Tales Written by the Dying in Awe. Vysheslav Filevsky

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      Author’s note: the pictures accompanying the text are available free on the Internet.

      The Sky of Heaven

      Someone said to the Elder, “They say that above the sky there is another sky, the sky of heaven. What is that?”

      “This is what creates worlds. This, among other things, is what created our earth with its gas wrapping that earthlings call the sky. This is what also generated the earth’s spiritual cover, which the planet’s inhabitants call the noosphere, their God or heaven of a higher order.” Such was the Elder’s reply.

      “How do you imagine the sky of heaven?”

      “For a living creature, it is impossible to imagine it,” the Elder continued. “All discussions of this topic are fantastic ideas, wandering thoughts.”

      Someone still asked for an answer. “Still, what would you call it?”

      “If you are so insistent…” The Elder pondered and lowered his head. Then slowly he lifted it and started speaking to no one in particular, looking nowhere.

      “The sky of heaven is what is universal, what builds things up and destroys them. Sometimes it appears to me in my dreams in the form of a swirling blackness as huge as my whole consciousness. Then it tightens, and over time, all of creation’s products disappear there without a trace. Into it we are also going to disappear.

      “In a mysterious way, suddenly, the black swirl transforms into a softly shining silver-edged beige cloud. Several times, it came to me in my waking state. It goes on, this cloud, and seems to take a living being for the soul, bringing it nearer to itself and transforming it from a servant of the earth to a servant of heaven. In such instances, a living creature involuntarily swears an oath of loyalty to it. I also swore such an oath.

      “But in my opinion, the images that I described to you are false. The sky of heaven provided me with them because of the feebleness of my spiritual essence. Meanwhile, in fact, there is neither a swirl nor a cloud.”

      “Well, what is there then?”

      “Some mysterious and great inconceivable force. In order to describe it somehow, living creatures came up with a lot of names. I call it heaven, the Most High, the Everlasting… Nevertheless, all of these are my mental fabrications and come within an inch of blasphemy. I pray to the sky of heaven for forgiveness for the sake of my hearty love for it and my tremulous awe of it.”

      What Is Life Like?

      There were two men. One traveled around the world just for pleasure. Meanwhile, the second never left his village and felt no need to see other countries. Both of them died on the same day. Together, they went to heaven. There, an angel who had never visited earth met them.

      “What are your impressions of life while possessing a body?” the angel asked the two souls.

      “Life on the earth is varied,” the first one replied.

      “Life is deep,” the second one said.

      The angel said nothing to them but smiled instead, because he knew that one could give hundreds of definitions of mortal life.

      You might wonder, “So why did he ask, if he already knew everything?”

      In reply, I would say to you, “Can we know why spirits act one way or another?”

      Mode of Existence

      Once upon a time, there was a man who wrote poetry. But when people took his books into their hands and opened them, they saw only empty pages.

      At first, the man was astonished and outraged. Then he said, “Oh, here, look – here are the poems!” And with his finger, he pointed to this or that tiny image.

      And indeed, some people succeeded in perceiving signs or СКАЧАТЬ