From the author: A course of lectures given in 2008-2009. Who is Kronos and what does he want? First of all, I want to read a few quotes from Iamblichus. Iamblichus is the founder of the Syrian school of Neoplatonism of the 3rd century AD, a student of Porphyry, who in turn was a student of Plotinus himself, the founder of Neoplatonism. Iamblichus comments on Plato’s Timaeus. “Timaeus” “Time arose along with the sky, so that, born together, they and would break up together if breakup came for them. Eternal nature served as the prototype for time, so that it could become as similar to it as possible. For the prototype is that which remains throughout all eternity, but the image has arisen, is and will be throughout all time.” That is, the archetype is eternal, and the image generated by the archetype develops over time. In his commentary on Timaeus, Iamblichus writes: “For these reasons, time is also, as far as it is possible for it, likened to the pattern of eternal nature, and a given time is like eternity, and is likened to itself, as far as possible on the basis of its uniform nature, and is created through a single energy, and acts in agreement with it, and gives a definition to all things that arise, even differing from each other." Iamblichus demonstrates other arguments on the same topic: "" For the prototype exists, remaining throughout all eternity, but the image arose, so he is and will be throughout all time.” Thus, what exists in the intelligible as a paradigm turns into an image in the becoming. And what exists there according to eternity, here - according to time. And what in the intelligible is in the “now” according to its being, here becomes in the continuation of all time. And the being that exists there in an equal way manifests itself in this place as something that is becoming and yet to be. And what is not separated there is separated here. And now the middle, dual nature of time becomes obvious, for time is the middle between eternity and heaven; it is dual, since it comes into existence together with the cosmos, being ordered by eternity; and presides over the cosmos, becoming like eternity.” A very important point in this: here time is interpreted both as eternity and as an ordered flow. And this happens, as it were, simultaneously, although the word “simultaneously” is not entirely suitable here, because eternity is always eternity. This is a single moment, stretching without end. The famous mythology researcher Mircea Eliade emphasized that there are two periods in the history of mankind: the mythological period, when humanity lived, as it were, outside of time - in eternity, and the period when time “became over-timed” and became linear. Images, unlike prototypes, begin to develop over time. Before that, there were archetypes, and humanity at that time lived according to archetypal laws and personified the myth. Those. everything went cyclically, in the footsteps of their ancestors, without retreating a single step. Next, let us turn to the genealogy and the creation of the world, which is also mentioned in Plato’s Timaeus. In particular, the place about the fact that from Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Heaven) Ocean, Kronos and Rhea and their entire generation were born, Iamblichus classifies Ocean, Kronos and Rhea to the three spheres between earth and heaven, since they divided it into three. The ocean rules over all wet essence. Rhea is the goddess who holds together the flowing and air-like breaths. Kronos directs the highest and most subtle place of the air - the ether, occupying the middle, for the middle and center among immaterial entities, according to Plato, has greater power than what is around it. If they are united and similar to each other, then Iamblichus proves that Kronos is a monad, Rhea is a dyad, Ocean is a triad, and then the entire generation of titans and titanides. It is very important here that Kronos is a monad, as something indivisible, although existing in its two hypostases as eternity and time. This interpretation of Iamblichus is not unfounded, and in the future, when we talk about Kronos, we will encounter this. Let me briefly recall the genealogy of the Olympian gods and the cosmology of the creation of heaven and earth. Uranus, after thathow he married Gaia, he was afraid of dying from one of his children, so when they were born, he returned them back to the bowels of the earth. And Gaia, exhausted from the burden, persuaded Kronos, the last born, to castrate Uranus. Kronos became the supreme god. The sickle with which he castrated Uranus was thrown into the sea by Kronos at Cape Drepan (Sickle) in Achaia. This sickle was kept in a cave in Zancle (Sicily). Further, in Greek mythology it is said that a golden age began with him. And the golden age is eternity, when people live in mythological time; Mircea Eliade called such a person “archaic man.” And there are still certain tribes on earth that we can call archaic, in which time has not yet begun, they live during the golden age. As a rule, these are tribes in the depths of Africa, in northern Siberia, some Indian tribes, etc. Kronos was also afraid of Gaia's prediction that one of his children would repeat his act and overthrow him. After all, everything is cyclical. Here we are faced not with the myth of Oedipus, but with the emasculation of the father at even earlier stages. These are the beginnings of the myth of Oedipus, not connected with the possession of the mother, but this struggle with the father and his repression begins from the very beginning of time. Kronos swallowed the children born to him by Rhea one after another. So he swallowed Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. From the union of Kronos with the nymph Philyra (whom he later, fearing Rhea’s jealousy, turned into a mare), the centaur Chiron was born - later a wise educator of many gods of the younger generation. Rhea, pregnant with Zeus, not wanting to lose her last child, gave birth to him in a deep cave in Crete and hid it there, and let Kronos swallow the stone. When Kronos realized that he had been deceived, he began to look for Zeus all over the earth, but Rhea prevented him from doing this every time. When Zeus grew up, he started a war with his father. The birth of Zeus is the birth of a hero who goes beyond the stereotype. On the one hand he comes out, but on the other he doesn’t come out, because he also castrates his father - the second round of times. Here again Kronos appears, both as eternity and as the passage of time, because we are talking about a ten-year war. Kronos was overthrown by Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus. According to the Orphics, Zeus, on the advice of Nyx, gave Cronus honey to drink, he fell asleep, and he was castrated. At the moment of castration, Aphrodite was born from the seed of Kronos. (In the Greek version, Uranus usually appears here). Zeus imprisoned all the titans who came to his defense in Tartarus. Tartarus is the farthest and most limited place of Hades. Zeus overthrew his father, freed his brothers and sisters from his womb, forcing Kronos to vomit up the children he had swallowed, and reigned over the world, making his brothers and sisters Olympian gods. The subsequent story is so well known that it does not require repetition. According to a later version of the myth, Kronos from Tartarus was subsequently resettled to the “isles of the blessed.” Hence, in the minds of the ancient Greeks, the “kingdom of Kronos” corresponded to the fabulous “golden age”. That is, it was the age of “eternal return,” when time went cyclically, and in fact there was eternity. Kronos as a monad, acting on the one hand as eternity, on the other hand as time. Hence the spheres of its influence: cyclicality and the boundaries associated with this cyclicality, beyond which it is impossible to go; the linearity with which Youth-Old Age is associated, therefore Kronos is such a combination - the Eternal Youth and the Old Sage; wisdom that comes in old age; a finitude associated with cyclicity, but also existing in linearity, that is, Death. Kronos has several spheres that flow from one another and which people encounter every day: time, limitations, depression caused by limitations, wisdom increasing over the years, and death is a fundamental limitation of habitual perception - the end of earthly time. As a rule, people fear Kronos just like Hades, instead of drawing invaluable experience from their storehouses. Like Borges’s line: “deriving the priceless experience of death...” It is impossible to live without restrictions. Without restrictions, a person loses his individuality. Firstthe limitation that we always have with us is the skin, the boundary of the body. A person who is not aware of himself in the body is of little use. A person who runs from Kronos, from the awareness of time, finitude and death - Heidegger called such people the man of the crowd - Das Man. True, such a person will not run far. The limitations of such people come suddenly, without any preparation, and, as a rule, cause them the greatest suffering, for which they, alas, are not prepared. On the other hand, depression as a consequence of limitation is a very good medicine, allowing you to realize yourself, your boundaries, the context of your life, your activities, your emotions, your picture of the world, to re-evaluate something, to take inventory of experience. Limiting experience is also a new experience. But this medicine is not for everyone. There are people, and not too few of them, who commit suicide from depression. They face even more drastic restrictions if they fail. I believe, also on the basis of archetypal conversations with Kronos, that those people who were with Kronos in some hidden, unconscious conflicts, in confrontation with him, cannot cope and commit suicide. Those who acquired debts gave parts of their souls to Kronos in exchange for not noticing time, escaping depression, not aging, that is, somehow maneuvering between restrictions. And when they are faced with some very strong limitation, they cannot stand it and commit suicide. That's my theory. The limitation is quite useful if you look at it from a scale larger than the scale of the current day, because at some point it gives the opportunity to switch from that rigid scenario that dominated both the small and large context. If a person gets used to something, he develops a rigid dominant, in this case the restriction is useful. It allows you to limit the flow of signals into this dominant, and it begins to weaken and the person can switch to another dominant. This is hard to experience because a habit has been formed and giving it up is always painful... It can be little things: a person gets used to a comfortable lifestyle and suddenly there is a crisis, etc., you have to switch to a different lifestyle. Nevertheless, a revision occurs - why was something given to a person, what did he do with it, how did he dispose of it... The question arises: are restrictions created at the unconscious request of the person himself at some higher level or is this a decision of the gods? You can see that everything obviously happens according to the will of man and the gods. What is man if not an assembly of gods? If we recall our first lecture and the words about the Aggregate Customer, the dialectic here is very complex: the gods control man, but man also controls the gods. Whether something happens consciously or unconsciously is associated with limitations, this is already a question of another limitation - the limitation of consciousness. Consciousness can be expanded. There are various means for this, ranging from pharmacology and plants, to exercises, meditation, joining the ASC, etc. Here we also enter into a relationship with Kronos, and we can also expand it to our limit, depending on how much we are indebted to Kronos. We are all indebted to Kronos, everyone in infancy turned to him, experiencing some kind of pain, and limitation with an unconscious request, a cry for freedom, for example, from diapers - one of the first restrictions in life. Everyone is in debt in their own way. The question arises: are there any ways how a person can repay part of the debt to Kronos? Paying off the entire debt is difficult, and brings what we call liberation, including from time (I don’t know how possible this is in the human body). There are ways to pay off at least part of the debt. Many people, who know and don’t know, talk about them on the pages of books: living here and now, living a moment as a lasting eternity, connecting Kronos into the Monad in oneself. This is here and now, which representatives of the new age movement have been talking about a lot lately - these are the collections of Kronosinto the Monad: you live simultaneously in the moment and in ongoing eternity. If a person falls into such a stream, without dwelling on the past and future, consider that he pays off part of his debts to Kronos. Living in the flow. In the flow of the present. But here New Age representatives confuse a lot about this. The present is not only the perception of the physical senses, it is also the world of the imagination (and it is a delusion to consider the thought process as some kind of evil, falling out of the present into fantasy), the world of the soul, which can also be lived in the present. The Present has meaning as the Present i.e. valuable, maximally valuable, truly existing. Imagination is something that really exists, it is a mental world that cannot be ignored and reduced to the functions of physical perception. This is also a kind of castration, castration of Kronos, also a limitation. You can live in both the inner and outer worlds, and on their edge, and travel back and forth. Being in the present may not coincide with being in the current biographical time, because biography and soul time are things that sometimes only touch, but most often their trajectories lie in different places. The present is where you are, as long as you are aware of being there. Awareness itself is what gives time realness. Therefore, “here and now” is not an absence of imagination, it is a presence both in the imagination and in the physical world, but a conscious presence when a person reflects: where he is, why, why, how. If a person tries to “stop the moment”, to become attached to something in the flow of the past or future, then he thereby sells part of his soul to Kronos, because in this case he falls out of the present into obsessing over what was or will be. Cyclic obsessiveness is stopping, falling out, an attempt to divide the Monad. His time begins to loop, Kronos loops him. There is a big difference here: fixating on something in fantasy or in the imagination, but in imagination you can move in the flow of images, without getting fixated, just following the images, observing, embodied in images. Images are fluid, unique, they do not get stuck in cycles, they develop - this is a constant mutual transformation. If you are fixated on some image, that’s it, you have fallen out of the present. This is worth paying attention to. You can even rehearse as an actor rehearses a role, mentally transporting yourself to the stage. But this will be a living work of the soul, a living stay in an image that is constantly developing, always new. If you savor or, on the contrary, fear the same thing and constantly remain in it, then you have fallen into a cycle. So you can be in the imagination, you can be in fantasy, it will be alive, real, if you follow the image, its living development, its self-organization, as the scientist would say. Behind the cascade of choices, behind the cascade of bifurcations that transform this image into strings of other images. If we talk about another aspect, being in the here-and-now, in eternity, in following the image and at the same time in the archetypal present time leads a person to Wisdom. The wisdom that a person extracts from reflection in the appropriate state, from asceticism as a limitation, from any reflection on finitude, on death. Only a neurotic thinks about death in a fixated manner, pushing against some barrier and fixating on this barrier and staying there. You can think about death in different ways, meditatively surrendering to images. After all, Kronos, like death, is sometimes depicted with a scythe in some cultures. The medieval philosopher and alchemist was often depicted in engravings at a desk on which stood a skull with empty eye sockets as a reminder of finitude and reflections on death, limitations, and the frailty of human existence. Maximum wisdom comes through awareness of these things. Therefore, when Kronos places a limitation on a person by mutual agreement with his self, which he, in fact, enters as one of the elements, then the person has a chance to become somewhat wiser. From anyrestrictions, even from the slightest, even from a cold that knocked a person down for two days, limiting the ability to actively continue their lifestyle. Or being late for a trolleybus or train, which limits the ability to get somewhere on time, provides an opportunity to reflect, i.e. surrender to the flow of images. There is no time to waste. Or rather, it is possible to lose it if you are not aware of it. You may think that you need to do something specific, but instead you are in some kind of forced isolation, for example, and don’t do it. But this is not a fact that what you think is what you really need. Mentally you made plans, the plans did not come true, you feel disadvantaged, limited - this is human stupidity, but if you realize this, then you can become wiser, because at this moment the work of the soul takes place. If you go through this depression, don’t run away from it, don’t try to immediately make up for what you supposedly missed, but think meditatively about it, being in touch with time. Another question arises: Where is the line where you can understand whether you need to retreat or fight? After all, you can’t just go with the flow and retreat at the slightest obstacle; there are things that require some kind of overcoming. Some people fight and gain, some retreat when faced with obstacles, some fight against windmills. The answer might be: Both make sense. For each choice there are guides of different archetypes. If someone fights with windmills, it means one of the gods is directing him to fight this and gain some experience from it. The question arises: where is a person’s choice if, according to this logic, someone is constantly directing him? A person’s choice is to listen to the voice of this or that god, figuratively speaking, to ride this or that ray, to listen to the voice that demands to retreat, or the voice that demands to fight. The voices come from different hypostases, from different gods, they give different experiences, and it is impossible to say that one of them is more correct. What happens that in a person’s soul there is not a single grain that belongs to the person personally? There is a dialectic here: - everything belongs to him, all the gods belong to him, in a sense, he directs himself through the gods, mythological and archetypal characters. Here it is worth understanding not literally that man consists of gods, or gods make man, or gods pull some strings on man like a puppet. Everything is here at once. Man is a collection of deities, this is what he is, all the gods belong to him. Each god moves him towards a certain kind of motives, feelings, thinking, sensations. You don’t have to use the language of the gods, you can break it down according to some other psychological models, motivations, and values. It’s just that the language of the gods is the language of a living, mythological picture of the world. If we perceive the soul as a set of sensory and figurative channels that connect all the gods together, then the work of the soul consists of a constant choice between these motives, well, I already talked about this in the last lecture in the passage about the concept of circumstances in directing. There are many situations when the mind stumbles to the restriction. Among them, one must learn to distinguish where the limitation needs to be pushed aside, giving space to creativity and knowledge of the nature of things with the mind, and where the mind should not try to explain the inexplicable, because it will be a completely meaningless fight with windmills. The mind has a clear functional purpose - to describe and inventory certain phenomena when the description is made. There are phenomena that are fundamentally indescribable, at least in this era, and this is sometimes immediately clear. Maybe language is missing because the mind also works with language. Language also includes images. There is a famous phrase belonging to the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my world are the limits of my language,” I believe this phrase came to him to some extent from Kronos. Language, after all, is also a self-developing system, growing, branching, somewhere running into dead ends, somewhere branching into new trends, and perhaps in a thousand yearspeople will have the opportunity to describe what is now indescribable. But now, if there is no language to describe it, it’s like hitting your head against a wall. There are things that are fundamentally irrational that do not need to be described now, based on the circumstances of this time. And only a few people who have reached a high level of language development are people for whom every word swarms with a string of images that are limited for others who do not have any experience. These are major philosophers, thinkers, cultural experts, scientists, mystics, and other people who can enter such a space of language that explains a lot of things. But unfortunately, most people do not understand them. We read, say, a book by some modern philosopher, for example Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault: individual words are understandable, but the meaning escapes because there are no figurative connections, but we don’t need this - this is a limitation for us, which for some reason we no need to understand. The images are interconnected by many different connections from different sides, from different angles of view, contexts. It is possible to grasp this intuitively, but it is difficult to describe, although such attempts are made by people who speak a certain level of language. Therefore, language is a very important thing, it really expands its boundaries if you let it flow through you and realize what is flowing through you, realize the entire interconnection of images behind every word and phrase. This is the expansion of the boundaries of language, and thereby the expansion of consciousness. Sometimes you can comprehend very, very much in one word, because it has many interpretations. And the more interpretations you can see in a word, sentence, text, the wider the space of your language and your world. Let us return to the hypostasis of Kronos - the fundamental limitation, which also has many interpretations, is death. Here is a quote from Hillman: “Because we have so little connection with the death we carry within ourselves, it seems to “pounce” on us from the outside, like an external force. What we are not aware of in ourselves always seems to come from outside. Theology has always known that death is the main concern of the soul. Theology is in a sense concerned with death, with its sacraments and funeral rituals, and descriptions of heaven and hell. But death itself is hardly open to theological investigation. Religious canons were a consequence of the dogmas of faith. The power of the priesthood drew its power from the canons, which represented a worked out position regarding death. This position may vary depending on the form of religion, but it always exists within it. The theologian knows what his position is regarding death. Scripture, tradition, and professional skill assist the theologian in explaining why death exists and what actions are expected of him in relation to it. The hope of the theologian's psychology and his power is the doctrine of life after death. Theological proofs of the existence of the soul are so connected with the canons of death - the canons of immortality, the sin of resurrection, the Day of Judgment, that the open study of death calls into question the very basis of theological psychology. We must remember that the theological position begins at the opposite pole to the psychological. It starts with dogma, not data; from petrified, inanimate experiences. Theology requires from the soul the basis for a refined system of belief in death, which constitutes one aspect of religious power. If there were no soul, man might expect theology to invent one in order to legitimize the ancient exclusive rights of the priesthood over death.” We do not know at what point on the curve of each life one is statistically supposed to enter death. We do not know what the fruiting time allotted to a person before death is. We do not know whether the soul dies at all. First spoken by Plato in the dialogue “Phaedo”, repeated in other sources and at other times, exaggerated, refuted, taken out of context, the philosophical maxim turned out to be true: philosophy is the desire for death and dying. The philosopher usuallyviewed life from the point of view of death, and death from the point of view of life. Life and death enter the world together; eyes and the sockets in which they are located are born at the same moment. At the moment of his birth, a person is already old enough to die. As he continues to live, he continues to die. Death is constantly approaching, and not just at that moment, which is determined by medicine and established legally. Every event in my life contributes to my death, and we create our death by living day by day. Logically, there can be an opposite view: any action directed against death, any action that resists death, is detrimental to life. Philosophy can consider life and death in unity. For philosophy there is no need for them to be mutually exclusive opposites, polarized by Freud into the images of Eros and Thanatos, Death is the only absolute reality in life, the only guarantee and truth. Due to the fact that it is the only state that all life must take into account, death is the only thing that belongs to a person a priori. Life matures, develops and strives towards death. It turns out that death is her true goal. We live to die. Life and death are contained in each other, complement each other, are understandable only in each other's terms. Life acquires its value through death, and the pursuit of death is the kind of life that philosophers often recommend. (in particular, starting with Socrates) If only the living can die, only the dying is truly alive. Through the mouth of Socrates, Plato said that philosophy is a rehearsal for death. This is a form of mortal testing. She was also called "dying to the world." Naturally, Death is not only the death of the physical shell, it is a departure from the world, a separation from the world in order to comprehend the wisdom of life. The first message when working through any human problem is to try to consider it as your own experience. A person understands the essence of the problem by connecting with it. He approaches the problem of death through dying. And we die constantly, from birth. The approach to the question of death requires dying in the soul, daily, similar to how the body dies in the flesh. And just as bodily flesh is renewed, so the soul is reborn after experiencing mortal experiences. Mortal experiences are important, they sometimes occur as catharsis, sometimes as a result of some kind of meditative practices, thanatotherapy, taking LSD, sometimes as a consequence of a life crisis and limitation. Consequently, working on the problem of death consists both in dying for the world with its illusory, supporting us hope that death does not really exist, and in “dying into life”, as a manifestation of fresh vital interest in its essence. Because living and dying in this opposition presuppose each other, any action that holds back death prevents life. “How” to die means no less than “how” to live. And here we return to Chaika once again. To the monologue of the World Soul, which was written by Kostya Treplev: “People, lions, eagles and partridges, antlered deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that lived in the water, starfish and those that could not be seen with the eye - in a word, all lives , all lives, all lives, having completed a sad circle, have faded away... For thousands of centuries, the earth has not carried a single living creature, and this poor moon lights its lantern in vain. Cranes no longer wake up screaming in the meadow, and cockchafers are no longer heard in the linden groves. Cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. Scary, scary, scary. (Pause). The bodies of living beings disappeared into dust, and eternal matter turned them into stones, into water, into clouds, and the souls of them all merged into one. The common world soul is me... I... I have the soul of Alexander the Great, and Caesar, and Shakespeare, and Napoleon, and the last leech. In me, the consciousnesses of people merged with the instincts of animals, and I remember everything, everything, and every life in myselfI'm experiencing it myself again. I'm alone. Once every hundred years I open my lips to speak, and my voice sounds dull in this emptiness, and no one hears it... And you, pale lights, do not hear me... In the morning a rotten swamp gives birth to you, and you wander until dawn, but without thought, without will, without the trembling of life. Fearing that life does not arise in you, the father of eternal matter, the devil, every moment in you, as in stones and in water, carries out an exchange of atoms, and you change constantly. In the universe, only spirit remains constant and unchanging. Like a prisoner thrown into an empty deep well, I don’t know where I am or what awaits me. The only thing that is not hidden from me is that in a stubborn, cruel struggle with the devil, the beginning of material forces, I am destined to win, and after that matter and spirit will merge in beautiful harmony and the kingdom of world will will come. But this will happen only when, little by little, after a long series of millennia, the moon, and bright Sirius, and the earth turn to dust... Until then, horror, horror...” Isn’t this the voice of Kronos, so brilliantly perceived by Chekhov? , and put it into the mouth of Nina Zarechnaya. Yes, the unconscious turns out to be inexhaustible. We, like swimmers, can glide along the waves of the ocean, and something new always rises from the depths to its surface. In life, as in the psyche: we are constantly faced with the need to adapt to new circumstances. When we reject mortal concerns, we reject life's most essential question, leaving life unfinished. In this case, organic death prevents us from confronting fundamental questions and deprives us of the chance for redemption. To avoid such a state of soul, traditionally called a curse, we must come to death before it comes to us. Here it is appropriate to once again turn to the god-ruler of the kingdom of the dead - Hades and expand the context of ideas about him: If Zeus acts as an emperor, then Hades is like a cardinal, and a gray cardinal, little by little. Zeus's voice is loud, direct and precise. Hades follows circuitous paths through the call of instincts. They would be direct if people could feel and experience their instincts. That’s why, by the way, the lower gods are now manifesting themselves and they are ready to give people parts of their souls, because the connection with instincts has disappeared (except for small tribes connected with the earth, peasants living by healthy instincts), which means that a little more and humanity will generally fly off to nowhere something from the Earth, physically or into some kind of psychosis, a massive departure from the body. In exchange for the fact that people will return the strength borrowed from Hades, he returns earthiness, because in painful situations they usually give him precisely those parts of the soul that are associated with the experience of physicality, with the sensation of the body, pain. And without the feeling of the body, a person is no longer a person. As shocking as it may sound to some spiritual seekers, a person is first of all a body, they will not find any spirit until they experience themselves through the body, sometimes through pain and illness a person has to be returned to the body. Otherwise, everyone runs to the spirit, and let’s give away the physical, the human, so as not to experience pain. Oh, it hurts me, oh Hades, help! - it naturally sounds different, it sounds unconsciously, in the womb, in infancy, and often in adulthood. It happens that a person thinks that he is turning to God or some kind of god, or is simply internally crying out for help, but the appeal ends up in Hades because he is experiencing pain. “Anesthetize me!” - it’s as if the person is saying - okay, come here - get some painkillers - you’re partially no longer in the body. It will be easier for you, you will become neurotic. Neurotics have much fewer problems than a healthy person, because he hides from life within the four walls of his neurosis. Over the long millennia of these favors to the gods, a certain limit in these processes has approached, so the lower gods are ready to make contact, to accept debts. This entire complex system of the Aggregate Customer, which trains a person, is built on techniques that the most advanced Zen mentors who build their paradoxical moves. UThe total customer has much more refined mechanisms, technologies and provocations and returns. If you join this game, you will play to the fullest. I repeat, now there is an opportunity to recoup, to pay off debts. Hades’ strategy is simple: he intimidates, provokes, brings a person to the brink of life and death, as a result, a person values ​​life more when he comes to this brink. Some who sold part of their soul to him or another god cannot value life at the same time, well... The game is not played according to human rules in a sense, it is difficult for a person to grasp these rules, and if he succeeds, then he understands that there is no illusions of humanism and security. Everything happens in real mode: wars, cataclysms, all this is given to a person to experience as experience, the most valuable experience of pain, deprivation, loss, fear of death, death itself in the end. Some of the gods behave like a psychotherapist, console, warn, encourage, some provoke, some arrange difficult situations, but the person himself chooses, because he is the totality of these gods. I often hear from people who channel that they get to a level of consciousness where everything sparkles and shines. “Dear humanity, everything will be fine, we love you.” We love, of course, but with a special love, real divine love, which also involves the infliction of pain, suffering, death, and everything else. It is important for them that man go through the school of the gods and free himself from them, and the gods free themselves from people and a completely new civilization arises. Humans created gods in a sense, and now the gods are playing with humans. Here the dialectic is mutual, seemingly unconscious on the part of people... And so, playing in this way, the gods teach us how to free ourselves. A tricky process is evolution. I have already said that Hades teaches through fear, anxiety, hopelessness, depression, despair. Zeus, for example, through the rapture of success, luck. But from a divine point of view, all these feelings are no better or worse than one another, they all give experience, all of them need to be passed through and reached another level of humanity. Some people understand these lessons, others don’t; humanity has put up too many barriers in the form of mental constructs, dogmas, obsessions, etc., and has forgotten how to perceive the direct language of the gods. Because even dreams have become incomprehensible to people, although dreams have been deciphered for another 2000 years, now we need a psychotherapist in order to understand the signals of intuition coming through dreams during the process of analysis. Intuition is our voice. The feeling of depression became a reason for committing suicide, although it was intended for something completely different. Fear is perceived as an excuse for running away from oneself, withdrawing into oneself, isolating oneself, or, at best, visiting a psychotherapist, and fear must be lived and felt as an instinct. All kinds of dogmas and teachings, religious and scientific, political, theological, tore man away from the language of the gods, and it no longer became understandable. The lessons of the gods began to be perceived exclusively through the head in the worst sense of the word - through dogmas, beliefs, book religious sermons, information that was not digested, not experienced as experience. The path to the gods is at the same time a path to instincts, and not somewhere to some unknown spirit. The spirit is also an instinct, it is inseparable from the body or the human form. At the ultimate stage, yes, this is a transition to another level of humanity, when a person lives through his body and emotions, and instincts, and personality, and then comes to realize himself in completely different boundaries of the collective world, only then is the possibility of the spirit opened to him, before that the spirit - an empty abstraction. The spirit is diffused in everything, in the gods, in the soul, in the body. This division of spirit - soul - body is so arbitrary, so essentially wrong, because they are all so intertwined that it is in principle impossible to isolate one thing. They have no boundaries, they are all one conglomerate. For example, a person wants to avoid some kind of pain and gives a part of his soul to Hades, it comes to him for training in some way, i.e. he takes her around the circles of his kingdom, shows her all this, gives heropportunity to touch. But at this time, a person not only lacks a soul, but also some part of his body is wooden, some group of muscles is compressed like a lump, as a rule, smooth muscles, skeletal muscles, and organ muscles are associated with Hades. Those. he gave both soul and body at the same time. And it becomes chronic, the pain and part of the body is not felt - it is a muscle clamp, a block - it is in the possession of Hades. But not just in the possession of the species, it goes through some kind of experience there, and it must be returned. Moreover, since these are deep-seated matters associated with Hades, these deep spasms cannot be reached even with a massage. Some areas of smooth muscle that cannot be reached are chronically tense, and even if, say, a person works with himself and can find a deep massage master who can reach these clamps, then the maximum that he can do is to relax this tension for a day or two, maybe for a month - with several sessions. But you won’t go to the massage therapist all the time, because the reason is not in the body, but in the fact that the soul (part of the soul) is in Hades. This is if a person has an unconscious “contract” with Hermes or Athena or someone else, then here you can remove its consequences with body-oriented work - deep massage, yoga, qigong and other types of bodily practices, and if the “contract” is with Hades, or even worse, with Chernobog, then here you cannot limit yourself to bodily work. But, I repeat, now is the time when the lower gods are ready to release tension both from the bones and from the deep muscles, if a person sincerely and, most importantly, turns to the right address. This is possible because the body, soul and spirit are inseparable. And the whole point is whether a person is ready, agrees to make the decision to live not in a world built on illusions of security, but to accept into his life both pain and horror from the fact that he will die (Heidegger called this the Horror of Nothingness that a person experiences when he realizes to the depths of his soul that he is living towards death: from being-towards-death the real path to his real self begins, and goes through horror and pain, alas). There is a lot of information that people do not need to know yet. For the most part, people are simply not ready for the huge amount of information that is stored in the collective unconscious. For some, a psychotherapeutic dose of this information is revealed, for others, a deeper dose of existential information is revealed, for each as he or she is ready. How to get in touch and disclose this information? - The recipe is extremely simple: live your feelings, experience pain, horror, ecstasy, love, anger... don’t give up on it, don’t run away and contact will come to the extent that you are open. Not necessarily, through words - maybe through feelings, intuition, dreams, sensations... Again, those qualities of yours that you consider negative: greed, stinginess, vindictiveness, the desire for destruction - there is no need to repress them and pretend that you are a “good boy or girl.” Greedy - at least admit it to yourself, don’t drive away this awareness, live it, enjoy it - you needed it once, so don’t deceive yourself, perhaps if you live and realize it, you can let go - this will be a dialogue with Hades. Open up to yourself, admit it, don’t hide in disguise, all this is in every person, so there will be contact, dialogue, this form of it, because for dialogue it is not necessary only rational understanding and words, by the way, this is the least effective form of contact. For many centuries, especially in Western civilization, humanity has divided feelings into good and bad and, accordingly, runs away from the “bad” ones, even to the point of repressing them into the unconscious. This is how people fall into their own traps. This is similar to the situation that you once decided not to poop in order to be clean, you didn’t poop for a day or two, then you started pooping, but you assured everyone at every intersection that you didn’t poop. And you’ve been saying this for two or three thousand years. Now, let’s say, I realized that there was nowhere else to go and I had to confess, but it’s already awkward - for so many centuries, foaming at the mouth, I claimed that I was clean. You need to get over this awkwardness; there is no other recipe. This is how you can lose your reputation“good and correct”, but become closer to Life. All these “correctness” and “goodness” are tricks of the mind. Yes, once upon a time the gods created the prerequisites for the division into “good” and “bad”, but all learning is targeted and historical, now are different times, humanity has already bumped its face into the mud, it’s time to return to life, to living instincts. The gods are precisely instincts! God, nature, that's one thing. To say that God “does not poop” (metaphorically), that he is white and fluffy, that he has nothing to do with physicality is stupid, this is a mistake... The Greeks were closer to the gods, they respected physicality, understood that the body -soul-spirit is one thing and it is impossible to separate them, except perhaps for convenience, as a coordinate system. God is the instinct of Life, if we talk about the One... Primary instinct. It has everything, day and night, inspiration and dullness, birth and death. Gods are not somewhere far from the body, from matter, they reflect desires, instincts, needs, values, motivations, emotions, feelings, sensations. It is not something ephemeral, separate from the body. And there is no division into the base and the sublime, etc. All these categories arise as a consequence of a social order, but for some reason it was needed, allowed, society would not have existed without it, and without society a person could not evolve. There is a very complex dialectic here... Society limits, presses, oppresses, but it is impossible without it... So: God is instinct. Kronos and Hades make up a complex instinct - the instinct of death. And not just physical death, but precisely that mortal experience that the soul so needs and about which, for example, James Hillman speaks. Let’s return to “The Seagull.” Kostya Treplev is a weak youthful ego, and in the last act, when he is convinced of futility his ambitions and, most importantly, having encountered in the last act of the play Nina Zarechnaya, with whom he was in love, despite her betrayal with Trigorin, who was the embodiment of Psyche - the Soul, and seeing that she is the image of the Soul, has long since lost relationship neither to the youthful ideal of the World Soul (about which he wrote), nor to Psyche, that she too was sucked into routine and philistinism - he, an unprepared, weak ego, commits suicide - shoots himself. But the hero who embodies all the characters in “The Seagull”, I would say, is a kind of hero of our time, that very transitional time, when the old is destroyed and the new has not yet arisen, this hero is schizoid - his ego is broken into several fragments, instead young weak ego, i.e. - Kostya, there remains an older, but also weak ego - Trigorin, who also did not escape from the embrace of the Great Mother. In addition to age and social status, he carries the same problems, namely, an obsession with a maternal complex through a connection with Arkadina - an immature and wayward spoiled Anima. Was the death of Kostya, a weak ego, in vain and did not bring any transformation? After all, the mortal experience that Hillman calls for happened... Chekhov leaves us at a crossroads, ending the play with Treplev’s suicide, and, it seems to me, he acts very wisely: he does not teach anything, but leads us to a choice. Just as, indeed, in “Ivanov” and in “Three Sisters”, where Tuzenbach dies in a duel, representing an immature motivation for the work of the soul - but will a new, mature one arise in its place? – UNKNOWN, we decide for ourselves, just like in The Cherry Orchard, everything old dies, the orchard is cut down, the memory of the past dies - the old servant Firs... Chekhov, anticipating Jung and Hillman, and many other psychologists and philosophers who lived before Chekhov himself and after him, brings us in each of his plays (perhaps, except for vaudevilles) to the moment of Transformation, inevitably connected, as Hillman proves, with a mortal experience for the soul, and then leaves us alone with ourselves... Let me give myself one more quote from Hillman , from his work “Suicide and the Soul.” “Philosophy would tell us that we are preparing for death day after day. Each of us builds our own “ship of death” within ourselves. Based on this point of view, by creating our own death, we kill ourselves every day, so that anydeath is suicide. Whether it be “due to a lion attack, or a fall into an abyss, or a fever,” every death is our own creation. And we may not ask with Rilke: “O God, give every man his own death,” since this is exactly the kind of death God gives us, although we do not understand it, because we do not like it. When a person builds the frame of his life upward like a building, climbing stairs step by step, floor by floor, only to step out of a high window or fall from a heart attack or stroke, is he not realizing his own creative plan, has not his own death been given to him? From this point of view, suicide no longer seems to be one of the ways to enter death, since in this case any death is suicide. From the point of view of philosophy, by consciously walking towards death, we build a better “ship”. Ideally, as it ages, it becomes increasingly indestructible, so that the transition to it from falling apart flesh can occur without fear, in a timely and easy way. This death that we build inside ourselves is an eternal structure, a “strange, mysterious ship” where the soul lives surrounded by decaying, temporary, mortal things. But death is not an easy matter; and dying is an ugly, cruel and painful process. Therefore, the conscious movement in the direction of death, proposed by philosophy, should become the main human achievement, embodied in the images of the heroes of our religion and culture. Until we can choose death, we cannot choose life. Until we can say a decisive “no” to life, which is not really the same as a “yes” answer, the only thing we can do is to go with the flow of the collective stream, the river of life. An individual who stands against this current experiences death as the first of all alternatives, for he who goes against the current of life is its opponent and is identified with death. Once again, a mortal experience is necessary to separate oneself from the collective flow of life and to discover individuality within oneself.” The mortal experience brings individuality to us. In addition, Chekhov's heroes come up when I wrote about the leading circumstances when religious dogma collapsed on an unconscious level under the influence of such circumstances as Darwinism, Freudianism, Nietzscheanism, atomic theory, etc. It has not yet been built - a prelude to the experience of death and rebirth, which has not yet arrived. We are still stewing in our masses in the transition between the 12th and 13th Arcana of the Tarot. And Chekhov writes about this: “Individuality requires courage. And since classical times, courage has been associated with suicidal arguments: it is necessary both to choose a difficult test of life and to enter the unknown by one’s own decision. The soul undergoes many mortal experiences, and yet physical life continues; and, just as physical life comes to an end, the soul often creates images and experiences that show the continuity of phenomena. Awareness as a process seems endless. For the soul, neither immortality is a fact, nor death is the end. We can neither prove nor disprove immortality. The psyche leaves this question open.” This is how Hillman looks at the issues of the soul, suicide and the experience of death. And now from these positions we can return to the plot of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, having already had the entire conceptual apparatus associated with Kronos, Hades, and 13- m lasso, with Hillman's philosophy. Can we say that by living this story, we show, or at least have the opportunity to show, courage? Stepping back from this question for a moment, I will explain that regardless of whether or not we have read classical works, fairy tales and myths, we carry these stories potentially within ourselves - they are archetypal, i.e. each of these plots is a path in the labyrinth of the Soul, which we agreed to describe as a polytheistic non-structural rhizome (more on this in the first lecture). And the morethe soul is developed, the more likely it is to walk along an ever-increasing number of paths bumping into each other and intersecting here and there, to exhaust the maximum of archetypal plots and their variations with your life, or even to create new paths and new intersections with your life - continuing with each generation to create a World Soul, which in my opinion is the task of man. Let’s look at the plot of “The Three Sisters” again, and at the same time we will use the method by which Jung’s student Maria Louise von France interpreted fairy tales. Three sisters: Irina, Masha and Olga - these are three main functions (sensual, intuitive and sensory), the fourth is a subordinate function (judging by the plot, most likely - thinking) - this is their brother Andrei, who showed promise, but as is destined to be a subordinate function , and remained undeveloped. Moreover, it is through this function that in the plot of “Three Sisters” we come under the influence of the shadow Anima, manifested in the image of Andrei’s wife Natasha. Tuzenbach is a motivation for the development of a sensory function (Irina, who dreamed of WORK, like other functions), but the motivation is not desired, coming rather from the mind, and therefore simply doomed to death (Irina does not love Tuzenbach, and agrees to marry him, only I would like not to remain an old maid like my older sister Olga, and try to start working after all). The main function is sensual (Olga), but it is also not involved in business, more precisely, by the definition of the main function - in business (a teacher in a gymnasium), but routine matters, which he wants but cannot get rid of, having received at the end of the play only a promotion in that the same routine work (gymnasium director). Masha, who personifies the intuitive function, also does not develop; she has settled down, so to speak, in the petty-bourgeois world that her stupid old husband Kulygin personifies, and only the appearance of a romantic love for Colonel Vershinin, a love for something unreal, something that in the words of Vershinin himself, it will not be very soon - “two hundred or three hundred years after us”, only the appearance of this love brings in a fresh whiff of the breeze that has flown in for a short time and allows only nostalgia for what could have been - ethereal dreams that one so wants to believe in, and which completely unrealizable for an auxiliary intuitive function. And on the ground floor lives an old friend of the family, who at one time was hopelessly in love with the late mother of the sisters and Andrei, the old drunken doctor Chebutykin, personifying unfulfilled dreams, melancholy and a burden of memories, from which moments of spontaneity and even cheerfulness and mischief sometimes distract, in the images of young people cheerful officers Fedotik and Rode, but they, alas, are very short-lived, very episodic... Staff Captain Solyony, whom we already talked about above, is also episodic, but episodic in his own way - he constantly looms in the background, just like a momento more - he in fact, it is not only a reminder of death, but that shadow figure in which death (at least for the far-fetched motivation - Tuzenbach) was already ripe from the beginning of the action and was only waiting in the wings at the end of it. The vengeful Aleko, the depressed Lermontov, the rejected lover are still waiting for their shot. A small death, the death of illusion, hope, and the inevitable collision after that with Kronos - this can make sense... if, passing, at least briefly, through this plot in some context of our lives, we find the courage not to run away from Kronos, Let us drink up the lesson prepared for us! All the classics teach something: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy... Chekhov does not teach. He leads the soul to the fork where we meet Hades and Kronos and leaves us there. In EVERY play and in many stories he brings us to this meeting. But he also scatters the keys to meet with Kronos during the course of the plays. He doesn't evaluate anyone. He shows - this is it. He has almost no clear-cut characters, good or bad. There are people with their existential vacuum. And some of them, and therefore certain parts of our personality, are not afraid to admit to themselves that they are losers (which is what moderna person zombified by advertising). And these are very important inner voices that can be clearly heard in moments of despair: Andrei’s monologue from “Three Sisters”: “I’ll just say it and leave. Now... First of all, you have something against Natasha, my wife, and I have noticed this since the very day of my wedding. If you want to know, Natasha is a wonderful, honest person, straightforward and noble - that’s my opinion. I love and respect my wife, you understand, I respect and demand that others respect her too. I repeat, she is an honest, noble person, and all your displeasures, forgive me, are just whims... (Pause.) Secondly, you seem to be angry because I’m not a professor, I’m not involved in science. But I serve in the zemstvo, I am a member of the zemstvo council, and I consider this service to be as sacred and high as service to science. I am a member of the zemstvo council and am proud of it, if you want to know... (Pause.) Thirdly... I also have to say... I mortgaged the house without asking your permission... I am to blame for this, yes, and please excuse me. I was prompted to do this by debts... thirty-five thousand... I no longer play cards, I quit a long time ago, but the main thing I can say in my defense is that you girls, you get a pension, but I didn’t. .. earning money, so to speak... (Pause.) They don’t listen. Natasha is an excellent, honest person. (Walks across the stage in silence, then stops.) When I got married, I thought that we would be happy... everyone would be happy... But my God... (Cries.) My dear sisters, dear sisters, don’t believe me, don’t believe it...” He finds the strength to admit that he is a loser. But perhaps the figure of Andrei, unearthed in the minds and souls of some of us, will help us accept this in some context of life, and get out of this state. Because only by accepting can you change. Doctor Chebutykin is from the same place, in a state of binge: “Damn everyone... damned... They think I’m a doctor, I know how to treat all sorts of diseases, but I know absolutely nothing, I’ve forgotten everything I knew , I don’t remember anything, absolutely nothing. Damn it. Last Wednesday I treated a woman on Zasyp - she died, and it was my fault that she died. Yes... I knew something twenty-five years ago, but now I don’t remember anything. Nothing... My head is empty, my soul is cold. Maybe I’m not a person, but I’m only pretending that I have arms and legs... and a head; Maybe I don’t exist at all, but it only seems to me that I walk, eat, sleep. (Cries.) Oh, if only I didn’t exist! (Stops crying, sullenly.) The devil knows... The day before yesterday there was a conversation at the club; they say Shakespeare, Voltaire... I didn’t read, I didn’t read at all, but on my face I showed that I had read. And others too, like me. Vulgarity! Meanness! And the woman who killed him on Wednesday came to mind... and everything came to mind, and my soul felt crooked, disgusting, disgusting... he went and started drinking...” And he has the courage to confess. And Kostya Treplev in the middle of the play. But Treplev throws out this phrase still bitterly, having not yet lived, but nevertheless, the first notes of living began: “It began from that evening when my play failed so stupidly. Women do not forgive failure. I burned everything to the last scrap. If you only knew how unhappy I am! Your cooling is terrible, incredible, as if I woke up and saw as if this lake had suddenly dried up or flowed into the ground. You just said that you are too simple to understand me. Oh, what is there to understand?! I didn’t like the play, you despise my inspiration, you already consider me mediocre, insignificant, like there are many... (Stamping his foot) How well I understand, how I understand!” In Chekhov’s plays, all these heroes fell into a new eternal return. After all, other voices confuse us at these moments and we roll back to where we were. And the effect of transformation will come if you unearth Andrei, Kostya Treplev, Ivanov, Chebutykin within yourself, hear them and accept them, let this truth (even if it was in a narrow context) take place, and here comes the exit to a new path of the labyrinth. Sometimes something dies old and outdated, like a dear childhood memory - this is Firs in the finale of The Cherry Orchard. And a stronger ego is born, perhaps Ermolai Lopakhin is an example of a strong ego. He has serious plans. He finds a solution - to chop.