The Kingdom of God is Within You

The book 'The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy is an Aligment Manual. In this book, Tolstoy points out the difference between a corrupted Christianity and an authentic one, which he says is founded on non-violence. He spends considerable time discussing the problem of Hypocrisy, how hypocrisy allows misalignment and disjuncture to continue, and how the only way to move beyond The System is with non-violent and aligned solutions.

Notes

The book suffers from some bias and ethnocentricity, but is nevertheless a fascinating examination of ethics, morality, and the significance and importance of Alignment.

Interesting, the book is aimed directly at elites and is an attempt to convince them of the need for Alignment, especially as a solution to painful Disjuncture.

Tolstoy would no doubt agree with Albert Einstein that there is something powerful and revolutionary in the authentic teaching of Christianity. Tolstoy considers the Church to have perverted Christ's teachings.

The book criticizes both science and religion of misrepresenting the true teachings of Christ.

Tolstoy's word for Alignment is Divine Perfection.

Christ is teaching not angels, but men, living and moving in the animal life. And so to this animal force of movement Christ, as it were, applies the new force-the recognition of Divine perfection-and thereby directs the movement by the resultant of these two forces.

To suppose that human life is going in the direction to which Christ pointed it, is just like supposing that a little boat afloat on a rabid river, and directing its course almost exactly against the current, will progress in that direction.

Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal indestructible forces of which the life of man is compounded: the force of his animal nature and the force of the consciousness of Kinship to God. Saying nothing of the animal force which asserts itself, remains always the same, and is therefore independent of human will, Christ speaks only of the Divine force, calling upon a man to know it more closely, to set it more free from all that retards it, and to carry it to a higher degree of intensity.

In the process of liberating, of strengthening this force, the true life of man, according to Christ's teaching, consists in carrying out rules, the law; according to Christ's teaching it consists in an ever closer approximation to the divine perfection held up before every man, and recognized within himself by every man, in an ever closer and closer approach to the perfect fusion of his will in the will of God, that fusion toward which man strives, and the attainment of which would be the destruction of the life me know.

The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though it can only be reached in infinity.

Tolstoy recognizes the Sermon on the Mount as Christ's Alignment Manual

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