Fear or Love? Critical notes

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If you turn to the judgments of Dostoevsky and Leontyev about God - is he love or fear, then, despite their opposite, the attitude of both towards God as a super-personality is striking, dictating certain settings to the people he suddenly produced. But God without people is in fact non-being, just as people without God is. And in this respect, they are balanced. This equilibrium is shown below in the form of a single consciousness of a hologram, manifested in living being on the same holographic basis with their informational coverage by an unmanifested God of an infinity outside of time.
Dostoevsky believed that God is exclusively love, which he imparts to those who believe in him so that they will show compassion for all of God's creatures, for which they will be rewarded: "Love a person even in sin, for this semblance of Divine love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God's creation, both the whole and every grain of sand, every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants, love everything. You will love everything and you will comprehend the mystery of God in things. Once you comprehend, you will tirelessly begin to know more and more, any day. And you will finally love the whole world with a whole, universal love. Love animals: God gave them the beginning of thought and serene joy. Do not disturb them, do not torment them, do not deprive them of joy, do not resist God's thought. A person, do not exalt yourself above animals: they are sinless, but you, with your greatness, rot the earth with your appearance and leave behind your festering trace - alas, almost all of us! - Love children especially, for they, too, are sinless, like angels, and live for our tenderness, for the purification of our hearts, and as a kind of instruction to us. Woe to one who insults a baby" [1].
Without God, Dostoevsky believes, love loses its life-giving source: "The absence of God cannot be replaced by love for humanity, because man will immediately ask: What for should I love humanity?" [2].
Indeed, Christ, through the mouths of his apostles in the New Testament, spoke of love so:
"This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that a person lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:12-13).
"But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who despitefully use you" (Luke 6:27-28).
Contemporary of Dostoevsky, the philosopher Leontyev, proceeds from the opposite, arguing that God cannot but be fear, which leads people with their sorrows and weaknesses to the realization of the greatness of the eternal Creator, thereby demonstrating the insignificance of a person before God, since faith in God rests solely on the fear of God, which destroys a human pride, while without fear, faith degenerates into empty earthly progress:
"The highest fruits of faith—for example, a constant, moment-by-moment disposition to love one's neighbor—are either inaccessible to anyone, or accessible to very few: some through the special grace of a beautiful nature, others through many years of prayerful struggle with bad inclinations. Fear is accessible to everyone: to the strong and to the weak – fear of sin, fear of punishment both here and there, beyond the grave… And to be ashamed of the fear of God is simply ridiculous; whoever admits God must fear Him, for strengths are too incommensurate. He who fears humbles himself; he who humbles himself seeks power over himself, visible, tangible power; he begins to love this spiritual power mystically, so to speak, justified before his mind; the fear of God, the fear of sin, the fear of punishment, etc., cannot humiliate us even in our everyday relationships because it leads to faith, and firmly established faith makes us bolder and more courageous against every bodily and earthly danger: against personal and political enemies, against illnesses, against beasts and all violence…[3].
“Such love, without humility and fear before the instructive doctrine, ardent, sincere, but also highly self-willed, either quietly and secretly proud, or noisily vain, does not come directly from the teaching of the Church, but came to us not so long ago from the West; it is the spontaneous fruit of anthropolatry, a new faith in earthly man and in earthly humanity - in the ideal, independent, autonomous dignity of the person and in the high practical purpose of “all humanity” here on earth. Love without fear and humility is only one of the manifestations (let us say, even the most attractive) of that individualism, that adoration of the rights and dignity of man, which reigned in Europe from the end of the 18th century and, having destroyed in people the faith in something higher, independent of them, having forced people to forget fear and be ashamed of humility, brought to the brink of the revolutionary abyss all those same Western societies in which this anthropolatry overpowered the love of God and faith in the sanctity of the Church, and in the sacred rights of the state and family. It is not the new that holds external societies together, but only the fact that within them, all that is old, strengthened over the centuries by the influence of creed, by the action of humility and fear, has not yet perished. A deceptive, one-sidedly understood love and respect for earthly humanity, for its earthly happiness, for its earthly rights, for its practical equality, has not yet managed to completely and everywhere eradicate love and respect for the authority of this or that Christian Church, for the God-anointed authority and parental rights... A love for humanity that is arbitrary, purely utilitarian, unrestrained and undirected is one-sidedness and lie" [ibid.].
"Christ did not promise us the future reign of love and truth on this earth, no! He said that 'in the end love will fail...' But we personally must perform acts of love if we want forgiveness and bliss in the afterlife—that's all" [ibid.].
***
In support of Leontyev's arguments about the fear of God, we cite the words of Christ's apostles:
"But I tell you whom you shall fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has the power to cast into hell. Yea, I say to you, fear him" (Luke 12:5).
"And if you call on him as Father, who judges each one impartially according to his deeds, then spend the time of your wandering with fear" (1 Peter 1:17).
In this comparison of Dostoevsky with his contemporary Leontyev in understanding God's attitude towards people, the first puts love at the forefront, and the second - fear, although Christ himself and his apostles rather balanced their assessment of these feelings, apparently because they perfectly understood the imperfection of a completely beastly person who is inclined primarily to fear a stronger one. To reverse this, mainly animal feeling, Christ emphasizes love, which Dostoevsky notes.
Leontyev does not believe in universal love, believing that such an imperfect person can be persuaded to obey only by fear of someone who is beyond his power.
To comprehend the need to equally both in our contradictory beingness, it is necessary to turn to the origins, that is, the animal world, where came from, somewhat transformed, fear and love.
Fear as a sensation for all living beings in reality is a reaction to a actual impending threat to a habitual existence, expressed initially in the appearance of alertness, and then the appearance of anxiety, which for warm-blooded creatures, in the case of turning of the danger into a real attack, is transformed first into fear, and then into the strongest fright (horror), creating the corresponding adrenaline release into blood that gives, for example, to antelopes the highest speed of rescue from a predator, and to a predator - aggressiveness in attack on the expected production or rage in battle with the rival, acting thereby at instinctively-hormonal level.
Thus, fear is a kind of detonator in creating for the being a situation, that is beneficial for survival, that is, the status of maintaining the sensations entering the body, without which - and this feels every creature up to the amoeba - comes a void, that already animals know about, because for them it happens in a dream or during fainting.
And in this regard, no living being is able to become fearless, just as it cannot exclude pain from its life, which indicates the degree of damage to a particular organ.
Fear indicates the reluctance of any being to lose sensations, a significant part of which is obviously pleasant, and this reluctance affirms life, although not a single living being, except a person, does not grasp own existence in the world, that is, it does not understand that this existence in the framework of the current time is ended with death.
Hence the difference in the nature of fear between animals and humans.
The animal fear coincides with the nature of fear in the natural (animal) part of a person’s consciousness, who, like any primate, responds to real danger, but fear, which manifests in that part of consciousness that makes a person aware of himself in the environment, making him no longer not only a simple dynamic component of this environment, but also partly its owner and conscious transformer for its own benefit, has a different character, directly determined by relations in society, which in turn is based on the relationship between the natural (animal) and self-conscious components of human consciousness, since self-consciousness is inherent only to a person and his communities, and it should influence in some way on the natural part of consciousness and vice versa, especially since they act together in the human brain, and are inseparable in this regard.
Therefore, for self-consciousness, since thanks to it a person is able to imagine, design and fantasize, may occur and the fictitious dangers, and respectively fear, associated with the existence of a person not in conditions of the wild nature, but in society, naturally, are of a different character compared to the natural fear.
That is, in addition to the benefits that self-awareness gives a person, it brings many negative consequences.
As for the lack of aware of himself by any living being, except man as a subject of action, setting goals before oneself, that are not related to the instinctive-reflex sphere of life activity, makes these purely natural beings quite satisfied with existence inside own niche of life according to standard programs that they do not understand and do not seek to consciously change. These beings have no morality, and the laws of their existence are reduced to purely biological, in which aspirations to occupy the most favorable position for nutrition and reproduction predominate, and their very slow development occurs through to the action of due to randomness in the form of the mutations in the genome.
Intuitively, this situation was noted back in the 19th century by the Danish thinker S;ren Kierkegaard: “If a person had no eternal consciousness, if some wild power was the basis of everything, a power that, interwoven in dark passions, gives rise to everything from great to insignificant, if the bottomless emptiness was hidden behind everything, which cannot be saturated with anything, what would life be then if not for despair? If it were so, if there were no sacred bonds binding humanity together, if one generation grew after another like leaves in the forest, if one generation followed another like the songs of birds in the thicket, if the human race was passing through the world without leaving a trace, like a ship gliding on water, or like a wind rushing through the desert like a thoughtless and barren whim, if eternal oblivion always eagerly awaited its prey and no force could tear this prey out of its claws, how in that case life would have been inconsolable and empty! [4, p. 20].
Although, of course, such situation is purely hypothetical, since a person was given forever not only natural consciousness, but also self-consciousness as the highest consciousness for their joint manifestation.
Self-consciousness gives a person and his communities the ability to transform certain chaos, more precisely, the dominance of randomness in development, which is the reason for its slowness, into accelerated development, which is caused by a more ordered, that is, purposeful, policy of acquiring benefits both by a person and his communities in his existence.
Thus, a lot of subjects or situations that cause or giving birth to fear, such as the opponent’s hatred, diseases, death, cannot be eliminated, replaced, or circumvented, but it is possible to try to debar oneself somewhat from them, for example, to stop thinking about them, although the very threat, the precursor of which is fear, does not disappear anywhere from this.
Therefore, Christ affirms through his apostles that the true means of such detachment is faith in God: "Fear not, only believe" (Mark 5:36).
***

The origin of love, in its broad sense as friendly, affectionate relationships between individuals in society, beyond any search for self-interest, is precisely the instinctive search for self-interest. This search, as a rule, is found in the cooperation of living beings, who unite in groups to more successfully survive in a larger number or to obtain the prey—respectively, schools of fish, herds of herbivores, and packs of predators.
This kind of cooperation presupposes mutual assistance, and for higher animals, the emergence of affection.
Besides, similar connection, even a mutual attraction, is embedded in the genes of more or less developed living beings, who unite in families to produce offspring, in which they, as it were, replicate themselves and prolong the lineage.
What distinguishes a person from other living beings is that he is are, to a certain extent, aware of own actions, planning and adjusting them. This is accomplished with greater success in a group, where the instinctive, animalistic component of consciousness, aimed at the survival of the group, initially dominates—a kind of collective egoism that manifests itself in the struggle for survival with other communities.
Over time, as civilization develops in its proprietary relationships, the most important of which is the growth of culture, such egoism begins to weaken. The overall growth of prosperity and culture also presupposes a rise in the human self-consciousness, largely replacing the animal component of consciousness characteristic by its egocentrism.
A sign of this beneficial change for cooperation is the search for pleasure not only in sexual intercourse but also in the relationships of different people with similar interests, which provoke empathy, friendliness, and selflessness.
From here, it's a short step to love, which is based on the highest degree of involuntary attraction of one person to another, yet, along with that, differs from passion in its awareness of own actions.
In particular, love for one's homeland is characterized by conscious sacrifice for its sake, while love between the sexes is distinguished not only by passion but also by selflessness and shared interests; while instinctive passion quickly fades, in case of preservation of common interests, the desire to be together is preserved, and vice versa.
Thus, love as a conscious feeling, and not simply attraction or passion, emerges with a growing level of self-consciousness, characterized by such personal traits as dignity and a high degree of altruism, opposed to the unchanging egoism of the animal component of consciousness.
Therefore, it can be concluded that in every human consciousness, individuality, which primarily reflects the egoism of the animal component of consciousness, coexists with altruism, which lies at the core of each person's personality. And these two aspects of the human consciousness, largely due to the different tasks they are solving, compete with each other in every possible way, uniting only at critical moments of existence for the sake of survival. And each person's place in society is determined, as a rule, by the predominance of certain individual and personal qualities, as well as the level of these qualities that a person has achieved.
***
If we look at the relationship between God and a person, we can trace a necessary and very specific connection between them.
As is well known, there is still no answer to what existed before the appearance of God, if indeed He somehow appeared, and why He suddenly decided to create beingness with all its accessories, including a person.
Be that as it may, God within us manifests as consciousness, animating a corresponding protein complex, which immediately enters into information flows against the backdrop of current time, always being in the thick of things, thereby experiencing both fear and love, accompanied respectively by pain and suffering from life and joy and enjoyment from that same life.
Therefore, God, "existing" outside of the current time, at the complete absence of all living beings, including humans, is nothing more than non-being Similarly, humans, without God, who brings consciousness, are also incapable of coming into being. Therefore, they cannot exist independently of each other. And this existence is ensured by the interaction of the infinite God with the finite living beings.
It's curious that Dostoevsky and Leontyev grasped that God is both love and fear, although they separated these qualities, thereby becoming one-sided. But they cannot be blamed, since they had no concept of the support that necessarily projects both love and fear
God, who is essentially a single consciousness, is by no means indifferent to people. On the contrary, as shown below, He, like any individual consciousness, is distinguished by activity, which is primarily realized through every living being, including a person in the current time.
Therefore, each person, emerging as the pinnacle of evolution, is "constructed" to be an individual, egoistic, and, in a certain sense, self-willed being, but at the same time, a social being who cannot help but coordinate their actions with their own collective surrounding in a competitive environment.
In other words, any change and development can only occur in a resistant and often hostile environment, evoking fear and despair in the face of numerous threats and adversities, which can only be countered by cooperation and mutual assistance, the ultimate expression of which is love.
Thus, fear and love are inalienable human qualities, the source of which is divine providence. Without them, humans would be no different from animals.
The point is not that one should love or fear Christ, but that God Himself, present as the consciousness of every human being, cannot help but love them, because He is that person.
But this person, like everyone else, finds himself largely in the hostile environment. People displace and destroy one another for the sake of survival, and then in search of a better life, which inevitably gives rise to fear of such a life. And here God can do nothing, since universal love means refusing change, cognition and development, which always occur through struggle.
Moreover, fear and love develop a person's feelings and mind, making them correspondingly thinner and deeper, and their experiences (feelings) more diverse. And God gets all this, but at corresponding expenses for a person.
If we move on to the technical details of the life process, they turn out to be completely different from what they seem, not only to people but also to science.
***
The fact is that every person is caught in a stream of information, communicating with others both to ensure their own existence and to improve it, competing with their neighbors.
Such contradictory existence, the success of which largely depends on an adequate assessment of incoming information, signifies a permanent dissatisfaction with both one's environment and oneself.
This provokes a circulation of events that, on the one hand, oppress and irritate a person, but at the same time, lead him to the understanding that without cooperation, a full life is impossible.
These are the natural foundations of fear and love, respectively.
However, all of this lies on the surface and requires a search for the original.
We suppose, that it's all like that.
What does God require, as He who contains everything within Himself, and along with that, to a certain extent, controls everything, and is also capable of feeling, thinking, and acting through His bearers for His own change, self-knowledge, and development?
Obviously, it is the possession of a system in the form of Creation that functions stably to manifest God through change, self-knowledge, and endless development through its agents, capable of providing him with such an opportunity in the form of life in all its vicissitudes, accompanied by experiences that provide both them and God with a "taste" of this life with all its bitterness and sweetness.
So how can one imagine the manifestation of God, "located" outside of time, and also within time in living beings, including humans, within the framework of a single Creation that must function sustainably, in our understanding, forever?
Obviously, this requires ensuring the unity and, along with that, the separateness, as well as the connectedness of all that exists.
This requirement is examined in more detail, for example, in my work "Beingness as an infrastructure for alive in the current time" [5].
Nevertheless, let us briefly outline the main positions of this concept.
The unity is represented by God himself in the hypostasis of an infinity outside of time, in which everything potentially is in a fused state, that is, inseparably.
The separationess can be represented in the hypostasis of God as a single consciousness and its thing basis outside of the current time in the form of a hologram [6] as a projection of God-infinity outside of time.
The connectedness in the unified system of Creation of God-infinity outside time, its hypostasis - God-single consciousness and the thing basis outside time is ensured in the so-called beingness in the current time by means of particles of a single consciousness (active) associated with the corresponding thing (material) particles (passive) in the form of a complex protein complex, discretely and cyclically reproduced in the form of various living beings within a certain environment surrounding them.
All these living beings are, in a sense, agents of the God-single consciousness, converting the information they perceive (the Holy Spirit in Christianity) through their presence into the current time, in which they can also selectively use the information to ensure their own temporary existence. Within this time, they change and develop to a certain limit, without losing their connection with the God-single consciousness of the hologram due to the hologram's fundamental property—"everybody in one."
Thus, the picture of Creation based on a hologram, connecting all components of Creation through information, is similar to a certain degree to the Christian representation: God the Father corresponds to an unmanifested infinity outside of time, potentially containing within itself all that was, is, and will be; God the Son corresponds to a single consciousness of a hologram as the active, combined in a hologram with the thing (passive), containing within itself in frequency form all that was and is; the Holy Spirit corresponds to the information permeating the entire Creation.
However, the infinite functioning of Creation is realized only thanks to the association within the framework of the current time in the information flows of the particles of consciousness (active) and things (passive) in the form of living beings, the highest representative of which is a person.

Bibliography

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