighbor himself went to Nasreddin and asked: “Nasreddin, where is my boiler?” He replied: "He died." See how easily your own mind can deceive you.

Beginning in the 1960s, one after another, Eastern spiritual teachers began to appear in the West. I remember driving to the Avalon Ballroom with Sufi Sam to hear Allan Ginsberg represent A.S. Bhaktivedanta, who was about to chant this wild mantra called Hare Krishna. The Beatles traveled by plane with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. One day I went with a group of hippies from Haight Ashbury* to a meeting with the elders of the Hopi Indians in Jota Villa. We wanted to have a hopi-hippie gathering at the Grand Canyon. We honored them as our elders, but I don't think they really wanted our honor. Because when we went there, we made terrible mistakes - we gave feathers to children, and some of us made love in front of everyone. We didn't know how to properly respect traditions.

Over the years, we have learned to respect tradition through our association with Eastern teachings. The problems with traditions stemmed from the question of how much of them to take directly and to what extent to modify them. However, the tradition should be changed from within, not from without. But many people in the West started doing something different - they took a tradition from Mahayana Buddhism and said, "This is good for Tibetan Buddhists, but really we should..." We tried many such modifications before we fully understood the practice from the deepest source - and in ourselves and in tradition. Carl Jung wrote something similar about Richard Wilhelm in his preface to the I Ching. He called Wilhelm a "gnostic intermediary", saying that Wilhelm imbibed the Chinese spirit into his flesh and blood. Wilhelm transformed himself in the way that was necessary to understand the tradition.

But many of us have been pushing forward so passionately that we have violated many traditions. We went to the East and brought them from there, but constantly adapted them to our own convenience and comfort. We have a cult of Ego in the West. We are most concerned with "I want", "I desire", "I need". This position is not equally true for Eastern cultures. Many Eastern spiritual practices are not centered on the individual and therefore cannot be directly transferred to the West.

At first, I didn't really understand the importance of tradition. I remember once we organized a TV show with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. We have spoken of detachment as a highly desirable quality of mind. I said to him, "Well, if you are not so attached, then why don't you give up your tradition?" He replied, "I am not attached to anything but my tradition." And I said, "Now, you've got a problem." My judgment stemmed from a failure to appreciate the intimate connection that a person has with his practice. A person enters the practice as an amateur, becomes almost fanatically attached to it, and then “emerges” from it and continues to live in it as in clothes, no longer being attached to it.

In the 1960s, we were united by our newfound spiritual awakenings and the ways we knew to achieve “higher” states*. At that time, one could find groups uniting around sexual freedom, drugs, mantra chanting, or meditation. We used oriental names like satsang or sangha, but our studies gradually created rigid boundaries around ourselves. Often there was a feeling of elitism, a different attitude towards those who were and who were not part of our group. There was a belief that "our way" is the only way. Many of us now recognize how much harm such an attitude of exclusivity can bring.

I am reminded of a story about how God and the Devil were once walking down the street and saw a dazzlingly shining object on the ground. God bent down and, picking it up, remarked, "Oh, that's the truth." And the Devil said, "Oh yeah, give it to me, I'll get it right." This is approximately how it was when “truth” began to be given an official status and streamlined in the 1970s. It became fashionable to be part of one of these great spiritual currents (which were beautiful and lifted people to incredible heights).

The embarrassment arose because many visiting Oriental teachers emerged from traditions based primarily on celibacy and asceticism. They were not ready to meet Western women who were at the peak of their passion for sexual freedom and feminism. The teachers were absolutely vulnerable and caught like flies to honey.

These people were teachers, not gurus. The teacher points the way, while the guru is the way. The guru is like a roasted goose: the guru is ready, there is nothing to add to it. We, however, accepted the concept of a guru, limiting it to our need for a "good father"* in a psychodynamic sense. We wanted the guru to “do it for us”, when in reality the guru is more of a presence that allows or helps you do your work. Depending on your karmic dispositions, you "do it" with yourself.

We gradually brought our evaluative mind into spiritual practice. Personally, I was constantly surrounded by rumors about this or that spiritual master. It seemed that each of them became a colossus with feet of clay. Many of us have constantly wondered if we could afford to receive a teaching from someone who was not pure enough in our eyes. We misunderstood the concept of "submission" or "surrender". We thought that we are talking about submitting to someone as a person, when in fact you are submitting or committing yourself to the truth. Ramana Maharshi said: "God, guru and soul are one and the same." So in reality you are surrendering to your own highest truth, or to the highest wisdom of the guru. Surrender is a very interesting issue. We in the West consider it a very unpleasant thing. We associate it with the image of MacArthur and with a submissively bowed head**. We have not yet matured to understand the fact that unquestioning submission is such an important aspect of the spiritual path.

As we learned more about the traditions, it became clear to us that in order to assimilate everything that happened to us under the influence of psychedelics, we would have to undergo a serious purification. At first we were not enthusiastic about it, but we began to understand that we had to stop creating karma in order to get to a place where we could climb high and not fall. This was the impetus for the passion for renunciation practices. There was a feeling that this earthly plane of existence was an illusion and a source of difficulties. Everyone agreed that we were here by mistake anyway. All that was left was to get “upstairs, outside”, where everything was divine, by any means. People began to feel that if they gave up worldly goods, they would become purer and be able to have deeper experiences. Many did, but now the problem was that they were collecting such experiences as accomplishments.

Meister Eckhart said, "We should practice virtue, not have it." We have tried to wear our virtue as patches on our sleeves to show how pure we are. Nevertheless, our practices and rituals affected us, and we began to have more and more spiritual experiences, to the point that at some point we all found ourselves in a state of spiritual bliss.

We reacted enthusiastically to this experience, we were fascinated by all these phenomena that arose as a result of our practices, meditation and spiritual purification. We were very vulnerable to spiritual materialism. Having an astral being in our own bedroom was almost like having a Ford in the garage for us. Tradition warned us against such an attitude; Buddhism, for example, warns against getting caught up in trance states, because there you experience omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Buddhism advises to simply acknowledge these states and move on. But the temptation to cling to such states as achievements still remains. It is very difficult to understand that there is nothing special about spiritual freedom, it is quite ordinary, and it is this ordinariness that makes it so precious.

With all these abilities comes great energy, because when you meditate and quiet your mind, you are attuning to other levels of reality. If you were a toaster, it would be like sticking your plug into a 220 volt outlet instead of 110 - everything burns out. Many people have had incredible experiences of energy, or shakti, or what is often referred to as Kundalini, the cosmic energy rising up the spine. I remember when this happened to me for the first time; I thought I had an injury because the sensation was very acute. When it began to rise up the spine, it seemed that a thousand snakes were crawling up the back. When Kundalini reached the second chakra, I had an involuntary ejaculation, and she continued to rise. I remember being seriously frightened because I didn't expect anything so terrifying.

I get phone calls all the time from people experiencing Kundalini; I can imagine how many of these calls the Spiritual Emergence Network receives. For example, a Berkeley therapist called and said, “This thing is happening to me, I ride my bike six hours a day and I don't get tired. I can’t sleep, I start crying at the most unexpected moments and I think I’m going crazy.” I said, "Let me read to you full list symptoms, I have a photocopy.” She was surprised: “I thought I was the only one experiencing this.” “No,” I said, “it's all documented. Swami Muktanada wrote about this a long time ago and it's just Mother Kundalini doing her job. Don't worry, it will pass. Just breathe in and out with your whole heart and don't let it harden."

These phenomena began to happen to us, and they frightened us, excited us, captured us and fascinated us, and we stopped to breathe in the fragrance of beautiful flowers. Many people, entering into the experiences of these planes, brought their ego with them; they claimed the power available in these realms as their own. Then they fell into “messiahism”, trying to convince each and everyone of their unique chosenness. These episodes were very painful for everyone.

I remember an episode with my brother when he got into mental asylum because he thought he was the Christ, and as such did terrible things. One day my brother, me and the doctor met in a hospital room - the doctor would not allow my brother to see anyone without his presence.

I entered in a cassock, with a rosary, and bearded, while my brother was in a blue suit and tie. He was locked up and I was free, and we both understood the humor of the situation. We talked about whether it is possible to convince a psychiatrist that my brother is God. All this time, the doctor was writing something in his notebook, obviously feeling out of sorts, because my brother and I were really somewhere far away. Then my brother said, “I don't understand at all why I'm in the hospital and you are free. You look like a psycho." I said, “You think you're the Christ? He replied: "Yes." “Great, then I am also a Christ,” I said. “No, you don't understand!” he objected. To which I replied: "That's exactly why they locked you up." The minute you tell someone that He- not Christ, beware.

Many people have lost their footing on the physical plane of reality when the energy arising from their spiritual practice becomes too intense. The “Spiritual Crisis Support Network” helped them return to earth. In India, people who experienced this kind of separation were called "drunk with the Divine." Anandamayi Ma, one of the greatest saints of all time, was a very worthy Bengali woman who spent two years tumbling around in the front garden of her house. It is known that all this time she went without a sari. In our culture, such behavior is the stuff of a scandalous chronicle column. In Indian culture they say, “Oh, this is a saint who is intoxicated with the Divine. We must take care of him in the temple.”

In our culture, we don't have a support system for this kind of transformative ground loss, a process that you sometimes have to go through. Of course, many people simply went to another reality and did not return. The complete process involves losing touch with the physical plane and then returning back, to this plan. In the early days the whole problem was to get people out there, to get rid of mental patterns and the heaviness that they have absorbed into their lives. Then you looked around and saw that everyone was "floating". I was looking at half the audience and I wanted to say, “Hey, bold up, it's all right. Life isn't that hard." To the other half, I was ready to say, "Let's get together, learn your address, get yourself a job."

When spiritual practice bears its first fruits, but you have not yet gained stability in the experience of transformation, your faith fluctuates and mosquitoes of fanaticism proliferate. Many students have fallen victim to this kind of fanaticism, although their teachers have long since left it behind. When you meet a spiritual teacher of any tradition - Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or an Indian shaman - you will recognize in him a person just like yourself. Such people don't sit around saying, "Okay, if you don't follow my path, then you're not worthy." But all their immediate disciples do just that; they have not yet gone deep enough in their faith, or come out of it at the other end.

For the method to work, it must trap you for a while. You have to become a meditator, but if it ends there, you are lost. You want to come to liberation, not to be a meditator for the rest of your life. Many people have ended up remaining meditators: “I have been meditating for forty-two years...” They look at you with honest eyes, they are bound by the golden chain of orthodoxy. The method should catch you, and if it works, it will exhaust and destroy itself. Then you will reach the other end, come out of it and be free from the method.

This is one of the reasons why Ramakrishna's doctrine is so beautiful - you can see him going through the practice of Kali worship, coming out the opposite end and then exploring other methods. Once you have gone completely through your method, you see that all methods lead to the same thing. People ask, “How is it that you, a Jew, practice Buddhist meditation and your guru is a Hindu?” I tell them, “I don't make a problem out of it. What bothers you so much? There is only one God, the One has no name, and therefore there is no form, and this is nirvana. I don't have any problems with that."

There was a certain element of “correctness” inherent in our approach to the spiritual path, and there were spiritual teachers who helped us overcome this dilemma. Probably Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche helped me the most. What you need in a really good teacher is the quality of cheating. Not wickedness, but swindle. I remember when I taught at the Naropa Institute for the first summer, I had a very difficult time with Trungpa Rinpoche. One of the problems was that all of his students were drunk all the time, studying gambling and ate a lot of meat. I thought, “What kind of spiritual master is this?” I myself have walked the Hindu path of renunciation. Hindus are always afraid to step over the line and fall. And here was this man, leading his disciples, as it seemed to me then, straight to hell.

Of course, I was in captivity judgments. When I looked at the same disciples a few years later, I saw them doing the Hundred Thousand Prostrations* and the hardest spiritual practices. Trungpa Rinpoche took them through their obsessive habits and tendencies towards the deeper aspects of the practice. He was not afraid, while most other traditions avoid such a risk for fear that someone will fail and "go astray." The Tantric teacher is not afraid to lead us through our own dark side. Therefore, you never know whether a Tantric is a perfect teacher or just a man indulging his own inclinations. There is no way for you to know this. If you want to be free, then all that remains for you is to use these teachers to the best of your ability, and then their karmic problems will not concern you. This is the secret of choosing teachers that you will eventually discover for yourself.

One day you come to a point where you find that you can only move forward on the spiritual path at a certain rate, depending on your karmic limitations. This is where you begin to recognize the timing of spiritual work. You can't get ahead of yourself or be a false saint because it throws you back and hits you in the head. You can rise very high, but you can also fall.

There are so many people who say they have "fallen off the path." I tell them, “No, you have not fallen off the path. It was just the karmic effect of pollution. It is all a path, and once you have already begun to awaken, you cannot fall away from the path. This is impossible. Where are you going to fall? Are you going to pretend it never happened? You can forget about it for a while, but what you think is forgotten will come back to you again and again. So don't get discouraged, just go ahead and be a worldly person for a little while."

Among other things, we expected that the spiritual path would make us psychologically healthy. I received a degree in psychology and worked as a psychoanalyst for many years. I taught Freud's theory; I was a psychotherapist. I took psychedelic drugs heavily for six years. I have a guru. I have been meditating regularly since 1970. I taught yoga and studied Sufism, as well as many branches of Buddhism. In all this time I have not rid myself of a single neurosis—not a single one. The only thing that has changed is that if before my neuroses were terrifying monsters, now they look like little imps. “Ah, sexual perversity, I haven’t seen you for a long time, come in, have a cup of tea.” For me, the result of the spiritual path is that I now have a different contextual frame of reference that allows me to identify much less with the neuroses I know and with my own desires. If I don't get what I want it's just as interesting as when I get it. When you start to understand that suffering is mercy, you cannot believe it. You think you are cheating.

While on the spiritual path, you begin to feel bored with Everyday life. Gurdjieff said: "This is just the beginning." He said, “It will get worse. You have already begun to die. Total death is still far away, but still a certain amount of stupidity comes out of you. You can no longer deceive yourself as sincerely as before. Now you have tasted the truth.”

As this growth occurs, your friends change and you don't grow at the same pace. So you lose a lot of friends. It can be very painful when the people you loved, even married to, don't grow up with you. Many of us fell into this trap, feeling guilty about leaving friends and realizing that we needed new types of relationships.

Along the way, when you can no longer justify your own existence by your accomplishments, life begins to become meaningless. When you think you have won but find that you have not really won anything, you begin to experience the dark night of the soul, the despair that comes when everything worldly begins to fall away. But we are never closer to the light than when the darkness is at its deepest. IN in a certain sense the structure of the ego was based on our separateness and on our desire for happiness, convenience and homeliness. Trungpa Rinpoche said in his picaresque way, "Enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment of the Ego."

Therein lies the difficulty. You are aware of the fact that your spiritual journey is fundamentally different from how you saw the path you were on. It is very difficult to make this transition. Many do not want to do this. They want to take strength from their spiritual work and make their lives enjoyable. That's fine and I respect that, but it's not freedom and it's not what the spiritual path offers. It offers freedom, but it requires total submission. Submission - of who you think you are and what you think you are doing - to what There is. The overwhelming thought is that spirituality is dying, becoming yourself. But there is death in it, and people are mourning. Grief is inevitable when who you thought you were starts to fade.

Kalu Rinpoche said, “We live in an illusion, the outward appearance of things. But there is a reality, and that reality is ourselves. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything.” When you give up your individuality, you become part of all things. You are in harmony, in Tao, in the general order of things.

Mahatma Gandhi said:

“God demands no less than complete self-giving in exchange for the only freedom worth having. When a person loses himself, he immediately finds himself in the service of all living things. This ministry becomes his revival and his joy. He becomes a new man, never tired of giving himself completely to God's creation.”

I am reminded of an anecdote about a pig and a chicken walking down the street. They were hungry and wanted to have breakfast. When they got to the restaurant, the pig said, "I won't come in here." “Why not?” the hen asked. “Because the sign says: “Scrambled eggs and ham.” - "Well, let's go in and order something else," said the hen. “That suits you,” replied the pig, “because only a partial contribution is required from you, and a full return from me.”

One of the things we develop along the way is the inner witness. The ability to calmly observe phenomena, including one's own behavior, emotions, and reactions. When you cultivate the witness more deeply, it is as if you are living on two levels at the same time. There is an inner level of the witness and an outer level of desires, fear, emotions, actions, reactions. This is one of the stages of the process, and it gives you great power. Behind it there is another stage - this is complete dedication. As the Buddhist texts say, “When the mind gazes into itself, the stream of discursive and conceptual thinking ends and supreme enlightenment is attained. When the witness turns to himself, when he witnesses the witness, then you go behind the witness and everything is just there. You no longer observe one part of your mind through another. You are no longer watching at all - rather you are simply there. Everything becomes simple again. I recently had an extraordinary experience. For so many years I've been trying to be divine, and lately I've been getting so many letters saying, "Thank you for being so human." Well, isn't that too much?!

One of the biggest traps a Westerner can fall into is our intellectual understanding, because we want to know what we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wise. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me "smart". When he wanted to praise me, he called me "simple". The intellect is a fine servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the instrument of our separateness. And the intuitive, compassionate heart is the gateway to unity.

spiritual path to best case gives us a chance to return to the heart's innate compassion and intuitive wisdom. Equilibrium occurs when we use our intellect as a servant, but do not fall under the control or trap of our thinking mind.

Here I have tried to show that the spiritual path is a fertile opportunity for us. The fact that you and I knew at all that such a path exists is already a mercy from a karmic point of view. Each of us must trust ourselves to find our own, unique way walk this path. If you become a false saint, it will hit you sooner or later. You must remain true to yourself.

We have a chance to become the truth to which we all aspire. One of Gandhi's most powerful lines: "My message is my life." One rabbi said: “I went to a neighboring village to see a tzaddik, a mystic rabbi. I did not go to study Torah with him, but to see him lace up his shoes.” St. Francis says, "It's no use going to preach unless our walking becomes our preaching." We must integrate spirituality into our daily lives, bringing equanimity, joy, and reverence into it. We must bring with us the ability to look into the eyes of suffering and take it into ourselves without looking away.

When I work with and support someone with AIDS, my heart breaks because I love that person and they suffer so much. And at the same time, there is peace and joy inside me. For me, this is an almost unresolvable paradox. But this is the real help. If you just let suffering take over you, you are just deepening someone else's wound.

You are spiritually working on yourself for the sake of all other beings. Because until you develop this quality of peace, love, joy, presence, honesty and truth, all your actions will be colored by your attachments. You cannot wait for enlightenment to act, and so you use your actions as a way to work on yourself. My whole life is my path, and this applies to every experience I have. As Emmanuel, my spirit friend, told me, “Ram Dass, why don't you take a course? Try to be human." All our experience, high and low, is a course of study, and it is perfect. I invite you to join me in my studies.

The rapid development of esotericism and the spread of all kinds of spiritual practices leads to the fact that an increasing number of people go through a spiritual crisis or spiritual transformation of the individual. Now many are drawn to Knowledge, looking for new ways spiritual development. Who am I? Why am I? Where did you come from? Where am I going? And when a person is no longer satisfied with the answers from the government, education, society, religion, he sets off on the Path.

What can a traveler encounter? What pitfalls await him on the Path?

The concept of a spiritual crisis was introduced by the founder of transpersonal psychology, an American psychiatrist of Czech origin with more than thirty years of research experience in the field of non-ordinary states of consciousness, Stanislav Grof. Prior to this, psychiatry, having imposed its stencils on the spiritual experiences of a person, attributed the mystical states and activities of world religions and spiritual movements to the field of psychopathology.

Any acute experience or stress can lead to a spiritual crisis.

But especially often provoke a spiritual crisis of the individual all sorts of spiritual practices, passion for esotericism, deep religiosity. These practices are just designed to be a catalyst for mystical experiences and spiritual rebirths.

Traditional spiritual practices are focused on liberation from dependence on material world. The main link of this dependence is the human Ego. It is precisely at the destruction of the Ego-programs that the efforts of those who follow the Path of spiritual development are directed.

The main experience of a spiritual crisis is that a person does not see the meaning of life, the future is gloomy, the feeling that he is missing something very important and valuable does not leave him. The process is accompanied by strong emotional experiences, a person experiences an almost complete failure in personal, social, public life or in the field of health. Having experienced fatal moments, he is freed from the influence of the Ego, acquires a higher level of conscious thinking.

Traditional psychotherapy in this case can only play a supporting role. A person who is going through the stages of a spiritual crisis does not need to be treated! But he can be helped to go through the transformation as painlessly as possible. But, by and large, a person can cope with his spiritual crisis only on his own, alone with himself.

Manifestations of a spiritual crisis are very individual, there are no two identical crises, but the main forms of a crisis can be observed. In humans, these forms often overlap.

During the passage of spiritual transformation, a powerful activation of the psyche occurs, large layers of the unconscious come to the surface, and this prevents a person from functioning normally in everyday life. The crisis can sometimes drag on for many years.

Like any crisis, the spiritual one also has its dangers and opportunities. A person can break down, or he can rise to a qualitatively new level (the so-called enlightenment).

Stanislav Grof identified the following most common threatening and difficult types of experiences that come to the surface in the process of personality transformation.

Fear

The body seems to be falling apart, new physical stresses and disturbing pains appear. However, fear, for the most part, seems completely illogical, as if it has almost nothing to do with the person experiencing it. Sometimes an individual involved in a crisis is able to deal with fears relatively easily, but other times the feeling of fear develops into a completely uncontrollable panic.

It could be fear of the unknown. Images come out of the subconscious, traumatic experiences, gates to the other world open, some are haunted by visions, prophetic dreams etc.

Fear of losing control. Everything around is collapsing, and a person can do nothing about it. He painfully realizes that he has no power over life and death, and that he is controlled by forces independent of his desires.

Fear of death and other unaccountable fears. There are frequent cases of incomprehensible bodily sensations: unknown pains, hard-to-diagnose diseases, outbreaks or sharp drops in energy, trembling, weakness, dizziness, a feeling of the presence of some unknown force that permeates the entire physical being.

Loneliness

It can be experienced with different strengths - from a vague feeling of separation from other people and the world to a deep and complete immersion in existential alienation.

The individual sometimes has to deal with unusual states of consciousness, which are very different from the everyday experiences of friends and acquaintances.

When inner world becomes more active, a person feels the need to move away from everyday life. The surrounding people, as a rule, do not understand him. Yes, and communication, which previously gave pleasure, now does not attract at all, and sometimes brings discomfort, up to bodily manifestations (weakness, headache, nausea, etc.). Often people who are in a spiritual search are looking for a society of "their own", where everyone speaks the same language, understands and accepts each other. Knowing that I'm not alone can be a relief.

During an existential crisis, a person feels cut off from his deepest essence, higher power or God. The result of this is the most terrible kind of loneliness - a complete and perfect existential alienation that permeates the entire human being. He cannot find any connection with the Divine; instead, he is haunted by a constant, agonizing feeling that God has abandoned him. Even when a person is surrounded by love and support, he can be filled with deep and burning loneliness.

Those who face an existential crisis feel not only their isolation, but also their utter insignificance, like useless specks of dust in a vast cosmos. The universe itself looks absurd and meaningless, and any human activity seems small and empty. To such people it may seem that the whole of humanity is engaged in a barren existence with no useful purpose. They can dive into deep depression and despair, and even trying to commit suicide. Often they guess that even suicide will not solve their problem; it seems to them that there is no way out of this torment.

Isolating Behavior

During a spiritual crisis, a person may seem "different" for a while.

In our culture it is not customary to be different from others, others may perceive it as inappropriate. The sense of separation is intensified whenever a person is told or otherwise given to understand: "You are not like us."

A person's interests and values ​​change. He is no longer able to discuss the purchase of new clothes, and former friends are moving away. The prospect of spending an evening in a club with a glass of whiskey no longer arouses optimism, but may cause disgust.

In addition, people undergoing the process of personality transformation can change their appearance dramatically.

For some, these new forms of behavior represent only a temporary stage of spiritual development, while for others they can become a permanent part of a new way of life.

Experiencing "madness"

During a spiritual crisis, the role of the logical mind often weakens, and the colorful, rich world of intuition, inspiration and imagination comes to the fore. Unexpectedly, strange and disturbing emotions arise, and once familiar rationality does not help to explain what is happening. This moment of spiritual development is sometimes very frightening.

Being entirely in the power of an active inner world, full of vivid dramatic events and exciting emotions, people cannot act objectively and rationally. They may see this as the final destruction of any remnants of sanity and fear that they are approaching complete, irreversible insanity.

Symbolic death

Ananda K. Coomaraswami wrote: “No being can reach top level existence without ceasing its ordinary existence.

In people, the topic of death causes, for the most part, negative associations. They perceive death as a frightening unknown, and when it comes as part of their inner experience, they are horrified.

For many people going through a spiritual crisis, this process is quick and unexpected. Suddenly, they feel as if their comfort and security is vanishing, and they are moving in an unknown direction. The usual ways of being are no longer good, but they have yet to be replaced by new ones.

One more form symbolic death represents a state of detachment from various roles, relationships, the world and oneself. It is well known in many spiritual systems as the main goal of inner development.

An important aspect of the experience of symbolic death during inner transformation is the death of the ego. To complete the spiritual transformation, it is necessary that the former mode of existence "died", the Ego must be destroyed, opening the way for a new "I". When the ego disintegrates, people feel as if their personality has disintegrated. They are no longer sure of their place in this world, not sure if they can continue to be full-fledged human beings.

Outwardly, their old interests no longer matter, value systems and friends change, and they lose confidence that they behave correctly in everyday life. Internally, they may experience a gradual loss of identity and feel that their physical, emotional and spiritual essence is suddenly and violently destroyed. They may think they are really dying, suddenly having to face their deepest fears.

It can be a very tragic misunderstanding at this stage to confuse the ego's death wish with the urge to actually commit suicide. A person can easily confuse the desire for what can be called "egocide" - the "killing" of the Ego - with an attraction to suicide, suicide. People at this stage are often driven by a powerful inner conviction that something in them must die. If the internal pressure is great enough and if there is no understanding of the dynamics of ego death, they may misinterpret these feelings and embody them in external self-destructive behavior.

From myself I will add the following.

Increased responsibility or Many knowledge - many sorrows

Sooner or later, a person who has embarked on the Path is noticed by higher forces of various directions, both dark and light. Some seekers rush back and forth at first, experiencing many temptations and trials. However, sooner or later a person must make his Choice.

It is customary to single out two main Paths - the occult and the mystical.

Path of the Occultist. He studies the Divine Law and uses it for his own purposes. It relies on reason and will, and not on love. He learns to control the mind so that it becomes a useful collaborator in the fulfillment of his goal.

Path of the Mystic. This is the path of love and sacrifice. In his choice, he is always guided by his heart. Love enables him to identify himself with God.

People who have embarked on the Path have a sharp increase in their ability to influence the world, people and circumstances. If such a person is left “unattended”, he can break a lot of firewood. And one day a person clearly understands that he is “under the hood”. When an individual is determined with his direction in the Path, the appropriate forces begin to lead him.

Previously, like all people, it seemed to him that he could do everything that came to mind, he was limited only by his conscience and state laws. And then he begins to understand that any of his actions, thoughts, emotions, causes the so-called effect of circles on the water. A person already clearly sees the connection between his actions and their consequences. And all this is monitored by higher forces, which, explicitly or not very clearly, begin to correct his behavior. Incomprehensible events occur, visions come, vague urges, sometimes direct instructions. It can be all sorts of "accidents" that interfere with the execution of the plan. These can be bodily sensations: the legs do not go, the throat is intercepted, the head hurts, the chest is squeezed, it is stabbed in the side (each has its own). All kinds of emotional reactions, for example, the mood deteriorates sharply at the thought of the intended action.

So-called mining is happening more and more often. Working off is essentially a restoration of balance. boomerang effect. This is where the laws of karmic retribution come into play. And since a person on the spiritual Path begins to intensively live out his karma, the working off comes to him several times faster than to an ordinary person. The simplest example: he said nasty things to a passer-by, walked a few meters away, fell down.

In addition, there are increased requirements for such a person. He can no longer afford frivolity, as before. He is already required to be aware and strictly observe the Laws (we are not talking about state laws).

In conclusion, I would like to say the following. For a person who has taken the first steps on this Path, there will be no turning back. This will forever change his worldview, way of thinking and reactions to the world around him. This Path is very difficult, full of dangers, ups and downs. But going back for a traveler is a degradation, a complete failure ...

R.I. Popov deduced the following formula of failure for esoteric losers:

I want to become enlightened - I meditate - I am blissful - my strength is gone - my career is gone - society does not understand me - I am the only one so smart - I am very advanced - my opinion means a lot - I feel my chakras - I hear the thoughts of others - I absorb all the nasty things in the world - I am getting fat and I get sick - I probably developed incorrectly - attempts to restore physical and emotional form - a lifelong fear of esotericism - leaving for a traditional religion - philistinism.

Good luck on your journey!

(c) elleirina

The fact that the crisis exists, and the situation is only getting worse and worse, no one will argue. You can verify this by reading newspaper reports, visiting a school, or simply going out into the street. We will not go into all the epithets and details of the characteristics of our generation. Instead, we will try to focus on the main aspects of the crisis and the causes that gave rise to them. Take, for example, the WHO (short for World Health Organization), which cites the main reasons why young people are interested in psychotropic substances are five desires:

1. make decisions yourself, feeling like adults;
2. to be like others (not to be a "black sheep");
3. relax and unwind;
4. take risks and rebel;
5. to satisfy curiosity.

Psychotropic substances are available, peer pressure is not easing - all this can push young man on a deadly path. It must be taken into account that often these substances become for young people an "outlet" from the problems and hypocrisy of society. Take a close look at these reasons. Ask yourself about the reasons for just such decisions by the young listed reasons. Please note that elementary, natural desires become dominant and pushing - young people do not know how (or do not want to) use the wealth given to them by nature: intelligence, beauty, love for others, etc.

Now let's ask ourselves a question about the reasons for using just such ways of satisfying natural needs. There are several reasons. At the heart of them is the inability of society to meet these needs of young people. The employment of adults, the prevailing bureaucracy, the hypocrisy and cynicism of society - this is what young people see. Add to this mass pop culture, which is nothing more than a means of enrichment, universally promoting not moral values, but self-indulgence and the search for paths of least resistance. As a result, we get a recipe for apathy and depression, which, according to doctors, affects today's youth and which young people are trying to overcome just the same through one of the ways to get "pleasure" and escape from reality.

Young people are not taught to achieve happiness by developing and improving their inner world and culture. For the most part, the school and students speak different languages, look at things and the world different eyes and live in different realities. And this is the main danger. Pop culture offers pleasure and indulges desires, while school only forces and squeezes into the framework of hypocrisy and hypocrisy. Who will give priority to the younger generation? The conclusion is obvious. Of course, there are many excellent schools and teachers loved by children. But what is their percentage in the total mass? And aren't they just the exception to the rule? To solve the problem and solve the problem, one must clearly know and soberly see the source data. Otherwise, the decision will not be correct.

This topic is so relevant that at the state level the issues of introducing juvenile justice and juvenile courts were discussed. It is also relevant for small towns. Poverty, the moral decline of society, the crisis of education and family - these are the main reasons for such a widespread crime among young people. It is important to remember that two factors should keep a person from crime - the punishability of an act and a developed self-consciousness (culture, spirituality, ethics, etc.), that is, external and internal factors of deterrence.

At the same time, self-consciousness (internal limiter) should be in the first place. The smaller the influence of this limiter, the greater the increase in crime. But the state of society as a whole and the propagated ideals reduce this factor to zero. And, as a result, a sense of impunity pushes young people to insane, sometimes even criminal, actions. How to instill high moral values ​​in young people is a difficult question, but one thing is clear - this must be done now, otherwise it may be too late later.

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Mon, 25 March, 2019 - 09:00 Kyiv	Kindergarten of the center "Kievskiy Dvorik"	3300 UAH

A wonderful description of what is happening to our world at the present moment. Although, perhaps, you need to start with yourself, right? And that will change everyone else around!

SPIRITUAL CRISIS - a crisis of social ideals and values ​​that make up the moral core of culture and give the cultural system the quality of organic integrity, authenticity. The crisis is accompanied by an intensification of ethno-social processes of collapse and disintegration, moral, economic and intellectual chaos, loss of moral priorities, a sharp polarization of society, and the destruction of social institutions. The spiritual crisis of society and the real danger of loss cultural identity sharply intensify the processes of consolidation national consciousness, in the sphere of which there is an intensive search for the values ​​of cultural integration and national consolidation.

The ideological prerequisite for overcoming the spiritual crisis is: the re-creation of those values ​​that form the core national culture and determine its uniqueness; the revival of national ideals; actualization in the public self-consciousness of people of the spiritual referents of the nation ...
"Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology and Pedagogy". 2013

A simple Russian person, after reading such an explanation of the definition of the Spiritual crisis in the modern " encyclopedic dictionary in psychology and pedagogy", may fall into a stupor from such a set of incomprehensible foreign words and phrases that not only do not really explain anything, but even more confuse the human mind and create even more questions, but still do not give an answer to the question of what is the Spiritual crisis and what is the reason for its appearance in the Russian world.

For some reason, it never occurs to anyone that for any person living in the Russian world, it will be much clearer if the explanations are given in a simple, native language, and not in the form of a set of incomprehensible foreign words and terms. Was it difficult to write an explanation in this vein:

SPIRITUAL CRISIS is a destructive, chaotic, confused state of society, in which the proposed base means and methods for achieving goals are at odds with the original, ancient foundations of society, with its spiritual culture and centuries-old folk tradition. To overcome the spiritual crisis, society needs to return to its ancient roots and original order, to its unique folk culture which preserves the spiritual strength of the people.

Such an explanation, I think, will be the most understandable for any ordinary person, regardless of his nationality, his religion or creed, living not only in the Russian world, but also in any country on our Earth.

In modern society, where spiritual values ​​are replaced or specially replaced by material values, always, sooner or later, there is a spiritual crisis. This becomes even more noticeable in modern, so-called "civilized countries", where spiritual values ​​are hushed up, or ridiculed as savagery and relics of the past, or completely ignored. The spiritual crisis manifests itself even in countries with great religious activity. Thus, the presence of a large number religious people in a country and the presence in it of a large number of religious buildings (temples, churches (churches), mosques, synagogues or datsans) does not yet indicate that this country is protected from a spiritual crisis.

The spiritual crisis of society never appears suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, it does not exist by itself, as an independent phenomenon. The spiritual crisis of society gains its destructive power gradually, over many years, many decades and centuries, and it gains this strength from soulless individuals who, with their lack of spirituality, infect the people around them, depriving them of spiritual strength, thereby leading people to a personal spiritual crisis. So where does the spiritual crisis in our world come from? Where are its roots and sources that feed it? In order to somehow understand these issues, you need to look into our distant past.

What distinguished the Russian world from the outside world around it? The Russian world was distinguished by the presence of enormous spiritual power in the people of its inhabitants. The saturation of spiritual power was so great that it was perceived by people outside the Russian world, even by the organs of smell. Remember the old Slavic tales, legends and traditions, which say about this: “I smell the Russian spirit”, “Here is the Russian spirit, here it smells of Russia”, etc., but these were not just beautiful turns of speech when these expressions were used V figuratively, these were images reflecting the objective world in all its diversity. Many pundits from academic science and skeptics may not agree with such a statement, incredulously coming up with various interpretations of these phrases, but how can they then explain such a manifestation of the enormous spiritual strength of the Russian people as spiritual unity. After all, throughout the known world history, any wars against the Russian world ended in the defeat of the invaders, who not only felt the Russian spirit with their nose, but also perceived the spiritual unity of the Russian people with all the fibers of their souls.

The Russian world had enough ill-wishers and enemies at all times throughout world history. What was it in the Russian world that prevented these hostile forces from living peacefully in their countries? The main reason was the presence in the Russian world of enormous spiritual power. This is due to the fact that on the lands inhabited by Slavic clans and tribes there were many sources of spiritual power. The Slavs ennobled the places where the streams of spiritual power came out of the earth, built temples and sanctuaries in these places, built temples to their ancient gods over the springs, and settled next to them. Living in cities and settlements near such sources filled people with great spiritual strength. This force strengthened not only the spirit of a person, but also comprehensively developed his soul, and filled his body with living natural force. These are the people of the Russian world who became an obstacle to hostile forces on their way to world domination.

Realizing that the Russian world cannot be captured and destroyed from outside, the hostile forces decided to weaken it from the inside, using their own basic qualities against the Slavs, such as: curiosity, decency, truthfulness, religious tolerance, gullibility and good nature. After all, the Slavs never elevated themselves above other peoples, did not indicate to others how to live correctly and what to believe in, they considered all people on Earth equal and similar to themselves.

First, together with trade caravans, from different countries, on Slavic lands went representatives of various cults and religions. They explained their appearance at the Slavic markets by the fact that merchants and merchants from other countries need to bring trebs and gifts to their Gods after a successful trade or exchange. The Slavs were calm about these explanations, it is necessary that it is necessary, because they also brought trebs and gifts to their ancient Gods after the end of trading affairs. In addition, the Slavs even helped foreign priests build cult buildings for other Gods near the marketplace, so that next time even more trade caravans could arrive for trade and exchange.

But then something strange happened, merchants with caravans went to their native countries, and strangers, priests of various cults, and religions of other Gods, remained near the marketplace in the cult buildings built for them. At first, there were explanations that they still needed to do a lot of things in their temples and bring beauty there for the next arrival of the trading caravan, then some other reasons were invented, and after a while the Slavs got used to the fact that in the temples of other Gods, next to the markets, constantly priests of various cults and religions live.

Ordering utensils necessary for temples from artisans, buying things and food from merchants, the priest made acquaintances with the people he needed. Having gained confidence in people, the priest began to unobtrusively tell them about the countries he visited, about the wondrous miracles that are happening in the world, and gradually, gradually moved on to a story about his religion, about all the charms, miracles and graces that his cult or religion. These stories made a special impression on the younger generation. After a while, impressed by the stories, the children, and sometimes their parents, themselves came to the priest to listen to his interesting stories about the wondrous miracles happening in the world and about the unusual faith that bestows various graces on its followers.

The people of the Russian World tend to communicate with each other, share news, especially in the last months of autumn, when the harvest is harvested in the field and all the bins are filled, as well as in the long winter, when they are not busy with field work and large-scale trade has fallen into hibernation. At this time, people gathered for gatherings, where they discussed news and various rumors. It was at such gatherings that unusual stories were heard about wondrous miracles in overseas countries, about unusual cults and religions of other Gods, which were told by merchants and artisans who themselves heard them from priests living in foreign temples near the marketplace. Those who were interested in these stories, after such gatherings, they themselves began to come to foreign priests in order to find out as much as possible about what was happening in distant countries, how people live there and what gods they revere. Human curiosity is not a vice, but only a means of broadening one's horizons.

Arriving at a strange temple, in addition to the priest, they were met by an unusual atmosphere. Painted in bright colors interior decoration, sometimes images or statues of alien Gods, as well as unusual smells from certain herbs and oils burned in special bowls. I think that it is not necessary to explain in what state people were led by the narration of the priests superimposed on a combination of bright color paintings and special smells. This state gave a feeling of unearthly grace. People more and more often began to visit other people's temples in order to feel an unusual state. Gradually, they forgot to visit the temples, temples and sanctuaries of their ancient Gods. Thus, they no longer received nourishment from the ancient sources of spiritual power.

As time passed, more and more people came to the temples and places of worship of foreign Gods, which means that the number of such temples and places of worship increased. The results were very pleasing to the enemies of the Russian world, for fewer and fewer Slavs received spiritual strength from their ancient sources. After several generations, the Western Slavic clans and tribes living in the territories of the eastern and Western Europe, lost their ancient sources of spiritual power, since many of them were forgotten, and many ancient Slavic temples and sanctuaries standing above the sources were destroyed, and the priests who preserved them were destroyed.

In the future, the same picture was observed in the territories of residence of the Eastern Slavic clans and tribes. These actions of foreign ill-wishers and enemies of the Russian world continued until the early 1920s, when the Bolsheviks came to power in post-imperial Russia. They did not understand spiritual issues at all, they simply declared all religions, cults and beliefs to be “opium for the people”, banned all confessions, clergy of various religions and beliefs, either shot them or sent them to prisons or concentration camps, and temples and ancient cult sanctuaries , began to destroy or use for their own needs ...