was so amazed by this knowledge that Sensei was so simply and lucidly telling us that I wrote down this whole conversation
into my diary, marking out for myself the most important moments: “The sense of human existence is the perfection of the soul!!!” I felt this but wasn’t sure. Now, once again I thought that this was changing everything that I had known up to now and that I considered so valuable and important in life. I looked around and thought: “We really live life entirely for the body. Even at home, whatever you look at, everything exists for the service and satisfaction of the needs of the body. Books are probably the only exception. Of course, Sensei said once that all these attributes of civilization are necessary for us to have more time for the perfection of our souls. But how much among all this unnecessary stuff is completely redundant! And still for us it isn’t enough. We still want more. What for? Why? After all, tomorrow we could die and in that other world they will value what we have cultivated inside us and not how much dust we’ve gathered by the tireless work of our shell, half rotten in the earth.”
I went on to revalue everything, even at school. The girls, as usual, showed off what fashionable rags were bought for them and with evident envy told about what they saw on others. Listening to them, I was surprised with myself, because before I was just the same. I was chasing some kind of illusive fashion that didn’t completely suit me. But my megalomania was increasing, as at that time I had an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. In reality, though, fashions are only those things that nicely suit a person. Once fashionable clothes, after a momentary presentation, are now hanging as dead weight in my closet. Why does one human need so much stuff? What do I need it for? Maybe somewhere people don’t have anything to wear. In my own class, for example, there are three girls from poor families. Two of them didn’t have fathers because they had died in the mines. And the third one’s father was a drunkard, which is even worse. Why can’t I share all this stuff with them? They need it more than me.
I asked the advice of my mother, although I lied to her a bit, telling her that our school had organized a charity action. But my mother wasn’t against it. We even found shoes for the girls. I gathered all this and then had to solve another problem: how can it be given to them? Putting myself in their place, I considered that the best variant would be to ask my class teacher to pass the clothes to them as if from some charitable organization. I suppose that she liked this idea, because in a week the whole school, under the initiative of our teacher, announced a charitable action to benefit children from the city orphanage. Having heard this news, I recalled once again Sensei’s words that one kind thought and one kind deed give birth to a chain reaction of kind thoughts and kind deeds. I thought that if everyone could understand this and did whatever good deeds he could, then perhaps poverty and hunger would disappear in the world. Otherwise, it’s somehow shameful to be called civilized when nearby somebody is starving or extremely needy.
With such thoughts of universal love, brotherhood, and mutual aid, my body was embraced by some kind of stirring quiver. A feeling of light, pleasant pressure began spreading in the area of my solar plexus. Reaching a certain size, it started to radiate waves, which brought consciousness to an even bigger excitement, to an increasing feeling of endless love to the whole world.
