From the author: Course of lectures given in 2008-2009. In the last lecture we focused on the final monologue of Sonya from Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya", essentially a hopeless, hopeless monologue And even “the sky in diamonds”, which supposedly awaits us beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, sounds unconvincing, like an attempt to reassure: “with obliging memories you are deceiving yourself” - here is something similar. What awaits us beyond the threshold of earthly existence? We stopped at this question. in the previous lecture, and I immediately want to say that I don’t know the answer to this question, but the very path along which we have already walked and the further path leads to reflections that will wander around this question. A person has many opportunities to adapt to this world You can fight this world, and most of us do this, because something in the world contradicts how it should be according to our ideas, concepts of good and evil, pleasant and unpleasant. It is clear that perhaps the world is much smarter. than our idea of ​​it is much broader and its logic is not clear to us, therefore it is possible to stop fighting this world and come into agreement with it and not experience suffering. After all, the price for this struggle is inevitable suffering. On the one hand, to say that “I stop fighting this world, I come into agreement with it” - such a phrase can be pronounced picturesquely and pompously, but in fact, at the very first crossroads you will encounter an internal conflict, where something is fighting, something independent of your desire not to fight. The conflict is deeper, in the unconscious, the collective unconscious, and only people who have reached the state of “Buddhas”, who have gone through a certain evolutionary path ahead of the universal one, can come into agreement with this world and not experience internal conflict, experiencing this world beyond contradictions, as one. We We talked at the beginning of the lectures about four mythologies, which until the fourth one has to be lived linearly, without the ability to collapse. You can only slow down, which is what most people do, clinging to the convenient models of the previous stage of development. Ontogenesis and phylogeny repeat each other, and each of us goes through the path that society has gone through. And this means that, starting with the symbol of the Great and Terrible Mother Nature, we come to polytheism, to polytheism, to gods responsible for different contexts of life, in order to then unite all the gods into the One, reach the level of monotheism, and go through it for some time, then to reject God, the existence of any objective truth. Decide to take the step of fighting God, a step that brings maximum suffering, because when we are in the position of monotheism, everything is clearly divided for us. There is a belief in some transcendental objective truth and the message is that the conflict consists only in repressing into the unconscious that which does not correspond to this. Having gone through this, we are faced with the fact that the repressed begins to penetrate into consciousness when we reach a higher level of personal development. A higher level of personal development is existentialism. And if we look from the point of view of existentialism, then the answer to the question “what awaits us beyond the boundaries of earthly existence” is merciless - nothing. Does this mean a final answer? No, it doesn’t, because we are talking about mythologies and we cannot talk about any final answer at all. There are many answers. It is useless to say that any of them is completely correct. Leonid Andreev, a writer of the early 20th century, comparable to such writers as Kuprin, Bunin, had a story where a person, having died, without yet going anywhere, appears before the devil. The devil offers him two possibilities: complete non-existence or hell with all the ensuing consequences that are described in literature. A person does not want one or the other. The entire plot of the story revolves around the devil’s story about one and the other perspective. In the end, the devil teases a person that in hell, of course, there are days off, promotions, seniority, but it is still an eternal hell. In the end the deceased offers to pulla lot, but Andreev does not specifically describe what he draws, but at the same time the man curses terribly and reproaches himself for not drawing something else. Although, if he had pulled out something else, as we can understand, he would have cursed no less. A useless argument. A person dies, being remains - this is an amazing experience. I once read the experience of a person who experienced clinical death, and not as they write in sugary books - no tunnels. The man was shot in the head, but by some miracle he survived, and clinical death consisted in the fact that life went out, there was nothing left, but somehow, it is not clear what sense organ, but they felt the presence of being. It was not colored in any way, and could not be called emptiness or silence, it was simply an experience of being. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the person returned from clinical death and survived. What you would worry about, and most importantly, who would worry about it. When we talk about the issue of afterlife, we very rarely place referential indices - who experiences life after death. It is not entirely clear who is experiencing life. Some kind of consciousness. What do we mean by consciousness? Different schools of psychology mean completely different things by consciousness. Either it is the ego, or it is a certain point of a transcendental observer, one way or another, there are theories that link even the point of an absolutely non-interfering and non-judgmental observer to certain rhythms of the existence of the brain. And the brain, as is known, after death, in an undestroyed body, functions for about 40 days - until this period, experiments record decaying electrical activity in the brain. Perhaps the funeral ritual on the 40th day is connected with this. There is probably some transcendental area that we cannot talk about until we have experienced all the stages of polytheism, monotheism and existentialism. Until we reject God and reject the very hope of the immortality of that with which we identify ourselves. As a rule, we identify ourselves not with the soul, but with a certain chaotic tangle of sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, actions, reflexes, etc. Such a chaotic space-time scale, a pattern of what we identify ourselves with. It's definitely disappearing. Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov does not pass in the same jacket, tie and briefcase, this is clear to everyone. Let's return to the original metaphor, about the possibility of coming into agreement with being and not experiencing the suffering experienced by a person who is somehow in conflict with being , be it at the stage of polytheism, monotheism or existentialism. If this is at the stage of monotheism, then “I accept God, but I do not accept God’s world,” as Ivan Karamazov said. If you take the position of existentialism, this is the absolute absurdity of the world. And somewhere in the transpersonal area of ​​the world a certain agreement arises, even with this absurdity. But it is too early, premature and even dangerous for us to talk about this, so as not to corrupt our souls. Therefore, numerous conversations about reincarnation, life after death, rather than advancing the soul, they corrupt. To experience this conflict not mentally, not as mental chewing gum, arguing in the kitchen or in lecture halls, beating your chest with your fist while shouting about belief in God, atheism or paganism, it’s all about what you experience inside. Which experience dominates? And what dominates is the experience to which a person has grown according to this structure of a conventional “tree”, the root of which is the Great Mother and the polytheism that follows her, the trunk is monotheism, and the top is existentialism. Next comes postmodernism, but it’s too early to talk about it, because it includes everything together, on an equal basis and with an equal degree of probability. But that's a completely different conversation. Few people have grown up to postmodernism, although now everyone is talking about it, just like existentialism, monotheism, etc. The whole point is where the dominant of our actual experience of ourselves is located. Because everyone can say that I want to merge in harmony with this world, but there are inescapable conflicts in the collective unconsciouswill show where we are. By the way, this can be reviewed psychoanalytically, but not so quickly, not in the first session - this is a long way. Today I will focus on the existential point of view of the soul. And we will continue the conversation about Chekhov’s heroes because this is precisely the plot - the plot of the transition to existentialism. His heroes are people in crisis of transition from monotheism to existentialism. They have not yet transitioned to existentialism, so they are at a dead end, and we will talk about this later. Existentialism is represented by two main works: the bible of the 30-50s of the XX century, the work of Heidegerr “Being and Time” and the bible of the 50-70s, the work of Jean Paul Sartre “Being and Nothingness”. Martin Heidegger writes quite “curly”; anyone who tried to read him understands what I’m talking about. I will try to retell the plots of these books in my own words, and then we will pay attention to the work that summarizes these two works - this is the work of Albert Camus “The Philosophy of the Absurd.” Before talking about Bitya and time, I once again want to emphasize that if a person does not In its development, it will go through the stage of existentialism, a cold stage that shatters all hopes, supports, all faith, a stage that leaves you alone with the cold, silent cosmos in order for you to experience the drama of your own life and the drama of all living things. Space is silent, the earth is silent, and there are no answers. You were thrown into this world not of your own will and you will not leave it of your own free will, but without experiencing this, you cannot become an adult - the ego remains weak. And it is precisely by passing to the stage of existentialism, ceasing to rely on any external support, including God, on belief in an afterlife, that you become an adult. And after that there is a chance to go somewhere further - an adult is not the limit. But earlier it is too early and pointless to talk about something transpersonal - all esoteric and magical fornication will be just a toy for a person who is hiding from himself and from life. And since, alas, these are the majority, it is precisely the passage of the stage of existentialism that is task number one in the course of the formation of a person in his mass. And this is precisely what reflects the plots of Chekhov’s characters. You can escape from existential nakedness into all sorts of esotericism, religion and other sweets, which is what happens to most people today, so after discussing the works of Heidegger and Sartre, I will once again return to the question of why belief in an afterlife and various kinds of reincarnation is not a step for most people forward, but on the contrary, a soul-corrupting attempt to escape into illusion. Only for those who have become adults (and Heidegger and Sartre give us clear guidelines on what it means to become an adult) do transpersonal categories and experiences, including the notorious reincarnation, make sense. Let's not forget that any knowledge is targeted and historical. There is no universal knowledge; knowledge is aimed at the addressee and for a specific era. What is important and relevant for one can corrupt or intimidate or turn away the consciousness of another. So: a brief educational program on the works of the classics of existentialism: Martin Heidegger “Being and Time”: Heidegger was a student of Husserl, studied phenomenology under his leadership, and wondered about being. Because being itself turned out to be forgotten in the entire history of philosophy: they talked about anything, about gods, about the transcendental, about metaphysics, but being itself, and specific existence - human existence, turned out to be, strangely enough, forgotten. Therefore, Heidegger saw the purpose of his work as extracting the theme of being from oblivion and answering the question: what is being? That is, to discover the meaning of existence. Moreover, being of a special kind - human existence. In this regard, Heidegger distinguishes between inauthentic and authentic being (Dasein and Das Man). The main features of inauthentic being are what a person runs into in order to shield himself from contact with the mode of the real - ambiguity, chatter, curiosity, advertising, glamor - whatever. The main characteristic of true being is conscience. With this question posed – the search for meaninghuman existence - the usual philosophical language, which was used by all previous philosophy, turns out to be inapplicable. Human being is always “being-in”. Being-in-the-world is the basis and condition of human existence. Being-in-the-world shows the original historicity of man, his finitude and temporality. But preoccupation with the present turns life into fearful troubles and the vegetation of everyday life. Such a life, as a manifestation of inauthentic being, is aimed at personal objects and the transformation of the personal world. This focus is anonymous and impersonal. It plunges a person into an impersonal and anonymous world where no one decides anything and therefore bears no responsibility. The main characteristic of the everyday world is the desire to stay in the present, in order to avoid the future, that is, death, at least in one’s illusions. The human consciousness here is not able to attribute death to itself. This leads to a blurring of consciousness, to the inability to discover one’s self. On the other hand, Heidegger designated the structure of human existence in its integrity as care. Man has the source of his existence in care and will never be released from this source. Caring is running ahead, and human existence is not what it is, since it is constantly running away from itself, slipping forward. That is, it is always its own possibility. Heidegger designated this moment of care as a project. Human existence is a being that projects itself; a person is always something more than he is at the moment. Each of the moments of care is, at the same time, a certain mode of time. Being-in-the-world is a mode of the past. Looking ahead is the mode of the future, being-with-being is the mode of the present. These three modes, mutually penetrating each other, constitute care itself. Heidegger's past, present and future differ significantly from objective time. The past is not something left behind, something that no longer exists. On the contrary, it is constantly present and determines both the present and the future. Unlike physical time, which is thought of as a kind of homogeneous continuous line consisting of “now” moments, the past appears in Heidegger as factuality or abandonment. The present is as a doom for things, as a ready-to-hand, as a being-with. The future is like a project that constantly affects us, and there is no escape from this project. We can meditate in front of a blank sheet of paper, a dot or a candle as much as we like, but given the unconscious, in which this project always exists, it appears in images. In this sense, the existential flow of time does not go from the past to the future, but in the opposite direction - time is temporalized from the future. Inauthentic being - the preponderance of moments of the present - the world at hand, obscures from a person the fact of his finitude. You can be here-and-now, or you can be there-and-then, but still be in the present, as Zen Buddhism and Gestalt therapy talk about, and you cannot treat this concept with strict literalism. Genuine being appears in Heidegger as a person’s awareness of his historicity, finitude and, ultimately, freedom. It is possible and feasible only in the face of death. In true existence, the future, being-towards-death, comes to the fore. Death in the broadest sense is a phenomenon of life. Death is a prospect. Death is the possibility of being, and the last possibility, the broadest possibility, the possibility of possibilities, which the human presence must always take upon itself. Death reveals to man the meaning of his existence. With death, a person faces himself. Any experience can be placed on the shoulders of another, but not death - you will have to experience it yourself. It is in death, in being-towards-death, that the very human possibility of being is revealed. Death reveals the human self and reveals the meaning of human existence. While a person is alive, while he is thrown into the world, he is thrown into this ultimate possibility, into death itself. Ordinary existence or does not think aboutthis problem, or is unwilling or afraid to admit this fact. I would say that a person begins to Live with a capital L only from the moment when he clearly, distinctly and without any compromise realizes his death. From this moment on, his life is being-towards-death. Heidegger wrote that this ultimate possibility is revealed to man through Horror. Not fear. Horror is fundamentally different from fear and fear. We are always afraid of this or that, but of something specific. Horror is completely non-objective. This uncertainty turns out to be fundamental. Terror of Nothing. What is Nothing? Every word, spoken or written, is a signifier, and it corresponds in our minds to certain signifieds, that is, a number of associations and images that are associated with this word. But not in the case of the word Nothing, no matter what we imagine - darkness, gloom, cold, endless space - all this is not this, all this is something. Nothing has an image, and this lack of image puts us in a state of “sticky Horror.” When I was about 10 years old and we were brought up in an atheistic paradigm, I was haunted by this experience many times. Especially at night, when I went to bed, and imagined that I was finite, life was really going towards death. And it was at night, breaking away from everyday affairs and worries, that I plunged into this sticky cold horror, when there was no one to say “save”, because no one will save, you understand this perfectly well already at the age of 10. This experience came in waves, took hold and retreated, and this continued for a long time. Oddly enough, human existence is not destroyed by this horror. This is an existential situation, and it affects people at different ages; for many, the first contact with Horror occurs in childhood, closer to puberty. And then we push this experience away from ourselves in every possible way, considering that this is a passed stage, or overshadowing ourselves with some kind of mythology or belief in an afterlife, or postponing this question until old age in order to reflect on it, detached from the everyday worries with which we begin to fill our lives. in fact, to escape from this Horror. A person tends to repress and obscure his death from himself. We don't see the essence of death. And the meaning of human existence, as Heidegger emphasizes, consists precisely in constantly going beyond oneself, in being-towards-death, because through this state of Horror we, oddly enough, are able to hear the call of being. The call of being, the call of conscience is heard only in the stupor of Horror, when all other noises of this life are silent. They stop putting pressure on the brain and inner hearing, and then the call of conscience opens. The call is a call for human existence to become itself, to find its authenticity in the face of being-towards-death. The call awakens the sleeping, inauthentic human existence and awakens hearing. Moreover, if the everyday state is captured by chatter, ambiguity, noise, then the call calls silently, silently, but for a person the call of conscience is perceived as a lightning strike. It's sudden. It's always a bit of a shock. I experienced this and I can say it was a strong shock. This is a calling to look into yourself and find out who I am, informally, very honestly and completely. Many people read books, and apparently the Call somehow penetrates without horror, they indulge in all sorts of esotericism, look for teachers, but that’s not it. But the Call of conscience always occurs against expectation and against our will, when we allow Horror. By accepting the call, you accept the challenge, choosing yourself. Heidegger further notes that, first of all, guilt is revealed in the voice of conscience. Moreover, it seems to me that in this case the translator did not find some broader word for being guilty; this is not some kind of ethical state. To be guilty in the world means to be involved. To be in the world, and we are always in the world, already means to be involved (guilty) in it - this is actually to be. This means realizing and sharing the fate of billions of the same abandoned, the same facing this question and the Call, the same hiding. And here, when you let in this call and felt involved in your peopleera, to a scale greater than yourself, this is where the possibility of contact with the transpersonal opens up. You no longer identify yourself with the ego, but with something bigger, with the era, with the being that remains when the ego dies, and it dies. WHAT we consider ourselves, our consciousness, turns into nothing, but existence remains. And thus the atheist Heidegger leads us to the possibility of the immortality of the soul, but only through the recognition of finitude, the recognition of Nothing! This is a paradox. We can conclude: the authentic human self that Heidegger was looking for was found by him. This is being-towards-death, horror, care, conscience, call and being guilty. And it is precisely this threshold that the heroes of Chekhov’s works are approaching and moving towards. They are just on the threshold, illusions are just being destroyed. They are lost, a situation of horror is approaching, but has not yet arrived. We will return to this, but for now Jean Paul Sartre “Being and Nothingness”. Here existentialism appears in its most radical manifestation. For Sartre does not leave a person any hope for external support at all. Man is absolutely free. One can argue with this - “man is a mechanism,” said Gurdjieff. But nevertheless, a person is absolutely free to even be a mechanism, even if he does not realize it. Dostoevsky expressed the following thought through the mouth of Ivan Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” The denial of the existence of God was the starting point of the entire philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. Unlike Heidegger, who built his philosophy of man without relying on God, Sartre rejects God in his defense of existentialism. His thesis: in man, existence precedes essence, as follows: what is the meaning of the words that existence precedes essence? This means that, first of all, a person exists, appears on stage and only after that defines himself. For the existentialist, man cannot be defined because initially he is nothing. For Heidegger, nothingness appears at the end, but here it appears from the very beginning, and nothingness also ends. Only later will a person become someone, and he himself will have to determine who he should be. Thus, there is no human nature because there is no God who designed it. Purely logically: the method of use or purpose of any tool, that is, the essence of the tool, is determined by its creator even before production. If we want to pull out a nail, we invent pliers. In this case, essence precedes existence. Therefore, if God exists, and He created man for some purpose, based on His idea, then we can say that in the case of man, essence also precedes existence. But if we deny the existence of God, then it turns out that the essence of man is not determined from the very beginning. Therefore, according to Sartre, people did not appear out of being, but as if out of nothing. Here he comes extremely close to the medieval mystics: Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme... They also sound like nothing, each in their own way. People are random, appeared from nothing, and are not defined by anyone. They choose themselves. You can say that these are words, but these words were lived by Sartre. The fundamental feature of existence is suffering, because man is the brightest point of opposition between himself and life - this is the absurdity of life. This is a struggle with life, and in this struggle you choose yourself, and as we said, the price for the struggle is suffering. While you choose yourself, by making this choice you choose all people in some capacity. To choose oneself means to accept responsibility for all humanity, a responsibility that includes suffering. However, suffering does not deter people from action, on the contrary, it is a basic condition and part of action...People are free according to existentialism. Since existence precedes essence, people are not determined by anything and have the right to do whatever they want. However, this also implies full personal responsibility for the actions taken. In this sense, freedom is a kind of burden for a person.By gaining freedom, we thereby become a being doomed to freedom. In other words, people suffer because they are free. On the other hand, if there is no God, we have no moral values ​​or precepts to justify our actions. Thus, neither behind ourselves nor in front of ourselves - in the bright kingdom of values ​​- we have neither excuses nor apologies. We are alone and there is no forgiveness for us. This is the idea that “man is doomed to be free,” free and alone. If we think the same way as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, then freedom is equivalent to permissiveness. They are afraid of this, because the absence of God is permission for all kinds of injustice. That is, a world without God is a world of inevitable evil and vice? Why not the other way around? Perhaps only by giving up all hope in God, in fate, in providence, can a person truly love, have compassion, and create, because he sees the insecurity, fragility, and uniqueness of every moment of existence, every life. This is the position of a very adult person. Indeed, at first a person may be overwhelmed by a feeling of permissiveness in the sense of looting, etc. For the most part, we are not yet mature for such freedom, since this is the freedom of a very adult person. Humanity as a whole needs God, needs the fear of God, needs hope... Sartre was significantly ahead of his time, he drew the line beyond which our era begins. And in the next century, the majority of people should mature. Most people cling to some kind of religious ideas, but a split has occurred. Atheistic existentialism seems impossible, scary, destructive and, in some cases, even blasphemous to many. Ruthless. And here is a question that can cause numerous indignations: namely, that any belief in an afterlife for a person who has not gone through the stage of existential maturation is destructive. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, no matter how hard you fight, trying to win back your illusions, if you want to grow up, these illusions about reincarnation will have to be discarded and admit, not speculatively, but with all your guts, to the point of piercing Horror, that Nothing awaits you. Absence of any pictures, sounds, sensations. The brain is feverishly trying to slip us anything - an image of a desert area, pitch darkness - but this is already something, not nothing! And here, if a person decides to go to the end, the brain stalls and experiences the same Horror that Heidegger wrote about, which can no longer be brushed aside. And here begins the Path from the world of everyday life with its soothing illusions to Being-towards-death, to true being. Therefore, if you call yourself an esotericist, first go through the stage of existentialism, first accept your complete finitude, mortality. You have the right to object indignantly: “Why should I believe these atheists? My soul is immortal!!! I will be reincarnated and be born again, as I have been born thousands of times!!!” - I’ll answer – who, exactly, will be reincarnated? Who do you mean when you say “I” or “my soul”? What do you mean, my dear friend, you are the image with which you are identified. What you experience yourself with - we said that it is something amorphous, a certain set of thoughts, sensations, actions, memory. That is, you experience yourself as nothing other than the Ego (some people don’t even identify themselves with the Ego, but only with the body). And even your momentary experiences of yourself as a silent observer in meditation or on the verge of sleep and wakefulness will not help the matter, because they are fleeting, and identification with the Ego dominates. (Not for everyone, but for the majority, I can assure you). And this stage of development, which humanity is now approaching (theoretically, it has already passed it, but in fact it is approaching it, has entered it), called existential, is necessary in order to experience to the core that this is the very Ego that is currently and you are - will disappear without a trace, and one day will become Nothing, without any image or likeness. If you honestly experience this, without trying to escape into beautiful fairy tales about reincarnation, then we will talk about the transpersonal world,where, paradoxically, talking about these reincarnations is no longer a pathology, but the norm. Paradox: what is self-evident knowledge for one is destructive and destructive for another. Hopes for an afterlife will not allow you to cross the line beyond which this very life after death is really real. And you find yourself in the state of the hero Leonid Andreev, who after death goes to hell for a final verdict. This line, beyond which life after death is really real, it is real for someone who has stopped identifying himself with the Ego, has grown from a weak ego to a strong ego, and even demoted him, and identified himself at least with the Soul. Here's an identification test. Can you, as an adult, responsibly say: “The most important thing for you is not personal.” It doesn’t matter who your position is - the president of the country or a janitor. Have you taken upon yourself the entire cross of human pain? Yes? Or is it still not? Do you constantly experience yourself not against the background of your home-work-party world, but against the background of the Epoch? If you answer honestly - “no” - good advice - go back to trying (sometimes lasting for years) to accept that you will disappear into Nothing. To do this, you don’t need to sit in asanas or fly in lucid dreams. Let's give up hope in order to find the fullness of life, this life - this is the lesson of existentialism. If we go through it, then perhaps another life will open up for us, which for the time being is too early to think about, and even harmful - we will want to run away from THIS life, with its pain, loneliness, uselessness of the best in you..., the pain for this whole fragile world, for people just like you, billions of people like you, doomed, thrown into life and trying to escape from it as best they can!!! Here we can take a short detour and return once again to the weak ego. I remember Ganya Ivolgin’s monologue from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. This is an example of the weak ego of a person who is experiencing, deeply approaching the experience that he is nothing, and trying to escape from it. In a situation where the prince is trying to keep Ganya from hitting his sister, and Ganya slaps the prince “that you are interfering everywhere,” and the prince goes to his room in a state of confusion and despair. And Ganya, in the same state, trudges after him, kneels down, apologizes, and a scene of reconciliation occurs. Ganya says that everyone considers him a scoundrel, and the prince vehemently objects: “I don’t consider you a scoundrel, on the contrary, I think that you are a very ordinary person, only very weak and not at all original.” And then Ganya soars: “Oh! Note to yourself, dear prince, that there is nothing more offensive than to tell a person of our time that he is not original, ordinary and without special talents! Do you think General Epanchin is insulting me out of malice? No! But because I am insignificant and ordinary! This is what infuriates me! That's why I so passionately want money, money, money!!! Oh, if I make money, I will be extremely original! And talented! And smart! Money is all the more vile, the more hateful, because it gives a person everything, everything, everything!!! And it will be like this until the end of the world!” This is the gray man complex. Worthlessness is within us. And she is inside us, and Ganya is inside us - she is a very strong character in the inner world. As a rule, he wakes up around 40 years old - a midlife crisis - this is Ivolgin’s voice. But strangely enough, if a person hears this voice within himself, this is his chance to begin the path of individuation. Let me quote from Jung: “A person who suffers from neurosis and knows that he is neurotic is more personally developed than a person who does not realize this. A person who knows that he is a great burden to others is more personally developed than a person who remains blithely ignorant of his own essence.” It turns out that neurosis gives a person an impetus to development and forms his motivation in this direction. If one has a firm belief in the value of awareness, then people susceptible to neurosis are in fact, perhaps not happy, but to some extent chosen. Exacerbation of neurosis often becomes a necessary prerequisite forchoosing a life path. Absolutely unbearable internal discord is proof of our true life. A life without internal contradictions is a kind of castrated life. Through neurosis and its accompanying symptoms, we can frankly see our limitations - but at the same time we can recognize our strength and our true essence. From this point of view, neurosis is like an alarm clock, and its role is much more positive compared to the one attributed to it by the medical community and the vast majority of lay people. Both Freud and Jung saw the cause of neurosis in blocking the flow of libido. But the use of a reductive (Freudian) approach involves tracing the problem back to its origins, while the use of an energetic (Jungian) approach involves determining the general intention of the entire psyche: where psychic energy wants to go. Where the path leads us is through the eternal return, praised and horrified by Nietzsche, to the awareness of the absurd, to the awareness of the existential situation. There is a saying - it’s funny to step on the same rake twice. It’s not funny - it’s absolutely necessary to step on the same rake many times! Every time you step on them, your problem opens up from different sides, and this very rarely happens in one blow. One and the same eternal return must be repeated many times in order to break out of this vicious circle. And this is the legend of Kronos devouring his children, and the cyclical nature of time, until at one moment a heroic effort is born to get out of this cyclicality. I will cite the dream of a man who was depressed for a long time after another divorce from his next wife and visited me as a psychotherapist. Soon after meeting Kronos at one of the sessions, an insight occurred - awareness of the reasons and debts to Kronos, after which a day later he had a dream, which we analyzed together. “I dream about the courtyard of my childhood next to my parents’ house. A small playground where we played football as children. And I run in circles around this area, circle after circle, circle after circle. I am being watched by two of my childhood playmates (whom in reality I have not seen for a very long time and have even forgotten). Then the action moves to an apartment where an engagement to some girl is about to take place. There are a lot of guests and some kind of entertainer. Everyone is dancing. I notice that somewhere in the corner of the room my grandmother is fighting with someone. Then I throw a light bulb at them. The light bulb hits the grandmother in the crown and explodes, and the grandmother dies. At this point I wake up feeling a terrible feeling of guilt that I killed my grandmother." We used the method of active imagination, and other methods described in our book "Archetypal Dream Study" i.e. he entered into every dream image, lived it from the inside and realized its meaning. Firstly, he had a dream after an important life-affirming event, which foreshadowed changes in life and a meeting with Kronos. All evening until he fell asleep he was in a festive mood and a premonition of some new life perspective. In the first fragment of the dream, he is running in a circle. When he experienced himself in this circle, he realized that these were the circles along which his fate had so far taken shape. A recurring plot of eternal return, not just one plot - many. Five or six women went through the same plot. And playmates who appear in a dream symbolize “childhood memory.” After all, this whole program was laid down in childhood, when the dreamer, with his illness, prevented his parents from getting a divorce. Next, in the parents’ apartment, the guests gather for the engagement - this is an engagement with the soul, Anima. Getting used to their images, he understands that these are various gods from different myths who participate in the construction of his destiny, and the mass entertainer is the main customer of all destiny, that is, we would call him the Aggregate Customer. They are present at this engagement all together because something important is about to happen, some change in fate. What is a grandmother? There were a lot of conflicting feelings associated with the grandmother in the dreamer’s life. ANDhatred, and fear, and love, and pity. She was the main source of family conflict, because of which the life of the dreamer’s parents failed, although they did not divorce - because of him, or rather his manipulation - illness. And precisely because in childhood he decided (subconsciously, of course) to repeat their bad luck in his personal life and, strange as it may seem, it was precisely this that “saved” the family from collapse. That is, a grandmother in a dream is a symbol of an internal conflict that triggered the dreamer’s fate every time in the same circle. A light bulb is a source of light and in a dream it symbolizes the light of consciousness - directed towards the source of internal conflict. And the death of a grandmother, as a result of a source of light hitting her - illumination, awareness - is the death of a conflict. Why then did the dreamer experience a feeling of guilt before waking up? But this is the guilt that Heidegger is explaining to us. Having realized and killed his internal conflict, he is no longer obliged to run in circles and, thus, violated the childhood “enchanted” promise to remain faithful to the way of life that he promised to lead in order to save the family of his parents (after all, growing up, the Inner Child in us remains faithful to what what he decided in childhood - this is where ridiculous and even tragic scenarios arise in the lives of people who often destroy themselves, but not because they are fools, but because it is almost impossible to resist the unconscious decisions of childhood if you do not work with yourself). That is, this feeling of guilt turns out to be a resolution to the entire situation, a kind of payment for the opportunity to go beyond the script. But in essence - a way out into participation in the world, a way out of the problems of the personal world towards Being-towards-death. But, before the dreamer had this fateful and transformative dream, after which his life really changed, he walked in circles for many years and stepped on the same and the same rake. And I dare to say that it was not wasted time, by stepping on the same rake we gain the fullness of experience in some context of life, this is necessary. The myth of Sisyphus is about the same thing, although there is no hint of a way out, we will look for a hint by once again plunging into existentialism, and then turning to Chekhov’s plots. “The gods sentenced Sisyphus to lift a huge stone to the top of the mountain, from where this block invariably rolled down . They had reason to believe that there is no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless work." A. Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus." At first glance, the moral of this fable is the futility of existence. Here we turn to Albert Camus, who examines this myth and the main The existential problem posed in this myth is a little different - it is not the futility of existence, it is the problem of suicide. And the solution to this question provides answers to the most mysterious questions of existence. What is suicide? This question is addressed directly to existence and can be considered one of the main questions of any philosophy. This is not such a simple question as it seems. From the point of view of legal science, medicine, traditional psychology, the issue of suicide has long been resolved and everything has been sorted out. But if you look from the point of view of the psychologism of the soul... James Hillman has a wonderful work “Suicide and the Soul”, which sheds light on the issue of suicide, where we will see that every death is ultimately a suicide. This can be called the main question of the philosophy of our time. How Camus viewed suicide. The reason for suicide is just an excuse for him. And the main reason is the absurdity in life, the collision with this absurdity in life. This is an unbearable collision when a person experiences himself as being thrown into this world not of his own free will, leaving not of his own free will, and he has to solve the problem: to stay here, protect himself with the toys of inauthentic existence, find the courage to survive the Horror and the Call of reality, or leave , escape. The absurd is the atmosphere into which humanity entered perhaps at the end of the 19th century. This is the atmosphere in which Chekhov's heroes live. Let’s remember “The Seagull” and Treplev and Arkadina in the bandaging scene, the paradoxical inability to hear each other is an absurd situation. Another triangle - Gaevaand Ranevskaya Ermolai Lopakhin in “The Cherry Orchard”. The fading impulses of Andrei and his sisters with each action in Three Sisters. The torment of “Ivanov” and “Platonov” from “A Play Without a Title”: “I am 35 years old, I am 35 years old, and I am nobody, I am a zero, a nonentity, I have done nothing in this world!” and the naive hopes of Sofia Egorovna, which are later found in many of Chekhov’s heroines: “We will work, work until we sweat, until exhaustion, eat simple bread, wear simple clothes...” - all of them are absolute nonsense! Man is limited in all his manifestations. The absurdity is in the unfillable gap between your own existence and the content that you put into it, how can a thinking being be mortal? What kind of destiny is this if I can come to terms with it only by renouncing knowledge and life, if my desire always encounters an irresistible wall? Any desire is the bringing to life of paradoxes. And such a fundamental paradox is the contradiction between the complete mechanicalness and conditioning of man (in Gurdjieff this thesis is taken to the extreme - “Man is a machine”) and what the soul yearns for and what seems to be about to be available, eternal, clear, crystal clear like a mountain air is a feeling of fullness of being and absolute freedom from conditioning. After all, if he did not exist, there would be no longing for him. It seems that everything is arranged in such a way that this poisoned peace is born, giving us seeming carelessness, sleep of the heart and renunciation of death. Here is Ranevskaya’s monologue from “The Cherry Orchard,” where these thoughts of Camus are expressed quite transparently: “Oh, my sins... I always squandered money without restraint, like crazy, and married a man who made only debts. My husband died from champagne - he drank terribly - and, unfortunately, I fell in love with someone else, got together, and just at that time - this was the first punishment, a blow straight to the head - right here on the river... he drowned my boy, and I went abroad, completely left, never to return, never to see this river... I closed my eyes, ran, not remembering myself, and he followed me... mercilessly, rudely. I bought a dacha near Menton, so he fell ill there, and for three years I did not know rest, day or night; the sick man has tormented me, my soul has dried up. And last year, when the dacha was sold for debts, I went to Paris, and there he robbed me, abandoned me, got along with someone else, I tried to poison myself... So stupid, so shameful... And suddenly I was drawn to Russia, to my homeland , to my girl... (Wipes away tears.) Lord, Lord, be merciful, forgive me my sins! Don't punish me anymore! Oh, it seems like music is playing somewhere..." The clash between irrationality and a frenzied desire for clarity is absurd. All thinkers agree on one thing: a person is able to see and know only his own walls. How can one not turn to the inexorable Kronos, inexorable twice as time and as limitations. Camus asks himself, he needs to understand why people voluntarily leave this world and why they remain. After all, to stay means to wage a continuous struggle. Camus’s main work is called “Rebel Man,” rebelling against the absurd. This struggle presupposes a complete absence of hope, but not despair, not renunciation. The absurd has meaning, it is a struggle to find meaning in the absurd. This is a very difficult question, it is very difficult to talk about it. Let us return to the myth of Sisyphus, armed with some theses about the philosophy of the absurd: Who among us does not dream of finally breaking out of the routine of everyday life and starting a big real business, finally starting to live? And sometimes we even come close to “starting to Live,” but, like Sisyphus, we roll back with the stone... But the myth of Sisyphus only states a fact, it does not give us mechanisms that allow us to see how this happens. Here later classical works come to the rescue, richer in details and details that are not accidental... In particular, we turn to Chekhov's play "Three Sisters". There are many characters there and each one means something important, right down to the nanny or Lieutenant Fedotik, who appears sporadically. Dreams of a new life, of a breakthrough from routine, of.