Alexandr Korol

eyes will open to everything.” I say: “And what’s the use of these,” I say, “retreats
of yours? I don’t see that you’ve become better — and all cough-cough, without
energy, without confidence. So what’s the use, I say, then? It means they don’t
work, and all,” I say, “the rest of your, of my acquaintances, the ones who go to all
these retreats. I don’t see that their life has started playing in bright colors, that
they shine — somehow nobody shines.” People don’t want to understand this.

And here’s another interesting moment. I’m talking with another person and I
tell him that: “You understand that you, well…” He says: “I want to come to know
spirituality, to know spirituality.” I say: “But in the sense that you,” I say, “you’re
material.” He says: “Well, how? Why am I material? Material is when I lived like
this, did everything this way, all the affairs, but now I don’t go anywhere, I just
read your books, analyse everything, break it all down.” I say: “But that’s not
spirituality. It’s the same material world, only it exists in practice and in theory.
And you’ve simply set practice aside and gone off into the material world of theory,
but your mind is seething just the same, and you appraise everything, analyse
and break it down with the mind, memorize some books about spirituality. So
that’s not spirituality.” And the person is shocked: “How incredible — how could
I have gotten confused about this?” I say: “I don’t know. Spirituality is something
else. It’s a different rhythm, when on the contrary you don’t think, don’t analyse,
don’t appraise, but live by feelings.” And so, you see, people have muddled the
boundaries even in this and don’t understand what’s what.

What I saw, that the people who don’t shine, who are extinguished, as I now
call it now… Probably that’s why in childhood I used to say that there are closed
and open people. I meant that an open one is precisely the one who has a heart,
and the light enters into it — that’s the open one, that is, the spiritual one.
Whereas the material one is precisely the one, the closed one, who has cut off
this feeling with the mind, and he doesn’t feel the feeling because of his seething
mind. And so I see that those who are extinguished — all right, they engage in
soul-searching, from which they precisely suffer, they think. They think that
from engaging in soul-searching they’re developing, but in reality they’re burying
themselves. And so I see that these people, they try everything on themselves very
much, appraise it on their own account, think about themselves 24 hours a day.