Spirit

The archetypal phenomenon of man, the pentagram of the microcosm within the "triangle" of evil, is reversed in this "complex" way if it refuses Christ’s helping hand (fig. 16). It will be "reversed" in the sphere of social life as it has come to particularly great and even decisive importance in the epoch of the consciousness-soul. The setups of evil shown in the figure basically integrate the entire spiritual elite of today’s humanity. Everything that in one way or another is gifted and creative serves one or even several forms of evil. Hardly has a human being discovered his creative abilities, he is seduced, attracted or recruited by corresponding associations, parties and orders. Other paths to self-realization will be closed to him. Human talent and the ability to develop are turned into colossal dangers. Average people within the mass are manipulated.

We have arrived at the conclusion of our consideration. Five-headed evil working in the five centers of worldly power is not the result of "free" play of bad tendencies in individuals, but a strictly integrated, spiritual (or better, anti-spiritual) unity, we could even say –organism that is super-sensibly personified. It denounces civilization and humanity as well as inevitably itself due to its inherent lawfulness (explaining the grim fight of its individual aspects), but still existing as a whole. Looked at purely from the cognitive point of view, it is an utterly interesting phenomenon of reversed dialectics. It contains a striving for synthesis ruled only by negation; its rudimentary elements do not attain higher existence due to cancellation. (This opens for us a deep understanding of the essential difference between Marxist and Hegelian dialectics.) In this case egocentricity acquires eternal character –the attribute of the higher world. But man should not enter this "infinity" because nobody knows what could happen to him if he were to be transferred back into the original condition of a "clump of clay".

From:
Crisis of Civilization By Gennady Bondarev

If, within the limits of ordinary consciousness, the human being wishes to study his soul, it will not suffice for him simply to direct his mind's eye backward, so to speak, in order to discern by introspection his nature as someone who looks out upon the world. He will see nothing new by this means. He will perceive himself in his capacity as a spectator of the world—merely from a different direction. In his waking life man is almost entirely occupied with the external world. He lives by his senses. In their impressions the external world continues to live in his inner life. Thoughts weave into these impressions. The outer world lives in the thoughts as well. Only the force with which the world is grasped in thoughts can be experienced as man's autonomous being. The sensation of this force, however, is of an entirely general and vague character. By means of ordinary consciousness one can differentiate nothing within this sensation. If one had to discern the human soul in it, one would obtain no more about the soul than a vague sensation of self; one would be unable to identify what it was.