I began writing the post yesterday, so it begins with the events of yesterday. Since there was no electricity, I could not finish right away.
It was quiet in the morning. Alexander Reshetnik told on Facebook about his trip to the village of Bogorodichnoye. It is between us and Izyum, two kilometers from Svyatogorsk. The Russian military is constantly bombing it, they destroyed the Orthodox church there. I glued together a video from Alexander and as soon as I uploaded it to YouTube, they cut off the light and water. It turns out to be the same all over the city. I understood this when I crossed Slavyansk on a bicycle. Despite the good weather, the number of people on the streets in the middle of the day was about the same as usual at six o'clock in the morning.
The city really began to look like a front-line one.
Someone was mowing the lawn in front of their house. Most often, the howling of sirens is now heard, in second place are the sounds of lawn mowers. The threat of the destruction of the city is quite tangible - from the Liman side, the invaders have already approached us at ten kilometers or even less. Despite this, people are trying to preserve the life of peace as much as possible.
When I returned home, there was light, but no water or Internet. Then the cannonade started again, the electricity was finally gone, and the phone stopped picking up the connection. So, it's for a long time. Then I sat down to write this post while there was a charge in the laptop battery, but I was completely cut off from the outside world. The orcs would break through, and I wouldn't know. But this is already a fantasy - yesterday their offensive slowed down, there is hope that the offensive will soon fizzle out. Although who knows... The cannonade is intense, a helicopter is circling somewhere, I don't know if it's ours or the enemy's.
The invaders are trying to demoralize us, which is why they are destroying infrastructure, especially water supplies and power lines. Without the Internet, it is impossible to assess the degree of danger. As I write, telephone connection has been restored, which is a good sign, but the cannonade has not subsided, there is no electricity. It is very difficult for people in such a situation, so I decided to outline my reflections on spiritual practice in the frontline zone, namely, the method of overcoming fear and despair. If spiritual practice isn't interesting now, you can read no further than this point.
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The premise of practice is the ability to distinguish between two spheres of mental life: the external sphere of experience given to me and, in its depths, the inner sphere of my efforts of will. Emotional experiences in these spheres manifest themselves in different ways.
1. Fear.
In the external psychic realm, fear manifests itself as an experience given to me that presses on me, restrains my actions, but I can resist it just like any external force. But as soon as I let fear into my inner psychic realm, it turns into a force that acts from within my effort, replacing my will, and gives the effort its own inertia. Thus, my volitional effort ceases to be mine and is further driven only by fear. This is how a state of complete absorption in fear arises, in which I lose myself and my will. However, until I have allowed fear into my inner realm, it cannot subdue my will, remaining merely a mental event from which I can turn my back.
In order for fear to subdue the will of a person, a special act of consent is needed for this fear to pass from the external mental sphere to the internal one. In accordance with this, the method of overcoming fear is defined, the essence of which is to separate oneself from the emotional experience, to make fear only an external phenomenon, like a traffic light indicating when it is safe to cross the road and when it is not. But since fear has its own power, tending to penetrate into the inner sphere of the psyche, constant effort of the will is required in order not to let it in.
Many people say that they cannot resist when fear takes over the body and penetrates through it. Therefore, it is necessary to control not only emotions, but also the body. For example, I immediately see a student's fear at the exam by the rhythm of breathing, smoothness or angularity of movements, and on this basis I try to support him morally. To prevent fear from penetrating inside yourself through the body, you need to change the rhythm of breathing. It is best to reproduce the rhythm that corresponds to a calm and confident state. Then you can already make sure that the movements of the body remain as natural as usual, not allowing them to get out of step under the influence of fear. This brings back the familiar natural sense of the body, which should be extended to the entire surrounding reality, as if it were an extension of one's own body.
However, if the fear has already penetrated into the inner sphere of the psyche and it is no longer useful to turn away and control the body, then it will be necessary to retreat even further inland, to pass to a new line of defense, as the Ukrainian army does, when the enemy artillery mixes the forward position with the ground. In this way, the inner sphere of effort of the will, which is seized by fear, becomes external in relation to the new inner position from which one can look at one's fear again detachedly, like a spectator of a horror movie who suddenly realizes that the events on the screen do not affect him in any way.
Despair.
Despair is more difficult to fight, because it not only paralyzes the will, but also forms such a false perception of reality, which develops into a closed isolated world, in which a feeling of helplessness and senselessness of any efforts overflows, and there is no more strength to get out of it. Here, too, one has to retreat within oneself, for it is no longer useful to cling to everything that is dear, to old attachments, hopes, habits.
When despair completely deprives you of all your strength, the only thing left to do is to move inward to an inner position and abandon your usual life, however, not to remain a bystander, but to find the strength within yourself to rebuild a new reality. At first, it will be difficult, for in the state of detachment from everything, it becomes empty inside. It is impossible to immediately fill this empty space with the whole world. The world will be built anew gradually as the new sense of life is revealed in actions. Let it be very small things at first, like mowing the lawn, when it seems it makes no sense of doing anything at all, but then, when the new power of life is awakened, you can become a real creator of your own destiny.
3. Loss of will to live.
Despair is followed by the most dangerous temptation - loss of will to live, when it seems that there is no point in living and you want to die sooner in order to free yourself from the need for pointless efforts. I could give many reasons as to why this position is false, but I will not do so, for this issue is not polemical but spiritual, and is linked to self-determination. Either we assume that nothing makes sense, or that existence in itself is good, despite the fact that life is difficult. But if so, even in the face of imminent death one must fight for every minute of life, for every moment is self-valuable regardless of the circumstances. The only way to overcome this temptation is through this kind of value-based self-determination, and no other methodology is likely to help.
I think that the current war between Russia and Ukraine is also a war for the highest spiritual value. For the occupiers, life is not intrinsically valuable and must be sacrificed for imperial ideas. Therefore, they destroy the civilian population and do not consider their own losses. Putin simply brought this imperial ideology to its logical end - to necrophilic imperialism. For its adherents, the meaning of heroism is heroic death, so they do not understand that for Ukrainians a hero must survive, because life is the highest value. Recently, a Russian fascist who fancies himself a philosopher reproached the Azov people for not wanting to die heroically. Even the heroism of the Russian fascists must necessarily be necrophilic. They can’t understand that Ukrainians fight not for the symbols of heroism, but for the sake of life, so the heroes must live, and Ukraine will do anything for this.
