Lecture “The Flowers of Evil”

“The Flowers of Evil”. Lecture at the Moscow International Film School
January 10, 2002. Geydar Dhemal.
Lecture at the Moscow International Film School (January 2002)

My name is Heydar Jamal, I am the chairman of the Islamic Committee. This is an international organization aimed at solving intellectual problems.

So, the topic that you formulated for discussion is the problem of evil in all aspects. Including aesthetic ones. You start with the aesthetic aspect as you study at Film School. However, it is quite clear that before becoming an aesthetic problem, the problem of evil must be a religious, theological problem, since evil and good are ethical categories. We live in a cultural environment where the concepts of “evil” and “good” have long become platitudes, very common and meaningless words that often characterize the emotional and subjective attitude of the speaker to the situation.
But if people rise a little higher, they start talking about universal human values, about the struggle for everything good and against everything bad. Unfortunately, this banalization of evil, just like the banalization of good, has actually disarmed modern human spiritually. That is, he is a rather helpless person who is in captivity of his impulses and wishes, poorly aware of the fundamental vectors, which are, first of all, Evil, and then, to some extent, maybe Good.

It must be said that evil is not a characteristic of any culture and any civilization, is not something so banally inherent in any intellectual, civilizational field. Moreover, the appearance of the idea of evil in human history, in human consciousness, was a revolution. It was a revolutionary idea. It was a colossal explosion — the fact that someone suddenly realized at some point in existence that there is evil, it was like a supernova explosion. Because usually, normally, in all ancient traditions, in all ancient civilizations, people did not have this idea, did not consider that there is evil. They did not consider that there is evil in the sense in which we pronounce this word “evil” today with pathos, based on centuries, millennia of Christian, Islamic tradition, with vibration, with pathos. And, for example, in ancient Egypt, and in modern India, which actually inherits the classical heritage of the Brahminical tradition, and in ancient China, the attitude towards evil was completely different. In Druid Europe, in ancient Rome, in Hellenic antiquity, the perception of evil was completely different. In general, there was a very functional attitude towards the fact that mutually opposing processes are going on in the world. Something is destroyed, something is created. This is a certain given, this is a manifestation of destiny, a manifestation of fate. This is the decree of heaven. There are some processes that are conditioned, say, karmically; that is, action is equal to reaction. You did something, hit someone, crushed them, and then they crush you. In principle, it is like a kind of mechanic that causes pain, causes trouble. But one must strive to reduce the level of this pain, to reduce the level of these troubles by certain spiritual, psychological techniques and procedures. And as it were, this is a matter of technology. For example, Buddhism focused on the problem of negativity as much as possible. And it did it in defiance of Brahmanism, which considered the negative as an indispensable part of the process of becoming.

When the idea of evil appeared in its ethical essence, it was a powerful movement against the main stream of traditions, the main stream of the universal sacredly oriented mentality. But in this case, too, human tried in every possible way to limit, narrow down the scope of reasoning about evil; to banalize it, at the same time, of course, fell into deep logical contradictions. The theme of evil was formulated from the moment when it became a clear and open narrative to all mankind. Not that mythical, legendary, which breaks up into some sections. That is, incomprehensible Achaeans or proto-Chinese, or some very deep proto-Aryan antiquity of Europe, which we can only hypothetically speak about.

General human history. In this universal history, a new factor begins to operate, the Prophets. Prophets who come to the space previously occupied by priests, kings… Great kings, who were cult figures of theophany, the embodiment of a deity on earth, surrounded by hierarchies of priests… Where the top — the heavenly top — found a strong correspondence in the earthly bottom. It is into this space that the prophets appear. And they start talking from the very beginning about evil. And it made a shocking impression, naturally, it shocked humanity, shocked history. It shook the core of the human soul. Because, for that matter, in druidic Europe, what later Christianity called the devil and demons, it was just some kind of natural agent. What is the devil for a pagan of pre-Christian Europe? This is a kind of space, natural agent, with the help of which certain operations can be carried out.

And all of a sudden this conversation about evil, which suddenly awakened in a person a kind of ethical instinct that has been dormant until now, ethical aspirations … That is, it suddenly turned out that evil, to some extent, is understandable, that evil is open to a person to some extent, and people immediately identified what they understand about evil, first of all, with the fact that they are finite, mortal, vulnerable . That is, they identified evil with the experience that everything, including themselves, is being destroyed. So it turned out that it is given to a person to understand evil through the experience of destruction, through the experience that everything around is destroyed and they themselves are mortal. And it’s very clear. This does not mean, by the way, that this is evil in the final instance, if we analyze to the end what evil is. This does not mean that destruction itself, for example, is a person — there is no person, there is an object — there is no object, this is precisely what is evil. No. But a person understands evil through the example of what it is, and then it was gone, transience. This is how a person perceives the first taste of evil. And then the person begins to think. We start to think. If a certain thing is, and then it was gone, what destroyed it? And it turns out that any thing is finite, because it is definite and fixed. And what destroyed it was that it was immersed in a kind of unqualified, quality-free, limitless basis. Every finite thing is rooted in some way in the infinite, which, on the one hand, holds it, and on the other, opposes it. This infinite destroys it. In other words, everything transient is destroyed in the eternal. Thus, it turns out that the Absolute, (and the Absolute, in fact, comes from the root “dissolve”, solvo, desolvo), the Absolute, it turns out, as it were, is the very evil that a person encounters directly, which destroys everything . But it turns out that evil then is absolute. This is precisely the basis in which all reality is immersed. It is evil, since we are faced with the fact that we perceive the taste of evil through destruction, and destruction carries in itself precisely the infinite, baseless Absolute.

This thought is so monstrous and unbearable for a normal person that he begins to carry out a series of mental operations in order to deviate from this logical conclusion, to banalize all this, to reduce, to place evil in some relative framework. And here comes to the aid a mass of, as it were, mistakes, confusions, set-ups, and cultural overlays. Because the same teaching of the prophets about evil, it does not come out of nowhere, but into the intellectual space, already occupied before by completely different doctrines. For example, Brahmanism, Advanto-Vedantism, Zoroastrianism, and so on, where either the idea of evil does not exist, or evil is functional, limited, and so on. And now, let’s say, there is a confusion between the revolutionary new teachings of the Prophets and these old doctrines of the priests. But when we talk about the teachings of the prophets, we need to be specific. We are not talking about some kind of Prophets in general, not about some kind of phenomenology of prophecy. Not about such a common concept — this word, perhaps, was also used by the Druids, who fell into a frenzy and broadcast on behalf of , say, a certain spirit. Or a colleague of the priests Pythia called herself a prophet. But we are referring to very specific Prophets. We mean the prophets of the Bible. We mean the prophets who come from Noah, whose chain is restored by Abraham, and which ends in the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, peace be upon them all. This chain of prophets is absolutely concrete, which stands in the center, in the axis of human history, around which everything revolves, which opposes everything.

And all these Prophets come into the world according to the same scheme. They come as heralds of the unrighteousness of what is — the “status quo”, of what should come to replace all this, eschatologically come and cancel everything that exists, that an alternative new one has appeared, and they always come in conflict with the existing global political regime. Or it is a ruler who exists at the time of a particular Prophet and whom a particular Prophet opposes, and who, in turn, seeks to kill him in the cradle and in the subsequent period. Either this is already, as in the case of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, we are talking about the geopolitical establishment of his time. At the time of the arrival of Islam in the world, it was Byzantium, it was Zoroastrian Iran. These were two giant superpowers in conflict with each other. And Islam acted as an opponent of both, that is, an opponent of the geopolitical status quo at that time. But the fact is that Christianity also opposed what was the status quo at that time, the Roman Empire. But the message of Moses was also a challenge to the pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who was a spiritual model of the archaic world and archaic humanity, such a clear spiritual model that information and rituals related to the ancient Egyptian tradition are still embedded in the minds of certain initiatory organizations. And all this was challenged by Moses. But Abraham, who appeared in the world at the time of Nimrod, who ruled Babylon, also challenged him.

That is, the prophets are revolutionaries who act in this way: at one pole they have a specific ruler of today, whom they accuse of illegitimacy, unrighteousness and tyranny. At the other pole is the whole status quo, everything that exists, the whole anthology, which they challenge, pointing out that they were sent to this world by God, except for whom there is no winner, and who is an alternative to everything. What is everything? Yes, to this absolute fate. Here is this infinite power of negativity, which erases all certainty. In other words, the Prophets do not hesitate to call the evil they oppose absolute. It is then their followers, historically prescribing themselves to their tradition, appointing themselves as interpreters, experts, the priesthood, as if continuing the impulse from the prophet, they are already reducing the theme of evil, they are already saying that evil is small, transient, admitted in the form an experiment, an exam, a test, a technical element, but in fact everything is wonderful, since this is God’s world, and in God’s world — what evil? God’s world was created by God, this is the subsequent damage …

The message, which is contained directly in the message of the prophets, is the definition of that — the first — that evil is limitless and it is absolute. The second is that it will be defeated. That is, the infinity and absoluteness of evil has an alternative. And they will be defeated and they will be changed. And instead of absolute evil, an equally absolute good will come. Relatively speaking, good, because the absolute that will come instead of evil, of course, is immeasurably brighter, more luminous, more vivid than the good that exists, let’s not forget this, in the pagan holistic tradition. That is, you must remember that the theme of the good, the immanent good, developed within the framework of pagan metaphysics. Plato spoke about being, about the last final unlimited being as good. We talked about how the incoming revolutionary message is superimposed on an already existing worldview, and confusion occurs. In our time, the last two thousand years, this confusion occurs in an easy way, because the message brought into the world by Jesus Christ, the message brought into the world by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon them both, is superimposed on Greek philosophy, which is crowned by the concept of the immanent good, coinciding with the idea of a complete and unlimited being. There is such a concept, it exists in its own space, in the space of ontologically oriented immanentistic metaphysics. What the prophets say has nothing to do with it. And the perception of Platonism and Aristotenism in the traditions of Christianity and Islam was one of the most serious methodological errors, which led these traditions into their historical manifestation from the true path, and perhaps, to some extent, responsible … (that is, confusion with Greek philosophy , adopting the methodology of Hellenic pagan philosophy) is largely responsible for discrediting theology as such, for bleeding and weakening the actions of these traditions. In any case, to a large extent, this applies to Christianity. Islam had a radical solution; from a certain moment, the philosophical tradition there was simply excluded from the context of religious spiritual action. That is, there was a tradition of kalam, this tradition of Plato and Aristotle, before the Mongols. Then it was decided that this philosophy does not correspond to Islam at all, not only Plato and Aristotle, but, in general, the whole method. Unfortunately, they “threw the baby out with the bath water.” That is, Islamic civilization was left without a whole section of spiritual activity. But it was a radical decision. But for that they divorced Islamic theology, Islamic religious feelings and Greek philosophy. They were divorced. This did not happen in Christianity. In Christianity, the marriage between Hellenism and the Christian church tradition turned out to be not destroyed, closer, and this ultimately led to the fact that we live today, let’s not forget this, in the post-Christian world.

— Tell me, what do you mean by this connection — Christianity and Hellenism?

The Church Fathers were Platonists… Platonism and Aristotelianism as a methodology became the basis for Christian theology. Moreover, Plato became to a greater extent the basis for Byzantine theology, and Aristotle became the basis for the theology of the Western, Catholic, say Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, is a thinker who is the basis of eschatological philosophy, which is still officially the philosophy of the Catholic Church, the Vatican, put the categorical system of Aristotle. That is, Platonism and Neo-Platonism, despite the efforts of individual theologians who considered all this to be an intellectual experience that did not correspond to Christianity, despite their protests and warnings, in general, Neo-Platonism was not rejected as something alien to prophetic traditions. And as a result, we live today in a neo-pagan world, where the intellectual and moral guidelines characteristic of pre-Christian Rome have been restored in their rights.

— Here, you are talking about evil, that there is some kind of force before which everything is mortal and everything collapses. It’s just not very clear what can defeat her then?

- This is the central question. The paradox is precisely that, the Prophets, on the one hand, say “yes”: that the total power, which is evil, and has no apparent limits, and yet it will be defeated, it will be defeated in such an eschatological final moment, when there is only one reality in which we find ourselves, and the reality is not social, not political, in general, not human, but total reality, the reality of heaven and earth, moreover, the reality of what holds them beyond heaven and earth — it will be swept away, replaced by another; something completely different, a different reality will come. And more than that, these Prophets say that the kingdom that is the kingdom of which we are slaves, that is, the kingdom of God, it is coming, it will come, it will replace the kingdom in which evil is allowed to rule for a certain time. Such a formulation about Satan: “is allowed to tempt.”

This is a kind of preamble that introduces a philosophical, cultural aspect. I would like to concentrate on the philosophical understanding of what evil is. That is, if we return to the description of evil as that infinite foundation that erases all concrete definitions: people, ideas, forms, beings, things, phenomena, it erases everything, and a person perceives evil precisely as a fact of destruction … But after all, this is only the contact of a limited thing with unlimitedness. That is, destruction is a consequence. The consequence of the fact that something that exists, as it were, falls into this fire. It is not the burning of a log that is evil… but the manifestation of evil, the burning of a log, which comes from the fact that the log, a piece of wood, has fallen into the fire, which destroys it. What is evil — burning logs or fire? In fact, of course, fire is evil, because the taste of evil that we get from destroying a log is only a consequence of the fact that fire has the power to destroy this log. Fire, that is, in this case, the infinite that acts as an alternative to any specific given, it is evil. And in this regard, we find that we are immersed in a world that has a certain analogue of this destructive infinity. This analogue is matter.

Ancient philosophers, Gnostics, the same Neo-Platonists, Zoroastrians… already had this instinct or intuition that matter in some way is a kind of delegate of that negative infinity that erases and destroys. Of course, when we say “matter”, we must clarify that we mean not the material aspect of the world, not the corporal aspect (here, the Marxist philosophers, by the way, had such low qualifications that, as a rule, they confused two completely different things — matter in its philosophical Aristotelian original meaning and the corporal, that is, the material aspect of the world, which is only a particular manifestation of matter). Matter, generally speaking, in the philosophical tradition is a substance, devoid of properties, and possessing the potential to produce a form from itself when exposed to it. That is, matter cannot be felt, perceived, experienced, it is pure substance. As a pure substance, it is not limited in itself by any forms, it is not limited, homogeneous, continuous, continuum, and so on. That is, in a more concrete way, it carries the characteristics of that infinity, which is the night that absorbs everything given.

Tradition, including the priestly tradition, speaks of night above and night below. There are like two nights. The night above is the night of the Absolute, which consumes everything. The night below is the night of matter, from which, as it were, all manifested things emerge. But these two nights are in a clear relationship, they correspond to each other. Now, we’re immersed in the night below. We are immersed in the matter’s night, which is no longer just an abstraction (the infinite that annihilates). Matter has a specific enemy because we instinctively feel that there is a certain fire inside us, a drop of light, which, like a firefly, like a beacon, is thrown into this darkness, and this darkness threatens to flood it. Moreover, why is there confusion in a naive person between the idea of matter and the corporal, material world? Yes, because the material world in a way closer to us is a delegate of this night. That is, he presents this night of substance, the night of matter, to us in a sensual way. Matter is a substance that has no form, no image, nothing. But the material world arises from it, which is the fruit of a mixture of matter and, say, forms and ideas that, getting into matter, produce objects. And the tactile, homogeneous-tactile aspect of objects brings to us the concept of a continuous space that surrounds us and sucks us out. In particular, this was the inspiration of Descartes, who said that reality consists of two moments: extension and point. Extension is loss, it is that which extends. A point is a thought, and a thought is my position as a subject in the midst of this extension. I am because I think, I perform the act of witnessing. I am a kind of violation of this homogeneity. I am a pole just driven into this open field that stretches around me. And, naturally, there is a dramatic opposition between extension and point; extension always strives to restore its homogeneity, it always strives to erase and absorb this point. That is why this point, that is, this moment of presence inside us, this moment of spiritual presence inside the night stretching around us, it makes us experience a threat, and the onset of this night on everything that exists, including us, makes us experience destruction as evil, because there is a concrete opposition, a violation of the homogeneity in the face of every sentient being, and that which extends around him. Matter in its dimension of extension, homogeneity, etc. is the representative of this night of negativity that erases everything. Therefore, matter is an anti-spiritual, absolutely evil, absolutely terrible force. Inside it burns this firefly of some ephemeral presence. The pledge, of what may be, will come to replace it as an alternative, but for now it is only an ephemeral presence in our hearts. From the point of view of the tradition of the Prophets, from the point of view of the religion of monotheism, good or goodness is not a piece of being, not just a certain sphere of light in itself, not rationalized harmony … There is good, relative, only the vector of resistance of matter. There is goodness only to the extent that the center within you — the point of light — resists the homogeneity, continuity, infinity of this extended night that seeks to engulf you.

Naturally, the theme of inertia, cold, entropy, extinction, death is connected with this night. The theme of the point is connected with the line of resistance, vertical, will, because faith is nothing but intellectual will. What is faith? It is a concentrated intellectual postulation that there is something around us that we deny, and we orientate ourselves to what should be instead of what is. It is nothing but an act of will. But, in essence, there is no difference between an intellectual volitional act and the fight against entropy, that is, an act of religious faith. Now, at some point, in parallel and completely separate from what the Prophets acted, the prophetic chain came and revolutionary threw the very idea of evil into the world, into a consciousness that perceives the status quo as an irrevocable duty. And even now, an ordinary person who is accustomed to instinctively returning to pagan models, to think in non-religious terms, if he is told that what exists is evil, what exists must be destroyed, what exists must be replaced with its alternative (an absolutely normal thing, from the point of view of the Gospel and the Quran , but simply formulated extremely rigidly)…. If you say this to an ordinary person, he will answer: “Yes, you are an extremist! What a horror you say! What, all that exists is evil? This cannot be. But what about children, flowers of life “and something like that…” That is, the idea that evil is radical, evil is total, is unacceptable. But how was it in the beginning? If a person has no concept of evil at all, how can he explain what evil is? How to explain to him that evil is total? …He has no concept of evil. And “totally” is everything, and “everything” is the norm, it is reasonable, it exists, there is no alternative, it is a synthesis of all vectors that calm down in the great zero, and you just need to accept this reality. This is how any metaphysician and pagan thinks. You tell him — this is evil, what is evil? So, all that is, all that exists — it must be destroyed. Why? Because by admitting alternatives, it morally requires the affirmation of a mandatory alternative.

Since there is one “it” only as it is, then the one in which a drop of spirit is glimmering must come and say: “This should not be.” It’s a secret. This is a mystical secret. The prophets are motivated by a mystical secret will, a paradoxical one that goes against everything that exists. Why? They cannot explain to the people plunged into a stupor why. But some feel, rise, and follow them. Because there are only those who follow the prophets, and there are those who do not follow the prophets — this is, as it were, fatal. This is an act of providence.

It is impossible for a person who thinks in terms of Advaita Vedanta, that is, the last non-duality of everything real, reality, it is impossible to explain the pathos of Christian or Islamic (which is essentially the same) eschatology, it is impossible for a Vedantist to explain the eschatological idea. He will say yes, in our tradition there is also the concept of cycles. Yes, the manvantaras that combine into kalpas. Manvantara is a human cycle, it ends, possibilities are exhausted, the “night of Brahma” comes, a new creation arises, and so on. But eschatology is not cycles, it is not a new creation, it is not a new golden age after the Kali Yuga. Eschatology is the destruction of all that exists and the appearance of a new earth and a new heaven in its place, it is the kingdom of God, which comes to replace the kingdom of Satan, or, if you like, in more general terms, the kingdom of God, which comes to replace fate, absolute fate, to the eternal decree of the unchanging, always revolving in the same way sky … It is replaced by the kingdom of God, the kingdom of absolute freedom, the kingdom of absolute light. This means that this is a victory over matter, in particular, the victory of the spirit over matter, the spirit thrown into the dungeon of matter. And the fact that the kingdom of God will come is absolute good, which is not there now, but instead of it there is a vector of good, which consists in resistance, opposition to matter, opposition to darkness. Hence everything, hence all techniques, hence asceticism, hence the path of the revolutionary Anabaptist sects of Müntzer and Hus, hence all social movements with the will to absolute justice, which have always risen as religious movements, movements in the wake of the light of the prophets in this world.

When we evaluate the problem in imperative and unconditional categories, it is of course very difficult to move from this perspective to the fact that evil, at the same time, is also a cultural factor within our human society, already mediated. That is, there was a time when people did not understand at all what evil is… Which by the way is reflected in the Bible, which in some way corresponds to the theme of a certain innocence of Adam in paradise, which is not necessarily a good state. That is, the ignorance of Adam, who did not know what evil is, what sin is; he seemed to be in an absolutely sleeping state, and we are accustomed to perceive this as a state of paradise, which is obviously positive. He did not know what sin is, so he was without sin. But the Bible does not say so, there is no such conclusion at all. He did not know. But then he learned only what really exists. He did not invent sin at the moment of learning about it, he met with it. And a person who is in a state of debilism, a person who is simply an idiot or naive, a person who simply does not know how the universe works, he thereby does not make the universe around him, which he does not know, good, harmonious completely. But suddenly something brings him out of this state, the truth of reality falls on him like a waterfall. And then there is the loss of innocence. But there was no innocence around, because there was that force of negativity, which was personified in the image of a snake. Indeed, in the tradition, the serpent is an auroboros that surrounds reality, compresses it and devours it.
And so, indirect, evil from the moment when they didn’t know anything about it at all and didn’t want to know, comes to the moment when it is an aspect of some entertainment, some aesthetics, just the core of cultural construction, some dimension that forms all things everyday civilization — from leisure to personal landmarks. It is very strange. It would seem that the evil that came as a tool for explaining what is, cannot be banalized to such an extent as to turn into a source of aesthetics, admiration, play.

In fact, there is a curious process of mixing here. First, what is aesthetics? Aesthetics itself needs a very special and deep consideration of itself through the lens of a total theological analysis. Ultimately, aesthetics is impossible without form. And the form is impossible without the manifestation of quantity in the material corporal world. For what is form if it is not geometry, if it is not symmetry, if it is not proportion, if it is not rhythm. For the primary aesthetic feeling is associated with instinctive satisfaction from the acquired harmony. The most primary and rawest aesthetics manifested itself in the ancient world, where it had a clearly geometric, rhythmic character. Paintings were everywhere in the world. People, animals, gods, everything was depicted in the world. But they were portrayed for functional purposes — to worship them, to conjure them, to influence the causal chain of events. For example, the idols on Easter Island or the images illustrating the book of the dead on the walls of the pyramids are functional images, informational images, or magical images.
But the images, which carry in themselves exclusively the satisfaction of proportionality and harmony, are a very concentrated place of the origin of Hellas, well, in general, the Mediterranean Oikoumene. And from there this aesthetic conception, more or less, and sometimes violently, subtly violently — through the propagandistic dissemination of the worldview — through the path of aesthetic experience, aesthetic experience, the possibility of the aesthetic — it spread throughout the world. Aesthetics, in principle, also penetrated to the east, since the east through the Mediterranean was very closely connected with the Hellenic tradition. As you know, Plato and Aristotle were returned to Europe by the Arabs, but before they were returned, they became deeply acquainted with them. And the powerful consequences of the ancient message acted in the Arab-Islamic civilization, practically, up to the Mongols. The Mongols destroyed the magnificent enchanting space of the Caliphate. Post-Mongolian Islamic civilization looks extremely one-dimensional and monochrome compared to the Abbasids, for example. But by the way, it was saved by this, because flowering leads to death.

Aesthetics thus spread very widely. What is aesthetics? In fact, this is the earliest form of perception of information. When we enter a room, we turn on the light, and in the very first split second we evaluate this room in terms of compliance with the usual, that is, the one we left this room when we left. The room looks a certain way. On the left, let’s say, a bookcase, on the right — a vase, straight ahead, a little to the left of the wall, for example, a picture, and so on. And when a person returns to a room that he himself has arranged, cleaned, with which he has certain memories associated, he recognizes it, he has a feeling of satisfaction that he found himself in a familiar world. Between this feeling, and the feeling of satisfaction from harmony, rhythm, symmetry, proportionality, there is a very strict connection. Imagine that someone visited this room and made some rearrangements, everything changed places. You turn on the light and find yourself in a completely unfamiliar space. It’s the shock that knocks you out. Ultimate shock — as if you find yourself in outer space in general, where everything is not clear to you at all, what is called in French [depriism] (?) — the loss of a sense of presence in oneself. But doesn’t a person experience the same thing when he encounters sound dissonance, with obvious asymmetry, with the irregularity of the arrangement of surfaces, angles, and so on. That is, something that quantitatively, geometrically, does not correspond to what is expected in it, some a priori present in a person will to proportion, the idea of proportion (I’m talking about proportion in a very broad sense). Human is a corporal system immersed in the corporal world, the world of corporal landmarks. Walking a person upside down on the ceiling clearly introduces a creaky, scratching effect not only on an adult, who, due to the mediation of his ideas, can also laugh, but even on a small child. A small child who does not yet have experience, seeing something that does not meet universal standards, will begin to react negatively, cry, and so on. This means that the feeling of how it should be in the corporal world is built into a person a priori. In other words, these patterns, templates, thought forms that exist in a person are some kind of quantitative programs, according to which a person evaluates the sensory information that comes to him. That is, there is a clang of grinding metal around the corner — “yeah, cars collided, or something like that.” That is, information is not the sound of tearing metal that has reached it; this sound becomes information when it fits into a certain model, a certain cliché. If a person is faced with a chaos of impressions, spots and cannot put this puzzle together into a recognizable picture, then this is not information for him, but chaotic entropy. So, aesthetics is the earliest form of organization, experience of information.

How is information different from knowledge? Knowledge is the conscious penetration into the mystery of the new, the comprehension of what, relatively speaking, in truth, in the eyes of God, this object is. And information is getting a certain correspondence with the a priori idea that exists inside you, about what is due, when sounds, spots, rhythms, all this falls into a certain picture that corresponds to something in your corporal reality. By the way, we are entering the information society. Around us, the rapid dictate of information is crowding out the sphere of knowledge, the sphere of research, the sphere of comprehension, the sphere of penetration. In place of all this comes information. That is, streams of impression that correspond to pre-prepared clichés. We become a kind of carriers of artificial intelligence, which, as it were, click-click-click — some wedges, some planes fall into place in the containers prepared for them, the gaps prepared for them. The first step towards the information society was taken in Hellas, oddly enough. Hellas is depicted as the childhood of mankind. Marx said that this is the laughing, jubilant childhood of mankind, meaning that it is all spontaneous, it is all wonderful; statues, sand, water, wreaths, dancing.

But it turns out that this is the first step towards the information society, the first step towards the fact that a person would cease to be a person. That is why, by the way, Hellenism was perceived by early Christianity, and Islam as well, as a challenge to the spirit, as a terrible threat, as a spiritual ulcer. That’s why the church fought Hellenism, really. Unfortunately, Hellenism turned out to be much more flexible and tenacious and corresponding to something inert, something terrible in human, a tradition that could not be ousted. It, in general, has remained, is acting, and, one might say, to some extent, it won today. Although, in a completely different form, unrecognizable as Hellenism. But let’s not forget that in Christian times, Hellenism repeatedly returned, through the Renaissance, for example, through neoclassicism, a little later, in different forms, and so on. That is, in various forms, he returned, dragging the whole legacy in the form of statues with their blind eyes, which, as they say, were painted and had pupils at the time they were made, and much more — capitals, columns, proportions and much more .

So, the information society is a society that postulates the right of matter to be continuous, homogeneous, and not to have the slightest gap in its midst. In other words, the information society is such an organization of a human where the point of opposition, a drop of opposition, a drop of light is destroyed in a human, it is thrown out of his heart. The society that was in ancient Egypt did not encroach on it. Then there was a society of tyranny, a society of slaves, from which they squeezed all the juices, turned them into caustic sweat, into olive oil, but they did not encroach on this point. The information society tells us that matter is a stream of pure quantity, in which discreteness is illusory, and continuum is the final truth about how the world works. The world is a continuum.

Democritus’ attempt to break it into atoms is discredited in the information society, in the informational doctrine of reality. Thus, the information society is the path that aesthetics has traveled from the shores of Hellas in order to bury the moral and ethical idea of evil again and return, as it were, an immoral, countermoral experience of the status quo as the only given and due, the flow of perception of which must correspond to the system pre-set clichés…

Hence it turns out that the space in which we live, the political space, is not indifferent to the topic of good and evil, and this is how. If we live in a realm of tyranny and oppression from the side of infinite extension, which oppresses us and crushes a lonely soul like the cosmos, then this should be broadcast at the human level as political technologies, social control, state organization. That is, the whole system of structures in which our destiny, our will, our inner wealth are alienated from us in favor of illegitimate, impersonal, anti-human entities that have been turned into idols by informational violence, aestheticization, be it states, institutions, no matter what… But we believe that this is in line with the expected, predictable, due, and so on. And we serve this, we alienate from ourselves the most subtle substance that makes us spiritual beings. We are turning into a puppet nomenclature of pawns. Exchange pawns on some huge board. Control, which we used to call power, is just not power, because power is originally a theological term that indicates God’s ability to create. And control is the reduction of possibility. What is control? Control is a ban on the passage to the left, to the right, control is a ban on the transport of certain things, this is censorship. It’s all reduction, it’s all limitation… we call it power. The power does not give us this, that, the fifth, the tenth, but we do not see that this power has generated something unprecedented. We see that it takes away from us the opportunity to do this, that, and the third, that is, it reduces everything to very one-dimensional monochrome vibrations of a molecule at a well-defined frequency. Like a reduction of Brownian motion in a very understandable scheme. It is known that when Brownian motion disappears, and a warm solution, where molecules move in disorderly motion, is replaced by such a cold crystallized substance, it is said that information increases, that is, the amount of information increases and the amount of entropy decreases. That is, control is an information process. Control over the activities and capabilities of each of us, limiting these capabilities, is an increase in information in the social volume, just as when cooling a hot suspension, where there are many random fluctuations, when cooling, entropy decreases, and information increases. Control is, again, an information methodology. It is amazing that it is connected with aesthetics, because aesthetics plays a huge role in the demagogic education of the elements subject to this control. Aesthetics is not just this or that cliché or demagogy, hoisting the flag, singing hymns and so on. Aesthetics is also the will of the bourgeois to proportion, harmony and predictability of his everyday life. Aesthetics is the will to clean streets, well, how is the will? — a claim, a demand, an expectation, clean streets, trams arriving on time, clearly — like machines — working social structures. In the twenties it was very beautifully stated. We, the marching legions, squares, look at the record of sports parades of the thirties, what a colossal aesthetic! It could be built only by bringing to virtuosity the forms of sports corporal psychological control over the human masses.

So, it turns out that the matter around us is extended and homogeneous, and is the deputy of the negative in destroying us. It turns out that this matter can be coarse and chaotic, or it can be subtle and highly organized. And when it is subtle and highly organized, it is much more dangerous. Because it destroys us, it oppresses us, it wipes its feet on us. The explosion of such structures, the destruction of such structures, the annihilation of such structures of subtle matter, is simply the duty of every spiritual person who subtly and deeply feels freedom.

But here we come to another issue. Religion and revolution. Religion is the true revolution. The first revolution with which a revolution begins in general. Religion, as we said, the theme of evil brought by the Prophets, and the declaration of all things evil was a spiritual revolution. This means that the real eschatological perspective is a revolutionary perspective, because in it what is, is replaced by what is absolutely opposite. Night turns to day. Revolution. But, inside this evil is the opposition of this extension, the opposition to this vampiric, sucking vacuum of the universe. After all, this is our duty, this is the revolutionary path that the Prophets commanded us, which Abraham, Moses, Christ, Mohammed, peace be upon them all commanded us. Is the kingdom of heaven not taken by force? But what is the kingdom of heaven? This is the kingdom of God that comes after the end of history, it is taken by force. Any force, internal, external. There is such a hadith in Islam: “Every believer must resist evil with his hand, if he cannot, with a word, if he cannot with a word, at least in his heart.” Although this is the weakest degree of faith. The strongest, then, is the confrontation with the hand. In other words, a person should come out and say: “Here, where I stand, this evil will not pass.” If he is swept away, well, the Lord will leave him alive, because the Quran says: “Those who fell in the way of the Lord are alive, but you do not know.” Therefore, the flowers of evil, they grow around us, they grow in the form of all those elements that are habitual, expected patterns, clichés. What each of us seems familiar, unquestionable, predictable, these are the flowers of evil. All these are the flowers of evil. Because our future death blooms in them, our spiritual eclipse, the absolute triumph of artificial intelligence and the absolute triumph of the information-quantitative flow, in which there will be neither plus, nor minus, nor zero, but only numbers popping out of the window, in which our past and future. With this I would like to end and invite you to ask questions.

-How to distinguish a genuine Prophet from a false prophet?

Genuine prophets are, first, sent by God with a certain law and a certain scripture, which is providentially affirmed and revealed as authentic. And within itself has its own logic. Those who follow this logic, they are in the providential ray, and those who do not follow, for them the question itself is meaningless. For example, there is such a tradition, a direction of thought, called [philosophia perennis] — eternal philosophy or philosophy about the eternal. After the appearance of Rene Guenon and his students in Western intellectual history, providentialism, the restoration of the theme of eternal tradition, conversations about the eternal content of all traditions, and so on, became fashionable in general. From the point of view of eternal philosophy, you approach a person, you say: there are priests… there is a distinction in the Jewish tradition — the era of the Prophets and the era of the sages. Sages are priests who interpret and interpret what is left of the prophets. Because the prophets leave and cannot control, this is already a combination of a providential ray and the actions of people. That is, while the Prophet is alive, he demonstrates to his disciples the criteria of truth and untruth. But when he is gone, such wolves in sheep’s clothing already come and say: now we know what he said, we can explain to you, follow us, and they begin to comment, and after a while the herd of his followers herded by the prophet, it turns into rams that are grazing by shepherds who are interpreters and connoisseurs of traditions. That is, in other words, paganism, like the surf, returns again, to the space that the Prophet purified, as Christ expelled the money changers from the temple… And then paganism, using the old instincts of ancient man, it returns back to where it was. But already it is, as it were, disturbed, it cannot come in the old form, for example, the form of human sacrifices, gladiator fights, open forms of sorcery and magic. It returns in a different form — interpretations that are designed to de-sharp this sting, de-sharp the sword brought into the world, and make it just a knife or fork, that is, banalize, adapt it to patterns left in the subconscious from ancient pagan layers. Therefore, your question is good, but the answer to it is beyond formal logic. During the time of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, many false prophets arose, but providentially they exposed themselves. That is, they say, they say that everything is fine, but something emerges there that renders meaningless with one such turn all the previous, previously said.

In addition, your question makes sense within the tradition itself, when it is necessary to distinguish what is inherited from what is brought. Let’s say there is a Christian tradition, there is a Christian tradition, an Islamic tradition, the Sunnah of the Prophet, what the Prophet said, commented on different things. Naturally, after his death, it became an object of political conjuncture. The Amiyad dynasty came, which was associated with those who opposed him to the very end, in the end realizing that Islam was winning, they accepted Islam and seized the political initiative and imposed their dynasty on the Caliphate. And, naturally, they began to revive the old pagan pre-Islamic traditions. That is, where Islam, social justice, reliance on the poor, on the disadvantaged, rudeness, arrogance, slave tribal nobility, tribal structure began to revive again. But people see that millions of people entered Islam, led by this sense of justice. And then hadiths are invented, that is, the prophet’s sunnah, a bunch of hired Ulama begins to invent that the prophet said this and that on such and such occasion. Three million hadiths at the end of the Amyyad dynasty… That is, purely physically, a person could not speak out three million separate discrete times on all occasions. And even thirty thousand times couldn’t be, and here are three million. And the question arises, how to purify, how to discard false layering, how to return to the core, how to distinguish authentic hadiths that also remained, because they carried the goal of transmitting genuine Islam, grains, pearls in this ocean of husks.
How to distinguish? And the Prophet left us a method — he said that if the hadith attributed to me contradicts what is in the Quran, it is false. This is a very simple and effective method, and it turns out that a huge number of hadiths, including those now quoted, do not meet this criterion. In addition, there is a formal way. It is necessary to find out who transmitted this hadith from the Prophet, who then heard it, that is, the chain of the transmitter — it must be clearly traced. Why do Fomenko and Nosovsky have no chance with their chronology? Because none of them mentioned the fact of Islamic chronology, which arose immediately after the Prophet. And this chronology, that is, day after day, fixation of events, biographies of real people, the possibility of this person meeting that person … That is, it is written, this one transmitted from that one. And we begin to study the biography and, for example, one lived in Baghdad, and the other in Basen, and they did not meet. That’s it, the chain no longer matches. That is, if they could not meet, then he could not hear about it. So, the chronology in Islam, it is so verified that to say: it was there, not here, three hundred years lost, six people it was actually one, or one was six — it’s complete nonsense, because everything was happening in front of a huge civilization that sent hundreds and thousands geographers, historians, like Ibn Batuta, who went on a trip along the Volga, and left clear instructions where he was, whom he met, the exact years — 923, if my memory serves me right. Against the background of this clear indication, which is checked with a lot of others, what kind of chronology games can there be?!

It was we who made a small degression from the theme of evil towards the question of methods. But again, it all boils down to the question you asked. How to distinguish true from false. In Spirit. Providentially. In the Qur’an there is such ayah “Whoever God wants to bring down, there is no mentor for him.” That is, someone who has gone astray can be given some formal guidelines, but these formal guidelines are meaningless, because the true reality is revealed only in the providential ray, that is, from within through the light of the heart.

- You said that evil is everything. And it turns out that there is no good now, at all?

- I said — good is opposition to evil, as a testament to the good that will come, if we prove to be worthy of it, if the critical mass of our resistance reaches what will be accepted by God.

- You said that evil would be defeated in such a way that one reality, the reality of good and truth, it would replace the existing reality. Is this like the end of the world?

— Of course. But the end of the world does not appear immediately, like turning on an electric light bulb, it appears in stages, through convulsions and agony of that old world that needs to be replaced.

- There is such a work “Mort”, and it also talks about the change of realities; there is something happening that should not happen, and something that was not expected, and no one understands this, and therefore the new reality, which happened due to some mistake, suppresses the old one. Do you mean it?

— This is the kind of intellectual constructs designed to falsify, discredit the concept of eschatology… What is eschatology?

- Eschatology is the doctrine of the last things, from eschatos, from Greek — the last. That is, this is a doctrine about the end of the world, about the end of this reality, about the last days, about how the last stages of this reality will proceed. That is, the central document of Christian eschatology, Christian tradition is the Apocalypse, which makes sense for everyone to know. As for the Qur’an, it is all an eschatological document, because it is all focused on the end of what is, the resurrection from the dead and the Day of Judgment. It’s like a central cross-cutting theme. So, as far as this “Mort” is concerned, as far as I understand, those people who live there, they don’t even understand that another reality has come. The fact is that eschatology is based on the doctrine of finalism. The author of the concept you are talking about proceeds from continuum, that is, that matter is continuum. Event, cause-and — effect series — continuums. Here is such an example — a person drinks, but at the same time does not notice a change in his state, because he does not have a core inside, there is no “I” inside, so he swims with his whole being to a new state and he does not have a distance and criterion. Therefore, after drinking a large amount of alcohol, he says — “I’m sober”, although his legs are tangled. Because he has no distance. What is described there is the same process of intoxication in the absence of a rod. This is the continuum of the phenomenal world. Eschatology speaks of finality, that is, of striking, of the end of everything. After the second coming of the messiah takes place — Jesus Christ, Mahdi, the guided one, who is the leader of the Islamic community, together they defeat the Antichrist, and the great kingdom of justice reigns, in which all physical laws stop, entropy stops. Life and flowering completely triumph over death, and this is all in our old world. After that, the angel’s trumpet sounds, and everyone dies, and after that another trumpet sounds, and everyone is resurrected, and after that, the last judgment. Nothing to do with what you are saying. Everyone must die, there must be an absolute end, a break with all experience.

- In the work I was talking about, there was no end …

- And that work, it throws in the theme of eternity and the invincibility of continuum matter and the absence of a real alternative at the moment, because all this is floating, has no core, no evaluation criterion. Therefore, there are teachings very similar to this that the end of the world has already happened, but we do not know it, we were not witnesses. This point of view was confessed by occultists already in the 20–30s — that the end of the world has already happened, the era of Aquarius is over, this is all the charm of demonic forms of obsession of consciousness.
“The only reason to choose the path of goodness is the light of the heart. But it’s very easy to talk about it in words, but when you come home you really want to sleep, when you stand by the refrigerator, you want to eat. I don’t understand how one can go to this light, choose the right position and resist matter.

— Well, in this case, firstly, I will probably say what is objective for me, but first you need to come to an intellectual conviction of the need to follow the light of the heart. That is, to create an internal intellectual prerequisite for the manifestation of the will, which will be the core of faith. Faith is based not on what is, but on what should be. And there are a lot of lukewarm people who know what should be, but nevertheless they do not have that passionary reserve, or, in other words, their battery is at a too low level, too low potential, and they simply cannot translate this obligation into a breakdown. , access to reality, everything remains a virtual wish. This problem is already psychological, subjective. But if there is a sufficiently powerful potential, then there is a technology to counteract the pressure of matter on itself, which is optimally developed in Islam. This is a whole system of orientations, coming from social, economic and political beliefs, where at every step a person opposes entropy. There is even such an Islamic doctrine — seventy-two forms or levels of application of faith. The most primary begins with the fact that a person walks and sees a stone on the road. He shifts it to the side of the road so that it does not interfere. This is the mission he has to do, it’s easier to pass by. The stone lies, you remove it — this is the most primitive effort. Effort, generally speaking, is at the core of faith, and it is a central theological concept. In the tradition of the Prophets, naturally in Islam, this effort is called jahd, the well-known word jihad is derived from this root. Jihad is a system of continuous organized efforts to overcome entropy, universal glaciation, and the universal triumph of matter. There are specific instructions that are given in the form of divine law and elaborated in detail. But in order to apply them in life… They are given and given, but there are hundreds of thousands of ethnic Muslims who, knowing about them or having heard about them, live an ordinary life, a petty bourgeois or Soviet life, are shopkeepers and drink in their spare moments, which is strictly prohibited. Because Islam is a religion in which the rights of reason, of mind, are postulated. That is, the mind has its own rights, and the believer does not have the right to influence his state by changing it with psychotropic substances. If he does this, he is committing a crime. The only state that is subject to change is the profane state, which he must change by prayer. Any chemical influences are a fall into the darkness of matter. At the same time, there is a psychological change, that is, the psychic night of each individual body is one of the twilight of matter. One of the directions is abstinence from alcohol. But it does not mean asceticism, in the sense that Simeon the Stylite stood for 30 years on a pillar on one leg. This means perfecting your body to serve God as a military commander, who leads you as an army to conquer the kingdom of God. Not as a figurative metaphorical one, but precisely to the realm that replaces this world, of which you are a part. And if you are to some extent merged with this world, then go against yourself, against relatives, against loved ones, in the name of that call that has in you only one point on which God stands. The foot of God rests and gives light inside, as it were, the earth of your heart. Everything else should be blocked. The only form of manifestation of good in this world is the opposition to evil.

- I have a question. If matter is absolute and cannot be touched…

— Matter is not absolute, it is a deputy open to our experience, the experience of the Absolute, the night below. It is not the Absolute in itself, but it is similar to the Absolute in a number of its properties, namely: unlimitedness, homogeneity, amorphousness, negativity, etc. It is similar to it without being it, and in this sense it gives us an idea of the negative Absolute and negative infinity, which we cannot get directly from the Absolute, because it is too far away, although it is continuously insignificant in us. But nevertheless it exceeds the possibilities of our immediate experience. Matter, being the substrate of the corporal-material world, is intangible as a substance. But it is close to us. That is, we can perceive it as a certain system of vectors. For example, inertia, the tendency to cold, freezing, lowering of potential, to dispersion, that is, in Zoroastrianism, which was the first serious attempt to put the problem of evil outside the prophets back in the days of paganism Prior to this, there was no theme of evil in paganism. There is this, there is that. There are frogs, there are birds, there is death, there is flowering, these are normal complementary processes. For the first time outside the prophetic oasis in Zoroastrianism, the question was raised that there is an absolutely negative vector, the pathos of the bad, evil, and there is an absolutely luminous, radiant, positive vector. For the first time, evil has been raised to the point that they are fighting, these two vectors. There is a theme of negativity that is associated with the night, with the moon, with amphibians — unlike warm-blooded ones; they were the products of [Arimak](?), i.e. a deity who controls evil. And on the other hand — [Armust] (?), as the god of light. They confronted each other and fought. But it is clear that all forms, both amphibians and mammals, are erased by a wide sweep of a true scythe, and fly into a kind of basket of non-existence. Because behind them is a vanishing infinity. This infinity is transmitted to us in the form of matter, which is an active tendency capable of being perceived in experience. You feel heavy. You sit and feel heavy. This is a manifestation of matter, this is entropy, closely connected with gravity, with the field of attraction. This moment, it is available to you in experience, you feel that if you were to fly, it would be something contrary to the natural, something so spiritual. You do not fly, you are oppressed; around you, as it were, it is more difficult to do than to destroy, it is very difficult to assemble correctly, but it is easy to disassemble and not assemble. These are all vectors of matter and forms of manifestation of homogeneity… Matter is simply presented to us. We cannot fight the Absolute itself, because only the Lord God can defeat it, but we can resist matter.
“But how can you counteract matter with your fists?” And is it possible to counteract it differently?

- It can be with a word, but it can be with a heart. Isn’t that a stronger way? Here we hit with a fist, so what? We will destroy only the form.

- The fact is that confrontation with a fist entails personal danger for you. Here the point is not to destroy the structure of evil, but to enter into an active clinch and substitute yourself. God does not want us to destroy evil, it is huge and exceeds our capabilities. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves, go to active confrontation, in which we put our lives as our gift, our innermost will, sacrifice the most precious. And exposing our lives to a threat, we become Abraham, who offered his firstborn as a sacrifice to God. That is, we are like Abraham in that we sacrifice ourselves, risk ourselves, offer ourselves. And further in the ray of determining our destiny, this sacrifice will be accepted, delayed, or not accepted at all. But if there is a certain number of those who are ready to sacrifice themselves, and they come together, and they are ready to sacrifice the most precious thing they have, then there is that critical mass that God accepts as evidence of his Covenant. Through this Testament, he intervenes and cuts this knot with his sword. But he expects us to be worthy and created that critical mass for which the Lord will intervene, for which he will stop this world and bring another.

- So the value of human life does not matter? Groups of people can destroy thousands of people in the name of…

- Of course they can. But the Lord also destroys thousands and even millions. Remember the country of Noah, Atlantis, which the Lord destroyed with a flood, remember Sodom and Gomorrah… The Lord destroys what he creates from clay, and sees that there is a lot of negativity in this clay. He crumples it, throws it, creates a new
“But we don’t create, what right do we have to destroy?”

— The fact is that we are, according to the teachings of the Prophets… — another thing, we can not accept this, and stand on the position of atheistic humanism, vitalism — but if you accept it, then the doctrine of the Prophets says that a person is a viceroy God on earth. God made man a viceroy. And the angels objected, they said, “Why did you put a human in charge? After all, mixing, blood, all sorts of outrages will come from it. Make us We are pure spirits who carry out your orders, we reflect only your truth.” But God said, “I know, but you don’t know.” In other words, when placing a human as a viceroy, the Lord meant that a human is an ambivalent, dual, critical figure that generates a lot of discomforts, imbalances, disharmony and destruction. But this is providentially necessary so that the light that shines in darkness is not extinguished and the darkness does not embrace it. That is, our duality, congestion with factors tearing us apart, our danger, that is, human is a dangerous weapon, like a cocked grenade, it is included in the providential predestination of God about the fate of creation, and is, moreover, the energy impulse that feeds the course of history. , the providential course of history. But also … besides, if we pass, as it were, from such a solemn language … Consider Schweik. How did the Austrian captain raise the soldiers to attack? What did he tell them? “Go ahead, bastards, you don’t want to live forever!” That is, in other words, we will all die, but at least this death should not be meaningless. Because a mere existence… a biological existence that, like grass, grows today and is food tomorrow, it seems to completely deprive any sense and tension of any effort at all. Destroys the differences between human and vegetation.

- I have a question about that transition from resistance to revolution …Religions and revolutions. As far as I understood, you said that the laws of the existence of matter include the entropy of destruction. Then why is it possible to destroy by turning into resistance? Logically, then, it turns out that it is better to create in resistance, since this contradicts the laws of matter with the laws of destruction. How then to connect things, I didn’t quite understand.

- I said that matter, it seems to have two poles, it is echeloned. There is coarse matter, there is heavy damp clay sticking to the sole that we knead, and there is thin matter — jelly clouds that float above us. More specifically, there is, for example, the proletariat trudging to work on the whistle at six in the morning to stand at the machine or at the conveyor. And there are political technologists, there is an elite, there is a political class, there is an oligarchy, there are state institutions, a system of representative democracy, all this is a subtle matter. Subtle matter is a toolkit that is designed to carry out measures of oppression. In other words, a system of events, as a result of which freedom and light in our hearts become virtual at first, and then go completely out. Therefore, we are not talking about the destruction of beauty, although here one can argue in the light of what was said about aesthetics earlier — it is about counteracting the fine organization of matter, which is a weapon for oppression. Let’s put it this way, if a knife is pointed at your heart, and you break it when it touches your skin, I think you will not philosophize about this, that here is a beautiful blade, turned, elegant, people sharpened it, worked, and I took and broke.

- For any destruction, when you talk about resistance, as the destruction of something, subtle matter, if this is not a metaphor, if we are transported into the field of life action, life deed, any destruction has, as it were, flesh, it is something behind itself attracts, well, whether it is blood, a ruined fate, a broken line, something else. In this case, how is this destruction that is done for the sake of resistance, how is it different from the destruction that it is designed to resist? We say evil is destruction. We start to resist and destroy something.

- From the very beginning, I said — destruction is given to us in order for us to understand the phenomenon of the existence of evil in general, because we perceive destruction as evil, we are so arranged. This does not mean that, in intellectual analysis, destruction itself is evil. I gave an example with a log. Log burning is not evil. Fire is evil, with its ability to destroy a log. But just the sight of that burning… Otherwise, we will not understand that fire is evil until we see how this log burns and turns into ashes. This is an example for us, since we ourselves are this log, then, as it were, this contact with evil is brought to us in the inner taste, so that we would understand that it exists at all. But I said that many pagans do not understand this, because they have very cleverly eliminated the idea of death as an ending, and they talk about reincarnations, changing form… That is, a whole system of stubs, which generally removes the problem of finality. The problem of finality is posed in the Abrahamic prophetic line. That is, Ecclesiastes tells us that death is final. The living know that they will die, but the dead do not know that they are dead. And it is final in the face of the upcoming Resurrection. If there is no death, there is no resurrection, then we are not talking about anything. Therefore, for a person who perceives death as the end, the feeling that he is insignificant and destroyed like a log gives him a taste of evil. Otherwise, he simply will not understand that it exists. Otherwise, he will be a conformist who simply merges with what is in a simple act of contemplation. And then it comes to him in his own skin. But further we must understand that it is not the very fact of destruction that is evil, but that principle, an indirect consequence of which is the phenomenology of destruction. That principle, that infinite which destroys, which is the base of destruction… Destruction is only a manifestation of this infinity, which asserts itself through everything, in spite of everything, through everything, and it is anti-spiritual, because it is an eternal night in which everything goes out, starting with any initiative, and this night equalizes all the pros, cons, black, white, high, low. Everything is equalized by this denying night. And we understand that this is the evil that must be resisted. But this evil is a metaphysical distant abstraction, and we live in a concrete reality, which, although produced from this distant abstraction, is here, concretely, that is, this is politics, this is everyday life, this is society, this is the economy. And it turns out that in the economy, in social laws, in the political systems of games, in the operation of the whole mechanism, which is called the fine human factor, this distant principle, which metaphysicians are concerned with as an abstraction, simply translates and forms in various forms. But it comes to us in everyday life from this abstraction in the form of what we have said about the information society, about police violence, about social and economic alienation, about cultural depravation. These are all manifestations of the dictates of matter, and highly and subtly organized matter, which in itself is simply a delegate and executor of the doom. Thus, human society, the state, bureaucracy, these are just the mechanisms of fate, the mechanisms of pagan fate, and any other attitude towards them is idolatry. Because what is Caesar’s is Caesar’s.

- I’m asking about the one who resists. And in this sense, I pick up Olga’s previous question, why, in this case, resistance is not creativity, creation, a sprout of manifestation of love, sympathy, compassion, something not participating in this game. It’s not that when I fight evil, I speak the same language with it…

- I told you that when you resist, you throw yourself under the wheels of this Juggernaut. (?) If you resist through love, creativity, and so on, you get a Nobel Prize or a State Prize, or nothing, but it’s like you don’t risk anything. But if you have already shown love strongly, then most likely they will give you a state award. And if you resist otherwise, then a prison awaits you, reprisals await you in the street, liquidation awaits you in the dark, and so on. That is, all those unpleasant things that a person tries to avoid, and when he accepts them, he becomes a martyr, and martyrdom is originally a religious path of faith.

“What about ‘let the dead bury their dead’?”

- This is somehow not related to our topic.

Why doesn’t it relate? Let the dead bury their dead, that is, let them deal with evil, and I will build next to them what is believed to be good.

— But this is a real wish of abstraction, because after all, the dead you are talking about, they will not let you build anything, or they will use what you are building to cover up and demagogically defend their arbitrariness. So they will point at you and say what wonderful people are building here, doing good, so everything is in order.

- Isn’t there a rejection of violence as such within the religious doctrine, Islamic, Christian? Well, in the same place, as far as I understand, maybe you will consider it a banal layer, but it seemed to me that this is the deep essence of religious doctrine, a ban on murder, on violence.

– The ban on killing exists in paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and in the Abrahamic religion, that is, in the religion from Abraham to Muhammad, including also Moses and Jesus Christ, there is a ban on killing out of hooligan motives, or out of selfish motives. The Qur’an says that killing is forbidden, which is an absolute crime, except for two cases: life for life, and taking life to stop the spread of wickedness on earth. That is, when you see that the night, the chaos of matter is spreading, then you have the right to take away that life, which is the chariot, or support or instrument of this spread. In other words, a slave has the right to kill a tyrant.

But there are no such ideas in the Bible. In the Quran, yes. I haven’t seen it in the bible.

- The Bible is full of such ideas, I just don’t have anything written out now. I do not want to quote from memory, but if you mean the Old Testament, then it is full of instructions and full of stories of bloody and brutal struggle between the monotheists and the world around them. For example, the Jews who left Egypt with Moses, they waged a very cruel bloody struggle with their environment of that time. And after forty years of wandering, they came to the promised land. But these are the obvious things. As for what is usually said, in the New Testament there are such commandments “thou shalt not kill” and so on. Yes, do not kill, and the investment of Peter’s sword, that is, Christ told Peter to sheath the sword when he cut off the slave’s ear. In Islam, there is no murder either, murder is a crime, the one who killed a person killed as if all people. All this is. But, killing a murderer, and killing to stop wickedness, which is a far greater crime than taking a life… That is, as if there are values greater than biological life. And besides, do not forget that the basis of the Abrahamic faith is self-sacrifice. Love is nothing but the will to self-sacrifice and martyrdom.

“It is one thing to sacrifice yourself, and another thing to sacrifice someone whom you consider to be a distributor of wickedness, and so on.

— The fact is that the very manifestations of evil, they, in the Abrahamic tradition, are condemned and sentenced. Here [ahimsa] is the principle of non-resistance, it generally remains behind the scenes, besides, in general, all this talk, in my opinion, about the prohibition of violence, it seems to me, is immoral, in conditions when you condemn the counter violence of the oppressed, while when it is necessary to talk about the bestial violence of power, which is carried out totally, in relation to millions, to destinies that are crippled, to structures of human survival that are destroyed. In this case, you are saying how we will respond to violence with violence, and there, God forbid, we will destroy the sprout that is built into this structure. But this structure brings death to millions, and for the most selfish purposes. In general, the state and power are devoid of any moral dimension. These are absolutely socially organized, shark-like mechanisms that devour human substance solely for the sake of reproducing power and control. And therefore to say that it is impossible to respond to this violence with violence is, in fact, immoral. It is morally demanding such an answer and morally asserting the right to extinguish the flowers of evil. To pull out and destroy the flowers of evil like a weed.

— You say that every person should actively oppose evil, but what about the fact that the subjective understanding of evil is in every culture and is different for every person? And I would like to give an example that has been haunting me for ten years, this is from the UNESCO reports. For a European, violence against a child is an absolute evil. But in Iran, for example, a twelve-year-old girl was sentenced to death because she, in self-defense, stabbed her employer, who wanted to rape her. How to compare it? Here we understand one thing as evil, but they understand something completely different.

- So, I can explain to you that the example you brought is absolute disinformation. Where did you get the information about a twelve-year-old girl who was sentenced to death for defending herself from rape?

Well, I can look again…

- Be sure to look, because I have repeatedly been to Iran, and I can say the following. Firstly, Iranians are running around with their children in general incredibly, that is, Europe has never dreamed of the cult of children that reigns in Iran. Because they are just very focused on the topic of good, positive, such good and so on. It’s like such a Zoroastrian subtext of a very warm attitude to being. Second. Since there are Sharia laws, an attempted rape will end in death for this employer. That is, instantly, with a whistle, people like this who are trying to rape someone, are shot in packs every day there. So. Sexual crimes in Iran are punished more severely than anywhere else in the world. But I perceive this example, most likely, as maliciously fabricated disinformation in the course of the political struggle to isolate Iran and the Iranian regime, that is, all my experience of getting to know Iran, repeated trips there, knowledge of how the judicial systems work there, who is arrested there , shoot, who is not — says that this is an implausible episode. In much the same way as in the West they tell all sorts of horrors about the Soviet Union and about Russia, which for us look like obvious slander, but are a stamp, such an ordinary stamp for Westerners.

-I have a question. Firstly, the moment when you said about the universal human standard, which is a priori built into a person, I am very interested in. Is there anything else besides the quantitative program that is a priori built in?

— Well, I did not mention the quantitative program by accident, but because, in principle, this is what the Kantian assessment of the a priori premises of our perception boils down to, so to speak. That is, a spatio-temporal characteristic, which, in principle, is solved quantitatively. That is, I would like to remain within the framework of such an already tested discourse. Speaking of things that go beyond that… yes… I think there is, but that would take us too far. In any case, this is the main thing, because through our a priori cliché of perception of the space-time continuum, ninety-nine percent of our life situations are solved. And in a very subtle way, as I tried to show. Things that seem to be completely social, in fact, are transmitted there from purely aesthetic grounds and vice versa. That is, there is a certain interchangeability of elements of our life that are quite far apart from each other, which are all based, relatively speaking, on our internal mental geometry.

- If you still can. Somehow you got away from this answer… Here is what concerns the Prophets and evil. If I understand you correctly, then every Prophet named the evil with which he fights… Does this mean that, in fact, we can list the evil that the Prophets called evil and consider that it is absolute.

“They always talked about the same thing, but there were two moments: what they repeated one after another, as if they reproduced this same mission, because the previous[communities] ones forgot themselves, rejected themselves, and they came again. Belonging, as it were, to a single family in time, and I must say that we know, accept and believe that they are all a single family, not in a metaphorical, but in a literal sense, because both Muhammad and Jesus Christ are physical descendants of Abraham — two different branches through Isaac and through Ismail. And as if it is a single chain acting in time… quite a long period of time. They reproduced indications of the same thing. First — they called the absolute evil Fate with a capital letter, which is the ultimate and final deity of the ancients. That is, the archaic consciousness is perceived as the horizon and the fundamental last of existence — Fate, well, Greek myths there, tragedies, well, this is all the Chinese “Decree of Heaven” and so on. Fate.
This is first absolute evil. Secondly, its specific bearer of today is a dictator, a tyrant… well, a modern Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caesar, Herod. Or, as it were, during the time of the last prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in general, the geopolitical alignment of that day and for subsequent times.

— A question about the Egyptian tradition. You said that there are rituals in the modern world that still exist. Could you list something, because I can’t imagine what it is. At least some of what’s left.

- Firstly, ancient Egyptian mythology is a very important element of the mentality of certain circles, namely the theme of Isis, looking for parts of the body of her husband Osiris, and, as it were, the whole saga of the love triangle, Isis — Osiris — Horus, this is the fundamental basis of the foundations of Masonic intellectualism and initiatory teachings which rests on two fundamental pillars. On the one hand, the legend of Osiris, on the other hand, the legend of [Herap]. Here are two points that define the intellectual field of the European elite that organized the social space of the West.

- That is, the Masonic trend exists in what is now?

- That is, it is the cultural core of Western modern human, so it is written about, let’s say, if earlier these were some secret programs in closed clubs, because there was an established institutionalized church, and there would be questions, for example, if a person in a Catholic country professed the cult of Osiris and Isis, that is, some questions would be asked. But now, in the era of freedom of conscience, the imperative of politically correct behavior, they have been removed. And there are a lot of monographs written not culturally, but, as it were, actual, doctrinally stated, and they are written in the academic discourse on the Egyptian mentality as having a very lively actual significance for modern human. For example, in the Soviet Union, someone had to ensure the unity of society. This was done by the CPSU. But there is no CPSU in the West, and who will ensure a certain uniform perception of certain phenomena and, as it were, a unified social approach? In all Soviet institutions — economic, ministries, executive committees, social security, there were communists. But, here’s how to ensure the same unity in the absence of the CPSU in the diversity of institutions in the Western world? There must be a structure that has its own program, and, as it were, its own intellectual code. When analyzed, this intellectual code turns out to be neither Christian nor Judeo-Christian, but borrowed… there are three sources: ancient Egypt, Babylon, the Roman Empire. Three elements that are the basis of the foundations of the cultural code of modern Western man. And Judeo-Christianity is left to such Protestant theologians as for example Teilhard de Chardin, that is, to professionals of Christian discourse. But this Christian discourse is outside the professionally collegial corporate space, it is not included in the cultural code of the people of action. People who organize a really social society. social structure.

- So you do not deny that the freedom of morals that exists among people is not religiously bound, does it resemble what it was in ancient Egypt, or something else?

— Well, firstly, a pagan society is not unbridled freedom, there is a system of taboos, it’s just that this system is not based on the counteraction to matter … And the system of taboos in a pagan society is a system of control, a system of restrictions that transfer all the rights to dispose of personal life and fate into the hands of the priestly caste; shamanistic, priestly, etc. This taboo has a completely different meaning than the moral imperatives in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, in the Abrahamic tradition. Taboo is something else entirely. Of course, there was a taboo in ancient Egypt, there was a taboo in Greece and Rome, but I must say that Freemasonry is …. Where does Freemasonry begin? From the fact that the public is above the personal. That is, if not this structure in the west, then there would simply be … The public is higher than the personal, that is, otherwise it will be just a rampant egoistic passions of the bourgeoisie and some kind of clans that will simply tear the social fabric to pieces. Someone should come and say that you need to limit yourself in order to build a bridge or create a pension fund, you need to already there … For example, in Dagestan, the Islamic factor has been destroyed there, and there was no freemasonry, so the pension fund is a hostage in the hands of bandits. As if these are the details of our post-Soviet life. Masons, in general, would not allow this.

-Thanks.

-Welcome. Well, maybe we’ll end there.