Chapter 11. The Incredible Spring
Can it be said that human life has a preface? Not counting the nine months before birth, past incarnations and other ambiguous options. Many people will say that yes, of course it happens. After all, you have to hear from time to time "I am only now beginning to live" or "Before such an event, it is as if I had not lived at all." Although nobody thinks of any preface when saying this, the meaning is exactly the same.
The notion of "living" in such a perception is equivalent to the notion of "living well". That is, if you have lived badly, it is as if you have not lived at all. A bad life doesn't count. What is a good life then? Good — in the sense of "comfortable", "successful", "fulfilling", "interesting", "rich". This is what is meant most often. But these notions can hide different things underneath. For many people, it's just pleasure. For some — the opportunity to learn, to work hard, to take responsibility freely. The former are unlikely to understand the latter. But for the latter, all of the above are also pleasures. Even more. For them it is happiness. The happiness of living with meaning. Or with more meaning than before. Then the life "before" can indeed be perceived as a preface, a prologue, a path leading to the main path of life. The prologue is also important, because without it there would be nothing else. Or the rest would be different.
Everything I've talked about in the previous chapters was a prologue to my life. Do I think it was not a life? Actually, no. Of course, it was part of life. But such a part, which would hardly be worth talking about without all that followed. Though it must be admitted that it wouldn't have happened without this prologue.
...It all began — this is where such a figure of speech is really appropriate — on one of the spring days of 1994. Memory has not preserved the exact date. I just didn't pay attention to it at the time, because I didn't realise that something special was happening.
When I tell someone about this day, I usually say that there was a voice in my head that said that I was going to become the founder of a certain teaching. However, this is a simplification. In fact, there was no voice as such. I just somehow had been realising the meaning of what was to be said. I do not undertake to explain the principle of this way of communication. It is as if the words themselves, as a set of phonemes, were not perceived by either hearing or consciousness, but their significances and meaning were perceived as if what was said had been heard and processed by the brain. Was this what is called telepathy? It could be. Let's call it that, conditionally.
My reaction was not surprise, but rather bewilderment. I just didn't know how to deal with such a strange case. After a little thought, I decided that I was imagining things. All the more so because I was ill, with a cough and fever. I'd never hallucinated when I was sick, but how else could I explain what had happened? I mentally shrugged my shoulders and put it out of my mind.
A few days passed, however, and it happened again. Then again, and again. That's when it was probably a good time to panic. Not because something extremely strange and incomprehensible is happening, but because it was clear: I am going crazy. After all, at that time I was tormented by my fears, which had been plaguing my psyche for a year or more. And so... As they say — time to get off, the journey's over. Strangely, I had no such thought. Apparently, after reading a lot about anomalous phenomena, after poltergeist and studying magic, I no longer had the rejection of something like this as impossible. The completely different thing was beyond my comprehension. Someone telepathically communicates with me — okay, let's say. What does not happen in the world... But what kind of teaching is this? What are we even talking about? What can I establish? I don't have anything I can teach anyone. Except what I've read in books. So this is not a teaching, this is what I tell everyone. There is nothing to pass on.
I knew about religious and philosophical teachings then, of course. It's written in school history textbooks, it's in books, movies, and anywhere else. Everywhere around us. However, I wasn't interested in anything like that. I've only seen the Bible in movies.
Or rather, a readable Bible. At home we had — and still have in my bookcase — a three-volume facsimile edition of the Francysk Skaryna's Bible. It was a subscription edition, which my parents bought, simply as a rare curiosity, which was not cheap but affordable for us. They bought it on the principle of "Let it be. We are Christians, after all." But it was almost impossible to read such a Bible. It was in Church Slavonic, in the medieval alphabet with mysterious letters, titling, letter symbols of numbers and all other exotics. I gave it a try — but gave up on the second page.
I also read "The Revelation of John the Theologian" published in some magazine. However, it was placed there not for the purpose of familiarising the reader with biblical texts, but in the context of the Chornobyl disaster — say, please make sure that the vision of the apostle somehow very much reminds us of modern events. At that time, the topic of predictions about Chornobyl was super popular. I also took communion with it, I did not believe in such interpretation of the "Revelation", but I had to admit to myself that it was really creepy.
That's practically the whole acquaintance with religion. Philosophy even less so. Diogenes lived in a barrel, that's what I knew. And here we are talking about the foundation of some teaching... My brain refused to perceive this idea as such.
Fragmentary appeals to me gradually became almost daily. When I learnt to ask questions mentally, they became real conversations. I learnt that the God of Wisdom, best known as Hermes, was speaking to me, and that he intended to hand over to me the teaching I was to reveal to the people. This became a new round of wonder and bewilderment.
About Hermes I knew then only what was said in the ancient Greek myths, the retelling of which, belonging to the pen of N. Kun, I had once read, and with which I was more or less familiar from other books and TV programmes. In publications devoted to occultism, I met the text of the "Emerald Tablet" by Hermes Trismegistus, whom I did not associate with the Greek god (and quite rightly). I had no idea about Hermeticism as an occult-philosophical tradition at that time, except for a few mentions in the same books. Later, I got acquainted with the texts of the "Hermetic Corpus", read various materials on the topic and learnt about the huge influence that the Hermetic tradition had on occultism, philosophy, religion. All this was later, when I began to purposefully study the history of the question, striving to get as full a picture of what was going on as possible.
At that time I just listened and marvelled at what was happening. Of course, the first serious question I asked then, and the most pressing one, was "Why me?" I did not flatter myself, I did not consider myself so smart, and by that time I had already had the opportunity to make sure that, for example, my writing abilities left much to be desired. Then again — disability. Perhaps, in a general sense, I am no worse than others, but I am clearly not qualified to be a mentor to others or to spread any kind of teaching. That requires mobility and physical strength and ability, which I lacked. Why such a strange choice? Why is the teaching given to me? It cannot be that there was no one more suitable! All these questions and doubts remained unanswered. My Teacher, Hermes, who told me to call him Emere, was silent on the subject. Only later it became clear to me that then, at the beginning of the revelation, I simply could not perceive the explanation properly — so incredible it was. Although, it would seem, what could be more incredible: the God of Wisdom was speaking to me, he was telling me the teaching that I was to pass on to people... But still. It was even more difficult to perceive what applied to me. So the solution to this riddle was postponed for later. I had to take it for granted then. The question "Why me?" had to plague me for several more years.
I say "revelation" even though I didn't call it that at the time. I didn't call it anything. Only some time later, there was a need to somehow designate what was happening. The teaching that was passed on to me was not a religion. As well as Hermes himself, was not that god Hermes that the myths tell us about. He was not a deity in the usual sense of the word. But he was what could be called the prototype of the mythical Hermes, as well as a number of gods of other religions. The Teaching tells about the structure of the world, the purpose of its existence, the place of a person in it and the meaning of human life. Nothing supernatural, no mysticism. Those who are called gods in it are, in fact, the personified laws of Nature. Energy, organised in a special way, possessing a certain degree of intelligence and carrying out the work of laws and various processes in the Universe. Hermes, or Emere, has a relation to the universal repository of information, a kind of global database. Therefore, he identified himself as the God of Wisdom, which very much discouraged me. Because the word "god" is associated with religion. But I had to start somewhere. Later on, for lack of anything better, I had to borrow other terms from the religious vocabulary. I began to call beings like Emere gods. The transmission of information from them to man — revelation. I called myself a prophet, as one who receives revelation.
It was very difficult to learn to perceive all these terms in a different, non-religious sense. To get used to the fact that in the Teaching they have nothing to do with the supernatural. I managed to get used to it, but the problem of terminology remained. We still have to use these words, which misleads those who meet the Teaching for the first time. It is mistaken for religion.
But this problem did not become urgent at once. At the time in question, I had no idea what pitfalls lay ahead. I asked questions and absorbed what was revealed to me. The first information I received was about the books I had used to learn about magic. I reread them again — but now the reading was accompanied by a commentary from Emere, explaining what was described there correctly and incorrectly. These comments gradually, somehow imperceptibly, grew into a presentation of the picture of the world. I suddenly realised that I was being told about completely different things, much more global.
I was done with my exercises in magic. It turned out that it was not the right thing to do. A path that leads away from normal interaction with Nature. But I will not dwell on this in detail. It's a very specific subject to go into here.
Emere told me about the Creator, about the origin and structure of the Universe, about the world of Spirit and the world of energy, about evolution and the role of sentient beings in it, about the purpose of man, about postmortem, about the Dragon, and about many, many other things... A flood of completely new information fell upon me, unthinkable for my previous understanding of the world. Sometimes I just had a hard time assimilating it. At some moments I began to "float": I felt dizzy and the world around me seemed strangely unreal. Then I would ask the Teacher for a break, and the conversations would stop for a few days. When I came to my senses and was ready to continue, they resumed.
As I reflected on the incoming information, I felt a certain embarrassment caused by the apparent contradiction. On the one hand, something that I never believed in: a Creator, the act of creation of the Universe, and the like. On the other hand, what I had recognised and believed in since school: evolution, strict cause-and-effect relationships, the impossibility of miracles, and so on. All this was hard to keep in mind, because it was personally difficult for me to link such realities within one consistent system.
Later I understood that it was a stereotype, which said that the idea of the Creator, who created the world, belongs to the sphere of supernatural, irrational, and is characteristic only for religious consciousness, — and therefore by definition does not combine with the rational scientific approach and the idea of evolution. Especially, evolution, which is obligatory for the Creator himself. It took me some time to overcome the barrier in my own consciousness. After all, the problem was not in the complexity of the information itself for understanding, but in the fact that the apparent contradiction made it difficult, so to speak, to settle it. There was a kind of rejection, which can be roughly described as follows: if I do not believe in the supernatural, considering it absolutely impossible, then how can I even take seriously the idea of the Creator, how can I take this information into mental and spiritual work? But when I managed to understand that the creation of the world by the Creator does not necessarily have to be a supernatural act, everything fell into place, and the rest began to fit perfectly into the scheme taught to me.
This is how it happens: habitual stereotypes that have become ingrained in our consciousness prevent us from seeing reality as it is. Of course, this is a well-known fact; I am not trying to present it as my discovery. It's just that the situation when I faced this problem not in theory, but in practice, and overcame it in practice, taught me a lot. I think it was one of the key moments of my path. I did not just learn something new then, but I broke an important stereotype of perception, without which it would be impossible to understand the Teaching.
Why am I emphasising this moment? Because this problem is relevant not only for me. It is the mentioned stereotype, as I have already said, that can most of all hinder the understanding of the Teaching. Simply because it does not allow one to even begin to study it seriously. People with a scientific mind may be repulsed by the fact that the Teaching recognise the existence of a Creator who created the Universe. For people who tend to put the supernatural above the rational, it is unacceptable to say that the Creator who created everything is not omnipotent and not even supernatural, that he also obeys the laws of evolution, and that the creation of the Universe was caused precisely by his evolutionary necessity. Here there is a collision of two types of worldview: scientific and religious. Their confrontation, as a conflict of rational and irrational consciousness, in different variations is one of the leitmotifs of the whole history of mankind. However, the Teaching reconciles them, showing that the idea of evolution is fully compatible with the idea of the existence of the Creator. Moreover: these ideas complement and explain, justify each other. And, of course, this integration is not limited to just the two ideas mentioned. The Teaching contains many such points and aspects. It as a whole can only be properly understood in this way — through the realisation that phenomena that seem supernatural can be explained from a rational point of view. And that the rational point of view, in its turn, should not make one reject in advance what, because of ingrained stereotypes, is perceived as manifestations of supernatural forces.
Studying the Teaching, you periodically catch yourself thinking that in one aspect or another it resembles religion, since it describes things that science does not recognise, but which, on the other hand, have undoubted similarities with religious ideas. In fact, this resemblance is of the same order as, say, a religious view of lightning. Religions traditionally considered it a supernatural phenomenon, an attribute of an angry God or gods, intended to frighten the disobedient and punish the unwanted. However, such ideas about lightning do not deprive it of its materiality, do not turn it into a figment of fantasy, into a creation of mysticised imagination. It exists, it is real. And the day has come when science has given this natural phenomenon a rational explanation. We see that the phenomenon itself exists, but there is nothing supernatural about it. So the Teaching tells us about many things that at first sight go beyond rationality: about the Creator and the creation of the Universe, about the world of energy and the world of Spirit, about gods, about life after death and reincarnation, and so on. However, it itself emphasises that all this belongs to the sphere of the natural, the rational — and therefore accessible to scientific cognition. Therefore, a person familiarising with the Teaching should be able to approach the material from such positions, i.e. to understand that the seemingly religious things about which it tells us are not really so, and yet they really exist. It may not be easy to develop such a perception in oneself, and it may not happen immediately, but it is necessary. Otherwise, there will inevitably be a bias to one side or the other: either denying the possibility of the existence of such things, or interpreting them in a mystical way. Both destroy the integrity of the perception of the Teaching and fatally distort its meaning.
Yes: the Teaching says a lot of things that science does not yet know. But this is a common thing when science does not know about the existence of something, or knows, but can not explain it. When the time comes, it will know and explain. The Teaching can greatly help it in this, pointing out the guidelines, suggesting cause-and-effect relationships, giving logical explanations for incomprehensible phenomena. It does not oppose itself to science. On the contrary: the methods of cognition existing in the Teaching and the scientific method are two manifestations of the same thing. They complement each other, and often merge altogether. In the future, the boundary between the Teaching and the scientific approach to the knowledge of the world will be completely erased, and they will visibly merge into one. In fact, they are one and the same even now, but this is less obvious for science than for the Teaching, and its recognition of this fact will have to wait.
All this I realised and was able to formulate clearly much later. Here I am sharing what was clearly formed in my consciousness only a few years later. Then, I repeat once again, I was amazed, discouraged, and just confused. In those days I had to break my own stereotypes of perception and assimilate a huge amount of new information. It was understandable, but because of its unusual nature and the enormity of what it touched, it was very difficult for me.
Even harder was the lack of an answer to the question "Why me?" It's hard to do something, and even something important, without having an idea of what it's all about. And I really wanted to have that idea. I not only wanted it: I was in dire need of understanding the conditionality of what was happening. The question "Why?" was answered, but not the question "Why in this way?" Without it, it was as if I lacked the ground beneath my feet.
And another difficult point was added to the others. The key words in it were "to do something". What to do was generally clear. To transmit the Teaching to people. A task that in itself was capable of frightening anyone with its scale and degree of responsibility. But how to do it? I had no idea from which side to undertake such a task. Not only did I have no experience of any contact with the spiritual side of life at all — we are not going to consider the infantile tugging of the priest's beard and bewilderment at God's angry grumbling — but I also had to teach others. I felt like a man who worked all his life as a janitor, and then he was caught on the street and made president of the Academy of Sciences. Like, come on, lead. That was the real confusion. What should I do, in terms of concrete steps? How do I even start?..
One way or another, it was necessary to start. I had to simultaneously study the Teaching myself, gradually building a new picture of the world in my head, and think about how to explain it to others. Except that it was not easy with the others either.
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