Roza and Margarita Riaikkenen's
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TOLSTOY -
ABOUT FEAR by Roza Riaikkenen II Fear is one of the most destructive feelings in
human life. Everyone knows it to some extent and has to deal with it. Battling
fear sometimes takes all the people’s attention and power away, negatively affecting
their ability to achieve what they would like to achieve in their life. Who can
be secured from fear? Perhaps, only an individual who realised what is fear in
common, and understood its illusory nature. Leo Tolstoy was a man who did this. Tolstoy stated that the cause of fear is
people’s perception of human life as of the existence of their physical bodies.
What do people fear? Usually, they think that they fear suffering and death. The most frightful fear – the fear of death –
is, according to Tolstoy, fear of a ghost. Nobody knows it, but everyone fears.
The fear of losing “the self”. What is then human
“self” and how can we lose our “self”? If my “self” is my physical body, then its
cells become periodically replaced: some of them die, and other cells replace
them. So, my physical “self” is at any moment of my life already different from
the “self” of the past moment. In fact, my initial physical “self” ceased to
exist long ago, and I don’t fear the constant disappearance of the cells of my
body. Despite all of our changes, our consciousness tells us that we are one
entity. If my fear relates rather to the possibility of
the disappearance of my consciousness, then a question arises: do I know when
it appeared and when it will disappear? “We fear
to lose with the death of our flesh our special “self”, which unites our body
and a number of states of our consciousness manifested in time into the one;
whereas my special “self” appeared not with my birth, and therefore the
discontinuance of the temporary consciousness which I know in myself cannot annihilate
that which unites all the temporary states of consciousness into the one.” (L.Tolstoy, About Life) Our temporary consciousness every day ceases
for the time of sleep, and we don’t fear this. If we went to sleep for a
season, like bears, or for a century, like in a fairy tale, we also wouldn’t
fear this. “For the understanding of not temporary, but true life, a million
years or eight hours of life’s cessation makes no difference because true life
doesn’t have any time.” “When
the body is destroyed, then the consciousness of today becomes destroyed also.”
But, maybe, it has to go to let people to develop their new consciousness,
which is dawning in the depths of the old one and has to break through it, like
a seedling is breaking through the envelope of the seed and developing into a
new plant. This is difficult, this is painful, but life is impossible without
this. Without this process, it would be a real death. Tolstoy tells us that in reality people don’t
fear death – they fear life because they feel that they don’t understand
something important about their life and they live their destined time not as
they should live – but how they should live they don’t know. “The best proof of
the fact that the fear of death is in reality not the fear of death, but the fear
of false, erroneous life is that people often kill themselves because of their fear
of death.” Because of their fear of life, people fear to
lose all these things, without which, as they think, they couldn’t live or
would suffer: wealth, respect and health. “It
seems to them that humans can be more or less lucky with their life. To be a
poor worker or a sick person, as they say, is a bad luck; and to be a wealthy
and healthy person is a good luck. They stretch all their powers of mind to
avoid bad, unlucky, poor and unhealthy life and organize for themselves a good,
healthy and lucky life.” Exerting every effort for this purpose, people fear to
lose the results of their effort. Do they feel themselves happy; do they feel
the good, which Tolstoy understood as the goal of anyone’s life? There are
plenty of examples, which show us that people can find their good in different
life situations: being healthy or ill, wealthy or poor, surrounded by other people
or in solitude. If we look around us, we can notice many different and
sometimes difficult situations, in which people find their good. For example, the
astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, whose physical body is severely disabled, is
living in his mind in the world of stars, and he is making tremendous
discoveries in this world! Sometimes, when people start feeling that their
rotation in the small circle of life aimed to their personal consumption cannot in reality be called life, they become frightened. Perhaps,
they start feeling the difference between their illusory personal good and the
real good, which becomes expressed through love. You cannot preserve your
personal good, but you have the opportunity of finding fearlessness and
immortality in love. While exploring the way to fearlessness,
Tolstoy came to understand the meaning of suffering, which people also fear. According
to Tolstoy, people change under the influence of suffering. It transfers their
attention from the pleasures of their mundane personalities to their
consciousness, which starts asking questions. Usually people don’t ask them
when they enjoy their personal life; they think that they have no questions:
they are so smart and lucky that they have nothing to think or doubt about –
they can teach others what they have to do to live well. This is their illusion, and they pay for it
with constant fear of losing it. At a certain time their pleasures inevitably
change to suffering. Suffering forces a person to ask: “why?” And in this way, from one question to another, consciousness is
developing; its seedling is sprouting and growing on. The individual is
awakening from the illusion of animal life to the real life of a conscious
human being, from striving to personal good to the deeds of active love.
As Tolstoy puts it, love is that which a person
cannot lose. Love leaves everywhere its blessed imprints, which continue to
act, i.e. to live, in eternity. And fear retreats - there is no place for it in
the world of immortal love. |
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