Alexandr Korol

what the trials were for me personally. For me, the trials were usually... So everyone’s trials are different. What is Mara? I’ll give an example: in 2020, when covid-19 started, this coronavirus, I was just observing — it didn’t interest me what scientists wrote in newspapers and media — I observed myself and saw that people who had hidden illnesses, which they didn’t know about and which were developed maybe only 10%, all those illnesses seemed to suddenly surface when people got covid. It felt like covid accelerated all the diseases they had, so if a person had no illnesses, nothing surfaced. But if they had some problem with their liver, lungs, or so on, it multiplied a thousandfold because of covid, and they got sick and died. It was like a speeding up of time — that everything hidden in a person, which might have appeared as an illness only after 10 years, appeared immediately thanks to covid, as if 10 years had passed all at once. And here I noticed something: Mara, the underworld — especially Mara itself — is still a vast realm, but Mara works like the covid virus does with health, only with the soul. If a person has some small sins or weaknesses, Mara seems to dig all that out, pulling it to the surface, creating circumstances so the person faces it, lives through it, and frees themselves from it. And it turns out that the more, so to speak, falseness inside a person — resentments, anger, envy — the more all of that intensifies because of Mara. That’s how Mara works, and what intensified for me was the reaction to a person when they do something wrong. I’m always right, I do nothing bad, no sin is on me — but if someone breaks your mug, accidentally damages your laptop, or takes your car without asking and crashes it, the reaction can vary: you can forgive, scold, fine, or argue and stop talking, so there are many options. The way I overcame this part of Mara was by finally deciding not to respond with that last reaction: when someone does something nasty to you, you shouldn’t call them a villain, scold them, or destroy them or their world by showing they are wrong and you are right. You shouldn’t try to serve justice like that. It’s better simply to show that you’re displeased — not with words, but with actions. For example, if someone broke your car or took it without asking, afterward you stay busy, don’t call or write to them unnecessarily, don’t invite them over, and don’t lend anything else. Then they’ll start to worry about what happened, and they’ll try to figure out what they did wrong and how to make it right — they’ll ask what, when, and why your attitude changed. And you can say: