Anastasia - The Ringing Cedars of Russia v7-10

Table of contents :
Vladimir Megre
Book I - Anastasia
Overview
Book 7 - The Energy of Life
Book 7 - Contents
Thought which creates
A bride for an English lord
You create your own fate
'Garbage-dump thinking’
A goddess of a wife
And where is your thought right now?
A conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather
Thank you
Divine faith
The speed of one’s thinking
Training thought
The ultimate taboo
Divine nutrition
A society of schizophrenics?
Opposition
To Jews, Christians and others
Going deep into history
Take down Jesus Christ from the cross
Terrorism
Pagans
Combat
The marvellous Vedrass holidays
Significant books
An exercise for teleportation
Give children their Motherland
A security zone of the future
A law for deputies elected
To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series
Book 8.1 - The New Civilization
Book 8.1 - Contents
Pre-dawn feelings
Dominion over radiation
“Goosey, goosey, ga-ga-ga”1 or The superknowledge we are losing
Rejuvenation
Divine nutrition
Demon Cratius
The billionaire
I am giving birth to you, my angel!
A fine state of affairs!
The Book of Kin and A Family Chronicle
One hectare — a piece of Planet Earth
People power
A new civilisation
Book 8.2 - Rites of Love
Book 8.2 - Contents
Love — the essence of the Cosmos
Do our lives correspond to the Divine programme?
Why does love come and go?
Wedding rites
Conception involves more than flesh
Russia erased
The elders’ mistake
The Creator’s greatest gift
Pre-wedding festivities
The wedding rite
Conception
Telegony can be overcome
The psychology of Man’s genesis and appearance in the world
A rite for a woman giving birth without a husband
Where should we have our babies?
The Vedruss birth
Not Radomir’s last battle
From the stars will they return to the Earth
Even in chaos there is a purpose
‘Soulmate gatherings’
A nuptial rite for women with children
High-society ladies
Millennial encounter
Anastasia’s wedding
Vladimir Megre
Book I - Anastasia
Overview
Book 7 - The Energy of Life
(Untitled)
Book 7 - Contents
Thought which creates
A bride for an English lord
You create your own fate
'Garbage-dump thinking’
A goddess of a wife
And where is your thought right now?
A conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather
Thank you
Divine faith
The speed of one’s thinking
Training thought
The ultimate taboo
Divine nutrition
A society of schizophrenics?
Opposition
To Jews, Christians and others
Going deep into history
Take down Jesus Christ from the cross
Terrorism
Pagans
Combat
The marvellous Vedrass holidays
Significant books
An exercise for teleportation
Give children their Motherland
A security zone of the future
A law for deputies elected
To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series
Book 8.1 - Contents
Pre-dawn feelings
Dominion over radiation
“Goosey, goosey, ga-ga-ga”1 or The superknowledge we are losing
Rejuvenation
Divine nutrition
Demon Cratius
The billionaire
I am giving birth to you, my angel!
A fine state of affairs!
The Book of Kin and A Family Chronicle
One hectare—a piece of Planet Earth
People power
A new civilisation
Book 8.2 - Rites of Love
Book 8.2 - Contents
Love—the essence of the Cosmos
Do our lives correspond to the Divine programme?
Why does love come and go?
Wedding rites
Conception involves more than flesh
Into the depths of history
Russia erased
The elders’ mistake
The Creator’s greatest gift
Pre-wedding festivities
The wedding rite
Conception
Telegony can be overcome
The psychology of Man’s genesis and appearance in the world
A rite for a woman giving birth without a husband
Where should we have our babies?
The Vedruss birth
Not Radomir’s last battle
From the stars will they return to the Earth
Even in chaos there is a purpose
‘Soulmate gatherings’
A nuptial rite for women with children
High-society ladies
Millennial encounter
Anastasia’s wedding
Book 10 - Anasta

Citation preview

According to Anastasia, special combinations of letters and words are inserted into the text, which influence a man beneficially. You can feel these influences while reading it, when your hearing is not disturbed by sounds produced by artificial things and mechanisms. Natural sounds like: the singing of birds, the sound of rain, the rustling of leaves in the trees help to produce positive influences. Translator. Larisa Malgosheva-Bartone 12 Suydam Sfc New Brunswick, NJ 08901 1(732) 249-8772 E-mail: Larisa 7777@ aol.com

Official Websites http://www.ringingcedars.com/ http://www.vladimirmegre.com/ http://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/ "Anastasia" is Book 1 of The Ringing Cedars Book Series. This series of nine books tells the story of a remarkable woman named Anastasia, discovered in 1995 by a Siberian trader, Vladimir Megre, while he was plying the waters of the remote Ob River. Anastasia was born in the forest in 1969 to parents who died tragically when she was just a baby. Living for the most part without warm clothes, food cultivation or manmade shelter, she has survived on fruit, nuts, berries and mushrooms, brought to her by "wild" animals with which she lives in peaceful harmony. Megre initially spent three days with Anastasia, during which time she displayed such astounding knowledge, power and wisdom that he abandoned his business and, at her request, began writing this series. She told him she would encode the books with an energy that would cause them to sell in the millions. Despite his lack of writing experience, this is exactly what happened. It is Anastasia's ability to strike a chord in the heart of the reader that makes these books so very unusual. The purity and power of her words is provoking an outpouring of joy and hope in people from all walks of life. The series has sold over 11 million copies and has been translated into 20 different languages. This is not the authorized English Edition.

Vladimir Megre Author of The Ringing Cedars Series

Vladimir Megre, born in 1950, was a well-known entrepreneur from a Siberian city of Novosibirsk. In 1994, during a stop on a trading trip along the mighty Ob River, a Siberian elder told Vladimir Megre about the existence of "ringing cedars"—sacred trees which can heal bodily diseases and elevate the human spirit. The elder told him of such a cedar growing in the Siberian backwoods. Intrigued, but committed to his present venture, Vladimir Megre later began to delve into literature on Siberian cedar trees and became one of the first Russian businessmen to rediscover the tremendous folk medicinal, nutritional and commercial value of virgin oil pressed from Siberian cedar nuts. It seemed that knowledge of the secret techniques of pressing the oil had been lost. In 1995, determined to rediscover this secret and launch a highly lucrative production of cedar nut oil, Vladimir Megre organized a second expedition along the River Ob. On this trip however, an encounter with the elder's

granddaughter, named Anastasia, transformed him so deeply that he abandoned his commercial plans, his trading business and temporarily even his family, and instead went to Moscow to fulfill his promise to Anastasia to write a book about what she had shared with him. Anastasia had reassured him that his books would sell in the millions. True to her promise, Anastasia's messages in the Ringing Cedars Series have spread like a raging wildfire across Russia and Europe, where news reporters are now writing about a "new dawn" unfolding and an "eco-village revolution" taking place, which may change the country's—and the whole world's—destiny. Vladimir Megre could not have known that his 1994-95 trade trips would change his entire life and affect the whole of humanity. Yet this appears to be the inevitable impact of his discovery of Anastasia and her remarkable messages for the world as chronicled in the Ringing Cedars Series. Now English readers are excitedly devouring these books—with more than 100,000 copies sold already—and bookstores claiming "these books are flying off the shelves!" A wave of excitement is now sweeping the Englishspeaking world as everyday 100's more readers discover his books. Vladimir Megre presently lives near the city of Vladimir, Russia, 240 km (150 miles) east of Moscow. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected] (Please note that he doesn't read or speak English.)

Book I - Anastasia Remarkable woman of the Siberian forest. Anastasia is considered to be a surviving member of an ancient Vedic culture, whose powers and knowledge far exceed anything known today. She is the inspiration for the Ringing Cedars Series. According to Megre's account, she was born in 1969, in the Western Siberian taiga (boreal forests) not far from the city of Surgut on the river Ob. Her parents died tragically in a forest accident when she was just a baby. She lives in the wilderness—for the most part without warm clothes, food cultivation or man-made shelter—and survives on fruit, nuts, berries and mushrooms, brought to her by "wild" animals with which she lives in peaceful harmony. She consistently displays the most developed psychic and mental powers including remote viewing and healing, mind reading and seemingly perfect memory. When challenged to solve some of society's most complex social, health and environmental problems, after only a few minutes lying on her back on the ground, with eyes closed and just her fingertips twitching, she has provided answers in such incredible detail, that witnesses have been left flabbergasted. She says these powers are natural to Mankind and in these books she describes exactly how they may be regained by any one of us. Most of all she is a beautiful mystery—one who has changed the landscape of metaphysical thought with her foresight and innate wisdom.

Overview There is so much mind-blowing material in these books it's almost impossible to give you an overview! What we can tell you is this... This real-life story begins in 1995. A trader prepares his ships to embark on the most remarkable trip of his life —a trip that will change the course of millions of human lives. Ahead of him lies the mighty Ob River —winding and snaking for 3,500 miles through the Siberian taiga—the vast boreal forest —that stretches across Northern Europe, Alaska and Canada. A warning! Nothing you have ever read before can prepare you for the journey you are about to take. You are about to meet Anastasia—a beautiful young woman—discovered by the author, living alone deep in the remote wild forests of Siberia. She is considered to be a surviving member of an ancient Vedic civilisation whose extraordinary powers and knowledge far exceed anything known today. Anastasia's powerful, myth-shattering messages reveal a profound wisdom grounded in ancient knowledge; they expose suppressed secrets and hidden historical facts that will completely change your understanding of our past, and offer a whole new paradigm for our planet's future. Anastasia will lift you up and hurl you into a future that is. well. everything you imagined life could and certainly should be! The twist is. it's here NOW! Anastasia will have you dancing with delight and squealing with excitement as you rediscover YOU. in all your glory! Anastasia's messages will simply blow your mind! Her soft-spoken words go straight to your heart—like nothing you have ever read! And the more you read them. the better you'll feel. Anastasia will restore your hope for the future and re-ignite your passion for life. After reading these books—nothing will be quite the same.

Book 7 - The Energy of Life

Book 7 - Contents 1. Thought which creates 2. A bride for an English lord 3. You create your own fate 4. ‘Garbage-dump thinking’ 5. A goddess of a wife 6. And where is your thought right now? 7. A conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather 8. Thank you 9. Divine faith 10. The speed of one’s thinking 11. Training thought 12. The ultimate taboo 13. Divine nutrition 14. A society of schizophrenics? 15. Opposition. 16. To Jews, Christians and others.. 17. Going deep into history 18. Take down Jesus Christ from the cross 19. Terrorism 20. Pagans. 21. Combat 22. The marvellous Vedruss holidays 23. Significant books 24. An exercise for teleportation 25. Give children their Motherland 26. A security zone of the future 27. A law for deputies elected by the people 28. To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series The Ringing Cedars Series at a glance. CHAPTER ONE

Thought which creates Man’s life! On what or on whom does it depend? Why do some become emperors or regimental commanders, while others are obliged to fend for scraps at garbage dumps?

One opinion holds that each person’s fate is predetermined from birth. That would make Man1 nothing more than an insignificant cog in some mechanised system, and not the highly organised creation of God. According to a different opinion, Man is a self-sufficient creation, including, without exception, all the diverse energies of the vast Universe. But there is in Man an energy peculiar to him alone. It is known as the energy of thought. Once Man realises just what kind of energy is in his possession and learns to exploit it to the full, then he will be a ruler of the whole Universe. Which of these two mutually exclusive definitions of Man is true? Perhaps the following ancient parable—you could call it an anecdote—will help us arrive at the answer. A man fed up with his life ran out into the woods at the edge of town, threw up his hands, clenched his fists and railed at God: “I can’t go on with my life. Your earthly household is filled with nothing but injustice and chaos. Some people go gallivanting ’round town in expensive cars and dine in fine restaurants, while others fend for scraps at garbage dumps. Me, for instance—why, I ain’t got enough money to buy me a new pair o’ shoes. If You, God, are just—that is, if You exist at all—then make my lottery ticket hit the jackpot.” At that moment the clouds parted in the heavens, a warm sunbeam caressed the complainant’s face and a calm, clear voice sounded from above: “Do not worry, My son. I am prepared to fulfil your request.” The man was overjoyed. He walked along the street with a smile on his face, happily peering into shop windows and imagining what kind of goods his lottery winnings might buy. A year passed. The man won nothing. He concluded God had let him down. Now the man, who by this time was really fed up, went back to the same place in the woods where he had heard God’s promise and cried: “You didn’t keep your promise to me, God. You let me down. Here I’ve been waiting for a whole year now I’ve been dreaming about the things I’ll buy with the money I win. But a whole year’s gone by, and I ain’t got no winnings yet.” “Oh, My dear son,” came the sad response from the heavens. “You wanted to win a lot of money in the lottery. So why over the whole year did you not buy a single lottery ticket?”

This little parable or anecdote has been making the rounds lately. People tend to laugh at the loser. “How come he didn’t catch on that for his dream to come true he first had to buy at least one lottery ticket?” they ask. “But this chap didn’t even take the most obvious first step!” It’s not the parable itself that’s important here, or whether this situation ever actually happened. What is important is how people relate to the chain of events recounted in this story. The fact that people laugh at the unfortunate dimwit tells us that they intuitively, perhaps subconsciously, realise that their own future life depends not only on some kind of Higher Power or Divine Design, but on themselves too. And now everybody can try and analyse their own life situations. Have they done everything they possibly can on their own to make their dream come true? I dare say, and not without some justification, that any dream—even one that seems to be unreal and utterly fan-tasaical—will come true if only the individual wanting it to come true takes simple and consistent actions toward his goal. This statement could be illustrated with a whole range of examples. Here is one of them. CHAPTER TWO

A bride for an English lord One day at a small local market in the city of Vladimir I happened to witness an incident between a young sales girl and an inebriated male customer. The girl was selling cigarettes. She was evidently new on the job and hadn’t yet boned up very well on her merchandise. She was getting the brandnames of the cigarettes mixed up and took a long time to wait on each customer. A small queue had formed—about three people. The last person in line, a drunken male, shouted out to the salesgirl: “Hey, can’t you move a little faster, birdbrain!” The girl’s cheeks blushed bright red. Several passers-by stopped to stare at the hapless girl.

The drunk continued shouting out his unflattering remarks. He wanted to buy two packs of Primas, but when his turn came, the girl refused to serve him. Flushed with embarrassment and clearly having a hard time holding back her tears, she declared to the customer: “You are being insulting, and I refuse to serve you.” At first the man was dumbfounded at this unexpected turn of events. Then he faced the growing crowd of gawkers and launched into an even more insulting tirade: “Will you just look at this stupid jackass?! If you got yourself a husband, he’d complain in no uncertain terms if you hobbled about the kitchen like a lame hen!” “I wouldn’t let even my husband insult me like that,” the girl replied. “Who d’you think you are, anyway? Nothing but a stubborn jackass!” the inebriated man went on, shouting even louder and more irritatingly; “She won’t let her husband—Maybe you’re planning on marrying some English lord?” “Maybe a lord, that’s my business,” replied the girl tersely and turned away. The situation was heating up. Neither side was willing to give in. A sizeable crowd of market regulars had gathered to watch things unfold. Onlookers began scoffing at the young salesgirl’s declared intention to marry an English lord. Another girl came over from the next stall and stood beside her friend. She just stood there, without saying a word. They stood there silently, two young girls who looked to be just out of high school. The crowd that had gathered were now talking amongst themselves about the girls’ insolent and haughty behaviour. Most of the snide remarks were about the girl’s pie-in-the-sky hopes of marrying a lord, along with her over-estimation of her attributes and opportunities. The dilemma was solved by a young man, the owner of the market stalls. When he first approached, he demanded in rather severe tones that the girl sell the cigarettes to the customer. However, after hearing her refusal, he quickly hit upon a solution satisfactory to all. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a fifty-rouble note and addressed the girl: “Madam, if you would be so kind, and if it is not too much trouble, please sell me two packages of Primas.” “Of course,” responded the girl, handing him the cigarettes.

The young man in turn passed the cigarettes to the male customer. The conflict was over and the crowd dispersed. This story has a sequel—a quite unexpected one at that. Each time I went by the market thereafter, I couldn’t help paying attention to these two young salesgirls. They worked just as deftly as their senior fellowworkers, but at the same time significantly distinguished themselves from them. They were slender of figure, modestly but neatly dressed, makeup not overdone, and their movements were far more elegant than the others’. The girls continued working at the market for almost a year and then both disappeared at the same time. It was about six months later, in the summertime, at the same market, that I noticed an elegant young woman walking beside the fruit stalls. She stood out from the crowd by her proud bearing and fashionable expensive attire. This striking young woman was accompanied by a dapper-looking gentleman carrying a basket filled with a variety of appetising fruits. It dawned on me that this young woman who was attracting all sorts of attention from the men around—as well as (no doubt) jealous glances from the women—was none other than the friend of the cigarette salesgirl. I went over and explained to the young couple—especially to the lady’s concerned companion—the reason for my curiosity. Finally the woman recognised me. We sat down at a table in an open-air cafe and Natasha (as she was called) recounted to me the events that had taken place over the past year and a half. Her story went as follows: The day when Katya had that incident with the customer in front of all the regulars we decided to quit our jobs so people wouldn’t laugh at us. You remember how Katya said back then that she was going to marry an English lord. And people laughed at her. We realised they would go on laughing and pointing fingers at us. But we didn’t manage to find work anywhere else. You see, we’d just finished high school, and didn’t make it when we applied to college. Well, all right, I got average marks, but Katya was a real brain. She passed her exams with flying colours, but still didn’t get in. They’d cut back on the number of free college places, and she didn’t have the money to pay for her education—her mum makes a pittance, and there’s no dad. So we ended up taking sales jobs at the market, since they wouldn’t hire us anywhere else. We began working and swotting to sit the next year’s college exams. But a week after the incident at the market Katya all of a sudden turns to me and says: “I’ve got to prepare myself to be worthy of being the wife of an English

lord. D’you want to train along with me?” I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious. Even back at school Katya had always been pretty obsessive about whatever she put her mind to. She went to the library and found the syllabus of a seminary for young ladies,2 which she adapted to modern times. And we started training like crazy according to Katya’s syllabus. We did dancing and aerobics, we studied English and English history, along with the rules of etiquette and good manners. We watched political discussions on TV so we could hold conversation with intelligent people. Even while we were at work in our stall we tried to behave as though we were at a high-society gathering, so that our manners would acquire a natural feel. We earned money, but didn’t spend it on ourselves. We didn’t even buy makeup, so we could save. We were saving so we could have fancy outfits custom made, as well as for a trip to England. Katya said, you see, that English lords would never come round a small market like this in Vladimir, which meant we had to go to England. Our chances would be far greater there. So we went to England with a tourist group. The two weeks there simply flew by. Of course, you understand, there were no English lords to greet us or take us around. And I really had no expectations for myself—I was just doing this to keep Katya compan. But she actually had hopes. Once she gets something into her head, that’s it. She never stopped looking every Englishman in the face, searching for her intended. We even went to a dance club a couple of times, but nobody asked us to dance, not even once. It was the day of our departure, and we were on our way out to the motor coach from our hotel, and Katya still kept looking around, ever hopeful. We stopped right on the hotel steps, when Katya suddenly puts her bag down, looks off to one side and says: “Here he comes!” I look, and lo and behold, walking along the sidewalk toward us is a young man, minding his own business and paying no attention to us. Just as I expected, he came right up to where we were standing, but didn’t even glance at Katya and walked right by. And then all of a sudden Katya—coo, blow me away!—calls out to him. The young man turns to look at us. Katya goes up to him slowly but confidently and says to him in English:

“My name is Katya. I am from Russia. Now I am leaving to go to airport on a bus with my tour-group. I have approached you... I have feeling that I can make you a very good wife. I do not yet love you, but I shall be able to love you, and you will love me. We shall have good children together. A little boy and a little girl. We shall be happy together. And now, if you wish, you can accompany me to say good-bye at airport.” The young man just stood there staring intently at Katya without saying a word. He was dumbfounded, no doubt from the shock. Then he said he had an important business meeting, wished her bon voyage and walked off. The whole way to the airport Katya sat staring out the windo. We didn’t say a word to each other. Both Katya and I felt awkward in front of all the tourists who saw the scene in front of the hotel. I could literally feel my skin tingling at all those people making fun of Katya and accusing her. But when we arrived at the airport and were getting off the coach, right there was none other than this same young Englishman, greeting Katya with a huge bouquet of flowers in his hand. She put her bag down—no, she simply let it fall to the pavement. She didn’t take the bouquet, but buried her head in his chest and began crying. He dropped the bouquet, and the flowers scattered all over. I helped the other tourists gather them up, while they just stood there. And the Englishman was stroking Katya’s head. And as though there were nobody else around, he kept telling her what a fool he was for almost letting fate slip through his fingers, how if he didn’t catch up with her he would suffer for it his whole life, and kept on thanking Katya for finding him. Meanwhile, as it turned out, the plane’s departure was delayed. I shan’t tell you how, but I was the one who managed to delay it. Her Englishman turned out to be from a family of British diplomats and he himself was about to be posted to some embassy. As soon as we got back to Russia, he started ringing up Katya every day. They’d talk for hours. Katya’s now in England, and pregnant. I think they really do love each other. And now I believe in love at first sight. When Natasha finished telling me her amazing story, she gave a smile to her companion sitting beside her. I asked whether they had known each other long. And the young man answered: “You see, I was in the same tourist group. When the Englishman’s flowers got strewn all over, Natasha started picking them up, and I began helping her. Now I carry her fruit basket for her. Who are we, compared to English lords?!” Natasha lovingly placed her hand on her companion’s shoulder and

said with a smile: ‘And just who are they compared to you—our Russian men?!” Then the happy girl turned to me and said: ‘Andrei and I got married a month ago. And here we are, come to see my parents.” After hearing the story of these girls, a lot of people might think: well, they were just lucky. Not a typical situation. But if I dare say it, the situation in this case was absolutely typical and entirely normal. More than that, I would affirm that other girls could predict a similar destiny for themselves if they are prepared to follow the pattern set by Katya and Natasha. Of course there may be certain differences—names, the type of suitor, and the time-frame involved—but a similar situation happening with others is already a predetermined fact. Predetermined by whom? By the girls themselves, their way of thinking and the consistent steps they take toward their goal. Think about it. Katya had a dream, or a goal: to marry an Englishman. What prompted this dream is unimportant. She was probably turned off by the atmosphere of the market, the drunken customers and how rude they were, or maybe the shameful taunts of the customer in question. In any case, a dream was born. What of it? What young girl doesn’t dream of a prince driving a white Mercedes, and yet still ends up marrying a typical loser? In the vast majority of cases their dreams do not come true. I concede that, of course, but the reason they don’t come true is simply that their actions, or more precisely, their action in respect to their dream is like the anecdote about the lottery ticket—when someone dreams about winning big at the lottery and even asks God for help, but doesn’t take the first elementary step of buying a single ticket. The girls began taking action, and a consistent pattern was realised: dream —thought—action. Try removing just one of these elements from the chain, and the girls’ fate would have turned out completely differently CHAPTER THREE

You create your own fate Man’s destiny! Many are wont to think that Man’s fate is decided by someone up there. But this ‘someone’ simply makes available to every Man the most powerful energy in the Universe—an energy capable of not only shaping its holder’s destiny, but of creating whole new galaxies. This energy

is called human thought. It is not enough just to know that this is so. One must become consciously aware of this phenomenon -- one must feel it. How completely we are able to become aware of it, to feel and understand it, determines the degree to which the secrets of this vast Universe of ours unfold before us, the degree to which we perceive how its wonders—or, more precisely, its natural phenomena—work. It is only the conscious awareness and acceptance of the energy of thought that will allow us to make our lives and the lives of our loved ones truly happ. And yet it is precisely a happy life that is predestined for Man on the Earth. And so we are obliged to persuade ourselves of the indisputability of the following conclusions: First: Man is a thinking being. Second: the power of the energy of thought has no equal in the Universe: everything we see, including ourselves, is created by the energy of thought. We can name off millions of objects from a primitive hammer to a space ship, yet the appearance of each one of these is preceded by thought. Our imagination builds a material object in space unseen to our eyes. Just because we don’t yet glimpse its materialisation doesn’t mean that the object doesn’t exist. It is already constructed in mental space, and this is more significant than its subsequent materialisation. A space ship is constructed by the thought of one or more people. We still don’t see it, we can’t touch it, yet at the same time it exists! It exists in a dimension invisible to us, but later it materialises, taking on a form we can see with our ordinary sight. Which is more important in the construction of a space ship—the craftsmanship of the worker executing the details according to the blueprints presented to him, or the thought of the designer and builder? Of course the physical labour on any project is absolutely necessary, but nothing can displace the primacy of thought. A real space ship can suffer a catastrophic accident, caused not by some kind of defective part, but always by an inadequately developed thought. In ordinary parlance it is known as thoughtlessness. Thought is capable of foreseeing any kind of accident. In thought there are no unforeseen situations. Yet all sorts of accidents and irregularities do happen. Why? Because of haste in turning the project into material reality,

not allowing it to be sufficiently thought through. Anyone who thinks this through on their own can come to the same indisputable conclusion: all objects that have ever been manufactured on the Earth are materialised thoughts. Now it is vitally necessary to realise that absolutely all life situations, including life itself, are formed first of all in thought. The world of living Nature which we see, including Man himself, was originally formed by God’s thought. Just like God, Man is capable of forming with his thought not only new objects but his own life situations as well. If your thought is insufficiently developed, or prevented by some cause from freely making use of its inherent energy and speed capabilities, your life situations will be influenced by somebody else’s thoughts—possibly the thoughts of your family, acquaintances, or society in general. But note that even in this case your life situations are determined aforetime by human thought. And you have only yourselves to blame if you have choked and imprisoned your own thinking, thereby subjecting yourselves to the will of another person’s thoughts, meaning that your successes or failures in life are already dependent on this other person or persons. You may be persuaded of what I have just said through a variety of examples in life. Think what a Man does before becoming a famous performing artist? First of all he dreams about it, naturally, then thinks up a plan of how to attain his dream, and then steps into action. He takes part in amateur productions, studies at an appropriate school, and then takes a job in the theatre, film studio or symphony orchestra. Some people may protest and say that while everybody dreams of becoming the most famous performing artist, only a few actually achieve this, while others are obliged to look for work in another field that has nothing to do with a career in the arts. Besides the dream, one needs talent too. Yes, of course, that is true. But talent is also a product of the power of thought. What about physical and natural gifts? They are significant, of course. But, then again, human thought is not so stupid as to inspire a legless person to enrol in a ballet school. How can it be, the reader may wonder: if everything, even one’s profession and well-being, depended on one’s own thoughts, then surely everybody would be rich and famous, and there wouldn’t be any people eking out a pitiful existence, rummaging through garbage dumps in search of something to eat.

Well, now, let’s head off to a garbage dump, in the literal sense of the word. CHAPTER FOUR

'Garbage-dump thinking’ I did this in the following manner. I let some stubble grow on my face, rumpled my hair and borrowed some old work clothes from a painter friend. Then I took a plastic bag and a stick and walked up to a garbage dumpster. I rummaged about with a stick in the garbage and came up with several empty bottles, which I put into the plastic bag, before proceeding to the dumpster at a neighbouring building. My efforts were rewarded. I had been at the second dumpster no more than ten minutes—fifteen tops—when I was virtually set upon by a man wielding a metal rod in his hands. “Keep your paws off what doesn’t belong to you,” he said in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “You’re saying that this is your territory?” I asked calmly taking a few steps back from the dumpster, at the same time handing him my plastic bag with the bottles. “Whose else would it be?” the man replied, already sounding less aggressive than before. He took my bag and began raking through the contents of the garbage dump, paying no attention to me. “Maybe you could show me where there’s some freebies around?” I enquired, adding: “I’ll make it worth your while.” “White,” responded the unofficial owner of the dumpster. I went to the store and picked up a bottle of white vodka,1along with a few snacks. Over drinks we got to know each other, and Pavel shared with me a lot of the tricks of his trade, and believe me, there were quite a few. 1

‘white’ vodka—clear, unmixed, ‘classic’ Russian vodka as distinct from ‘coloured’ varieties of vodka (e.g., fruit liquors infused with cranberry, rowan-berry etc.) available on the market. You have to know, for example, what days especially to guard against ‘transients’ like me invading and pinching one’s ‘property’. Especially after holidays, when a lot of bottles get tossed out. It is also important to know which refuse materials contain base metals, and how to collect them—some dealers pay more for glass containers and base metals. And to know what to do with discarded clothing that’s still fit to wear. I attempted to change the subject.

While Pavel was entirely capable of expressing his opinions on politics and the government, he did so with considerably less interest. He had a one-track mind—everything revolved around the dumpsters. As a final conclusive test I suggested the following to him: “You know, Pavel, there’s a chap building a house not too far away who’s looking for a security guard over the winter, as well as to help in the construction, for which he’s willing to pay extra. And supply groceries to boot. Every week his driver brings potatoes, onions and cereal. You’re a decent fellow—he’ll hire you. If you like, we can go have a word with him.” After a few drinks, as might be expected, we had become friends. Which made the sudden sharp shift in his mood all the more unexpected. First he spent about thirty seconds in intensive thought. Then after staring at me another thirty seconds in a kind of standoffish silence, he finally came out with what was on his mind: “You think I’ve been drinkin’ and not realised what’s going on? What’s all this business, creep, about me being hired as a guard, just so’s you can take over my dumpsters?” He didn’t even ask what kind of wage a security guard might earn, or what kind of accommodations might be included, or what kind of work, specifically, he might have to do for the extra pay. His thought was completely concentrated on his dumpsters, working out the best way to take care of them and protect them from competitors. So it turns out that this Man predetermined the course of his thought— deciding the questions of his existence on the basis of garbage dumpsters— and then followed the direction of his thought. One could cite quite a number of other examples confirming the indisputability of the fact that the creation of all material objects, life situations and social phenomena is preceded by the energy of thought. One Man can influence another through his own thoughts. This is attested in ancient tales and parables. Here is what Anastasia’s grandfather had to say about the energy of human thought. CHAPTER FIVE

A goddess of a wife “Yes, Vladimir, Man’s thought has access to energy unsurpassed. Many of the creations of this energy are either dismissed as magic or counted as

miracles and ascribed to a higher power. “Take, for example, the ‘miracle icons’. Why would they suddenly become miraculous? Why would a piece of wooden board with a hand-painted image on it all of a sudden have the power to work miracles? It happens when iconographers imbue their work with a sufficient amount of their own mental energy. Those who look at the icon then add their own energy. People talk about a ‘prayed-over icon’—in other words, an icon imbued with a goodly amount of the energy of human thoughts. “It used to be that iconographers knew about the properties of this great energy Before approaching a particular work, they fasted to cleanse their body of impurities, at the same time intensifying their thought. Then they entered into a state of detachment, focusing their energy on a single task— the painting of the icon. When it was completely finished, they spent another long period contemplating what they had done. And miracles were sometimes the result. “People sometimes see unusual phenomena, or various kinds of angels. But note that people invariably see only what they are thinking about. They invariably see only the images they believe in. “Christians, for example, can see only their own saints. Moslems see only theirs. That is because they are beholding the projections of their own or the general collective thought. “Back only fifteen hundred years ago there were people who understood the power and properties of the energy of human thought. There are parables about this. Would you like to hear one?” “Yes, I would.” “I shall translate it from its ancient tongue into contemporary language, and change the setting to modern terms to make it more understandable. But tell me first, how does a man who has been married to a woman for a long time behave? What does he do when he comes home?” “Well, a lot of husbands, as long as they don’t habitually reach for the bottle, will sit down in front of the television set and either read a paper or watch TV. They might take out the garbage, if their wife asks them to.” ‘And what about the women?” “There’s no question about that—they get supper ready in the kitchen, and afterward wash the dishes.” “Fine. That will help me translate the ancient parable into modern terms.” Once upon a time there lived an ordinary husband and wife. The wife’s

name was Elena, her husband was Ivan. Every day the husband would come home from work, sit down in his favourite chair by the television set and begin reading the newspaper. His wife Elena would get supper ready As she gave Ivan his supper she would nag him that he never did anything useful around the place, and was not earning enough money. Ivan got irritated by his wife’s nagging. But instead of giving her some kind of gruff response, he simply thought to himself: She herself‘s a dirty slut, and she’s telling me what to do. But when we got married, she was so totally different—she was beautiful, she was tender. One day when this nagging wife demanded Ivan take out the garbage, he reluctantly tore himself away from the TV and headed outdoors with the dustbin. Upon returning, he stopped in the doorway and turned to God in his thought: “O, Lord! O, Lord! Just look at how lousy my life’s turned out! Do I really have to while away all my remaining years with such a nagging and ugly wife? This isn’t life—it’s sheer torture!” And then all of a sudden Ivan heard the quiet voice of God: “My son, I could help alleviate your troubles, I could give you a splendid goddess of a wife, only if your neighbours noticed a sudden change in your life, they might become greatly astonished. Let us work this way: I shall change your wife just a little at a time. I shall imbue her with the spirit of a goddess and improve her outward appearance. Only you must remember that if you want to live with a goddess, you have to make your own life worthy of a goddess.” “Thank you, O Lord! Any man would be happy to change his life for the sake of a goddess. But tell me: when will You start making changes in my wife?” “I shall begin a few little changes right awa. And minute by minute I shall be changing her for the better.” Ivan went back into his home, sat down in his chair, picked up the paper and turned the television back on. Only he did not feel like reading, or watching any TV films. He could not wait to peek and see whether his wife had started changing—even just a little. He got up and opened the kitchen door. Leaning against the door-post, he began watching his wife intently. She was standing with her back to him, washing the supper dishes. All at once Elena felt herself being watched and turned toward the doorway. Their eyes met. Ivan looked at his wife and thought: No, I don’t see any

changes going on in my wife. Seeing the unusual attention her husband was paying her and not being able to figure it out, Elena all at once straightened her hair, and a rosy blush came over her cheeks as she asked: “What is it, Ivan? Why are you looking at me so intently?” The husband could not think of what to say. Embarrassed, he blurted out: “Well, maybe... the dishes... maybe I could help you wash them? I was just thinking about it, for some reason.” “The dishes? You help me?” the wife echoed in surprise, taking off her much-soiled apron. “Well, you see, I’ve already done them.” Wow! She’s changing right before my eyes! Ivan thought. Look how fnnch prettier she’s become all of a sudden! And then he started drying the dishes. The next day after work Ivan couldn’t wait to get home. He couldn’t wait to see how his nagging wife was little by little being transformed into a goddess. Hasn’t she got a lot of goddess in her already? But I haven’t changed even a little bit myself, as usual. In any case, I should buy her some flowers, so I won’t fall flat on my face before a goddess! Upon opening the door to his home, Ivan stood entranced in amazement. There before him stood Elena in her party dress, the same one he had bought her last year. She was sporting a neat hairdo, complete with a bright ribbon. He was dumbfounded. With some awkwardness he offered the flowers to Elena, not being able to take his eyes off her. She accepted the flowers and gave a little gasp. She lowered her eyelids and a rosy blush filled her cheeks. Oh, what marvellous eyelids goddesses have! What meekness they express! What extraordinary inner beauty, and outward looks! And Ivan gasped in turn, upon seeing the table set with their fancy china and two candles burning on the table, along with two wine-glasses and the food with its divinely tempting aromas. He sat down to the table, and Elena his wife sat down opposite him. But then suddenly she jumped up and said: “I'm so sorry, I forgot to turn the TV on for you. But here, I’ve got today’s paper for you.” “Never mind the TV, and I don’t really feel like reading the paper either—

they all keep saying the same thing,” Ivan responded with sincerity. “I’d rather you tell me what you’d like to do tomorrow, Saturday” Completely overwhelmed, Elena asked in amazement: “What would you like to do?” “Well, I happened to pick us up a couple of theatre tickets today. Anyway, tomorrow afternoon, I thought you might like to do a bit of shopping. Since we’re going to the theatre, I thought we’d drop into a store first and buy you a dress suitable for the occasion.” Ivan just caught himself in time from blurting out his cherished secret: a dress suitable for a goddess. Embarrassed, he looked at her again and gave another gasp. A goddess was indeed sitting at the table before him. Her face was beaming with joy, and her eyes were sparkling. Her restrained smile was just slightly inquisitive. O Lord, how marvellous goddesses are after all! But if she keeps on getting better day by day, can I become worthy of this goddess? Ivan mused. All of a sudden, a thought struck him like lightning: I’ve got to do it! Fve got to do it while this goddess is here with me. I’ve got to ask her, plead with her to bear my child. A child which will come from me and from this most marvellous goddess! “A penny for your thoughts, Ivan! Could that be excitement I see in your face?” Elena asked her husband. He sat there excitedly, not sure how to talk about so precious a thing. This was no piece of cake—asking a goddess to bear a child! This was not a gift God had promised him. He did not know how to tell her about his wish. Fumbling with a corner of the tablecloth, Ivan got up from the table and pleaded, blushing: “I don’t know... Do you think... But I... wanted to say...for a long time now... I want to have a child with you, my beautiful goddess!” Whereupon she, Elena, came over to Ivan, her husband. From her love-filled eyes a tear of joy rolled down her rosy cheek. She placed her hand on Ivan’s shoulder, and her breath flared in a warm flush. What a night that was! What a morning! And oh, what a day it is! How marvellous it is to live with a goddess! thought Ivan, as he bundled up his second grandson for an outdoor stroll. “What did you understand from this parable, Vladimir?” “I understood all of it. God didn’t actually help Ivan. All he did was listen to God’s voice. Ivan made his own wife a goddess through his thought.”

“Of course, you are right: Ivan created his own happiness with his thought. He made his wife a goddess and changed himself. But God did help Ivan.” “When?” “Back when God gave everything to each of us, when He was contemplating the creation of Man. And explaining everything to the first Man he created. Do you remember God’s words from the book Co-creation? He said: “‘My son, you are infinite, you are eternal, within you are your dreams of creation.’1 “These words, Vladimir, are still true today. Every Man has within himself creative dreams. The question is only: in which direction are they aimed? And how powerful is the thought, including its energy, in His sons and daughters living on the Earth today?” 1

Quoted from Book 4, Chapter 8: “Birth”.

CHAPTER SIX

And where is your thought right now? I shall not concern the reader with further examples. Each one can ascertain independently from his own life what segments of his being have been created by his own thought and what segments by somebody else’s. To answer this question once and for all, let’s start by stating the obvious: thought is precursor to everything. As I have already indicated, to anyone who succeeds in not only becoming aware of this but in feeling it as well many secrets of the Universe will be revealed. First and foremost, a distinct picture of creation will appear. God created the world in which we live through the help of a dream—the energy of His thought. He created Man, giving him complete freedom of action and endowing him with powerful energy capable of creating similar worlds, or possibly worlds even more perfected than the Earth. In order to create new worlds or to perfect the world already created, it is vital that the speed of Maris thinking match that of the Divine. However, one glance at the world created by human society shows clearly that it is not only imperfect but poses an ever-increasing danger to existence. Consequently, a degradation of consciousness is clearly taking place or, more precisely, Maris speed of thinking is diminishing. The very first people possessed a speed of thinking equal to the Divine. It

could not have been otherwise, since, like any parent-creator, God could not even think of creating His child less perfect than Himself. What powers could have proved capable of influencing human consciousness and aiming it down the path of degradation? If anyone had the power to do so, that means he would be able to surpass the energy of thought of both God and Man. But there is no such being, either on the Earth or anywhere else. The proof of this statement is simplicity itself. If there existed an entity possessing a greater speed of thinking than Man, it would long ago have created its own world and we would be able to see it. To either redirect or subjugate the energy of human thought is something only human thought itself can do. In other words, one Man possessing a greater speed of thought than the rest and wanting to subjugate others could, under certain circumstances, do so. In today’s situation human society has been subjugated to the descendants of the Egyptian priests who preserved the knowledge of the science of imagery and who maintained, with the help of special exercises, the capability of thinking at a much greater speed than the vast majority of people living on the Earth.1 And there are circumstances which confirm this to be the status quo. There is one Man who has proved capable of standing up to the priests oneon-one. I am talking, of course, about the Siberian recluse, Anastasia. And note that she achieves palpable results without the help of any kind of army or technical superstructures, but simply by virtue of the power of her thought. For farther details, see Books 4 and 6, especially Book 6, Chapter 6: “Imagery and trial”. That mankind is beginning, at the dawn of a new millennium, to enter into a Divine world of splendour is to me, personally, an indisputable fact. I should like to share some joyful news with my readers. I have it on reliable authority that several individual groups of scholars have been working, independently of each other, on a programme of national development according to an image created by Anastasia. Not just people with academic degrees, but students, too, have been involved in these projects. To develop a programme like this in detail requires approximately two to three years of persistent work on the part of a whole army of specialists. But the first glimpses of it you can already catch even now.

For example, the Internet site www.Anastasia.ru has published a paper by a fourth-year Ukrainian university student outlining a programme of development for Ukraine, based on Anastasia’s idea of family domains. People all over Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States2 have been sending in draft constitutions for future communities. It is not for me to judge the merits of this young woman’s paper, but it is already significant simply by virtue of its being the first one published. It is also important to note that these scholars became involved not by dint of somebody’s commission but by the dictates of their own hearts. It won’t be long before you get a chance to become acquainted with and discuss their highly important works. "Commonwealth of independent States— an organisation made up of most of the former Soviet republics, founded in December 1991—immediately following the dissolution of the USSR—to facilitate trade ties as well as mutual co-operation in matters of foreign policy and defence. It does not include Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania; moreover, Georgia and Turkmenistan have opted for less than full membership status. think these projects will be set forth for public discussion under the umbrella name of the national idea? I could have included these passages in my previous book, following the account of my conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather. I didn’t. I thought it would be premature. As it is, many people dismiss Anastasia’s powers as bordering on fantasy or fairy tales. My conversation with her grandfather, however, revealed to me even more extraordinary phenomena than any Anastasia had shown me earlier, and helped me see Anastasia herself in a new light. Now that current events in human society have begun to confirm what I heard back in the Siberian taiga, I shall cite part of my conversation with her grandfather. ^Indeed, in 2006—four years after this book was originally published in Russian—the Russian government put forth four National Projects: strong agriculture, affordable housing, high-quality education and healthcare. A number of prominent politicians, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party and Deputy Head of the Russian Duma (Parliament)—have openly declared that the concept of kin’s domains should become the basis for implementation of these ‘National Projects’. More recently, in March 2007, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the ‘National Projects’, publicly stated that the idea of kin’s domains was fully aligned with the government’s own priorities.

CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER SEVEN

A conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather This took place on the day following her great-grandfather’s passing.1 Usually, when loved ones pass from our lives, relatives offer expressions of sympathy. The last little while Anastasia’s grandfather never left his father’s side. Now that he’s all alone, I decided to seek him out and talk with him, to take his mind off his sorrow, as is customary I knew pretty much where I could find him, and so headed over to the neighbouring glade. Anastasia’s grandfather was standing motionless at the edge of the glade, watching and listening to the nutcracker birds3 4 twitter on the branches. He was wearing a long shirt5 made out of nettle fibres and some kind of ropebelt. He was barefoot. I knew that residents of the taiga took care not to interrupt each other’s train of thought. And I began to realise on just how high a level this culture of communication actually was. It speaks of the great respect they have for each other’s thinking. After some time Anastasia’s grandfather turned and headed over in my direction. As he approached, I could detect no trace of sorrow on his face, which manifested its customary kind-heartedness. “Good day to you,” he said, offering me his hand as we exchanged greetings. In our conversation he always structured his sentences in terms of modern, often quite mundane usage, sometimes making a joke or teasing me —though never insultingly On the contrary, he had a way of making you feel at home, as though you were chatting with a member of your family. And he was somebody you could talk with very easily on any subject—even on topics men bring up when there are no women around. Undoubtedly many of Anastasia’s abilities were inherited from her parents and ancestors, as well, of course, as from her grandfather, who had, after all, played a hands-on role in her upbringing. What knowledge of life, what abilities lay hidden in this grey-headed elder who a hundred years on had lost none of his keenness of mind and youthful agility? With me he spoke in very simple terms, although one time I overheard him talking with his father. Well over half the words he used were ones I had never heard before. It means that in talking with others, out of

respect to them he makes use of their lexicon and manner of speaking. “Well, now, how are things going? In your civilised society? Any people starting to wake up?” asked Grandfather with a hint of jocularity. “Things are going along okay,” I responded. “There are some scholars who have taken an interest in Anastasia’s ideas. Various groups are working on national development programmes based on her proposals. This is happening not only in Russia but in other countries as well. But it’s not clear just yet when all the marvellous things, as she put it, will actually come to pass either in our country or abroad.” “It’s all happened already, Vladimir. The main thing has been done.” “What do you mean by ‘the main thing?” ‘Anastasia has created a thought, an image of a future state, and she has done this with her usual meticulous approach, right down to the last detail and how thoughts will be materialised in a future reality. “Now you and a lot of people will be able to see this splendid future materialised. The energy of her thought is extraordinarily strong, and her strength has no equal anywhere in space. It is perfect and quite specific, but the main thing is that she keeps on gaining strength thanks to the help of other people’s thinking. She is no longer alone. “So you tell me that groups of scholars in various countries are working on national development programmes, and entrepreneurs are starting to build the domains she thought up, and her thought has been perceived by manypeople young and old. Once these people have had contact with her thought, they are creating thoughts of their own. “The thoughts of all these people merging together are filling space with an energy of unprecedented strength, and this energy is materialising a splendid future. Already one can see partial manifestations of this materialisation.” “But what if someone deliberately started to obstruct this materialisation of the future?” I asked. “The priests, for example, who now rule the world, let’s say the high priest himself began obstructing it?” “He will not obstruct it. He will help it along.” “How can you be so sure?” “I have heard his conversation and seen his thought.” “What conversation? How did you see it?” “Vladimir, you’ve probably already guessed that my father was one of those six priests.” “I had no idea.”

“Well, you might have guessed. Although outward simplicity and the ability to conceal one’s abilities and possibilities is one of the important components of their power. There’s no way they’re going to brag about the weapons in their arsenal the way the leaders of the world’s great powers do. The priests are capable of aiming these weapons wherever they like by directing the leaders’ thoughts, by bringing about corresponding situations. And they never had any thought of bragging about themselves in public. Their major, secret goal over the millennia has been to achieve a dialogue with God. No matter how they’ve acted, they have never feared Divine revenge, knowing that God has given full freedom to each Man, and He will not break His promise. “They have been controlling mankind, torturing it even, thereby showing God that they are more capable than anyone else, that the fate of the Earth’s civilisation depends on them. This kind of situation, they figured, ought to compel God to enter into a dialogue with them... Only there hasn’t been any dialogue. And now it’s become clear why it has been totally out of the question for the priests to have a dialogue with God.” CHAPTER EIGHT

Thank you When little Anastasia was born, and after this tiny infant who had not yet learnt to walk was left all alone without any parents, the fiery sphere began to put in an occasional appearance beside her.1 My father, along with the other priests, knew about a great many natural phenomena that your scientists today consider mysterious and unexplainable. Yet he could still not account for the power of this fiery sphere. Its unfathomable energy could momentarily dissipate in space in the form of tiny sparks, or just as quickly gather itself together into a single whole. A delicate tongue of fiery light bursting from the sphere could instantaneously pulverise a huge stone or rock. The same tongue of light was also capable of tenderly touching an insect’s leg as it crawled along the petal of a flower, without causing any harm. But the main, the most inexplicable part of the mystery was how this cluster of tremendous energy reacted to the feelings and desires of little Anastasia. That meant it had feelings, and thought besides. Thought, in the complete sense of the word, is native only to Man. But the

fiery sphere was not Man. Then who was This? How could It possess feelings which belong only to Man? Where did It acquire such tremendous power and might? This and the following two chapters are narrated by Anastasia’s grandfather. I told you, and you described this in your book,2 how it changed the Earth’s gravitational field in a single spot, when Anastasia was learning to walk. Thousands of little tongues of light emanated from it, combing the little girl’s golden hair. Father had an idea about what kind of forces could have produced this fiery, mighty and thinking sphere, but he never spoke of it aloud. Supposition requires proof. When Anastasia was a little older, we once overheard her talking with the sphere. Or rather, she was the one who did all the talking. The sphere never uttered words, it only reacted to the child’s words through its actions. When Father asked Anastasia about the sphere, she gave only a very brief answer: “I would call it Good.” Her answer was insufficient for my father, but he didn’t speak with her again about the sphere, not back then nor over the years since. From that original answer it was clear that Anastasia had no desire to give a definition either to the fiery sphere itself or to its actions. Most probably she perceived it through her feelings. But my father, for some reason, was anxious to define the phenomenon. From the time the sphere first appeared, Father stopped participating in the priests’ affairs and concentrated his attention on solving the mystery. The priests know the mechanisms for confirming a hypothesis or overturning their own hypotheses. To this end it is necessary to publicise the phenomenon with a highly accurate report and await people’s reaction and opinions. Mind you, these people should not be asked or instructed to express their opinions. Definitions must arise freely, on the level of feelings and not just intellect, in order to be as accurate as possible. "See Book 2, Chapter 27: “The anomaly”. So, at my father’s request, I told you about Anastasia’s childhood, including the story of her communication with the mysterious phenomenon. You wrote about this in your book without distorting what you heard, and, most significantly, you did not express any opinions of your own. We looked forward with some excitement to hearing your readers’ reaction.

It came very quickly, expressed not only in the usual things people say, but in emotional bursts of feeling. People said or wrote what my father had supposed for many years but never spoke aloud—thoughts he had hid from the other priests. You published poetry from readers who wrote not because somebody had asked them to, but straight from the heart. Let me remind you of how one of these poems starts off: On her Birthday God appeared To his beloved little Nastenka..? Father’s guess had been confirmed. The fiery sphere which communicated from time to time with Anastasia is none other than a representative form of God. God has many representative forms. Each blade of grass is a manifestation of His thoughts. But of all the many elements comprising God’s representation, the sphere presented itself, if not as the main one, certainly as one of the most majestic and concentrated forms, including even the energy of both intelligence and feelings. And then one day... This happened after you had written your first five books. After the publication of her words—or rather, dark space was penetrated by what seemed like a fiery sword—the emotional outburst captured in her words: 3

Nastenka— a common diminutive variant of Anastasia,

“Prepare yourself, all wickedness and evil-mindedness, to leave the Earth behind and fall upon me!”6 From Anastasia’s lips these words go far beyond the meaning of just the words. You, Vladimir, along with many others, have had the opportunity a number of times to see that for yourself. And the wickedness began to attack Anastasia with an invisible energy. The white circles started appearing, bleaching the grass all around. It even happened sometimes that Anastasia would lose consciousness momentaril. And we didn’t know how to help her. Our little granddaughter did not ask us for help. And because she didn’t ask, that meant unquestionably that this was something she had to work out all on her own. More recently, however, we began to notice these attacks on her getting more and more severe. It was as though evil were simply agonising to carry out these final attacks.

But our granddaughter’s tenacity was growing at the same time. Lately the routine blows have simply caused her to give a shudder and head for the lakeshore. Somehow the lake water has been able to quickly restore her strength. After splashing and diving in the water, she’s come out at full strength, as before. On one particular day we noticed Anastasia heading for the lake after one of the usual blows, but she was treading very carefull. When she stopped to lean against a cedar trunk and rest, Father said with some alarm: “Today our granddaughter is having a particularly difficult challenge to handle. It’s really been hard on her. Look, and you will see some grey strands in her golden hair.” Then we saw Anastasia push off from the trunk, take one step and then another in the direction of the lake. Then she stumbled and stopped once more. It was at this point that the fiery sphere appeared from space, right in front of her. But this time its lightning flashes were changing colours, as though volcanic ashes were seething inside it. And then all of a sudden it would look as though fierce fiery arrows were piercing through an invisible protective shield—floods of them dashing out and disappearing in space. But the sphere was not decreasing but increasing in size, while the diverse energies inside it were condensing and seething with ever greater intensity. The sphere itself was not suspended in space, but contracted and expanded like a heart. Then all at once it fell still, as though trying to make a decision. And thousands of lightning trills of energy dashed out in Anastasia’s direction. At just what point this sinking girl managed to raise her hand, Father and I failed to detect, even though we were watching the whole event, trying not to blink. We knew what this gesture meant. She was shielding herself from the lighting trills directed at her. But why? At that time we still weren’t in a position to understand. But one thing was clear: the fiery sphere, through its energy, was capable of fully restoring her strength. Not only that, but it could also endow Anastasia with fresh energy, whereby outward attacks could no longer hold any terror for our granddaughter. But why did she decide to act on her own? The tongues of fire extended in her direction quivered, but did not touch Anastasia, standing there with her hand raised. They either disappeared in the sphere, which was still raging with tremendous energy, or dashed out once more, reaching out in her direction but, as before, not touching her. And then all at once, with slow and tender words, she addressed the fiery

sphere and its tongues of light: “I implore You now to contain the bursts of Your energy. Do not touch me. I can restore my strength in Your lake as before. I just need to make it to the shore.” In an instant the sphere gathered up all its quivering tongues of light from all around, and kept pulsating like a heart. It swept upward with a flash—it seemingly cracked asunder and then contracted. Its myriad tongues made a dash for the ground, touching everything on the path leading to the lake from Anastasia’s feet. And another vision arose. The path began to sparkle with millions of pulsating colours of light, making a multicoloured rainbow arc over the path leading to the lake from Anastasia’s feet. It was a wondrous sight indeed! Anastasia’s pathway now lay through a triumphal arch! She took a step, but to one side. She did not follow the route marked out for her by the fiery sphere. She slowly attained the shore and dived in, then resurfaced and simply lay in the water with outstretched arms. Then she started splashing about—her strength had returned. Anastasia’s behaviour in relation to the fiery sphere, which was really in relation to God, was beyond our comprehension. But what happened next is comparable to a turning point in the consciousness of all mankind, or to a change of balance in the energies of the Universe. What happened next was... Throwing on a little dress over her still wet body, she carefully smoothed out its folds, straightened her hair, then pressed her hands to her breast and began speaking out into space: “My Father, You are present everywhere! I am your daughter amidst Your perfect creations.’ I must put an end to the dispute among the entities in the Universe as to whether Your creations are perfect, or whether they might be flawed. “My Father, You are present everywhere! You have fulfilled my request and not touched me. None of them will now say that Paradise will return to the Earth only when God corrects His imperfect creations! See Book 4, Chapter 11: “Three prayers”. “But there is nothing requiring Your correction. You created all right from the start in perfection. My Father, present everywhere, I am not alone. In all the corners of the Earth there are sons and daughters of Your own. And they have mighty aspirations. They will restore the Earth to the marvellous flowering of its original pristine creation.

“My Father, present everywhere, we are your sons and daughters. We are created by You. We are perfection. “And now we shall show everyone what we can do. And may You be delighted by our actions.” When Anastasia uttered these words and then fell silent, the fiery sphere which had been resting high above made a dash for the ground. About three metres from Anastasia’s feet it dispersed into millions of tiny sparks all around, and then in an instant gathered itself back together into a single whole. Only this single whole was no longer a fiery sphere. There in front of Anastasia stood a child of (in Earth terms) about seven years. It is difficult to say whether it was a boy or a girl. The child’s shoulders were covered by a fabric with a pale bluish-purple sheen that looked as though it were made out of mist itself. The child’s hair fell around his shoulders. The expression on the child’s face was one of intelligence, confidence and grace. Rather, the expression on the child’s face was impossible to convey in words—it could only be described in terms of the feelings which overflowed our souls. The young child stood barefoot on the grass without trampling even a single blade. Anastasia knelt to the ground in front of Him, then sat down on the grass, her eyes fixed on His extraordinary face. It seemed that in the very next second He and she would embrace, but this did not happen. The child smiled at Anastasia. With a careful utterance of each sound, He said: “Thank you, sons and daughters, for your aspirations.” Then as He dissipated into space, the fiery sphere once more appeared high above, glistening with a joyful light of the like nobody had ever seen before. It made several circles over the lake, and for five minutes or so drops of warm rain soothed everything growing around, as well as the smooth surface of the lake. The moisture was invigorating. A few drops fell on my arm without rolling off. Instead, they dissolved, filling my body with a luxuriant bliss. My father is always unflappable in situations like this, in complete control of his emotions, but this time even he was shaken. He walked through the taiga as though he could no longer feel his body, and I followed. He walked for several hours, and then turned to speak to me. A tiny tear was rolling down his cheek. As one of the high priests, he was not susceptible to such emotion. But I saw his tears. Father said quietly and confidently: “She did it! Anastasia has brought people across the dark forces’ window of

time. The seeds of happy and joyful aspirations will now be scattered over the whole Earth.” Then Father had a long and animated conversation with me. He was not surprised by the actions of the sphere, or by the fact that one of God’s representative forms—perhaps His main manifestation—had appeared to Anastasia in the person of a child. My father was a priest, and not just a simple priest either. He had the ability to discern what was important in visible occurrences. And it wasn’t at all the vision itself that interested him. The most important thing was the appearance of a thought in space. The thought produced by Anastasia had not been heard since the time of creation, nor reflected in a single religious or scientific treatise. Utterly simple and yet, at the same time, extraordinarily exalted, it has turned the treatises we know into naive musings which had nothing in common with the Divine essence. Anastasia had imbued human consciousness with the concept of God which Man had been missing all these years. :

What does it consist of?:

CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER NINE

Divine faith You know that the Earth and everything growing on it, as well as all its functions—rain, snow, wind—were thought up by Elim right from the very start. Our Creator—the Great Mind—created His great creation in an impulse of inspiration. And He created Man In His own image as a culmination of His creation. But ever since the time of creation it turned out that many beings have been plagued with doubt as to whether Man was really created by God as a creation unsurpassed in the Universe. Is it really true what God said about Man not being just like any other creature but being equal with God? God Himself said, “My image and likeness he is... I have given him everything that is Mine, and will furthermore give him for his own all that may be thought at a future time.”1 God wanted to see His own creation, Man, in the likeness of Himself. Now take a look at mankind today Many people talk about God. They talk

about the strength of their love for the Creator. But with that they are lying to themselves. For it is impossible to love someone without seeing, feeling or understanding Him. Many will say “I believe in God”. But what exactly do they believe in? Do they believe in God’s existence? But surely that indicates a very primitive level of consciousness. A Man who says “I believe God exists” is admitting in effect that he neither feels nor understands God, but simply believes in His existence. If by faith in God they mean that God is an almighty, kind and loving parent, then what do they do for God apart from uttering words? They destroy His creations and isolate themselves behind the stone walls of monasteries from the world created by their Father. They spend their time thinking up and churning out all sorts of treatises. And everywhere it’s the same. The treatises say that God must be worshipped. But people worship they know not what. And now, Vladimir, just imagine how God feels when He looks down and sees all this corruption. You can picture it if you try. After all, God possesses all Man’s feelings, only with Him they are stronger, sharper and purer. But even with the feelings we have today—our human and parental feelings —we can still picture how our Parent, our Creator must feel. Here He is looking down on His children, but all they can do is cry: “We love You, only give us more of Your goodness. We are Your servants, we are powerless and ignorant, we are stupid. Help us, O Lord!” Is it really possible for creations in God’s likeness to conduct themselves this way? What could be more painful for a parent than the helpless moaning of his children? This is how doubts about the perfection of God’s creations arose among the elemental beings of the Universe. “But who could make such a fool of Man this way? How? When?” “The only one who could make a fool of Man is someone possessing equal power of thought—in other words, Man himself.” The priests were the ones who launched mankind down the path of degradation. They took it upon themselves to prove to God that they were capable of controlling all mankind, on the premise that humanity’s moanings and torments would force God to enter into a dialogue with them. They counted on this because they know that God never talks with anyone, never interferes in human destiny, that all destinies are determined by the paths human beings themselves have chosen.

But if mankind were to be brought to the brink of total destruction, God might enter into negotiations with those leading mankind to that brink—with those influencing people’s minds—in order to head off an utter collapse. The premise was that God would do this for the sake of all humanity. Millennia went b. But God did not enter into a dialogue with the priests and did not bring about any new miracles to bring people to their senses. First my father, and later I myself, understood why. If He had done this, if God had interfered in human affairs, then He Himself would have confirmed the speculations on the part of the elemental beings of the Universe that Man was an imperfect creation. But, more importantly, His interference would have ultimately destroyed Man’s faith in himself. Man would have ultimately ceased discovering the Divine elements within himself and relied solely on help from outside. And so He waited, and believed in His children, observing events and suffering, enduring the mockery and the taking of His name in vain. He believed in His creation, Man. It is His own faith that is truly the Divine faith. The priests had hoped that the solution would come about just at the point when a global catastrophe was imminent. They had hoped the scenario they had thought up would come to pass. Not one of them imagined that a single Man—a young woman—in the space of a few short years would thwart their plans and efforts they had been making over the course of millennia and turn mankind back to its Divine pristine origins. But Anastasia did produce this most extraordinary turnabout. She demonstrated to the whole Universe the power of God’s creation, she demonstrated the Divine wisdom. And quite possibly for the very first time. Just imagine, Vladimir, the majesty and significance of that event. For the first time since the moment of the creation of the Earth, our Father heard talk of the perfection of His creation. The marvellous future visualised by Anastasia is already alive in space, and being concretised moment by moment by a whole lot of people who are beginning to understand their own essence and purpose in life. Materialisation will inevitably follow. “But when will it follow? The priests, after all, are also capable of acting and interfering.” “But not the high priests. The challenge now is to abort the programme created by the priests. My father spoke with one of them before his departure. The priests never meet amongst themselves. They are located in various parts of the globe, but can communicate at a distance by feeling each

other’s thoughts.” My father was standing on a small hillock. The dawn’s rays were already skimming the tops of the cedar trees, illuminating my father’s face and his profile. I heard this dialogue take place silently in space: “I am Moisey, descendant of a dynasty that has been controlling the destinies of peoples for thousands of years. I am their descendant and forebear. I appeal to you, self-appointed High Priest, but not on bended knee. Do not waste your efforts trying to counteract Anastasia. “My granddaughter’s aspirations do not correspond, in any way, shape or manner, to the plans we have thought up. This lack of correspondence is pleasing to me, it strikes a chord in my soul. I am Moisey, I am a priest. We are equal in power. I shall shield my granddaughter with my own self.” And the high priest’s answer: “Yes, Moisey, you and I are equal in power. And thus I realise that you are not asking me to stop the attacks—it is advice you are seeking from me. “I am the one who is now thinking of how we can help her, how to put an end to this monstrosity of a system. We created a monster, and it is stronger than us. You yourself, after all, participated in its creation. “It has been devouring children and mangling people’s bodies for millennia. Now it will take centuries of our efforts to stop it. But your granddaughter’s thinking is more accelerated than ours. She can create millennia in the space of a single year. None of us at the moment is in a position either to help her or to harm her. “The only thing I am certain of is that we should be creating our own lifestyle according to the image outlined by your granddaughter, and pour all our knowledge into our creations, so that we ourselves become an example for people to follow.” The priests did not use all that many words as they talked amongst themselves, but what they said made a great deal of sense. “I don’t think everyone will understand the priests’ dialogue. It’s not clear to me, for instance, what kind of a beast they are talking about, the one that devours children. And why, if they really want to help Anastasia, your father and the high priest still say they are not in a position to offer help.” “It’s all in the speed of one’s thinking, Vladimir.” “Speed of thinking? But why is that so important? What’s the connection?” CHAPTER TEN 1 Man— Throughout the Ringing Cedars Series, the word Man with a capital

M is used to refer to a human being of either gender. For details on the word’s usage and the important distinction between Man and human being please see the Translator’s Preface to Book 1. 2 seminary for young ladies— from tsarist times in Russia, when there were elite boarding schools reserved for girls of noble descent. The syllabus would have included a wide array of subjects (languages, dancing, painting, etiquette, religion etc.) designed to prepare the girls for their future roles in high society. 3 Great-grandfather’s passing is described in Book 6, Chapter 3. ‘An invitation to the future”. 4 "nutcracker birds (Latin: Nucifraga caryocatactes)—in Russian these are known either as orekhovki (nut birds) or kedrovki (cedar birds). 5 long shirt (Russian: rubakha)—in this case, a knee-length shirt common as everyday wear among Russian rural dwellers. 6 Quoted from Book 3, Chapter 24: “Who are you, Anastasia?”.

CHAPTER TEN

The speed of one’s thinking It is now well known that the feature that distinguishes Man from all other life growing and thriving on the Earth is his capacity to think. But thought is found in creatures and plants too, albeit in embryo. Man distinguishes himself from all others by the speed of his thinking.1 Back at the beginning, the speed of Man’s thinking most closely approximated God’s, and with a certain lifestyle could increase and even surpass the Divine. At least that was the way our Parent wanted it. If Man’s speed of thinking had attained the level of the Divine, Man could even now be creating a living, harmonious world on other planets. The whole question of the significance of the speed of one’s thinking is the greatest of the secrets guarded by the priests. They did their utmost to eliminate even expressions referring to it from the language. Perhaps you have heard such expressions as slow-witted or with you it takes a long time to sink in. What is the meaning here? It means that it is difficult or boring to talk with someone whose thought operates at a slower speed. All people living on the Earth have varying speeds of thinking. The differences may or may not be significant. A significant superiority in speed of thinking may enable one Man to conquer a great many people, even whole nations. On the speed of one’s thinking see also Book 2, Chapter 29: “Why nobody can see God”. Imagine that a million people are given a specific problem in arithmetic to work out. The one who can think at a faster rate than the others will be the first to come up with the solution. He may solve the problem ten seconds faster than the rest—or twenty, or thirty seconds, or a minute, or even ten minutes faster. We learn from this simple example that one person may know the answer ten minutes earlier than the rest. Ten minutes before the other 999. He will learn something new, acquire knowledge faster than the rest. This arithmetic example may seem harmless enough, but... Now let’s imagine that all people on the Earth are given a problem that takes a thousand years to solve. They start working on it. But one Man has three times the speed of thinking of the others. That means he will know all the

intermediate decisions of mankind before everyone else. What takes humanity 900 years to work out, he will solve in 300 years. That means that for 600 years he will be in a position to control and direct the actions of everybody else. He will be able to reveal to someone the correct intermediate decision which will help him further his goal or, alternatively, give someone a false hint, thereby throwing him backward. Or, what would even be easier for him, give the wrong clue to everybody at the same time, driving them all to a dead end, and then later ‘make a discovery’ in front of everyone—in other words, rule over them. As far back as seven thousand years ago the priests realised the tremendous advantages available to any Man who possessed a higher speed of thinking than all the rest. They took it upon themselves to significantly widen the gap. They tried to increase the distance between their own thinking and that of others by using special exercises, but they failed to achieve any significant difference in those times. And so they thought up a system which would slow down the thinking of every child coming into the world. The system they inculcated kept improving over the millennia and it is still operating today. Take a close look at the lifestyle of the majority of people of our time. If you analyse it, you will see the multitude of efforts directed at stopping the operation of your thought. Anastasia began revealing the priests’ secrets to people. She told about how even a small child should not be distracted from what he is doing—in other words, the operation of his thought should not be stopped. Then she showed you a series of exercises aimed at accelerating a child’s thought. She told about how education as we see it begins with the correct presentation of questions to the child. When a child is presented with a question, his thought begins to search for the answer and thereby gains more and more momentum. This means that the speed of his thinking is increasing minute by minute, and by the time he is eleven it will be many, many times faster than that of someone raised under a system designed to slow thought down. Let us take a look at what is happening in the world today. Right from his mother’s womb a child is surrounded by artificial objects. Any object is the embodiment of someone’s thought. So the child is presented with somebody’s thought—a primitive thought at that—a rattle, for example. A child just a little older is given a doll or a mechanical toy car. Children love to play, but they are still dependent on others, so they play with what others present to them.

Think about the difference, Vladimir. Your daughter, when she was little, kept shaking her rattle, and later got interested in dolls. Your son, on the other hand—the one Anastasia bore you—also likes to play, as all children do. But what he played with was a squirrel, a wolf, a bear, a snake and a lot of other creatures made by the Creator. Now compare the two, only be sure to picture to yourself the degree of discrepancy in the speed of thinking between the one who created the child’s rattle or doll and the One who created the squirrel. So it turns out that one child comes into contact with an object comprising a primitive thought, while the other communicates with an object created by God. The vast discrepancy between the objects the children communicate with means that the speed of their thinking will be vastly different. One of them will have a greater speed of thinking—you yourself can guess which one. When children in your society begin to talk, you determine for them what they can do and what they cannot. Children are persuaded, in effect, that they should not think for themselves, that everything is already decided for them. This means they don’t have to think. All they have to do is follow somebody else’s thoughts. When children go to school, a teacher stands before them and explains the essence of things, along with the rules of conduct and the order of the Universe. The teacher not only explains—he demands that the children think the same way as somebody else has thought. And once again this serves to slow down the development of the children’s thinking speed. Or, to put it more precisely, children are prohibited from thinking independently. In your schools the most important subject—the one designed to increase the speed of children’s thinking—is missing from the syllabus. This most important subject is replaced by a whole lot of other subjects aimed at slowing down children’s existing speed of thinking. CHAPTER ELEVEN

Training thought Listening to Grandfather’s account, I realised that Anastasia too, in communicating with our son, was constantly creating learning experiences for him, training his thought up to speed. Outwardly this looks like play, but thought is all the while being trained even when the child, through what looks like play, is developing purely physical abilities.

I have already mentioned how one morning while playing tag with a shewolf, Anastasia executed the following trick: after beckoning to the wolf, she quickly began running away from it. The wolf gave chase. But when it had almost caught up, Anastasia suddenly leapt up against the trunk of a nearby cedar tree, pushed herself off from it with her legs, did a somersault and ran off in the opposite direction, while the wolf’s inertia kept it dashing on past.1 I watched as my son, too, played tag with a wolf cub. The young wolf always overtook the boy, no matter how fast he tried to run. It would run just a little ahead, then turn and deftly manage to give a quick lick to the child’s arm or leg on the run. Volodya would stop on the spot, rest a while, and then once again try to outrun the wolf, and once again the wolf would catch up with him. When Anastasia showed our son the trick of leaping against the cedar tree to sharply change his direction, he really liked the idea, and tried to repeat it himself. He leapt up against See Book 1, Chapter 6: ‘Anastasia’s morning”. the tree from a run, but was unable to do a somersault and head off in the opposite direction. When he tried pushing off from the trunk the first time, Volodya landed on all fours. Falling again on his second attempt, he looked enquiringly at his mother. Anastasia told him: “Before jumping up against the tree, Volodya, you should work out your next moves in your head.” “I did do that, Mama. I saw how you did it, you know.” “You saw how my body did it, but you did not conceive or feel how your body should do it, or what it should be governed by You first need to train it with your thought.” How one could execute a physical exercise in one’s thinking was something quite incomprehensible. However, the boy walked up to the tree-trunk and stood by it for some time, either with his eyes closed or making instinctive movements with his arms and legs. Then he stepped back and made a run at the cedar trunk. This time he ran faster than usual. I was even a bit afraid something might happen to him, that he might hit himself against the trunk and get hurt. But he came through with flying colours. He pushed himself off and executed the somersault. After stumbling just a little on landing, he was able to start running back at once. He repeated the exercise several times, getting it more technically perfect each time. Good exercise, I thought. “It develops all the muscles,” I told Anastasia.

“Yes,” she replied. “It develops the muscles, and, more importantly, accelerates the thinking.” I wasn’t about to ask how a purely physical exercise could accelerate one’s thinking, but it wasn’t long before I realised that this was precisely the goal Anastasia had in mind in showing Volodya that particular trick. It happened like this: Volodya summoned his playmate, the wolf, and they started off racing. The wolf had almost caught up to the boy when Volodya did his somersault and ran back in the opposite direction. Not anticipating this turn of events, the creature kept dashing on past the cedar. While the wolf stopped and tried to figure out what had happened, Volodya was already running headlong the other way in triumph. He was laughing, waving his arms, leaping into the air, making the most of his victory. The young wolf, however, proved an exceptionally astute and clever rival. As Volodya was trying this trick for the fifth time, at the very moment he was approaching the tree, the wolf suddenly slowed its pace and stopped just a little space shy of the tree-trunk. When Volodya completed his somersault and was about to run off in the other direction, the wolf easily got in a lick as he landed, leapt in the air and wagged its tail. Now it was the creature’s turn to triumph, while Volodya could only stare at it distractedly in amazement. Anastasia and I sat nearby and watched the whole scene unfold. Once again Volodya attempted to outwit the creature, but once again he failed. On each occasion the clever wolf stopped just in time, waited for the boy to land, and managed to get in a lick, sometimes more than one. Volodya began pondering the situation. His expression turned serious, even to the point of frowning. But apparently nothing came to him. Still pondering, he headed over to us and looked us enquiringly in the eye. Anastasia at once said: “Now, Volodya, you will have to take into consideration not only your own thought, but also the thought of the wolf.” And once more the boy went off to think. I also began contemplating the situation. And I reached a firm conclusion: once the wolf had figured out the boy’s manoeuvre, there was nothing more that could be done. The wolf would anticipate his actions, and while he was executing them, it would simply wait for him. Even if Volodya did the trick twice as fast, the wolf would still succeed in getting in its lick, and no amount of thought would help. When I discerned from the boy’s face as he approached us that he had come to the same conclusion, I said to Anastasia: “Why are you tormenting the child like that? It’s clear that he’s never going to outrun the wolf no. And neither will you. That she-wolf of yours had no idea of what was going on when you ran away from her, but this young wolf

has proved to be smarter than its mother.” ‘Yes, it is smarter than its mother, but Man should always be smarter. I am not tormenting our son. I simply suggested he think about it, take the wolf’s thought into account and come to his own solution.” “But it’s absolutely clear there’s no solution here. If there is, then show me. It’s hard for me to see my son with such a sad expression on his face.” Anastasia got up and beckoned to the young wolf, which came to her delightedly at once, wagging its tail. Anastasia gave it a cuff on the shoulder and ran off, signalling the wolf to follow. Volodya and I watched how fast and easily Anastasia ran. The amazingly sprightly and fluid movements of this already mature mother were impressive in their beauty and forthrightness. Yet still the young wolf’s pace was just that much faster. Several times Anastasia was able to dodge it by sharply changing direction. The wolf momentarily lagged behind a bit, but was soon well on its way to catching up. There was no doubt but that it would overtake her in the long run. Then Anastasia made a headlong dash for the same cedar trunk Volodya had used to push himself off from. A few metres before reaching the tree the wolf slowed his pace and, upon seeing Anastasia leap into the air, he sat down, preparing to lick her arm or leg the moment she landed. But... She did indeed make her leap, but did not push off from the tree. Her body passed within a centimetre or two of the trunk. She kept on running, getting further and further away, while the astonished wolf went on sitting at the ready, trying to make sense of what had happened. Volodya jumped up and down, clapping his hands and shouting with glee: “I have got it, Papa, I have got it! I have to think quickly, for both myself and the wolf. I have to think quickly for myself and manage to think for the wolf more quickly than it thinks for itself, and put it all into action on time. I now know how to do it.” When Anastasia came over, he said to her: “Thank you, Mama. The wolf will never catch me now” The next time he raced the wolf, Volodya first tried twisting and turning as Anastasia had done, but then he went through a whole cavalcade of all sorts of tricks. He would grasp hold of a small tree-trunk on the run and use it to change direction faster than the pursuing creature. Or, leaping over a thick branch that had been broken by the wind, he would run up to it a second time, only this time jumping just on the spot, while the wolf made a

headlong dash forward. This is just one example—and there are a great many more. But the important thing is not the number of examples, but understanding the principle of the exercise. CHAPTER TWELVE

The ultimate taboo Not only for children, but for grown-ups living today too, the system pours forth floods of apparently meaningful information, but in reality practically all communications are calculated to draw Man away from information.1 Take, for example, the TV you watch regularly. Every news broadcast tells about how one official is meeting with some other official, or how one leader meets with another leader. Their meetings are served up as news. But if you stop to think about it, you’ll realise that there is absolutely nothing new here at all. Officials have been meeting together for thousands of years now, hour by hour. Summit negotiations between various countries have also been taking place for thousands of years. But nothing ever comes from these negotiations, and nothing of substance ever changes as a result. It does not change because they never talk about the most important thing. They never discuss the true cause of war. They talk only about effects. Yet the media lead you astray by serving up every summit meeting as news. Just think about it: the ultimate taboo subject in the whole world is the path of mankind’s development. Can you just imagine the passengers of an aeroplane in flight who couldn’t give a care in the world as to where the plane is heading or whether it is even able to land? You may think that passengers like that don’t exist. Everyone boarding a plane has an idea of how long the flight will last and the destination city. But ask one or two or a thousand people living on Planet Earth, ask a million even, and nobody will be able to tell you just where mankind is heading. The system created by the priests has blocked up human thought. Modern Man with his extremely slow rate of thinking is not in a position to determine whether mankind—or even a single nation-state—is on the right path of development. He is not in a position to visualise even his own life.

In reality, all the leaders on the Earth are in control of nothing, absolutely nothing. There is not a single country in the world where you will find a clearly stated plan of national development. Such a plan is impossible without first determining a clear and explicit path of development for the residents of Planet Earth as a whole. As a result of a simple scheme the priests devised in the process of constructing their system, all rulers are mere superintendents watching over the functioning of the priests’ system. They are all wrapped up in their own country’s scientific and technical progress, their military strength and the preservation of their own power. For this they are ready to sacrifice the quality of the air and water in their own country and collectively in the world. They are weighed down under the system created by the priests. Like the majority of people on the Earth, the rulers are active pawns in this system. Their thought is slowed down as much as anyone else’s. The speed of one’s thinking! Oh how I hope that you or some of your readers can perceive this not just through cold logic but feel it with every fibre of your being—feel how important the speed of your thinking is for the whole Universe! To find the right words, or to cite the examples needed for understanding, is not an easy task. Examples! Anastasia compared the modern computer to a prosthesis for the brain2—in other words, to a prosthesis for thinking. It is probably true that people most familiar with how a computer works will not only understand but also feel the importance of thinking speed more readily than others. After all, you too, Vladimir, are able to work on a computer. Maybe through the computer you will be able to more quickly appreciate the catastrophic consequences of the sluggishness of human thinking. Anyone familiar with a computer knows how important for the computer is the size of its memory and Its operating speed. Note, I said: operating speed. Now imagine what could happen if one were to slow down the operating speed of a computer controlling an aircraft’s flight or a nuclear power plant. The computer might allow an accident to happen, and that would mean a disaster. The living biological computer native to every Man on the Earth is incomparably more efficient than the manufactured variety It is called upon to assist in the controlling of an immeasurably more perfect and massive device—the planets of the Universe. These can be governed when this biological computer operates at a speed approximating or surpassing that of the original. However, the speed has been diminishing, and is continuing to diminish. Anyone can see this for

themselves if they but examine the situation more carefully. When even the most state-of-the-art manufactured computer keeps getting loaded day by day, hour by hour, with all sorts of data—it doesn’t matter what kind of data, only that it is being inputted—eventually it will start to work more slowly, or it may refuse to process any new information whatsoever. This happens when its memory is overloaded to the point it can no longer accept new data. “See Book 1, Chapter 17: “The brain—a supercomputer”. Most people on the Earth today have experienced something like this. And the system created by the priests has got out of control. It has started operating all on its own. When I mentioned earlier the monster devouring the children, I was talking about the system which has got out of control. Take a careful look: when a child is born to an earthly mother, what is it that immediately takes it into its mighty clutches? The system. What determines what food is to be given to the child? The system. What determines what kind of air the child is to breathe and what kind of water he is to drink? The system. What determines the selection of his path in life? The system. The priests are losing control of the social order on the Earth, yet they are aware of the laws by which it operates and can still exercise an influence on the life of the planet. They are able still today to slow down or accelerate development in specific situations. When the first book with Anastasia’s sayings appeared, the priests took an immediate interest in it. Naturally! After all, these sayings came from the mouth of the great-granddaughter of a priest—not only someone familiar with the secret levers of control but also a young woman leading a lifestyle favourable to accelerating the operation of thought. They realised that Anastasia had set herself the goal of transporting people across the dark forces’ window of time. Theoretically, this is indeed a possibility. Transporting across time constitutes a change in consciousness. And it is possible to do something like this with a single individual. Substantially changing the collective consciousness of mankind is a process extending over millennia, requiring the participation of many generations. But a process extending over millennia cannot be called transporting people across a window of time.

Transporting people across a window of time means changing the consciousness of people already living on the Earth today—changing it to a consciousness which was or will be inherent in them under the conditions of a Divine, paradisaical existence. The priests tried to figure out the plan by which Anastasia was going to operate. They did work it out and deemed it to be naive, containing a plethora of questionable decisions. The means of distributing information through a book alone they regarded as clearly insufficient. Modern Man, they believed, requires a good deal of repetition for information to sink in. Then they learnt that the book’s author was an entrepreneur who not only was lacking even minimal authority among spiritually thinking people but was a complete unknown in such circles. Consequently, the priests decided, a Siberian recluse would not be able to achieve anything significant in human society by the method chosen. My father shared this opinion as well. The priests got their first shock and call to alertness when Anastasia’s prophecies in the first book started coming true. She told you: “I shall bring you many people who will explain to you what is incomprehensible.”3 And people started coming to you who were not just capable of explaining something. People started to act. She said: '"This and the following references are drawn (though not word-for-word) from various chapters in Book 1. See especially Chapter 26: “Dreams— creating the future”. ‘Artists will draw pictures, and poets will write verse.” And both pictures and many poems came forth, dedicated to the new and marvellous reality of mankind’s being. She said: “The book you write will be read by people in various countries.” And the book has been published in many languages. The priests did not know what power or devices facilitated the realisation of Anastasia’s sayings. Yet they are coming true for all to see. They realised that she was beginning to make her cherished dreams come true, but they could not discern the manner by which she reached the goals she set for herself. This could mean only one thing—namely, that the speed of Anastasia’s thinking significantly surpassed that of the priests. The insightful combinations produced by her thought are incomprehensible. This means

that the priests might lose the opportunity to influence human society for good. This was not something the priests could permit. While they were trying to figure out patterns of counteraction, something even more incredible came to light. New sayings of Anastasia’s were being made public. Many people now aspired to create the domains she had talked about. And then Anastasia became the target for all kinds of counter-measures. One of the most effective of these was a disinformation campaign involving the magic word-symbol sect.1 Your press was filled with publications talking about various terrifying sects, including the so-called Anastasia sect’. These publications used still other word-symbols like totalitarian and destructive. This particular counter-measure has been used by priests from time immemorial. In ancient Rus’ it helped facilitate a change in religion.2 This was a tactic that never failed. And in the latest case, too, the priests imagined that it had done its job. You and a whole lot of readers—both those who communicated amongst themselves and those who didn’t know each other—were amazed to discover that people were labelling them ‘sectarians’. False rumours were cleverly and intensively circulated. This is why government agencies never reached a decision on the question of landgrants. There was active opposition, both vocal and hidden, to the initiative to allocate land for the establishment of family domains. The system had worked. Lower-order priests figured that they were rid of Anastasia once and for all. The high priest was the first to discern that this was not the case. He realised that in visualising the future, Anastasia’s thought had not only taken the system’s counter-measures into consideration, but had also redirected them to serve the cause of good. This is what happened. The domains established according to the principles outlined by Anastasia were impossible to construct along traditional lines. They required a detailed plan of development. They involved the working out of a long-term project which would take at least a year to develop— significantly longer in some cases. Action without sufficient preparatory thought could lead to the discreditation of the ideas involved. By slowing down the process of land allocation, the authorities prevented quick action from being taken.

But slowing down the process of land allocation did not enable them to destroy the dream of a bright future or to slow down the speed of thinking on the part of many people who were in the process of imaging their future domain, not to mention the future of the country and a marvellous future for all mankind. While Anastasia spoke about Russia’s taking the lead in building this marvellous future, she well understood that it would be impossible to create a Paradise in just a single community or even in a single nation-state. Indeed, her dream was being adopted in the hearts of people in countries the world over. You can ascertain this, Vladimir, by the popularity of your books published in these countries. They are enjoying great acclaim today, but that is nothing compared to what the future holds. When people begin to realise... Now the priests have recognised this. Anastasia is beginning to solve mysteries they have been beating their heads over for thousands of years. Here is one of them. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Divine nutrition The high priest once told my father in conversation: “Your great-granddaughter, Moisey, knows the mysteries of being which were concealed from us. She knows the secrets of nourishing both the body and spirit. You yourself, of course, ascertained this from her own words: One should eat just as one breathes.1 “Our forebears once read these words on the walls of their secret temples. We believed them to be meaningful, but up until now their secret has not been revealed. In explaining just a little of it to those who will be creating their own family domains, she will thereby create the conditions for the speed of thinking of these new domain dwellers to exceed our own. Compared to children born in her domains we shall appear to be simply ignorant youngsters. In setting out her design, she showed us the only way out—each of us must set up the same kind of domain which she has described to everyone. We shall establish them, we shall try to make them better and more perfect than the rest, and for that we have great possibilities. “She is revealing the mysteries of being to everyone, and by the time we learn about them, we shall already have our domains, while others will still be going about setting up their own. And then once again the difference in

the speed of our thinking will allow us to foresee and consequently control life on the planet. This is what I have been thinking. I should like to hear your opinion on this, Moisey” Quoted from Book 1, Chapter 4: “Who are they?”. And my father replied: “You want to hear my opinion because you have your doubts. You want to foresee what situation Anastasia will be visualising in case the priests—and you who have appointed yourself to the highest position—are the first to set up the domains which will draw you closer to the Divine being? You want to know whether her thought has taken such a scenario into account?” “I am convinced that she has,” the high priest replied to Father. ‘And she herself does not conceal the fact. But I should like to hear your opinion on why she is openly daring us by giving us the opportunity to reassert our control over the world?” “All because,” my father answered the high priest, “my great-granddaughter Anastasia is not about to enter into a confrontation with you. When the priests, as the rulers of the Earth, begin creating their own domains, their thoughts will be transformed. Their souls will become radiant with light.” {...} “Thank you, Moisey! Our thoughts have come together as one. And I applaud the prospect of living in another reality—possibly in one where each of us can talk with God. “I bow before your great-granddaughter’s thought, Moisey. May Anastasia succeed in finding the strength within herself to overcome the system we created like a wild beast, or a herd of beasts. Help her if you can, Moisey!” “Try helping her yourself. I can’t keep up with her more youthful thought. I used to think her actions were illogical.” ‘And I shall not be able to either, Moisey. She eats just as she breathes. We have been soiling our flesh. I have not the strength to nourish my spirit the way she nourishes hers. I can only guess at what is helping her.” In the times of our pristine origins people’s way of life was quite different from today’s. They not only knew Nature, they controlled it. Through the sounds of Nature and the power of the light of the heavenly bodies they had access to the database of the Universe. They received information not just through their mind, but through their feelings too. The speed of their thinking was many times greater than that of people today. The early priesthood realised that absolute control over mankind was possible only if they could achieve a considerably greater speed of thinking

than other people, but how to achieve this goal? One of the ancient priests once said in a secret conversation with the high priest: “We cannot accelerate our thought to achieve sufficient superiority over everybody else. But we can use special devices to slow down the thinking of all mankind.” “You said: all mankind. Does that include your own thought?” the high priest responded. “Yes, in the final analysis, it does, but to a much lesser extent. The discrepancy will be tremendous. The advantage will be on our side.” “Since you are talking about it, that means you have already found a way of slowing down the thought of all mankind. Tell me about it.” “It is simple. We need to conceal from people the existing Divine method of nutrition. We need to have them consume food that does not accelerate, but, rather, slows thought down. That is the main condition. The rest is a chain reaction. The degradation of thought will bring a number of factors into play which will influence the speed of their thinking. Compared to us everybody else will be inferior.” “How can we conceal what God offers to everyone?” “We promote the necessity of giving gratitude to God for what He offers.” “I have it. You have come up with a monstrous plan, but it is perfect. People will agree to give gratitude to the Creator and will not see anything wrong with it. We shall think up rituals to draw people away from God’s first-hand creations. People will be thinking that they are giving God thanks. But the more time they spend on giving thanks, gathering around the idols we think up, the less communication they will have with God’s own creations, and the farther removed they will be from information coming straight from God. “They will be receiving information from us, but imagining it is God’s will. Their thought will go off in the wrong direction. We shall lead it in the wrong direction.” Centuries passed, and people spent more and more time on the rituals thought up by the priests, thinking all along that they were simply paying their respects to God. At the same time people communicated less and less with the Creator’s first-hand creations and, consequently, no longer had access to the information of the Universe in all its fulness—God’s information. They caused God pain and suffering, all the while believing they were bringing Him joy. At the same time the priests began telling people what kind of food they

should be giving preference to, at the same time creating for themselves the secret science of dietetics. The priests needed this to maintain their brain, their spirit, their physical health—and, consequently, their thought—in a more efficient operational state than other people’s. Thus they suggested that people plant certain lands of growing things, but they themselves used other lands for food—more specifically, in a greater variety than the rest. Thus began a monstrous degradation of human consciousness. Man began to know diseases of both body and soul. People intuitively sensed the meaning of nutrition and over the millennia tried to come to terms with this question. Wise men appeared who attempted to give advice on what food products were the most healthful. Many teachings on dietetics were introduced. It was a topic touched upon in books you are familiar with, such as the Bible and the Koran. Here is what it says about nutrition in the Old Testament, for example: You shall not eat any abominable thing. These are the animals you may eat: ox, sheep, goat, buck, gazelle, roebuck, wild-goat, white-rumped deer, longhorned antelope, and rock-goat. You may eat any animal which has a parted foot or a cloven hoof and also chews the cud ... you may not eat... the camel, the hare, and the rock-badger ... you shall regard them as unclean; and the pig, because it has a cloven hoof but does not chew the cud, you shall regard as unclean. You shall not eat their flesh or even touch their dead carcasses. Of creatures that live in the water you may eat all those that have fins and scales, but you may not eat any that have neither fins nor scales; you shall regard them as unclean. You may eat all clean birds. These are the birds you may not eat: the griffon-vulture, the black vulture, the bearded vulture, the kite, every kind of falcon, every kind of crow, the desert-owl, the shorteared owl, the long-eared owl, every kind of hawk, the tawny owl, the screech-owl, the little owl, the horned owl, the osprey, the fisher-owl, the stork, every kind of cormorant, the hoopoe, and the bat. All seeming winged creatures you shall regard as unclean; they may not be eaten. You may eat every clean insect. You shall not eat anything that has died a natural death. You shall give it to the aliens who live in your settlements, and they may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner; for you are a people holy to the Lord your God.' Over the millennia various books were written advising people what and how to eat to be health. But not a single book, not a single wise-man—or, indeed, all the scholars put together—has ever been able to fully shed light

on this question. The proof may be seen in the ever-increasing numbers of diseases of the human body and soul. A whole lot of books were published advising how to treat disease. And today you have the science of medicine. They tell you it is constantly being perfected. But at the same time just look at how the number of sick people is constantly increasing. So what is medical science actually perfecting? The results speak for themselves: it is perfecting disease. 2

Deuteronomy 14: 3-21 (cited here from The New English Bible).

I can see that this conclusion sounds strange to you. But just think: why don’t the whole masses of animals in natural surroundings get sick, while Man, who considers himself to be the most highly developed of all creatures, is unable to cope with his own diseases? The science you call upon to treat disease has never, over the whole period of its existence, ever touched upon the ultimate cause of all disease. It has always given its attention to effect. People who are sick, of course, need doctors. But it is no less true under the current conditions of your world order that doctors need sick people to treat. But even among the priests themselves the speed of thinking has been declining. Not to the level of everyone else’s, but still diminishing. This phenomenon disturbed the priests more than any other. They paid more and more attention to the mysteries of Divine nutrition but could not unravel them. One of the priests assigned to take care of the science of dietetics apparently figured out something and began writing it on the wall of the secret underground chamber where no one except a few of the main priests could enter. He wrote: One should eat just as one breathes. After writing the last letter of the last word of the sentence—or, rather, just before finishing the last letter—the old priest died. He had not managed to explain the meaning of this sentence to anyone—either to his descendantsuccessor or to any of the other priests. Priests have been trying to unravel the mystery of the phrase “One should eat just as one breathes” over all the millennia since. They were afraid that somebody else might get wind of it and guess its secret before they did. They erased it, rubbed it off the wall of their temple. But they transmitted it orally to succeeding generations of their descendants, in the hope that it would be deciphered in the future. All to no avail.

Astrologers, healers and wise-men appointed by political rulers worked on the question of nutrition over many thousands of years. Nobody was able to solve the puzzle. If any of the rulers’ wise-men had managed to figure out how Man should feed himself, then those rulers that considered themselves to be the strongest in the world would have ceased to fall ill, and their longevity would have increased. If any of the earthly rulers had known what kind of food he should take in, he could have become the supreme ruler of the Earth. The speed of his thinking could have surpassed that of the priests. But all the rulers of the Earth get sick and die. Their longevity is no greater than that of ordinary people, even though they may have the best healers and wise-men right at hand. And so the degradation of human society continues. It seemed to be just in passing that Anastasia uttered that sentence to you: “One should eat just as one breathes.” You published it in a book. You published it in the context of your experience with her and didn’t give it any special thought. But for the priests living today, the publication of that sentence, the one that had been erased from the walls of their temple more than five thousand years ago, became a cause for very great concern. Time and again they gave careful reading to the books with Anastasia’s sayings and realised that not only did she know the phrase, but she had full knowledge of Divine nutrition. The speed of thinking of a Man possessing such knowledge would naturally be able to surpass that of all the priests taken together and, consequently, be able to control all humanity, including the priests. But in order to maintain control, he would have to conceal information, while here she has gone and revealed it to everyone. This means she has freed people from the priests’ influence, thereby leading them to direct communication with the thoughts of God. This was something they realised after seeing how Anastasia slipped in among her sayings information on the nourishment of Adam. In Co-creation you cited Anastasia’s words about how people were nourished back at the time of their pristine origins: ‘All around him were a multitude of fruits with a variety of tastes, berries and edible grasses. But during those first days Adam felt no sense of hunger. He remained satisfied with fresh air alone... “One certainly cannot live on the air Man breathes today. Today’s air is

dying, and is often harmful to one’s body and soul. You mentioned the saying that one cannot live on air, but there is another saying: ‘I have been fed by air alone’, which corresponds to what was available to Man in the beginning. Adam was born in a marvellous garden, and the air surrounding him did not contain a single harmful particle. Pollen had been dissolved into that air, along with drops of purest dew.” “Pollen? What kind of pollen?” “Pollen from flowers and grasses, from trees and fruit, which diffused fragrances into the air. Some came from those close by, while breezes brought others from distant places. Back then Man was not distracted from his great works by any problems of finding food. He was fed by everything around him through the air. This was the way it was all designed by the Creator right from the very beginning, so that all life on Earth should strive to please Man, and the air and the water and the breeze would be life-giving, under the impulse of love.”3 Of course, people’s diet at the time of their Divine pristine origins was not confined to life-giving air. They consumed a lot else besides, but their body and soul were nourished by air and water to a significant degree. When you published Anastasia’s words about nutrition, the priests were astonished at how this simplest of truths had escaped them for so long. Yet all along they knew why this was so. Secluding themselves in their temples, they were not able to breathe the pollen-laded air. In gathering people together for rituals, where the only thing the crowds raised was dust, they ended up breathing the dust of their own schemes. The priests understood the significance of nutrition. Their diet included teas containing many healing herbs, along with a variety of fruits and vegetables. Among other things they attached considerable importance to cedar oil, which their attendants brought them from far-off places. Moreover, their diet also included honey and flower pollen gathered by bees. But Anastasia showed that this was far from being sufficient. It was a different kind of pollen, for one thing. The pollen that the bees gathered and packed into honeycomb was quite healthful, of course, but was a far cry from the variety that could be found in the air over one’s family Space. Bees, after all, gather pollen from a relatively small number of floral species. But the air contains all varieties, and it is distinguished from bee-produced pollen by its softness and its easy digestibility. Airborne pollen is alive, capable of fecundation. With each breath a Man would take it in and it dissolved inside, nourishing his whole body,

including his brain. When the priests saw Anastasia talking about family domains—a hectare of one’s Motherland for each family—they realised she was taking people back to a way of life that was part and parcel of their pristine origins. They knew right away that family domains are not only capable of bringing people material benefits—there is something much more important. In the context of Anastasia’s sayings people can form a Space capable of nourishing their body, soul and spirit, and show to everyone openly the truths of the Divine order of creation. The time is approaching when mankind will be present simultaneously in two worlds. It will be able to make use both of the achievements of the technocratic, artificial world, as well as its own Divine pristine origins. By comparing these two worlds, not through hearsay but first-hand, through observing their own experience, people will be able to make their own choice, or create a new world. They will be able to create their own marvellous Divine future. Anastasia showed people not only the meaning and essence of Divine nutrition, but how to attain it as well. Her family domains... Picture to yourself, Vladimir, a morning-time. A Man awakens at dawn and goes out of his house into the garden of his family domain, in which are growing more than three hundred varieties of plants he needs. He has taken up the habit of walking around his property every morning. As he walks along the path his eyes are delighted by the lively variety of herbs, trees and flowers. These cannot help but delight and furnish him with positive emotions. Nothing can give him a greater emotional charge or abundant energy than one’s own family life-giving Space. Many ages passed. In each of them attempts were made to attract mankind to all sorts of different values. Man became enthralled with a huge house, the latest clothing, a new car or some other gadget. Man became enthralled with money and his position in societ. But all such joys are conditional and fleeting. They only bring a temporary sense of happiness and pleasure, and within a short space of time they become commonplace, bothersome and sometimes downright annoying. An old and decaying house will begin to demand constant repair. A car, too, can start having frequent breakdowns. Clothes wear out.

Man has always intuitively felt the true beauty and perfection of the eternal, and that is why even a king surrounded by luxury and personal palaces has always needed a garden. This is a truth that has remained unshake able for millions of years of Man’s life on the Earth. True delight and peace is attainable only in one’s own family domain. When a Man takes his morning walk through his family domain, every blade of grass is delighted and reacts to him. And, far from decaying, his garden grows with every passing moment of blessed living. The Man understands that the programme he has set out—trees, bushes and fruit-bearers planted by his own hand—will not decay but live on through the ages. They will live for ever, provided the Man does not change his mind. When the Man takes his morning walk through his family domain, he breathes its air, and with each breath takes in thousands of invisible particles —plant pollen. The air is saturated with them. Quite alive, they enter the Man, dissolving within him without a trace, nourishing his body with everything he needs. And the air of one’s family domain nourishes not only the human body, but feeds the spirit with ethers and accelerates thought. When the Man takes his morning walk through his family domain, he may stop all of a sudden and pick three berries off a currant bush and eat them. Why does he stop in front of a currant bush in particular? Why does he pick precisely three berries? In what book of wisdom has the Man read that on this particular day he will need these three berries? And he really does need them, as it turns out. He needs them on this very day, this very minute, and in this very quantity. Then after taking another few steps, the Man bends over to smell a flower. Why does he do this? Who told him of the need to take in the aromatic ether of this flower in particular? And several steps farther on he picks something more to eat... When the Man takes his morning walk through his family domain, he smiles, thinking about something personal, while at the same time enjoying a surfeit of fruits—not thinking about them, but feeling them. This Man has been eatingjust as he breathes. Who then has been calculating the Man’s dietetic needs with such incredible accuracy? Where has all this information been recorded for every Man born on the Earth? This information—you realise, Vladimir—all this information is present in every Man born on the Earth. Note this: Every Man contains a ‘mechanism’ (I can’t seem to find an alternative

word) capable of arousing the sense of hunger—a signal that his body and spirit require some kind of substance in the Universe. We need not specify just what exactly, the proportion or quantity—nobody can answer this question intellectually. Only your body knows about this and it is what selects just three currant berries out of the whole variety available. But in order to afford the opportunity for the right choice, your body must have all the information available about them. And it is only in one’s family domain that such information is accessible. Let’s say you go into a store where there are a whole lot of fruits spread out on the counters. You want an apple. You see a whole huge variety of apples. Which kind to choose? An exact choice is impossible, since your body— which is capable of making an exact choice—does not have any information about the apples on the counters. It hasn’t tried them. It doesn’t know the taste and correlation of substances. Neither does it know when the apples were picked, which is very important as well. As a result, the apples you purchase at the store may turn out to be beneficial, but their benefit will be not nearly so great as when your body is apprised of all the information about the product you are making it digest. The product you ingest may even turn out to be harmful to your body—in which case disease makes an appearance. Such a thing could not happen in your family domain, since you know for absolute certain which tree produces the sweeter or more sour apples, and when they are ready for you. Your body receives all the information about all the fruits in your family domain. It received all the information about them back when you were still in your mother’s womb. And afterward, when you drank milk from your mum’s breast. Your mum, after all, delighted in the very same fruits. And they contributed to the consistency of her milk. And now as a grown Man... When a Man is in the Space of his kin’s domain, he tastes the fruits and berries—everything that went into the consistency of his mother’s milk. There is another concept in your civilisation—it’s healthful for a Man to consume fresh produce. But what, exactly, is ‘fresh produce’? Not frozen, dried, tinned or sealed in barrels, like you thought, but produce that comes to you in its natural state. And you have cultivated a huge assortment of hybrid varieties that can be preserved many days with the appearance of fresh produce. Believe me, the appearance of freshness is deceptive and harmful.

Now see if you can make sense of what I’ve just said and test it out for yourself. Almost all berries can be considered ‘fresh’ for no more than a few minutes. Cherries (both sweet and wild) and apples will last an hour, tops. But still they change with every minute that goes by, mutating into something else. Pick a cherry and leave it just overnight, then take it back to the tree where it came from and eat it. Then pick another cherry from the same branch and taste it. See—you will sense the difference—which cherry is fresher and tastier—even with your eyes closed. As for raspberries, you’ll notice the difference after only an hour, while some other kind of fruit might take twenty-four hours. And you will see that anyone who does not have a family domain, no matter how rich or important he may be, cannot take in fresh food. That means he is not as capable of quick thinking as he might otherwise be. Even back in ancient treatises wise men attempted to set forth their perceptions as to what produce was the most healthful for Man in any given season. And this is very important. But among all of these there is only one treatise which remains inviolable, and that is the one which God Himself prepared for each individual Man. Look for yourself and see how gradually, starting in the spring, the early plants bring forth their fruits. Others appear later in the summer, at its beginning or end, while the autumn gives rise to a variety of other plants. What is there to write about here, when it has been so obviously set forth what one should eat and when. And not just in broad terms of months or seasons. The choice is hinted at moment by moment. You need only think about it, Vladimir, to understand. It is as though the Creator is ready to spoonfeed any Man with His own hand. Just think how perfect and exact His programme is. There is a particular season of the year when any given species of fruit ripens. At the same time the planets are in a particular arrangement. And that is the most favourable season for Man to take in that fruit. It was at that very moment, the most appropriate moment as indicated by God, that Man decided to take in the fruit, as his body suddenly felt a desire for it. There was no question of Man’s working all this out through calculation. Man did not make a problem out of what to ingest and when. He simply ate. He ate because he felt like eating, because it pleased him to do so. And at the same time his thought was elated with joint co-creation. His thought danced ahead, no longer concerning itself with what had been planned in advance by the Father’s hand. It desired to create even more so

that everyone could rejoice in the contemplation at the sight of a new creation. And the Father exclaimed in delight: “My son is a creator”, as He fed His child with His creations. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A society of schizophrenics? In listening to Anastasia’s grandfather’s account of what Man should eat and how, I couldn’t help comparing what he said with the dietary regimes of people today, even rich people living in so-called civilised countries. A rather puzzling situation unfolded. Let’s work it out together once and for all. To begin with, we all know that it is healthful for Man to consume fresh and ecologically clean produce. We all know that in Nature there are plants capable of treating all types of diseases of the body. Hold on—we need to be more precise: in Nature there are plants capable of preventing diseases of the body. Then why don’t we have them available? Why and under whose influence have we chosen a way of life which destroys not only our bodies but our minds too? Someone out there must be simply laughing at us, befooling us into calling this way of life ‘civilised’ besides. If we use terms like civilised country, civilised society, meaning by this a society of people which has achieved a certain (and, of course, correct) level of development, then this development should also be reflected in, among other things, questions pertaining to diet. And not just ‘among other things’, but first and foremost. Now let’s pay a visit together to a typical food-store or supermarket, the kind you find in any so-called civilised country. It could be either in the West or here in Russia—if we’re talking about major cities, the difference in variety of produce isn’t all that great. We find that the majority of produce available is nicely packaged and has a long shelf-life. We find a whole lot of dried, frozen and concentrated products, which can hardly be termed ‘fresh produce’. At the supermarket we can also find so-called ‘fresh’ vegetables, beautifulto-look-at tomatoes, cucumbers and so forth. But lately it has come to light that these are hybrids—specially cultivated varieties capable of preserving their good looks for a long time, but considerably inferior in quality to the

normal, natural variety. Just about any adult resident of a European country is aware of this. Europe already has a chain of stores with signage proclaiming they sell only ecologically clean merchandise, but at a price about five times higher than in other stores. This means that the public has now recognised that other stores (and there are far more of them) sell produce that is not ecologically clean. But let us call a spade a spade. The public has recognised that a majority of their number have been consuming produce that is harmful to their health. Hold on! What about the term civilised society ? Is it possible for people in a ‘civilised society’ to consume food of inferior quality which is harmful to their health? A more accurate description of such a people might be a ‘muddle-headed society’, or a ‘society with a befuddled population’. In ‘muddle-headed societies’, whose ranks Russia seems to be trying so hard today to join, one can outline a distinct system for befuddling the population. Look at what is happening. Someone consumes inferior produce and takes ill. The sick person falls into the arms of a system called ‘health care’. This system has at its disposal a huge quantity of drugs, hospitals and clinics— and this has to be paid for somehow. Huge sums of money are continually being poured into it. We are told it is constantly improving. But note: according to statistics the number of sick people is rising each year. Then along come new diseases which mankind never had to grapple with before—including a whole lot of mental illnesses, not to mention the fashionable profession of psychotherapy. And the question resounds loud and clear: what is behind the degradation of the overall health of these ‘civilised societies’? Isn’t the health-care system itself at least partly to blame? By comparing data from various sources, anyone who wishes to can determine that the overall degradation of humanity’s health is an actual fact. Yes, we’re talking about physical well-being, but mental health is an even more dangerous factor. We have only but to turn away from the obtrusive, monotonous flood of information that does not allow Man to think about what is really going on, and we begin to doubt (to put it mildly) the ‘normality’ of the majority of the population of these so-called ‘civilised societies’. We begin to look upon these societies’ chosen lifestyle as indicative of a schizophrenia disorder. Judge for yourselves.

Let’s say a Man living in his family domain wanted to eat—an apple, for example. What does he do? He goes out into his orchard, picks fresh fruit from a tree and eats it. Then let’s take a look at the actions of another Man who lives in a city apartment in a developed society, who also wants to eat an apple. He takes some money, goes to the store and buys an apple, which is no longer fresh. He buys an apple which another person grew and packed in a crate. Someone else transported this apple in a truck or a plane. Then a third party built a store and placed this apple on one of the counters. All these operations, from the growing of the apple right up to the final sale, are accounted for by special people who compile inventories and collect taxes, duties and other exorbitant charges. Thus we have a whole chain of procedures whereby people are involved in the supposedly useful business of offering a fellow human being the opportunity to taste the fruit of an apple tree. And the one who tastes this fruit must first find work somewhere to earn the paper money and pay for this whole thought-up chain of intermediaries standing between the appletree’s branch and Man. Yet our society considers this normal. A befuddled society has no inkling that someone very much wanted to lead people away from their true purpose and have their attention occupied in senseless pursuits. The process of drawing people into such absurdities has been a long one. That’s not something you could do quickly. If you tried to do it quickly, even the most feeble-minded individual would be able to see the stupidity of what was happening. Just think what a paradox it all is! One fine day you decide, as usual, to go out to your apple tree and pick some fruit. You no sooner step off your front porch and start heading for the tree than you catch sight of a whole queue of people. “Who are you?” you ask the fellow standing closest to you. “I’m an apple dealer,” he answers. ‘And who are these people behind you?” you continue to wonder, and hear in reply: “Behind me is the person who trucks the apples to my store, behind him is the one who picks them from the tree, and around each one of us you see an entourage of people in fresh clean suits—they are the ones who record the quantity of apples that pass through our hands.” “But really, what are you, chaps? Don’t tell me you’re a bunch of schizos?”

you blurt out in a fluster. “What’s with all the meaningless red tape? Who’s going to thank you for such nonsense as this?” And the reply comes: “You will thank us—you will pay all of us money, and with that money we too shall buy apples.” ‘And where am I going to get all that money to pay you?” “Go see your neighbour, the one with the pear trees. There’s a job open for a record clerk. YDU can become a pear-tree record clerk, earn money, pay us and eat apples whenever you like.” How absurd!—you’re thinking, no doubt. Utter schizophrenia! Of course it’s absurd. Of course it’s schizophrenia. But this is just the kind of tiling that’s going on right now with each of us in our society. The conditions for a healthy life—and really, they are all too obvious—need to be set down in the form of a treatise. Well, here’s one—a miniature treatise: Point Number 1. Every Man living on the Earth should have his own domain, his own Space to guarantee for himself a supply of high-quality food. Point Number 2. In his own Space Man should grow, preferably by his own hand, fruit-bearing plants—plants that he considers tasty and healthful. Say, for example, someone knows ahead of time that he doesn’t like red currants —he need not plant these in large quantities. Altogether at least three hundred varieties of perennials should be put in. I shall not go over again the particular methods of sowing and communicating with the plants, as they were described back in the first book, when Anastasia was talking about the dachniks.4 Naturally, this is not something that can be accomplished in the space of a year—or even two or three. But it is entirely possible to ensure that one’s children will have, in fact, an ideal source of food supply. Point Number 3. Every morning upon awakening, a Man should take a walk through his family domain and, if he desires, eat some fruit or berries or herbs which have just that moment ripened to maturity. This should be done entirely according to one’s desire, and not at the recommendation of some sort of dietician, even one with a post-graduate degree. Once your body has become familiar with all the taste qualities of the food growing in your domain, it will compile the ideal regime for you in terms of quality, quantity and the appropriate time for the food to be eaten. You don’t need to go out to your garden just in the morning or according to a strict timetable somebody has thought up, but only when you have a real desire to eat. In our modern living conditions, many people cannot stay all the time in

their domain, even if they have one. But it is good to go out to it at least once a week. And in case of illness, before taking any medicines, it is best simply to go out to your family Space and stay there for several days. If you have already established your own Space, and if your body can access information about the plants growing in that Space, it will be able to determine with absolute certainty what is necessary for recovering your health. According to Anastasia’s affirmation, there are no diseases of the human flesh which cannot be overcome by the Space of Love you have created. Of course we’re not talking about the space of a city flat, but a domain established according to the principles she has set forth. After formulating these rules on a pad of paper, I read them to Anastasia’s grandfather and asked: “Have I left out anything?” “If you simply want to jot down a summary, this will do to start with. Only you really must say something about the neighbours.” “What have neighbours got to do with it?” I didn’t understand at first. “What d’you mean, what have they got to do with it?” Grandfather was taken aback by my query “Think about it: if just on the other side of the fence from your domain there’s a factory spewing forth deadly fumes, and the wind carries these fumes into the Space of your domain, what kind of air are you going to be breathing?” “Nobody would build their domain next to a factory!” I protested, but said no more. Then I remembered. In the city of Novosibirsk, there are dacha plots located barely half a kilometre from a tin-smelter. And in Germany there are farmers’ fields right next to an autobahn with eight lanes of traffic. And I thought: Wow! Such a simple concept as growing agricultural produce for food is possible only in places that are ecologically clean— preferably not anywhere close to big cities. There’s no way a simple concept like this is going to get through to Man. So I’ve really got to add one more point: Point Number 4. Your domain should be located in an ecologically clean zone. It should be surrounded by the domains of those who share your vision of creating family oases of Paradise. One breeze will carry life-giving pollen from your domain to your neighbours’, while another breeze from their

direction will bring you life-giving air. CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Opposition Many readers of the Ringing Cedars Series can already attest to the opposition that has pitted itself against a harmonious lifestyle—a lifestyle favourable to both physical and mental health. I have mentioned on a number of occasions having received communications regarding anti-Anastasia statements purporting to come from Russia’s Orthodox Church. And that churchmen themselves apparently instigated the rumours now spreading among government departments to the effect that all the readers of the Series are ‘sectarians’. At first I found it hard to believe that such communications were serious. But shortly afterward members of the Novosibirsk Readers’ Club told me church representatives had paid a visit to the local Concert Hall where a reader’s conference was to take place, asking management to forbid the event. Then they showed me one of the Orthodox-Church-related sites on the Internet where a so-called ‘Doctor of Theology’ was making all sorts of slurs against Anastasia, and the language he used could hardly be termed theological. My readers protested in an effort to show that Anastasia’s ideas were indeed positive. But apparently the ‘Doctor ofTheology’ was not able to discuss this point, preferring instead to focus on the question of whether Megre was my real name or a pen-name. After that, people started sending in newspaper articles from various regions of the country which looked almost like carbon copies of each other. Indeed, from the writing style, uniform phrasings and malicious inventions, it was readily apparent that they had all been drawn from the same original source. Finally, there was something quite extraordinary, in connection with the St. Petersburg Vstrecha drama company’s performance of a play called Anastasia, based on the Ringing Cedars Series. On 23 July 2002 the troupe arrived in Vladimir5 and staged a performance in the Taneev2 Concert Hall. The play was to have been presented in Tula3 on 25 July. On the 24th of July the local newspaper ran a front-page appeal from the missionary office of the Tula Diocese urging people to boycott the production, saying that both the books and the play were promoting a return to paganism.

It was a case of rampant fear-mongering. In spite of that, the Tula performance went ahead, playing to a full house. But when the artistic director of the Vstrecha Theatre showed me the article, I and others who read it immediately came up with a set of identical questions addressed to the missionary office of the Tula Diocese. How canyon criticise aplay yon haven’t seen? The only performance before Tula had been in Vladimir only a couple of days before. To all intents and purposes Tula was the premiere. In St. Petersburg, however, Orthodox priests came to see it and afterward thanked the actors for a most spiritually inspired production. They said we should have more plays like this! The conclusion is inescapable. A phenomenon like Anastasia is constantly under the watchful eye of some kind of opposing power. This power may be located entirely within the borders of Russia or outside as well. In any case it has at its disposal a far-flung network, capable of reacting to currents running through masses of people, capable of accelerating or retarding these currents at their own discretion. The stories about the priests told by Anastasia and her grandfathers are taking on increasingly real and specific shape. They have begun to express themselves in concrete actions of today. Her grandfather said that the high priest, who forms the ideology of whole peoples, has stopped opposing Anastasia, but the system created by the priests will carry on the opposition for centuries to come. And this has also been confirmed by real-life events. The zealots who implement the opposition on a local level have proved themselves incapable of figuring out what is really going on. They seem to be acting as though they had been pre-programmed, making sweeping and completely unfounded accusations against Anastasia. For example, in response to the question Should we all go live in the forest? Anastasia replies: “There is no need to go live in the forest. You need to clean up the place you have been polluting first.”6 The press, however, has been putting out statements to the effect that Anastasia is urging people to abandon their city dwellings and children and go off to live in the forest. So, one can draw the conclusion that some kind of agencies are actively endeavouring to hinder the promotion of Anastasia’s ideas—namely, that each Russian family should be granted a hectare of land to establish a kins

domain. Naturally, Anastasia’s opponents try not to mention this idea, preferring instead to scare people with their fictitious inventions. Naturally, I wanted to defend both the idea itself and the readers of my books from slander and from the other obstacles standing in the way of reaching this high goal. Defend them. But how? And from whom, specifically? After all, even the slanderers must have real names, they have their own masters and interests. But Anastasia’s supporters have their own research centre. I don’t know all their names personally, not by a long shot, but their ideas and conclusions are quite fascinating. For example: The counter-action is aimed not directly at Anastasia so much as at the ‘national idea’ currently taking root in Russia. It arises from an intermediary source, as though local followers each received a cue to take action, independently of each other. These followers are to be found in various social strata, including the clergy. Their methods are primitive: slander and the propagation of patently false rumours and, when necessary, taking over the movement’s leadership and discrediting it. The research centre managed to establish who it was that stole a computer containing the manuscript for one of my forthcoming books, and found out about a secret plan for taking over the Anastasia website. But who tried to replace my Anastasia books with others that looked similar on the surface but in fact were aimed at leading people away from her ideas? And how could they possibly do this? I was also told that the same forces were organising a smear campaign, using the same methods in each case, against Anastasia, Academician Shchetinin’s school7 and the singer Nikolai Baskos8 And just what, the reader may well ask, has Baskov got to do with all this? He is a very pleasant young man with a rich and powerful voice. And that is precisely what is driving these forces mad. Imagine this young Russian with his topnotch voice suddenly singing: The dawn is now breaking o’er the great ringing cedar’s fair branche. And illuming the tribes of the pure Planet Earth with its lustre. With a love-sigh the heavens pour forth all the help they can muster. Interplanetary breezes caress the grand Dream with romances. From every seed springs a mighty idea, A Messiah from every child’s perepeteia. In a bright ray will awaken Rossiya...

God bless Rossiya and Anastasia! ‘ This song was sung by a children’s choir at the launch of the book Who are we? at the Oktiabr Concert Hall8 in St. Petersburg. It has been performed by modern bards, and was featured in the video Take back your Motherland, people! It was written by a schoolteacher from Belarus and seems to be taking on a kind of folk-song status.9 Perhaps Baskov will sing other patriotic songs which will strike a chord in Russian hearts. These new national initiatives, harbingers of a Russian renaissance, are obviously threatening to someone. I was told there was no need for concern, and asked not to speak about what was going on. 1 was assured that this was simply a first opportunity to study the methods and pinpoint who was specifically behind the ideological subversion aimed at any positive tendencies in Russia. And I would have gone along with that. Let it be dealt with by the ‘competent authorities’. However—and you must excuse me for this—there is one subject on which I cannot remain silent, despite my promise to the contrary If I did not speak out on this, I would forever lose my self-respect. "Reminder: the words Rossiya and Anastasia both rhyme with Maria (and idea)—see footnote 1 in the Translator’s Preface to Book 1, also footnote 2 in Book 5, Chapter 13: “Equestrienne from the future”. Oktiabr Concert Hall (Russian: Bol’shoi' kontsertnyj zal “Oktiabr ’skiy”)— a modern concert-hall with glass exterior, seating 4,000, opened on 25 October 1967 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (which actually took place 5 November by modern calendars). It is still one of St. Petersburg’s most prominent cultural centres. 9

The song cited above actually belongs to Oleg Atamanov (1956-), a celebrated Russian bard, sometimes referred to as “the bojan of all the Russias”. In ancient Russia, bojans were enlightened travelling bards who had mastered the power of word to such an extent that their songs and tales had the effect of putting the listener into an altered state of consciousness and leading to spiritual awakening. Atamanov is continuing this tradition today. Since 1998 he has recorded over forty albums, and has audiences weeping at his concerts. I cannot remain silent about the attacks on Academician Shchetinin’s school —on its teachers, on educational innovators in general, and especially on the children. The pupils at Shchetinin’s school, along with their teachers, have decided to build a second school, this time in the Belgorod Region.9 10 Under an agreement with a local organisation they began refitting the interior of an

allotted accommodation to suit their needs. Accustomed to hard work, and experienced in design and construction, they quickly brought their task to completion. They wanted to afford other children, too, the opportunity to study in a real school. Only they were forced to abandon the premises they had just refitted. Why? Because their provocateurs were on the alert. From the same source that instigated the rumours about all the Anastasia readers being ‘sectarians’ came exactly the same kind of accusations of Shchetinin’s school being a ‘totalitarian sect’. As in the case of Anastasia, seemingly on cue, a number of Russia’s socalled ‘Orthodox’ priests11 began to confirm what had been said. Again, the same uniform phrasings, the sweeping accusations without any factual confirmation. According to a certain ‘Father Alexei’, the pupils at Shchetinin’s school “have absolutely no experience in handling money”. That’s a lie, chaps. They do have experience. Only they are not fixated on money the way you are. At Shchetinin’s school they make use of ‘sentencing circles’, where the perpetrator appears in person in front of a whole group of people who are predisposed to react negatively toward him and express their censure. That’s quite an accusation! But haven’t Cossacks12 brought their own violators to ‘sentencing circles’? They have indeed, and not just to censure, but to punish with whips. And haven’t our political parties, either communist or democratic, not used similar methods? Does not the Russian Orthodox Church summon its violators to a ‘circle’ before defrocking them? The Church used to do worse than that—it used to burn them at the stake. And here we are simply talking about censure. Perhaps the writer who described this in a negative light had in mind a circle consisting of his own persona? But that would no longer be a ‘circle’ but real totalitarianism! Again, some articles complain that Shchetinin’s school is protected by Cossacks and free access to its grounds is not always permitted. Chapter 6 (“The first appearance of you”). It should also be noted that the term Slavic (as applied to a number of related East European peoples from Russians in the East to Poles in the West to Serbs in the South) comes directly from the root slav meaning ‘praise’ (compare also the Russian word slovo, meaning ‘word’). 12

Cossacks (Russian: kazaki)—descendants of a race of independent professional warriors who traditionally hired out their services to the ruling

authorities, especially in the Caucasus. Local Cossacks in the Tekos area today have a special relationship with Shchetinin’s school. But today, ladies and gentlemen, many schools are under security protection. And not only in our own country Anyway, what business might yon have at Shchetinin’s school? Be God-fearing and take care of your own health. Aren’t you the ones, after all, who are horrified at the fact that the pupils of this school don’t drink or smoke, that they are constructing new school buildings themselves and are good students? You no doubt get a thrill of ‘sublime pleasure’ when you find drugs and foul language in schools! I am not going to list all the nonsensical drivel written about this marvellous school. The writers have come under condemnation even from their colleagues. An article by Alexander Adamsky13 is of particular interest. Here are some excerpts: On Saturday 1 April, on the ATV creativity channel, they showed a pretaped episode of the programme Press Club, devoted to what people refer to today as ‘controversial press coverage’ surrounding Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin’s school near the village ofTekos in the Province of Krasnodar. The Press Club producers decided to invite journalists writing on educational topics, as well as educators themselves, to discuss the whole question. 14

Alexander Izotovich Adamsky (1955—)—Rector of the Eureka Institute for the Study of Educational Policy in Moscow and member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation (a consultative body analysing draft legislation for the Russian parliament). Adamsky is an ardent supporter of innovative educational approaches that develop and support independent thinking on the part of children. Adamsky has been advocating transferring control of educational budgets to the schools themselves as well as opposing attempts by Russia’s Orthodox Church to introduce ‘Fundamentals of Orthodox Christian culture’ as a compulsory subject in Russia’s public school curriculum. The article cited here was first published in the newspaper Pervoe sentiabria (First of September ) in 2000, issue 27, under the title ‘Anything you can’t understand has no right to exist”. (Note that 1 September, the first day of school, is termed ‘Knowledge Day’ in Russia.) Both professionally and from a global perspective, the unique character of Shchetinin’s system provokes controversy in modern educational circles. But there are what Alexander Radov terms ‘educational killers’ whose arguments vastly differ from those of people who question Shchetinin’s views on particular matters of substance.

Such ‘killers’ do not argue; their aim is to destroy. As long as education has existed, as long as anyone can remember, right from the times of Socrates, up-and-coming philosopher-teachers have been censured and beaten down for ‘confusing young minds’ and not teaching according to conventional norms... So yet another round of 'pogroms’ directed at Shchetinin is not coincidental. As Alexander Radov said during the Press Club discussion, even as in times past such attacks were organised by bureaucrats, today they are initiated by innocent-looking journalists. So it turns out that these ‘nice boys and girls’, faced with something that does not fit into—indeed, that is quite contrary to —their preconceived opinions as to what a school should be, what an educator should be, or how an educational system should be structured, find themselves quite incapable of accepting the existence of something their consciousness can neither fathom or even make room for. In other words, ‘what I don’t understand has no right to exist’—such is the ‘killers” simple but deadly logic. What we have here is the old world flushing out the dregs on the bottom— the last, clotted sediments of totalitarianism, which has been so aggressive and unshakeable in its hatred toward anything unlike itself. The old world, where there is no room for tolerance, where children must fit into a uniform mould and all teachers are obliged to teach one and the same thing. The opening remarks on Press Chib were telling: one of Shchetinin’s attackers said there were grounds for censure, but first he wanted to hear the arguments for. Amazing how the old Stalinist logic survives—anyone is obliged to defend himself to start with, and then the prosecutors decide the degree of the defendant’s guilt. That he is guilty in the first place there is absolutely no doubt. The question is only how guilty he is and what the degree of punishment should be... It is useless to argue with such accusers, and to mention them by name would only play into their desire to be noticed—their desire for selfpromotion and self-glorification which is what they are really after. One must be extremely patient here, realising that they are the mouthpiece for the old world of the obsolete, an outlet for gross ignorance and malice. In terms of the broader picture, they themselves are not to blame for anything, just as an infant is not to blame if he plays with matches and burns down his home. But what will become of the school, what will become of our educational future? As we see it, Shchetinin has made a tremendous educational discovery which, naturally, has gone unnoticed by his persecutors. He has come up with a totally new educational content. He has established a lifestyle pattern

at his school, on his ‘educational island’, so to speak, in such a way that this lifestyle pattern has become its educational content. Of course there is a syllabus—of course there are subjects—the kids study both mathematics and biology. But this is just the raw material, while the Telcos way of life has become the content—building construction, arranging for the provision of food, protecting one’s living quarters, art, interpersonal communication. Moreover, everybody says that children are different, that they not only have different learning rhythms but also different areas for the optimum development of their abilities. But so far it is only Shchetinin that has managed to make it so different children can learn entirely at their own individual pace. So a Shchetinin pupil may end up, for example, taking Grade 9 physics at the same time as a post-secondary course in architecture. This is continuing education in the true sense of the term. Who else has been able to accomplish this? It is a challenge even to imagine such a thing, let alone think it through and put it into practice. Of course, Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin is a genius. Of course he is an artist, a thinker and a prominent exponent of our culture. But by the very same token neither he nor his creative genius can be squeezed into pre-set frames and cliches, either laudatory or derogatory. Shchetinin is someone whom one not only can but must engage in argument, someone to study with and, yes, someone definitely deserving of praise. An artist, after all, cannot live without some kind of praise or recognition. But Shchetinin is not someone to be pushed around. Nobody should be pushed around. And nobody should be utterly destroyed —because, sooner or later, shame will have its own. It’s only in a mob mentality that people assert themselves by destroying others. The way to assert one’s self in normal human society is by expressing respect and love —not only toward one’s self, but toward others as well. You can condemn such ideological ‘killers’ all you like, but what is that to them? They see condemnation as their reward. Their masters will make it all up to them. Meaning that they will keep trying all the harder. And they’ll always get away with it. How can they be punished, anyway? People have simply expressed their own opinions. They have simply made a mistake, and no punishment has been decreed for mistaken opinions. Yet they are not mistaken. In labelling the school a totalitarian sect they have merely been pursuing a specific goal, namely, stopping the public authorities from extending a helping hand to the new marvellous beginnings in Russia. Very few government officials, after all, will bother going to the school itself to ascertain the real status of things first-hand. They will most certainly try to

keep as far away as possible from any contacts. What if there really should he something wrong with the school? they might ask themselves. Hence the school is put in a defenceless position—an easy target for the ‘killers’, who are just waiting to deal their well-calculated blows. But what are we doing to help? After all, we see it’s not just the teachers that are under attack, but the children too. Look, more than three hundred Russian children are being trampled in the dirt, vilified and insulted, and this has been going on for two years now. I don’t believe it’s Russians who are doing this. It’s nowhere near part of the Russian character. But we are passive observers of this poisoning. Highlyplaced government officials and ordinary people alike are passively observing it. We are passive witnesses to an all-too-obvious pushing around and moral bashing of children. Who’s doing it? Maybe Russian special-service officers can sa. But God forbid we’ll have to tell our grandchildren that we once lived in a time when Academician Shchetinin’s school still existed in Tekos, home to three hundred children who dreamt about a marvellous Russia! We ought to be able to tell our grandchildren living in their Russian domains that “we were around when this school you are so happy to go to now got off the ground. We saw it through during this difficult time.” All that will come later. But right now... Mikhail Petrovich, Telcos teachers, educational innovators! It’s a challenge for you, of course, but you know... You know very well that “you cannot creep your way to the truth”.11 And children too! Children of theTekos school. Forgive me, young Russians, if I don’t manage to do everything I’m supposed to. But I shall be able to. So will many other people. What’s the weather like there at the moment—nice and warm, eh? That’s good if it’s nice and warm. May the Sun shine over you more often, and warm up the dream within each of you! Hoping to get some advice on how best to proceed, I described the situation to Anastasia’s grandfather. The elderly fellow stood there leaning on his walking-stick (or staff) as he listened intently to what I had to say. After hearing me out, including my request for advice, the old fellow stood silent for a while. His facial expression betrayed intense thought. Finally, he lifted up his head and, squinting his eyes as though scanning space, began speaking. “Neither my father nor I myself, not even the high priest, was able to guess how our granddaughter Anastasia would have any success in deciphering the secret of all secrets and answering the question as to why the Earth has

begun morphing itself into such a stinky mess. The tribulations of the flesh and the agitations of human souls are something Man has brought upon himself. “If Earth’s earlier civilisations are supposed to be the smartest, why did they not preserve a happy lifestyle for their children? “Everything today can at last be returned to the original world of God’s creation. Nobody had any idea how to preserve it and avoid repeating mistakes of the past. And then, if you please, she created the unthinkable combination all by herself, with her own thought, and immediately translated it into reality All questions will now be answered. “Events that took millennia to unfold Anastasia has compressed into a single age. She is repeating them. Now everyone can experience the history of the Earth, the history of your country, for himself. They can evaluate, draw a conclusion and write that conclusion down in their own Book of Kin. Man will be able to learn for himself, with his feelings and his soul, the events of a whole series of millennia. “You see, just as Anastasia is now being denigrated, your ancestors were denigrated in Ancient Rus’ as their culture was devastated. “They accused the paganism andVedism of Ancient Rus’ of being frightfully barbaric and a cultural wasteland. How can you make people feel and fully appreciate what things were really like back then? ‘All on her own our granddaughter revealed the aspirations of our Russian ancestors and took upon herself the harsh blows ofher attackers— themselves the descendants of those who slandered our ancestors in front of their contemporaries, in front of their children and grandchildren. “It is as though she were inviting everybody living on the Earth today to choose themselves a role in a historical play, then act out this role and observe the situation from the sidelines. And even those who start observing the whole scenario as spectators will be playing the role of spectators and thereby experiencing and appreciating the events taking place, and they themselves will be drawn into the action. “I’ve got a bit ahead of myself. You wanted to know who is responsible for the insults and hindrances. I’ll give you an answer. After all, that’s not hard for a priest. “It is people that have been responsible for obstructing anyone who has understood and been inspired by the ideas expressed by our granddaughter Anastasia. But not just any people. These people are bio-robots controlled by a tiny sect which arose a long time ago, and far away from Russia.”

“But,” I observed, “one of the clippings I have of signed newspaper articles states that the missionary office of the Tula Diocese has come out against Anastasia. I’ve read reports from people in various parts of the country on the unkindly attitude on the part of individual Christian congregations. Do they too include, as you say, bio-robots, controlled by some kind of sect?” “The human bio-robots themselves are unaware of this control. They were simply pre-programmed a long time ago. The programmers had not foreseen anything on the order of Anastasia and so the programme experienced a major malfunction—pointing it down the road of self-annihilation.” “I can’t put together details like that in my head. Where can I find confirmation?” “If you can’t put them together in your head, then put them all together according to your own sense of logic. Anyone capable of thinking will find it in their own sense of logic.” “Put it together logically?” “Yes. Simple facts everybody knows. Take a look and see how one can reason, using only facts as a basis.” “How?” “First of all, get a clear determination for yourself of just what Anastasia recommended everyone should do.” “Well,” I said, “she recommended everyone obtain at least one hectare of land and set up a domain on it for their family and descendants. As she says, if every family creates this little corner of Paradise for themselves, the whole Earth will be transformed into a Paradise. She also explained how to grow edible plants to counteract human diseases. Furthermore, she talked about a healthy lifestyle, child-raising and an appreciation for Nature, stating that Nature is comprised of God’s thoughts in solution. In sum, she set up a model whereby Russia can become a flourishing land and a home to happy families.” “In talking about kin’s domains,” Grandfather continued, ‘Anastasia in fact revealed the greatest secret of the Divine being. She showed Man the way back to Paradise. This becomes clear if you gather all her sayings scattered over the various books together. “She revealed a secret which the dark forces had kept concealed for thousands of years. These dark forces had destroyed everything that could have helped people learn about it. “In the second century of your so-called ‘Common Era’ the last book still written in Runic characters was destroyed. This book told about Man’s

Divine way of life. It talked, too, about the possibility of mastering the Universe through the harmonious mastery first of a plot of one’s family land and then the planet called Earth as a whole. “Man who had mastered the Earth to perfection was presented with the opportunity to master other planets in the Universe—not technocratically, but psychotelepathically” “But didn’t any of the great wise-men talk about the Earth the way she did, at least once?” “There is not a single treatise extant today, Vladimir, where you will find the discoveries Anastasia has made. Moreover, in the past six thousand years people have been deliberately led astray, led away from understanding the Earth. They have had all sorts of teachings thrown at them and told that that’s where they’ll find the truth. “No sooner does Man study one doctrine than he recognises that there is no truth in it. He’s presented with another to study, then a third, and so forth. So life goes on, and even upon reaching his deathbed Man still hasn’t understood the essence of life. “Yet Man is still intuitively attracted to the Earth, to the great adventure of understanding it. Realising that this attraction of human souls could not simply be cut off at the roots, the powers of darkness decided to cast a shadow over Man’s attraction to the Earth. “In short, there have been a great many deceptions throughout the ages. But over the past six thousand years nobody has interacted with the Earth with conscious awareness.” ‘“With conscious awareness’—is that what Anastasia recommends?” “Yes, that is what she recommends, and what people take from her sayings. Anastasia has turned human society as a whole onto a marvellous path. And nobody will now be able to stop her. After all, a whole lot of people are already carrying her dream in their hearts.” “But still, the hindering and slandering of both Anastasia and her readers has not stopped. If they only realised they can’t stop her, they’d give up their slandering.” ‘At the moment, Vladimir, through the efforts of the slanderers, the higher echelons of power are attempting to thwart the dawn of a new era here in Russia. In the near future they will try to present the idea in a distorted form in some other countr. And they will try to discredit the idea. ‘Anastasia was able to foresee all this ahead of time. Her course of action, carefully thought through in advance, impressed even the high priest. She

realised that once she had revealed the essence of Man and the Earth, a lot of people would not be able to hold themselves back from direct interaction with the Earth. Too hasty an action could be dangerous—after all, people would first need to create their Space in their thoughts. “In Russia the slanderers are now trying to set up obstacles, but people are still not betraying their dream and are mentally creating their Space without letting up. “Of course the system is strong, but you can’t just go accusing everyone indiscriminately Church people are divided over Anastasia.” “I know,” I said. “I have met with a number of clerics who understand and support Anastasia.” “You and your readers must be aware of just who in the world might be disadvantaged by information surfacing in Russia today” “I would say there are many self-proclaimed ‘developed’ nations that would not want to see another, even more developed country on the horizon.” “Yes, that’s logical. But each country has a lot of people. What do you think —are all of them up on what’s happening here, do they follow and analyse events taking place in Russia?” “Not all of them, of course. But there are certain interested parties.” “Who, for example?” “Who? Well, for instance, companies that deal in medicines and supply them to Russia in large quantities, they would be disadvantaged if Russians stopped getting sick.” ‘And beyond that?” “Beyond that... There are a great many foodstuffs that we import from abroad today If Anastasia’s plans were to be implemented, it would be the other way round: Russia would export foodstuffs to many countries. And in that she would have no competition.” “Which means Anastasia’s plan would turn out to be unprofitable—not to the populations of these various countries but to certain classes of people, and these might be located in just about any country, including Russia itself. Do you agree?” “Yes. In general, I do.” “Now tell me, this class of people who possess enormous capital, might they not have their own intelligence services following global development trends?”

“Of course. All major companies have such services. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. There are even schools set up to train such people.” All right. So, major companies have services providing them with intelligence from various countries. And in turn they can influence the creation of favourable conditions for themselves?” “Yes.” “You agree. Good. If you pursue this line of reasoning, you will come to the conclusion that national governments have similar services at their disposal. There are many examples of this in history. The most significant of all is a tiny Jewish group which is involved in the governing of America, Europe and Russia. Though they have merely been an instrument in the hands of the high priest.” “What’s the connection between this group and the Christian dioceses that have come out against Anastasia?” “I indicated that those who serve as bio-robots are this type of people. They arose under the influence of the priests’ programme and the tiny Jewish group that is spread out in various places.” “Where’s the proof of such statements?” “In historical facts. They need to be examined meticulously and impartially” 1 In today’s Russian usage, the word sekta (‘sect’) is used as a synonym for kul’t (‘cult’). Therefore the accusation of being a ‘sectarian’ actually suggests adherence to some dangerous cult. 2 change in religion— The reference here is to the official adoption of Christianity as a state religion by Kievan Rus’ in A.D. 988. For a more detailed description, see Book 6, Chapter 4: ‘A dormant civilisation”. Rus’ (pronounced ROOSS) was the name given to the East Slavic state dominated by the city of Kiev between 880 and the mid-iath century, although Anastasia explains that it dates back much farther than that—see, for example, the closing statement in Book 6, Chapter 6: “Imagery and trial”. 3 Quoted from Book 4, Chapter 4: “The first day”. 4 See Book 1, Chapters io: “Her beloved dachniks” and ii: ‘Advice from Anastasia”.

5 Vladimir—the name of the city in Russia where the author resides. See footnote 1 in Book 5, Chapter 6: ‘A garden for eternity”. 23 July (the author’s birthday) was proposed by Anastasia as the date for Dachnik Day— see Book 2, Chapter 9: “Dachnik Day and an All-Earth holiday!”. Sergei Ivanovich Taneev (1856-1915)—one of Russia’s most revered composers and pianists, also a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Many music-associated buildings and institutions are named in his honour. One of the largest music venues in the region, the Taneev Concert Hall, with its seating capacity of 600, also houses the Vladimir Philharmonic Society Tula— a large city of a half-million inhabitants a few hours’ drive south of Moscow, known for its production of samovars as well as armaments. It is not far from Leo Tolstoy’s family estate ofYasnaya Polyana. 6 Quoted from two different paragraphs in Book 3, Chapter 21: “Should we all go live in the forest?”. 7 Academician Shchetinin’s school— This school, founded at Telcos in the Caucasus by the renowned educational authority Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin, is described in Book 3, Chapters 17: “Put your vision of happiness into practice” and 18: Academician Shchetinin”. 8 Nikolai Baskov (1976-)—an internationally recognised Russian opera star, who has performed on a number of occasions with his mentor, Spanish diva Maria de Montserrat Caballe. In recent years he has become known for his rendition of popular songs, especially those based on operatic or classical pieces. Some critics consider him one of the most popular singers in Russia today 9 Belgorod Region (Russian: Belgorodskaya oblast)—a large, primarily agricultural region located on the fertile plains of south-western Russia between the Don and Dniepr Rivers, north of the Black Sea. While today it is believed that the name Belgorod (literally ‘White city’) is derived from the proliferation of limestone deposits in the area, it may actually have a deeper meaning, originating from the name Belbog (lit. ‘white god’)—the god of light, goodness and happiness in the ancient Slavic tradition. 10

so-called, ‘Orthodox’ priests— Megre is questioning here the traditional application of the termpravoslavnaia (commonly translated Orthodox, literally signifying ‘right-praising’) to Russia’s official church. The term Prav’(Order, or rightness) was one of the three concepts central to Russia’s original ‘paganism’ (see Chapter 20), along with Nav’ (the Inner, or invisible world) and Tav’ (designating the Outer, or visible world)—cf. footnote 1 in Book 4. 11 This is a quotation from Anastasia, reproduced on the back cover of the Russian edition of Book 2, The Ringing Cedars of Russia.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

To Jews, Christians and others In appealing to Jews and Christians, I am counting on the understanding of at least some adherents of these two mutually exclusive ideologies. I realise not everyone is aware of the reason I felt compelled to touch upon this topic. The mere mention of the subject in my previous book1 touched off a chain of hurt feelings—even though the essence of Anastasia’s sayings has only one aim, namely, to shed light on the causes of conflicts between peoples— the same conflicts that have been going on incessantly over the past five millennia. As I was working on the present volume, common sense dictated that it would be better to avoid the theme of Jews and Christianity altogether. Why stir up a good part of my readership and cause them to become disposed against me? Nevertheless, in view of the information in my possession, I do not feel I have a right to withhold it, no matter how distasteful it may seem to some people. In presenting descriptions of the Jewish pogroms which have been going on for millennia, I simply cited historical facts, trying my best not to offer personal commentary on the events described or to treat them too subjectively. My only goal here is to try to prevent yet another large-scale pogrom against Jews which could take place simultaneously in several countries. Such a pogrom could conceivably be significantly greater in scope than that unleashed during the era of Nazi Germany. See Book 6, Chapter 6: “Imagery and trial”. In fact, it is almost inevitable. Only one thing can prevent it: a sufficient understanding of the causes of previous pogroms, along with corresponding actions to remove these causes. I shall try not to resort to the statements made by the recluses of the Siberian taiga—Anastasia and her grandfather—even though they carry more and more weight with me personally with each passing year, since others might interpret them as sheer invention. I shall endeavour to draw proofs simply from well-known facts, or facts which can be easily attested by anyone who wishes to. And so, as is known from historical sources, anti-Jewish pogroms date back

to the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. And over the last millennium they have occurred approximately once every hundred years, in various countries which had become christianised by that time. And their scope has been expanding with each passing century. The last large-scale attempt to annihilate the Jews occurred in Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945. Jews were burned in concentration-camp ovens, shot execution-style and poisoned with gas. Various sources estimate the number of jews exterminated during this time to be in the neighbourhood of six million. The regularity of recurring events connected with the extermination of the Jewish populations of various countries over more than one millennium clearly and convincingly attests to the existence of certain causes behind these events. At the same time somebody has been attempting to carefully conceal the true causes. The mass media—the press, radio and TV—have been painstakingly trying to avoid this most contentious issue. It only takes a single mention in the media to provoke accusations of inciting racial hatred. In actual fact racism can be incited more readily by remaining silent about the sensitive and controversial issues facing society today. A great many facts attest to society’s sensitivity to the Jewish question. Many people will remember a speech by a Russian general, a member of the State Duma, in which he declared, in effect: “Get all the Jews out of Russia!” A number of Duma members condemned the general. Naturally, he was given no coverage in the press. Nobody started an argument with him. Why? Was it because this general was just one lone voice supporting such a view, making it hardly worth wasting precious airtime on the whole Russian public’s arguing with just one person? I dare say, though, he is not alone. He has a lot of company, not just among his fellow-generals, but among Russian civil servants, among Russian youth. The numbers of people willing to blame all their troubles on the Jews are steadily increasing. The silence on the part of the press is allowing them to build up to a critical mass. I can cite figures which more than eloquently attest to this. Since 1992 more than fifty anti-Semitic books have been released in Russia by various publishing houses. This rather sizeable number does not include materials published by the underground press, nor a multitude of newspapers and magazines.

You won’t find these publications gathering dust on store shelves or in publishers’ warehouses. They are circulating from hand to hand. Many of them have been read so many times the covers are starting to fall off. These are publications in demand. And their readers tend to dismiss the absence of any discussion of the issue in the press by simply saying “the whole press is in the hands of Jews”. Their arguments are so well developed that anyone without a thorough grounding in the subject will find it a challenge to counteract them. I was sitting in my train compartment, on my way back to Moscow from St. Petersburg, when in walked two men and a girl. The men wore darkcoloured shirts and wide army-officer belts. They looked very much as though they had been exhausted by some rather strenuous activity and immediately lay down on the upper bunks. I struck up a conversation with the girl, who, like the men, was dressed rather severely. It turned out they were on their way home from a convention of (as she put it) ‘the patriotic forces of Russia’. ‘And what issues were discussed at your convention?” I asked her. “The struggle with world Jewry,” she proudly replied. “How can you, being here in Russia, struggle with someone who is, let’s say, in Europe or America?” “We’ve got our supporters in Europe, and in America too. We haven’t contacted them all, but we know of many movements that share our views. Patriots in various countries are soon going to unite against world Jewry” The girl was talkative, chatting on audaciously Either by instruction or at her own initiative she was taking on the role of agitator for her (as she was convinced) ‘patriotic’ movement. I asked the girl: “Tell me, have the Jews harmed you personally in any way?” “Sure they have. Because of them I’m forced to live in a poor and filthy country which keeps kowtowing to the West and licking up its crumbs.” “But what makes you think the Jews are the cause of the failures in our country?” “’Cause they’ve got this special plan of action. They deceive and plunder one country, then another, then a third. And no sooner does the first get back on its feet than they start cleaning it out again. They don’t even consider us human beings. Just look at what’s written here. This is a copy of several passages from

their Talmud.” Handing me a slim pamphlet, she opened it to a particular place and I began reading. I shan’t reproduce these citations here, as back then, during our conversation, it was hard for me to tell how much they actually corresponded to the Talmud. I was already aware that, according to the Old Testament, the Jews consider themselves to be a chosen people. But that’s not the point. I was so struck by this young ‘patriot’s’ rampant aggressiveness that I felt it was high time to get to the truth of the matter. The root cause of the incessant conflicts within many countries lies in the existence, within one and the same society at one and the same time, of two mutually exclusive religious ideologies. Let us examine the question of just what is religion? First and foremost, it is an ideology which shapes a particular class of Man, plugging him into a particular programme of action. Religion—in this case, the religion of the Jews—defines the Jewish people as exclusively chosen by God, and even concretises and regulates its actions in respect to other peoples. Christianity, on the other hand, says that a Christian Man is a servant, and some will get to relax in Paradise only after this earthly life. It’s hard for rich people to get to Paradise. You must love your neighbours and share your possessions with them. The Talmud says: “It’s all yours”, while the Bible says: “Give it all up”. A good combination! These two mutually exclusive ideologies arose from one location—i.e., Israel. But that doesn’t mean that they were worked out by Jews themselves. That’s not the point. What is significant here is the inevitability of conflict. The inevitability of conflict between adherents of the two ideologies can be attested by examining even the behaviour of very young children. Let’s say we tell one child that all the toys he sees belong only to him, while we encourage another child to give up the toys he owns when another needs them—what then is the result? The second child may agree to hand over his toys once or twice, but he won’t exactly feel love for the one who takes them. Sooner or later he will want at least something back, but nothing will be offered to him. As a result he will either start crying or try to use force. And so it turns out that two differing ideologies may serve to facilitate conflict even between children as yet unborn.

In a case like this nationality doesn’t even come into the question. You could turn all the ethnic Jews into Christians and all the Slavic peoples into practising Jews and still get the very same conflicts. It is not nationalities that are constantly warring with each other, but differing ideologies exploiting nationality for their own purposes. We have heard even very cultured and enlightened people warn us from time to time about the necessity of a tolerant attitude toward different faiths. The State Duma has adopted a law punishing those inciting ethnic or religious hatred. On TV we see leaders of different denominational groups getting together to participate in secular governmental receptions. It all gives the appearance of something good, proper and normal. But it does absolutely nothing to reduce extremism. We still keep seeing placards with inflammatory slogans saying Kill them! and we still hear reports on people setting off explosions at non-profit organisations. So, what’s going on? It’s all quite simple. The situation cannot be changed simply by eloquent words and appeals. To the contrary, such words only serve to conceal the real state of affairs and make it worse. It remains concealed, waiting for the ‘zero hour’ to explode and destroy the state. “Let’s show a tolerant attitude toward all faiths!” Let’s indeed. I myself— like many others, I think—have nothing against a tolerant attitude. But what then happens with the faiths themselves? This is what happens. Each of them tries with all their might to become as strong as possible and attract to their ranks the greatest possible number of followers. Finally, once they think they have achieved a sufficiently solid power base, two ideologies inevitably find themselves on a collision course, as is clearly confirmed by the history of incessant conflicts in the world. But over the course of many centuries mankind, as though pre-programmed, continues to make the same mistakes over and over again. Did the priests know about this—the ones who created the two ideologies? Yes, they knew How could they not know, these people who are capable of exercising a psychological influence on millions of people in various countries all over the world, capable of pre-programming human beings? Was their aim really to make the Jewish people happy by telling them they were ‘chosen’? History shows quite a different motivation. Over the centuries the Jewish people have been used as a ‘throwaway card’, or scapegoat, serving as a shield to divert people’s attention from those who are ‘playing their own little game’, using both Jews and Christians as pawns in a simple chess match. This kind of pre-programming causes only suffering to both parties.

You can see for yourselves where all this is leading today. The world is witnessing an ever greater accumulation of aggressive energy. Conflict continues between Israel and Palestine. With their military technology and American support, Israel can occupy Palestinian land and subject the inhabitants to its own demands. But this is by no means favourable to the development of mutual respect between two neighbouring peoples. Quite the opposite: the amount of aggressive energy directed at the Jews is sharply rising throughout the Muslim world. This energy will inevitably find its outlet, including incessant acts of terrorism on both Israeli and American territory. But it is not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is at play here. More and more inhabitants of our planet are realising that the current path of development of our global civilisation is heading for a dead end. People are being devoured by AIDS, drugs, crime and technological disasters. The overwhelming majority of Earth’s inhabitants are deprived of the opportunity to consume food that will not harm their health, to drink clean, uncontaminated water and to breathe pure, unpolluted air. But what if these masses of people were to acquire information about the true cause of social and technological disasters? What if leaders appeared who could show them the true instigators of this depressing global situation, and expose their game, their aims, their tricks? This, and this alone, is what the world ideologists are afraid of. It is for this reason, in an attempt to shield themselves from universal human outrage, that they keep tossing out again and again that time-tested card, namely the Jews. Ton bet—they’re to blame for everything—down with them] Angry masses launch attacks on Jews indiscriminately. That’s what’s been going on, over and over again, throughout the ages. They attack them, thinking they’re getting rid of something evil, whereas all they’re doing, in fact, is letting off steam’. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Going deep into history The account told me by Anastasia’s grandfather struck me as being quite extraordinary, and yet quite simple in its proof of the extraordinary. Subsequently I began comparing his arguments with those from other sources and yeas amazed at how closely the details coincided. These were facts which nudged logical thinking to certain conclusions. And now I shall try reconciling the conclusions drawn by Anastasia’s grandfather with those of other sources.

Back during the years 30-100 of our Common Era small groups of believing Jews and dissidents living in Israel, Palestine or other parts of the Roman Empire, began to merge into an independent movement within Judaism. This resulted in the formation of a small Christian community comprising people who earnestly believed in the precepts of Christ Jesus and His imminent resurrection—an account attested in a great number of historical monographs, including the Bible. In a word, there is no question that the mighty Christian doctrine began with the gatherings of a small Jewish community. But now let us try to determine how the teachings of this small community suddenly found its way into not only the Roman Empire but also the territories of present-day Europe and Russia. How did people in so many countries come to hear of it—given that so few people knew about it even in Israel itself? According to Anastasia’s grandfather, the priests who controlled the Jews of that period realised that by tinkering with (or, rather, re-working) the Christian teachings in a certain way these teachings could shape a type of slave mentality which would be very easy to control. This mentality either partially or almost completely rules out independent logical thinking, and Man begins to believe what he is told by the clergy or by someone else. More precisely: one ends up with bio-robotic people, subject to whatever programming has been instilled in them. (A bio-robotic Man is a Man who consents—not entirely of his own free will, of course, but under the influence of special occult programming—to believe in an unreal world. And given that this unreal world has been constructed by someone for a specific purpose, this someone claims that he knows the laws of the unreal world and demands that Man subject himself to them. Whereas in fact he is subjecting the Man personally to himself.) Next, the priests of Judaism, who at the time had not just the knowledge but also the practical experience of inculcating self-serving teachings into masses of people, trained hundreds of preachers from Christian ranks, gave them money and sent them off to various countries to instil the priests’ own self-serving teachings into the local populations. An incidental proof of this may be seen in the following. At the end of the second century of our Common Era a number of Jewish Christian communities suddenly launched a comprehensive missionary campaign in various countries. This campaign was preceded by a period of intensified evangelisation (the publication and copying of the Christian Hebrew Bible).

Everybody knows perfectly well that even today publishing books requires money. In ancient times the production of each book required not just money, but big money A goodly sum would have been needed, too, for travel to other countries. It was largely merchants, or wealthy and prominent people, who could afford such travel. So how could such an extravagant, large-scale operation be carried out by a community consisting mainly of rural residents? Of course there must have been expert theoretical training and a considerable amount of financing involved. The attention the priests paid to these rural residents, together with their moral and financial support, served to turn ordinary peasant believers into fully-fledged fanatics. Just picture to yourself a Hebrew villager who is suddenly told: “We see in you the makings of a great missionary and preacher. All you have to do is study up a bit, well give you money and you’ll teach people, only... Only not here in our country You’ll be going to other countries.” And so they studied up, got their money and off they went—travelling to other lands. So, what was the result? Any success? Not a bit. The Jewish preachers were rejected by the people in every country they went to. It was more than just a simple rejection—at first they were listened to, then asked to leave. The more obtrusive among them were beaten or had dogs set upon them. This is confirmed by many historical facts known from the Roman Empire of the period, where the major contingent of preachers was sent. The only significant result of this massive campaign was the organising of a network of Christian communities in various parts of the Roman Empire. But there was no way they could shake the foundations of the traditional sects of the time. Ancient Rome was left just as pagan as in earlier times. These sects exerted no influence either on the political life of the Empire or on the formation of the new type of Man—the bio-robotic slaves the priests had dreamt about. And the Roman emperors had absolutely no regard for this first wave of preachers. The Emperor Nero, who was generally tolerant of the various pagan beliefs on the whole, took a particular dislike to the Christians. Christians were expelled from Roman territory by various emperors: Dionysius (249-251), Diocletes (284-285) and especially Galerius (305-311), one of the leading persecutors of the sect. It was not until the second wave came that the preachers had any success. Unlike their predecessors, preachers of the second wave were no fanatics.

The priests prepared them in such a way that they could speak eloquently about their faith on the one hand, while on the other they had a knowledge of psychology and were capable of influencing a person by using his aspirations to achieve their own ends. The mission of the second wave of preachers was focused solely on the rulers—persuading them that their authority could be enhanced and perpetuated by the Christian faith, that it would make their state completely governable, controllable and flourishing. It was to this end that certain dogmas were introduced as well, such as Allpower is of God and The ruler is God’s vicegerent on the Earth. Confessions opened the door to controlling the thoughts, hopes and actions of every citizen of a country In a word, the preachers began persuading the rulers that the christianisa-tion of a state would create the most favourable conditions for governing. And on the surface it did, but only on the surface. In falling into these traps, the rulers had no idea they were actually falling under the control of other powers. Christianity began noticeably consolidating its position in the Roman Empire beginning in 312 C.E., when Emperor Constantine was persuaded how advantageous the presence of Christian churches within the state would be for him. He agreed to offer them patronage, even while still maintaining the temples to the Roman gods. This led to a significant improvement in the position of Christianity within the Roman Empire, an increase in its wealth, and successive generations of Christian archbishops attaining a level of power rivalling that of the Roman senators. This phenomenon, along with many others to follow, attests to the fact that Christian teachings were unable to develop and exert any serious influence on society without the support of secular rulers. Christian leaders themselves were always among the pretenders to power. While the Roman Church continues to enjoy great power even today, the Roman Empire disappeared. A coincidence? An exception to the rule, or a predictable pattern? This question can be answered by examining the history of nationstates in the ensuing centuries, right up to the present day. There is not a single state on our planet anybody could name which began flourishing with the arrival of Christianity. On the other hand, one can name off a whole list of states which succumbed to the same sad fate as the Roman Empire.

And one more interesting historical fact: in every single country where Christianity was officially adopted, it wasn’t long before non-Christian Jews began to appear and start engaging in rather strange activities. They became wealthy with extraordinary ease. In every Christian country they pursued their activities on such a large scale that they couldn’t help but be noticed by both the citizenry and the governments of these countries. And when they reached a certain level in a particular land, the people started reacting violently toward them and the government began expelling them abroad. We have access to a whole lot of reports of anti-Jewish pogroms in various Christian countries, dating back to the beginning of the eleventh century. In 1096 dozens of Jewish communities were plundered on the Rhein and their residents exiled. In 1290 Jews were expelled from England. At the end of the fourteenth century more than 100,000 Jews were exterminated in Spain. (Granted, some time later Jews quietly began coming back to these countries.) This list of historical facts could all too easily be added to. But no need. It is already absolutely clear that these situations, so similar to each other and constantly repeating themselves over many centuries, are the result of preprogramming. And since losses have been suffered by both the members of the Christian world and the Jews themselves, there must be a third party involved which remains free from loss. For this third party both types of Man—the Christian and the Jew—are reduced to the status of mere bio-robots, easily manipulable. Who is this third party? Historical researchers attempting to dig out the roots and discover the essence of the lawlessness that has been taking place constantly in the world over the millennia have always pointed only to the Jews. They are to blame for everything, or so the claim goes. But if there exists a third power, both the Jews and the Christians turn out to be nothing but puppet bio-robots in the hands of this third power. But is it possible to determine and prove its existence today? Of course it is. By what means? By means of historical facts and logical thinking. You can judge for yourselves. Within the Jewish society there is one tribe in particular—or layer, ethnic division, caste: you can call it what you like—the name doesn’t really matter. For brevity’s sake let’s call them Levites. Some historical sources say the Levites were descendants of the Egyptian priests. Other more familiar sources, in particular the Old Testament, give us

to understand that the Levites occupied a special position among the Jews. For example, according to Hebrew law they were exempt from participation in military action. They were not compelled to pay taxes or tributes to anyone. The Levites were not included in the Hebrew census described in the Old Testament.1 When the Hebrews were on the march and the time came to make camp, the tribes of Israel—numbering anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000—pitched their tents in a circle, each one in a pre-designated spot. There were indications of the north, south, east and west co-ordinates as well as the locations where guards were to be posted. The Levites invariably occupied the centre. Hence protection of the Levites fell within the duties of all the other Hebrew tribes. And just what did the members of this class of Levites do? It was their duty to appoint from among their ranks officials to conduct services, and enforce Jewish laws—laws which, among other things, regulated what to eat, what to do with apostates and where to go. The laws were strict and specific. They covered all one’s waking hours from morning ’til night. They showed what lands people could occupy Also whom they should fight. Thus the Levites were the de facto rulers of the Jewish people. And, all things considered, most definitely qualified for the job. Special provisions for the Levites are described in the first chapter of the Book of Numbers in the Bible (verses 47-54). It is hard to tell whether the Levites were actually Jews themselves. Few of the laws every Jew was supposed to abide by extended to them. For example, while universal Jewish law required circumcision of a child on the eighth day after birth, the Levites were exempt. Thus, with their knowledge of the secret science of the Egyptian priests and their capacity to do experiments, engage in observation and contemplation free from military duties and the work routine everybody else was so accustomed to, they have been in a position to constantly perfect their knowledge from generation to generation right up to the present day. Now, how could that be—‘up to the present day? People may wonder why we haven’t heard about the ethnic group or social class known as the Levites. The English, Russians and French, for example—everybody knows about them. But why do so few people know about the most intelligent people of all, the Levites, especially since they are the ones governing everybody?

The reason is that just like the Egyptian priests, they too must remain in the shadows. In case anything happens, full responsibility will fall on the Jews, the ones who carry out their will. Jews have been persecuted for centuries in various countries of the world. Persecuted for what? For using any means they can to make as much money as possible. And many of them are successful. Anyway, what have the Levites got to do with this? What benefit or interest would it be to them if Jews in England, Spain or Russia went about their politicking and transferred a major part of public or private funds to their own bank accounts—in other words, pocket the money for themselves? Wouldn’t both the rulers and the people of some country or other catch sight of this ugly phenomenon, and start a violent reaction against Jews and mistreat them? Something like that could go all the way up to the Levites. Hence the impression of illogicality in the actions of the Vise Levites’. And what point would there be in the Levites’ helping the Jews with sound advice or in coming up with clever intrigues for them—manipulating whole nation-states at a time? Well, as it turns out, there is a point. A matter of simple, direct and specific interest. Money! Wealthy Jews, no matter what country they find themselves in, are obliged to pay a part of their profits to the Levites. Proof? Take a look! According to the Old Testament, the Hebrews are obliged to give a tenth part of their income to the Levites. Here is the exact wording from the Bible: All the contributions from holy-gifts, which the Israelites set aside for the Lord, I give to you and to your sons and daughters with you as a due in perpetuity. This is a perpetual covenant of salt before the Lord with you and your descendants also. The Lord said to Aaron: You shall have no patrimony in the land of Israel, no holding among them; I am your holding in Israel, I am your patrimony. To the Levites I give every tithe in Israel to be their patrimony, in return for the service they render in maintaining the Tent of the Presence. In order that the Israelites may not henceforth approach the Tent and thus incur the penalty of death, the Levites alone shall perform the service of the Tent, and they shall accept the full responsibility for it. This rale is binding on your descendants for all time. They shall have no patrimony among the Israelites, because I give them as their patrimony the tithe which the Israelites set aside as a contribution to the Lord. Therefore I say unto them: You shall have no patrimony among the Israelites. The Lord spoke to Moses and said, Speak to the Levites in these words: When you receive from the Israelites the tithe which I give you from them

as your patrimony, you shall set aside from it the contribution to the Lord, a tithe of the tithe. Your contribution shall count for you as if it were corn from the threshing-floor and juice from the vat. In this way you too shall set aside the contribution due to the Lord out of all tithes which you receive from the Israelites and shall give the Lord’s contribution to Aaron the priest. Out of all the gifts you receive you shall set aside the contribution due to the Lord; and the gift which you hallow must be taken from the choicest of them. You shall say to the Levites: When you have set aside the choicest part of your portion, the remainder shall count for you as the produce of the threshing-floor and the winepress, and you may eat it anywhere, you and {your sons and] your households. It is your payment for service in the Tent of the Presence...1 Someone might wonder how the Old Testament, more than two thousand years old, relates to our modern times. There is an answer. Aren’t there still rabbis and other clerics among Jewish believers today? Of course there are! And, of course, the majority of Jews still observe their religious canons. If that is so, then just try to picture the colossal amount of capital held by the Levites, scattered through the banks of various countries! Besides that, they don’t have to worry about maintaining or multiplying their capital. Most bankers in a lot of countries are Jews, and that is their job. Of course, at the right moment the Levites can drop a hint as to where their capital should be invested. They can suggest which regimes, alliances or groups opposing existing governments should be either supported or, alternatively, exterminated by financial intrigue. There might have been reason to doubt Anastasia’s information on human society all over the globe being controlled by just a handful of priests. But now, after going through this chain of logic, there can no longer be any doubt for anyone still capable of logical thinking. I’m not talking about fanatics. The logic may be outlined as follows: Approximately one million Jews came out of Egypt under the control of the priests. The priests’ close assistants were the Levites, to whom they entrusted the task of shaping the Jews into a pre-determined type of individual Man. To this end they created an ideological religion, which set up a series of rituals along with a unique way of life. The Levites managed to carry out their appointed task. The ideology created several thousand years ago still weighs on the Jews even today. It is what distinguishes them from the host of other nationalities living on the Earth.

One of the basic tenets of this ideology is the declaration that, of all the national groups populating the Earth, God selected the Jews alone as His chosen people. So, this ideology still exists today, the Jews still exist today, and the conflicts continue and many people know about them. But where are the Levites? Do we ever hear much about them? Hardly at all. And therein lies their subtlety—or their wisdom—you can call it what you like, but they exist. Now picture to yourself a rather small group of people living on this Earth who possess a greater degree of esoteric knowledge than anyone else—a group that has, over the millennia, been constantly adding to their experience of practical influence over masses of humanity. Is there any body that can be compared with them—say, some sort of statesponsored institute set up to study issues of national development or the formation of ideologies? This is not possible for a variety of reasons, including the following: The Levites have been passing their esoteric knowledge down to their heirs over the generations, and are continuing to do so today. Modern science rejects esoteric knowledge and therefore does not consider it a serious object for research, to say the least. This absurd situation did not come about haphazardly. But why is it absurd? Judge for yourselves. On the one hand, the state accords official recognition to a number of religions, and they too are quite esoteric. The state even sets up favourable conditions for their financial support. Yet the state does not make any provision for scientific study of esoteric tendencies. This means, in effect, that within the territory of the state there are legalised structures capable of influencing the mentality of its citizenry. But the secular government has only the foggiest idea of what this influence consists of in actual practice. So, in the end, who is controlling whom? Secondly, not only the government but all its thinking citizens should try to learn the lessons of history History makes a very good school of life. But, for this, one has to know one’s history. Those who rule the world know it perfectly well. Most people, however—and that includes those in the government—know next to nothing of the history of the state in which they live. More than that, the little history they do know is distorted. Russia is a perfect example. It wasn’t that long ago that we heard in our schools and colleges, in art and

especially literature—just about everywhere, in fact—how terrible life was for our grandmothers and grandfathers in Tsarist Russia. For most of us this belief was a sacred cow. For most of us it went far beyond a belief—people made such a fuss over those that delivered us from the terror of tsarism. For many people the commissars in their leather jackets were heroes, while the symbol of reactionary extremism became the priesthood. And then all at once, before our very eyes—note, not over two or three generations or centuries, but right before our eyes—history changed. The commissars in their leather jackets, it turned out, were scoundrels, subjecting the people to genocide. And after tsarism we lived in the most terrible and totalitarian state in the world. And again, the majority of the people believed it. And once more the majority made a fuss over those who had delivered them from the yoke of a totalitarian state. I am not about to say which of these regimes is the better or the worse. But it seems that we should all ponder this phenomenon of change—something amounting to a whole sea-change in our consciousness over an extremely brief period of time. We should ponder the question of why it changed so radically. Did the changes take place all by themselves or under somebody’s manipulation? Here, too, it is not difficult to guess: for a long time now it has been all too easy to manipulate our consciousness, and this is what is still going on today. We are like guinea-pigs in somebody’s hands. It is only the masters of manipulation that are competing amongst themselves. It is they who render us incapable of perceiving historical reality. But let us try to discern just what this reality in fact, is all about. Let us try to determine historical reality not on the basis of somebody’s words, but of our own power of reasoning. Note how every day on the TV, programme after programme keeps showing us first-hand how husbands subtly betray their wives and vice-versa. We are constantly being called upon to pay attention to scores of non-existent problems, but God forbid any serious issue will be raised by our politicians, journalists or writers! Such an issue makes a brief appearance only to be immediately lost in the daily soup of gossip, violent TV series, psychotropic advertising and mud-slinging. What we need is a thoughtful analysis of what’s been going on, a critical analysis of the status of life on our planet today, and the working out of a plan for the future. We need a new ideology An ideology that won’t cause the world’s peoples to come to blows with each other, but will actually unite

them. But repeating a thousand times how necessary it is to do this, even shouting it a thousand times, won’t make it happen. Even if we were to gather all the leading scholars of the world and sit them down together to work out this new ideology, again, nothing would come of it. Only an unending argument. If science were capable of working out such an ideology, it would have come up with it and put it into practice long ago, at least in some country or other. Anastasia. It doesn’t matter any more who she is. That’s not the point. In the face of this ongoing lawlessness, Anastasia has given to the world the idea of family domains. Now it is becoming abundantly clear that in very simple terms she has outlined a philosophy, a new ideology, which has remained and still remains unshaken in human hearts ever since the creation of the world. Kings andpaupers, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Shintoists, Russians, Chinese and Americans, have always found the greatest grace and solace for their soids in the bosom of Divine Nature. Anastasia’s philosophy is the philosophy of uniting mankind not with words, but through concrete action, by merging the interests of different peoples of the world. Experience has shown that it is accepted by people of different nationalities, including Jews. And I have documentedproof of this. And I invite Jewish analysts, Christians and ideologues of patriotic movements to examine her ideas and philosophical aspirations. My invitation extends to leaders and followers of any religious denomination, either large or small. The very act of examination is a creative process in itself, which can lead to a union of opposites—to a “conjoint creation and joy for all from its contemplation”j as God Himself wanted. ^Quoted from Book 4, Chapter 2: “The beginning of creation”. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Take down Jesus Christ from the cross I’ll say this right off: one must be careful not to confuse the teachings of Jesus Christ, the selfless deeds of Russian church elders, with the occult set of rituals we are confronted with today. It is quite possible for the most beautiful teachings to be neutralised by occult devices. As you must realise yourself, Christ Jesus has nothing to do with them.

Moreover, He himself continues to hang on the cross to this day, thanks to the efforts of the occultists and our own ignorance. I have deliberately devoted a number of chapters to the power of the energy of human thought, through which people are able to create images. If this is understandable, then tell me: which is the clearest image of Christ Jesus prevailing in your thought—in the thoughts of the majority of believers? A straw poll points to a crucifix—the image of Jesus Christ crucified on the cross. You will find crucifixes in every Catholic and Orthodox church. Who thought up an occult device like this, and for what purpose? Did Christ Jesus himself want this particular image to be front and centre, predominating over all the others? Of course not! But we—yes, we—continue to project the image of the crucifixion—note, not the resurrection, but the crucifixion—through the power of our own thoughts. And the image we kiss is not of the resurrection, but of the crucifixion.1 And that is how we still keep Him on the cross. This simple occult device uses the energy of collective human thought in shaping an image. And Jesus Christ will remain hanging on the cross until we realise this and take him down from it with our thoughts—until we stop giving in to occult machinations. Right from the start, in shaping the various religions the priests tried to imbue them with their occult rituals and teachings. Any religion—even the very brightest, one which summons people to kindness and noble deeds—if interwoven with the priests’ nuances, can be a powerful device in their hands. This device has enabled them to subjugate whole entire nations and set them at odds with each other, to the point of utter self-annihilation. That’s the way it has been and still is today. Many contemporary religions still today involve occult rituals and teachings whose meaning and degree of influence on mankind is known only to the priests. The projection of jesus Christ’s crucifixion by a great many people’s thoughts is due to a particular occult ritual. But the people themselves involved in this projection—or, rather, their souls—will be crucified over and over again as long as they project this image. The collective thought of the crucifixion is so strong that it can penetrate right through to the flesh of people today Jesus’ bleeding wounds periodically appear on the bodies of certain believers—this is known as the stigmata mystery.2 Many 2

scholars believe that the stigmata, or bleeding wounds—are a symptom of mental illness. I would add that this is not a disease affecting a single individual, but rather a whole segment of society, and that its root cause is an occult ritual observance induced by the priests. However, instead of making a thorough investigation of this phenomenon, some enterprising people have exploited it for commercial purposes. Take, for example, the city of San-Nicolas in Argentina, home to the stigmatic Gladys Motta:3 all around her house are signs of a brisk trade in everything directly or indirectly connected to her. Anastasia’s grandfather put it this way: “People murdering each other, along with what you call terrorism, is rooted in the teachings of the priests which they have infused into many religious denominations, both large and small. “They are the ones who came up with the doctrine that Man’s true Divine life is not on the Earth but somewhere in another dimension. They are the ones who invented the image of a Paradise apart from the Earth God Himself created. It is because of this doctrine that so many religious fanatics manifest an attitude of neglect toward life on the Earth. It takes but a small amount of pressure exerted on their mind to induce them to kill either themselves or others. 0

Gladys Quiroga de Motta (1937-)—one of the more celebrated stigmatics in the world today. An ordinary housewife living in San Nicolas de los Arroyos (a small town 230 km north of Buenos Aires), Ms Motta had her first vision of the Virgin Mary on 25 September 1983, a vision repeated many times since. Ms Motta’s stigmata first appeared in November of the following year and then twice a year since, during Advent and Lent. Every year on 25 September thousands of pilgrims (now more than a million annually) descend upon the town, hoping to benefit from her presence. In recent years the increased tourist trade in San Nicolas, including the sale of ‘Blessed Virgin Mary’ souvenirs, saved the town’s economy following the privatisation of the local steel mill. “Anastasia has tried to bring this information to our attention through many different words and phrases. But not everybody will grasp what she says. Not everyone will understand my words. You, Vladimir, along with your readers, should give careful thought to what we have said, and cite your own examples and proofs. A number of different voices blending into a single whole will be able to bring liberation. “Look carefully at the root cause of war and terrorism today and you will clearly see the influence of this monstrous teaching.”

The Siberian elder went on at some length on this subject. He appeared to be just a little excited, sometimes pausing to stroke the cedar pendant hanging around his neck before returning to the topic of how we ourselves need to be more aware of the manifestation of occult rituals and teachings. “No spiritual teachers will be able to save people from these doctrines if the people don’t start thinking for themselves and learning to recognise them,” Grandfather said. Believing that I had grasped the significance of his statement, I set about investigating the phenomenon of terrorism in our lives. In the future this is something we shall have to do all together. I shall merely start the ball rolling. CHAPTER NINETEEN

Terrorism And so, in recent years, a wave of acts of terrorism has swept across many lands. Memories of large-scale events, such as those of II September 2001 in America, still haunt people’s minds. A fearful terrorist act took place even more recently in our country: from the 23rd to the 26th of October 2002 terrorists held more than S00 people hostage at the Moscow Theatre Centre on Dubrovka Street during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost.3 In between these two major acts of terrorism quite a few others have occurred, not quite so spectacular, in various parts of the globe, claiming human lives. On each occasion different governments have angrily denounced the terrorists involved. Their ‘special services’ keep mouthing assurances that the guilty parties will be punished, at the same time increasing the level of precautionary security measures. An international coalition to combat terrorism is already at work. Even today, however, the problem shows no signs of letting up. Quite to the contrary, it is taking on ever greater proportions and becoming increasingly refined in its methods. It is hard to escape the impression that someone has been making masterful ploys to keep leading both governments and their special services down the wrong path. The true source and chief organiser of many of the world’s terrorist acts came in for a brief mention not too long ago in Russia. During the October 2002 hostage crisis the major TV networks featured a whole host of interviews and commentaries. This included statements from the Emergency

Response Headquarters, presented by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, among others. This trim, grey-haired man spoke tersely, almost in military fashion. His speech included no hesitation-sounds like uh-iih... nhtn... His sentences were marked by thoughtful content and sensitivity, indicating that his thinking was relatively quick and precise. He was one of the first to declare that “we’re dealing here with religious fanatics”. Quite possibly not very many people paid attention to this particular phrase, but for many who did understand, it resounded like a bolt from the blue. For the very first time—from the lips of a Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs yet—one of the fundamental tenets of terrorism was called by its real name. This was followed by the floating of another concept: Islamic fundamentalism. Rumours began circulating that Islamic fundamentalists had declared war on Christians and Jews—Israel, Russia and the United States of America in particular. The question arises as to how to fight against religious fanaticism. I suggest we all calm down and take a more thoughtful look at the situation. Let us first decide whether religious fanaticism is found only in Islam or whether it exists in other religions as well. Of course the latter is true. Let’s not forget history. Think of the numerous Christian crusades. Think of the painting of the Boyarynya Morozova.2 Think of the names of all the martyrs ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of some religious dogma—martyrs who were elevated to sainthood after death. The fact becomes patently obvious that it is not religion as a whole, but rather specific dogmas infused into various religions which make people indifferent to their own life. The religious suicide-fanatic is quite confident that, far from being indifferent to life, he is crossing over into real life. How does this happen? Among any community of believers, Muslim or Christian, there can always be found a group of radical adherents to a particular dogma, whose faith can be honed by occult rituals to the point of fanaticism. The result is a kind of bio-robot who believes in something he himself can’t see or understand logically. Subsequently, those who are familiar with the functioning of the mind know perfectly well what buttons to press on this bio-robot, and they press them. Not with their fingers, of course. They simply indicate the target the biorobot is to destroy for the sake of a bright future. Then the bio-robots ‘'painting of the Boyarynya Morozova—a famous canvas painted in 1887 by the Russian artist Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (1848-1916), showing the

chained Boyarynya (Duchess) Feodosia Morozova on a horse-drawn sleigh surrounded by her ‘Old Believer’ supporters, all crossing themselves with two fingers, in defiant protest against the politically motivated reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church’s new decree at the time that three fingers were to be used in making the sign of the cross was one of the main points of contention in the raskol, or schism, that split the whole institution apart in the 17th century Tsar Alexey Romanov (father to Peter the Great), who instigated the reforms, had the Boyarynya (pron. baATAHrin-yd) arrested in 1671 and planned to execute her, but fear of public unrest caused him to commute her sentence to imprisonment in Borovsk, where she was kept in a pit and died in 1675. begin to work out the termination operation on their own and proceed to carry it out. Their own earthly life no longer has any meaning for them. They are, after all, confident in their own transition to a better, heavenly existence. And so long as there exists the doctrine of goodness being attainable not on the Earth, but somewhere else, no army or ‘special services’ will succeed in eliminating suicide-bombers. Let us picture the following situation. Let’s say the ‘special services’ belonging to the major powers have got together and through their joint efforts have managed to get rid of every last terrorist on the globe. But what will that change? New terrorists will simply be born—as long as the doctrine which produces them continues to exist. So what is the solution? Of course one cannot do without traditional precautionary measures. But along with these it is essential to understand how dangerous the doctrine is and to eliminate it before it produces more and more suicide-bombers. Understanding! That is the most important thing today! Otherwise the struggle against terrorism will simply turn out to be a joke. Picture the following situation. A religious fanatic, a suicide-bomber, seizes an aeroplane and aims it at some significant target in a major populated area. The authorities start negotiating with the terrorist—they tell him they are ready to meet any demands he has. But what these negotiators do not realise is that the religious fanatic’s real goal is not the satisfaction of his demands. His aim is to die and assure himself entry into the non-earthly Paradise he has imagined for himself. This dogma of a non-earthly Paradise, projected by the collective thought of people of various denominations, influences unbelievers too. For millennia now it has been exerting a most destructive influence on all mankind.

What I’m about to tell you now may seem unrealistic, even fantasaical. Still, the only way to solve this problem without violence may be the following. It is absolutely essential that Orthodox Church patriarchs, Islamic muftis,4 religious elders and (above all) Christians, Catholics and Muslims come together for a conference, to carefully examine the situation in the world, today and change the life-destroying doctrines in their religious teachings. It is essential that religious fanatics be helped to regain their human perspective on life. It is essential to declare: “Our Father is here, on the Earth, and not somewhere else!” And what if the religious leaders don’t get together? What if they don’t make any declaration like that? Not to worry. It has already been made! People aren’t turned on any more by the leaders of our religious denominations exhorting everyone to live in ‘peace and friendship’ with each other. Just the mere statement that “we will have nothing to do with terrorism” is no longer believable. A more radical step is required. I indicated that a meeting and declaration such as this may be dismissed as unrealistic. Let’s examine why. Why are we reluctant to believe that highlyplaced, highly religious leaders would not be able to simply come to an agreement amongst themselves? After all, if they can’t come to an agreement, then what can you expect from rank-and-file believers? If they can’t come to an agreement on their own, then common-sense elements in society and governments need to give them some help. It is absolutely essential that they talk amongst themselves and agree. Otherwise bombs will start talking for them, in a big way Much better for the mind of Man to do the talking. The mind of the children of God. At first glance it may seem as though it might take a rather long time for Anastasia’s ideas to effect any positive transformation in Russia, let alone other countries, seeing how gradually human consciousness ordinarily changes. However, experience has shown that in the case of many readers it can change instantaneously. Let’s look at what might happen in Chechnya5 if the Russian government, the State Duma, had adopted a law granting every willing family a hectare of land on which to establish a domain of their own along the lines recommended by Anastasia. The twenty thousand refugees who have been living with their families in tents for three years now would be granted their own domains. Over those three years each of those same tents which are now forming dirty tent cities would already be standing in its own splendid

garden. Some of the residents would have already managed to build themselves a house. Who is stopping this from coming about today? Somebody who favours not peace, but its opposite. Somebody who is trying to prevent any positive changes from taking place in Russia. Your efforts are wasted, chaps! I doubt any of you has even the foggiest idea of just who Anastasia is, or what powers she embodies within herself. I’ll say one thing: it’s not simply that she will create what she has thought up, she has already created it. It’s already coming to pass, and your opposition confirms it. Any building site has its share of garbage, but sooner or later they clean it up and plant flowers. CHAPTER TWENTIES

Pagans The main criticism levelled against Anastasia comes down to the allegation that she is a ‘pagan’—without even the slightest proof or examination of the ideas put forward by this taiga recluse. Though Anastasia herself clearly and distinctly called herself a Vedruss.6 Well, then, if she is a ‘pagan’, what does that imply? Japan, even today, is practically a pagan country. The Roman Empire, in its heyday, was pagan, too. Our forefathers and mothers were also pagan. But much more than that. At the time when the Egyptian state and the Roman Empire were flourishing, Vedic culture was still reigning in Russia.2 So, should we be proud of our pagan history and heritage, or be ashamed of it? We are told that our heritage is something to be ashamed of. The words paganism- and pagan3 have been turned into word-symbols— symbols designating something bad or terrible. The word Christian has also become a word-symbol. But it symbolises, by contrast, spirituality, decency, enlightened thought, closeness to God. Today we have the opportunity to observe the Christian as a type, and judge his worth by his fruits. We can judge by our own modern way of life... What am I saying?—we are not in a position to judge anything! We simply can’t compare this type with the way of life led by our pagan forefathers and mothers, which people

today are all too prone to curse, hidden as it is from our sight. In sum, what we are told about the history of our country (as served up to us) is the following: Our ancestors were some kind of horrible dark people, but then ‘enlighteners’ arrived, bringing with them a new ideology worked out in Israel—namely, Christianity. The Russian Prince Vladimir adopted it and baptised the whole nation of Rus’.4 Not long ago we celebrated the millennium of this event. But what is a thousand years? A mere split-second against the backdrop of billions of years. Well, let’s think in terms of from the word yazyk (literally, ‘tongue’— meaning a territory where the population shares the same language)—and were used by early Christians in Russia to refer to the totality of Russia’s (non-Christian) people, who spoke a language different from that of the Christian newcomers. The English term pagan is derived from Latin paganus, meaning ‘rural’ or ‘of the village’—rural areas were much slower than urban populations to accept Christianity Note that for the same reason the word villain (derived from village) in English has also acquired a negative meaning. 4

RUS’ (pron. ROOSS)—the name given to the large East Slavic state in the tenth century, north of the Black Sea, with its capital at Kiev. In 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev accepted baptism from the Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) church and shortly thereafter presided over a mass baptism of Kiev residents in the Dniepr River. In return he obtained the hand of the Byzantine Emperor’s sister in marriage as well as a military alliance with Byzantium. not a split-second, but a single day: That’s very important—being able to compress time. Now you will see what comes from this line of reasoning. Let’s say you awake one fine sunny morning and see visitors at your door. They proceed to tell you that your parents are bad and horrible pagans, that you must become Christian and instead of communing with Nature, you must ask forgiveness for your sins, since your parents were such sinners that their sins have attached themselves to you. And right off you agree with the foreigners’ statements. You follow them to their temple and kiss their hands. You ask for their blessing and try not even to think about your parents. You try to erase them from your memory, leaving behind nothing but the notion horrible pagans. This is the picture that emerges from our figurative compression of time. Over the past thousand years the ‘foreigners’ have focused our attention on a

multitude of different events: they tell about who went to war with whom, what splendid buildings they constructed, who married whom among the princes or kings, who gained power and how. But by comparison with one’s attitude toward one’s parents and their culture, this has no essential significance. All these other events, disasters and woes will simply be a consequence of the fundamental act of betraying one’s parents. “But we never betrayed our parents,” someone will argue. “Such events took place more than a thousand years ago, and those were quite different people who lived back then.” Well, I could paraphrase it, and expand the time frame, but it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. Your distant (very distant) foremother was a pagan. She loved and understood Nature. She was acquainted with the Universe and knew the meaning of the rising Sun. She gave birth to you... She gave birth to you, in the far-distant past, in a marvellous garden. And your beautiful foremother rejoiced over you, and your father was happy at your appearance. And your forefather and foremother wanted you, so far-far distant from your present-day self, to make this marvellous Space even more marvellous—to make it so that it would come down to you in the present day, enhanced by each succeeding generation, so that you, today, would be able to live on an Earth transformed into a planet of Divine Paradise. They did this especially for you. They were pagans, and were able to understand God’s thoughts through Nature. Your distant (very distant) mama and papa knew how to make you happy. They knew because they were pagans. Your father died in an unequal battle with foreign mercenaries, fighting for your future. Your mama was burnt at the stake because she refused to exchange your marvellous future for what you see around you today. But today still came... And today the descendants of the pagans are still on bended knee, still kissing the hands of the descendants of those who burnt their mothers and slew their fathers. They kiss their hands and make up songs about Russia’s inconquerability. They sing songs about the Russian spirit, slavishly crawling on their knees for more than a millennium now. What kind of freedom is that? Hey, you who have been oppressed by a thousand-year yoke, intoxicated by the drug of foreign ideology, it’s time to

wake up! Whoever is able, wake up and start thinking! How could it have happened that Anastasia, a Siberian recluse, a Russian, after saying only a few words about Russian history, was immediately met with such opposition—and not just anywhere, but right here in Russia itself?! If this country, as we believe, was not seized by ideologues from abroad, then who is behind all this opposition? It turns out that it is the Russians themselves who are opposing even the slightest mention of their past, of their parents. As though they—Russians—had quite lost their marbles. No, not quite, and this is evident from the multitude of letters, songs and verses, the constantly increasing print-runs (already totalling millions of copies) of books containing the sayings of Anastasia. The hearts of Russians are starting to beat in time with the hearts of their forebears—both distant and not-so-distant—who dreamt about their children’s happiness. The opposition is being provoked by mercenaries and their accomplices. What kind of mercenaries? What kind of mercenaries’ accomplices? Can you seriously think that the transformation of the whole Russian people’s way of life was brought about simply by the word of some Russian prince named Vladimir? Especially in view of his rather shaky hold on his princely throne. What, did he just happen to be sitting around one day and say: “Well, lads, I’ve decided you’re all going to have to forget your parents’ culture and be converted to Christianity”? And the people enthusiastically replied: “Sure, we’re tired of our ancestors’ culture—come on, Prince, baptise us”? Absurd? Of course it’s absurd. In actual fact, Prince Vladimir first tried to strengthen his hold on power through changing the religious views of the ancient Slavs, setting up a pantheon of pagan deities. Pagan belief, however, would not permit the hallowing of the social relations that would result. It rejected the attempted justification of social and proprietary inequality, Man’s exploitation of his fellow-Man and the divine right of kings. Hence Prince Vladimir, in order to satisfy his political ambitions, was obliged to select a foreign religion for the Russian people. It is no secret that the choice fell upon the Byzantine variant of Christianity, precisely because it allowed for the virtual subordination of the clergy to the prince’s authority, never mind the legal question of subordination to the patriarchate at Constantinople. But we are assured that Vladimir took this step for the benefit of Rus’s enlightenment and prosperity. We are all aware that a change of ideology is almost invariably accompanied

by social disasters and bloodshed. But in this case it wasn’t merely a question of a change of ideology It was a sharp sea-change in religion, culture, way of life and social order. Compared to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 this was a revolution ‘seventy times seven’. And if it too had been followed by a bloody civil war, it would have been a civil war ‘seventy times seven’. But in those early times there was no civil war. There was no civil war simply because pagan Russia was inhabited exclusively by pagans. We are told there was opposition, including armed opposition between pagans and Christians in Rus’. But if Rus’ was wholly pagan, then where did the Christians come from? They came from other countries, along with the mercenaries. Prince Vladimir at the time was a long way from being the most powerful prince in the region. Of course he had his own armed garrison. But we learn from history that this garrison was far from being equal to any serious military confrontation. Additional support from the populace was always required. The basic armed forces in Ancient Rus’ were always made up of the People’s Militia. But what kind of popular military resistance can we talk about if the people as a whole were opposed to baptism? Foreign mercenaries, perhaps? Of course! But was the Prince’s treasury wealthy enough to hire and maintain an entire army? Of course not! But the Prince still obtained the required funds. From whom? From the patriarchates of Rome and other christianised countries—these patriarchates had become fairly wealthy by that time. And so it happened a thousand years ago that the half-Russian Prince Vladimir, in return for the boost to his power, allowed foreign emissaries to conduct their propaganda campaigns, along with their schemes and provocations—and in the long run to commit acts of violence against the Russian people. Rus’ turned out to be a tougher nut to crack than the Roman Empire, and not easily given to being influenced by propaganda. This resulted in the Prince using mercenaries to reinforce his garrison and—again, with the mercenaries’ help—to get rid of a part of the rebellious population. My opponents may argue that this is only one version of events. No, my ideological friends, we are talking about objective historical reality It can be proved even without the phenomenal abilities of Anastasia or her knowledge of history I as a simple human being can prove it to you here and now, and that means a whole lot of other simple human beings will also be able to

figure it out. Perhaps those devotees of occult ideologies can tell me how many millions of Russian fathers and mothers they burnt alive at the stake? Name your figure—even a conservative estimate will do. Or are you going to tell me that this never happened? But it did! Your own sources mention it. Think back. At a congress that took place in Russia back in the fifteenth century, a group of Volga elders raised the question of abolishing the death penalty for heretics. Note that this was already five centuries after the christianisation of Russia, and here are the sons of Rus’, still resisting. Not only was the death penalty not abolished, but the Volga elders faced an unenviable fate. But if you still wish to look upon what I have said as simply my version of events, go ahead. Only let us then regard your statements as a version too, and then let’s compare both versions. A comparison will easily show that your version is completely illogical, that it is founded merely on statements which you demand to be accepted as truth. Besides, you are unable to present a single document confirming, for example, that pagans in Rus’ offered human sacrifices. Show people what archaeological evidence you have, go dig up the victims. You won’t find any, because there weren’t any. Show us the pagan books outlining their world-views. Give people a chance to compare the cultures of both civilisations. You refuse to show them? Why? Because you know very well that once people become acquainted with such texts, they will see the utter absurdity of their modern lifestyle. And so it turns out that your Utopian version is not backed up by any proof, and so you demand that everyone simply believe and that’s it. “Believe in us, or else you’ll be labelled a godless non-believer.” There is evidence to show that Rus’ was enslaved by deception and force. I shall not go through the whole list—a single example will suffice. From those times right up to the present day Rus’ may be considered an enslaved country. And foreign ideology is still prevalent in the Rus’ of the present. Even today Rus’ is still paying tribute money, only in a different form—the flight of capital, the sale of mineral resources, the stranglehold of poor-quality foreign food products on our market. And today the ideological component is very closely monitored. The mere mention of the culture of Ancient Rus’ is enough to call countermeasures into action—including the never-ending scheming and attacks on

Anastasia. You speak of freedom of speech, but why are you so afraid of her words? Why do you try to discredit your own country’s culture and not allow people to get to know it? I know why. The culture of our ancestors is marvellous, joyful and highly spiritual! In my previous volume, called The Book of Kin, I cited Anastasia’s account of a wedding rite involving two lovers.7 This rite still existed a scant two thousand years ago in Rus’. The publication of this book gave rise to a number of conclusions on the part of scholars and researchers. I have already mentioned that over the past while Anastasia’s sayings have been subjected to investigation by scholars in various disciplines. Some of them carry on their work openly and even try to have their findings published, while others simply send them in to the Anastasia Foundation8 for reference. So as not to leave them open to attack, I shall not name names, but simply convey the gist of their various reports.9 m Anastasia’s presentation of the wedding rite prevalent in the culture of Ancient Rus’ is a unique and priceless document attesting to the high level of knowledge among the inhabitants of the time. The whole rite is based not on belief in the supernatural but on the knowledge of that which we today term ‘supernatural’. The individual components of this rite maybe seen even today among various peoples. But in the modern interpretation these components are purely ritualistic, senseless and deficient in nature and, consequently, not up to the task of cementing the union of two people in love to the same degree of effectiveness as back when they were applied with full conscious awareness. In today’s version of the rite, some of these components seem meaningless, grounded in a kind of superstition. At best, they fall into the category of socalled ‘esoteric’ activities. Anastasia’s description takes us from a misperception of the rite as a senseless act to an awareness of its preeminent rationality and indicates not only knowledge but the ultimate height of spirituality among those generations of Slavs which came before us. [...} A comparative analysis of today’s wedding rites and the one described by Anastasia fosters the impression that today’s rites are more characteristic of an undeveloped primitive society, while those of Ancient Rus’ belong to a civilisation which is highly developed in every sense of the word. For example: Among a number of peoples today, including Russians, there is a ritual

activity of showering the newlywed couple with cereal grains. One of the mothers or grandmothers or relatives of the newlyweds scatters cereal grains in front of the couple on their way into their home or throws it over the couple themselves as a token of happiness for the future family. This kind of activity today is associated with superstition or esoterica. There is no other rational explanation for it. What sense is there in seeds of grain simply falling on the floor, asphalt or pathway leading to the house where they will immediately get trampled on and crushed? The ritual described by Anastasia also includes a special act involving cereal grains. But here, right off, one can associate it with several distinct and clearly thought-through rational purposes. All the wedding guests— relatives, friends and acquaintances—bring with them seeds from their best plants, and each one plants by his own hand the little seed he has brought with him in the spot designated by the newlywed couple. In terms of material wealth, it is not simply betokened but actually achieved in practice by the special act described. In just a brief space of time—an hour or two—the newlyweds have the makings of their future orchard, drawing upon the best fruit and berry plantings in the neighbourhood, as well as a vegetable garden and a green hedge wherewith to frame their Space. {...} No less important is a second, or psychological, aspect of this special act. Many of us know about the improvement in one’s mental state upon entering into natural surroundings. Such pleasant sensations are enhanced by contact not with someone else’s garden plantings but with your very own. The strength of spirit and level of emotions you should feel upon entering a garden where every little tree, bush and blade of grass was created as a gift for you directly by your parents, relatives and friends is something we can only guess at, as it is doubtful that anyone living on the Earth today is able to have such a Space as this. And by all appearances it was not just material prosperity but, more importantly, one’s inner positive emotions resulting from such a special act, that played a fundamental role therein. {...} In current esoteric literature a lot is said about the energy of kundalini and chakras,10 The information presented basically focuses attention on the possibility of the existence of chakras. There is little doubt as to the existence of the energy of love or the energy of sexual attraction between men and women. The vast majority of people have experienced the effect of this energy on themselves. However, neither the theoreticians of the past nor our modern

sciences have ever touched upon the possibility that Man can actually control this energy. The rite described by Anastasia has shown for the first time how Man can control, transform and maintain this energy {...} In actual fact, the young lovers materialise the love which has been bestowed upon them—or which has entered into them. With the help of this energy they shape a visible and tangible Space around them. They see to it that this great energy remains with them in perpetuity. Why was this possible for them, but not in our present reality? Let us compare the actions of two loving couples—in the past and present. The average loving couple today spends their time either at entertainment venues or alone together on walks or at home. They often enter into sexual relations even before marriage. [...} The basic goal of most lovers today is the official recognition of their relations by a secular marriage bureau or a church. Research has shown that young couples do not adequately plan for their future life together. If a couple should try to determine their course of life together after marriage, it is a vague conjecture at best. Psychologists observe that it is the hope of each would-be newlywed that, after joining together, their life will be improved by their partner. They all hope that the elevated, life-fulfilling state of love will carry on after marriage. But the love is fleeting. The surrounding space becomes routine— far from reminding them of their earlier feelings of being in love, it starts to become irritating through its routineness and primitiveness. The irritation can also arise in the couple’s relationship to one another. Few suspect that something other than this irritation is at the root of the couple’s actions after marriage. Dissatisfaction actually results from an inability to make proper use of the state of love. [...} As practice has shown, neither secular laws nor religious admonitions are capable of ensuring continuing mutual affection or even an attitude of mutual respect. Now let us take a look at the actions of the young couple in the account presented by Anastasia and try to come up with a logical, scientific interpretation. First, the declaration of love in itself is quite striking: “With you, my beautiful goddess, I could create a Space of Love to last forever,” the young man told his intended. And if the girl’s heart responded in kind, she might answer: “My god, I am ready to help you in your grand

co-creation.” Now compare this with the declaration of love formulated by the famous poet, which comes the closest to describing the gist of modern attitudes toward the energy of love: I love you so, what can I say more, What else could I tell yon besides...f11 As we can see, the first declaration above proposes right off a distinctly formulated grand act, namely the creation of a Space of Love. In effect, it is a scientific materialisation of love. The second declaration, on the contrary, does nothing more than state “I love you” with no further action specified. It is simply that neither he nor she have any idea how and for what purpose to use their energy of love. {...} The lovers in Anastasia’s account, by mutual agreement, set about forming a Space of Love for themselves and their future generations. They go off by themselves, and may even spend the night in the shelter they have built on their chosen plot of land, but refrain from entering into sexual relations. Is this some kind of ritualistic abstention? {...} Such instances of abstention are part of many peoples’ religious beliefs. They are also found in secular ethics. Young people in love should not enter into sexual relations before their marriage is registered or, alternatively, before they are wedded in a religious ceremony However, the vast majority of young people today pay no heed to religious admonitions or public condemnation, but freely launch into pre-marital sex. Why? The most probable answer lies in the complete illogicality of both the social and religious requirements—the lack of a plausible explanation as to what the energy of love is all about—or, more accurately, simple ignorance thereof. The energy of love activates a whole complex of feelings in Man. It accelerates the mental processes. And this energy can be compared to an apex of inspiration which presupposes a series of grand acts to follow. Thanks to their knowledge, as well as a highly developed culture of mutual human relations, the young couples of Ancient Rus’ quite naturally directed the energy of love and sexual attraction toward the act of creating a Space for their future life together. What two young lovers create together can hardly be surpassed, one would imagine, with the help of scientific investigation. The following statement of Anastasia’s attests to this: The world of academe is in no position to create even the similitude of a splendid domain because, again, there is a law of the Universe which says: A single Creator inspired by love is stronger than all the sciences combined, which are deprived of love.

All the actions of the participants in the events reflected in Anastasia’s account of the wedding rite are infused by logic, rationality and the highest degree of culture and spirituality. By comparison, what a sorry spectacle is offered by our modern wedding ceremonies, with the main focus on the reception, where the guests gorge themselves on food and alcohol. In terms of their emotional richness, along with their meaningful and informative content, Anastasia’s presentations of the parables and rites of Ancient pagan (or, to use her term, Vedic) Rus’ by far surpass all the ancient tales we know of, describing our past history Even the famous Song of Igors campaign0 pales before them. 10

Song of Igor’s campaign (Russian: Slovo o polku Igoreve)—a celebrated poetic chronicle of Ancient Rus’, dating back to the twelfth century. Through her narratives on Vedic Rus’ Anastasia is, in effect, revealing to us the highly spiritual culture of a civilisation of which we were hitherto unaware. She is radically transforming academic concepts as to the history not only of our country but of humanity as a whole. Such an unexpected sea-change, not to mention the simplicity with which it was brought about, has thrown many leading lights of contemporary academia into confusion. And in an effort to somehow maintain the framework of the academic positions they have attained, they try to pretend that nothing has changed, that they know nothing about the information presented. They are like ostriches hiding their heads in the sand. The information is real, it is truly priceless and sensational, and it will come to be demanded more and more by society at large. Who might that be? Under whose influence are they operating today—these people that are calling our ancestors ‘barbaric pagans’, perverting that great word pagan to suggest something backward, or evil? What programme are they following? And how come our historians have accepted such a definition? It couldn’t have been our historians that did that. Maybe they’re not historians at all? If they haven’t been able to tell us up to now anything concrete about the history of our country of just one thousand years ago, but keep on insulting or tacitly allowing others to insult this period of our history, then these are not historians of Russia, but traitors or mercenaries, acting on behalf of somebody else. And we shouldn’t be relying upon them any longer. It is vital that we ourselves, through our joint efforts, bit by bit, use analogies to restore our

own past and rehabilitate both our forebears and ourselves. If we don’t... Many readers the Ringing Cedars Series have already begun to write a Book of Kin for their children.11 Some of them will certainly want, too, to express their thoughts on the history of Ancient Rus’, to tell their children about where we came from. But what can we write about our past? Are we really going to carry on with that nonsense we have been told for so long? n

See especially Book 6, Chapter io: “The Book of Kin”.

Maybe it’s better not to write anything about our past, just pretend it never existed. But that won’t work. If we act that way, then our children after us will keep getting served up the same story over and over again in a way that will suit somebody’s particular interests. Someone may wonder how we, as ordinary folk—not scholarly historians— can restore a history of two or three thousand years ago. We can! Since we’ll be doing it not because we’re carrying out someone’s instructions, but according to the dictates of our hearts and minds. I shall attempt to start the ball rolling, but let us all together begin gathering whatever stories, facts and analogies we can, and putting together our own family histories. Let us all begin thinking and reasoning about this together. As I said, a lot can be restored even just using analogy. Here’s an example. Take a look. More than two thousand years ago the mighty Roman Empire was in its heyday, including Roman law, the Roman Senate and the Roman Emperors. The cities of the Empire were adorned with epochal edifices, and Rome already had a water supply system. There were libraries, and a flourishing of art. The Roman Empire waged quite a number of wars. In contrast to the developed states of the pre-Christian era, there is virtually no information about the Russian state—its political structure, its territories or culture. Maybe it simply didn’t exist? Of course it existed. We know from historical sources that by the time Rus’ was baptised it already had cities and princedoms. And Prince Vladimir, who oversaw the baptism of Rus’, was by no means its first prince. The same sources tell us about his father, Prince Sviatoslav12 In other words, Rus’ existed contemporaneously with the Roman Empire. It had its cities and a multitude of wealthy settlements. Yes, wealthy, because the cities of Ancient Rus’ took shape not just as capitals of princedoms, but as trade and handicraft centres serving the many settlements in the outlying area. Poor settlements do not give rise to cities. There would simply be no one to finance their construction and no consumer demand for what they produced.

And now let us try to determine whether pre-Christian Rus’ was a strong or a weak state? Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it was extremely weak. Not only that, but historians claim that Rus’ was divided into petty independent princedoms which were constantly warring with each other. But once again the question arises: if pre-Christian Rus’ was so weak, a state torn apart by internecine conflicts, why did it not fall prey to attacks by more powerful states? As a weak state by comparison with its neighbours, not to mention the Roman Empire, the Russian state could have been easily conquered and transformed into a tribute-paying colon. But here is where the enigma and the mysteries begin. In all the annals of the Roman Empire and other states of the period there is no mention of any attack on Rus’. We ourselves know that up to the time of the official baptism, Rus’ was a free and independent state, unconquered by any other. So, why did no one try to conquer pagan Rus’? I_

Prince Sviatoslav I of Kiev (942-972)—a warrior prince of Kievan Rus’, said to be the first Slavic prince with a completely Slavic name. The name is comprised of two ancient Russian roots: sviat (holy) andr/A (praise/glory), which had the same meanings as the Old Norse names of his mother (Olga) and father (Rurilc), respectively He is known largely from what is described in a document known as Povest’ vremennykh let (Chronicle of ancient years, sometimes referred to as the Primary chronicle or the Tale of bygone years), which refers in large part to Scandinavian and Byzantine influences on Russian culture and religion. But not all Russian scholars accept this document as historical fact. Perhaps it was because it had an extensive, well-organised and wellequipped army? But no, that it did not have. Even during the time of the princes there were only small armed garrisons whose numbers were far from equalling those of the Roman legions. We shall never understand the historical truth if we start with a false reasoning about pagan Rus’—especially Vedic Rus’. On the other hand, everything falls into place if we accept and understand the opposite hypothesis. Vedic Rus’, before the time of the princes, was a highly spiritual, highly organised civilisation. It was that same ‘lost civilisation on the Ranh about which legends would be subsequently told. I deliberately referred to Ancient Rus’ not as a state but as a civilisation,

since the benchmark of statehood for that period is considered to be Egypt or Rome. These were under the control of supreme rulers, priests and an elite that had enriched itself at the expense of slaves. The social structure of Rus’ was significantly perfected and more civilised in comparison to Egypt or Rome. In Rus’ at that time there was absolutely no slavery Neither were there any petty princedoms warring amongst themselves. Rus’ was comprised of marvellous kin’s domains. Decisions were taken at popular assemblies known as veche. Information was circulated by ‘wise-men’.13 Ij

wise-men (Russian: volkhvy), also known as Magi or wizards—a reference to ancient ‘scientists’ with particular knowledge of the workings of Nature, often possessing exceptional powers. In Ancient Rus’ one of the volkhvy's major tasks was the development of agricultural symbology and fertility rites to guarantee abundant harvests. Many volkhvy also fulfilled the role of travelling community teachers. Further details will be presented in Rites of Love (Book 8, Part 2 of the Ringing Cedars Series). This is the same reference that is found regarding the ‘wise men’ who visited the infant Jesus in Bethlehem, according to the NewTestament (see, for example, Matth. 2:1). But note how the concepts have been distorted, including the meaning of the word civilisation. Egypt, where all the people were subject to the rule of the priests and pharaohs, was known as a highly developed, ‘civilised’ state, while Rus’ at the same period was called backward, uncivilised and weak, without any kind of real statehood. That’s pretty steep! If there was no slavery, and no petty-tyrant despots, does that mean there was no state—that Rus’ was uncivilised? Again, the same question: why then did nobody conquer Rus’? There were, of course, attempts at conquering the Vedruss people. But those who tried it always endeavoured to erase the results of such attempts, even from their own memory. Here is what Anastasia told me about one of these attempts that took place more than two thousand years ago. 1 Numbers 18:19-31 (cited here from The New English Bible). Note that “the Tent of the Presence” corresponds to “the tabernacle of the congregation” in the older Authorised Version of the Bible. 2 In some Christian churches, including the Russian Orthodox, kissing a

crucifix is part of accepted ritual. 'stigmata— marks or pain sensations in places on the body corresponding to Jesus’ wounds from the crucifixion. The word stigmata comes from the Latin word for marks in the Vulgate edition of Galatians 6: 17: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus “ (quoted here from the Authorised Version). The majority of stigmatics are said to be female members of Roman Catholic orders. 3 Nord-Ost (lit. ‘North-East’ in German)—a Russian musical play based on a novel by Veniamin Kaverin and telling a romantic story set in the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago (in Russia’s Far North) in 1913. During the performance the premises were seized by a group of well-trained and wellarmed commandos (including a group of women with explosives strapped to their bodies) who demanded from the Russian government the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from the war-crippled Chechnya republic. The theatre was eventually stormed by Russian elite ‘special troops’ but the deadly gas they used ended up killing 130 hostages on the spot and causing many more to die afterward. The theatre was closed temporarily after the hostage crisis, but re-opened with the same production the following February. Subsequent attendance was poor, however, possibly because of fears of renewed attacks, and the play was cancelled in May 2003. 4 mufti— an Islamic leader who has studied and is authorised to interpret Islamic law. 5 Chechnya—a small, mainly Muslim republic within the Russian Federation (see footnote 4 in Book 5, Chapter 17: “Questions and answers”). 6 Vedruss (pron. vid-ROOSS)—see Book 6, Chapter 4: ‘Adormant civilisation”. “Vedic culture—see the section on ‘Vedism’ in Book 6, Chapter 5: “The history of mankind, as told by Anastasia”. "paganism, pagan—In Russian, the wordpaganyi (now speltpoganyi) means ‘foul’, ‘unclean’, ‘vile’ and has been frequently used by Christian ideologists—in conjunction with yazychnik (‘pagan’)—to refer to adherents to Russia’s pre-Christian religion, as well as ‘non-believers’ in general. Thus under the influence of the Christian church over centuries the term yazychnik has acquired a strong negative connotation. Yazychestvo

(‘paganism’) and yazychnik (‘pagan’)—both stressed on the second syllable —are derived 7 See the section entitled: ‘A union of two—a wedding” in Book 6, Chapter 5: “The history of mankind, as told by Anastasia”. All farther quotations from Anastasia in this chapter are taken from this same section. 8 The Anastasia Foundation for Culture and Assistance to Creativity—a nonprofit organisation based in the city of Vladimir. See Book 5, Chapter 15: “Making it come true”. 9 "Five different reports are cited (the first at some length), set off by asterisks in the English translation. 10 kundalini— the power (energy) coiled up in a form of a serpent and located at the base of the spine, at the body’s lower chakra (energy plexus). Many oriental yoga practices aim at spiritual enlightenment by awakening the kundalini energy and moving it up the spine to the higher chakras. 11 From Tatiana’s declaration of love in her letter to Onegin in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (better known in the West as Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same title), Act I, Scene 2 (JW translation). 12 have presented to you, dear readers, the pronouncements of a number of academic researchers. As you can see, they confirm the informational significance of Anastasia’s sayings and even talk about the subsequent confusion among contemporary scholars. But confusion is one thing. The opposition—the concentrated efforts being made to stop the spread of this information which sheds light on the history of our country and our people—is quite another. Somebody has felt very threatened by the possibility of our digging into the knowledge and culture of our forebears.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Combat In those days the Vedic way of life was still the prevalent culture in Rus’. The Vedruss people still had no cities. Rus’ was made up of a large number of settlements, rich in extraordinary foods, the joy of life and bright people who lived in their family domains.1 There were other countries at that time, which boasted of great cities where the power of money was becoming more and more dominant over human aspirations. And there were great armies, and with their help rulers attempted to bring the whole world under their own control. And many countries bowed under the control of the dark forces. Once an elite Roman legion was sent to Rus’. Five thousand warriors approached the boundary of the first settlement they came to. And they threateningly made camp right on the outskirts of the little village. The military officers called for the village elders to come to them. And the elders came, knowing no fear in the face of this ominous force. The officers explained that they came from the most powerful country of all and that, consequently, all the settlements must pay tribute to them. Anyone unable to pay would be taken into slavery. The elders replied that they were not disposed to share their food with any evil-doers, thereby feeding hordes of dark forces. r

The text of Anastasia’s narrative is reproduced in this chapter without quotation-marks for each paragraph. Whereupon the commander-in-chief said to the elder most advanced in age: “I have heard about your barbarity and your unusual way of life. Your mind is incapable of even appreciating the correlation of forces here. With a mind like that you will never be free in a civilised Empire. You will either exist as slaves or not exist at all.” And the Vedruss village elder replied: “It is the one who is not capable of using Divine provisions for his food that is not allowed to exist. Look.” And with these words the elderly Vedruss took two identical fresh and beautiful apples out of his pocket. He surveyed the officers, all glistening in their armour, but his gaze rested on a young private soldier. He went over to

the soldier and held out one of the apples, saying: “Take this, my son, may this fruit be a delight to your soul.” The young private took the fruit and tasted it right there in the sight of all those standing around. His face lit up with a delight that provoked envy among the others. Then the elder, still holding the second beautiful apple in his hand, turned again to the commander-in-chief, went over to him and said: “My soul has no desire to offer this marvellous fruit to you. What that means, try to understand yourself.” And he placed the second apple at the feet of the commander-in-chief “How dare you, old man, answer back that way to a commander distinguished in battle?” a Roman orderly exclaimed, as he picked up the apple and gasped in amazement. And all the commissioned officers and their subordinates were in shock from what they saw. For the beautiful apple had begun rotting right before their eyes in the orderly’s hands. And right before their very eyes a swarm of midges suddenly appeared and devoured the rotting fruit. And the Vedruss elder continued: “Nobody can buy the fruit of Divine grace for gold or take it by force. You may call yourself a lord and master and imagine yourself defeating countries, but the only thing you will eat that way is rot.” “This is not mysticism, Vladimir, you must understand. Fruits grown with love can give their grace only to those who themselves have instilled love in them, or to those to whom the growers give them of their own free will. This is the order of the Universe, and for proof of this you need only take a careful look at the present day People are doomed to eat fruit which is far from fresh.” “But what about the wealthy?” I queried. ‘And those that rule the world?” “They face even greater problems with food. They are afraid of poisoned fruit and dainty dishes. And before they eat anything themselves, they have those around them taste it first. They post guards and special servicemen around their foodstuffs, but to no avail... Many a ruler has died in agony from eating bad food. “You will note that many people are trying today to produce health-restoring cedar-nut oil. Only the healing properties of this oil vary, depending upon the thought of the producer. ‘And that Vedruss elder was no mystic. He was merely outlining what every child growing up in Vedic Rus’ knew about all the time.” &B But the aged Vedruss’s remarks provoked anger and he was taken captive. He was put into a cage so that he could witness the torching of the houses

and gardens in his village. And so that he could watch its men, women and children parade before him in chains. The commander said to him spitefully: “Look there, old man. There are your fellow-villagers, now they are slaves. You made fun of me in front of my retinue in a bad way, and the fruit you gave me showed immediate signs of decay. Now all your fellow-villagers are slaves, and they will now produce undecaying fruit for us under pain of death.” “Under pain of death,” observed the elder, “one can only grow that which brings death, even though it may have a pleasant appearance. You are primitive. You will not be able to conquer my country. I have released a pigeon with information about you. Once they see it, my magi will tell everyone the news.” The commander issued an order. Runners fanned out to all the Vedruss settlements with a view to delivering the order. It demanded that each settlement send representatives to see how strong, well-trained and wellequipped were the Roman troops. And how they were capable of wiping any bravely resisting settlements off the face of the Earth and taking the children and young women as slaves. And for everybody to bring tribute to his warriors so fearsome. And from now on to collect tribute for the Empire, and deliver the tribute to the Empire in person. On the appointed day, at dawn, ninety Vedruss lads appeared before the huge camp. Out in front stood Radomir—whom you have heard about before—wearing a long shirt Liubomila had sewn for him with love. And all the young men with him had on light-coloured shirts. No helmets of iron covered their light-brown hair. Their heads were framed instead by bands woven from grasses. They carried no shields to protect themselves from fatal blows. Only two swords hung from a belt around each one’s waist. They stood silently holding their steeds by the bridle; many of their horses did not even have a saddle. The officers in command of the five-thousand-strong well-trained troops, who had gathered together in council, stared at the ninety young lads. The commander-in-chief came over to the cage in which the head of the razed Vedruss settlement was being held, and asked: “What can the presence of these lads possibly mean? I ordered the elders of all the settlements to come and hear the decrees of my country’s Emperor.” The Vedruss replied from his cage:

‘All the village elders know what you want to tell them. They do not like what you have to say. And they decided not to go meet someone they do not like. In front of your troops’ camp you see but ninety lads from the next village. They are wearing swords. Possibly they want to do battle.” Oh you brainless barbarians1, mused the commander-in-chief. I could send a single detachment to fight them and it would be a light task, of course, to kill them off completely. But what good would come from a bunch of dead bodies? Would it not be better to explain the situation to them and bring them back hale and hearty to the Emperor for slaves? “Listen to me, old man,” the commander addressed the Vedruss elder. “The young people will pay heed to what you say. You explain to them the absurdity of such an unequal combat. Tell them they ought to submit to us. I’ll spare their lives. Of course they’ll be taken captive and I’ll make slaves out of them. But they will not be living in a barbaric land, they’ll be provided with food and clothing if they become obedient slaves. You tell them, old man, how utterly absurd it would be to shed their blood in such unequal combat.” The Vedruss elder replied: “I shall try I shall tell them. I can see for myself the blood boiling in these young Vedruss lads.” “Then go ahead, old man.” The Vedruss elder began speaking from his cage in a loud voice so that the warriors standing before the camp could hear. “My sons, I can see the two swords hanging from each of your belts. I can see the spirited steed that each of you has by his side. You are holding them by the bridle, you are not overexerting them with your own weight, but you are saving their strength for battle. You have decided to go into battle, under the wise Radomir. Answer me.” The commanders and troops watched as Radomir stepped forward. After making a deep bow before the elder in the cage, he responded by confirming the elder’s words. “I thought as much,” said the Vedruss elder, and went on: “You are their leader, Radomir. I believe you are aware that the forces you see before you are not equal to your own.” And once more Radomir bowed in acknowledgement of the elder’s affirmation. The officers were satisfied with this dialogue. But what they heard next astounded them like nothing they had ever heard before. The elder went on:

“Radomir, you are young and your thought moves swiftl. So spare the visitors’ lives. Do not kill all of them. Make them depart and put down their weapons and not play with them any more.” At first the officers were in a state of shock upon hearing the elder’s extraordinary words. Then the commander-in-chief exclaimed with irritation: “You’re mad! You’re out of your mind, old man! Who is in a position to spare whose life here—you have absolutely no idea! You have just condemned all your fellow-villagers to death. I’ll give the orders now...” “You are too late. Look, a few moments ago Radomir was standing there contemplating, but you saw how he acknowledged what I said. That means he understood my words and will not kill you.” A second later the officers saw the ninety young men standing in front of the camp suddenly leap onto their steeds and head at full speed toward the camp. The commander-in-chief managed to order a detachment of archers to prepare themselves to meet the Vedruss warriors with a hail of arrows. But when the warriors on horseback came within shooting range, they suddenly jumped down off their horses and began running alongside them. As soon as they got close to the Roman troops, the Vedruss lads formed an oval encircling half their number along with the horses, while the other half cut through the Roman ranks, which had not yet completely come together, and started fighting. In each hand they held a sword, which they wielded equally deftly with either hand. But they simply knocked the weapons out of their opponents’ hands without fatally wounding them. The reserve legionnaires had a hard time picking their way through the disarmed and wounded Roman soldiers lying on the ground to replace them in combat. In the meantime, the small Vedruss contingent determinedly pushed through to the tent of the commander-in-chief. Radomir used his sword to hack open the lock on the cage where the Vedruss elder was being held captive. After bowing to him, he easily picked him up by the waist and set him on a horse. Two of the young warriors of Radomir’s contingent seized the Roman commander-in-chief, threw him over the rump of another horse and brought him into the centre of their oval. The valiant warriors quickly pushed ahead, not back the way they came, but forward, and before long they left the crush of the Roman troops behind, jumped on their horses and dashed off. But after only a few minutes’ ride they stopped at a small hillock and dismounted. Almost all of them then lay down on the grass, stretched out their arms and stayed motionless.

The captured Roman commander was amazed to see the Vedruss lads lying on the ground fast asleep. Pleasant smiles brightened their faces. In the meantime their steeds peacefully nibbled at the grass beside them. Only two watchmen kept an eye on the actions of the Roman troops. Left without their regimental superior, the Roman officers argued for some time, blaming each other for what had happened, and then argued over who should take charge and how to proceed. At long last they decided to despatch a thousand horsemen (almost all the cavalry) in pursuit of the Vedruss warriors. The remainder would follow the pursuers at a distance, in case of unforeseen events such as the appearance of reinforcements on the Vedruss side. The basic motivating factor behind this decision, however, was fear. The thousand-strong detachment of well-equipped cavalrymen launched into the chase. No sooner had the ranks of the Roman cavalry begun leaving the camp than one of the warriors of Radomir’s contingent, seated on his steed, gave a blast on his horn. The warriors lying on the grass sprang up at once, seized their horses’ bridles and began running. Having rested themselves after the battle, the Vedruss lads ran very fast, but gradually, very gradually, the pursuing Roman cavalry started catching up to them. Anticipating victory, the cavalry commander ordered his bugler to signal an escalation of the pursuit, and the bugle sounded. But the thousand eager legionnaires were already spurring on their frothing horses in a mad rush to shorten the interval between them and the Vedruss lads running on foot ahead of them. There now remained a very small space between the two. Again the agitated commander ordered an acceleration of the chase. And once again the bugle sounded forth. But by now the mad gallop proved too much for some of the broken-winded Roman horses and they fell in their tracks. Paying no attention to them, the horsemen were already drawing their swords to attack the fleeing Vedruss warriors, when suddenly... At the sound of the horn all the Vedruss runners leapt onto their horses and... they soon began to put an ever-increasing distance between themselves and their pursuers. The captured Roman commander-in-chief realised that the Vedruss warriors had been saving their horses’ strength up ’til this point and now there was no way his men would be able to catch up. They changed both the Vedruss elder’s and the Roman commander’s horses. The commander also observed that the lads were not sitting upright, but lying prone along their horse’s rump, clinging on to the mane, once more sound asleep. He wondered about

their need to conserve their strength at this stage of the game. It was only later that he would find out why. The Romans, stimulated by the chase, kept feverishly whipping their horses. Many of their steeds fell beneath them, while the sturdier specimens among them, given the weight of the heavily armoured soldiers on their backs, could not keep up with the Vedruss horses, which remained untired by the pursuit. Once the cavalry commander was able to discern the folly of trying to overtake his opponents, he ordered all his men to stop and dismount. But by now it was too late. A good number of the Roman horses were brokenwinded and fell to their knees. ‘All rest!” came the command to the Roman cavalry. And then the soldiers, who had just dismounted from their exhausted steeds, saw the Vedruss contingent sweeping down upon them like a whirlwind. The young warriors held a sword at the ready in each hand. Bounding all along the edge of the circle of dismounted Romans, they inflicted light wounds on soldier after soldier, knocking their weapons out of their hands. And the Roman legion was seized with horror. And they all began running for help toward the infantry that was following behind. The Vedruss contingent came after them on horseback, but for some reason kept their distance. Nor did they touch the Roman soldiers which had fallen from exhaustion. The fleeing Romans—by this time no longer running, but swaying from fatigue as they walked—stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of Radomir with his two swords at the ready, along with his horsemen right behind him, all calm and full of energy. The Roman soldiers dropped to their knees, and those that still held weapons placed them on the ground in front of them. Now utterly powerless, they began awaiting the anticipated vengeance at the hands of the Vedruss warriors. Radomir and his companions walked among the Roman soldiers seated on the ground, their swords sheathed. And Radomir and his companions began talking with the soldiers about life. Taking off their grass headbands, they gave them to the legionnaires so they could apply the healing herbs to their wounds. The herbs stopped the blood flowing from the wounds and took away the pain. And they returned the com-mander-in-chief to his legion. Some time later, upon returning from their campaign against Vedic Rus’, the fine-looking columns of soldiers marched into Rome.

The Emperor had been informed by courier-runners about the strange events that had befallen the Roman legions’ elite soldiers. After he had the opportunity to see his soldiers and officers for himself, he was overcome by a sense of embarrassment that lasted for several weeks. Whereupon he issued a secret order to eliminate all the detachments from his army that had participated in the Vedic Rus’ campaign, both soldiers and officers, and have them transferred—to various corners of the Empire. And he gave strict instructions that nothing should be heard about the campaign even by their friends and close relations, not even a word. The Emperor himself sent troops to Rus’ no more. And in a secret book written for his successors he implored: “If you want to keep the Empire intact, as to a war with the Vedruss people, do not even think of such an act.” The Emperor was no fool. He was alarmed to see his troops returning from their campaign all healthy and unharmed, but carrying no spoil with them. Indeed, their faces betrayed no anger or even a desire to serve in war again. If he let men such as these remain in the Imperial army, who knows whether they might infect the whole corps with the same desire not to go to battle any more. ee All the same, the Emperor’s successor made another attempt to conquer the Vedruss people. Having learnt a lot about their tactics from those that had had contact with them, he sent ten thousand soldiers on a second campaign to Rus’. Once more the soldiers arrived at a small Vedruss settlement, where they speedily made camp and set up fortifications. Runners were sent to summon the elders. But at the appointed hour the Roman officers looked and saw coming toward them from the Vedruss village only a little girl about ten years old, accompanied by a little boy who could not have been more than five. The soldiers parted ranks to make way for them as they arrived, arguing with each other. Tugging at his sister’s skirt, the boy said: “Sis Palashechka,2 if you don’t let me conduct the talks myself, I shan’t think proper of you.” “What improper thing would you think of me, you little scamp?” the sister asked her brother. “I shall think of you, Sis Palashechka, that you were born a jolly naughty girl!”

“It’s not proper to think that.” “It’s not proper indeed. So let me conduct the talks with the enemies.” ‘And if I agree, how will you think of me then?” “I shall think that you, Sis Palashechka, are the prettiest, cleverest and kindest girl of all.” '‘"Palashechka (stress on second syllable)—an affectionate name in Medieval Russia. ‘All right, brother, you start the talks. I don’t find it proper to talk with addle-brained people.” The children presented themselves boldly before the Roman officers, and the girl’s little brother addressed them, without the slightest hint of trembling: “My daddykins told me to tell you all that in our village everybody is gathered round for a celebration at our feasting-ground. It is held there every year. And every year the people enjoy themselves at the feasting-ground. It’s not proper, my daddykins says, it would be wrong for him to leave the celebrations and come and talk nonsense with you. So he sent me—and my sister tagged along.” The commander-in-chief even let out an audible squeal upon hearing the boy’s audacious remarks. His face turned pale, and he grasped at his sword. “You insolent young whelp, how dare you speak to me like that? I’ll make you a slave in my stables well into your old age! Your sister, now...” “Hey, there, gramps!” the sister interrupted. “Hey, there, gramps! Give up those silly playthings of yours—your swords and shields and spears—and run back home lickety-split. You better run while you still can. See that cloud coming? It won’t talk with any visitors. It’ll attack you without any words first.” With that the girl unwrapped the bundle she was carrying and, taking out a thimbleful of some kind of pollen-dust, sprinkled it over her brother. Then she took the remainder and sprinkled it on herself. In the meantime the cloud-horde kept approaching steadily over the land, all the while buzzing and increasing in size, until it finally descended upon the camp. And before long the Romans’ armour lay on the ground—their shields and spears and swords. The officers’ and the soldiers’ tents were left empty. The brother and sister stood among the troops’ discarded things, and the little brother said to his elder sister: “You still didn’t let me speak with the enemies, Sis Pala-shechka! I didn’t finish telling them everything I wanted to.”

‘Anyway, you started. You mustn’t be upset if I interfered a bit—you’re a Vedruss warrior, a defender of your Motherland!” “Well, okay I shall still think that I have a well-behaved, kind and beautiful sister.” Picking their way through the discarded armour, the brother and his beautiful sister headed back to their village. The receding cloud already looked quite small from where they stood. Even so, within it were ten thousand elite Roman warriors fleeing home in terror. They kept falling and getting up again. And kept on fleeing in panic. Do not think there is any mysticism here, Vladimir. The Vedruss people simply made a decision. In each domain—and there were more than two hundred domains in the settlement—they opened up ten beehives,3 each hive containing approximately fifteen thousand bees. You can figure out the size of the cloud for yourself. A huge number of bee-stings will first cause serious itching and pain. A person could then fall into a fatal sleep. And so the happy Vedruss people continued to live in peace of mind, knowing neither war nor trouble of any kind. No external foe posed a threat to them for a long, long time. And yet... Rus’ was still conquered, after all. It happened when it fell prey to cunning snares, thereby producing a power which acted against its own self and brought about its fall. 3

beehives—The Russian term here (koloda) designates a special kind of beehive, made out of a hollow log. For a description, see the section entitled “Who gets stung by bees?” in Book 1, Chapter ii: Advice from Anastasia”. eo Thus Anastasia recounted several stories about life in Vedic Rus’. Possibly others might have information—in the form of ancient tales—about how people lived in those times. There’s no point in looking for written records since, as we know from history, they were all carefully destroyed. They were burnt in Italy, England and France, and especially zealously in Russia. But those who feverishly destroyed the culture of our forebears could not eradicate its imprint in the depths of human hearts and souls. We must perfect the knowledge of our history. We must know it and respect it. But we must also reflect on the understanding that Vedistn, Paganism and Christianity are all stages of our history. Not one of these stages should we neglect. By attacking one of them, we shall only go on attacking ourselves. We should treat Christianity with understanding and respect. And other

faiths as well. Only then will all the stages of our history form a solid foundation for a marvellous future. But this is what can follow from knowledge and understanding. From giving a proper evaluation to each stage of our history, from seeing each stage of our history as lessons for building the future. Otherwise we shall go on living in the world of the absurd. Governments and legislators in various countries are currently struggling with terrorism. They pass laws forbidding the incitement of racial or religious hatred. Andyet at the same time these countries officially permit and support denominational teachings in which acts of mass terrorism are carried out for political purposes, supposedly in the name of God. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The marvellous Vedrass holidays We can get some idea of the Vedic culture by looking at certain holidays which have survived into our modern times. Even today they still remain among people’s favourites, even though only a few elements of the original pristine rites have been preserved. What holidays are these? I’m talking about New Year’s, Shrovetide1 and Trinity Sunday2 Of all the many holidays I could mention I shall simply cite here this most prominent example, where the greatest changes have taken place. This holiday occurs at the beginning of June. As you know, in current practice Trinity Sunday is a day when people go to the cemetery to visit their relatives’ graves. Upon arriving at the cemetery they sanctify the graves and tidy up the enclosures.3 A lot of them bring a bottle of liquor with them; after having a drink at the gravesite, they leave a small glass and a piece of bread for the deceased. They talk amongst themselves, reminiscing about the deceased’s life. Many people feel obliged to weep at gravesites. The degree to which this original pagan ceremony has undergone profound change is confirmed by the following. During Vedic times, and even later in the pagan period there were no cheerless, mournful rites as there are now. Each holiday gave people a charge of positive energy, and transmitted to young people the knowledge of their forebears. And remembrance days in Vedic times were quite different from those of today. There were no processions to the cemetery or lamentations over the

graves of the deceased. In fact, during Vedic times there were no cemeteries at all. The deceased were laid to rest in their own family domains without burial vaults or even headstones to mark the occasion. A small raised mound of earth was created, but even this over time became flattened to ground level. The Vedruss people believed that the best memorial to their forebears was to be found in what they had created during their lifetime. Their knowledge of Nature and of Man’s capacities led them to conclude that if all the relatives were to visualise death, their collective thought would prevent the deceased’s soul from being reincarnated. On the day of remembrance of one’s forebears all the members of a family would gather in the morning in the oldest domain. In front of everyone the eldest—usually a grandfather or great-grandfather—would approach the youngest generation of children, and begin to talk with them, more or less as follows: “When your Papa was the same height as you are now,” the grandfather would tell his grandson of about six, “he planted this little sapling. Time went by and now that little sapling has grown into a large fruit-bearing apple tree.” Whereupon the grandfather led his grandson over to the apple tree and touched it himself as his grandson stroked the tree. Next, the grandfather went around to other trees and bushes, telling who planted them. All the other members of the family were able to help the grandfather with their own reminiscences, telling amusing anecdotes or the impressions they had had at the time the trees were planted. Finally, the family members all gathered around the domain’s centrepiece— the family tree, which was usually a cedar or an oak. “You see this tree,” the eldest family member continued. “It was planted by my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather.” A general discussion then ensued as to why this variety of tree was chosen over some other. Why had the distant forebear planted the tree in this particular spot, rather than farther to the right or left. Some people asked questions, while others answered them. Occasionally an argument would break out. And it often happened that, in the heat of the argument, all of a sudden one of the children, without being aware of it himself, came out with a strange-sounding declaration: “How come you do not understand? I myself planted this tree in this particular spot, because...”

The adult family members realised at once that their little one harboured the soul and feelings and knowledge of one of their own distant forebears. And how proud they were that his soul was not aimlessly drifting through the waste spaces of the Universe, that it had not broken up into small particles, but continued to live in perfection, in life eternal. Paganism, and especially Vedism, could scarcely be termed a ‘religion’. It would be more accurate to refer to it as the culture of a way of life. It was the greatest culture alive on the Earth, belonging to a highly spiritual civilisation. This civilisation did not need to believe in God—its people knew God. This civilisation’s people communicated with God, they understood the thoughts of the Creator. They knew the designated purpose of every blade of grass, of every midge, of every planet. This civilisation’s people continue to rest in our souls even to this day. They will most certainly awake. The happy, life-delighted creators of a marvellous planet, the children of God—the Vedruss people. These are not simply empty words. There is as much evidence to back them up as can be desired. One proof is found in Japan. As is known, in the sixteenth century Christians began a considerable proselytising campaign injapan. However, upon observing the results of the Christian missionaries’ activity, Tokugawa leyasu,2 3 the Japanese ruler at the time, outlawed Christianity in his country Japan, with its native religion of Shintoism, is the closest country today to paganism. The word Shinto translates to ‘pathway of the gods’. According to Shinto, Man’s ultimate goal is harmonious co-existence with Nature. What then? Is the Japanese people’s way of life something terrible and uncivilised? That’s how people see Man’s life during the pagan period. But it’s not true. Quite the opposite. Many Japanese write poetry and have a reverent attitude toward Nature. The whole world is entranced with Japanese ikebana? And yet the attraction to this refined art is not restricted to Japan’s professional florists. Ikebana is something you can see in practically every Japanese household. The Japanese show special treatment to their children. Adults go the greatest possible lengths to ensure complete freedom for their children. A nation of poets and artists, it would seem. Yet the level of Japanese technology surpasses that of even the most developed countries of the world. It is a challenge to compete with them in the field of electronics or motorcar

manufacturing. In referring to a modern pagan country like Japan, we are talking only of elements of paganism. Just think what type of Man one could have in a fully pagan culture! One thing is clear: in terms of the level of knowledge and spirituality he would significantly surpass the type of Man prevalent today. But it was in somebody’s interests to befool us by insisting upon our belief in the exact opposite. Japan is not an exception—it is by no means the only example. From deep in our millennial past come names of such geniuses among poets, thinkers and scholars as Archimedes, Socrates, Democritus, Hercalitus, Plato and Aristotle. They lived between two and six hundred years B.C. And where did they live? In Greece—which at that time was also a pagan country. Japan, Greece, Rome, Egypt, with their ancient temple structures, classical art, holidays and traditions, all bear witness even today to the cultural level of these peoples. But what can our own historians tell us about Rus’ of that time? Absolutely nothing. How does one find tangible evidence that Vedic Rus’ was home to artists and poets, not to mention glorious warriors who never attacked anyone but were skilful masters of weaponry? I said to Anastasia: “Unless we can find tangible proof of the culture ofVedic Rus’, nobody will believe in it. Your accounts of it will be treated as mere legends. Beautiful legends of course, but still legends. I’m convinced there’s no point in searching historical works. So you are all that’s left. Can you point to any tangible proof, Anastasia?” “Yes, I can. For there is actually a great deal of proof.” “Then tell me: in what spot should we go with excavation?” “Why start with excavation? There are a great many human dwellings that offer proof of the Vedruss culture.” “What kind of dwellings? What do you have in mind?” “Look carefully, Vladimir, at the houses people are constructing today, and compare them with the houses that have been built in the village where you now live. Almost all the old houses in this village are decorated with traditional Russian wood-carvings. You also saw even older houses when you visited the museum-town of Suzdal.”4 “Yes, and they are all decorated with even finer carvings. And not just the houses—the portals and garden gates too, they’re all works of art.” “In other words, the deeper you go into your people’s past, the more

beautifully appointed human dwellings you see. “In museums, too, you can see beautiful wood-carvings adorning distaffs, mugs and other household items which were in common use three to five hundred years ago. You will notice, Vladimir, that the artistry of the masters keeps increasing, the farther one travels back through the ages. “Creativity like that on a massive scale has not been found over many centuries in any country in the world. Note, Vladimir, that these were not individual artists working on commission for a few rich bigwigs, but absolutely the entire population participated. Judge for yourself: if you see an ordinary distaff in a museum, it did not belong to the Tsar, or the Tsar’s wife, or some kind of bigwig. You are looking at an object which was found in every home. People used these lacy wood-carvings to decorate all their buildings, including the fences; they decorated all their household items, and embroidered their clothes. If this had been done by master craftsmen, it would have taken an unimaginable number to produce all the examples we know about. Each Vedruss family did this on their own. “The whole population were engaged in artistic pursuits. And this tells us that the whole population lived in plenty. A good deal of time is required if one is to spend a lot of time on artistic creations. Your historians are all wrong when they say that people in ancient times spent their whole day bent over, tending their agricultural lands. If that were true, they would have had no time for artistic pursuits. And yet they did. And as for their skill with weaponry, judge for yourself: if they were able to build such beautiful log mansions with an axe, they must have wielded it like a brush in the hands of an artist. “Do you know what kind of competitive entertainment they thought up for Shrovetide? They drove into the ground two large upright logs about three metres apart. Two male competitors went up to these logs, carrying an axe in each hand. After being blindfolded, the men worked with both hands simultaneously, competing to see who could cut down their log first. But that was not all—they had to cut it down so that it would fall exactly on their competitor’s log and knock it over.” CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Significant books One day I asked Anastasia’s grandfather if he had ever had the opportunity to read any spiritual or scholarly books. His answer struck me as rather strange:

“If you mean taking a book into my hands, leafing through the pages and reading the words printed in the books, that’s something I’ve done only on one occasion. But everything written in significant books is known to me.” “How so? And what are ‘significant books’? If there are significant books, that means there must also be insignificant ones, eh?” “Indeed. But why are you stuffing your head fall of all this?” “What d’you mean, why? A cultured and civilised Man ought to be wellread. When I speak at readers’ conferences, I’m often asked whether I’ve read this book or the other. But I’ve only read just a few books in my lifetime. So I’d like to know which books I should read first. A lifetime isn’t enough to read all of them, even if one read all day from morning ’til night. That’s why I need to know about these ‘significant books’, so as not to come across as an utter ignoramus.” “You know, Vladimir, when you’re asked at your readers’ conferences what books you’ve read, you can say you’re familiar with all of them.” “I can’t do that unless I have actually read them all. They might ask me, for instance, what a particular author said in his book. If I’ve never even held his book in my hands, there’s no way I could come up with any kind of answer.” “Simply tell them: ‘This author has nothing substantial to say’ Tell the one who asked you the question to prove otherwise. You know, Vladimir, it only appears from the numbers that there’s a lot of books out there. In fact you can count the number of significant books on your fingers.” “But how do I know whether a book is significant or not?” “With the help of a criterion.” “Can you let me have this criterion? At least to borrow?” “Of course I can let you have it, and all your readers too. The point is that the criterion for determining the significance of a book is people’s way of life.” “What d’you mean—their way of life? What’s that got to do with it?” “People live in various parts of the globe. Human societies are conditioned by national differences. National cultures vary from country to country. As does their way of life, and their longevity. The culture of various peoples is shaped under the influence of, among other things, a significant book. Generally: a book that determines a people’s philosophy, gives rise to a particular religion and, consequently, away of life. “In China, for example, Confucius’ teachings5 are considered significant. A

special view of the world has been developing there since ancient times. To put it briefly, it views the world as a living organism. “Part of this cosmic organism, or system, is the concept of yin and yang.2 If you are interested in the Chinese people’s way of life, if you think it might serve as an example for the rest of mankind, then read Confucius’ book. If you are interested in the Japanese world-view and their life-achievements, then read a book about that country’s traditional religion—Shintoism. In many respects it helped shape the Japanese people’s way of life. “If you think that the happiest people live in the Christian world, then read the Bible. Significant books are those books which shape a particular way of life of a part of human society” “But in Christian spiritual literature, after all, there is a lot more besides just the Bible.” “Yes, indeed. But there is absolutely nothing new in them. As a rule, in every significant book there are one or two basic thoughts or philosophical conclusions. All other books on a similar theme simply repeat this thought and contribute nothing new to one’s world-view. “Take, for example, one of the basic thoughts of the Bible—namely, that God must be bowed down to and his instructions carried out. This has given rise to a whole lot of books outlining the best way to do this. Some books say you should cross yourself with two fingers, others with three. They tell how to build temples with the best-looking outward appearance. They cite hundreds of examples of acts of worship by various people, devotees of genuflection. They talk of wars and arguments over particular methods of worship. “People get immersed in these arguments and lose their ability to discern the basic thought. They no longer use the basic thought as a standard with which to compare others. 'yin, yang— the two opposite (though complementary) principles of Chinese philosophy, underlying both Taoism and traditional Chinese medicine. The yin (originally denoting a shady slope of a mountain or river-bank) represents a darker, passive feminine entity, symbolised by the elements of water or earth, while the yang (from the designation of a sunny slope) encompasses a brighter, active, masculine force, symbolised by fire and wind. What happens is that in reading a whole lot of books about one and the same thing, they do not obtain any new information, but merely atrophy their analytical abilities. And they don’t even bother trying to determine whether God really wants Man to bow down to Him, or whether He wants something

quite different. As you can see, the hundreds of thousands of ‘spiritual’ books that have appeared over the past two thousand years all say pretty much one and the same thing. “The appearance of a new well-grounded thought about the interrelationship of God and Man signals the appearance of a new significant book for the first time in two thousand years. With its appearance, its predecessor in the ranks of significant books passed into the ranks of historical documents.” “You’re talking about the appearance of a new significant book? What’s it called?” “Co-creation. It contains new thoughts. And it is well-grounded. The main thought of this book states in a clear and well-grounded manner precisely what Gods wants of Man, and what Man’s purpose is. You wrote this book from Anastasia’s words, and you will remember, Vladimir, God’s response to the question from the elements of the Universe: ‘What do you so fervently desire?’ everyone enquired. And He, confident in His dream, replied: ‘Conjoint creation and joy for all from its contemplation.”’3 “But where is the proof that this declaration actually represents God’s will?” “The proof is everywhere. In the declaration itself. In the human heart and soul. In the logic of thinking. Judge for yourself: if you accept as a premise God’s creation of the Earth and Man, then the feelings ensuing from that on the part of God will correspond with those of Man—the parent of his children. All loving parents wish conjoint creation with their children. “The second part of the declaration specifies what kind of creation God desires: ‘and joy for all from its contemplation’. So tell me, what kind of creations can bring joy to absolutely everybody?” “That’s a hard question to answer. Some people get joy out of a good car, while others couldn’t care less about cars. Some like eating meat, while others don’t eat meat at all. There’s even a popular saying: There’s no accounting for taste. It’d be hard to find something that everybody could embrace.” ‘And yet, it is possible. Think about air, water, flowers, for example...” “But those have already been created, while we’re talking about conjoint creation.”

“Yes, air, water and vegetation have already been created. But they’re not always the same. Man is capable of making his air filled with dust, smoke and lethal gases, yet the same Man can fill it with ethers, aromas and flower pollen. “Water can vary too. You can use chlorine-smelling water, for example, or you can drink genuine, refreshing water. And in among the great variety of plants you can either manufacture bloody chaos or create living scenes of extraordinary beauty and grandeur, attractive and delightful to the eye. There’s a statement about that in Co-creation.” “If the book Co-creation, as you say, is significant, then isn’t it also supposed to transform the life of society or somehow influence it?” “Yes, that’s a law. Anew thought inevitably embodies itself in a new way of life for society.” “But when will this come about? Two years have gone by already since that book was published.” “To put it more accurately, not two years already, but just two years. In this relatively brief space of time, however, it has already co-created a great deal. You yourself were saying, weren’t you, that many people are already attempting to build a new way of life for themselves. They’re even creating national development programmes.” “Yes, I did say that. There are indeed manifestations of this already” “You see? It took three hundred years to make Christianity noticeably felt, and here look at what’s been accomplished in just two years! Anastasia’s thoughts are materialising in a real way of life among many peoples, they are uniting their aspirations into a single creative impulse of universal cocreation. “She launched a new way of thinking into Space, and this is an event of colossal proportions. This means that the book in which these thoughts were set forth for the first time will be accorded a similar evaluation.” “I guess that means that I too will be one of the world’s significant writers?” “You will not be one of... You will be the most significant, Vladimir. My granddaughter would not even think of secondary roles for her beloved.” “It’s not working out quite that way The popular newspaper Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and facts)6 published a book rating putting The Book of Kin in second place overall in Russia.” ‘After a time a great many people will become aware of the significance of the books you have written. And then a simple first place in the ratings

won’t seem like all that much. A mere six years has passed since you wrote your first book. You were a nobody back then, but today—you are more than just famous. I’ve heard that you’ve been awarded recognition as a People’s Academician and presented with a certificate.” “You’re right, only this recognition wasn’t from a traditional academy, but a public one.” “Well, there you ago—a public academy5 Treasure this award, it’s higher than the traditional variet. The people have spoken. The people who have realised the significance of your books, they’re the ones who’ve decided that you are significant. It means they’ve actually understood Anastasia’s thoughts and appreciated them. It’s not just ordinary people who have been able to do this, it’s people who will be able to go farther and embody, understand and materialise her thoughts. That’s how it will be. Only don’t give yourself airs—hold out until the time comes, without giving in to pride.” public academy— In Russia today, apart from the state-sponsored and statecontrolled Russian Academy of Sciences (known by its Russian acronym of RAN) and its branches, there are a large number of independent academies created by individuals or groups of citizens, or by other nongovernmental organisations. These are sometimes referred to as ‘public’ (Russian: narodnyi)—in the sense that they have been created by members of the public rather than State. “I’ll try my best. I’ll read over Anastasia’s sayings again. It goes without saying that I won’t read crime novels or any kind of fiction. There’s really nothing in the way of new thoughts in them. Just light entertainment fluff. “But I do have one question I’m unable to find an answer to. You can’t really tell whether a book is significant or not until after you’ve read it. But there’s a huge number of books out there—you walk into a library and the shelves are lined with tens of thousands of books. Many of them have pretentious titles, even ones like Conversation with God, or Truth unveiled or All the secrets of life. In actual fact, however, you can read and read and still not come across any new thoughts. For every ten thousand there’s maybe only one significant book, but then my chances of stumbling across it are one in ten thousand too. What to do?” “Well, I’m telling you: before starting to read anything, take a survey of how people live in various corners of the globe, take note of situations that appeal to you in their lifestyle, and then read their book, and ponder it.” “But what if I don’t find anything appealing? All peoples have similar troubles. There are differences, sure, but in the main... Take the environment, for example—there’s nowhere in the world where it’s not going downhill.”

“Well, then, if you don’t find anything appealing, then give some thought on your own as to how to build a harmonious way of life, and when you come up with something, you’ll write a book about it yourself.” ‘All by myself? Without reading anything else?” “You’re contradicting yourself, Vladimir! You were the one that said you can’t find any books worth reading, and behind those outrageous titles there’s only a proliferation of words without any sense, without any new thoughts. And at the same time you are doubting—you think you can’t be intelligent without reading a whole lot of rubbish. In any case I can tell you that every Man, right from birth, aspires to read the most important book— one whose language is distinct from printed letters—you remember: ‘The Divine language has fragrance and colour...’”6 “I understand.” “So read and ponder what you’ve read.” CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

An exercise for teleportation “You’re right, Vladimir,” Anastasia’s grandfather continued. “In terms of the present state of consciousness of most people today what Anastasia creates can seem incredible. “Still, once the conscious awareness and state of mind belonging to our forebears at the time of our pristine origins are fully comprehended, these same people will look back and laugh at the astonishment they are now expressing. “I’ll tell you now about just one exercise that will enhance your ability to easily teletransport your second self—that is, to transport yourself to a neighbouring town, or a different country or time period. Anybody can do this as long as they’re not lazy about it. “Remember one time you saw Anastasia, in response to your request, move her body in a split second from one side of the lake to the other, and then move it back again?1 And she didn’t hide the fact that any Man is capable of doing the same. One must mentally visualise all the cells of the body, down to the tiniest ones which aren’t even visible under a microscope, and disperse them into space with one’s thought, and then gather them together by the power of thought in the new place. Just watching this can astonish the imagination. ‘Anyone can do this whose speed of thinking allows them to visualise in a

single moment all the details of their body. Even a microscopic error, though, is enough to prevent the cells from gathering together after dispersal. “I’ve done this on just three occasions over my lifetime, and each time I prepared for it a year or more in advance. I can’t do anything like that any more. Either I'm just a bit past my prime, or I’ve got too lazy. But even my granddaughter, who was able to demonstrate her teleportation abilities so easily, said that this shouldn’t ever be done unless there is an acute need for it. And she explained why. “Still, she transported you on several occasions to different times and cities. You saw images and you felt as though you were present at the events you witnessed. Am I right?” “Yes, you are,” I confirmed. “It was when I described how she transported herself and me to another planet, without our bodies.2 Our bodies remained on the Earth. A lot of people didn’t believe such a thing was possible.” “They’ll believe it when they’re able to do something along those lines themselves. I’ll teach you how. Just listen carefully and try to make sense of what I say. “Man is made up of a multitude of energies which comprise his being. Feelings, thought, imagination—that’s all Man too. But these energies cannot be seen by the eye. We shan’t say whether these parts of the body are material or not. In this case the degree of their materiality isn’t important. What is important is that they exist, and that these are also you— a Man. “The material human body is one of many elements comprising a Man. Man can live without a material body, only then he would have to be called something else. The material body affords a visible opportunity to define the degree of harmonious balance among all the other energies. “Now imagine that you or some other Man took all your energies, by your own free will, separated them from your body and transported them to a different space.” “Is that something anybody can do?” “They can. It happens to a certain degree with everyone when they sleep. But don’t get carried away, keep on listening. I said that Man is capable of transporting, by his own free will, his whole complex of feelings to some other place. “That requires just a bit of training. Here’s a training exercise. “First, you need to find a spot where you won’t be disturbed. It can be just an ordinary room with a bed. As long as no distracting sounds can enter.

“So, you lie down on the bed and relax your body. See to it that your arms, legs and head are all lying freely in a comfortable position. Then, without moving, try to direct more of your blood toward one hand (as opposed to other parts of your body), purely by your will. If you don’t succeed right off, try again, until you feel a slight tingling in your fingertips on the hand you’ve been directing the blood—and your energy—toward. “You should spend no more than thirty minutes a day on such attempts, but keep them up until you are able to freely direct the flow of energy and blood at will—first to one hand, then the other, then to your feet. Once you achieve the desired result, you should be able to direct energy to the brain as well. “If you succeed at this, you will notice a significant benefit to your health. You’ll be able, for example, to remove a pimple or sore from your arm or leg or any other part of your body You’ll be able to reverse hair loss. But, most importantly, you’ll be able to supply your brain with supplemental energy. “I should also point out that in order to achieve such results, you should refrain from eating meat for several days before beginning the exercise. You should have a varied diet of fresh and easily digestible foods—foods containing ethers. In your present living conditions these are hard to come b. But here are some foodstuffs which can give you a lot of things you’re missing: take approximately ten grams of cedar oil each morning, then about twenty grams of honey and five of flower pollen. You should repeat this three hours before bedtime. “Once you have completed this first part of the exercise, you can then go on to the second. For this part, tell me, what are some of the most common actions people perform every day around their home?” “Probably food preparation is the most frequent. The majority of us, of course, prepare food every day. Peeling potatoes, for example.” “So, choose an action which you repeat most often. Which specific action it is doesn’t really matter—the main thing is that it is one you are very familiar with. You mentioned peeling potatoes. This may well be the most familiar for some people; others can choose something else. “Now take a watch and note the time as you begin this particular action. While you are carrying it out try not think about anything else. Remember all the details as well as what you feel while doing it. If you’re peeling potatoes, for example, take note of how you hold the knife, where the scraps fall, how you washed them, and the sensation of the water. Remember how

you put the potatoes into the pot for boiling and set it on the stove. Remember how you cleaned up the scraps when you were finished. “When you decide that your actions are completed, look at the time and either remember or write down how many minutes you spent on them. Let’s say it took twenty minutes altogether. Now set your alarm-clock to go off in exactly twenty minutes. Go into the other room, the one where you mastered the first part of the exercise while lying on the bed. Lie down on the bed again, relax, close your eyes and picture yourself in the room where you peeled the potatoes. “It is essential to visualise everything down to the minutest detail. If you visualise everything correctly and consistently and in all the details, the alarm should go off at exactly the moment that you have finished your visualisation. “If you’re lazy and leave out a lot of the details, you’ll finish your visualisation before the alarm goes off. If, on the other hand, you’re slow and lethargic in your thinking and visualisation, the alarm will go off before you’ve finished. “Some people will need a whole year’s training to do this, others two years, while there are those who might learn it all in a month. Once you learn to make your visualisations coincide with real time, you’re close to being ready for teleportation. You can then go on to the third part of the exercise. “In Part Three you have to mentally enter another room of your home and carry out a series of actions which you do only rarely First measure the time it takes you to carry out the actions in visualisation. Let’s say you go into a room, fill a watering-can with water and proceed to water some flowers. After doing this and getting up from the bed, check your watch to see how many minutes the visualisation took you, and either memorise the figure or write it down. “Then go into the room you recently entered in your mind and repeat the action of watering the flowers. The time should coincide right to the minute. If it doesn’t, well, that means you need more training. Once you’ve got the times to coincide, then you’ll be able to do a great deal with your second self —you’ll be able to visit not just other rooms in your home, but your neighbour’s home too and even other countries. For this you will only need a few reliable details. After analysing them, you’ll be able to re-create the whole environment in detail and actually go there. “Not everyone will manage to do something like this, but I can tell you with certainty that once you have been in an overseas city, you’ll be able to go there again and again by transporting that second self of yours.

“Once you master this, though, you need to be mindful about one particular danger—you shouldn’t detach your second self from your body for very long.” At this point I’ll digress from Anastasia’s grandfather’s account and tell you in more detail about the danger involved. After doing this exercise (for curiosity’s sake) and achieving the results he spoke of, I tried teleporting my second self to the island of Cyprus, to the city of Paphos, which I had visited earlier.3 Lying on the sofa in my office, I relaxed and pictured myself getting ready for the trip, going to the airport, boarding the plane, landing at Larnaca and checking into the hotel I had stayed at in Paphos. Then I took a shower and walked down to the sea-side. Coffee in the evening, the local music, a morning stroll 011 the beach, bathing in the sea—it was all there. I returned—or woke up, I’m not sure which is the more accurate description here—three days later. And I could barely lift myself out of bed. My body, to put it mildly, had been wanting to go to the bathroom for a long time, and nobody had bothered to take it there. It was also very hungry, but nobody had fed it. I finally managed to get up and take a look at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t happy with what I saw. A three days’ stubble had sprouted on my face, and my facial expression was peeved and joyless. And I felt very sorry for my poor body, which had been abandoned the past three days. The whole experience taught me a lesson: that Man’s body is nothing but an utterly helpless piece of flesh without the energy of the second—or is it the first?—human self. Yet helpless as it might be, it still belongs to me and I have no right to leave it unattended, even for the sake of a trip to some overseas resort. I also observed that when you travel without your body, though the sensation may appear complete, and you feel the sea water and the warmth of the Sun’s rays, the body still doesn’t get a tan. At first I regretted the time wasted on the training. But later I managed to make profitable use of it in the ability to foresee, with the help of my second self, some events that hadn’t happened yet. This is how I managed to write on several topics which I’m about to present to you now. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Give children their Motherland

In Ukraine there is a city called Kharkov:7 In this city there is an orphanage. A fine orphanage, with cozy rooms, a handsome aquarium and a large swimming pool. It has received significant support from local authorities and the business community. In showing me the facilities, the head of municipal education department remarked that children from this orphanage go to the regular public school. As I looked out the window I could see groups of children on their way back from school. Only one little girl was walking apart from the rest. “That’s Sonia.2 She’s in Grade One,” the director explained. “She always walks alone. She thinks that she will soon be adopted by a Jewish family” “Why ajewish family?” I asked. “She doesn’t at all look like a Jewish child, with her fair hair. She looks Ukrainian more than anything.” “Someone at school told her that Sonia is ajewish name, so she must be Jewish. Sonia agreed, and decided at once that she would definitely be adopted by ajewish family. And she always walks alone, thinking that if she walks with the group, her future parents might not notice her.” Kharkov has a fine orphanage. There are orphanages, too, in other cities in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. They are home to children. Yet no matter how cozy the rooms in these orphanages, all children dream of having parents and a family. In her nondescript shoes, small and slender first-grader Sonia trod in a nononsense fashion across the asphalt courtyard, separately from her group of classmates. And Sonia, who lived in the orphanage, had a dream... A day went by, then another, then months. Sonia wasn’t aware that children’s shelters had been around a long time in various countries, and that not all children ended up being adopted. Most of them, in fact, are doomed to spend their whole lives parentless. Sonia wasn’t adopted either. However, her life did not turn out in the usual way. At that time a group of Kharkov residents decided to build a community not far from the cit. They managed to acquire a hundred and fifty hectares of land, and a hundred and twenty families decided to set up their own kin’s domains, a hectare each in size. One lot on the edge of the community remained unspoken for, so they decided to give it to somebody from the orphanage. It turned out that little Sonia was selected as the recipient. They brought the girl out to see her plot, accompanied by one of the housemothers. The housemother began to explain to Sonia: “D’you see, Sonia, the stakes driven into the ground and the rope stretched

between them? This rope marks off your land, a whole hectare. It is a gift to you from people who have also taken a hectare of land nearby to plant gardens and build houses on. When you grow up, you too will be able to build a house and plant a garden. Your land will be waiting for you.” The little girl walked up to the rope, touched it, and asked the housemother: “Does that mean that on the other side of this rope is my land and I can do whatever I want with it?” “Yes, Sonechka, this is your land, and you alone are in charge of everything that will grow on it.” ‘And what will grow on it?” “Well, for the time being, as you can see, a lot of different kinds of grasses. But look over there, on your neighbours’ plots—they’ve already started planting apple trees and pear trees, and a whole bunch of other fruit trees, and they’ll soon have flourishing orchards. And when you grow up, you will decide what to plant on your land and where to put it, so that it will look beautiful, just like the others.” Sonia bent over and crawled under the rope onto her hectare of land. She took several steps along the rope, carefully examining the ground and all the little creatures twittering and darting about on the grass. She walked as far as a little birch-tree growing on the plot and touched its slender trunk. She turned to the housemother, and in a somewhat excited voice asked: “What about this little tree? The little birch tree? Is that mine too?” “Yes, Sonechka, as of now the birch tree belongs only to you, since it’s growing on your land. When you get older, you’ll be able to plant other trees here... But now it’s time to go. It’ll soon be lunch-time and I have to get back to the group.” The little girl turned to look at her plot and stood silently contemplating it. People who have children know that when they play, children often build little rooms for themselves out of various things or, in the country, they set up little lean-tos for themselves to play in. For some reason, every child has a need to fence off a little world of their own from the big world outside, to create their own space. Children who live in orphanages have a common space, but this common space, even if it is very well appointed, can only have a negative effect on them. Like other orphanage children, Sonia never had a corner to call her own, even a tiny one. And here she was standing on the other side of the rope, where everything belonged exclusively to her—including the grass, and the lively grasshoppers hopping across the ground, and the little birch tree. The

slim little girl turned to her housemother and started to speak. Her voice combined tones of both pleading and decisiveness. “I beg of you, very, very much, to please let me stay here. You go on ahead, and I’ll come back on my own.” “How will you get back? It’s thirty kilometres!” “I’ll make it,” replied Sonia firmly “I’ll walk and I’ll make it. Maybe I’ll take the bus. Please let me have some time on my land all by myself.” The driver of the Zhigidi,8 who happened to be the proprietor of the plot next door to Sonia’s, overheard the conversation and proposed: “Let the girl stay here until this evening. I’ll take you back now, and bring her home tonight.” After a moment’s thought the housemother agreed. How could she refuse, after seeing the face of this little girl standing behind the rope, awaiting her decision. ‘All right, Sonia, you may stay here until this evening. I’ll send along lunch with the driver.” “What d’you need to do that for?” responded the Zhiguli driver. “Well be happy to share our lunch with our neighbour,” he added, with a respectful emphasis on the word neighbour. “D’you hear that, Klava?”9 he called out to his wife, who was busy preparing lunch on the porch of their house. Their house was still under construction. “Make dinner for four—our neighbour will be joining us today.” “Fine,” answered his wife. “There’s enough for everyone.” And she added: “Just give us a shout, Sonia, if there’s anything you need.” “Thank you,” answered Sonia, now extremely happy. After the Zhiguli had departed, Sonia walked along the rope strung between the stakes. She walked slowly, sometimes pausing to sit down on the grass and touch something with her hands before continuing on. In this fashion she walked around the whole perimeter of her lot. Then she stood in the middle of her hectare and surveyed all sides of the perimeter. And then all at once, she threw her hands in the air and began running, jumping and spinning around. After lunch Klava noticed how tired the girl looked after trotting around her plot, and invited her to have a nap on a folding cot. But Sonia, tired as she was, replied:

“If possible, can you give me some old clothing I can spread out to lie down on. I’ll take a nap on my own piece of land, by the birch tree.” Nikolai10 set up the cot with a mattress and blanket beside the birch tree on Sonia’s plot. The girl lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep. This was her first time sleeping in her own kin’s domain. But now the orphanage was faced with what initially seemed an insoluble problem. Not a day passed but Sonia would ask the housemothers to allow her to go to her own hectare of land. Their explanations—that she was still too young to take the bus all by herself, and the housemothers couldn’t take her since they couldn’t leave the other children—fell on deaf ears. Sonia began talking with the orphanage’s director. She explained to him that she absolutely had to go see her land. She had to, because on the neighbouring plots people were already planting trees, and would soon have flourishing orchards, while her land would be left abandoned. Nothing would be flourishing on it. Finally the orphanage’s director came up with a solution that was acceptable to Sonia. He told her: “Right now, Sonia, it’s not possible to take you out to your plot, since apart from everything else, you still have a fortnight’s study ahead of you. Two weeks from now the summer holidays will begin. I’ll have a word with the neighbours next door to your plot, and if they agree to watch out for you, then during the holidays we’ll send you off to your plot for a time—for a week, at least, or maybe longer. “By the way, you could spend this coming fortnight getting yourself ready for your land. Here, take these two brochures and read up. One of them tells how to make planting beds, and the other is a guide to medicinal herbs. If you can be on '’Nikolai (pron. ni-ka-LTE, rhyming with ‘by’)—a masculine name of Greek origin, now commonly used in Russia (corresponding to Nicholas in English). The ancient Russian name Kolya is now used as an endearing form of Nikolai. In this case it is the name of the driver, Klava’s husband. your best behaviour these next two weeks, 111 also get ready for you a selection of seeds for the holidays.” Sonia was on her best behaviour. She did all her lessons conscientiously, and devoted all (absolutely all!) her spare time to reading the two brochures the director had given her. When she lay down to sleep, she dreamt about the beautiful plants that would grow on her plot. On one occasion, while all the other children were fast asleep, the night-nurse noticed Sonia drawing sketches of trees and flowers by the moonlight streaming through her

window. The neighbours did agree to watch out for the little girl, and when the summer holidays began, the director himself helped load a number of items into the baggage compartment of the Zhigiili, including box lunches for two weeks, a small shovel and rake, as well as a packet of seeds. Nikolai didn’t want to take the box lunches from the orphanage, but the director assured him that Sonia was an extremely independent girl and would never want to be a burden to anyone, so it would be better for her to see she had her own supply of food. And they also gave her a new sleeping bag—in spite of the fact that Nikolai’s family had already fixed up a little room for Sonia on the finished ground floor of their house, complete with sheets and pillows. As Sonia was getting into the car, a whole lot of people came out to see her off—not just the orphanage staff on duty that day, but a crowd who had come especially to look upon the little girl’s face, which was beaming with happiness. For the first three nights Sonia slept in the room her neighbours had fixed up for her, spending all day long on her own hectare of land which was so dear to her heart. The third day was Nikolai’s birthday, and a lot of guests came. One young couple arrived with their tent. On the following day, when the guests departed, the tent was left behind. “That’s a present for you,” the young couple said to Nikolai. Then Sonia asked Nikolai if she could sleep in the tent. Nikolai gave her his permission. “Of course, go ahead, if you like. What is it—do you find your room stuffy?” “The room’s fine,” replied the girl. “But everybody here spends the night on their own land, while my land is all alone at night. There are lights burning on many of the other plots at night-time, but mine’s all dark.” “So, does that mean you’d like me to set up the tent on your plot?” “I’d like that very, very much, Uncle Kolya—if you could set it up beside the birch tree. Only if you have time, and if it’s not too inconvenient...” Every night after that Sonia slept in the tent Nikolai set up on her plot beside the birch tree. Upon awakening early in the morning, she would go at once to the bucket of water standing by the tent, and draw some water in a mug. After filling her

mouth, she would let a thin stream of water splash onto the palms of her hands to wash her face. Then she would take out a sketch-book in which she had made handdrawings of the plan for her plot, and study them. After that, she would proceed to dig her flower and vegetable beds. The small sapper’s spade the director had given her had a sharp edge, but Sonia was unable to get the full blade into the ground; she could only get it in only half-wa. But she still managed to make her vegetable beds. Her neighbour Nikolai offered to plough up any designated areas with a rototiller, but Sonia categorically refused. She was fiercely jealous of any encroachment on her territory. People sensed this and endeavoured not to cross over the line (marked out by stakes and rope) without her knowledge. Even Nikolai, upon awaking in the morning, when he went to call Sonia to breakfast, would go only as far as the property line and call out to Sonia from there. Perhaps it was some kind of extraordinary streak of aspiration toward independence on this young girl’s part, or else the fear of becoming a burden to someone, that prevented her from asking anybody any favours. Even when one of the community residents tried to offer her clothing, or candy, or some sort of equipment, she would politely thank them, but categorically decline the offer. In the two weeks she spent on her land, Sonia managed to dig out and plant three vegetable beds, with a huge flowerbed in the middle. On the morning of her last day of her fortnight’s stay, Nikolai went to the perimeter of her plot as usual, to call her to breakfast. The girl was standing by her flower-bed (in which nothing had come up yet). As she stared at it, she replied to Nikolai without turning around: “Uncle Kolya, you don’t have to call me to eat this morning, I don’t feel hungry.” Nikolai would say later that he could hear her voice cracking, he could tell she was barely holding back her tears. He wasn’t about to try to find out what the matter was. He went back to his place and began observing Sonia through his field-glasses. The girl was pacing back and forth across her plot, first touching a plant with her hands, or straightening out something in one of the beds. Then she went over to her birch tree and put her arms around it. Nikolai could see her shoulders trembling. By lunch-time the orphanage’s ageing mini-van arrived. The driver stopped

at the entrance to Nikolai’s territory and sounded his horn. Nikolai would recount the subsequent events as follows: When I saw her through my field-glasses gather up her simple little things, like the shovel and rake, and head over our direction with such a sad expression on her face, when I looked at that face close-up, I couldn’t hold out any longer. I grabbed my mobile phone and rang the orphanage. Fortunately I was able to get through to the director right away. I told him I was willing to sign any papers required, accepting responsibility for the child, saying I would take the summer off work to spend the whole time here on the plot, just so the little girl could stay on her piece of land until the end of the holidays. At first the director started to explain that all the children from their orphanage were to go to summer camp at the sea-side for rest and therapy— that he and his colleagues had spent a long time securing this opportunity, and that now they would be going to the camp, thanks to the generosity of a group of sponsors. I then spoke with the director frankly, man-to-man, but he wasn’t offended, and gave me an equally frank response. Whereupon he asked to have a word with the driver, promising to come out himself tomorrow. I ran out to the road and handed the telephone to the driver, adding from myself: “Okay, there, friend. Get out of here pronto!” The driver left. Then Sonia came up to me and said: “Uncle Kolya, didn’t the van-driver come for me? But why did he leave?” For some reason my negotiations with the orphanage director had left me rather tense. I lit a cigarette, my hands were trembling, and I responded to her: “What makes you think he was coming for you? He simply came to see if you needed any food supplies, or anything else, and I told him everything was okay” She looked me straight in the eye. It seemed as though she understood what was going on. Then she said softly: “Thank you, Uncle Kolya!” Then she began walking, and eventually running, back to her land. The orphanage director came the following morning. I was already waiting for him. Only he didn’t head my way, but walked straight over in the direction of Sonia’s tent. I didn’t get a chance to warn him not to cross the line without an invitation. But, smart fellow that he is, he guessed as much himself. Again, in an apparent effort not to traumatise the child, this clever

chap had the sense to say, as the little girl came to meet him: “Good day, Sonia. I just stopped by to let you know we’re all going off to the sea-side. Would you like to stay here, or join us on our trip?” “Stay here!” Sonia didn’t just say it, but screamed it. “I thought as much,” responded the director. “So I brought you something byway of box lunches...” “No need to trouble yourself, no need to waste your time. I don’t need anything.” “No need? Then what would you have me do? The state provides us with funds for each child in our care. But you are here taking care of yourself, and feeding yourself. Tell me, how can I account for the state funds in a situation like this? No, please be so gracious as to accept these... Okay, Alexeich,11 you can go ahead and unload them. “Will you allow us to come in, Sonia? Maybe you’ll show us your place here?” Sonia stared at the director for several moments, sizing up the whole situation. Then she noticed the driver of the mini-van unloading some heavy-looking bags, and once she finally realised that she would be staying put here on her land for the whole summer holidays, she joyfully exclaimed: “Oh, what have I... Come in, come in. The gate’s over there where there’s no rope. Please be my guests. I’ll be happy to show you my place. You too, Uncle Kolya, come on in.” She led us over to her tent and at once invited us to take a drink of water from the bucket standing alongside. “Here, have some water. I get it from a spring. It’s goodtasting, better than tap water. Do please take a drink.” “I shan’t say no to that,” replied the director, drawing a half a mugful of water from the bucket and downing it with gusto. “It’s jolly good!” The driver and I both took a drink and complimented Sonia on her water, to her great delight. It was probably the first time in her life that Sonia had possessed anything of her own. Even if it was just water, it was still something that was hers, something of her own that she could offer to adults. Sonia began to feel like a real participant in the world. After that, we sat there listening for maybe an hour and a half or two hours while Sonia regaled us with her report of what she had already planted and what she was going to plant. And she showed us her drawings of her future kin’s domain. Only there was no house in the plans she had drawn.

“It’s time for us to go,” the director told Sonia. “You can unpack your things on your own. I threw in a battery-operated flashlight. It’s an electric torch that can shine far into the distance, but if you switch it over to the daylightlamp setting, you can use it to read by. And now you’ll have something to read. I brought you some magazines on landscape design, and gardening books, and books on folk medicine.” “Oh, I forgot something again,” spluttered Sonia. “Just a moment.” She pulled back one of the tent flaps, and we saw bunches of various herbs hanging on a tent wire stretched taut. She took out several bunches and offered them to the director. “This is celandine.7 A special kind of herb... This is for Katya in our group, she needs to make a brew with it and drink it. She’s so often ill. I read up on celandine in the brochure you gave me. I’ve dried it already. “Thank you...” In sum, this director’s a pretty fine fellow, and he loves children. I had a talk with him later. He asked me how Sonia was behaving herself, and gave me some concrete advice. Sonia spent the whole summer in her tent on her own piece of land. The bed at the centre of her garden blossomed with magnificent flowers, while the produce from the vegetable beds included onions and radishes. In the evenings, when the days began to grow shorter, you could often see the light of the electric torch flickering in the tent. Every evening Sonia read books on folk medicine and made drawings of her future plans for her land in her sketch-book. When the orphanage’s mini-van came to collect her at the end of the summer, I helped Sonia load up her things. And there was quite a bit to load! Just the bunches of herbs she had dried numbered around two hundred. Her yield also included a sack of potatoes and three pumpkins. The van had a full load. I asked Sonia: 7 celandine—see footnote 4 in Book 3, Chapter 20: “Mediums”. “What about next year? Shall I hold on to your tent for you?” “I’ll definitely come again next summer. First day of the holidays, I’ll be here. You’re a good neighbour, Uncle Kolya. Thank you for being such a good neighbour!” And she shook my hand just like an adult. And this time it was a much stronger handshake. Sonia had not only got herself a good tan, but she had

got stronger and more self-confident as well. When she came the next year she brought fruit-tree saplings along with her, as well as some kind of seedlings, and got down to business right off. At a community meeting people from our settlement decided to build Sonia a little house. But Zina,8 whose husband was an entrepreneur and had built the biggest mansion in the community, began to insist that Sonia’s house should be more than ‘little’. “I’m ashamed to look visitors in the eye. The foundations of all the houses in the settlement are being set up as though they were palaces, and here’s one only child living in a tent. What can visitors think?” Knowing the girl’s feelings, especially her resentment at any kind of offers of assistance, they entrusted me to negotiate with her. I went to see her and said: “Sonia, at a community meeting the residents decided to build you a little house to live in. All you have to do is show us where you would like it placed.” In response, she asked me rather guardedly: “Uncle Kolya, how much would a little house cost?” Not suspecting anything, I replied: Zina— an endearing form of the name Zinaida (pron. Zee-na-EE-da). “Oh, somewhere in the neighbourhood of two hundred thousand roubles. In other words, about two thousand per family.” “Two thousand each? But that’s a lot of money. That means people would have to buy less of something for their own children—just to spend on me. Uncle Kolya, I beg of you: tell the people I don’t need a house right now. I haven’t even thought of a place to put it yet. I beg of you, Uncle Kolya, please explain to the people...” She was greatly concerned, and I could understand why Upon receiving her piece of land, Sonia felt independent for the first time in her life. Her plot of land substituted for her parents—it needed her and she needed it. By some kind of internal instinct the girl felt or imagined that her land didn’t want any outsiders laying their hands on it. And God forbid anyone might criticise her after the house was completed, even tacitly Her own sense of independence was far dearer to her than having her own house.

I tried to persuade the residents not to force any gifts on the girl. But then something completely unexpected happened. A group of kids on their way back from the lake ran past Sonia’s plot. Out in front, on a fine-looking bicycle was the entrepreneur’s son, Edik.12 He was always teasing Sonia, calling her Malyavka,13 even though he himself was only three years her senior. “Hey, there, Malyavka!” Edik called out to Sonia. “You spend your whole time landscaping—aren’t you bored with that already? Why don’t you come with us to see the fireworks?” “What ‘fireworks’?” asked Sonia. “My Papa’s going to burn down the construction trailer his workers have been using. Come and you’ll see. We’ve already got a fire-engine there on stand-by.” “Why burn it down?” “’Cause it’s spoiling the view.” “But after it burns down, nothing will grow on that spot for a long time.” “Why not?” “’Cause all the helpful worms, all the bugs, they’ll get burnt up too. I tried lighting a fire by my tent one time and see, nothing’s ever grown on that spot since.” “Wow, Malyavka! You’re really observant! So, come and save our worms. Take the old trailer away, otherwise Papa won’t know how else to get rid of it.” “How am I going to take it away? Isn’t it heavy?” “What d’you mean, how? With a crane, of course! The crane’s coming the day after tomorrow to set up our windmill. So, either you take it or we’re going to have a big bonfire.” “Okay, Edik. I’ll agree to take your trailer.” “Then let’s go.” A crowd of adult neighbours, along with a whole lot of children, had gathered at Edik’s parents’ estate. Afire crew was standing by at the ready. Edik approached his father, who was already on his way over to the construction trailer, carrying a can of gasoline. To the disappointment of the younger crowd and the glad astonishment of the adults, he told his father: “Papa, you don’t need to burn the trailer.”

“What d’you mean, I don’t need to? How come?” “’Cause I’ve given it away.” “To whom?” “To the Malyavka.” “What Malyavka?” “To Sonia, from the plot on the far side of the settlement.” “Well! Did she agree? Did she agree to accept it from you?” “Hey, Papa, if you don’t believe me, ask her yourself.” Sonia was standing in the crowd of youngsters. Edik took her by the hand and brought her over to his father. “Tell him, Sonia, that you agree to take this shack off his hands. Tell him.” “I agree,” Sonia answered quietly. Oh, how the entrepreneur just bubbled over with pride at his son’s accomplishment! Quite a coup! Here was this girl who never took anything from anyone, and now the capricious Sonia had decided to accept a gift from his Edik. As soon as the children had left, the entrepreneur summoned the whole construction brigade that had been putting the finishing touches on his mansion, and said to the foreman: “So, now, lads. Take any materials you need and start working around the clock—I’ll pay you double time, if you can only refit the trailer’s interior to modern European living standards in forty-eight hours. You can leave the exterior shabby, the way it is. But the interior...” Forty-eight hours later, next to the birch tree where the tent had been standing on Sonia’s plot, the construction trailer with its shabby exterior was set up on a brand new brick foundation. The exterior was indeed shabby, but the builders had primed it for painting, and left tins of Finnish14 paint and brushes inside. Sonia later painted the exterior herself. She now had, for the first time in her life, her very own little house, standing on her own dear piece of land. By the following year this house had been transformed into a little fairy-tale chateau, covered with ivy and wild grapevines and surrounded by flowerbeds. 1 Shrovetide (Russian: Maslenitsa)—the week prior to the beginning of Lent (in February or March), marked by a carnival or public festivities.

Maslenitsa (from maslo = “butter”) is actually the ancient Russian holiday marking the coming of Spring. Even in its present-day form it includes a large number of old ‘pagan’ elements, such as the ritual making and eating of pancakes (symbolising the Sun) and the burning of a straw-stuffed figure representing Winter. After the Russian Orthodox Church’s attempts to eradicate this and other pagan celebrations failed, the Church included these pagan festivities in its own calendar of ‘Christian’ holidays and continued to venerate Russia’s ancient pagan gods under the guise of Christian saints. %

Trinity Sunday (Russian: Troitsa)— In contrast to western churches, which celebrate the Trinity the first week after the late-spring holiday of Whitsuntide (Pentecost), the Eastern Orthodox Church includes the Trinity in its Pentecost celebrations. Tn Russian Orthodox cemeteries family graves are usually located within a fenced enclosure. 2 Tokugawa leyasu (1543-1616; surname cited first)—the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan which ruled the country from 1600 to 1868. 3 ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging. 4 Suzdal (pron. SOOZ-dal)—like the neighbouring town of Vladimir (about 30 km distant), one of the oldest cities in Russia. For further information see footnote 1 in Book 5, Chapter 6: “A garden for eternity”. 5 Confucius (K’ung-fu-tzu) (551-479 B.C.)—ancient Chinese thinker and philosopher whose teachings on morality, justice and social relationships (collectively known as Confucianism) are still respected and practised today in a number of Asian countries, including China, Japan and Korea. They are set forth in a publication known as The analects of Confucius. 6 Argumenty i fakty—a leading weekly newspaper on current affairs. Founded in 1978 by the Znanie (Knowledge) organisation, it was designed primarily as a Soviet propaganda tool, but during the (openness) era of the late 1980s the paper was gradually transformed into a forum for real discussion. In the early 1990s it claimed to have a print-run of 33.5 million and was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the largest circulation in the world. 7

Kharkov (known in Ukrainian as FJjarkiv)—a major Ukrainian industrial and cultural centre, situated near the junction of the Lopan and Udy Rivers (tributaries of the Severski Donets), in the north-east of the countr. With a population of a million and a half, it is the second largest city in Ukraine after Kiev. 'Sonia—an ancient Russian name (literally meaning ‘sleepy’), now often used as an affectionate form of the name Sofia, also appearing in variants such as Sonechka (pron. SON-yetch-kd). 8 Zhigiili—a car produced at Toliatti on the Volga River (see footnote 1 in Book 4, Chapter 22: “Other worlds”), here referring to the car which had brought Sonia and the housemother out to see the plot. 9 Klava—an affectionate form of the feminine name Klavdia (correspond 10 ing to Claudia in English). 11 'Alexeich (pron. a-lek-SAT-yitch)—here a patronymic (see footnote 9 in Book 1, Chapter 1: “The ringing cedar”). Patronymics in Russian are occasionally used alone in certain situations, one of them being an employer addressing an employee he knows very well. The full form of Alexeich would be Alexeevich. 12 Edik— an endearing variant of Edward. A few foreign names have become popular among Russians at certain periods of histor. But then Russian suffixes may well be added to satisfy the Russian penchant for diminutive (endearing) forms. Byway of comparison, note the popularity among English speakers of certain endearing Russian names like Tanya and Sasha. 13 Malyavka (pron. mal-YAF-ka)— a condescending nickname indicating someone younger or shorter than one’s self, something on the order of ‘Little One’ or ‘Shorty’. 14 European, Finnish—to Russians or Ukrainians, this meant significantly higher quality than was standard in their own countries.

ee Ten years went by Sonia finished school and had already spent a whole year living in her domain. Mansions could be seen throughout the community, which was already dripping in lush green vegetation and flourishing orchards. But the best and prettiest estate belonged to Sonia. While her classmates were leaving the orphanage and going off to parts unknown, trying to get accepted into any kind of academic institution just to get a roof over their heads, or to find any kind of work so they could at least feed themselves, Sonia was already a wealthy woman. The residents of the community would give their surplus fruits and vegetables to a manager. Products grown on domains fetched a higher-than-average price. They were exported to countries in the European Union, where they were sold in stores specialising in eco-friendly produce. Sonia gave what she grew on her plot to the manager as well. Though most of what she produced was bought by visitors from the city who had heard about this extraordinary girl and her fabulous domain. 1 Sonia had also been gathering medicinal herbs and had helped save a great many people from disease. One day Edik came back for a visit to his parents, who were now living fulltime in their domain. For the past three years he had been studying at a prestigious university in America. He was about to undergo a serious medical operation. He was suffering from liver and kidney disorders, probably caused by the poor quality of food and water abroad. Before the operation, Edik decided to spend a week visiting his parents. His mother, Zinaida, made a suggestion: “Maybe, son, we should pay a visit to our local healer? Just in case she can help.” “Now there, Mama, what century are we living in, eh? Medicine in the West has been highly developed for quite a while no. They just cut out and replace whatever they need to. Don’t worry. Em not going to see any witchdoctors. That’s ancient!” “I’m not suggesting you go to any witch-doctors. Let’s go see... you remember that little girl from the orphanage on the far side of our settlement who surprised everyone by fixing up the piece of land they gave her, all on her own?” “Oh, you mean that Malyavka? I vaguely remember her.” “Well, now she’s no longer a Malyavka, son, but a very respected woman. Managers are

willing to pay double the price for anything grown by her hand. And people come from faraway places for her blend of medicinal herbs. Even though she doesn’t advertise it at all.” “How did our Malyavka get to be such an expert?” “Well, she’s been spending every summer since Grade One on her plot, and every day during the winter she’s been reading books on gardening and folk medicine. The child’s mind is sharp, and she picks up everything so quickly She got a lot of it from books. Only people say her real understanding came more from herself. They say, too, that the plants understand her. She talks with them.” “Well, that’s our Malyavka for you! How much does she charge for treatment?” “Sometimes she charges, but she’s also been known to offer help for free. One day last autumn I happened to meet her by the pond. She looked me in the eye and told me: “Auntie Zina, the whites of your eyes don’t look too good. Here, take this herb, make a tea with it and drink it, and it’ll get better.’ And it did. And there was really something wrong with my eyes, since I had a liver complaint. Now that’s gone too. “Let’s go, son. We’ll go and see her. Maybe she can help your liver too.” “It’s not just my liver, Mama. They’ve already made their diagnosis and they’re going to remove one of my kidneys. And no tea’s going to help that. Anyway, let’s go pay her a visit—it’ll be interesting to see Malyavka’s domain. They say it’s like a Paradise there.” “Yes, indeed! She’s done a fantastic job!” exclaimed Edik, as he and his mother approached Sonia’s domain. “Most people in the community seem to have put all their efforts into building mansions with stone fences, whereas she’s created a real Paradise. Just look, Mama, the fence she’s created from greenery!” “You would have held some of that exclamation in reserve if you knew what her garden looked like,” observed Zinaida. “Only very few people get to see it.” She opened the gate a little and called out loudly: “Sonia! If you’re home, come on out. Sonia, are you home?” The door of the little house—the former construction trailer—opened wide, and out onto the porch stepped a young woman. With a deft movement of her hand she tossed her tightly woven

braid of chestnut-coloured hair over her shoulder. When she caught sight of Zinaida accompanied by her son, her cheeks flushed with a rosy glow She fastened the top button on her cardigan which fit snugly over her supple breasts, and with a soft and light but still gracious step this young and beautiful girl made her way down the porch steps and along the path to the gate, where Zinaida and Edik were standing. “Hello, Auntie Zina! Welcome back, Edward! If you’d like, come into my house or into my garden.” “Thank you for the invitation. We accept with pleasure,” replied Zinaida. But Edik didn’t say a word and didn’t even return Sonia’s greeting. “You know, Sonia,” Zinaida went on as they headed for the garden, “my son has a problem. He’s about to have an operation. Even though it’ll take place in America, it’s still pretty upsetting to me as a mother.” Sonia stopped, turned around and asked Edik: “What’s the trouble with you, Edward?” “My heart,” Edik replied, gasping in his throat. “What d’you mean, your heart?” exclaimed Zinaida. “You told me it was your liver and your kidneys. Does that mean you were lying so I wouldn’t get overly concerned?” “I wasn’t lying. But now, Mama, my heart is beating so fast—can’t you feel it right here?!” He took his mother’s hand and placed it against his chest. “Listen—it’s going to rupture and explode if you don’t convince this beautiful maiden to marry me at once!” “You’re such a jokester,” laughed Zinaida. “You practically scared me to death!” “I’m not joking, Mama.” “Well, if you aren’t joking,” Zinaida gaily continued, “you ought to know that half the community have already sent matchmakers over on behalf of their sons. But to no avail—Sonia doesn’t want to get married. You can ask her yourself why she doesn’t want to, but don’t set your poor mother up for a fall.” Edik went up to Sonia and quietly enquired: “Sonia, why have you never married anyone?” “Because,” Sonia softly responded, “I’ve been waiting for you, Edik.” “Oh you teasers! What are you making fun of a mother like that for?”

“Bless us, Mama, right now. I’m not teasing,” Edik declared firmly, and took Sonia by the hand. ‘And I’m not teasing either, Auntie Zina,” Sonia said in a serious tone. “You aren’t teasing? That means you too, Sonia?... You’re not joking? Well, if you’re not joking, then what are you still calling me Auntie’ for, instead of ‘Mama’?” “Fine. I’ll call you Mama,” replied Sonia, her voice trembling. She took a step in Zinaida’s direction, but then paused in hesitation. Zinaida couldn’t immediately catch on to what was happening—was this some kind of stalemate, a joke? She anxiously glanced back and forth between Sonia’s face and her son’s. Then there came the moment when she realised how serious the young couple’s intentions really were, and at this point she rushed over to Sonia, embraced her and broke into tears: “Sonia! Sonechka! Daughter! I know you’re serious about each other.” Sonia’s shoulders were trembling too. She hugged Zinaida and repeated: “Yes, Mama, we’re serious. Very serious indeed.” Whereupon the young couple, holding hands, slowly and without eyes for anyone but each other, walked down the community street to the domain belonging to Edik’s family: Zinaida walked out in front. She was laughing and crying at the same time, and chattered on incessantly accosting each person they met: “We’ve just come... And they—bang!—they’ve fallen in love with each other... And I—bang!—I blessed them. At first I thought they were joking. But they—bang!— they fell in love right off. And I told them... And they said they wanted ‘to get married, Mama, today!’ Good people, how is that possible? There’s preparations to be made—it all has to be done officially. That’s just not possible!” Presently they saw Edik’s father, the entrepreneur, coming out of the house to greet them. Upon hearing this same (more or less) disconnected account from his wife’s lips, he looked at the young couple and said: “Well, now, you’re chattering on as usual, Zinaida. And what d’you mean, a wedding today is impossible? Just look at these young’uns. We have to hold the wedding not just today, but right now!” Edik went up to his father and embraced him. “Thank you, Papa.” “What are you thanking me for? Let’s not waste time hugging each other!

Everybody say Gor’ko/”12 “Gor’ko! Gor’ko!” all the people cried out that had gathered round. 12

Gor’ko! (lit. ‘Bitter!’)—a call for the bride and groom to kiss at a wedding reception (in the sense that the wine is bitter and needs a kiss to make it sweet). Edik and Sonia kissed each other for the first time in front of the residents of the community Everyone who happened to be home at the time assembled for the wedding. An improvised table was set up in the fresh air and they all helped set it together. The ceremony didn’t just ‘buzz’ the way things did at traditional Russian parties—it ‘sang’ well into the night. Despite the parents’ pleadings, the young couple decided to settle down not in Edik’s parents’ mansion, which was actually more like a palace, but in Sonia’s little house. “You see, Father,” Edik explained, “this palace we’ve built here with all its different wings takes up practically half a hectare. But we don’t have the beauty that Sonia’s domain has, or even the air. We’ve got to take half the additions down.” The entrepreneur started drinking, and kept at it for a whole week. But after that, to everyone’s surprise, he started taking down the wings he had added to his mansion. He explained: “We were pretty silly, putting up all the additions. Our grandchildren won’t want to move into catacombs like these!” And Sonia and Edik went on living happily... Stop! Now I’ve already started talking about the future. And most certainly, it will be marvellous! But what about the present? At the present time, there is indeed a fine orphanage in the city of Kharkov. And there is a little girl named Sonia there. Sonia’s in Grade Three now, but she doesn’t have a hectare of land of her own, neither do Tanya, Seryozha or Katya, or any of the thousands of children living in orphanages. The Ukrainian Rada13 has not even put the question on its agenda yet—the question of granting a hectare of land to every resident of the country, including orphans, for lifetime use, on which to set up a family domain. Neither has the Belarus Duma or the Russian Duma considered it. Will the children forgive them? Will today’s parliamentary deputies be able to forgive themselves? l}

Rada—the Ukrainian Parliament, corresponding to the Duma in Russia and Belarus.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A security zone of the future For the past five evenings Nikolai Ivanovich1—the warden of a maximumsecurity correctional facility (in plain language, a prison)—had not been able to leave his office at the usual time. When his workday officially ended he turned his telephone ringer off and began pacing his office, deep in contemplation. Occasionally he would sit down at his desk, pick up the green folder lying on it and peruse its contents for the umpteenth time. A convict serving time for an infraction of Article 93, Clause 1, of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation had put forward a petition to him on behalf of a group of inmates in Cell 26, with what at first glance looked like an unthinkable proposal. The convict, whose name was Khodakov, proposed acquiring for the facility a hundred hectares of abandoned or unused arable land, to be surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with a watch-tower at each corner—in other words, taking all due precaution to prevent escapes. On this fenced-in hundred hectares ninety prisoners would be engaged in agricultural labour. The applications of those interested were kept in a file in this green folder. In their applications these prisoners committed themselves to supply the whole facility with vegetables, to the tune of half of all the produce they grew on the land. The other half they asked to be sent to their families. So far, nothing impossible in their request. In various correctional facilities prisoners are engaged in manufacturing activity In some cases this involves crafting simple objects in woodworking shops, in others—organised textile production, where prisoners sew simple items of clothing, such as quilted jackets or underpants, and receive a nominal wage for their work. The low wage is also due to the rather low level of productivity involved. According to the proposal in the file, the prisoners wanted to take up agriculture. Well, no problem there either. A payment of half of their produce was entirely feasible. No need to bother with selling stuff, or shipping off products on consignment and then waiting months for the proceeds to come in. But that wasn’t all... Khodakov, on behalf of the other prisoners, asked that the hundred hectares be divided into one-hectare plots, each plot to be assigned to a specific prisoner. In addition, they asked that each prisoner be granted the right to build a one-room cell-hut on their plot. There was also a request that any prisoner who wished to, be allowed to stay on their land after serving their sentence, and then for the prison not to collect as a levy but to purchase

surplus produce from them, as well as to allow them to enlarge their dwellings. The file containing the proposal, or request, had been given to Nikolai Ivanovich as far back as six months ago. Along with the ninety applications and the text of the proposal, the file also included plans for the future plots, handsomely executed in coloured pencil. The drawings showed the watchtowers, the barbed wire and the controlled-entry point. After his initial reading Nikolai Ivanovich tucked the green folder away in the bottom drawer of his desk. From time to time he would mentally go over its contents, but he had not given any answer to the prisoners. A certain circumstance had come about, however, which caused the warden to spend every evening over the past five days in intensive contemplation of the prisoners’ proposal. An order had come from the national administration to take steps, beginning the following year, to enlarge the facility and construct additional cells, with a view to being ready to accept a hundred and fifty new convicts by the year’s end. The order was accompanied by plans for additional wards to be attached to the existing buildings, along with a financing schedule. It was proposed to use prisoner labour in the construction. Nikolai Ivanovich mused as follows: The financing will be delayed as usual, and there will be problems procuring low-cost materials. They put one set of prices for construction materials into the budget, but when it comes to the actual building its something else already. Prisoner labour is never very efficient. The order is patently impossible to carry out. But there was no question that it had to be carried out. Nikolai Ivanovich’s retirement was only five years away He had already attained the rank of colonel. He had been the warden of this facility for twenty years now, without a single black mark on his record. And now this order. But these concerns were not uppermost in the colonel’s deliberations. The green folder! In his memo Prisoner Khodakov stated that his proposal would fulfil the principal objective of incarcerating prisoners in such institutions— namely, rehabilitation. The fact that modern correctional institutions seldom succeed in their rehabilitation efforts—indeed, quite the contrary, they end up producing more experienced criminals—was not lost on Nikolai Ivanovich. If this were not so, you wouldn’t get them coming back to prison for the second or third time. Nikolai Ivanovich had given a great deal of time and energy to his calling, and was extremely disturbed by this situation. His life was getting on now, his term of service was coming to an end, and

what was there to show for it? A nursery for criminals, as it turned out. The green folder! How infectious it was! If only he could confidently conclude that there was something unacceptable in the proposal the file contained! But no. Something inside him would not let him reject it out of hand. But neither could he bring himself to fully support it. It was an offbeat, unconventional proposal. The next morning, the colonel’s first order of the day was to have Prisoner Khodakov from Cell 26 brought to his office. “You can take a seat, Mr Khodakov,” said Nikolai Ivanovich to the man who had just come in, accompanied by an escort guard. The warden gestured to a chair. “I’ve just been looking over the contents of your file. I have a specific question for you.” “Sir!” the prisoner hastened to reply getting up from his chair. “Sit!” the guard commanded. “Yes, do sit down,” the prison warden replied softly. “No need to jump to your feet the way they do in court.” Turning to the escort guard, he added: “You can wait for us outside.” “So, Sergei Yurevich Khodakov, I must say you’ve submitted a rather strange proposal.” “It only seems strange on the surface. In fact, the proposal is extremely reasonable.” “Then tell me directly, flat out, what kind of cunning plan have you thought up here? Are you aiming to set up the conditions for a mass escape? The ninety candidates applying are all serving sentences of between five and nine years. Does this mean you want your freedom sooner?” “If there’s any cunning plan in this proposal, it has nothing to do with escape, sir.” Again the prisoner rose and showed signs of concern. “You’ve got the wrong impression...” “Just sit down and relax. And let’s dispense with the ‘sir’. I’m Nikolai Ivanovich. I know from your file that you are Sergei Yurevich. You used to be a psychologist. You defended your thesis, and then went into business. Your sentence was for major embezzlement—right?” “Yes, I was sentenced—it was back at the beginning of perestroika, after all, Nikolai Ivanovich. You just get used to one set of laws, and suddenly new ones come out...” “Okay, okay. That’s not the issue here. Explain to me what you have in mind with this agricultural zone with a barbed-wire fence, or is there another

name for it?” “I’ll try to explain, Nikolai Ivanovich. Only it’s hard for me to do that, because of a particular circumstance.” “What circumstance?” “You see, we’ve been reading this book—it’s called Anastasia. Then along came another book, a sequel. Well, anyway, the book talks about Man’s purpose in life. About how if everyone living on the Earth took a hectare of land and created a corner of Paradise on it, the whole Earth would be transformed into a Paradise. The book explains this very simply and convincingly.” “Sounds pretty simple to me! If everyone took... and created..., well, then, of course, the whole Earth would be transformed... But what’s this got to do with your proposal?” “I’m trying to tell you: it’s all outlined very persuasively in these books. Now some people might just glance over them superficially, and not get everything. But we have the time—we’ve been reading and discussing them, and we understand them.” “So, what have you got out of it?” ‘After reading these books, a whole lot of people have the desire to acquire their own land and create a Paradise oasis in their own kin’s domain. They’re free, they can do this. So we’ve decided: even if it’s behind barbed wire, we can still each take a hectare of land, work on it, and make it into something beautiful... Byway of a penalty, we suggest handing over half or even more of our produce either to the facility or to the public at large. But we do have a special request—that our plot is not taken away from us when we’ve served our sentence—in other words, those who want to stay on there can remain.” “So, what does that mean—that you’re going to live out the rest of your lives under the guards’ rifle muzzles?” ‘After we’ve all served our sentences, you can take away the barbed-wire fences and cart them off for use somewhere else, along with the towers. You can use them in another location for a new group of prisoners who want to fix up their own domains—while we stay put on ours.” ‘Aha! And then when their time is up, we switch the towers and barbed wire to a third location, while they go on living on their land. Is that it?” “You’ve got it.” “Some sort of phantasmagoria! What is it—you want me, the warden of this facility, to create Paradise oases for my prisoners? And are you certain that this can really work?” “I’m absolutely convinced it will be a success. As a psychologist I’m convinced. And it’s something I feel in my heart. Judge for

yourself, Nikolai Ivanovich: someone serves nine years behind bars, and then walks free. He hasn’t any friends. His friends are back in the prison’s security zone, or in their cells. His family doesn’t want anything to do with him. Neither does society at large. Let’s face it, who’ll give an ex-con a decent job? Most job categories are up to their ears in unemployed professionals, and look how many highly qualified people are standing in queue at employment centres. Our society provides no positions for exconvicts. There’s only one road ahead for them—back to the old routine. And so they follow it, and they end up back here with you again.” “Yes, I know the scenario. What’s the point in merely stating the obvious? But tell me, as a psychologist, why did the cons who read these books suddenly change and go for the idea of getting a piece of land behind a barbed-wire fence?” “Well, you see, they all got a glimpse of eternity on the horizon. Like, people believe you’re still alive, even in a prison cell. Whereas in fact you’re not. You’re dead. Because there’s nothing left for you on life’s horizon.” “What were you saying about ‘a glimpse of eternity’?” “I told you, it’s hard for me to explain it right off. It’s all in the books...” “Okay, I’ll read these books, and try to figure out what’s made you wax so lyrical over this. Then well talk again. Guard, take him away” Prisoner Khodakov got up, put his hands behind his back, and asked: “May I ask one more question?” “Go ahead,” the colonel agreed. “When we were working out the plan for this security zone, we took all existing regulations for prisoner holding into account. The proposal does not allow for any violation of these regulations.” “I say, you’ve thought of everything! The regulations... No violation... I’ll check it out.” Then Nikolai Ivanovich ordered the guard: “Take him away” Subsequently the warden called in the prison’s legal counsel. He handed him the file and said: “Here, take this. Study it thoroughly and determine where there are any violations of prisoner-holding regulations. Report back to me in forty-eight hours.” Porty-eight hours later the legal counsel was sitting in the warden’s office. He began his report with a few evasive phrases, atypical for his profession.

“The thing is, Nikolai Ivanovich, that from the point of view of the law and the regulations governing the holding of prisoners in so-called places of confinement, the proposal in question cannot be treated as an open-and-shut case.” “What kind of spin are you trying to give me here, Vasily,2 like a lawyer in court? You and I have known each other for fifteen years...” Nikolai Ivanovich got up from his desk. For some reason he appeared flustered. After pacing around the room for a while, he sat down again and continued: “Tell me specifically, what have we here by way of regulation violations?” “Specifically... Well, if you want it specifically, I’ll have to take it one step at a time.” “Okay, then. One step at a time.” “We’re talking about forming a new security zone here. The proposal allows for the isolation of this area from the outside world. This hundred-hectare zone will be fenced off with two rows of barbed wire. Watch-towers are also provided for. The zone is secured in full accordance with regulations. “The document goes on to propose the dividing of the security zone into individual plots of one hectare each and assigning each plot to a particular prisoner. Well, what is there to say? The regulations state we should accustom the unconscientious citizens in our charge to hard work, create workshop units for basic production, as well as set up a subsidiary farm and work toward partial self-financing. After all, the law allows for the setting up of institutions such as ours with special 2 Vasily (pron. va-SEE-lee)—a masculine name of Greek origin, now commonly used in Russia. Note that Nikolai and Vasily, because of their long friendship, often omit the patronymic in conversation with each other. In Russian they also call each other by the informal pronoun ty (similar to tu— instead of vous— pin French). provisions for economic activity and multi-purpose use of forest reserves. In our case this proposal envisages the setting up of a subsidiary farm which will provide those in our charge with a supply of fresh vegetables, with maybe some left over for sale. So far, we’re entirely within the limits of the law.” “Don’t draw things out. What’s next? Where do we go beyond the limits?” “Well, next it’s proposed to construct a separate cell on each plot to provide living accommodations for the prisoner—the one the plot is assigned to as a work-space.”

“That’s right—each one will have his own individual cell on his piece of land. The thing is, we don’t have enough funds to buy regular beds. And here they’re asking for a separate cell with all the amenities and furnishings. A utopia!” “I guess you didn’t take a thorough look at all the details of the proposal, Nikolai.” “What d’you mean, not a ‘thorough’ look? I practically memorised the thing.” “I don’t know about that. Don’t know about that... But there’s an attachment here giving plans and a description of the interior of this individual cell. Everything is strictly according to regulations—one bed, one toilet, one table, one chair, one bookshelf, one night-stand; a metal door with a peephole and an exterior lock, bars on the windows. As for financing, it’s spelled out here specifically: each prisoner is responsible for funding the construction of his own individual cell.” “That wasn’t in the document I saw.” “I don’t know about that. Don’t know about that... Take a look for yourself —it’s there. And the sketch, and the working drawings for the builders, and the description.” Editor’s footnote from the Russian edition: Law of the Russian Federation of 21 July 1993, amended 9 March 2001: “On institutions and agencies administering criminal punishment in the form of confinement”. “What d’you mean, ‘it’s there? It wasn’t there when I handed you the file to go over. I distinctly remember that it wasn’t. I’ve been over that file a dozen times from cover to cover. And here you... In two days?” “Yes, I did it, Kolya. I was the one. Only not in two days. They gave me a similar file three whole months ago. I recently put in my own additions and corrections, to which they agreed.” “Why didn’t you say anything to me about this earlier?” “You yourself only asked for my opinion two days ago.” “Okay. Let’s hear what you have to say about all this.” “Here’s what I think, Nikolai. If this proposal comes to fruition, there’ll be a significant decrease in the number of prisons and labour camps in the country, and the crime-rate will be cut in half. And you, Nikolai Ivanovich, will go down in history as a genius of a reformer.” “Never mind history Let’s look at the nitty-gritt. Will it fly from a legal standpoint?” Nikolai Ivanovich once again got up from his desk and began pacing the room. The legal counsel turned to the warden, who was still pacing the room in

serious contemplation, and enquired: “What are you so concerned about, Nikolai?” “Me, concerned? Now what have I got to be concerned about? Anyway... No, you’re right, Vasily I am concerned. I’m concerned because I can’t decide what I should say about this proposal in my brief to the general.” ‘Aha, so that’s it! So you’ve decided to support it after all? You’ve been thinking about taking it to the general?” “I’ve been contemplating it. I was thinking you might shoot the proposal down and persuade me not to go see the general. That’d be a weight off my shoulders. So I guess you’re in favour of it?” “Yes, I am.” “That means I’ve got to go,” Nikolai Ivanovich concluded, in a rather cheerful tone, as though he had actually been afraid his friend might shoot the proposal down. The warden stepped over to a cupboard and took down a bottle of cognac, along with some lemon and two shot-glasses. “Let’s drink, Vasily, to our success! Tell me, when was it that you found yourself so favourably disposed toward this file?” “It wasn’t right away” “Same here.” “My daughter’s doing a law degree at an institute. She’s in the middle of writing her graduating essay on “The influence of incarceration on the eradication of criminal acts”. She gave me a draft to read. I read it, and just listen to what she says: Ninety percent of those who serve their time in incarceration reoffend. The underlying cause behind these depressing crime statistics is the following: • a person’s upbringing, which has led him to the committing of a criminal act; • the challenge of adapting to society following the period of incarceration; • the formation of a criminal world-view during the period of incarceration in a criminal environment! “Do you realise what her conclusions mean, Nikolai? It turns out that you and I, just by honestly trying to do our duty, are actually helping shape a criminal world-view?” “We don’t ‘shape’ anything. We act in accord with regulations, the law and the orders we’re given. Although, you know, I too have a lurking sense of dissatisfaction here. I used to put it out of my thought. I’ve been trying to convince myself it’s none of my business.

“But then this file appeared... I’ve been contemplating it for six months no. And I’ve finally decided to go see the general. Only even though I’ve sat down several times to rewrite a report, to make it sound more intelligible, it’s still not coming.” “Let’s try it together. I think the main thing is not to scare the general off by making it sound too original and outlandish. We’ve got to simplify it.” “I agree. It should be simpler. But how? Especially since they’re asking to have the land turned over to each prisoner for lifetime use after they’ve finished serving their sentence.” “Yes, that aspect doesn’t seem realistic for the time being. We don’t have any federal law at the moment on the allocation of land for lifetime use. I’ve thought about this point. We’ll have to be honest with them. When they’ve finished serving their time, the question will be taken up in the context of the land legislation in existence at that time. I think they’ll understand. Everybody knows you can’t go above the law. We don’t make the laws. But we should also point out the direction we see things heading. Right now it all seems to be leading to a law permitting private ownership of land.” “God willing,” affirmed Nikolai Ivanovich as he poured out a second round of cognac. “Let’s just have another wee dram... To success!” They clinked glasses. Then all at once Nikolai Ivanovich put his glass down on the table and once more began pacing the room. “Don’t tell me you’re concerned again?” asked the legal counsel. “You see, Vasily,” Nikolai Ivanovich rattled on anxiously without pausing, “you and I here have been dreaming big dreams, like youngsters. We’ve got carried away with our dreams, forgetting that we’re dealing here with criminals. There are some among them, of course, that simply took a wrong turn, and may be sincerely willing to get their lives back together within the limits of the law. But the majority of them are hard-core criminals, rounders through and through. They’ve got an entirely different agenda, and what kind of gimmick are they trying to pull here?” “I’ve thought about that too, Nikolai. But let’s do a test first, and afterward you can decide whether to report to the general or not.” “How are we going to test them?” “Here’s how. Tell me, when did they give you this file?” ‘About six months ago.” “That means they’ve been discussing this project for more than six months now, working out the drawings and plans. Then they put it all beautifully into a folder and attached ninety application forms. So, let’s you and I gather

all the applicants together, suddenly and without warning, in the auditorium. We’ll invite specialists—let’s say, agronomists, specialists in vegetable growing, and have them examine the lot. The examiners can ask questions about things like what to plant in the soil and when, and we shall see how many would-be responders there are. You know, if they’re really serious about this, and they’ve got hold of this idea without any ulterior motives, if it’s a real dream with them, they wouldn’t just sit on their fannies, would they now, and wait ’til their proposal’s answered. They’d have to be studying agrotechnology.” “Now that’s really something, Vasily! Can you imagine rounders spending half a year boning up on how to plant flowers and cucumbers? That’s really steep! Maybe a chap raised in the country might know the answer. But for these...” “That’s why I’m telling you, let’s test them before deciding whether to go see the general or not.” Upon entering the auditorium they found not ninety, but two hundred prisoners sitting there. By the time the warden had invited the specialists in agrotechnology—two instructors from the agricultural institute and one from the college, the number of would-be domain dwellers had reached two hundred prisoners. The prisoners had taken their seats in the auditorium, not suspecting that they were to be given a test. They saw the three people sitting behind the table on stage, but had no idea who they were. Then the warden came out and announced: “In connection with the proposal to organise a subsidiary farm, we needed to consult people acquainted with agriculture. Anyway, I am happy to present to you three instructors from specialised educational institutions. They will be asking you questions, and after that we shall decide who among you may be entrusted with a plot of land.” Nikolai Ivanovich introduced each of three instructors in turn and invited them to put questions to the gathering. The first to ask a question was an elderly instructor from the agricultural college, seated at the right of the stage: “Who among you, sirs, can tell me what time of year tomato seeds should be planted for the propagation of seedlings? When should the seedlings be transplanted in the ground? And if you’re familiar with the term singling out, tell me then, please, what signs indicate the need to use it?” He's got ’etn on the run now! thought Nikolai Ivanovich. A bunch of questions all together in one. I bet even my wife, who’s a veteran dachnik, couldn’t even handle those from memory. She always checks in the books before planting anything. And look how quiet everybody is—not a stir. The silence in the hall disturbed Nikolai Ivanovich. He secretly hoped that

the project would actually come to fruition. The only reason he was being so picky about it was not that he wanted to reject it but because he wanted to eliminate any flaws or defects in advance. The silence in the hall indicated that the project was being treated as less than serious by the participants most involved, which augured poorly for its chances of success. Come on, now! he agonised. Not a single answer? Isn’t there at least one country lad out there? Though, in the country, it’s more often the women than the men who do the vegetable planting. To somehow compensate for the awkward pause, Nikolai Ivanovich stood up from the table and said in a severe tone: “What’s up, lads? Didn’t you get the question?” “We got it,” replied a young prisoner seated in the front row. “Well, if you got it, then answer the question.” “Who do you want to answer? You haven’t called anyone to come to the chalkboard.” “What d’you mean who? What chalkboard? If anyone knows the answer, put up your hand.” Instantly all two hundred prisoners present raised their hands. The examining instructors, who had been conversing amongst themselves, at once fell silent. Nikolai Ivanovich was overcome with mixed feelings. On the one hand he felt a sense of pride in his charges, as well as a renewed hope that the project might indeed come to fruition. On the other hand—a sense of alarm over whether any of the two hundred who had raised their hand could give a satisfactory response to the question. “How about you answering?” He gestured to the talkative young prisoner sitting in the front row. The young man got to his feet. Stroking his bald head with a tattooed hand, he began to talk quickly and volubly: “The time for starting tomato seedlings will not be the same each year. It all depends on the onset of reliable frost-free weather, which, of course, varies from year to year. If we take into account the need to plant the seedlings in the ground before they bloom, along with the period of maturation, we can calculate the time the seeds should be planted for propagation under greenhouse conditions or on a window-sill.” “That will do, young man,” said the college instructor, interrupting the young prisoner’s discourse. “Put up your hand, whoever can continue.” Again two hundred hands were thrust in the air. The instructor gestured to

an elderly prisoner, by all appearances an old-time criminal with a gold filling in his mouth. The old fellow quickly rose to his feet, and began speaking in sedate tones: “They need good regular soil, not some kind of useless crap. You need to put in some worm-processed humus, or peatmoss. But you shouldn’t plant seeds directly into pure peat moss like that. They quickly get used to the peat, then when they’re put into the garden they’ll be knocked for a loop— it’ll be too different for them. So you need to take the peat and mix it with just a bit of sand, using soil from the garden to dilute it at least by half. And you have to warm up their little earth-nest for them—say, up to about 25 degrees3—before sticking the seeds in the earth.” “That will do,” the instructor interrupted. “Basically you explained everything correctly. Next one continue,” and he pointed to a decentlooking, bespectacled prisoner in the third row. “So, your colleague left off saying: before planting tomato-seeds in the prepared soil, you have to... What do you have to do?” The prisoner rose to his feet, straightened his spectacles and continued: “Before planting the seeds in the soil you have prepared for them, you must put them in your mouth and hold them in the saliva under your tongue for at least nine minutes.”4 'The Celsius (Centigrade) scale common throughout Russia, Europe and Canada, is used throughout the Ringing Cedars Series. 250 C = 770 F. 4

See the section entitled “The seed as physician” in Book 1, Chapter 11: ‘Advice from Anastasia”. The examiners seated at the table, as well as the warden, were shocked by this amazing declaration, and stared at thebespectacled prisoner. After a brief pause one of the institute instructors asked again: “Do you mean to say that before planting in the soil it should be moistened in water?” “Never in water, certainly not in chlorinated or boiled water, where all the vital bacteria are destroyed. It must be moistened in one’s own saliva, to infuse it with information about one’s self. After it has been in a Man’s mouth, after being in his saliva at a temperature of 36 degrees5 (i.e., normal body temperature) for nine minutes, the seed will awaken from its dormancy and know right off what it is to do, and for whom it is to bear fruit. If a Man is suffering from any ailments or abnormalities, the seed will try to bear fruit to remove such abnormalities.” The three instructors held an impromptu discussion amongst themselves,

then turned to Nikolai Ivanovich. The college instructor queried: “Who taught your charges—what institution did you invite specialists from to teach them?” Even days later the warden still couldn’t figure out how he could have tripped up on answering this question. He responded this way: “I don’t really remember where they were from. I wasn’t involved with that aspect, but I know they came from Moscow. A high-profile professor came.” The prisoners in the auditorium caught on to the warden’s fib at once. They realised he was trying to protect them, not letting the latest responder be made fun of by the examiners, and, silently and gratefully, they in turn extended their support. The young prisoner in the front row (who had been the first to respond to the question) added: “We thought he wasn’t just a professor, but an academician.2 And he knows a lot about the Siberian taiga, about life in general.” “That’s right,” added the prisoner sitting beside him, “he’s a real clever chap, a super scholar.” From various corners of the hall could be heard rumblings of approbation of the professor from Moscow, whom none of them had ever seen in the first place. The second institute instructor, who had not spoken up to now, all at once began talking, trying to sound imposing: “Yes, colleagues, I seem to remember seeing this theory somewhere myself, although I can’t remember where it was. Science today is moving in this direction. I find something intriguing in this—36 degrees, actual human saliva permeated with all different kinds of vital bacteria... There’s definitely something to this.” “Yes, yes. I seem to recall it too,” the college instructor echoed thoughtfully and in an equally grandiose manner, giving the impression that he too had heard something. “This is one of the new tendencies in vegetable-growing. Theoretically, of course, it is scientifically grounded, but we shall have to see how it works in practice.” The prisoners seated in the hall gave fluent responses to a whole series of questions on agrotechnology. Their answers were not always of the standard variet. But the invited examiners were no longer in a hurry to offer counterarguments. Quite the contrary, they listened with great interest. While the assistant warden went to see off the instructors, Nikolai Ivanovich

sat silently at the table in front of the hushed auditorium. A deathly silence hung over the hall as he leafed through the contents of the green folder. Then the warden raised his head, surveyed the whole auditorium and began to say: “I can tell you this, lads. I still don’t have a complete understanding of what you’re proposing. No, not completel. So I’ve decided... In any case, I don’t know what will come of it. I’m going to try to push it through with the central administration.” The hushed auditorium, as though on command, suddenly rose to its feet and erupted in spontaneous applause. Taken completely by surprise at the reaction, Nikolai Ivanovich rose to his feet as well. Overcome by an inexplicable embarrassment, he felt a pleasant and joyful sensation in his heart. But he managed to put on his best poker face befitting his status as a no-nonsense warden, and said: “What’s all this noise about? Take your seats!” But even as he spoke he could feel the inappropriateness of excessive severity in the given context, and added: “We’ll still have to invite the professor from Moscow, all the same!” Upon receiving Nikolai Ivanovich, the head of the Correctional Facilities Central Administration, General Pososhkov, got down to business right off: “It’s not just you. Others, too, have been advised to upgrade their facilities, some just by five or ten places, some by as much as a hundred and fifty You should be ready to accept an additional contingent of prisoners within a year. They all say it’s a challenge, unrealistic, and so our prisons are overcrowded. What would you have me do? Here I’ve got an order from the Justice Minister to make room for an additional six thousand prisoners. But you’ve given me cheer, Nikolai Ivanovich. I heard you say you’ll be ready to receive your share and right on time.” “Yes, I’ll be ready. Only there have to be some modifications to the project, as I outlined in my report.” “I know, I know. I read it. Only not everything’s clear to me in your report. You want to get involved in agriculture. That’s great! Assigning a separate plot to each prisoner—who’s stopping you? What makes you think you need my approval on this? But the notion of building a separate cell on each plot, now that does sound rather strange—it’s unreasonable. Go build one or two barracks. They can march to work each morning under guard. Less expensive. You’ll get no additional financing for individual cells.” “But I’m not asking for any additional financing.” “What are you asking for, then?”

“I just need you to approve the overall plan for individual cells on each plot.” ‘And where’s the money going to come from to build these units?” “From sponsors’ subsidies.” “You must have some pretty eccentric sponsors... Look, okay then, I don’t have time to go into it. I’m going to write on your proposal: ‘Review and complete’—but I’ll ring them up myself and tell them they should review and complete it with due process—no dela. Is that it?” “There’s just one minor problem...” “What problem?” “I don’t have any land I can use for a subsidiary farm.” “So, go see the governor. Ask him.” “I spoke with his deput. They’re considering, but that’s all they’re doing at the moment.” “Okay, I’ll do what I can. I’ll ring him up... That’s it?” “Yes, sir.” “So, you can proceed. All the best.” Nikolai Ivanovich’s facility obtained the land—200 hectares—by the autumn. The land was in an isolated area, far from the nearest population point. They managed to truck in the barbed wire and five-metre-tall posts required to construct the enclosure before the seasonal rains washed out the road. Nikolai Ivanovich realised that if the enclosure wasn’t ready by the autumn, there was no way they could start cultivating the land on the plots the following spring. But how to get the posts into place, if even the back country road stopped two kilometres short of the allotted area? They wouldn’t be able to get either the manpower or the equipment they needed for drilling the post-holes to the designated site. When the prisoners learnt about the problem, they put forward a proposal to the warden: they would dig the post-holes by hand, and cross the twokilometre stretch from the end of the road to the construction site on foot, under guard. Every day, even under the cold autumn rain, a convoy of fifty prisoners marched out to the site, wearing homemade oilskins they had glued together from plastic sheeting. There had actually been even more volunteers, but because of a shortage of guards only fifty could be accommodated at a time. The future landholders gave their all to their work. By the first frost all the fence-posts had been set up and connected by barbed wire, and the watchtowers erected. Back at the cellblock they constructed a log cabin for the

guard at the controlled-entry point and put it in place, too. The order was also submitted that autumn for the construction of the huts— individual cells for the prisoners to live in, at a cost of 30,000 roubles each. But there was no money left to pay for these. The prisoners set about raising the money where they could. Some had savings stored up from before their incarceration, others were helped by relatives, but there were a few who found it impossible to raise such a sum from any source. They sent a memo to the warden letting him know of their willingness to live in tents. But this was against regulations, and they were turned down. One hundred and eighty huts were transported to the new security zone over the winter road and set up on the piles driven in the autumn. And early in the spring one hundred and eighty prisoners were installed in these primitive huts with bars on the windows. One fine spring day the warden stood in one of the watch-towers and surveyed the extraordinary scene before him. On the two hundred hectares of barbed-wire enclosure a hundred and eighty plots had been delineated, divided from each other by stakes and brushwood, with the occasional border marked by a length of stretched wire. Those are the wealthy ones, decided the warden. Their relatives must have sent them money not just to build their cell, but for their border markings too. Lanes and foot-paths ran between the plots, with a common space for meetings at the centre. In some of the low-lying areas the snow hadn’t completely melted. But on the little hills the first green blades of grass were already showing. On almost every plot the warden could make out the dark outlines of isolated human figures—figures which appeared faceless and identical in their warm prison jackets, cloth caps with ear-flaps, and rough, artificial-leather boots. What could these isolated, faceless figures possibly create on this empty ground? Why weren’t they staying in their cells? The warden peered through his field-glasses and focused in on one of them. It turned out to be Prisoner Khodakov, thrusting his spade into ground, which was still partly frozen as he dug another hole. Shifting his field-glasses around, Nikolai Ivanovich counted nineteen holes already dug in the half-frozen ground around the perimeter of Khodakov’s plot. All over the zone, figures in dark jackets were doing exactly the same thing —digging holes around the perimeter of their plots. “Why so many holes?” Nikolai Ivanovich wondered aloud.

“They’re for the saplings and bushes which will grow into a green hedge surrounding each plot,” the guard explained. “I see. Couldn’t they wait a week or two until the ground is thawed and the digging will be easier?” “I told them as much, but they don’t want to wait. They’re afraid they won’t get it all in on time. Each one has four hundred metres of hedge to plant— that’s no light undertaking. And once the ground thaws out, they’ll have to start work on their vegetable beds.” The warden spent quite a while longer observing the zeal and dexterity each of his charges displayed as they worked, and he mused: There must be some kind ofcosmic link between the soul of a Man and the soul of the Earth. If that link is there, Man is in harmony with the planet. If it isn’t, then there’s no harmony. Corruption sets in, and crime goes up. Of course, that book, Anastasia, must be quite exceptional. All the cons have read it, and something inexplicable has erupted in their hearts. It’s happened with me too—I read it and now I’ve started looking at life differently. Of course this book is playing its part—prisoners all over the country are reading it. But the book’s strength is really in how it brings out Man’s relationship with the Earth. In other words, that relationship is primary, and one should never attempt to sever it. And all this talk about high morals and spirituality is nothing but idle chatter without this mysterious relationship which is not yet fully comprehended! By autumn all the plots in the ‘new zone’, as the prisoners themselves called it, were framed by still only partly-grown saplings of apple trees, pear-trees, rowans, birches and all sorts of plantings, which with their leaves decked out in their multi-coloured autumnal hues, created a most pleasing picture to the eye. Approximately fifteen hundred to two thousand square metres of each hectare had been planted with forest saplings. Even by that very first autumn the view from the watch-towers over the two hundred hectares below gave a distinctly different and positive impression compared to the desert-like black earth that could be seen everywhere the preceding spring. It was abundantly clear that the whole enclosure was being transformed into an exceptional oasis of green. All summer long the new zone provided the prison cafeteria with fresh greens, then cucumbers, tomatoes and beets. In the fall each prisoner offered up—from the plot of land entrusted to him —five sacks of potatoes, along with several dozen jars of salted and canned cucumbers and tomatoes. The prison commissary was provided with a whole winter’s supply of beets, carrots, horseradish and other vegetables.

An unusual scene took place in the autumn at the new zone’s controlledentry point. In contrast to all other prison facilities in the world, where foodstuffs and other treats would be passed to the prisoners from outside, in this new zone they were moving in the opposite direction. The soldiers handed out jars of preserved vegetables to the prisoners’ relatives. Many had come by car and left with a wealth of produce in their baggage compartments. Prisoners who did not have any relatives living close by sold their part of the harvest, through the soldiers, to food wholesalers at a handsome profit. Nobody came to see Prisoner Khodakov, however. He did not have any relatives. He had grown up in an orphanage, and asked to have his portion of the harvest sent to the nearest children’s home. Nikolai Ivanovich earned the administration’s gratitude for a successful carrying out of their order. He was the only warden able to accept a new contingent of one hundred and eighty prisoners without a worsening of holding conditions for the remainder. The past year had been the busiest one for Nikolai Ivanovich in all his twenty years of service. Apart from his usual duties, he was also responsible for ‘prying’ seeds or saplings for the new zone out of whatever source he could. But he felt a shiver of delight every time he saw the old prison ZiF pull up, loaded to the gills with young saplings. 7

Zil (pron. ZEAL)—a standard lorry or truck produced by the major Russian (Soviet) automobile factory known as Zavod imeni Likhacheva (acronym: ZIL) in the city of Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga river, which has been operating under one name or another since 1916. From 1927 until his death in 1956, it was run by Ivan Alexeevich Likhachev, when it was renamed in his honour. The factory also produces passenger cars (marketed under the Volga brand) and luxury limousines (‘Chaika') which during the Soviet period were the motorcars of choice for higher-placed government officials. Five more years went b. Then on one fine July day a helicopter appeared and began to circle over the new zone. Nikolai Ivanovich stood at the controlled-entry point and watched the helicopter fly over. He knew that on board were General Pososhkov and members of a committee despatched by the Ministry of Justice. Perhaps someone had sent in a complaint about the warden, or it might have been simply rumours, but in any case word had spread about a peculiar’ prisoner-holding regime. After the helicopter landed, the committee members, all highly-placed officials, stepped out onto the open space in front of the entry point. But Nikolai Ivanovich kept standing and thinking only about the zone’s security

perimeter: Yes, it is clear that I shall be charged with a violation of regulations here. Why did I ever give permission for these climbing perennials to be planted around the security perimeter? They’ve already climbed up three metres, the full height of the barbed wire and formed a hedge, so that the wire can’t even be seen behind all the different flowers. The barbed wire, you see, they didn’t find aesthetically pleasing. They even put in climbing plants and flowers around the watch-towers, which have wound their way right up to the guards’ lookout. Now the whole thing doesn’t even look like a security zone any more, more like some sort of a Paradise oasis amidst fields overgrown with tall grasses. “Here, if you please, is the first violation, already quite evident,” said the general representing the Ministry “What kind of security perimeter have you got here? Anyone who wants to, can climb over a barrier like that, all wound around with vines,” the general went on, turning to Pososhkov, the administration chief. “Any soldier will tell you that. Am I right?” The Ministry representative addressed the lieutenant on duty at the entry point. “Permission to answer, General, sir!” the duty officer responded, standing to attention at his post. ‘Answer when you’re asked a question! Is there any violation of regulations here?” “Negative, sir, General, sir! In this instance you are simply looking at a tactical improvement of the security perimeter of the prisoner-holding zone.” “Wha... what’s that?” one of the Ministry committee members was taken aback. “What kind of tactical improvement are you talking about? What kind of drivel is that?” All the committee members stopped beside the lieutenant standing at attention. Oh, that jokester, mused Nikolai Ivanovich, feeling ultimately let down— that Lieutenant Prokhorov again with his endless jokes. If only he coidd control himself in front of the committee! Now for certain they’ll never pardon this ridicule. And he just stands there at attention without so much as a blush. The lieutenant began talking, spitting out his words: “Permission to answer the question on improvement, sir!” “Answer, if you can,” ordered the general from the Ministry. “By ‘tactical improvement’, do you mean your flowers?” “Exactly, sir. If any criminal tries to escape by climbing over the

barbed wire intertwined with flowers, he won’t get very far.” “Why is that?” asked the general in astonishment. “In the process of climbing over the perimeter fence intertwined with fragrant flowers, his whole body will be infused with their scent, which means that even an inexperienced dog will be able to easily track him down and bring him back.” “So, he’ll be infused!” The general broke into a loud guffaw and all the committee members joined in. ‘And the dog will follow the scent of the flowers! Pretty nifty, Lieutenant. Imaginative. And how many escapees have your dogs brought back that way?” asked the general through his laughter. “Not a single one,” replied the lieutenant, and continued in all seriousness: “Since the criminals realise the futility of any attempt at climbing the fence, there hasn’t been a single escape attempt in the past five years.” The committee members felt even more exhilarated by the lieutenant’s serious look and his declaration. “D’you mean to say that there has not been a single attempted escape from this security zone in the past five years?” the committee head asked the administration chief. “That’s right, not a single one,” replied Pososhkov. The committee members, clearly pleased by the lieutenant’s sharp-witted responses, put the following question to him: “Tell us, Lieutenant, if no criminals even attempt to escape from this security zone, then why the armed soldiers in the watch-towers?” “To protect the zone from the outside world,” replied the lieutenant. “What does that mean—£to protect from the outside world’? Does anyone try to break in to the zone?” 'Affirmative, sir!” the lieutenant responded. “Many of the prisoners’ wives have declared their wish to live with their husbands in their cells. Some of them have requested permission to spend the summer in the cells along with their children. But our strict warden’s strict enforcement of regulations won’t permit any such lawlessness. So a few unconscientious wives took it upon themselves to try either getting through the hedge or tunnelling underneath. But all such brazen attempts have been thwarted by the zone’s excellent security force.” Uncertain as to whether the lieutenant was joking or speaking seriously, the committee chair enquired of Nikolai Ivanovich: “Have there really been instances like this?”

Affirmative,” replied Nikolai Ivanovich. “Two such attempts have been thwarted. I received ninety-six applications from prisoners’ wives wishing to spend the summer with their children on their husbands’ plots. But apart from the conjugal meetings provided for in the regulations, nothing like this can be permitted.” “I wonder what it is that attracts them to the security zone, especially with the children?” mused the committee chair aloud, adding: “In any case, colleagues, let us go in and take a look for ourselves.” “Open the gates!” Nikolai Ivanovich ordered the lieutenant. The wooden gates, decorated with traditional Russian carvings, quickly opened up, and the committee members entered the security zone. They had hardly gone a few paces when they all at once spontaneously stopped. Seen through the helicopter’s viewports, the zone had had the appearance of a beautiful green oasis. But here on the ground it was not only the delightful foot-paths of mowed grass, not only the multicoloured living fences around the perimeter, that struck the committee members. Accustomed to the odours of their offices and city streets, they were now gracefully enveloped by the delicate fragrances of summer plants and flowers. The silence was broken only by the singing of birds and the humming of insects—sounds which by no means irritated, but soothed people’s ears. “We should visit one of the plots,” said the committee chair, for some reason in a hushed tone, as though afraid of disturbing the general atmosphere. The prominent officials walked up the pathway of the first plot they came to, heading for the cell-hut. The little hut was actually surrounded by a metal cage, though this was scarcely visible unless one examined it at close range. From a distance it looked like a little green hillock. Wound around with various vines and surrounded by flower-beds, it blended in most harmoniously with the surrounding space. At the entrance to the hut stood a man in a white T-shirt, his back to the approaching visitors. The prisoner was oiling a metal lock bolt, energetically trying to slide it back and forth. This was something of a challenge, and the prisoner was so absorbed in the task that it was a while before he became aware of his visitors. “Hello, Kharlamych!”8 Nikolai Ivanovich greeted him. “Make our guests feel at home, introduce yourself.” Kharlamych quickly turned about. After momentarily losing his bearings upon seeing visitors, he quickly regained his composure and introduced himself:

“Prisoner Kharlamych, sentenced according to Article 102 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation to twelve years. Served six years in the cellblock, five years now in the new zone.” ‘And what have you been doing here with your door?” asked the committee chair. “I’ve been oiling the exterior bolt, Chairman, sir! It’s started sticking quite a bit, the metal they produce today’s not very good quality, it rusts quickly.” The committee chair went over to the door leading into the cell, closed it and tried shoving the bolt into position. It didn’t budge on the first attempt, but he finally got it to work. Then he turned, and, with a meaningful glance to the administration chief Pososhkov, declared: “So, you claim you’re following all the regulations for prisoner-holding to the letter. Does that mean that after completion of their workday they’re all locked up in their cells?” Kharlamych (pron. har-LA-mitch)— a patronymic derived from the prisoner’s father’s name Kharlam. The use of the patronymic alone here indicates the highly informal relationship that has developed between the warden and his charges. The administration chief was silent. Everyone realised that the metal bolt had rusted and was hard to budge for the simple reason that it had not been used for a long time. Prisoner Kharlamych realised that he had let his superiors down. And thoughts began running through his head: I should have fixed this damn bolt a long time ago. How can I explain to these people that this lock is completely unnecessary? Nobody here would even think of leaving the zone, of running away from his land. To what purpose? Where would they go? As for Kharlamych, here was his native space, here was his Motherland. It was here that he was greeted every morning by the singing of the birds and the waving of the branches of trees he himself had planted. He had even been raising a little goat, which he had named Nikita, along with a dozen laying hens, and had a couple of beehives. Others had their own homesteads, setting them up just a little differently, but for each one it was his own homestead, on his own piece of land. And here he had gone and let down his warden with this damn bolt! Kharlamych was really upset. He began talking quickly and excitedly: “I'm the world’s worst son-of-a-bitch when it comes to this bolt, Chairman,

sir! And I have no excuse if it should reflect badly on my buddies. Only I want you understand—let me have one last word here. Let me... Let me tell you: my whole life has changed. Not even ‘changed’—in fact, my life has just begun in this place. I’m free here. Out there, outside the gates—there’s no freedom there—indeed, that’s where all hell breaks loose. The soldiers up there in the watch-towers—they’re like angels to us. We pray that they don’t let any scum in here...” The prisoner’s voice with its he art-wrenching emotion and the content of what he had to sayworked its own unique effect on the people standing by All at once one of the committee members, a woman deputy from the State Duma, suddenly burst out: “What’s all the fuss over this measly bolt? Don’t you see it rained last night? The bolt’s started shrivelling.” The committee chair glanced at the metal bolt, then at the woman, and burst out laughing. “Shrivelling, you say? Why didn’t I think of that before? It did rain, after all, and the bolt began to shrivel, and it rusted... And up in the towers—those are angels, you say?” ‘Angels,” Kharlamych echoed. “Tell me, when is your time up?” “In eleven months and seven days.” “How do you propose to live after that?” “I’ve applied to have my sentence extended...” “What? How could it be extended? Why?” “’Cause out there there’s no freedom. There’s no order in that kind of freedom. There’s no freedom without land.” ‘And who’s stopping you from going free, getting a piece of land and creating the same kind of homestead that you have here, only as a free man? You could get yourself a family!” “You know, Chairman, sir, that’s something I’ll never understand. Who’s stopping us here in Russia from giving each Russian a hectare of land? I’ll never understand. Does Russian land belong to Russians or not?” “Right now, according to the law adopted by the State Duma, everyone has the right to buy land,” observed the woman deputy. ‘And what if I don’t have the money even to buy a single hectare of land? Does that mean I have no Motherland? That’s the way it looks—I don’t have it and never will have. But if Russia is my Motherland, just who am I supposed to buy it from? It turns out somebody’s seized my Motherland for

themselves—the whole country, down to a single hectare—and is now demanding a ransom from every last Russian! There’s some monkey business going on here. Beyond the law and beyond our understanding. “You, Chairman, sir,” Kharlamych addressed the committee chair, “I see by your stripes that you’re a general. So, liberate our Motherland from whoever seized it and is demanding a ransom. Or are you too going to be paying a ransom for your own little piece of the Motherland?” “Prisoner Kharlamych, cease and desist!” Nikolai Ivanovich intervened. He could see the scar on the war-wounded general’s cheek turning purple, and his fists clenching. The general stepped up to the prisoner. They stood staring each other in the eye, without a word between them. Then the general quietly said: “Show me around your homestead, Russian citizen,” and added even more quietly, almost to himself: “your piece of the Motherland behind barbed wire.” Kharlamych showed the committee members around his young garden, with its budding fruit on the branches. He treated them to currants and raspberries. He showed them the tomato beds, along with the more than 200 square metres he had planted with cucumbers. He showed them the pond he had dug himself with a spade. Standing beside the pond was a neatly arranged row of barrels. “Kharlamych has a particular know-how here,” Nikolai Ivanovich explained to the committee members, pointing to the barrels. “He salts away a hundred fifty-litre barrels of cucumbers every year. He’s developed a superior, firstrate pickling method. And he’s invented an original preservation system. First he fills each barrel with cucumbers and brine, then he caulks them and stores them in the pond, underwater. They’ll keep that way until the spring. As soon as the restaurant wholesalers arrive from Moscow, Kharlamych chops a hole in the ice and drags a barrel over to the entry point. We sell them at five hundred roubles a barrel. Kharlamych gets 250, and the rest goes to the prison coffers.” ‘And how much does each enterprise make annually for your facility?” enquired one of the committee members. “On average, around a hundred thousand roubles a year,” responded Nikolai Ivanovich. “Though, according to contract, half of it goes to the workers on the plots.” ‘A hundred thousand?” the committee member was astonished. ‘And you’ve got here a hundred and eighty hectares all told. That means you have a net

profit of ninety million a year from them?” “Yes, that’s right.” ‘And the prisoners each make fifty thousand a year?” “Yes, that’s how it works out.” “In the whole country we’ve got over a million citizens being held in incarceration. What if we switched them all over to such a system? What a tremendous source of income for the country! Plus the number of criminals, judging from what we can see, would significantly decrease.” “Switch over... all of them?” another committee member broke into the conversation. “But we’re facing quite a different question here: this zone may even be closed down. Why were we brought here anyway? To find out what’s really happening. There’s something funny going on here—prisoners living in better conditions than people at libert. And these prisoners, no matter how you put it, are criminals. Anyway, what are you going to do, Nikolai Ivanovich, when these people’s terms are up?” The warden answered without hesitation: “If I had my way, I would let every last one of them look after their own plot. I’d take down the barbed wire and move it somewhere else—start setting up a new zone.” In their report to the Ministry of justice the committee members reported that they found no violations of regulations on prisoner-holding. “What about these rumours that the prisoners are living in better conditions than many free citizens?” asked the Minister. “Then it is the lives of our free citizens that have to be improved,” the committee chair observed. “We need to give people land. Not lip-service, but in actual fact.” “But that’s not within our jurisdiction,” said the Minister, dismissing the proposal. “Let’s get right to the essentials.” “In terms of essentials, it comes down to this: we need to replicate this experience in all the facilities under our jurisdiction,” the committee chair stated firmly: “I second that,” affirmed the woman deputy, adding: “and I fully intend to introduce a bill in the Duma to grant every Russian family a hectare of land for lifetime use, whereon to establish their own kin’s domain.” The Duma passed the law. At one swoop millions of Russian families began planting gardens and little forests on their own family lands. And Russia flourished... In what year did this happen?... What—it hasn’t happened yet? Why not?

Who’s stopping us? Who is preventing Russia from flourishing? CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 1 European, Finnish—to Russians or Ukrainians, this meant significantly higher quality than was standard in their own countries. 2 academician— a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (a very high rank indeed).

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A law for deputies elected I realised that Anastasia’s grandfather possessed not only extraordinary psychoanalytic abilities but also information about the societal structure of various nations. But I wondered how specific his knowledge was about state institutions. After all, here he was living out in the taiga, without access to radio, telephone or television. So how would he get information, let’s say, about our national government agencies? There was no way. Which meant he did not have any specific information. Still, I decided to ask him: “You know that in our Russian state there is a body known as the State Duma?” “I know,” came the reply: ‘And d’you know who works there, and how it functions?” “I know that too.” ‘And do you have information on each deputy?” “Yes, on every single one.” ‘And the laws they pass—is that something you know about too?” “Not only about the laws they pass, but about the laws they will pass in the future. I know about them in advance. But, again, why are you so surprised, Vladimir? For a priest that is the simplest of tasks—it’s not all that interesting.” “Yes, I am surprised, because I don’t understand how you can possibly know about every single deputy, let alone what laws the Duma is going to pass in the near future. It’s some sort of inexplicable mysticism.” “There’s no mysticism here, only the most primitive of tasks.” “Well, could you explain this phenomenon to me? The depth of information you have, I mean.” “I can, of course. It’s really all very simple. You see, back five thousand years ago the pharaohs had their Council. In the Roman Empire there was the Senate. The tsars had their Boyars’ Duma.1 Now what can I say more? The names may be different, but the essence is always the same. After all, the law doesn’t depend on how a legislative body is named, but on what influences parliamentary delegates are subjected to—on the living conditions surrounding them and the perspectives for the future to which

they are bound. But all the conditions were pre-programmed for them a long time ago. If one knows the programme, one knows what’s ahead as well— including what decisions the legislators are capable of reaching.” “What do the law and the deputies’ living conditions have to do with it? How are they connected with a broader programme? Anyway, what can you yourself possibly know about how a modern Duma deputy lives?” “It’s very simple. Of course, I’m not talking about how any particular deputy sleeps, what they eat or how they dress. That’s not something I care to know, nor do I find it of interest. I’m talking about what’s significant. “I’m sure it’s the same now as in earlier times: people are elected as deputies only after going through a whole lot of wheeling and dealing. That’s fact number one. In their striving for power, many of them fall into the hands of those who are in control of the material world. But after going through all their trials and tribulations, they find themselves in a tight spot. The programme is always attempting to cut them off from significant information, and generally succeeds in doing this. “What perks does the deputy receive? I think—I’m sure—that today, just as before, he gets an individual office, a new place to live, along with (nowadays, at least) a car. Not to mention two or three assistants, some get more than that.” “Yes, that’s more or less it,” I confirmed. ‘Are you trying to say that all this fits in with a programme worked out millennia ago?” “Of course it does. But wait, let me finish. Tell me if I’m mistaken about what happens today Apart from that, I believe that just like a whole lot of people, deputies have to go to work each da. They have to be present at Duma sittings, and make laws.” “Yes, you’re right.” ‘And each one serves for a set term—four or five years...” “It’s four at the moment.” “Okay, four. When their term is up, they have to be reelected. But even before the next election they’re all thinking about it.” “Quite right.” “Hold on, there—how do you know that? Think how surprised you were when I told you I know what laws are going to be passed. And now you claim you know how deputies think about their future. What, have you suddenly become a clairvoyant? Or a celebrated prophet?” “Nothing of the sort. Any fool would know this. If election time is coming

up, than anyone wanting to be re-elected will be thinking about it and taking appropriate action.” “Slow down, there. Note what you just said: ‘thinking about re-election’.” “Yes, that’s what I said.” “But surely deputies should be thinking about new laws.” “Of course. They’re thinking about them at the same time.” “When? At what time of the day? In short, believe me, the programme doesn’t leave them any time for thinking. For ages now, as you too well know, the people have been choosing parliamentary delegates on the expectation that they will then pass wise laws. What the people don’t understand is that their basic programme does not allow them to think. “Think about this yourself some time.” It is enough to point out the various levers that can be moved with the help of money; We are shown this in the press and on TV through stories about so-called ‘dirty technology’. But we watch it all through the eyes of an outside observer. On the other hand, the actual participants in election campaigns are far from being outside observers. They know what it’s like to be the target of smear tactics. Even if you haven’t experienced it yourself, you can, of course, well imagine what kind of weapons can be used against you when big money’s involved. A defensive reaction is only natural—you have to cover your behind at all costs. And behind you, in this case, is some pretty big money. So you have to tie yourself, for safety’s sake, to some kind of solid financial shore. Or, as people say today, to the oligarchs. An alternative is to throw your fortunes in with some political party. It doesn’t really matter which one—you’re still going to have to pay off your debt to them later. And what about wise laws? Ah, yes. It is simply a question of no appropriate conditions having ever been created to facilitate them. Of course, deputies do enjoy a host of perks—including parliamentary immunity with law-enforcement agencies. But the question still remains: if you put the deputies’ perks on one side of the scale and the intensity, scheming and stress associated with their work on the other, it’s anybody’s guess as to which will win out. There is another paradoxical circumstance. The history of mankind has never known a single individual, a single super-wiseman, capable of making only and exclusively wise decisions hour after hour, day in and day out. It is

no secret that even prominent rulers and regimental commanders occasionally make mistakes. The deputies’ work schedules are arranged in such a way that they have sittings every single day Not only that, but daily sittings for several hours a day At each sitting they are supposed to pass a number of legislative bills relating to different spheres of human life. History has shown that the adoption of wise legislation is impossible under such an overloaded work schedule—on either a theoretical or a practical plane. It is impossible because of the lack of time for contemplation. Nevertheless, this absurd order of things is what prevails in most countries on the various continents of the globe. Who instituted it? Well, it must have instituted itself, many might think. But there’s no way that could have happened. It’s too carefully thought through and goal-specific. Besides, for some reason, it is not being discussed in any meaningful way. You can argue as cogently as you like for its destructive nature. You can prove its destructive nature scientifically, with the help of psychoanalysts. That, of course, is important, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is: what’s the alternative? But there is nothing in the way of an alternative on the horizon. Indeed, who would even have one come to mind when such a phenomenon has practically become the norm in almost all countries? But since Anastasia’s grandfather was the first to raise this question, and since he was familiar with the work of bodies similar to our current legislative assembly over the course of thousands of years, it was possible he might be able to suggest an alternative. And so I enquired: “Well, could you suggest your own ideal version of how elections should be run and how legislators should subsequently proceed in organising their work?” And this is what I heard in reply: “There’s no point in talking about the elections themselves until the deputies’ working and living conditions are changed.” ‘And what kind of working and living conditions, in your opinion, should there be?” “First of all, the deputies need to be taken away, at least for part of the time, from their artificial information field.2 They need to be supplied with nourishment capable of sustaining the complete functioning of the brain. An image needs to be created which attracts the respect of society and which any deputy cannot fail to follow.”

“What does it mean to ‘create an image?” “Judging by what you told me about today’s deputies, their outward trappings suggest that the public has formed a negative image of government officials in general and elected deputies in particular.” “Yes, generally speaking, the public does have a pretty negative image of them.” “That’s very bad. People build up negative thought-forms regarding their deputies, and so what happens is that they themselves make them negative. An image is the most powerful, concentrated energy of a large number of people.”3 ‘And how are people to think of them positively if their own life doesn’t improve?” “You see, we’ve got what amounts to a closed circle here. Each time, you elect those who seem to be the best people for the job, but then, no sooner are they elected than you start calling them the worst people.” “But just how do we get out of this vicious circle?” “For the past five thousand years there has been no better way than the one proposed by Anastasia, and there won’t be in the foreseeable future.” “What d’you have in mind here?” ''artificial information field— see Book 6, Chapter 9: A need to think”. Tn the science of ‘imagery’, see Book 4, Chapter 19: A secret science”. “Land.” “She said we need to give each willing family at least a hectare of land—for lifetime use, whereon to establish one’s own kin’s domain. But she didn’t say anything about parliamentary deputies.” “In actual fact, she specified ‘every willing family’. Don’t deputies have families?” “Indeed they do.” “So, why not start with them?” “The public would say that’s going too far—they’ve got enough perks as it is.” “You need to explain to the public on whose behalf this step is being taken. They need to know what the most favourable conditions are for passing the legislation the public expects.” “But on what basis should the deputies be granted land—on special terms or the same as for everyone else?” “The same as for everyone else, though not exactly Every deputy should be allotted at least a hundred and fifty hectares of land on which a new type of

community will be established, according to the principles Anastasia talks about. Of the hundred and fifty hectares granted for lifetime use, the deputy may keep one for himself, as long as his family is small and no additions are in the offing. In cases where the deputy has children who are already forming their own families and they want to set up domains of their own, a hectare should be set aside for each of his children’s families. Thus the deputy himself will end up with one, or three, or five hectares of land, depending on the size of his family.” ‘And what about the remaining hectares? You mentioned a hundred and fifty, all told.” “Thirty percent of the remainder he can give away to whomever he likes. But after that the plots should be offered to people from different social strata—soldiers, academics, artists, entrepreneurs and so forth. In each community one or two hectares should be definitely set aside for refugees and children from orphanages. But two deputies should not be given land in the same community” “So, what then? If each deputy has his own family domain, does that mean that the laws will get better right away?” “Of course they will. Our country will have the wisest laws in the world!” “How so?” ‘At the moment, deputies spend long periods of time in their offices and at parliamentary meetings, cut off from the public. At the moment, they do not receive any gratitude for good laws or censure for bad ones. At the moment, following their natural inclinations, they try to provide for the material wellbeing of their families. After their term of office is up, they may change their place of residence and even move to another city or another country, where nobody will reproach them or hound them for any violation of expected norms. A change of residence or country will not affect their financial status. As long as they have money, they can go wherever they like and find shelter, food and clothing. But money won’t be able to buy them a kin’s domain of their own, a piece of their Motherland. “Today the concept of Motherland is terribly distorted. ‘Motherland’ is nothing but a territory someone has defined by borders. But, when you stop to think of it, one’s Motherland always begins with one’s family land and extends to encompass all the people who are of a kindred spirit to you. Those who begin to establish their own domains will obtain their Motherland in perpetuity. The loss of one’s family domain is the loss of one’s Motherland in perpetuit. This is the greatest tragedy for one’s family. “It is not their laws or their morality that will prevent deputies from making

wrong decisions, but their kin’s domains. And for people who have their Motherland, money will lose its primary importance. Only in his kin’s domain can Man obtain the complete range of nutrition he needs, including nourishment for the proper functioning of the brain. But this is extremely important for people who have a lot of thinking to do. “The sittings of the State Duma should run no more than three days a week. The rest of the time the deputies should spend in their kin’s domains—a place they can really think things through, and lay the real groundwork for the making of laws. “The deputies’ wives should not be employed in any position that is not connected with their husband’s work. The family domains will shield deputies, at least for a time, from the influence of artificial information coming from the artificial world. It will facilitate the thinking process. In the case of the great philosophers, great thoughts were always born in conditions of solitude, and not during public speeches.” ‘And what if some of the deputies are unwilling to accept land and refuse to set up their own family domains?” “This is where we come to the election of public representatives. If any deputy refuses to set up a family domain, the public should not re-elect him for a subsequent term. Even though he holds citizenship in the country where he was elected, in reality he is a foreigner. He doesn’t need this Motherland. And no matter what good things are said about him, his actions, in fact, will bring no good to the people.” “But once they know that voters will give preference to candidates who have a family domain, some deputies may just take the land and erect their own palace-like mansions on it, along with tennis courts and brick walls, and won’t plant any trees or garden or living fence as Anastasia recommended. What then?” “Then they’ll show what they’re really made of. But here too people will be able to make the right choice. Why do you think every Man in Rus’ was endowed with a patronymic?3 Back in the early days of Rus’ a Man would introduce himself by saying: I am Ivan from Nikita’s domain, citing the name of his father or grandfather who had established his kin’s domain. In other words, the domain was something to be proud of. In referring to it, a Man would describe himself, as well as his character and abilities, in the fullest possible manner. Anyone who could not point with pride to his domain was considered an outcast.” The more Anastasia’s grandfather went on about the kin’s domains, the more distinctly the joyful picture of our country’s future became etched in my consciousness. Can you just imagine?! Imagine! Three hundred and sixty deputies of our State Duma each taking a hundred and fifty hectares of

land and organising three hundred and sixty marvellous new-style communities! Each deputy will then be showing not just in his words, but in his actions, what he is capable of achieving. And Russia will bear witness to the first three hundred and sixty oases in which Russian Federation citizens will begin to live in actual human conditions. Then these deputies will pass legislation. And, naturally, there will be not a single law harmful to the environment. They will pass laws guaranteeing the right of each citizen to obtain his own small piece of the Motherland. They will stand up for this right, because each of them will have their Motherland. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series My dear readers! I thank you heartily for your understanding and moral support. I thank all who have openly expressed their thoughts in Internet communications and the almanac? who have tried to organise discussions of the ideas outlined in the Ringing Cedars Series through letters to the press. My thanks to you, scholars ofRussia—first and foremost, to Boris Minin,4 5 who openly appeared on the stage of the Podmo-skov’e Concert Hall with his evaluation of Anastasia’s ideas. A special note of gratitude is due the fine actor, Distinguished Artist of Russia Alexander Mikhailov,6 who took part in the conference. My thanks also to the economist Dr Viktor Medikov,7 who has written a number of papers on his research of the ideas expressed in the books. And to Anatoly Eriomenko, Active Member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, for his marvellous poetry: TO A DEITY Age and health and sloth all notwithstanding, Here I am before you on knee bending, Simply ’cause I’ve seen in you from far Life’s renown. A Deity you are. Instantly you scattered all illusions Rising from dark forces’ sly intrusions. Your depiction of a future bright Helped me banish sorrow’s fearsome night. In you I see Man’s true being ascending, Possibly, another age’s ending,

Where my granddaughters, just like a Muse will embody you and your bright views. Though at heart I quietly resist Every time you need say “I exist!”, ‘Tis no sin to talk of your appearing In a place where others might be hearing. Therefore send I from my heart agleam Rays of warmth to you, my living dream. And, in night-time vision or tomorrow, In the taiga I shall see your shadow. TO THE ELDERS OF RUSSIA Oh, you wise-hearted elders of Russia, Have you nothing to lone hearts to say? For the blue eyes that grow ever lusher Will still shine o’er the world with their ray They will waken dull tribes and refresh them With humanity’s flourishing wave. If there’s no other means of expression, A tall cedar to chips she will shave. And in secret will give them like manna To all people eternity-bound, And will call us with this unknown manna To the place where our future is found. With our knees now already unbended, And our backs straightened tall and so proud, All our worries and idle contentment We forsake not tomorrow, but now. Let us still hear the voice of the ages, That has whispered to us as a friend: “You are singular children of Nature, Death and treason do not spell your end. “Nor do mud-slingings, fury unleashing, Nor do stone walls or home-destroying hail, But for those who accept the true Teachin. Their connection with Nature won’t fail. “We are given a power immortal From the Earth-gods and God high above, By a heavenly hand incorporeal, That our hearts may awaken to love. “Let us all, then, as singular brothers, With our heart-strings stretched taut in a bow, Now extend our embrace to all others, Send our ray out wherever we go. “Then in spring over all the Earth’s nations All the cherry-tree gardens will bloom.

For humanity’s new generation. There will be no more danger or doom.” Oh, you wise elders, sons of Rossiya, Do not slacken, but say the word true. May the joy of dear Anastasia’ Now shine forth in its heavenly blue. I thank Viktor Pavlovich Garkavets, the Superintendent of Education for the City of Kharkov, as well as the instructors, workers and administration of the tractor factory in this Ukrainian city, for organising a fantastic meeting with my readers. 5

Rossiya, Anastasia— a reminder: both these words rhyme with Maria (pron. ras-SEE-ya, a-na-sta-SEE-ya). The phrase On a star see ya (= See ya on a star) might be a helpful hint in remembering the pronunciation of Anastasia’s name. My thanks, too, to all the organisers of readers’ conferences in other cities. Thank you, Russian emigrants in Germany and Canada. Thanks to the bards who have written more than five hundred songs now, and the artists who sent in their pictures. They are already posted on the site www.Anastasia.ru, and the best of them have been published in the almanac Zveniashchie kedry Rossii (Ringing Cedars of Russia). One of their works may be seen on the cover of {the Russian original of} the present volume. My thanks go out to the tens of thousands of people who have expressed their appreciation for my books in their sincere and inspired letters. I thank you all for your open support. Without it, it would be a lot harder for me to write! However, I would like to share with you—especially with those public figures who are only just contemplating coming out with their support of Anastasia’s ideas—the following points. You should understand that there is considerable opposition to these ideas— a planned and organised opposition. It is still not completely clear specifically who is spreading the false rumours and what levers of power they are using. You should be aware of this so that you can determine for yourself whether it is worth it to you to openly support the ideas outlined in these books. I know first-hand how unpleasant all the slander and provocations have been, but it is many times harder for me when they are directed against you, my readers. All the more so when they are personalised and intensive—as, for example, the attacks against the children and teachers of Academician Shchetinin’s school.8

I wouldn’t want any others to be subjected to similar attacks. I am not merely convinced—I now know for absolute certain that the ideas outlined by Anastasia are irreproachable. Their materialisation can, of course, be temporarily held back, but they will still be revived in human beings with ever-increasing force. From where I stand, the most vital and important steps required today are the following: First. Organisation of schools, courses and seminars at the local level. It is vital to adapt general designs of family domains and communities to specific locales. You need to study the healing properties of herbs and plants growing in your area in particular. You need to know exactly which vegetables and fruits will grow under natural conditions in your climate. You need to prepare working designs—specified down to the minutest detail —for your family domains and communities. Second. You need to bring in specialists who have a good understanding of what is happening and plug them in to work on creating a programme of development for the Russian Federation. This should be a universal programme, capable of solving all the problems of orphans, refugees and low-income families through the idea of establishing kin’s domains. The security and well-being of each family will ensure the security and wellbeing of the nation as a whole. It is vital to flesh out the details of your dream, then it will most certainly come true. Let every person do as much as they can along this line, starting from their own resources. 8 We should see the birth of dozens, hundreds of designs for kin’s domains and communities—designs for the economic, ecological and spiritual development of individual regions and the whole nation. You know, when I first saw Anastasia, she was standing on the shore of the Siberian River Ob.9 She was wearing an old long skirt and a quilted jacket, with a kerchief on her head and rubber galoshes over her bare feet. This taiga recluse looked like an unassuming and lonely woman. But today I have the impression that it was our Rossiya that was standing there in the Siberian wilds with rubber galoshes over her bare feet. It was our dream of the future that was standing there so lonely on the deserted Siberian riverbank. But now, it is within us\

And the time will most certainly come when our dream will stride openly and free in a beautiful ball-gown across all of Russia—and not just across Russia. The greatest energy in this dream is the energy of life To be continued... FOR NOTES & POETRY Anastasia, the first book of the Ringing Cedars Series, tells the story of entrepreneur Vladimir Megre’s trade trip to the Siberian taiga in 1995, where he witnessed incredible spiritual phenomena connected with sacred ‘ringing cedar’ trees. He spent three days with a woman named Anastasia who shared with him her unique outlook on subjects as diverse as gardening, child-rearing, healing, Nature, sexuality, religion and more. This wilderness experience transformed Vladimir so deeply that he abandoned his commercial plans and, penniless, went to Moscow to fulfil Anastasia’s request and write a book about the spiritual insights she so generously shared with him. True to her promise this life-changing book, once written, has become an international bestseller and has touched hearts of millions of people world-wide. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, the second book of the Series, in addition to providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the story of how Anastasia came to be published, offers a deeper exploration of the universal concepts so dramatically revealed in Book 1. It takes the reader on an adventure through the vast expanses of space, time and spirit—from the Paradise-like glade in the Siberian taiga to the rough urban depths of Russia’s capital city, from the ancient mysteries of our forebears to a vision of humanity’s radiant future. The Space of Love, the third book of the Series, describes author’s second visit to Anastasia. Rich with new revelations on natural child-rearing and alternative education, on the spiritual significance of breast-feeding and the meaning of ancient megaliths, it shows how each person’s thoughts can influence the destiny of the entire Earth and describes practical ways of putting Anastasia’s vision of happiness into practice. Megre shares his new outlook on education and children’s real creative potential after a visit to a school where pupils build their own campus and cover the ten-year Russian school programme in just two years. Complete with an account of an armed intrusion into Anastasia’s habitat, the book highlights the limitless power of Love and non-violence. Co-creation, the fourth book and centrepiece of the Series, paints a dramatic living image of the creation of the Universe and humanity’s place in this creation, making this primordial mystery relevant to our everyday living

today. Deeply metaphysical yet at the same time down-to-Earth practical, this poetic heart-felt volume helps us uncover answers to the most significant questions about the essence and meaning of the Universe and the nature and purpose of our existence. It also shows how and why the knowledge of these answers, innate in every human being, has become obscured and forgotten, and points the way toward reclaiming this wisdom and—in partnership with Nature—manifesting the energy of Love through outlive s. Who are we?—Book Five of the Series—describes the author’s search for real-life ‘proofs’ of Anastasia’s vision presented in the previous volumes. Finding these proofs and taking stock of ongoing global environmental destruction, Vladimir Megre describes further practical steps for putting Anastasia’s vision into practice. Full of beautiful realistic images of a new way of living in co-operation with the Earth and each other, this book also highlights the role of children in making us aware of the precariousness of the present situation and in leading the global transition toward a happy, violence-free society. The book of kin, the sixth book of the Series, describes another visit by the author to Anastasia’s glade in the Siberian taiga and his conversations with his growing son, which cause him to take a new look at education, science, history, family and Nature. Through parables and revelatory dialogues and stories Anastasia then leads Vladimir Megre and the reader on a shocking re-discovery of the pages of humanity’s history that have been distorted or kept secret for thousands of years. This knowledge sheds light on the causes of war, oppression and violence in the modern world and guides us in preserving the wisdom of our ancestors and passing it over to future generations. The energy of life, Book Seven of the Series, re-asserts the power of human thought and the influence of our thinking on our lives and the destiny of the entire planet and the Universe. Is also brings forth a practical understanding of ways to consciously control and build up the power of our creative thought. The book sheds still further light on the forgotten pages of humanity’s history, on religion, on the roots of inter-racial and interreligious conflict, on ideal nutrition, and shows how a new way of thinking and a lifestyle in true harmony with Nature can lead to happiness and solve the personal and societal problems of crime, corruption, misery, conflict, war and violence. The new civilisation, the eighth book of the Series, is not yet complete. The first part of the book, already published as a separate volume, describes yet another visit by Vladimir Megre to Anastasia and their son, and offers new insights into practical co-operation with Nature, showing in ever greater

detail how Anastasia’s lifestyle applies to our lives. Describing how the visions presented in previous volumes have already taken beautiful form in real life and produced massive changes in Russia and beyond, the author discerns the birth of a new civilisation. The book also paints a vivid image of America’s radiant future, in which the conflict between the powerful and the helpless, the rich and the poor, the city and the country, can be transcended and thereby lead to transformations in both the individual and society. Rites of Love—Book 8, Part 2 (published as a separate volume)—contrasts today’s mainstream attitudes to sex, family, childbirth and education with our forebears’ lifestyle, which reflected their deep spiritual understanding of the significance of conception, pregnancy, homebirth and upbringing of the young in an atmosphere of love. In powerful poetic prose Megre describes their ancient way of life, grounded in love and non-violence, and shows the practicability of this same approach today. Through the life-story of one family, he portrays the radiant world of the ancient Russian Vedic civilisation, the drama of its destruction and its re-birth millennia later—in our present time. To be continued... The Energy of Life Book 7 of The Ringing Cedars Series Re-asserting the power of human thought and its influence on our lives and the destiny of the entire planet, this book brings forth a practical understanding of ways to consciously control and build up the power of our creative thought. It sheds further light on the forgotten pages of humanity’s history, on religion, on the roots of inter-racial and inter-religious conflict, on ideal nutrition, and shows how a new way of thinking and a lifestyle in true harmony with Nature can lead to happiness and resolve personal and societal problems. ISBN 978-0-9763333-7-

RINGING CEDARS PRESS www.RingingCedars.com 1-888-DOLMENS US$14.95 CANS19.95 AU$24.95

The New Civilisation by Vladimir Megre Translation and footnotes by John Woodsworth Editing, footnotes, design and layout by Leonid Sharashkin Cover art by Alexander Razboinikov Copyright © 2005 Vladimir Megre Copyright © 2007 Leonid Sharashkin, translation Copyright © 2007 Leonid Sharashkin, cover art Copyright © 2007 Leonid Sharashkin, design and layout Copyright © 2007 Leonid Sharashkin, footnotes All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007934389 ISBN: 978-0-97633338-8 Published by Ringing Cedars Press www.RingingCedars.com 1 Boyars’ Duma—an advisory council comprised of the boyars (in Russian, stress on second syllable), a hereditary caste of nobility which prevailed in Russia from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries. The Boyars’ Duma, instituted in the 15th century, was involved in various aspects of affairs of state, including legislation, financing and military support. 2 did subsequently think about this situation—over and over again, in fact. And truly, our traditional laws on the election and duties of Duma deputies began to seem more and more absurd. Let’s take a more detailed look at the practice as it has evolved up until now. Let’s say a relatively smart fellow—above-average, that is—has decided to stand for office. He wants to participate in passing wise legislation that will help people lead a good life. In running the gauntlet of an election campaign, he is very likely to find himself dependent on funding (some become more dependent than others). This in no way means that someone from the world of the wealthy offers financial assistance to every single candidate in return for future considerations.

3 patronymic (Russian: otchestvo, derived from the Russian word for ‘father’—otets—and related to the word for ‘Fatherland’—otechestvo)—the middle name of every Russian citizen, derived from one’s father’s first name. Cf. footnote 9 in Book 1, Chapter 1: “The ringing cedar”. 4 the almanac— a quarterly periodical that was published by Anastasia Foundation (in conjunction with the Russian publisher of the Series) between 2001 and 2004. The almanac contained readers’ art-work, poetry and letters, articles on ecological building-design, permaculture and other topics relevant to the creation of kin’s domains, as well as news on the newly formed eco-villages, readers’ clubs and forthcoming events. The functions of the almanac are now largely fulfilled by a range of on-line resources and periodicals. 5 Boris Alexeevich Minin (1936-)—professor of economics; president of the International Academy of Social Development; director of Russia’s Federal Certification Centre for eco-friendly products; member of Russia’s parliamentary committee on questions of social tolerance. 6 :

Alexander Yakovlevich Mikhailov (1944-)—a popular Russian film and theatre actor, who has appeared in several dozen films and received a number of awards, including Actor of the Year (1982 and 1985), as well as the title of Distinguished Actor ofRussia (1992). 7 Viktor Yakovlevich Medikov (1950-)—professor of economics; member of the Russian State Duma (Parliament) for two consecutive terms (19931999). Author of several books on Russia’s new national idea of kin’s domains, he has founded a Kin’s Domain Academy to collect and disseminate information on the establishment of family domains. He was one of the first political figures in Russia to lead by example and set up his own kin’s domain in an eco-settlement some 240 km (150 miles) east of Moscow. 8 'Academician Shchetinin’s school—See description in Book 3, Chapter 17: “Put your vision of happiness into practice” and Chapter 18: ‘Academician Shchetinin”.

9 See Book 1, Chapter 2: “Encounter”.

Book 8.1 - Contents 1. Pre-dawn feelings 2. Dominion over radiation 3. “Goosey, goosey, ga-ga-ga” or The superknowledge we are losing 4. Rejuvenation 5. Divine nutrition 6. Demon Cratius 7. The billionaire 8. I am giving birth to you, my angel! 9. A fine state of affairs! 10. The Book of Kin and A Family Chronicle 11. One hectare—a piece of Planet Earth 12. People power 13. A new civilisation Love creating worlds CHAPTER ONE

Pre-dawn feelings Anastasia was still asleep. And over the endless Siberian taiga the first glow of light was breaking across the pre-dawn sky; This time I was the first to waken, but stayed quietly lying beside her on my sleeping bag, admiring her serene and beautiful face and the flowing contours of her figure, as the soft, heavenly light of the advancing morning made them ever more distinct. It was good that this time she had arranged for us to spend the night under the open sky She had no doubt been able to sense the warmth and gentle stillness of the approaching night, and so had made our bed not in her cozy dug-out cave but outdoors, at its entrance. She had spread out my sleeping bag, which I had brought during a previous visit to the taiga, while she fixed up beside me a beautiful place to sleep for herself, comprised of flowers and dried grasses. She looked picture-perfect lying there on that taiga bed, wearing a thin flaxen knee-length dress, which I had brought her as a gift from my readers. Perhaps she put it on only when I was around; she was quite capable of sleeping in the nude. The colder it was in the forest, the more dried grasses were applied; after all, a haystack can keep out the cold in the winter too.

Even a simple soul without Anastasia’s level of hardiness could sleep comfortably in hay without extra clothing. I tried it myself. But this time I was lying there on my sleeping bag, looking at Anastasia resting beside me, and I kept imagining how this whole scene might look in a wide-screen feature film. A sylvan glade in the depths of the endless Siberian taiga. The pre-dawn stillness is only rarely broken by a scarcely audible rustling of branches in the crowns of the majestic cedars. And here is this beautiful woman so serenely asleep on her bed of grasses and flowers. Her breathing is perfectly even and barely audible. The only thing noticeable is the slight swaying to and fro of a blade of grass clinging to her upper lip as she inhales and exhales the health-giving air of the Siberian taiga. Never before had I managed to see Anastasia asleep here—she was always the first to awake. But this time... I took great delight in watching her. Carefully raising my upper body and resting on my elbow, I studied her face, immersed myself in thought and began talking to myself. You are still altogether beautiful, Anastasia. It will soon be ten years that we have known each other. Of course I’ve got older during this time, while you’ve hardly changed at all. No wrinkles on your face. Only your golden hair is now showing one strand of silver grey. Apparently something extraordinary’s happened to you. Judging by the massive campaign that’s been unleashed against you and your ideas, judging by what is being said in the press and bureaucrats’ offices, something is going on in the dark forces’ camp. They keep trying to get on my nerves, and I know how they’d love to get their hands on you. But their arms are evidently not long enough... And still, you’ve got that grey strand of hair showing. But it can’t spoil your extraordinary beauty. You know, tinting individual strands a variety of colours is an ‘in’ thing right now. Among our young people today highlighting strands is a hip fashion statement. And you don’t even need to go to a hairdresser’s—it’s just happened all on its own. And the scar where that bullet grazed you,1 it’s practically gone. See Book 3, Chapter 7: “Assault!”. The pre-dawn sky continued to brighten, and the scar was barely noticeable, even up close. Soon it would disappear completely. Look at you sleeping so peacefully here in the fresh air, in your own taiga world, while out there, in our world, extremely significant events are taking place. Researchers are talking about an ‘information revolution’. Perhaps it is thanks to you, orperhaps they are simply following the dictates of their

own hearts, but people in our technocratic world are beginning to create their own family domains, enriching the land. They have adopted your image wholeheartedly, Anastasia—the marvellous image of the future for their family, the country and possibly the whole order of the Universe. They have understood all you have said and are building this marvellous future for themselves. And I am trying to comprehend, too. I’m trying my best. I still don’t completely understand what you mean to me. You taught me to write books, you bore me a son, you made me famous, you brought back my daughter’s respect for me—you’ve done a lot! But that’s not the main point. It’s in something else, the main point. Perhaps it’s lying hidden somewhere within. You know, Anastasia, I have never spoken of my feelings for you, neither to you nor even to myself. In fact, I’ve never told any woman in my whole life that I love her. I’ve never said that, not because I’m completely without feelings, but because these words have always seemed strange to me, even nonsensical. After all, if a person loves another, this love should be reflected in one’s actions toward one’s beloved. If words need to be spoken, that means there are no genuine, tangible actions. It’s the actions, after all—not words—that are most important. Anastasia stirred ever so slightly, took a deep breath, but did not waken. And I continued to talk with her, still speaking within myself. Not once have I ever spoken to you about love, Anastasia. But if you asked me to fetch you a star from the sky, I would climb up to the top of the tallest tree, andpushing off from the uppermost branch, I’d take a leap in the direction of that star. If I happened to fall, I would catch myself on its branches, and climb up once more to the top, and again leap toward the star. You’ve never asked me to fetch you a star from the sky. You only asked me to write books, and I am writing them. But my writing doesn’t always come out too well. Sometimes I fall. But I’m not done with them yet, after all. I still haven’t written my final book. I’ll try to write it so you’ll like it. Anastasia’s eyelashes fluttered, a gentle glow flushed across her cheeks, and she opened her eyes. I caught the tender gaze of her greyish-blue eyes... Oh, Lord, what a warmth those eyes always give off, especially when they’re so close to me. Anastasia watched me without a word, but her eyes sparkled as though full of moisture. “Good morning, Anastasia!” I said. “You probably haven’t had a good long sleep like that before—you’ve always woken up before me.”

‘And a good morning to you, and a marvellous day, Vladimir,” Anastasia responded quietly, almost in a whisper. “I should like to have just a wee bit more sleep.” “So you haven’t had enough sleep yet?” “I have, and a very good sleep at that. But my dream... I was having such a pleasant pre-dawn dream.” “What kind of dream? What was it about?” “I dreamt you were talking with me. About a tall tree and a star, about falling down and climbing up again. The words were about the tree and the star, but it struck me as though they were really about love.” “Things can often seem pretty fuzzy in dreams. What connection could a tree possibly have with love?” “Everything can have a connection, and great meaning too. It is the feelings that matter here, not the words. This day’s dawn has brought me an extraordinary feeling. I shall go out to greet and embrace—” “Who?” “This marvellous day, which has offered me such an extraordinary gift.” Anastasia slowly rose to her feet, stepped a few paces away from the cave entrance and then... She did something she always did in the mornings—her unique exercise routine. There she was, flinging her arms out to the sides and a little bit upward. She gave a momentary glance up at the sky and then all at once spun round. Then she ran off and did an incredible somersault before spinning round again. Lying on my sleeping bag by the cave entrance, I admired Anastasia’s darts and lunges and thought: Wow! A mature woman already, and look how quickly, beautifully and energetically she moves, just like a young gymnast! Fascinating how she felt what I had in mind as I was talking to myself while she was sleeping j Maybe I really should own up to her? And I cried out: ‘Anastasia, it wasn’t simply a dream you were having.” She stopped her exercise routine at once and stood there in the middle of the glade. Then she deftly turned a couple of cartwheels in my direction and landed right beside me. She quickly sat down on the ground and joyfully enquired: “Not simply a dream? And just how is it not ‘simple’? Out with it! Tell me all the details!”

“Well, you see, I was thinking about that same tree. I was talking to myself about a star.” ‘And where, tell me, where did you get these words from? What produced them—these words?” “Maybe feelings?” Our conversation was interrupted by a cry from Anastasia’s grandfather. ‘Anastasia! Anastasia, listen to me right away! Do you read me?” Anastasia jumped up, and I got up quickly, too. CHAPTER TWO

Dominion over radiation “Has Volodya been up to something unusual again?” Anastasia enquired of her grandfather, who had rushed over to us. And Grandfather, with a passing glance at me and a brief “Hello, Vladimir!”, explained: “He is down by the lakeshore. He dived down and brought up a stone from the bottom. Now he is standing there, clutching it in his hand. It is safe to assume that the stone is burning his hand, but he will not let it go. And I do not know what advice to give him.” Then Grandfather turned to me and barked: “Your son’s down there. You’re his father. What are you standing here for?” Not fully aware of what was going on, I ran down to the lake. Grandfather ran alongside me and explained: “This stone is radioactive. It isn’t big, but contains a good deal of energy— an energy similar to radiation.” “How did it happen to turn up at the bottom of the lake?” “It’s been lying there a long time. My father, even, knew about that stone. But nobody’s been able to dive down to it.” “How did Volodya manage it? How did he know about it?” “I trained him to do deep-water dives.” “What for?” “He kept pestering me to show him, asking me again and again. You two don’t seem to have the time to look after your own child’s upbringing— you’ve been shoving the whole burden onto the shoulders of your elders.”

‘And who told him about the stone?” “Now who would have told him, eh, apart from me? I told him.” “What for?” “He wanted to know what stopped the lake from freezing over in winter.” As we approached the lake, I saw my son standing on the shore. His hair and shirt were all wet, but the water had already dripped off them, which told me he had been standing like that for some time. Volodya stood with his arm stretched out in front of him, his fingers clenched into a fist, which he kept his eyes fixed on like a hawk. It was clear his hand was clutching that same sinister stone from the bottom of the lake. I took two steps in his direction. He quickly turned his head toward me and said: “Don’t come any closer, Papa.” And when I stopped, he added: “Good health to your thoughts, Papa! But keep back just a little further. Maybe it would be better if you and Grandfather lay down on the ground. I shall be able to better concentrate that way” Grandfather at once lay down on the ground, and without really knowing why, I followed suit. For some time we didn’t say a word, just watching Volodya standing on the shore. Then a rather simple thought struck me, and I said: “Volodya, couldn’t you just toss it a little ways away?” “Where away?” my son asked, not turning his head. “Into the grass.” “I must not throw it into the grass. It could cause a lot of destruction. I feel I must not throw it away yet.” “So, does that mean you’re going to keep standing there all day, or two days? What next? You’re going to stand there a whole week? Or a month, even?” “I am thinking about what to do, Papa. Let us keep quiet and give thought a chance to find the solution without being distracted.” Grandfather and I lay silently on the grass and looked at Volodya. And all at once I became aware of Anastasia approaching slowly—too slowly, under the circumstances—from the other end of the shore. When she got about five metres from Volodya’s position, she sat down at the water’s edge, as if nothing unusual were going on. She let her feet dangle in the water and

stayed there that way for some time. Eventually she turned to our son and very calmly enquired: “Is it burning your hand, son?” “Yes, Mama,” Volodya replied. “What were you thinking about when you fetched the stone? And what are you thinking about right now?” “The stone is giving off energy, similar to radiation. Grandfather was telling me about it. But Man1 also gives off energy I know that. And human energy is always stronger than any other—it cannot be dominated by any other. I brought up the stone and I am holding it. I am trying with all my might to repress its energy—to send it back inside the stone. I want to demonstrate that Man has dominion over any radiation.” ‘And are you succeeding in demonstrating the superiority of the energy coming from yourself?” “Yes, Mama, I am succeeding. Only it is becoming increasingly hotter. It is burning my fingers and palm just a little.” “Why do you not throw it away?” “I feel that I must not do that.” “Why?” “I feel it.” “Why?” “It... It will explode, Mama. It will explode just as soon as I open my hand. There will be a big explosion.” “You are correct, it will explode. The stone is giving off the energy accumulated inside it. You used your own energy to repress its flow and direct it back inside. You used your thought to shape the nucleus within the stone, and your energy is now building up inside it, along with its own. It cannot go on accumulating indefinitely It is already raging within the nucleus you formed with your own thoughts—it is getting hotter and the stone is burning your hand.” “I realise that, and that is why I am not letting go of my hold.” Outwardly Anastasia was the picture of calm. Her movements were slow and smooth, her speech was measured and with pauses. I could still feel, however, the extremely intense concentration of her thought—it must have been working faster than ever. She rose to her feet, gave what appeared to be a lethargic stretch, and said quietly: “That means you realise, Volodya, that if you open your hand suddenly,

there could be an explosion?” “Yes, Mama.” “That means you have to release it gradually.” “How?” “Just a tiny bit at first. First, ease up on your thumb and index finger to expose just a fraction of the stone. Picture in your mind right off how the energy you directed into the stone is emanating straight upward like a ra. And its own energy will begin to follow suit. Be careful: the ray must be directed only straight up.” Concentrating all his attention on his tightly clenched fist, Volodya gradually eased the pressure on his thumb and index finger. It was a sunny morning, but even in broad daylight one could see the ray emanating from the stone. A bird flying way up high fell into the ray and was immediately transformed into a puff of smoke. It looked as though a small cloud exploded in vapour when the ray passed through it. A few minutes later and the ray was scarcely noticeable. “Oh, I have been sitting here with you too long!” said Anastasia. “I think I may go and make us some breakfast while you amuse yourselves here.” She took her time leaving. After going only a few steps, she staggered a bit, and then headed down to the water and washed her face. No doubt her outward calm had concealed an incredible inner tension. She had hid it so as not to frighten her son and interfere with his actions. “How did you know exactly what I should do?” Volodya called out after the receding figure of Anastasia. “How, indeed?” Grandfather echoed, mockingly He had already got up from the ground and was feeling in much better spirits. “What do you mean, howl At school your Mama was a top-notch pupil in physics!” And he burst out in a loud guffaw. Anastasia turned toward us and broke into laughter herself, explaining: “I had not known about that before, son. But whatever happens, you always need to look for and find a solution. And not to let your thought be fettered by fear.” When the ray could no longer be seen at all, Volodya opened his hand completely A small oblong stone was lying quietly on his palm. He stared at it for some time, muttering under his breath as he addressed the stone: “What is inside you is no match for Man!” Then he once again closed his hand into a fist and dived straight into the

water without taking off his shirt. It was a good three minutes before he resurfaced and headed back toward the shore. “I was the one who taught him how to hold his breath that long,” Grandfather commented. After Volodya came out of the water, he jumped up and down to dry himself off, then headed over our way I couldn’t wait, but burst out: “D’you have any idea what radiation is, son? I guess you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have gone and fetched that wretched stone. Can’t you find yourself some other business to poke your nose into?” “I know all about radiation, Papa. Grandfather told me about the disasters that have happened at your nuclear power plants, about your atomic weapons and the dangers now posed by the storage of nuclear waste.” “So, what’s all the interest in this stone lying at the bottom of the lake? What about it?” “Yes, indeed, what about it?” Grandfather joined the conversation. “You preach at him, Vladimir. I’m going to go have a little rest. It seems that lately your son’s been making quite a few demands on me.” Grandfather started heading off, leaving me alone with my son. And here he was, standing in front of me in his shirt, all dripping wet. He was evidently quite upset about the worry he had caused us all. I didn’t feel like nagging him any farther. I simply stood there without saying a word, not knowing how to begin. Volodya was the first to speak. “You see, Papa, Grandfather told me that these nuclear waste facilities are extremely dangerous. According to probability theory, they can do irreparable harm to many countries and the people living in them. And to our whole planet, besides.” “They can, of course, but what’s this got to do with you?” “What this means is, if people think the problem is solved, but the danger still remains, it means they have not come up with the correct solution.” “So, what if it is incorrect—what does it matter?” “Grandfather said that it is up to me to find the correct solution.” “So... have you found it?” “I have now, Papa.” There he was, standing before me, my nine-year-old son, soaking wet and with an injured hand, but entirely confident in himself. And speaking in a calm and confident tone of voice about how to solve the problem of storing

nuclear waste. An altogether peculiar situation! After all, he is no scientist, no nuclear physicist and doesn’t even study in a regular school. Most peculiar! Here is this boy standing in his wet clothing on the shore of a taiga lake and discussing the safe storage of nuclear waste. Not counting on any kind of effective solution on his part, I asked, simply in the interests of keeping the conversation going: “Well, what specific conclusions have you come to regarding this insoluble problem?” “Out of all the possible variants, I think the most effective is deconcentration.” “I’m not sure what you mean—deconcentration of what? “Of nuclear waste, Papa.” “How so?” “I came to the realisation, Papa, that radiation in small doses is not at all dangerous. It is present in small quantities everywhere—in us, in plants, in the water and the clouds. But the real danger comes when too much is concentrated in one place. In the nuclear facilities Grandfather was telling me about, a whole lot of radioactive objects are concentrated together in one place.” “Well, everybody knows that. Radioactive waste is hauled to specially constructed storage facilities, which are carefully protected from terrorists. They’ve got specially trained personnel who ensure there are no violations of proper storage technology.” “Quite right, Papa. But the danger still exists. And a catastrophe is inevitable, caused by someone’s specific thought imposing a wrong decision on people.” “You know, this problem, son, is being investigated in scientific institutes by highly qualified specialists. You’re not a scholar, you haven’t studied science, and so you’re not capable of solving such an important question. It’s modern science that ought to come up with an answer.” “But what has been the result, Papa? After all, it is precisely the inventions of modern science that have caused people to be subjected to great danger. Of course I do not study in school, and I do not know the science you are talking about, but...” He fell silent and lowered his head. “What does that ‘but’ of yours mean? Why did you stop, Volodya?” “I have no desire, Papa, to be a pupil in that school or to study the science

you have in mind.” “Why not?” “Because, Papa, that kind of science is what leads to disasters.” “But there’s no other kind of science.” “There is. ‘Reality should be determined only through one’s own self,’ says Mama Anastasia. I understand what that means, and I am studying, or ‘determining’. At the moment I do not know how to put it more specifically” Wow! How sure he is of his convictions! I thought. Then I asked: ‘And what is the probability of disaster, as you see it?” ‘A hundred percent.” “You’re certain of that?” ‘According to probability theory and the absence of any counteraction to destructive thought, a disaster is inevitable. The construction of large nuclear storage facilities can be compared to the construction of huge bombs.” ‘And am I to guess that your thought has begun counteracting this destructive element?” “Yes, I have launched my thought into space. And it will triumph.” “Specifically, what solution has your thought come up with regarding the problem of the safe storage of nuclear waste?” ‘All nuclear waste concentrated in large facilities needs to be deconcentrated —that is my thought.” “Deconcentration—does that mean dividing it into fragments a hundred thousandth or a multi-millionth in size?” “That is right, Papa.” ‘A simple solution. But the big question remains: where to store these tiny fragments?” “On kin’s domains, Papa.” For a moment the shock of this incredible statement completely overwhelmed me—I didn’t know what to sa. Then I practically shouted: “Nonsense! That’s utter nonsense you’ve thought up, Volodya.” After I’d thought about it a little more, I said in a calmer voice: “Of course, if nuclear fragments are deconcentrated and spread among various places, a global catastrophe can be averted. But this will also put

millions of families who have decided to live on these domains in danger. After all, everybody wants to live in a place that’s environmentally clean.” “Yes, Papa, everybody wants to live in an environmentally clean place. But there are hardly any such places remaining on the Earth today.” ‘And here in the taiga, isn’t this environmentally clean either?” “The environment here is relatively clean. But it is not ideal, not pristine. There are no ideal spots left, anywhere. Clouds can bring their acid rain here too, from a variety of places. The grass and trees and bushes are coping with it for the time being, but the filthy places are becoming only filthier with each passing da. And the number of such places keeps growing with each passing da. That is why it is essential right now not to walk away from this filthiness, but attack it. ‘We need to create clean places ourselves’—that is what Mama says. “From all the possible variants my thought selected just one. It could not come up with any other. My thought tells me it is safer to deconcentrate and tame the waste one fragment at a time, and derive a benefit for life on our planet by storing a tiny fragment on one’s domain.” “But where on the domain? In a larder? In a safe? Store this radioactive capsule in an underground cellar? Has your thought given you any hint of this yet?” “The capsule should be buried underground no less than nine metres deep.” I spent some time thinking about my son’s proposal, which had indeed seemed incredible at first, but the more I thought about it, the more inclined I became to accept that there was some grain of reason in what he said. At the very least, his proposal for nuclear waste storage would be entirely sufficient to avert a large-scale catastrophe. As to pollution on the given domain, that was something that could indeed be avoided, and there might even be a plus side. Perhaps scientists could come up with something like a mini-reactor—or something similar. And then, all at once a thought dawned on me. Wow! Here was another reason for the need to deconcentrate the storage of radioactive waste. Money! Huge sums are being doled out by foreign governments for the storage of such waste. It is these funds that pay for constructing the facilities, maintaining service personnel and whole security control systems. And a part of this money inevitably disappears into the unknown. Why not pay it instead, to every domain where radioactive waste capsules are stored? Fantastic! Not only would ‘safe contamination’ be guaranteed, but people would earn money besides.

At the present time nobody can guarantee security from contamination even for those living far away from the storage facilities. Think what happened at Chernobyl2—the contamination affected not just parts of Ukrainian territory, but of Russia and Belarus as well. Clouds can carry the pollution for hundreds and even thousands of kilometres. ”Chernobyl—a town in northern Ukraine with a nuclear-power generating station. In April 1986 an accident at Reactor No. 4 caused one of Europe’s worst environmental disasters, spreading dangerous radiation over a huge land area. As a result of the accident, the population of Chernobyl (13,000 people) and nearby Pripiat’ (49,000) was evacuated, and these towns, as well as the larger surrounding area, are now uninhabited. So, even though it is still at the conceptual stage and the details need fleshing out, my son’s proposal deserves serious consideration—not just on the part of the academic world, but from governments, and especially the public. I was walking along the lakeshore, immersed in my thoughts, and had quite forgot about my son. He was still standing at the same spot, silently watching me. His upbringing forbade him from being the first to reinitiate our conversation. To interrupt the thought of a Man in contemplation was unthinkable. I decided to change the subject. “So, you spend your time thinking about different problems, Volodya. Don’t you have any duties to carry out? Have you been assigned any work to perform?” “Work?... Assigned?... I always do what I feel like doing. Work? What do you mean by the word work, Papa?” “Well, work is when you carry out some kind of task, and people pay you money for it. Or when you do something that’s going to benefit your whole family Take me, for example—when I was your age, my parents assigned me to look after our bunny-rabbits. And that’s what I did. I would collect grass for them, feed them, clean their cages... And the rabbits brought our family a bit of income.” After hearing me out, Volodya suddenly said with some excitement: “Papa, I shall tell you about one particular duty which I assigned to myself —a very enjoyable duty Only you’ll have to judge whether it can be called work or not.” “Tell me about it.” “Then let’s go. I have a specific place I want to show you.”

CHAPTER THREE

“Goosey, goosey, ga-ga-ga”1 or The superknowledge we are losing Goosey, goosey; ga-ga-ga—the first line of a popular Russian folk song. The song accompanies a children’s game in which a group of children (representing a flock of geese) are fleeing home from their feeding grounds while another child (as a wolf) tries to catch them. We started heading off from the lake, Volodya leading the way He had changed somehow His analytical and concentrated mood had given way to one of joyfulness and excitement. Sometimes he would do a pirouette as he walked along, or a little leap into the air, as he explained to me: “I never looked after bunny-rabbits, Papa. I did something else. I am not sure what to call it—gave birth? That will not do. Created? Not really... Ah, now I remember. I think in your civilisation it is called sitting on eggs. So, I sat on some eggs.” “What d’you mean, you sat on some eggs? That’s a mother hen’s job, or some other kind of bird’s.” “Yes, I know. But in my case I had to sit on them myself.” “What for? Tell me everything, in the proper order.” ‘All right, in the proper order. Well, it happened in this order: “I asked Grandfather to find me some eggs laid by wild ducks and wild geese. At first Grandfather grumbled a bit, but three days later he brought me four large goose eggs, along with five duck eggs, which were smaller. “Next in order, I dug a little hole in the ground, and put some deer manure in the bottom along with grass stalks, and then I covered them over with dried grass, and then on top of this I placed the two sets of eggs Grandfather had brought me.” “What was the manure for?” “For warmth. Eggs need warmth to hatch. And they need warmth from above, too. Sometimes I lay down on the ground myself, covering the hole with my stomach. When it was cold or rainy, I assigned this task to the bear.” “How did the bear keep from crushing the eggs?” “Ifou see, even though the bear is big, the hole containing the eggs is pretty small. He lay on top of the hole, and the eggs were at the bottom. Sometimes I would have the she-wolf guard the eggs, at other times I would sleep on the ground nearby myself, until they started to hatch. It was so wonderful to

watch them hatching. Not all of them made it, though. From the nine eggs I started with, were born two goslings and three ducklings. I fed them grass seed and crushed nuts and gave them water to drink. Whenever I fed them, I would invite various creatures living on our territory to watch.” “What for?” “To show them how I cared for the little chicks, to help them understand that they should not touch them, but that they should protect them instead. I would also sleep beside the hole where the goslings and ducklings were born, except on cold or rainy nights when I had the bear take over for me. The chicks nestled in his warm coat, which made it very nice for them. “Next, if I am to proceed in the proper order: I put up stakes around the hole with which I made a wicker fence from branches, and put branches above the nest as well. As the goslings and ducklings grew and learnt to climb out of their hole, I would walk around their nest and make short whistling sounds: tsu-tsu-tsu. Upon hearing this, they would immediately climb out and run after me. They tried running after the bear, but I trained them out of it. The bear can travel quite a distance, and the birds might not make it in one piece. “But nothing happened to them. They grew up, feathers appeared, and they learnt to fly I would toss them up in the air to help them along. Then they began flying off on their own, but always returned to their nest. “When autumn came and a whole lot of birds started gathering in flocks to fly south, my grown-up ducks attached themselves to a whole flock of ducks, and my geese joined a flock of geese, and they all flew off to warmer climes. “But I guessed—I was almost certain—that they would return in the spring. And they did. Oh, how fantastic that was, Papa! They came back, and I heard their delightful cry: ga-ga-ga. I ran over to their nest and began calling: tsu-tsu-tsu. I fed them grass seed and some nut kernels which I had ground up beforehand. They took the feed right out of my hands. I was so happy, and all the creatures around heard the cry and came running oh so happily... “Look, Papa, here we are! Look!” There in a secluded spot between two currant bushes I saw the nest my son had fashioned. But there was no wildlife to be seen anywhere around. “You say they’ve come back, but there aren’t any birds here.” “Not at the moment. They have flown off somewhere to have a stroll or look for food. That is why they are not here right now, but look, Papa!”

As Volodya pushed the branches aside to widen the opening, I caught a glimpse of three nest holes. In one of them lay five small-sized eggs, probably, duck eggs. In the other, just one, slightly larger—a goose egg. “Wow! That means they have come back. And they’re laying eggs. Only just a few.” “Yes!” Volodya exclaimed in excitement. “They have come back and are laying eggs. They could lay more if I took some of the eggs out of the nest and fed the mothers more often.” I looked at my son’s happy face, but could not fully comprehend the reason for his joyful excitement. I asked him: “What are you so fantastically happy about, Volodya? I know none of you— either you or your Mama or your grandfather—eat eggs. Which means that your actions cannot be called ‘work’ or a ‘job’, since there’s no practical benefit from it.” “You think so? But remember, other people eat bird’s eggs. Mama says it is all right to use anything the animals themselves give to Man. Especially for people who are not accustomed to a vegetarian diet.” “What have other people got to do with your activities here?” “I have decided that something needs to be done so that people living on their domains can be free from the burden of so many household tasks. Or almost free. So that they can have time to think and reflect. This is possible —if you understand God’s intent in creating our world. I find delight in the science of getting to know His thoughts. It is certainly the grandest science of all, and it is something that must be known. “We need to learn, for example, why He made the birds fly south in the autumn, but they do not stay in those warmer climes, but come back in the spring. I have thought a lot about this, and have guessed that He did this so that Man would not be burdened during the wintertime. In winter birds cannot find food for themselves, and they fly awa. But they do not stay in the south, but come back—they want to be useful to Man. This is God’s intent. There is much for Man to learn from what our Creator has conceived.” “What you’re suggesting, then, Volodya, is that ducks and geese can live in every domain, lay their eggs, feed themselves, and then fly off in the autumn and come back in the spring?” “Yes, quite right. After all, it worked with me.” “Yes, I see—it really did work with you. But there’s just one concern I have... It will probably upset you to hear this, but still, I have to tell you the

truth. Just so you don’t go looking ridiculous with your proposal.” “Tell me the truth, Papa.” “You see, there’s this science we call economics. Economists are trying to figure out what is the best way of handling the production of various goods —in this case, eggs. In our world a lot of chicken farms have been set up, where a whole bunch of chickens are kept in one place. They lay their eggs, and afterward these eggs are shipped off to grocery stores. People can go to these stores and easily purchase as many eggs as they need. It’s all worked out to ensure the least expenditure of labour and time on a per-unit basis.” “What does ‘expenditure of labour’ mean, Papa?” “It refers to the quantity of time and resources spent on the production of a single egg. You have to carefully work out what’s going to be the most efficient method of production, and that will be the best method.” “Fine, I shall try to work it out, Papa.” “When you work out the whole thing, you’ll understand. But to figure it out you’ll need expense statistics. I’ll try to get them from some economist.” “But I can calculate everything right now, Papa.” Volodya gave a bit of a frown, evidently concentrating, and after a minute announced: “Minus two to infinity.” “What kind of a formula is that? What does it refer to?” “The efficiency of the Divine economy is expressed in an infinite series of numbers. Even starting from zero, modern scientific economics is already two points down.” “You’ve got a pretty strange method of calculation there. I can’t fathom it. Can you explain how you arrived at that figure?” “I set the benchmark for our current case at zero. All the expenses involved in a chicken factory—its construction, maintenance and delivery of eggs to stores are summed up in the figure of minus one.” “What d’you mean, ‘minus one? These expenses should be expressed in roubles and kopeks.”2 2

kopek (Russian: kopeika)— a coin worth 1/100 of a rouble. It is derived from the Russian word for ‘spear’ (kop’e, pronounced kap-TO), in reference to a warrior piercing a dragon with his spear—a scene depicted on early Russian coins. The word ‘rouble’ itself is derived from the verb mbit’ (‘cut with an axe’)—early coins represented a silver band cut in rectangular

pieces. “Monetary units are relative and will always vary, and so they are not significant in this methodology. They all need to be lumped together under the arbitrary value of ‘minus one’. Whatever expenses there are, in terms of a zero benchmark, they can be expressed as ‘minus one’.” ‘And where did you get the second minus figure?” “That is quality. It cannot be very good. The unnatural maintenance conditions and the lack of variety in feed cannot help but lower the quality of the eggs, and this gives rise to another value of minus one. So we get ‘minus two’ altogether.” “Okay, let’s say you’re right. But in your case, too, there are huge expenditures of time. Here, tell me, Volodya, how much time did you spend, as you put it, ‘sitting on’ the eggs, and then feeding the ducklings and goslings, and watching out for them?” “Ninety days and nights.” “So, ninety times twenty-four hours. And all that in aid of producing no more than a few dozen eggs—and that only at the end of a year! For people living in their domains, it would be much more efficient to buy some little chicks at a market or hatch them over the winter with the help of an electric incubator, and in four or five months they’ll start laying. In the second year, before winter sets in, they’re generally slaughtered, since their laying capacity goes down by the third year. So they kill them and start raising a new batch. That’s technology for you.” “That is the technology of never-ending burdens, Papa. You have to feed the chickens every day, store up food for the winter, and every other year raise a new batch of chickens.” “Sure, you feed them and raise new ones, but thanks to modern technology it isn’t nearly as time-consuming as your alternative.” “But those ninety days will launch a programme that will last forever. Once they come back, the migratory birds will raise their young all by themselves, they will teach them how to get along with human beings and come back to their homeland. And they will go on doing this for thousands of years. In launching a programme like this, Man is passing it on to future generations of his family. He is giving back to them a little particle of the Divine economy A hundred years from now an expenditure of ninety days in calculating the cost of producing a single egg, will count as minutes, and continue to diminish with each passing year.” “But still, there are expenses, and you haven’t taken these into account.” “These expenses are offset by a powerful counterweight, which is no less

significant than what is produced by the birds.” “What counterweight?” “When birds once again fly from faraway lands back to their native woods and fields, people are delighted to see them. Thanks to their joyful and beneficial energy, many people’s diseases are eliminated. But this energy is ninety times stronger when they do not merely fly back from the south, but come directly to you and start greeting the Man living on that domain with their happy cries and refrains of exultation. Their singing brings joy and strength not only to Man but to the whole Space around him.” Volodya spoke with confidence and inspiration. It would have seemed foolish to continue arguing with him. I pretended to be absorbed in contemplation or to be figuring out something in my mind. I felt a little put out that there was nothing I could teach my son or even offer him a few hints on. And what kind of upbringing or education do we have here anyway? Here is my son standing right in front of me, and yet he seems like a child from another planet or another civilisation. He has a different concept of life, a different philosophy and speed of thought. He can do instantaneous calculations. And it is clear, as I have been made aware, that even if I spent a year on computer calculations, whatever he comes up with would still be more accurate. It’s as though everything inside him were turned upside-down. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to ask: To what degree have we perverted our own lives—our concepts and meaning of life? All our disasters have arisen from these perversions. No doubt this is all true, but still... I’m so anxious to find some way of being useful to my son. But how? With no expectations left, I asked him quietly and offhandedly: “I’ll give some thought to those economics of yours. Maybe you’re right... But tell me, son: you’ve been playing with different tasks here, working them out. Have you ever had a really serious problem to meet?” Volodya sighed deeply and, it seemed, rather woefully. After a brief pause he replied: “Yes, Papa, I do have a big problem. And only you can help me solve it.” Volodya was sad, while I, on the other hand, was delighted to find something at last where he required my help. ‘And what does it involve, this big problem of yours?”

A big problem “Remember, Papa, when I told you last time you were here that I was preparing to go off into your world when I grew up?”3 “Yes, I remember. You said you would come into our world and find yourself a Universe Girl to make her happy. You’d build a kin’s domain with her, and raise children together. I remember your telling me. So, you haven’t abandoned your project?” “Not at all. And I often think of the future, about that girl and the domain. I can picture in detail how she and I will live there together. And how you and Mama will come visit and see how the dream which that girl and I cocreated together is being turned into reality” “Well, then, what’s your problem? Are you afraid you might not find your girl?” “That is not the problem. I shall look for this girl and find her. Come, I shall show you another little glade. And you will see it all for yourself—you will sense what the problem is.” Volodya and I arrived at a small glade located right next door to Anastasia’s. When we reached the middle of the glade, we stopped, and Volodya invited me to sit down on the ground. Then, cupping his hands around his mouth, he gave out a loud and extended cry: A-a-a-a! First he cried out in one direction, then another and yet another. In just two or three minutes there began a rustling in the treetops all around the glade, and a whole lot of squirrels could be seen leaping from branch to branch, gathering together on a single cedar tree. Some of them simply sat down on one of the branches and stared in our direction, while others—apparently the more restless ones —continued hopping from one branch to another. A few minutes later and out of the bushes came running three wolves. They sat down at the edge of the glade and also began looking our way. A sable came along and took up a position about three metres from the wolves. Then two goats appeared. They didn’t sit down, but stood at the edge of the glade, their eyes fixed on us. Soon afterward came a deer. The last to arrive was a huge bear, noisily making his way through the bushes. He too sat down at the edge of the glade, panting all the while, saliva dripping from his tongue. He had probably been a long ways off and had had to run for some distance. All this time Volodya stood behind my back, with his hands on my shoulders. Then he took a few paces back from me and picked some herbs. Coming back to me, he said:

“Open your mouth, Papa, and I shall give you some herbs to eat. This is so they can see that I am feeding you from my hand, and will not be upset at the sight of a stranger.” I took the proffered herbs in my mouth and began to chew. Volodya sat down beside me, put his head up against my chest and said: “Stroke my hair, Papa, so that they will fully calm down.” I began stroking his light-brown hair with delight. Then he sat down beside me and began to explain. “I realised, Papa, that God created the whole world as a cradle for His son, Man. The plants, the air, the water and clouds—everything has been created for Man. And the creatures stand ready to serve Man with great delight. But we have forgotten, and now it is important to understand what services the creatures can perform, what their purpose and destiny is. Even today a lot of people are aware that a dog can guard the house, find lost objects, and aid in keeping one’s home safe from intruders. A cat, of course, can catch the mice that raid the larder. A horse is transportation. But all the other creatures have a specific feature and designation, too, which should be understood. I have tried the best I could to determine the function of all that you see here. “Now they are sitting there and awaiting my command. This is the third year now I have been working with them to understand their purpose. Take, for example, the bear. Because of his big and powerful paws, he can dig an underground cellar, put supplies in it to save for the winter and dig them up again in the spring. He knows how to bring honey from a tree hollow.” “Yes, I know, Volodya. Anastasia told me that at one time people used bears as household help.” “Mama told me that, too. But look what I have taught the bear to do.” Volodya rose to his feet and stretched out his right arm in the bear’s direction. The bear drew himself up on his haunches, and even seemed to stop breathing. When Volodya clapped his hand against his thigh, the huge bear took several giant strides and lay down at the boy’s feet. Volodya squatted down beside the beast’s enormous head, gave it a slap and began scratching behind the creature’s ear. The bear purred with pleasure. When Volodya got up, the bear did the same, watching the boy’s every move. Volodya went over to the edge of the glade, where he found a dry branch, and stuck it into the ground about ten metres from where I was sitting. Then he returned to the edge and approached a small cedar tree about a metre high. He touched it and clapped his hands twice. Right off, the bear ran over to the cedar and sniffed it. And then an incredible thing started to happen.

My son sat down beside me on the grass and the two of us began watching as the scene unfolded before our eyes. The bear spent some time sniffing the little cedar. First he would walk away from it, as though measuring something, then he would run over to the spot where Volodya’s dry branch was sticking up. And all around the branch he suddenly began scraping away the earth with his front paws. Working furiously with his paws and their powerful claws, in the space of a few minutes he had dug a hole approximately 80 cm in diameter and about half a metre deep. He stopped to admire his handiwork, and even stuck his head into the pit, probably to sniff it. After that the bear ran over to the cedar Volodya had indicated, and began to dig out the earth around it. When he had dug what amounted to a circular trench, the bear sat down on his hind paws next to the cedar, dug his front paws into the trench and pulled the little tree out of the ground, along with a sizeable clump of earth. Rising on his hind legs, he held the clump between his front paws and headed over to the hole he had dug earlier. He carefully sat down and lowered the clump with the cedar into the hole. It turned out the hole was about 15 cm larger than required. The bear backed off to take a look at his handiwork. Once more he pulled out the cedar and set it to one side, while he filled in the hole just a little more, before replanting the cedar. Now everything was just right. The bear backed away to once more inspect his accomplishment. This time he was apparently satisfied, as he went back to the cedar he had planted and began filling in the crevice around the clump from which the tree was growing. He used his paw to scoop up the earth, stuff it into the crevice and then pack it down around the newly replanted tree. It was quite a fascinating scene, but I had earlier witnessed how the squirrels brought dried mushrooms and nuts for Anastasia,2 3 or how the wolves played with Anastasia and protected her from wild dogs.3 Not only that, but a lot of people can observe all sorts of tricks with various animals just by attending a circus performance. My own dog Kedra4 also takes delight in carrying out a range of commands. What I witnessed in the taiga glade also bore outward similarities to a circus performance, except that it didn’t take place in an arena surrounded by a high net, but in natural surroundings. And the performers were not circus animals living in confined cages, but free—or ‘wild’, as we call them— dwellers in the taiga. They might well have seemed wild to us, but to my son they were simply friends and helpers. Just like our household pets and farm animals.

However, I must point out one mysterious and incredible distinction in particular: the loyalty of household pets and farm animals can be explained by the fact that Man gives them food and drink and provides shelter. People who go see animal acts at circuses may also notice that after each successful trick the tamer rewards the lion or tiger, giving them some kind of treat or trifle he keeps on his belt or in his pocket just for that purpose. Circus animals which spend years confined in cages have no opportunity to hunt for their own food. They are fully dependent on Man. By contrast, the creatures here in the taiga are absolutely free and fully capable of finding food and shelter on their own. Yet still they come—not just come, but make an enthusiastic dash to respond to Man’s call and carry out his commands. They carry them out with considerable desire and even servilit. Why? What do they get in return? Volodya gave no food to the bear. But still, the bear’s joy was many times more clearly evident than that shown by the circus animals upon receiving their treat. The bear that transplanted the little tree on Volodya’s command stood there shifting from paw to paw, his eyes fixed on the boy as though he wanted to repeat the action or perform some other task. It is strange how this huge taiga bear really wants to keep on doing something for Man, and for a child at that. Volodya was not about to set the bear any new task. He gestured the bear to come over, grasped the fur on the bear’s muzzle with both hands, ruffled it a bit, then petted the muzzle and said: “"fou’re a super helper—not like the goats.” The bear purred with delight. This threatening creature sounded as though it was at the very pinnacle of bliss. Anastasia has said: “Such beneficial energy can flow from Man as has never before been seen. Every living creature on the Earth needs this energy just as it needs air, sunshine and water. And even sunlight is but a reflection of the great energy emanating from Man.” Our sciences have discovered a multitude of diverse energies and even brought about the artificial generation of electrical energ. They have split the atom and manufactured bombs. But how far (and in what direction) have our sciences advanced in studying the more significant and important question as to the energy emanating from Man himself? Is there any tendency toward studying this energy at all, including its mysterious capabilities? Or studying Man’s abilities in general, and his function in both our world and the Universe?

Perhaps someone is trying by whatever means available to hinder Man from knowing himself. And I mean actual hindering. It cannot be, it cannot possibly be Man’s destiny to spend years sitting in a casino or at a bar for a shot of vodka, or drudging away at a cash register in some store or at a manager’s desk in some office. And even a supermodel, or a president, or a pop-star—none of them come even close to Man’s most important purpose. And yet it is these very professions of our modern age, along with making money, that some enigmatic ‘entity5 is promoting today as the most important thing in Man’s life. It’s what we see in a good many of our films and TV shows, which concentrate on everything except the meaning of life. All they do is turn Man into a banana-head. Isn’t that the reason wars are happening all over the place? And the Earth is becoming more and more polluted? And people lose their sense of direction, they see no purpose in living, and so they take to vodka and drugs. Who is supposed to stop all this rot that is taking place with our Earth? Science? But science isn’t saying anything. Religion? Which religion? Where are the results? Maybe everyone needs to ponder this for themselves? Ponder it! For themselves! To ponder, one must first think. But where? When? Our lives have become one giant bustle from morning ’til night. Every single attempt that has ever been made to ponder the meaning of life has been suddenly aborted. Selling magazines featuring half-naked sensuous bodies—oh, sure! Savouring sexual perversion—oh, sure! Showing and telling about the beastly antics of pervert-maniacs—oh, sure! Writing and talking about prostitutes in the media—oh, sure! But there is less and less talk about the meaning of Man’s life and Man’s purpose—it’s becoming more and more a taboo topic. I glanced up from my contemplations to look at my son. He was sitting on the grass beside me, watching me intently I thought he might have something more he wanted to show me. I asked him: ‘And what was it you were saying to the bear about goats, Volodya?” “I cannot, for the life of me, Papa, determine what their purpose is.” “What’s there to determine? Everyone knows what goats are for—to give milk to Man.” “Yes, milk, of course. But perhaps there is something more they can be taught.”

“What more could they possibly...? Why bother looking for something else?” “I have been watching them. Goats are capable of stripping bark off trees and stumps. And they can bite off branches from bushes. If you let them into a domain, they could cause harm to the plants. To stop that from happening, I am trying to teach them to trim the hedges around the domains.” “Trim?” ‘Yes, Papa, trim. After all, people trim hedges to make them more beautiful —either in a straight line or in different shapes. Grandfather told me you call it landscape design, or topiary art. But the goats do not seem to have any concept of what I want them to do.” ‘And how are you teaching them?” “I shall show you.” Volodya reached for a rope made of nettle fibres woven together, about three metres long. He fastened one end to a small tree and stretched the rope through a clump of bushes. Then, gesturing the two little goats to approach, he gave each of them a pat. He touched the bushes with his hand and even snapped off a small branch himself with his teeth. He said something to the goats, and they set about vigorously gnawing off the bushy branches. Each time they neared the rope border, Volodya would give several tugs on the rope and make some disapproving sounds. The goats would stop for a time, holding their snouts up and looking enquiringly at the boy, but then go back to biting off the branches, paying no attention to the rope. “You see, Papa, it is not working. They do not realise they are supposed to trim the bushes in an even line.” “Yes, I see. Is that the problem you were talking about?” “That is not the main problem, Papa. It is something else.” “Then what?” “You noticed, Papa, how happily the different creatures came running to my call?” “Yes, I did.” “I have been working with them for several years now, and they have become accustomed to communicating with me, but only with me. They look forward to this interchange, they want to be petted. But once I go off into your world, they will miss me. They will miss not having a Man ever come to see them again, or call them and give them something to do. I feel that the communication with Man and serving Man has become the most

significant focus in their life.” “Couldn’t they communicate with Anastasia?” “Mama has her own circle, her own creatures she is friends with. Besides, she is very busy and does not have time for all of them. “But, you see, these...”—and here once again Volodya pointed to the creatures still sitting around the edge of the glade—these I chose myself, and I am the only one who has been working with them these past few years. “Three months ago I asked Grandfather to be present with me at all our training sessions. Grandfather muttered, but he was always there beside me. But recently he told me he would be unable to replace me.” “Why?” “He said he did not have the same interest as I had in animal-training. And once again he began to mutter that I should not have spent so much time with the animals individually. And that I should not have given them so much petting. And he reminded me that these creatures look upon me not only as their leader, but as their child, too, since the older among them saw me when I was a baby and even nursed me. You see, I made some kind of mistake, and now I must definitely correct it. Only now I am no longer able to correct it all on my own.” I looked at the creatures still sitting at the edge of the glade. They gave every indication that they were waiting for Volodya to give them some sort of instructions or to do something with them. I imagined how they would miss him if he were to go away. The same way my dog Kedra misses me when I have to leave my home in the country for days or weeks at a time. She has a warm little doghouse and I don’t keep her chained up—she’s free to roam the fields or the forest or the village. And I have a neighbour who feeds her every day He makes kasha1 for her, and gives her bones to chew on. But my neighbour tells me: 1

kasha—a traditional Russian and Eastern European porridge made with wheat, buckwheat and other grains. “She misses you, Vladimir Nikolaevich. She’ll often sit by the gate and gaze down the road you come home on. And sometimes she’ll whimper.” And whenever I arrive, Kedra rushes headlong to greet me, rubs against my legs, and sometimes she’s so enthusiastic she’ll jump right up and try to lick my face, soiling my clothes with her dirty paws. And there’s no way I can train her to be not quite so ebullient in expressing her emotions. But these creatures in the glade... All the time we talked they sat there quietly watching us, looking the picture of composure. What do they want?

After all, nobody is making them sit that way or wait on some kind of command from Man. My God... A thought all at once bubbled up with absolute clarity and struck my heart. It was much more than just about these creatures sitting in a taiga glade—it was the realisation that all the creatures on the Earth have a specific purpose and await contact with the highest being on the planet, namely, Man. They have been created to help Man fulfil his supreme mission. Like all life on the planet, they were created by God to help Man realise his grand destiny... But Man... I looked at the creatures in the glade and began to realise that my son really did have a serious problem on his hands: he could not simply abandon these creatures. Nor could he bring himself to give up his dream about the girl he would be setting up a domain with. “Yes, Volodya, that really is a problem,” I told my son. “Doesn’t look as though there’s any solution. Not one we can find.” “There is a solution, Papa, but it does not depend on me.” “On whom, then?” “You are the only one who can solve this problem, Papa.” “Me? And just how am I supposed to do that? There’s nothing/can do here, son.” There is a solution “I think, Papa, that you will be able to help me if you really want to,” said Volodya quietly. “You think so? But, you see, I have no idea what to do. You may think so, but I have no idea.” I was still sitting on the grass, while Volodya stood in front of me, looking me in the eye with some kind of an imploring gaze, his lips whispering something inaudible. I could tell by his lips that he was saying one particular word over and over again. Then, without taking his eyes away, he said it distinctly: “Sis-ter. I earnestly beg of you, Papa, to bear me a sister, together with Mama. I shall nurse her and raise her myself. They will help me. We shall not distract you and Mama from your activities. I shall teach her, when she grows a little. I shall tell her about everything. She will remain here with my creatures and my Space. “Bear me a sister, together with Mama. Unless, of course, you are ill... or are too tired. That is, of course, if you can. Grandfather told me that men in your

world often get ill and grow older faster because of the way of life there, the air not fit to breathe and the foul water. You are a little past fifty years old, Papa. But if you are tired, Papa... If your strength is pretty much exhausted... Then spend three days with me. Just three days. I have everything all prepared, and a great deal of strength will be restored to you.” My son was excited, and I interrupted him. “Wait, Volodya, calm down. Of course I’m a little tired. But I think I’ll have enough strength. That’s not the point. In principle I have nothing against giving you a sister, but when it comes to bearing children, a desire on the part of both parents is required.” “I am sure of it, Papa. I know for certain that Mama will not refuse. If you agree, let us not waste any time, but begin right now to prepare for the birth of my sister. I have been studying up on it. Grandfather has helped me a great deal. I have made calculations and have everything prepared. Stay with me three days and three nights, and do not go off anywhere, and do not get distracted by anything, Papa. Your energy and strength will increase.” “What makes you think I don’t have enough energy or strength, Volodya?” “I think you have enough, but you shall have more.” “Okay, I shall spend all three days with you alone, but we must go and let Mama know.” “I shall explain everything to her myself, Papa. I shall tell her we have a common project. She will not go into specifics and will not object.” “Well, all right, then, let’s get started.” I even began to wonder what my son had prepared that would restore a great deal of strength and energy to Man after only three days. And I shall say right off that the procedures he prepared may seem rather strange, but the sensation resulting from them on the third day defies explanation in words or writing. It wouldn’t be appropriate, either, to say that a Man becomes ten or twenty years younger, though he may indeed look as much as five years younger. But on the inside... Somehow everything inside me seemed to be working differently Not only did I have new strength, but the world around me seemed just a bit different. CHAPTER FOUR

Rejuvenation

First ordeal. No sooner had I agreed to follow through with the procedures thought up by my son than he signalled the assembled creatures to go away. He grasped hold of my hand, and we ran down to the lake. Volodya stopped several times along the way to pick herbs in various places, which he softened and rolled into a ball. When the ball was ready, he instructed me to eat it, which I did. And in just a few minutes I noticed a heavy drip of snot exuding from my nose and I began to vomit. It seemed that all my stomach juices had been pumped out. I was unable to speak for all the vomiting, while Volodya explained: “That is good, Papa. Do not be afraid. It is good for all that useless stuff to come out of you. Only a pure state will remain. This is what they do in cases of poisoning.” I was physically unable to offer any kind of answer, but thought to myself: That’s true: poisoning victims drink tablets which produce nausea and vomitin. There are laxatives, of course—castor oil, for example. But what do I need this ordeal for? I haven’t been poisoned. As though he had tuned in to my question, Volodya explained: “You, of course, have not been poisoned, Papa, but the food you have been consuming is right on the verge of having a poisoning effect. Just let go of everything filthy inside you.” After the vomiting and the discharge of the phlegm from my nose, along with a copious flow of tears from my eyes, I began having a series of soft bowel movements, and five times I ended up running into the bushes for a lengthy period. The whole procedure lasted two to three hours. Then came relief. “Now do you feel better, Papa? Better than before? Eh?” “Yes,” I affirmed. Second ordeal Volodya once again took hold of my hand and off we ran. When we reached the shore of the lake, he instructed me to wash myself and swim around a bit. Upon coming out of the water, I noticed him extracting a clay jar from a hole in the ground, about a litre and a half in size. “Now, Papa, you need to drink this water. It is called dead water—because it contains very few microbes. This water should not be drunk if the air is polluted. But we have pure air here, so it is all right to drink dead water. It will rinse your insides and cleanse them, and wash out a lot of microbes and bacteria from your body Drink as much as you can, Papa. When you have drunk up this whole jar, I shall give you another, and when you have finished that I shall give you a third jar, containing living water. And all the microbes and bacteria you need will be restored in a balance that is just right

for you.” I should point out right off that Volodya and his family consider dead water to be that found at great depths below the Earth’s surface and containing a minimum of bacteria. I believe our mineral water in bottles is precisely what they call dead water. In any case, I think all of our drinking water is dead water, and that is why our children suffer from disbacteriosis, especially newborns. Living water, on the other hand, they consider to be surface water from pure streams or bodies of water, a few of which have indeed been preserved in the depths of the Siberian taiga. There’s something I wish to emphasise here. Grandfather later explained to me that spring water is not considered living water when you drink it right out of the spring. To be considered ‘living water’, it must first be kept for three hours or so in a wooden or clay vessel with a wide neck. “Living water needs to absorb sunlight,” he said. “With the aid of sunlight, organisms are generated which are indispensable to human life. You call them microbes and bacteria.” Then the water should stand in the shade for at least another three hours. After that it can be drunk as ‘living water’. Third ordeal. “So take a drink whenever you feel like it, Papa. In the meantime we shall proceed to the next phase. Usually, for people polluted by the outside world, this whole process takes about nineteen days, Grandfather said, though it is even better to stretch it out over thirty-three days. Since you do not have that kind of time, I have shortened it for you down to three days, but we shall manage. Come with me to another spot—I have set up a particular device there.” We walked about a hundred metres away from the lake, and there amidst a group of trees I saw a place prepared for me to lie down, made of dried grasses. Next to this lay four ropes made of woven nettle fibres or flax. At one end of each rope there was a noose, while the other was tied to a tree. After I lay down, Volodya put each of my hands and feet through a noose, tugged on them a little and began tightening them with the aid of sticks placed half-way along each rope. After a little tugging, as though trying to literally quarter my body, he jerked each of my hands and feet in turn. I could feel a crunch in my joints. Then he tightened the rope even more, saying: “Papa, you need to lie like this for an hour on your stomach and an hour on

your back. And so that it will not be boring for you and even more beneficial, I shall give you an invigorating massage. And you can just relax, or even go to sleep, if you like.” My son and I went through this procedure two hours each day on all three days. As I later found out from Grandfather, this procedure served to lubricate all my joints. It is especially important for elderly people. It can even add to one’s height, since it straightens out the spinal column. But the main benefit is increased lubrication of the joints. Think about it: when we walk or run or work out in the gymn to pump up our muscles, almost all exercise involves increased pressure on our joints. In Volodya’s procedure, though, it is exactly the opposite: the pressure is taken off. Each time during the stretching procedure, Volodya gave me a massage. On the second day he rubbed down my body with some sort of sweetish juice or tea, and a whole lot of insects crawled over me. I had been told earlier by Anastasia that they served to cleanse the pores of my skin.1 In our own living conditions, the pores of the skin can be cleansed by going to a Russian banya and applying, for example, a birch besom.2 When a Man steams and sweats, the pores of his skin are cleansed, too. Interspersed with the stretching procedures we did some fairly common exercises: running, swimming, chinning ourselves on the bough of a tree (using it as one would an exercise bar). About three times a day Volodya suggested I do a handstand, head down, and hold the position for as long as I possibly could. I stood like that, my legs leaning against a tree trunk. This, too, is a rather interesting procedure: a lot of blood rushes to one’s face, making it tense up and causing a smoothing of the wrinkles. For the whole three days we lived on cedar milk, flower pollen, cedar nut oil, berries and a small quantity of dried mushrooms (all this is available in our society). Going through all the procedures thought up by my son and reflecting on how they could be adapted to our conditions, I came to the general conclusion that all this can be done effectively back home. One can even use body-cleansing agents available in pharmacies, as well as making use of diuretic remedies and fasting. It is not difficult to obtain dead water either—all water sold in bottles today is dead water. You can get living water, too, if you have access to a pure wellspring. You begin to feel the healing effects of these procedures right off. See Book 1, Chapter 25: “Bugs”. A mysterious procedure.

But included in this set of procedures was a rather mysterious one, which would be quite a challenge to replicate under our conditions, although maybe someone will have an idea and let me know. I shall describe it in detail. Three times a day—morning, just before lunch and just after three o’clock in the afternoon (more or less)—my son gave me some tea to drink which he had prepared. Each time when the hour came for me to take the tea, Volodya would run off to his hiding-place and bring back a small jar of this tea, which he invited me to drink, but no more than one swallow at a time. The first time he did this, he said: “Take a drink of this tea, Papa, and remember how big a swallow you took. As soon as you have drunk it, lie down on the grass, and I shall listen to what is happening with your heart.” I drank the tea and lay down on the grass. Volodya put his little hand on my chest and kept very still. Within a few moments I felt either a warming or a tingling sensation in different parts of my body My heart began to beat furiously It wasn’t as though it had started beating any faster—I had the sensation of my heart muscles expanding normally, but contracting much more sharply than usual, forcing out the blood. As I was later informed by specialists, in cases of a vigorous and sharp blood flow through places where the capillary vessels are partially blocked, warming and tingling sensations can be expected. Volodya listened to my heart-beat for several minutes, and then said: “Everything is fine, Papa. Your heart can actually withstand an even larger swallow. But it is best not to take any chances. The next time take a slightly smaller swallow” When I asked my son why he was giving me this tea and what its composition was, he replied as follows: “This tea, Papa, will give you a great deal of strength, and help you recover from any diseases you may have. But, most importantly, it will enable you to discover the strength and energy you will need for the birth of my sister.” “What, d’you think I don’t have enough already?” “Perhaps. But now you will have strength and energy in abundance, and in the exact balance you need.” “Are they permanent, or will I use them up with the birth of the child?” “For bearing subsequent children you will need to drink this tea once more. After all, they do it this way each time.” ‘And just who might ‘they’ be?”

“Sables and other animals. I only studied the sable’s actions. It was Grandfather who advised me as to when, at what time and for how many days I needed to watch them in particular.” ‘And how does Grandfather know about all that?” “Grandfather, you see, Papa, has all the knowledge of the great wise priests of yore. Even knowledge that has been forgotten by the priests of today. And even knowledge that was secret many thousands of years ago. This tea was taken by the priests before the birth of their children, also before death, so that they could remain immortal.” “What d’you mean, ‘before death, so that they could remain immortal’?” “Well, I mean, so that everyone would think they were dead—whereas, in fact, they only changed bodies and were reincarnated on the spot, and all their information stayed with them. There are other methods of quick reincarnation, but very few that will allow the retention of the information possessed at the time of death. That is why people can be reborn but still have to study life all over again, learn everything right from scratch, and they are unable to compare the present world with the past. And they get confused in their life because they include no knowledge of life and no feelings capable of sensing God.” “But with Grandfather, all the information about the past, you’re saying, has been retained?” “Yes, Papa. Our Grandfather is a great priest and wise-man. There is only one person living on the Earth today who significantly surpasses him in power.” “Where is he living right now, this strongest and wisest one—do you know? Ydu must be talking about the high priest?” “I am talking about our Mama Anastasia, Papa.” ‘Anastasia? But how could she have more information and greater knowledge than your greatgrandfather?” “Grandfather says he is hindered by too much information. And he can forget things. But Mama experiences no such hindrance, because there is no information contained in her.” “What d’you mean? Which is it—does she really know more, or has she no knowledge at all?” “I did not express myself quite accurately, Papa. With Mama Anastasia all the information... how shall I put it?... she has a great deal more, only it is compressed in the form of feelings. And whenever she needs to, she is able to feel in a single moment something that Grandfather might require a day or two, or even more, to think about.”

“I can’t say I understand everything you’ve said, but it is interesting. Tell me more. What about you? Does this mean that you don’t possess information about the past, seeing how you’ve had to consult with Grandfather?” “That is correct.” “Why? You mean to say you’re mentally inferior to them—Grandfather and Great-grandfather? And what do they tell you about this? Grandfather probably tells you that I’m to blame?” “Grandfather never told me anything like that.” “But what about Mama? What did she say?” “I asked Mama why I do not know as much as my forebears. And not as much as she, or even you, Papa. And this was her answer: “’All the truths of the Universe, son, and all the information accumulated right from its pristine origins, has always been available to every Man, nothing hidden. Not everybody is capable of understanding it and making it their own, because their life-goals and the aspirations of their souls do not correspond to those of the Universe. Man has free will in everything, and is free to choose a path other than that of the Universe. But God is free too, as to when, how and to whom He gives a hint. You must not worry about information that is lacking in you. Seek out your dream and know that the whole will be offered to you in full, if the dream that is born within you is worthy of co-creation.’” “Hmmm... So tell me, Volodya, what do you make of all that?” “Once my dream and life-goal are created in all their detail, all the knowledge I need to turn the dream into reality will be born in me all on its own, without fail.” “But in the meantime, then, you will go on consulting with Grandfather?” “Yes, with Grandfather, and Mama, and you, and I shall try to ponder life all on my own.” “Does that mean I have to consult with Grandfather about the recipe for the extraordinary tea you’ve been giving me these past three days?” “When it comes to the recipe, I can tell you about that myself.” “Then tell me.” “This recipe was prepared using taiga herbs. So that I would be able to know which herbs to choose, and in what correlation, for three days and nights I observed a sable—one that likewise had an aspiration to be a father. Grandfather told me that the female sable will not allow her mate to

approach her if he fails to prepare himself properly. And I observed what herbs he ate during those days, and at what time he chose to pick them. That, too, turned out to be important. All the herbs he ate I gathered as well, only I had to gather a larger store of them, since you, Papa, I can tell, weigh quite a bit more than a sable. “Once I had gathered samples of a particular kind of herb, I would put them into a vessel and grind them down with a pestle until a juice emerged. All this time I thought only good and pleasant thoughts—about you, Papa, about Mama, and about my future sister. Then I would take the paste which resulted and empty it into a clay jar. I poured water over the jar’s contents and added cedar oil so that it formed a film on top. When you drank that swallow of tea, Father, and your heart started beating a bit faster, I could tell the tea had turned out well.” As I listened to my son, I thought: Not many people have the opportunity to observe a sable in its natural surroundings. But perhaps they coidd keep watch on what herbs a cat or a dog eats, for example. For that it would be necessary to carry or transport these pets into a forest and follow their behaviour, and, if possible, identify which herbs they ate. I was most interested in the tea recipe which my son followed, since just three days’ using it produced a palpable effect, while Volodya had indicated a complete therapy course ought to last either nineteen or thirty-three days. That means that after a full-term course, in combination with the other exercises, Man can really free himself from many ills, halt his body’s ageing process and rejuvenate himself in some sense of the word. I want to stress that even this three-day application in practice confirms that such an effect is possible. Then there is folk wisdom, too, to take into account, as well as the scientific basis of these procedures. Of course people have gone to chemists’ or drug stores and seen the herbal mixtures our pharmaceutical industry has to offer for the treatment of a variety of ailments.3 Many know that in Nature there are a whole lot of medicinal plants. But not everyone knows that these can only be really effective, either prophylactically or therapeutically, if they are picked on the right day and at the right time of day. As to preparing herbal mixtures, along with everything else must be considered the way medicinal herbs correlate with each other. As we can see, there are too many factors that need to be known in order to prepare a mixture like Volodya’s. And it is highly doubtful whether any of our herbal healers today knows about all the factors involved. I very much wanted to take this opportunity of presenting, as a gift to my readers, a recipe for body restoration never before published anywhere in the

world, and in a simpler form than Volodya’s, so that it will be easily accessible to the majority of people. Directly my son’s three-day therapy course came to an end, he informed me he would like to go to bed earlier than was his custom (it turned out that he barely managed to get two or three hours’ sleep a night the past three nights), and he dozed off immediately, while I started heading back toward Anastasia’s glade. I was fascinated by two questions. First, why did our son not possess a knowledge of the past, as did Grandfather? And secondly, was there any way of simplifying the recipe for the tea which he had prepared for me? A vision Thoughts of food, however, were gradually relegated to the back burner as I began to concentrate more and more on thoughts of my future daughter. On the one hand, it wouldn’t be a bad thing at all if Anastasia gave birth to a daughter as well as a son. But on the other hand, when this daughter gets older, she will either have her own Space or inherit the Space created by my son and face the same problems Volodya is having to deal with right now. Besides, who could she possibly marry, here in the taiga? She could go off into our world, but that wouldn’t be easy either. It would mean leaving her own Space and her loyal animal friends. And I can’t imagine any young man agreeing to come and live with her in the taiga. It’s not all that comfortable here in the wilds for someone from the outside. And, to be honest about it, that includes me. It is interesting to talk with Anastasia —I would even say her company is alluring. When I’m with her, I feel a sense of peace and joy in my heart. But when I’m left all alone and she’s not around, I feel uncomfortable, to say the least—even a bit fearful. The creatures treat Anastasia and our son quite differently from me. Of course they don’t attack me, but whenever we meet, they still regard me with an air of suspicion. I once attempted—in Anastasia’s presence—to command the squirrels to bring me some cedar cones. I made the same gestures as Anastasia, but there was no reaction from the squirrels. Another time I tried calling the she-wolf. Just like Anastasia, I held out my hand to her, then clapped it against my thigh. But instead of running toward me, she stood rooted to the spot, and her hackles stood on end in a show of aggression. And I lost any desire to further communicate with these creatures. I realised that they could be loyal only to one specific Man in perpetuity. So it could turn out that some young man comes to see our daughter in the taiga and he will not feel comfortable in her Space. Volodya has not given sufficient thought to his sister’s future. Turns out he feels sorry for the creatures, but apparently not for his sister. And I didn’t think about it either

—I absent-mindedly gave him encouragement. Immersed in these thoughts, I was surprised to discover that I had already arrived at Anastasia’s glade. No sooner had I taken a few steps in the direction of the familiar dug-out than I noticed Anastasia herself standing there, her body half-turned to me, combing her long hair with her hands. I stopped dead in my tracks: she did not look at all like the same woman I had known for the past ten years. And when she turned to face me, my legs became jelly, my heart began throbbing and I realised I could not move from the spot. Just ten to fifteen paces from me stood a woman who looked the picture of a fairy-tale vision. She was wearing a long, sheer, light-coloured dress down to her ankles, almost like a ball gown, gathered with a belt around her slender waist. Her head was crowned with a wreath woven of grasses and flowers, like a diadem. Her golden hair hung in wavelets around her shoulders. But that wasn’t all! Her stately figure and face were so beautiful as to defy any possible description. I stood there, afraid to move, my gaze unblinkingly fixed on Anastasia. It seemed as though if I took my eyes away I would lose consciousness. My head began spinning, but I continued to gaze at her without blinking. I found myself digging my nails forcefully into my hand, seeking escape in pain from this extraordinary state of mind. But I hardly felt any pain at all. And as this uniquely beautiful woman gradually and graciously approached me, I lost all sensation, not just of pain but of any part of my physique. She slowly came right up to me, and I recall feeling the enchanting fragrance of her body I could sense her light breathing and... I lost consciousness. When I woke up I was lying on the ground. Anastasia was sitting beside me, massaging my temples and the bridge of my nose. Her diadem-wreath was gone, and her hair was brushed back and tied with a blade of grass. I felt an almost complete calm as I gazed into those tender greyish-blue eyes which had become so dear to me. And I finally came to myself upon hearing her voice: “What happened to you, Vladimir? Did you get overtired, or did our son somehow upset you?” “Our son... No, quite to the contrary, he has been giving me treatments these past three days. We went through a series of exercises.” ‘And you overexerted yourselves?” “Volodya did. He fell asleep. By contrast, I’ve begun to feel very good indeed.”

“Then why did you lose consciousness? Your heart was throbbing and has still not completely calmed down.” “Because... Oh, Anastasia, why did you dress up that way? Your hair’s somehow different. And the way you walked as you approached me—that was unusual, too.” “I wanted to do something nice for you, Vladimir. After all, you are more accustomed to look at women in fancy clothes. I thought you and I could take a walk together through the taiga or along the lakeshore. And here you are lying down. If you want to have a rest, let us go to the dug-out, and there you can have a nap.” “First let’s go and take a walk, as you proposed,” I said as I rose to my feet. “Only you, Anastasia, walk behind me, please.” “Why?” “Because... Yes, I am more accustomed to looking at women in fancy clothes, as you say. But it is better for me if you don’t dress up that way, or wear your hair like that, or adorn yourself like that.” “You did not like the way I looked, Vladimir?” enquired Anastasia, as she trotted along behind me. “That’s not it. I liked it very much. Only, in future, do it just one step at a time. Your hair first, for example. And then spend some time wearing it that wa. Then you can put on your diadem-wreath, and a day or two later the dress. Only without the belt to start with, and afterward you can put on the belt. Y)u see, if you do everything at once, it’s really hard for me to get accustomed to. It looks strange.” “Strange? Does that mean you did not recognise me, Vladimir?” “I recognised you. But... It’s just that I was simply overwhelmed with your beauty, Anastasia.” ‘Aha, you admit it! You admit it! That means you really think I am beautiful? Eh?” I felt her hands resting on my shoulders, and I stopped. Then I closed my eyes, turned around and replied: “You, Anastasia, are not just beautiful. You are...” She pressed herself against me, putting her head on my shoulder. “Our son, Anastasia,” I went on, in a whisper, “would like to have a little sister.” ‘And I would like you and me, Vladimir, to have a daughter,” Anastasia quietly responded.

“May she have your looks, Anastasia!” ‘And may our daughter be like you...” I shall not describe that night. Or the following morning. They are beyond description. But I shall say one thing to my men-readers: if any of you manage to see a goddess in the woman you know, your days and nights— many, many days and nights, in fact—will be divine. All the miseries of the past will vanish before them. And there will be no more storms to darken your day I’m not talking about sentimentality here, nor about beautiful words and professions of love. The whole point is... In any case, let each figure it out for themselves, if they can and wish to do so. 1 Man—Throughout the Ringing Cedars Series, the word Man with a capital M is used to refer to a human being of either gender. For details on the word’s usage and the important distinction between Man and human being, please see the Translator’s Preface to Book 1. 2 See, for example, Book 1, Chapter 6: Anastasia’s morning”. 3 See, for example, Book 3, Chapter 12: “Man-made mutants”. 4 Kedra—a name derived from kedr (the Russian word for ‘cedar’ or ‘Siberian pine’).

CHAPTER FIVE

Divine nutrition It was only several days later that I remembered I wanted to find out from Anastasia the recipe for the therapeutic tea, as well as the overall method of correct nutrition or dietetics for my readers. It’s a good thing I remembered. It seems that Anastasia knew about an unusual—I might say, unique— method of nutrition which can be applied even to city living conditions. To my surprise, instead of giving me the tea recipe right off, Anastasia began talking about Man’s capabilities, about patients and healers. We had spoken of this on several other occasions, but what she had to tell me this time was indeed interesting. “Reality, Vladimir, must be defined only through one’s self. Every Man living on the Earth today is capable of seeing into the lives of people thousands of years ago, of looking into the future, and of creating his own future. All have this tremendous ability within themselves. It just needs to be understood. Once it is understood, then nobody can lead them away from the truth. People will come into harmony with each other, and endless warfare will cease. ‘A lot of efforts have been made to distort past reality. The possibility of distortion arises when Man abandons his own reasoning powers and forms constructs of the past based on somebody else’s words and conclusions.” “It is not entirely clear to me, Anastasia, how every Man on the Earth can arrive at a knowledge of people living in centuries past, let alone past millennia. There is a whole science, too, exclusively devoted to studying the history of mankind. But even today scholars argue over Man’s origin and purpose. Historical events are interpreted in different ways.” “’In different ways’—does that mean there are correct and incorrect interpretations? Or perhaps there is some distortion in the way they all describe the past? As a rule, the distortions are introduced for someone’s particular benefit. But when you, all by yourself, recreate scenes of the past within yourself, you will see the truth—you will determine your purpose and place in the Universe.” “But how, for example, would I be able to see historical scenes of thousands of years ago all on my own?” “You can picture them through logical thinking. And even the life of the Vedruss civilisation will appear to you.”

‘And what should I think logically about?” ‘About images of people you have seen over the half-century of your life, and the changes that have taken place in them.” “It’s still not too clear to me just how I should be thinking.” “It will become clear if you are not too lazy to think. Come, Vladimir, let us begin together, and you can continue on your own, and every Man may recreate scenes of the past, in order to integrate the very best parts into his future.” ‘All right then, but you be the first to start.” “I shall begin. Look hard and, if you can, add details—they are important. Today you see a whole lot of hospitals and pharmacies with medicines for thousands of ailments.” “Yes, that’s something everyone can see. What of it?” “Do you recall that just thirty years ago there were fewer of them?” “Yes, of course.” “And how many were there a hundred or two hundred years ago?” “A lot fewer. Everybody knows that modern medical science is only a little over two hundred years old.” “You see, your own logic has led you to a conclusion: not too long ago there were no hospitals at all. Now think, and recall: who treated people in cases of illness?” “Who?” “You yourself lived in a village and saw how your grandmother gave your father and mother herb teas to drink.” “In that village it wasn’t just my grandmother who could bring about cures —there were others too.” “And in every human settlement there were most certainly people who gathered and preserved therapeutic herbs. And every Man could obtain help right away, whether he came down with a minor ailment or even a serious disease. And payment for help was a pittance, often just a simple ‘thank you’ sufficed.” “Well, sure, they were neighbours, after all. And there were plenty of herbs to be found all around.” “Yes, there were very many useful herbs. And many people were aware of the properties of these herbs.” “Of course they were. I myself knew about some of them, but now I’ve forgotten.”

“You see, you have forgotten. Many people have forgotten. What does a Man do today if he gets a scratch or a cut?” “He goes to a pharmacy, buys a bandage or a band-aid and sticks it on the wound.” “He spends time getting to the pharmacy and spends money when he is there. By contrast, in the past, every child knew that if you apply a plantain leaf directly to a wound, the wound will quickly heal and there will be no infection.” “I know that too, but today in many places the herbs are contaminated. All around, you find noxious fumes from cars, dust, acid rain...” “Yes, you are right. But that is not the point. When we talk about images of the past, you could draw the conclusion that Man’s knowledge of curing people in the past was superior to that of people today.” “It would seem that way.” “I hear a note of doubt or uncertainty in your voice, Vladimir. In that case the image will not appear before you. You must be absolutely certain in the force of your confidence. Or in your rejection. Continue to pursue the course of logic.” “You see, Anastasia, all logic, too, tells me that Man’s knowledge in the area of folk medicine in the past was significantly greater than that possessed by people today One might even say, immeasurably greater. It follows that the services effected on the basis of this knowledge were significantly more perfected than toda. But somehow it is challenging to suddenly find that all our modern hospitals, pharmacies and medical institutions are completely superfluous. It simply boggles the mind! “When someone in the Vedruss civilisation—our ancestor—came down with an ailment, he would eat a herb or drink a tea, and the ailment was gone. When someone in our civilisation takes ill, he goes to the hospital, pays a fee to be seen by a doctor, the doctor prescribes some kind of pills or shots, and the patient has to pay again for the drugs, often quite dearly so. And then in lots of cases the drugs turn out to be counterfeit. Officials from the Ministry of Health say that up to 30% of the drugs sold at our pharmacies are counterfeit. ‘And then a whole bunch of terrible new diseases keep popping up. It’s as though someone deliberately erased the perfect knowledge we once had and replaced it with something less efficient or even illusory Moreover, official medicine still today treats folk healers with a fair degree of scepticism, probably because it sees them as competition. But why do not the state and society realise that for hundreds and thousands of years mankind has

efficiently healed itself through folk medicine, accumulating a huge amount of experience over this time, and hence this deserves to be developed and studied? And, in the final analysis, to be taught in the schools? “But that would mean all the businesses involved in modern medicine would collapse... incredible! Simply incredible, Anastasia! I think I’m beginning to understand: modern medicine is not as much about curing people as about running a business! And if it’s business we’re talking about, that means that all the companies making pills find it much more profitable when people are ill. The more sick people there are, the more income will kick in for the drug companies. By the laws of business, in such a situation the number of sick people will quickly begin to steadily increase. It’s a vicious circle. I’m becoming more and more convinced that health care in the distant past was much more rational and effective than today Only there are a few historical facts that are standing in the way of a final conclusion.” “What kind of facts, Vladimir?” “Well, for instance, history has recorded epidemic outbreaks of plagues, smallpox and leprosy Some history textbooks say that whole settlements died out. Did that really happen?” “Yes, it did.” “But now, through he help of modern medicine, the plagues have been beaten, along with cholera and smallpox. For example, they inoculate everyone against smallpox and that’s the end of it. That means that the folk healers of the past were defeated by these diseases, while modern medicine has succeeded.” “That is not true, Vladimir. Take a closer look at the time-frames and put simple facts together. These epidemic outbreaks you speak of began happening at a time when folk healers were subjected to persecution. Many of them were even put to death. During the occult ages1 they were seen as a threat to the authorities. Both then and now it was believed that pagans worshipped Nature and were unspiritual people. This is not true: pagans respected Nature as the creation of God. And they had knowledge of many of the Divine creations which people are ignorant of today.” “That’s enough, Anastasia. I no longer have any doubts. It is plain that modern medical science is a long ways from the science of folk medicine. I’m convinced of that. But why did you go to such pains to persuade me?” “It was not just for you. I wanted your readers, too, to be able to understand by comparing facts.” “But what for?”

“When one fact is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, other indisputable conclusions will come about. They may seem incredible, but please do not be so easily amazed, Vladimir.” “What incredible conclusions, for example?” “First, answer this question. Tell me how people—the majority of people— explain how mankind in ancient times possessed such colossal information about Nature.” “What d’you mean, how? If you’re talking about the prescriptions of folk medicine, it’s quite clear they were passed down from generation to generation.” “All right, that may be. But I think you will agree that for each of the thousands of prescriptions, there had to be an original author.” ‘According to logic, of course, there had to be, but now it is no longer possible to trace the authorship of these prescriptions.” “It is possible! All the knowledge of the grand creation was imparted by the Creator to each and every one without For more information on the occult ages, see Book 6, Chapter 8: “Occultism”. exception. This I shall prove to you, Vladimir, and to everybody. Do not be too hasty to dismiss what I say as incredible.” “I shall try not to. Go on.” “People think that originally Man was many times more feeble-minded than today. But that is not true, Vladimir. People of pristine origins had Divine knowledge right from the beginning.” “But what d’you mean, ‘from the beginning’, Anastasia? What, did God Himself write out prescriptions for a whole bunch of herbal treatments? Historians’ descriptions allude to mankind gradually accumulating its knowledge over the centuries.” “But to pursue the course of logic to its end, that particular allusion would lead to a different conclusion.” “What kind of conclusion?” “It would follow from that that Man is not the perfect creation of God but the most underdeveloped of all creatures that ever lived on the Earth!” “How does that follow?” “Think about it. Your dog knows what herbs she needs to eat when she comes down with an ailment. And a cat will know to run to the forest to find

a herb she requires. But nobody wrote them a prescription. A bee knows all about extracting nectar from a flower, building a honeycomb and storing honey in it, and gathering pollen. And what raising the next generation is all about. If one link in the chain of knowledge the bee family is endowed with should be removed, the whole family would die out. “But bees continue to exist toda. And that can only mean one thing: the Creator has given them all the knowledge they need right from the start, right at the moment of their creation. And that is why the bees have not died out, but have lived for millions of years, and are still building their unique honeycombs even today, just as in the first moment of their creation. And the ants, too, continue to build their homes. And flowers continue to unfold their petals with the advance of each new dawn, just as on the first day of their creation. And the apple, pear and cherry trees know exactly what kind of juices they need from the ground to grow their fruit. All information is given to them right at their inception, right at the moment of their creation. And Man is no exception.” “Yes... Incredible. All logic really does lead to that conclusion. And that means... Hold on—just where is all this knowledge right now?” “It is preserved in every single Man. And the therapeutic recipe for the healing herbal tea is one that every Man is free to compile for himself.” “But how?” “You see, Vladimir, God gave it to Man right from the beginning. It is capable of curing a great many diseases of the flesh and prolonging life. It is extremely simple, and at the same time not so simple. Man should be able to figure it out with his mind. Let me start with some pre-history.” In the Vedruss civilisation everybody lived to be more than a hundred years old. And they knew no diseases of the flesh. They nourished themselves according to God’s prescription. Not arbitrarily and not haphazardly but with the greatest thoughtfulness the Creator specially arranged it so that the herbs, vegetables, berries and fruits did not ripen all at once, but one after the other in a strict sequence. One ripened in the early spring, others over the summer, or later in the autumn. Their ripening time was determined by the moment when the specific fruit, vegetable or herb could offer the greatest benefit to Man. A Man living on his own domain, feeding himself as God prescribed, could not take ill. The type of food and the time of taking it had been determined for Man by God. Man himself decided the quantity of food, but not through reason—he ate as much as he liked. And his body could accurately determine, down to the gram, the required quantity of food. In the autumn each family put up stores for the winter: berries, root

vegetables, herbs, nuts and mushrooms. Over the winter, in every household a plate stood on the table, with little piles of produce from the summer harvest. All the members of the family were involved in their own activities, but whenever they felt hungry or thirsty, they would go over to the table and take what they needed without thinking about it. Note, Vladimir: they took what they needed without thinking. Their bodies knew exactly what kind of food was needed and in what quantity—everyone had been endowed with this ability by God. This ability can be revived now. All that is needed is information. I have adapted the Vedruss method of nutrition for people of today Try it yourself, and encourage others to try it. It goes as follows. A Man living in a modern apartment needs to acquire a small quantity—a hundred or two hundred grams each—of all the vegetables, fruits and edible herbs growing in the region where he lives. Before using any of this produce he should go a whole day without eating, drinking only spring water, and having a glass of red beet juice for lunch. After drinking the beet juice it is better not to leave his home. The stomach and bowels will start undergoing an intensive cleansing process. Upon awakening the following morning and feeling hungry, he should be able to take any vegetable, herb or piece of fruit and put it on a small plate. After sitting down at the table, he should carefully observe what is lying on the plate, sniff it, lick it and then eat it with an unhurried chewing. It is best to be alone in the room during this time, isolated from the sounds of the artificial world. The feeling of hunger may not disappear after eating a single piece of food, or it may reappear after a short period of time. In that case he should select a second piece and eat it in the same manner as the first. Man should take all the produce he has obtained and sample them in any sequence at short intervals. The time for sampling any particular food is determined by the sensation of hunger. The taking of food should definitely begin in the morning. By the end of this day a Man should have sampled all locally grown produce. If there is a large variety available and one day is insufficient, the sampling can extend to the following day. This procedure is extremely important. It will give many people’s bodies, perhaps for the first time in their lives, a chance to become acquainted with the taste qualities and properties of the local produce, and to determine how

needful it is to Man at a given moment and in what quantity. Once the body has become familiar with all the produce, one should cut each vegetable into small pieces and lay them out on a large plate. Small clumps of greens and berries should also be put out, either alongside or on another plate. Any produce that will quickly spoil on the plate should be immersed in spring water. Also on the table one should put honey, flower pollen, cedar oil and spring water. Man may go about his own daily affairs, but when he feels hungry he can go over to the table and pick up an item he likes (either with his hands or with a wooden spoon) and eat it. It is possible some of the food may be eaten up completely, while the rest may be left untouched. This means that your personal wise physician and nutritionist—your body which was given to you by the Creator—selected for you what you needed at that moment, while what you did not need was left untouched. The uneaten produce need not be put again on the table the following da. But after three days a complete variety should once again be displayed. It is possible that one’s body will need something different by then. In time Man will be able to determine which items can be temporarily excluded from his diet, so as not to waste his efforts in obtaining them. But it is possible that after a period of time his body will indeed have need of them again, and so from time to time one should lay out on the table as wide a variety as possible. I know that people living in your world often need to be away from their dwellings, but even here one can adapt. For example, one can make or acquire a small birch-bark container, in which to put a portion of the food from the table. One’s body will choose what is most required. In case of an extended trip, one’s body needs to become familiar with the produce available in the new territory, since, in spite of identical names, there may be significant taste differences. In this method of nutrition, Vladimir, it is important to grasp one essential point: it is not only the animals that are able to determine which kinds of food will be most beneficial to their bodies at a given moment and in what quantity; This knowledge is present, too, within every single Man. Our son thought up everything correctly: to prepare the healing tea for you from taiga herbs, he decided to observe a sable. But if you yourself knew the taste of every herb, your body would be able to determine and select the herbs you need far more accurately than the sable.

When you get back to your apartment, allow your body to get to know the taste of all easily available produce. Do not mix the food together or add salt, otherwise your body will not be able to determine the value and significance of the produce. This method by which any Man can compile his own dietary regime or recipe for healthful nutrition seemed to me to be most original and logical. The body’s needs—in terms of quantity and variety of produce—will naturally differ from one individual to the next. Consequently, there cannot be a single recipe or dietary regime which is the same for all. But through the aid of the method proposed by Anastasia, every Man can make up his own individual regime, which will be as accurate and useful as possible for him. It appears as though man-made recipes and prescriptions are not always beneficial to one’s health. Instead, they tend to be technology-based and more convenient for the manufacturers and organisers of our modern nutrition industry. Take McDonald’s, for example—one of the most powerful and influential corporations, known around the globe— inculcating in the whole world a taste for uniform hamburgers and cheeseburgers along with packages of fried potatoes, roping in everybody under a single unitary norm. Such a system undoubtedly works very well to the manufacturer’s advantage—uniform products, uniform equipment and preparation technology. How far removed such uniformity is from the natural method of nutrition, and how harmful! More and more people all over the planet are becoming aware of this. Wednesday, 16 October 2002 (the UN’s World Food Day),2 became the annual official day of protest against McDonald’s—a protest against the promotion of junk products under the guise of food, the use of aggressive child-oriented advertising campaigns, the cruel exploitation of workers, unethical treatment of animals, destruction of the environment and the world dominance of large corporations over our lives. More and more, McDonald’s is being held up by a worldwide circle of protesters as a symbol of contemporary capitalism. One after another, all across the globe lawsuits are being brought against American corporations dealing in ‘junk food’—McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King and Wendy’s—on behalf of millions of consumers led astray by the systematic and unethical promotion of harmful food products. These people have consequently suffered from obesity, heart ailments and a variety of other serious health "World Food Day (also known as World Nutrition Day) —established in 1979 by the member countries of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) to raise awareness of world poverty

and hunger and to commemorate the founding of the FAO on 16 October 1945 in the city of Quebec (Canada). A specific theme is selected for each year’s celebration. The Worldwide Anti-McDonald’s protest is an independent movement which chose their annual protest day to coincide with World Food Day According to their literature, the Worldwide AntiMcDonald’s Day has been marked since 1985. problems. Concern over this health threat is growing everywhere in Europe and the USA, exacerbated by mad cow disease and the use of genetically modified feed, as well as direct consumption of genetically modified produce (e.g., potatoes and corn) and their traces in other products (chocolate, pastry etc.). But is it only our nutritional system that is constructed with somebody’s particular profit motive in mind? What about our contemporary governmental institutions? Take, for example, our modern democratic society—how ideally suited is it to human life? I was most interested to hear what Anastasia would have to say about this. “Tell me, Anastasia, if someone could construct a nutritional system for their own advantage at the expense of millions of people, I wonder whether our social order might have been deliberately set up with a similar motive.” “Indeed it has. Think about it, Vladimir: ages pass, and the names of your societal structures change, but their raison d’etre remains the same—the exploitation of people.” “Well, it hasn’t always been the same. For example, we used to have slavery, and now we have democracy I think, under democracy there is far less exploitation than when we had slavery.” “Vladimir, would you like me to show you a scene from the past and tell you a parable?” “I would.” “Then look and see.” CHAPTER SIX

Demon Cratius The slaves walked slowly in single file, every one of them carrying a polished stone. Four lines of them, each line stretching a kilometre and a half long, from the stone quarries to the site where construction on the

walled city had begun, under the watchful eyes of armed guards—one military guard for every ten slaves.1 Off to one side, on the pinnacle of a thirteen-metre-high ‘mountain’ crafted out of polished stones, sat Cratius, one of the high priests. For the past four months he had been silently observing the construction activity. Nobody distracted him, not a single person dared interrupt his contemplation, even with a sideways glance. Both slaves and guards accepted this artificial mountain with its throne on top as a fixed feature of the landscape. And nobody paid attention to the figure either sitting motionless on the throne or walking to and fro around the lookout platform atop the ‘mountain’. Cratius had set himself the task of restructuring the state, consolidating the power of the priests for a millennium, subjugating to them all the people of the Earth, turning all without exception (including national rulers) into slaves of the priests. One day Cratius came down from his throne, leaving a double in his place. The priest changed his clothes and took off his wig. He gave orders to the captain of the guard to have him bound in chains like a simple slave and placed in the line behind a strong young slave named Nard. Looking into the faces of the various slaves, Cratius had noticed that this young man in particular had a penetrating and purposeful look, not a wandering or detached gaze as did many of the others. Nard’s countenance alternated between excitement and intense contemplation. That means he’s hatching some kind of plan, the priest realised, but he wanted confirmation of the accuracy of this observation. For two days running Cratius followed Nard’s every move, silently hauling the stones, sitting beside him at mealtimes and sleeping next to him in the barracks. On the third night, directly the Sleep! command had been given, Cratius turned to the young slave and in a tone of bitterness and despair whispered to no one in particular: “Will this situation keep up the rest of our lives?” The priest watched as the young slave gave a shudder, and suddenly turned to face him. His eyes were sparkling, which was noticeable even in the dim torchlight of the cavernous barracks. “It won’t last much longer,” the young slave whispered back. “I’ve been working out a plan. And you, old fellow, can be part of it!” “What sort of plan?” the priest asked with a sigh of indifference. Nard began to explain with an air of confidence and enthusiasm: “You see, old man, soon you and I and all of us will be free men instead of

slaves. Figure it out for yourself: there’s just one guard for every ten of us. And one guard, too, for every fifteen women slaves who do the cooking and sewing. When the time comes, if we all fall upon the guards at once, we can overpower them. It makes no difference that the guards are armed and we’re in chains. We outnumber them ten to one, and our chains can also be used as weapons, to shield us from the blows of their swords. We’ll disarm all the guards, tie them up and seize their weapons.” “Hold on there, young man,” Cratius sighed again, and added with feigned indifference: “Your plan isn’t completely thought through. Sure you can disarm the guards watching over us, but it won’t be long before the ruler sends in replacements—a whole army, maybe—and he’ll have the insurgents killed.” “I’ve thought of that, too, old man. We’ll have to choose a time when the army’s not around. And that time is coming. We’ve all noticed how the army’s preparing for a campaign. They’re getting provisions ready for a three-month trek. That means that in three months the army will arrive at its destination and engage the enemy in combat. It will be weakened in battle, but it will be victorious, and bring back many new slaves. They’re already building new barracks to house them. We have to start disarming the guards just as soon as our ruler’s army goes into battle. The couriers will need at least a month to go call it home, and it will take at least three months after that for the weakened army to return. By the time the four months are up we’ll be ready to meet them. We’ll have at least as many fighters as there are in the arm. The slaves they seize will want to join us when they see what’s happened. I’ve thought it all out in advance, old man.” “I see, young fellow, with your plan you can disarm the guards and overpower the army,” the priest answered, already sounding more cheerful, and then added: “But what will become of the slaves after that, and what will happen with the rulers, the guards and the soldiers?” “I haven’t given too much thought to that. Only one thing comes to mind, though: whoever was a slave in the past will become a free man. Whoever’s not a slave today will be a slave tomorrow,” replied Nard with some hesitation, as though thinking aloud. “But what about the priests? Tell me, young man, after your victory, will they be slaves or not?” “The priests? Haven’t thought about that either. But now I’m thinking: the priests can stay where they are. The slaves and rulers listen to them. Sometimes they’re hard to understand, but I get the feeling they’re harmless. Let them keep on telling their stories about the gods, but we know best how to live our lives and have a good time.”

“Have a good time—that’s great,” responded the priest, and pretended he couldn’t wait to get to sleep. But there was no sleep for Cratius that night. Only contemplation. Sure, he thought, the simplest course of action would be to report this to the ruler, and have them seize this young slave—he’s clearly the chief instigator. But that won’t solve the problem. The slaves will always have the desire to be freed from bondage. New leaders will emerge, new plans will be hatched, and as long as that goes on, the main threat to the state will always be from within. Cratius was faced with the challenge of working out a plan to enslave the whole world. He realised there was no way he could attain his goal through physical compulsion alone. What he needed to do was exert a psychological influence on every single individual, on whole nations of people. He had to bring about the thought of every single human being to the notion that slavery is the highest bliss. He had to launch a self-developing programme to disorient whole nations in space, time and ideas—especially in their literal perception of reality. Cratius’ thought was working faster and faster, he was no longer conscious of his body, or the heavy chains on his arms and legs. And all of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning, a programme came to his thought. Even though all the details were still to be worked out, and he could not yet explain it to anyone else, he could already feel it within, exploding off the scale. Cratius was now feeling himself to be the omnipotent ruler of the world. Lying on his bunk in chains, he was full of self-exultation: Tomorrow morning, when they’re escorting us all to work, Til give the secret signal and have the giards captain take me out of the line and remove the chains. Til finalise my programme, say a few words and the world will start to change. Incredible! Just a few words, and the whole world will be subject to me, to my thoughts. God really has given to Man a power unequalled in the Universe—the power of human thought. It brings forth words which can change the course of history. The situation’s turned out very well indeed. The slaves have prepared their plan of insurrection. It’s logical, this plan, and is clearly capable of leading to an interim result very favourable to them. But with just a few words I shall ensure that not only they, but their future descendants, and the rulers of the Earth too, will be slaves for millennia to come. In the morning, on Cratius’ signal, the captain of the guard freed him from his chains. And the very next day the five other priests, along with the pharaoh, were invited to his observation platform. Cratius began his speech before the gathering as follows:

“What you are about to hear must not be noted down or passed along by any of you. There are no walls around us, and my words will be heard by no one but you. I have thought up a way of turning all people living on the Earth into slaves of our pharaoh. That is not something one can do even with the aid of vast numbers of troops and exhausting wars. But I shall accomplish it with a few simple sentences. All I need do is utter them and just two days later you will see how the world has begun to change. “Take a look down there and you will see long lines of slaves in chains, each slave carrying a stone. They are guarded by a host of soldiers. The more slaves there are, the better for the state—or so we always thought. But the more slaves there are, the more we have to be afraid of their rebelling. So we increase the size of our guard. “We are obliged to feed our slaves well, otherwise they will not be able to perform their heavy manual labour. But still they are lazy and inclined to rebellion. See how slowly they move, and the guards have become lazy and do not bother using their whips to beat even the strongest and healthiest slaves. But they will soon be moving much more quickly. They won’t need any guards. The guards themselves will be turned into slaves. This can be effected in the following way: “Before sunset today heralds will be sent out everywhere to proclaim the pharaoh’s decree: With the dawn of the new day all slaves will he granted complete freedom. For each stone brought to the city, the free men will receive one coin. The coins may be exchanged for food, clothing housing a palace in town, or even a whole town. From here on in, you are free peopled After the priests had let Cratius’ words sink in, one of them, the eldest, said: “You are a demon, Cratius! The demonry resulting from your plan will cover most of the nations of the world.” “So, I may indeed be a demon, and what I have thought up, people in the future may call democracy” At sunset the decree was proclaimed to the slaves. They were astounded. Many of them could not sleep at night, thinking about the new and happy life that lay ahead of them. The next morning the priests and the pharaoh once again climbed up to the lookout platform atop the artificial mountain. They could not believe the scene unfolding before their eyes. Thousands of former slaves chasing one after the other, hauling the same stones as before. Dripping with sweat, many of them were carrying two stones apiece. Others with only one stone in their hands, were literally running, kicking up the dust as they ran. Some of the guards were also hauling stones. These people, who now considered themselves free—after all, they were no longer in chains—strove to obtain

as many of the sought-after coins as they could, so that they could build a happy life for themselves. Cratius remained at his post on the platform for several months after that, continuing to observe with satisfaction what was going on below. The transformation was colossal. Some of the slaves had organised themselves into groups and built themselves carts. Then they piled stones on top of the carts, and pushed them along, their skin covered in sweat. They will invent many more devices, Cratius thought to himself with satisfaction. Internal services have already started—food and water delivery. Some slaves have been eating right on the go, not wanting to waste time going back to the barracks for a meal, andpaying for the food delivery with the coins they’ve earned. Wow! They’ve also got doctors going around, offering help to people with physical needs right on the spot—also for coins. And they’ve appointed themselves traffic regulators. Soon they’ll be choosing their own rulers and judges. Let them choose: after all, they consider themselves free now, whereas nothing has really changed—they’re still hauling the same stones as before... And so they have been running, down through the millennia right up to the present day, through the dust, sweating to carry the heavy stones. And today the descendants of those slaves still keep up their senseless running. “You’re probably thinking of ordinary working people, Anastasia?” I observed. “Sure, anybody could agree with that. But you can’t apply the term slaves to heads of corporations, or government officials, or entrepreneurs.” “Do you see a difference, Vladimir? If so, tell me what it is.” “On the one hand you’ve got people labouring and hauling stones like slaves. The others are in charge of the hauling—or, in today’s terms, managing the operation.” “But managing, after all, is still work, and often more complex work than slaves hauling stones.” “Well, in a sense you’re right: entrepreneurs have a bit more thinking to do. Their thought is occupied with their work from morning ’til night. So, does that mean that the pharaohs, the presidents and chancellors are slaves, too?” “Yes, that is correct. Even the priests have become slaves, the ones who dreamt up this whole fateful scheme.” “But if there are slaves, there must also be slave-owners. Who are they, if you aren’t including even the priests in this category?” “The slave-owner is the artificial world people have been creating

themselves. And the guards sit within most people’s minds or bodies, whipping them and making them earn coins.” “It’s a sad scene indeed,” I observed, “and it looks as though there’s no way out. Over the past thousands of years empires have come and gone, religions and laws have changed, but in fact nothing has really changed: just as Man was a slave before, he remains one now. Tell me, is there anyway this situation can be corrected?” “There is.” “How? And who can do it?” “The image.” “What d’you mean, imaged What kind of image?” “The image that offers people a different situation. Judge for yourself, Vladimir: people who control the world today through money believe that only power and money can bring happiness to Man. And all the people out there striving to earn a few coins have convinced them that they are right. But often—very often, in fact—the winners in this senseless rat-race are the ones who suffer the most. They reach illusory heights and feel, more acutely than others, the whole senselessness of their life. I shall show you a scene from the future—go ahead and describe it. Let it be played out in real life.” CHAPTER SEVEN

The billionaire The billionaire John Heitzman was dying on the forty-second storey of his office tower. The whole floor had been converted into his personal apartment. Two bedrooms, a work-out gym, a swimming pool, a dining room and two studies had comprised his refuge for the past three years. During this time he had not left his apartment even once. Not once had he taken the express lift down to where the core of his financial and industrial empire was in full operation. Not once had he gone up to the roof, where his personal helicopter was on standby, replete with a full crew awaiting his command. Three times a week John Heitzman retreated to one of his studies to receive four of his closest associates. At these brief sessions, which lasted no more than forty minutes, he listened to their reports with some indifference, and occasionally issued brief instructions. The billionaire’s orders were never a subject for discussion—they were simply carried out swiftly and to the letter. The book value of the empire under his exclusive control kept

increasing by an average 16.5% annually Even over the past six months, when Heitzman ceased convening even his tri-weekly sessions altogether, the ledgers showed no decline in profits. The system he had created continued to run smoothly with no glitches. Nobody knew the billionaire’s true financial worth. His name was hardly ever mentioned in the press. Heitzman held strictly to the rule: Money hates trouble. As a young man he had been admonished by his father along these lines: “Let those upstart politicians strut their stuff on the TV screens and in the pages of the press. Let the presidents and governors spout their addresses to the people, assuring them all’s well. Let the billionaires in the public eye go gallivanting about the country with their fancy cars and bodyguards. That is not a course, my dear John, you yourself should follow. You should always remain in the shadows and use your power, the power of money, to control governments and presidents, the wealthy and the poor, in a variety of different countries. But they must never guess who is controlling them. “The plan is simple in the extreme. I was the one who created the Monetary Fund, which lists the names of many different investors. In actual fact seventy percent of the fund’s capital has been invested by me under different names. On the surface, as far as the dimwit masses are concerned, the fund was created for the support of developing countries. In actual fact I created it as a device for collecting ‘tribute-money’ from all the countries involved. “Here’s an example. Let’s say an armed conflict breaks out between two sides. One of them (more often, both) needs money Let them have it—it will be repaid with interest. Or some country is experiencing a social upheaval and, again, money is required. Let them have it—it will be repaid with interest. Or two political forces come into conflict; one of them will get money through our agents, and once again it will be repaid with interest. Russia alone pays us an annual sum of three billion dollars.” At age twenty, John Heitzman had especially enjoyed these discussions with his father. Despite his earlier severity and reticence to talk, one day the father summoned John to his office and invited him to make himself comfortable in a soft armchair by the fireplace, while he himself poured a cup of his son’s favourite coffee with cream and asked with a spark of genuine interest: “How are your college studies going, John?” “They’re not always that interesting, Dad. I get the feeling the professors aren’t too good at giving a clear and comprehensible explanation of the laws of economics.”

“Good. An apt assessment. But more precisely: professors today can’t explain the laws of economics because they haven’t the faintest idea of them themselves. They think economics is the domain of economists. But it isn’t. World economics is under the control of psychologists, philosophers and high-stakes players. “When I was twenty, my father—your granddad, John—let me into the secrets of the management process. Now that you’re twenty, I think you’re worthy of inheriting this knowledge.” “Thanks, Dad,” replied John. Thus began, in these fireside chats, lessons in the laws of economics one never hears about at university. The father taught his son using his own unique method. The whole educational process was conducted in these heart-to-heart conversations, on a good-natured tone, with examples and elements of pla. The information the senior Heitzman revealed to his son was astounding. There was no way one could obtain it anywhere else, even in the most prestigious universities in the world. “Tell me, John,” asked the father, “do you know how many wealthy people there are in our country? Or in the world?” “Their names are listed in business journals in order of their estate-value,” replied John calmly ‘And where do we rank in these lists?” This was the first time Father had used we instead of I. That meant he already considered him, John, a full partner. While he did not want to offend his father, John replied: “Yiur name, Father, isn’t included in these lists.” “Yes, you’re right. Fm not there. Even though just our annual profit alone amounts to more than the whole estates of many included in the lists. And my name isn’t there because one’s wallet should not be transparent. Many of these people work either directly or indirectly for our empire—for yours and mine, son.” “Dad, you must be a genius at economics. I can’t even imagine how you can make such a huge empire pay us ‘tribute-money’ every year without military intervention. You’ve managed to set up such a tremendous economic operation!” The senior Heitzman took a pair of fire tongs and gave a poke to the logs in the hearth. Then, without a word, he poured two glasses of light wine for his son and himself. It was only after his first wee sip that he finished explaining: “ Y)u know, I didn’t set up any operation at all. The capital under my control simply allows me to give orders, and others carry them out. Many analysts and government experts in various countries, even their presidents, would be astonished to learn that the current situation in their countries is

not determined by their own actions, but rather by my will. “Political technology centres, economics institutes, analytical think tanks and government agencies in many countries—none of them are aware that they’re working along strict guidelines laid down by my departments. And I don’t have all that many employees. For example, all of Russia’s socioeconomic policy and its military doctrine are determined and controlled by one department comprising four psychologists. Each psychologist has four secretaries. Not one of them knows about the activities of the others. “I’ll tell you how the control system works—it’s really quite simple. But first, John, you should understand the true laws of economics—which you’ll never get from any college professor. Professors don’t even know they exist. Here’s a law: in the conditions of a democratic society, presidents, governments, banks, as well as major and minor entrepreneurs in all countries work for a single entrepreneur, who stands at the top of the economic pyramid. They worked for my father, now they’re working for me, and soon they’ll be working exclusively for you.” John Heitzman looked at his father and could scarcely take it all in. Certainly, he knew that his father was rich. But here they were talking about much more than riches—they were talking about supreme power, which was now going to be passed by inheritance to him, John. All this incredible information still had not sunk in completely How could it be that, in a free and democratic society, everyone from presidents on down to the hundreds of thousands of firms, both major and minor—supposedly all separate legal entities—were in fact working for just one man, namely, his father? “When I first heard from your granddad what I have just now shared with you, I had a hard time figuring it all out. Right now, John, you’re probably in the same boat... “But let me make one thing perfectly clear,” the elder Heitzman went on. “There are wealthy people in this world. But for every wealthy person there is someone even wealthier. And there is one who is the wealthiest of all. All the other wealthy people—and, consequently, all the people under their control—work for him, the one who is the wealthiest of all. This is the law of the system under which we live. ‘All this talk of unselfish aid to developing countries is nothing but a bluff. Sure, wealthy countries grant credit to developing countries through international funds, but in fact they do this simply to get back a healthy amount of interest in return for using their credit—in other words, to collect ‘tribute-money’. “Russia, for example, pays three billion dollars a year to the IMF, and this amount only represents the interest on the credit allotted to Russia. Many

economists are aware that the basic financing for the IMF is provided by American capital. They realise that the extortionate interest rates on credit use is siphoned off to the USA. But who they go to specifically, nobody knows. America as a country is simply a convenient shield in the capital game. And it is dependent on capital more than any other nation. Tell me, John, did you know that America has a national debt?” “Yes, Dad, I know. It’s an astronomical figure. Just last year it amounted to... And servicing the debt cost...” “So, that means you realise that a country which loans to other countries at the same time takes out huge loans itself?” “Through its own Federal Reserve?” ‘And who does it belong to—this Federal Reserve?” “It... It...” John had never thought about whom America was in debt to, but as he tried to answer his father’s question it suddenly dawned on him: in the United States of America every taxpayer pays into the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve of the USA is a private bank. And, consequently, all America is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to private individuals... or, to a single individual. John Heitzman had never been flustered in his life. He led, as they say, a ‘healthy lifestyle’. He did not drink or smoke, he maintained a healthful diet, and worked out every day in his private gymnasium. Only in the past six months he had stopped going to the gymn. He had spent these six months lying in bed in one of his spacious bedrooms, crammed full with state-ofthe-art medical equipment. Doctors maintained on-call shifts around the clock in the next room. But John Heitzman did not trust modern medical science. He felt no need of even talking with his doctors. There was one professor of psychology, however, that he occasionally deigned to favour with brief answers. Heitzman did not even care to know his doctors’ names, including the name of this professor, though he did make a note to himself that he was the most sincere and honest of the lot. The professor talked a good deal, but what he said often included not just medical assertions but also reasonings and a desire to determine the causes of a disease. One day he came in all excited and announced right at the doorway: “I spent all last night and all this morning thinking about your condition. I think I’ve discovered the cause of your illness! That means that once we’ve removed the cause, we can talk about a pretty quick recovery... Oh, sorry, Mr Heitzman—I forgot to say hello. Good afternoon, Mr Heitzman. I got a

bit carried away with my ideas.” The billionaire did not answer the professor’s greeting, or even turn in his direction, but that was how he treated all his doctors. And sometimes he would make a gesture to a doctor who had just entered the room—just a slight movement with his hand, which they all knew meant: Go away. Not perceiving any such gesture this time, the professor kept on explaining excitedly as follows: “I do not agree with my colleagues on the need to transplant your liver, kidneys and heart. Granted, these organs of yours aren’t functioning up to par at the moment. No sir! Not up to par! That’s a fact. But neither will transplanted organs. The reason they’re not up to par lies in your extreme depression. Yes sir, in your depression. I’ve gone over your medical history quite a few times now. And I think I’ve made a major discovery Your attending physician—he’s a really great guy—he wrote down everything in detail. Every single time he noted your mental condition. Your internal organs would always start to fail the moment you got into a depressive state. Yes sir! Quite a state... “Now here comes the $64,000 question: is the failure of your internal organs causing the depression? Or the other way around: is the depression causing organ failure throughout your body? I’m absolutely convinced that the depression is the original cause. Yes sir! It’s your extreme depression. It’s a condition where someone ceases to strive for any goal, he loses interest in what’s going on around him, he doesn’t see any sense in living. And then the brain begins to transmit only half-hearted commands to the whole body! And I mean the whole of it! The stronger the depression, the weaker the commands. At a certain level the brain may cease giving these commands altogether, and then comes death. “So, the ultimate cause is depression, and as for eliminating it entirely, well, that’s something modern medicine has no answer for. So I turned to folk medicine. And now I’m convinced that your extreme depression is the result of a curse. Yes sir! More specifically, someone’s put a spell on you, and I’m prepared to back that up with quite a number of facts.” The billionaire was about to make his Go away! gesture. He disliked all such esoteric healers—people who promised to exorcise demons and take away spells or set a defence against them—people he considered petty operators or swindlers. No doubt the professor was on the rebound from the ineffectiveness of modern medicine, he thought, and so had fallen to the level of these so-called healers\ But the billionaire did not manage to execute the gesture. The professor headed him off, with words evoking just a smidgen of interest, but interesting all the same.

“I have the feeling you’re getting ready to send me away Maybe for good. I ask you... No, I beg you, give me just five or six more minutes. It’s very possible that once you’ve understood what I have to say, you ll make a full recovery, and I'll make an important discovery. Rather, I’ve already made it —I just need to have it confirmed once and for all.” The billionaire did not make his Go away! gesture. For three whole seconds the professor stared at Heitzman’s motionless hand and realised he could continue, which he did at a rapid-fire pace: “People look at each other differently. Sometimes with indifference, other times with love, or hate, or envy, or fear, or respect. But it’s not the outward expression of the eyes that is the main factor here. The outward appearance can be just an ordinary mask, like the faux smile of a waiter or a salesman. What’s important are the true attitudes, the true feelings one person harbours towards another. The more positive emotions people express towards a particular individual, the more positive energy is concentrated in him. On the other hand, if negative emotions predominate in the atmosphere surrounding a person, he will experience an accumulation of negative and destructive energy. ‘Among the common folk this is called a spell, and folk-healers base their actions on this phenomenon. By no means all folk-healers are charlatans. The whole point is that a person who has been the target of too much negative energy from those around him is himself capable of neutralising it or, in other words, compensating for it. By telling the patient that he has removed the spell by certain types of actions, the healer helps him believe that he is cleansed. If the patient believes the healer, he is really evening out the balance within himself between the positive and the negative. If he doesn’t believe, it won’t happen. You don’t believe in folk-healers and, consequently, they won’t be of any help to you. “But that isn’t to say that you don’t have an excess of negative energy which is destructive to your mind and bod. Why negative? Precisely because a man in your position can only be looked upon by people around you with resentment, and I don’t mean just a bit of harmless envy. They might look at you—or, more specifically, treat you—with hatred. People you’ve fired or haven’t given a raise to. A lot of people feel your power and react with fear. You see, all that amounts to negative energy To counteract it you need positive energ. This can be supplied by family members or relatives, but your wives have run out on you, you don’t have any children or friends, and you don’t communicate with your relatives. You have no sources of positive energy around you. “Now an individual human being is capable of producing positive energy—

and in sufficient quantity—within himself, all on his own. But for this he needs to set his heart on some kind of dream or goal, and the step-by-step realisation of this goal will bring about positive emotions. You’ve already achieved so much in life that now, it seems, you don’t have any more goals or dreams left. “But it’s extremely important to have such a goal and to strive to attain it. I have analysed the physical and mental health of different types of business people. Someone who likes mixing dough and bakes pies and sells them is happy that he can now afford to buy something he needs, and dreams of developing his business. After all, it’s only with development that he receives many of the goods and services civilisation has to offer. ‘A bank manager or the owner of a profit-making concern likewise strives to develop his business, strives for increased profits, but often with less enthusiasm than someone who makes or sells pies. It’s paradoxical, but true —the enthusiasm just isn’t as great. It isn’t as great because he’s got significantly fewer tempting benefits ahead of him than the pie salesman. For him the achievements of civilisation have no special value, they’re just routine. “If someone with a relatively modest income suddenly has the chance to buy a car, the purchase of the car will evoke in him a tremendous feeling of satisfaction or even ecstasy, while someone who is relatively well-off won’t get any thrill from a brand new car. To him it’s a mere trifle. Paradoxical, but true: rich people have fewer occasions for delight than those less well-off. “There’s one other factor that can bring satisfaction—beating one’s competition. But you, Mr Heitzman, it seems, have no competition at all. “So it turns out you have only negative energy acting upon you, and there’s a great deal of it out there. Oh, and I forgot to mention: there’s just one force that can conquer the masses of negative energy—just one, but it’s powerful, incredibly powerful—it’s called the energy of love. It’s when you find yourself in a state of love and someone loves you. Unfortunately, in your case, however, you don’t have any women in your life. In fact, it looks like you don’t really have any interest in them at all, and at your age and in your condition you’re not likely to have any more interest in women. “There’s a lot of evidence to back up my conclusion. I’ve compared the longevity stats of rich people, prominent politicians and presidents over the past hundred years. The results are quite persuasive. Longevity for the world’s power brokers doesn’t look all that great by comparison with the common folk—in fact, most often it’s less.

“Paradoxical, but true: facts are facts. Presidents and millionaires, in spite of being under constant medical care, in spite of having access to the state-ofthe-art technical help and medicines and to only the highest-quality foodstuffs, are getting sick and dying just like anyone else. All this is eloquent testimony to the fact that surrounding negative energy exerts a colossal influence, and no medical science, even the very latest, is able to counteract it. “So, what’s the bottom line? A dead-end situation? There is a way out—it may be small, it may be only one of its kind, but it’s there! Yes sir! It’s there. Memories! “My dear Mr Heitzman, please, try to remember the different stages of your life. Any memory that will bring back pleasant feelings. “Most importantly, if there’s anyone you’ve given a serious promise to and not carried it out, see if there’s any way you can carry it out now. I ask you, for your own sake, for the sake of science, to take at least two or three days and try to remember the good moments in your life. We’ve got equipment to monitor the functioning of many of your body organs. The monitoring goes on minute by minute. If you do what I’m recommending, and if these instruments start indicating positive results, there’s indeed a chance we’ll be able to see you through to a full recovery. Yes sir! You’ll make it! I’ll certainly find a way Or maybe you’ll find it on your own. Or maybe it’ll just come about all by itself... Your life will come across it on its own.” The professor fell silent and once again fixed his gaze on the hand of his patient, lying motionless before him. A few seconds later and the customary gesture sent the professor out of the room. Like many people, John Heitzman began to recall his past. He had at least something of an understanding of what the professor had said to him. He could try to find happy moments from his past life, and they might have a positive effect. The problem was, though, that everything he had experienced in his life seemed not just devoid of anything pleasant, it was uninteresting and even senseless. Heitzman remembered how he took his father’s advice and married the daughter of a billionaire, thereby adding to his empire’s wealth. The marriage did not bring him any satisfaction, his wife turned out to be barren, and after ten years of conjugal life she died of an overdose of narcotics. Then he married a famous fashion model, who was the very picture of a wife passionately in love. But just six months after the wedding his security service showed him snapshots of his wife cavorting with her former lover. He was not about to discuss it with her. He simply gave orders to his bodyguards to see to it that he would never have the occasion to see or be

reminded about her again. By now in his recollections Heitzman had reached the starting-point of his participation in his father’s empire. He had not been able to pinpoint even one pleasant instance that he felt like holding on to and use as a source of positive emotions. There was just one moment of pleasantness that he could remember. It was when he proved to his father that there was no need of becoming the sole owner of the Monetary Fund. Other investors in the fund, looking for a good return, would devote their mental energy to increasing the fund’s capital, and thus would be working for them, for the Heitzmans. His father took some time to think about this. Then, several days later, at dinner time, he broke with his customary reticence to offer praise and said: “I agree with your proposal, John, regarding the Fund. You’re on the right track. Congratulations! Go ahead and give some thought to other areas too. It’s time for you take over the reins.” For the next several days John Heitzman was in an upbeat mood. He ended up making several more decisions and increasing the profits of their financial-industrial empire even more. However, he no longer derived any special feeling of joy from this. The reports of increased profits were cold and dispassionate. No farther praise would be coming his way His father died, and praise from underlings brought no particular pleasure. John Heitzman continued going back in his recollections and reached the time of his childhood. The rare moments of contact with his father were dimly illumined in his thought. His ever-strict father, as a rule, would issue admonishments in the presence of nannies and teachers which he had hired for young John. Then all at once a wave of warmth rolled through the body of the billionaire lying motionless in his bed. His body gave a pleasant shiver. In Heitzman’s recollections the curtain rose on a bright and very clear scene. He saw a far corner of the garden of his family’s estate and there, surrounded by small acacia bushes, a little house about two metres high, with a single window. For some quite inexplicable reason all children yearn to create their own little house, their own space. That yearning is there, no matter whether the child has his own room in his parents’ house or lives in the same room with his parents. With almost all children there comes a time when they start building their own little cubby-hole. In every Man, apparently, there is a gene that preserves some kind of ancient memory, telling him he ought to set up his own space. Whereupon any adult or child heeding this call, which

arises from the depths of eternity, goes about setting it up at once. Never mind how amateurish it turns out by comparison with modern apartments, a Man who has built this for himself derives much more satisfaction from it than he would from the most chic and stylish apartment. And so the nine-year-old John Heitzman, who had two spacious rooms all to himself in the family manor, still decided to build his own little house with his own hands. He constructed it out of plastic boxes that had been used for transplanting seedlings. These boxes turned out to be handy building materials. They came in a variety of colours. John made the walls using blue boxes, with a yellow border around the whole perimeter. He piled the boxes on top of each other, fastening them together in tongue-and-groove fashion. On one wall John made the box-bottoms face outward, which meant that the whole inside wall was comprised of a multitude of shelves. Boards with stapled-on plastic film served for the roof. He spent a whole week building his little house, taking advantage of the three hours a day he was allotted for leisure walks in the fresh air. On the seventh day, just as soon as leisure time came, he headed straight for his creation in the far corner of the garden. Pulling back the acacia branches, he saw the house he had built and froze in astonishment. There by the entrance stood a little girl looking in the doorway of his creation. The girl was wearing a light-blue calf-length skirt and a white cardigan with frills on the sleeves. Her chestnut-coloured hair fell in ringlets around her shoulders. At first, young John reacted with some jealousy to the presence of a stranger beside his creation, and he enquired with a hint of annoyance: “What are you doing here?” The girl turned her pretty little face toward him and replied: “I’m admiring.” “What are you admiring?” “This marvellous and clever little house.” “Wh-what kind of house?” young John queried in amazement. “Marvellous and most clever,” repeated the girl. “Houses may be marvellous, but I’ve never heard them called clever” observed John thoughtfully “Only people can be clever.” “'Yes of course, people can be clever. But when a clever person builds a house,” the girl countered, “the house turns out to be something clever, too.” ‘And what do you find clever about this house?”

“The inside wall is very clever. It has ever so many shelves. Yfou can put a lot of useful things on those shelves—toys, too.” John was pleased at how this little girl reasoned things through. It flattered him, and possibly the girl herself pleased him. She’s pretty, and reasons things through cleverly, he thought to himself. And aloud he said: “This house I built.” And he immediately added: “What’s your name?” “I’m Sally, and I’m seven years old. I live here in the servants’ quarters, since my dad works as a gardener here. He knows a lot about plants and is teaching me. I already know how to raise flowers and how to graft branches onto trees. And what’s your name, and where do you live?” “I live in the manor-house. My name’s John.” “Does that mean you’re the master’s son?” “Yeah.” “So, Johnnikins, let’s play house!” “How do we play that?” “We play like we live in this house, the way grown-ups live. You can be the master, since you’re the master’s son, and I’ll be your servant, since my dad’s a servant.” “That won’t work,” observed John. ‘A servant’s supposed to live in the servants’ quarters. Only the husband, his wife and their children can live in the manor-house.” “Then I shall be your wife!” exclaimed Sally, and asked: “Can I be your wife, Johnnikins?” John did not answer. He went into the house, took a glance around, and then turned to look at Sally who was still standing just outside the doorway He said rather brusquely: “Okay, come on in and pretend you’re my wife. We have to think about how we’re going to decorate the inside.” Sally stepped into the house. She looked into John’s eyes with tenderness and excitement and said, almost in a whisper: “Thank you, Johnnikins. I shall try to be a good wife to you.”

John did not come to his house every day. During the time allotted for leisure walks he was not always allowed to play in the garden. Escorted by bodyguards and tutors, he would be taken instead for a visit to a city park or Disneyland, or go horseback-riding. But when he managed to get away to his little house, he almost always found Sally waiting for him. With each succeeding visit John took interest in the changes that had been occurring in the house. First of all a carpet appeared on the floor, contributed by Sall. Then little curtains on the window and over the entrance. Next came a little round table with an empty photo-frame on it. Sally said: “Johnnikins, you’re coming here less and less often. I keep waiting for you, but you don’t show up. Give me a photograph of yourself, and I’ll put it in this frame. I can look at your picture and it will make it easier waiting for you.” John left her his photograph when he came to say good-bye to the house, and to Sally. He was going to be moving with his parents to another villa. Multibillionaire John Heitzman lay on his bed in his fancy apartment and smiled as he recalled, with ever greater detail, his childhood contact with the little girl Sally It was only now that he realised that this little girl loved him. She loved him with her first childhood love—reckless, unanswered and sincere. Perhaps, just perhaps, he loved her, too, or perhaps she was just a passing fancy. But she loved him as probably no one else would love him the rest of his life, and so the memories attached to the little house he built in the garden and his contact with Sally still evoked in him a lot of warm and pleasant feelings. These feelings warmed his body and made him feel good. After leaving the manor-house, he met with Sally one more time, eleven years later. But this time... New feelings excited his whole body. John Heitzman even sat up a bit in his bed. His heart had started chasing the blood through his veins with ever-increasing strength. That meeting... He had forgotten about it. He had never thought about it all this time. But now it occupied all his thoughts and made him excited. He came back to the estate where he had spent his childhood, returning after eleven years just for a day’s visit. That was all the time he could afford. After lunch he went out into the garden, and somehow he found himself heading down to the far corner of the garden, where in among the acacia bushes he had built his little house. As he pushed back the branches and stepped into the little glade, he literally froze in astonishment. The house he had built out of plastic boxes eleven years ago stood on the same spot as before. But all around... All around were little beds of flowers, and a sand-

covered path led to the entrance, where a little bench was now standing. And the house itself was wreathed in flowers. The bench had not been there before, but it was there now, the grown-up John noted to himself. He pushed aside the curtain covering the entrance, bent down and stepped into the little house. At once he could sense someone’s recent presence. His childhood photo stood on the little table as before. The shelves were neatly lined with Sally’s childhood toys. On one of the shelves, next to the table, stood a little bowl of fresh fruit. An air mattress lay on the floor, fitted with a coverlet. John stood there in the little house for about twenty minutes, remembering pleasant feelings from his childhood. Why is this happening? he thought. His family owned a whole lot of fancy villas. There was even a castle, but neither the castle nor the villas had ever evoked such pleasant feelings as arose here, in this little house constructed of plastic seedling boxes. When he came out of the little house, he spied Sally. She was standing there silently at the doorway, as though reluctant to interfere with the surge of recollections that had broken upon his thought. John looked at her, and noticed her cheeks flush with a rosy glow. She lowered her eyes in embarrassment, and said in a soft, velvety, extraordinarily tender and emotional voice: “Hello, J ohnnikins!” He did not answer her right away He stood there admiring Sally’s extremely beautiful, mature body Her figure-hugging dress fluttered in the breeze. Through the light material could be seen the outlines of her sculptured form —no longer that of a child but of a maiden, feminine and supple. “Hi, Sally,” John said, breaking a long pause. “You’re still keeping house here?” “Yes. After all, I promised. There’s some fruit inside—it’s just been washed. Have some. It’s for you.” “I see... For me... Well, then, let’s go in together and have a bite.” John pulled the curtain aside, letting Sally go ahead of him. She went in and squatted down. She took the bowl of fruit down from the shelf and placed it on the table beside the photograph in the frame. There were no chairs in the little house, and John sat down on the mg. He reached out for a bunch of grapes and inadvertently touched Sally’s shoulder. She turned her head and their eyes met. She inhaled sharply, which caused a button to come undone on the cardigan stretched taut across her breasts. John grasped hold of Sally’s shoulders and drew her close to

himself. She did not resist. Quite to the contrary, she leant against him with her feverishly glowing body Sally did not resist when John slowly and carefully laid her down on the rug, or when he caressed her and kissed her lips, and her breast, or when... Sally was a virgin... Neither before nor afterward didjohn enter into intimate relations with any virgin. And now, after forty years had passed since that last meeting, he, John Heitzman, suddenly realised that this had been the only really beautiful, reason-defying intimate moment he had ever had with a woman. Or, rather, with a girl, whom he had made a woman. After that they fell asleep for a little while. When they awoke, they began talking with each other. What had they talked about? John Heitzman racked his memory as best he could. He very much wanted to remember at least part of their conversation. And he remembered. Sally had mentioned how beautiful life was. She said her father was saving up some money to buy her a plot of land, on which, if he could afford it, he would build her a modest house. And Sally herself would do the landscape design and put in a wide variety of plants, and she would lead a happy life and raise her children there. Back then John decided within himself that he would help Sally Wow, he thought, here’s a girl that can be happy just with some plot of land and a little house. Mere trifles! I mustn’t forget to help her acquire the land, and the house. But John did forget about his intentions. He forgot completely about Sally He was distracted by his life with its manifold charms. A new yacht and his own private aeroplane brought joy for a few days at their first appearance. He found a longer-lasting distraction in playing the money markets, in adding billions to his father’s financial holdings (which he subsequently inherited)—a distraction which excited his nerves and feelings for more than twenty years. It dominated over everything else. He went through first one marriage, then a second, as a matter of course. His wives left no trace of themselves behind. After he turned forty, playing the financial markets ceased to give him any pleasure, and he began to suffer increasingly frequent periods of depression, which finally led to a nervous breakdown. But now John Heitzman was no longer in a state of depression. His recollections of Sally had quite stirred him up. Yet at the same time they made him angry at himself. How could this have happened? he thought. I promised myself that I would help Sally, this girl who loved me, to obtain a plot of land, and a house, and I forgot. Now John Heitzman was a man accustomed to keeping his promises, especially those he made to himself. He realised he would never stop being

angry with himself until... He pressed a button to summon his secretary. When the secretary entered, John Heitzman was sitting on his bed. Even though he found it difficult to get out the words, for the first time in the past six months he began talking: “Over fifty years ago I was living in a certain manor-house—I don’t remember the address, you can find it in the archives. There was a gardener working there—don’t remember his name, but it’s in our archived bookkeeping accounts. The gardener had a daughter, her name was Sally. Find out where Sally’s living now. I need this information by tomorrow morning at the latest. If you have it earlier, let me know at once, regardless of the hour, day or night. Do it!” The secretary rang at dawn the next morning. As he walked into the office, John Heitzman was sitting in his wheel-chair by the window, wearing a dark-blue three-piece suit. He was shaved, and his hair neatly combed. “Sir, the gardener was let go forty years ago and died soon afterwards. Before his death he managed to buy five acres1 of land on an abandoned ranch in Texas. On this land he started building a house, but broke his back during the construction and died. His daughter Sally finished building the house and now lives in it. Here’s the address. That’s all the details we have at the moment. But on your order we’ll go ahead and gather all the information you need.” John Heitzman took the piece of paper from his secretary’s hand and examined it carefully After folding it neatly, he put it into his inside jacket pocket and said: “Have the helicopter ready for take-off in thirty minutes. It should land about four or five miles from her villa in Texas. Have a car meet me at the landing site. Just an ordinary-looking car—no limousine, no bodyguards, just the driver. Do it!” At three o’clock in the afternoon John Heitzman, limping slightly and leaning on his cane, made his way up the gravelled path to a modest cottage surrounded by luscious greenery 1 When he first spied her, her back was turned to him. The elderly woman was standing on a small stepladder, washing the outside of a window. John Heitzman stopped and stared at this woman with her beautiful ash-coloured hair. She could feel his gaze and turned to face him. For a while she simply stood there with her eyes fixed on the old man standing on the path. Then all of a sudden she jumped down from her ladder and ran to greet him. Her step was light, and nothing about this woman

looked old. She stopped about a metre from where Heitzman was standing, and in a quiet but emotional voice said: “Hello, Johnnikins!” Immediately she lowered her eyes and put up her hands to cover the blush on both her cheeks. “Hello, Sally!” said John Heitzman, without another word. Or, rather, he was speaking, but only to himself, not aloud. How beautiful you are, Sally, and how beautiful are your sparkling eyes, and the little wrinkles around your eyes! You are still just as beautiful and good as before! Aloud he said: “I was just passing through, Sally I heard you were living here, so I decided to stop by and maybe to stay the night... if I’m not imposing, that is.” “I’m so happy to see you, Johnnikins. Of course you can stay the night. I’m here alone, but tomorrow my two grandchildren will be arriving for a week. I’ve got two of them: a granddaughter, she’s nine, and a little grandson— well, he’s twelve already. Come on in, Johnnikins, and I’ll give you a bowl of herb tea. I know the kind of tea you need. Come on.” “So, you were married, Sally? You had children.” “I’m still married, Johnnikins,” Sally answered cheerfully. ‘And we had one son. And now two grandchildren... Why don’t you sit down at the table out there on the porch, and I’ll bring the tea out to you.” John Heitzman sat down in one of the plastic armchairs on the veranda. When Sally brought out a large bowl of some kind of tea, he asked her: “How come you said you knew what kind of tea I needed, Sally?” “You see, my father used to gather herbs for your father. He’d dry them and then make a tea, and this tea was of great help to your father. And I learned how to gather herbs, too. My dad told me that you, too, Johnnikins, have inherited this same disease.” “But how did you know I was coming?” “I didn’t know, Johnnikins. You see, I gather them in case of any need. But tell me, Johnnikins, how are you doing? How’s your life turned out?” “In a lot of different ways, I guess. I’ve been busy with a variety of things, but I don’t want to think about that right now. You’ve got a fine place here, Sally—it’s beautiful, so many flowers... and a garden!” “Yeah, it’s really nice. I really like it here. But you see over there to the right, they’ve got a building project in the works. They’re planning to build a waste treatment facilit. And over to the left there’ll be another factory of some sort. They’re talking about moving us out...

“But you’re tired from your trip, looks like you’ve been travelling quite a distance, Johnnikins. I can see how exhausted you are. I’ll make up a bed for you by the open window. Just have a lie down and relax. Only drink up your tea first.” John Heitzman got undressed, with some difficulty He really was tired. His muscles, atrophied by six months of lying motionless in bed, could only barely keep him on his feet. He finally managed to pull the blanket over him, and he fell asleep at once. Lately he had been unable to get to sleep at all without a sleeping pill. But here, all at once... He slept in until noon and did not see the morning. He got up and took a shower and then went out to the veranda. Sally was getting lunch ready in the summer kitchen, and a little boy and a little girl were helping her. “Good afternoon, Johnnikins! Looks like you got a good sleep. You look so rejuvenated! Here, meet the grandchildren. This is Emmy, and this young fella’s name is George.” “And I’m John Heitzman. Good morning!” said the elderly man, extending his hand to the boy. “So there, you’re officially introduced,” declared Sally. “You two go take a walk and work up an appetite while Emmy and I get lunch ready” “Ed like to show you our garden,” George said to Heitzman. The old man and the young boy walked through the marvellous garden together. The boy kept pointing out various plants and could not stop talking about them. Heitzman, in the meantime, was concentrating on thoughts of his own. When they reached the end of the garden, the boy announced: “Now, behind this acacia bush is my ‘apartment’—Grandma made it for me.” Heitzman pulled aside a branch and looked... There in a small glade behind the acacia stood his little house—made from the same plastic seedling boxes. Only the roof looked a bit different. And the curtain covering the entrance was different. Heitzman pulled back the curtain and stooped slightly as he stepped into the little house. All the furnishings were just as he remembered them. Only the photograph on the table was laminated in plastic sheathing. The photo was of Sally’s grandson. Every thing’s just the way it should be, he thought. The little house now has a new occupant and hence a new photograph. Heitzman picked up the photo and held it in both hands. To make conversation, he remarked: “Well, now, little George, your photo came out pretty well here!”

“But that’s not my photograph, Uncle John. That’s a picture of a boy Grandma was friends with in childhood. It just happens he looks like me.” John Heitzman made his way back up the garden path as fast as his legs could carry him, limping with his cane, and stumbling. Panting and feeling a little confused, he approached Sally and asked: “Where is he now? Where’s your husband, Sally? Where?” “Please calm down, John,” said Sally softly. “You shouldn’t allow yourself to get so excited. Please, sit down... “It turns out, John, that back in my childhood I promised a very fine young boy that I would become his wife...” “But that was a game!” John Heitzman was practically shouting as he leapt up out of the chair. ‘A children’s game!” “Maybe so,” Sally responded. ‘Anyway, let’s say I’m still continuing to play at it. And I’m pretending that you’re my husband... my husband and my beloved.” “George does look a lot like me, the way I looked as a boy Does that mean you gave birth to a child after that night, Sally? Did you have a baby?” “Yes, John, I had our son. And he looks like me. But he very much has your genes, and our grandson is the spitting image of you.” John Heitzman’s gaze alternated between Sally and the boy and girl setting the table out on the veranda. He was no longer able to speak. His thoughts and feelings were confused. Then, for reasons which he himself did not fully understand, he said in a business-like tone: “I have to leave right away Good-bye, Sally” He took a couple of steps down the path, then turned and headed over to Sally, who was standing there quietly Barely supporting himself on his cane, he got down on one knee in front of her, took her hand and gave it a long, slow kiss. “Sally, I have some very important, urgent matters to attend to. I have to leave immediately.” She put her hand on his head, softly rumpling his hair. “Yes, of course. You have to leave, if you’ve got important matters and problems to take care of. If you run into any difficulties, John, you can always come here to our home. Our son now manages his own little firm— it’s known by the lovely name of Lotos—and he does landscape design. He’s had no special training, but I taught him myself, and he’s doing some

very smart designs, and there’s hardly any shortage of orders. He helps me financially, and visits me every month. “But it seems you’ve got some money problems? And something of a health problem, too? Come back, John. I know how to give you treatment and we’ve got enough money to live on.” “Thank you, Sally... Thank you... I’ve got to hurry! I’ve got to...” He walked down the path to the gate, his thoughts all caught up in a plan he had in mind. In the meantime Sally watched John’s receding figure and whispered to herself: Come back, my love! She was still repeating this phrase like a mantra even an hour later, forgetting about her grandchildren. She did not even notice the helicopter circling for more than half an hour overhead, over her plot of land with its little house and marvellous garden.

By the time John Heitzman’s helicopter landed on the office tower roof, his close associates and their secretaries were already hard at work in the board room, feverishly checking figures, getting ready to report to the boss. They had grown unaccustomed to meeting in his presence, and now it was with considerable fear and trepidation that they awaited his arrival. When John Heitzman entered the room, everybody rose to their feet. He began speaking even before reaching his chair at the head of the board-room table. “Sit down. No reports today. Listen carefully to what I have to say, I’m not going to repeat myself. No time. So. In Texas there’s this villa—here’s the address. Your instructions are to buy up all the lands around this house within a radius of a hundred miles. Buy up all the industries located on these lands, even if it means paying three times their worth. Whichever one of you is responsible for buying and selling real estate can leave the room now and get to work immediately Put all our agents on the job if required. This operation should take no more than one week.” One of the associates jumped up and hurried toward the exit. John Heitzman continued: ‘All buildings, factories and facilities located on these lands are to be demolished within a month, max, even if this means hiring hundreds of construction companies. A month from now grass should be planted on these sites.” Heitzman instructed the last associate remaining in the room: “There’s a firm in Texas with the pretty name of Lotos. Sign a five-year

contract with it. Engage this firm to design communities for all the lands we buy up around that villa in Texas. Whatever the firm asks, double it. Do it!” Two weeks later John Heitzman appeared before an audience of fifteen hundred people. The audience, recruited with the help of personnel firms, comprised landscape design specialists, botanists and agronomists. Everyone wanted to get work—especially since the advert mentioned the contract amount, twice the standard average. John Heitzman walked up to the podium and began speaking in his usual authoritative tone, which was rather sharp: ‘According to the contracts being offered you, each of you will receive free of charge a plot of land for lifetime use, measuring five acres. You’ll be offered several designs for prefab homes to choose from, and these homes will be built on each plot at whatever spot you designate, all at my company’s expense. For the next five years the company will make payments to each adult member of your family as specified in the contract. Your job is to make the territory you receive a place of beauty. You will plant gardens and flower-beds, and make ponds and pathways. Ydu will make everything beautiful and good. The company will pay the cost of seedlings and whatever seed materials you request. “That’s it. If there are no questions, those who wish to accept my offer can sign their contract.” But the fifteen-hundred seat auditorium was enshrouded in utter silence. Nobody got up from their seats to head over to the tables, where secretaries were waiting with contracts ready to sign. After a minute of complete silence, an elderly man rose from his seat and asked: “Tell me, sir, these lands where you propose we settle, are they contaminated with deadly pollutants?” “No,” replied one of Heitzman’s associates. “On the contrary, this whole area has a comparatively clean environment, and the soil is quite fertile.” “Then tell us honestly,” asked a young woman jumping up from her seat, “what kind of an experiment are you proposing to conduct on people? Many of us have children, and I for one do not want to subject my child to goodness-knows-what kind of an experiment.” The hall erupted with a general buzz, and cries of Opportunists! Inhuman! Monsters! could be heard. People started getting up and filing toward the exit. Heitzman’s associates tried to explain and respond to the questions, but to no avail. Heitzman himself sat there helplessly and watched the people leave the room. He realised that their departure was the final blow to his hopes. Or something even worse... He so wanted to do something nice for Sally, for

his son and grandchildren. He wanted not only for there to be no more belching smokestacks in the vicinity of Sally’s cozy cottage, but for there to be gardens around, and good neighbours too. He had bought up the lands, and the belching smokestacks had been demolished on his orders. And grass had been sown in their place. But the land could only become good if good people lived on it. And here they were leaving. They did not understand. How could they understand, anyway? What could make them believe? Stop! Ail at once it dawned on him. They knew nothing about the situation, and that was why they did not believe. But now if he told them the truth... John Heitzman rose to his feet and quietly, still hesitantly, began to speak. “People!” he began. “I understand. I need to explain to you the reasons for this action by my compan. But they’re impossible to explain. There’s no way they can be explained. Because it’s just that I... You see, it’s like this... Or, rather, there’s something personal to me in all these contracts. Or how shall I put it?...” Heitzman was confused, and did not know how to continue. But the people had stopped in their tracks. They were standing in the aisles, in the exit doorways. And they were all looking intently at Heitzman. They were silent, and here he was, not knowing how to proceed. Yet somehow he managed to pull himself together and go on: “Back in my childhood... In my youth... you see... I loved this girl. But I didn’t realise back then I was in love with her. I was later married to other women. I got involved in business. For the past fifty years I never saw this girl. Never even thought about her. And then just recently I remembered her. I discovered she was the only person who ever sincerely loved me. And she still does. But I didn’t know about it. Like I said, I’d forgotten all about her. And I realised that she was the only one I could ever love... ‘And then... I met her. Now, of course, she’s along in years. But for me she’s still the same as back when I knew her years before. She loves her garden. She does everything so beautifull. And I wanted there to be beauty around her. And good neighbours. It’s better for her to have good and happy neighbours living nearby. “But how to make that happen? As a businessman I’ve managed to put a bit of money aside. And so I bought up the land, divided it into plots, and drew up these contracts. I did it for the one I love. Or, just maybe, I did it for myself?” This last sentence John Heitzman uttered almost as though putting the question to himself. After that he began speaking as though talking aloud to himself, as though he did not see the people standing in front of him.

“We live for something—what do we live for? We strive for something— what is it we’re striving for? I’m going to die soon—what am I leaving behind, except dust? “But now, I’m not going to die, not until I finish my project. And I’ll leave behind something eternal—I’ll leave behind a garden for the one I love. I’ll leave behind many gardens. “"You know, first, I wanted to simply hire a whole lot of workers and sign a contract with a big company doing landscape design. Sign a contract so that employees could look after the plants. But then it dawned on me. Any kind of beauty will turn out lifeless, if you don’t create it for yourself. And that’s why I decided to make it so that someone created it for themselves. That’s why I’m offering you the plots of land and the houses, and all I ask in return is for beauty around the one I love. “You didn’t believe that the terms offered in these contracts were genuine. You didn’t know what goals the party offering you these contracts was really pursuing. Now you know.” At this point John Heitzman fell silent. The people standing in the hall were silent, too. The first to break the silence was the woman who had expressed the most scepticism earlier. First she hurried over to the row of tables standing by the stage with the contracts laid out, and asked one of the secretaries to enter her name on a copy, which she signed without even reading it. Then she turned to the people standing in the auditorium and exclaimed: “There, I’ve signed it. I was the first one to sign. That means I’ll go down in history, because I was the first. When you think about it, not a single man, no matter how rich, has ever given a greater gift to the one he loves than this person standing there on the stage. And it would be impossible for him to do more.” “Nobody could even think of doing more,” cried another woman, “in the whole recorded history of mankind!” “I love you!” called out a third. “I want a plot right next to your beloved,” declared a fourth. “What’s her name?” “Her name...” began Heitzman, but went on: “maybe it’s better she doesn’t know. Let her think that this was all the will of fate.” With a single surge, the people in the hall headed over to the tables standing by the stage. A queue formed. People gaily joked with each other, calling each other simply Neighbour, but the majority, especially the women, kept

staring at the man on the stage with sparkles of love in their eyes. For the first time in his life John Heitzman felt the energy of good directed at him—the energy of love and unfeigned delight emanating from many human hearts. An all-triumphant energy, capable of healing any ill. He walked off the stage, now without a trace of a limp. For several months he personally took active part in the demolition of the remaining facilities on the bought-up lands, discussed the details of design of the whole community around Sally’s cottage and alternative landscape designs for different plots, along with the whole infrastructure. A year later, when John Heitzman once again approached the gate leading to Sally’s cottage, as far as the eye could see, people were already planting little saplings for their large gardens. Several saplings stood near Sally’s gate, with a carefully wrapped root system. It seemed as though Sally had intuitively felt him coming, for she ran out to greet him. “John! It’s so good to see you again! Really good! Hello there, John!” She ran up to him with a spring in her step, bubbling over like a young girl. She grasped John’s arm, pulled him over to have a cup of tea, all the while happily chattering away nonstop. “You know what’s been happening, John?! You know what a miracle’s been taking place here all around! I’m so superbly happy! There’ll be no more belching smokestacks next to our house. There’ll be good neighbours! See how life’s sprucing up all around?! Really sprucing up! If you’ve had any business failures, John, don’t worry your little head about it. You can just laugh at it and come and move in with us. We’re wealthy now. Our son’s just got himself a real big contract, and I mean big! He’s now in charge of a whole design and planning project. And we’ve got ourselves a little more land. Our son’s going to be building himself a new house. And the two of us, if you want to, can live here.” “I do want to,” replied John Heitzman, adding: “Thank you, Sally, for the invitation.” “But why go on living in an old house?” boomed out a voice from behind John Heitzman’s back. He turned around and caught sight of his son. He knew right off that it was his son. And the young man continued: “If I understand correctly, you are actually my father?... When little George told me that you thought the photo of Mom’s childhood friend was of him, I knew who’d come. And Mom never did learn to hide her true feelings. “I, of course, don’t yet have the same feelings towards you that Mom does, but for the sake of my happy parents, I am ready to pay for the building of a

new house for the two of you.” “Thank you, son,” said John Heitzman, almost overcome with emotion. He wanted to give his son a hug, but for some reason hesitated. The young man stepped toward him on his own, extended his hand and introduced himself: “I’m John.” “Great!” said Sally ‘And it’s great now that you two have got acquainted. When you get to know each other better, you’ll really like each other. But right now let’s have some tea.” And as they sat at the table Sally kept on talking animatedly, non-stop, about the extraordinary events that had been taking place in the last few months. “Can you just imagine, John? Just imagine! Here they’ve been telling a story like the most beautiful tale in the world. A tale which is coming true to life. Just imagine, John—people say that all these lands were bought by one and the same person. Then this person invited the best designers, agronomists and gardeners and gave each of them several acres of land free of charge for their lifetime use. He told them to make their plots beautiful. And he offered them all the saplings and seeds free of charge, and will even keep on paying them for five years to beautify their own plots. Just imagine, it is he who will be paying them. He poured all his savings into this project, right down to the last cent.” “Well, maybe not all,” Heitzman protested. “People say he put in all. And you know why he did all this?” “Why?” asked John Heitzman calmly. “That’s the whole beauty of it. He did it so that the one he loved could have a place to live amidst all this beaut. They say she’s a landscape designer as well. And somewhere around here she’s got a cottage too. Only nobody knows who she is or where she lives. Can you just imagine, Johnnikins, what will happen when people find out who she is?” “What?” “What else? Everybody will want to go have a look at her and even touch her like a goddess. I myself, for instance, would want to touch her. She’s probably an extraordinary woman. Maybe she’s extraordinary outwardly, maybe inwardly Everybody around is saying that there’s no other woman in the world who could inspire a man to take such an unusual and beautiful step. That’s why all the people will want to see her and even touch this man and his extraordinary wife.” “Probably they will,” John Heitzman agreed, adding: “But what can we do about it, Sally?”

“What d’you mean, we?” Sally wondered aloud. “I say we, because that extraordinary woman, the one on whose account all these things around are happening, is you, Sally!” Sally stared at John without blinking, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. When the first glimpses of understanding dawned on her, she let the cup she was holding slip out of her hands, but nobody paid attention to the sound of it breaking to pieces. John Heitzman turned his head in the direction of another sound—the sound of a chair falling, when his son impulsively jumped up from his seat. The younger John rushed over to his father and said excitedly, in a soft baritone voice: “Father! Father! Can I give you a hug?” John Heitzman was the first to embrace his son. He could hear how his son’s heart was racing. His son gave him a hug in turn, whispering excitedly: “The world has never witnessed such a powerful declaration of love, without even using the words of love, ever! Fm proud of you, Father! Fm so happy for you, Father!” When father and son turned to Sally, she was still trying to come to terms with what had happened. All at once her cheeks flushed with a rosy glow, as though smoothing out the wrinkles around her eyes. Tears began rolling down her cheeks. Sally was embarrassed. She rushed over to the elder John, grabbed him by the arm and led him down the front porch steps. Their son watched as his parents, hand in hand, started making their way slowly down the path, heading for the acacia bushes which concealed the little house of their childhood, and then began skipping toward the acacia like youngsters. Ten years later a much younger-looking John Heitzman was sitting at a local cafe-bar with some other men from the community. He laughingly explained: “No, I won’t ran for any presidential office—don’t even try to tempt me. And it’s not just a matter of age. You don’t have to be president to run the countr. That’s something you can do from right in your own garden. See, you’ve shown by your own example how to really make a good life, and all America is now turning into a flourishing garden. If it goes on like this, heck, we’ll even overtake Russia!” “Well do it! Well do it” echoed Sally, who had just come in. “Only now, let’s head for home, Johnnikins. The baby won’t go to sleep without you.” Then she added, whispering in his ear: ‘And neither will I.” And so they began walking home, down a shady, sweetsmelling allee, these two not-yet-old people: John Heitzman and Sally In the springtime it always

seemed that their life was just beginning. Just as real life was beginning all over America. “That’s a beautiful ending to your story,” I told Anastasia, when she had finished telling her account of the future. ‘And all your stories are so encouraging. But will something like that really happen? In real life?” 1 5 acres = 2 hectares approximately

“It will definitely happen, Vladimir. That is no made-up story, but a projection of the future. The names and locales are not important. What is important is the essence, the idea, the dream! And if my story has evoked positive feelings, then people will certainly project its essence into the future, and many people will add their own details and infuse the projection with their own great meaning and conscious awareness.” “How does all that come about?” “See how simple it is. Did you like the story?” “Did I like it? Til say!” “Do you want it to come true in the future?” “Of course I do.” “What if you tell it to others? Will there be those who will want to see something like that come true, too?” “I dare say there will.” “'You see, that means that anybody will want to, who takes on the role not just of an observer of history, but an actual participant in it. And they will make the story come true.” “Yes, I think that’s clear enough. But I’m just a bit sad that you went and painted such a beautiful scene in respect to foreign entrepreneurs, rather than Russians.” “Vladimir, for Russians, life is already drawing beautiful and real scenes all on its own. Or, to put it more accurately, many Russians are working out the Divine eternit. And that is something you could tell about all by yourself.” “By myself? Well, I guess so. I really do know quite a few Russian entrepreneurs who have taken not just one but several hectares of land and are building their domains on them. Like the ones you described. Only their stories aren’t as romantic.” “Grand chapters need to be written about anyone who has made conscious contact with the Earth. Such a story will be inexhaustible. Look, here is just one story—see if you can recognise some familiar names.” CHAPTER EIGHT

I am giving birth to you, my angel! Viktor Chadov, an entrepreneur, awoke at dawn. His girlfriend lay beside him in the big bed, still asleep. The thin blanket hugged the contours of her delicate figure.

Every time they attended formal receptions together or went to some fancy resort hotel, her body attracted men’s envious or lustful glances. Not only that, but Inga (as this sleeping beauty was called) possessed a most charming smile and gave the impression on those around her of being a smart and educated woman. Viktor took such great pleasure in her company that he bought a second four-bedroom flat, furnished it with ultramodern pieces and gave Inga the keys. Occasionally, if his intensive business schedule allowed, he would spend a night or two with her. He was grateful to this twenty-five-year-old woman for these marvellous nights they spent together, and the opportunity to chat with her, but he had no plans to marry her. He had no special feelings of love for her. And, besides, he knew which side his bread was buttered on: after all, he was 38 and she 25. Naturally, it would not be long before this young woman would start hankering for a younger man. And, with her body and brains, that would not be too difficult to find. And she would find a younger and even richer man, all thanks to him. After all, if he married her, he would be also introducing her to a circle of influential businessmen. Inga turned her face toward him, smiling in her sleep. The blanket had slipped down just enough to expose one of her alluring, so perfectly shaped feminine breasts. But this time Viktor Chadov experienced none of his usual stimulation at the sight of her half-naked body; He carefully replaced the blanket on his sleeping partner. Silently, trying not to wake her, he got up from the bed and headed out to the kitchen. He made some coffee and poured himself a cup. Lighting a cigarette, he began pacing the spacious breakfast-room floor, practically oblivious to his surroundings. What a dream! His feelings were still aroused by last night’s extraordinary dream. Yes, his feelings, rather than his mind. Viktor had dreamt that he was walking along a shady allee, concentrating on the feasibility of a routine commercial deal. Behind and in front of him walked his bodyguards. He was irritated at their presence and had a hard time concentrating. His attention was also distracted by the constant noise of traffic along the edge of the park. Then all of a sudden his bodyguards disappeared and the traffic noise died down. And he could hear the birds singing, he could see the marvellous spring foliage on the trees lining the allee, and the flowers on the bushes. He stopped and delighted in the soft and pleasant feelings welling up inside him. And he felt better than he ever had before in his life. And all at once he noticed, far down the allee, a little boy running toward him. The sunlight was shining from behind, giving him a kind of halo, and it

almost seemed as though here running toward him was a little angel. A moment later and it dawned on him that this was none other than his own little son. The lad’s hands and feet were in constant energetic motion. With a joyful premonition, Viktor squatted down and threw open his arms to embrace him, while his little son, in turn, threw open his arms on the run. But then all at once the boy stopped in his tracks, about three metres shy of Viktor. The smile faded from the youngster’s face, and the look in his eyes made Viktor’s heart start to pound. “Come on, come to me! Come and let me hug you, son.” The boy answered with a wry smile: “There’s no way you can do that, Papa.” “Why not?” Viktor asked in surprise. “Because...” answered the boy with a tone of sadness. “You can’t hug me, Papa, because you can’t hug a son which hasn’t been born. After all, you didn’t give birth to me, Papa.” “Then you come and hug me, son. Come on.” “I can’t hug a father who didn’t give birth to me.” The boy tried to smile through his tears. A tear was already trickling down his red cheek. Then the boy turned, hung his head, and slowly wandered off down the allee. But Viktor was still standing there on his knees, rooted to the spot. The boy kept getting farther and further away As did the soft and pleasant feeling Viktor had had a moment ago. Once again, from the distance, it seemed, he could hear the roar of traffic. Unable to move, Viktor summoned up his remaining strength and called out: “Don’t leave me! Where are you going, son?” The youngster turned, and he could see another tear trickling down his face. “I’m going into the nowhere, Papa. Into the infinite nowhere.” Again the lad hung his head without saying a word. Then he added: “I’m sad, Papa, I’m sad that I wasn’t born and so I cannot restore your life with myself.” With head lowered, the little angel receded into the distance and presently disappeared, literally dissolving in the Sun’s rays. The dream ended, but the impressions of the marvellous soft and pleasant sensations lingered on. It was as though they were summoning Viktor to take action. After finishing his third cigarette, Viktor extinguished it firmly and decisively. He rushed into the bedroom, calling out loudly on the way:

“Wake up, Inga, wake up!” “I’m not asleep,” answered the beautiful girl from the bed. “Just lying here, lolling about. I’ve been wondering where you disappeared to.” “Inga, I want you to have a child. Could you have a son with me?” She threw off the blanket and leapt out of bed. She ran over to him, flung her arms around his neck and pressed against him with every inch of her supple and beautiful bod. And then in a hot whisper she confided: “The most delightful and beautiful declaration of love is when a man asks a woman to bear his child. Thank you... that is, if you’re not just joking.” “I’m not joking,” he replied firmly Putting on a bathrobe, Inga responded: “Well, if you’re not joking—if you’re serious, that is... This is a decision we need to think through. First, I want my future child to have a father. But you, my dearly beloved, are still married.” “I’ll get a divorce,” Viktor promised. In fact, he had already divorced his wife three months before, but for a variety of reasons had not yet told Inga the news. “Once you get your divorce, then we can start talking about a child. But I’ll tell you right off, Viktor. Even if you get divorced, it’s still too early to think about children. “In the first place,” Inga reasoned—half in jest, half serious, “I still need a year to finish graduate school. Secondly, I’m so tired of studying that once I finish, I’d like to take another year just to fool around, make the rounds of a few resorts and have a good time. So, if you’re talking about a child... Well, children could put an end to that little plan once and for all!” “Okay, I was joking,” Viktor interrupted her rambling train of thought. “I’ve gotta go. Got an important meeting coming up. I’ve already called for my car. So long!” He left, but it was not for any meeting, and he had not called for any car. Viktor walked slowly down the sidewalk, giving the once-over to every woman he met. He was viewing them through new eyes—a view he himself was not accustomed to. He was trying to pick out a woman who might be worthy of bearing him a son—a woman he felt he could have a child with. Immediately all the stylish girls with heavy makeup who had earlier attracted his attention fell away He had completely lost interest in all the girls who dressed in tight-fitting clothes or semi-nude in mini-bikini tops to show off their figure. It’s clear why they do that—it’s what’s on their minds, he thought to himself. And then they try putting an intelligent expression on their face.

They use their various body parts to attract men, and maybe someone will bite. And they do bite, of course, only not to have kids. It’s a bite for a shag no procreation there. Go on, dummies, wiggle your behinds! I’m not going to let any wigglers like that have my child. Two girls he happened to notice coming toward him were smoking as they walked, and one of them was holding in her hand an open bottle of beer. Now they’re the kind that are absolutely no good for having children. Only an idiot would want to have a child with that sort. Another thing Viktor noticed was that very few of the women and girls he saw were really healthy-looking. Some were slouching, others had an expression on their face that made them look as though they were suffering from stomach cramps. Still others showed definite signs of either obesity or anorexia. No, it wouldn’t do to have children with them, Viktor thought to himself. Wow! It looks like every one of those women is dreaming of a prince sidling up to them in a white Mercedes, and yet they themselves coiddn’t do the most basic thing of all for that prince. In their own unhealthy state, they couldn’t possibly give him a healthy child. Viktor did not bother to call his driver. Instead, he went on to his office on the trolleybus, still looking up and down every woman his eyes fell upon, trying to find among their number one who was worthy to bear his child, but to no avail. All day long, including during his lunch break and when he was alone in his office, he could not stop thinking about the woman who was to give him a son. At times he had the impression of looking for a woman he himself could be born from. At long last he came to a conclusion: if an ideal partner could not be found, she would have to be created. For this he would need to find a more or less healthy young woman with an attractive (or, at least, not a repulsive) appearance, one with a good character, and arrange for her to have all sorts of training and health-improvement exercises in the best sanatoriums. But the main thing would be to send her off to be tutored in a top educational institution, one where she could learn all about preparing for pregnancy, carrying the child to term and the birthing process itself, as well as basic pre-school education. At the end of his working day, he called in his firm’s lawyer, Valentina Petrovna, a woman who had been made wiser by the school of hard knocks. He invited her to have a seat and began in a roundabout way:

“I have a bit of an unusual question for you, Valentina Petrovna. It’s rather personal, but it’s very important to me. A cousin of mine asked me to make an enquiry for her. Anyway, she’s planning on getting married soon, and she asked me to find out where she can locate an educational institution in our country for women to study up on the best way to carry their pregnancy, as well as what the birth process and subsequent child-raising involves. And what the role of the father should be in this.” Valentina Petrovna listened intentl. When he finished, she thought for a while before saying: ‘As you know, Viktor Nikolaevich,1 I have two children, and I’ve always been interested in literature on birthing and the raising of children, but I’ve never even heard of that kind of school, either in our country or abroad.” “Strange! They teach everything nowadays, and yet this most important issue isn’t touched in either our high schools or our post-secondary institutions. I wonder why?” “Yes, it is strange,” Valentina Petrovna agreed. “I’ve never really thought about it before, but now this state of affairs does seem strange to me. The State Duma, it looks like, doesn’t shy away from discussing the topic of sex education in the schools, but the question of teaching how to give birth to and bring up children isn’t even raised.” “That means that every couple is obliged to experiment on their own child?” “That’s what it boils down to,” replied Valentina Petrovna. ‘An experiment. There are, of course, a wide variety of courses teaching parents what to do at birthing time, how to handle newborns, but there’s no scientific basis underlying the process, and it’s pretty nigh impossible to decide which courses are really going to help and which are harmful.” “Did you take any courses yourself, Valentina Petrovna?” “Well, for our younger daughter I decided on a home birth, in the bathtub, with the help of a midwife. A lot of women are doing that today People believe that it’s more comfortable for a child to make its appearance in the world in a home environment, in the presence of family. They say newborns can tell when people treat them with love as opposed to just simply indifference, which is what you get in many maternity wards. It’s like a conveyor belt there, after all.” Viktor did not find his conversation with Valentina Petrovna all that encouraging. In fact, it depressed him. For two whole weeks he spent all his free time thinking about the problem of childbirth. For two whole weeks, as he walked about the city on foot, visiting high-class restaurants, bars and theatres, he would give probing looks into women’s faces. He even went out

into the countryside, but could not find anyone suitable for him there either. One day he parked his jeep near a teacher’s college and peered through the jeep’s tinted glass windows at the girls passing by After three hours he noticed a young woman coming down the steps with her hair tied back in a short, light-brown braid. She had a stately figure and, as it seemed to him, an intelligent-looking face. As she walked past his jeep on the way to the bus stop, Viktor rolled down his window and hailed her: “Excuse me, please, miss. You see, I’ve been waiting for my friend here, and I can’t wait any longer. If you could show me the best route to the centre of town, I’d be happy to give you a lift home after that, if you like.” The girl looked at the jeep, assessing the situation, and then quietly answered: “Sure, why not? I’ll show you.” After she got into the front seat and they had introduced themselves, the girl pointed to the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard and said: “You got some nice cigarettes there. Mind if I have a smoke?” “Help yourself,” replied Viktor. He was just as glad when his mobile phone rang at that moment. No important message, but when he hung up, Viktor put on a worried face and told the girl, who by now was aggressively puffing on a cigarette: “Something’s come up. I’ve gotta get to an urgent business meeting. You’ll have to excuse me.” With that he let the girl out on the sidewalk, cigarette in hand, after deciding there was no way he was going to let his son be poisoned by tobacco smoke. All during these two weeks Viktor did not meet with his girlfriend at all. He did not even ring her up. He had decided that if she did not want to have a child with him, if all she wanted to do was have a good time and hang around fancy resorts, he had no use for her. Certainly, it had been fun spending time with this beautiful and intelligent woman, but now his life-plans had taken a completely different turn. Til leave her the flat, Viktor decided. After all, this woman did spice up my life for a while. He headed over to the university Inga attended, to give her his keys to the apartment. On the way there he rang her up on his mobile: “Hi, Inga!” “Hi!” came the familiar voice over the telephone. “Where are you now?” “I’m almost at your university. Will you be finished classes soon?”

“I haven’t gone to the university for ten days now. To tell you the truth, I can’t see myself going back there any time soon.” “Something happened?” “Yeah.” “Where are you now?” “At home.” When Viktor opened the front door and entered the flat, Inga was lying on the bed in her bathrobe and reading some kind of book. Glancing at Viktor, she said, without getting up: “There’s coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen.” And once more she buried her nose in her book. Viktor went into the kitchen and took a couple of gulps of coffee. After lighting a cigarette, he plunked his keys down on the kitchen table, then went back to the door of the bedroom, where Inga was still reading, as before. “I’m leaving,” he told her. “Maybe for quite a while, or maybe for good. I’m leaving you the flat. Good-bye. Take care of yourself, hang loose.” And with that he headed toward the door. Inga caught up with him right in the doorway. “Hey, wait a minute, there, scamp!” she said with an upbeat tone, tugging at Viktor’s sleeve. “You’re leaving me, eh? You turn my whole life upsidedown, and now it’s ‘Good-bye’?” “Now how have I turned your life upsidedown?” Viktor asked in surprise. “You gave me a good time, and I bet it wasn’t too bad for you either. You now have the flat all to yourself, and a closet full of clothes. Take care of yourself, have fun the way you wanted to. Or is it more money you want?” “Y)u know, you really are a scamp! C’mon! First you spit on my soul, and then you carry on about the flat, clothes, having fun?” “Hey, take it easy. Don’t make a scene. I’ve got important business to attend to. Good-bye!” Viktor reached for the door handle. But Inga once again held him back, grabbing hold of his arm.” “Not so fast, darling. Hold on a moment. There’s something I want you to tell me. Did you ask me to bear a child, or didn’t you?” “I asked, and you said no.” “Yeah, I said no, at first. Then I thought about it for a couple of days and changed my mind. I quit graduate school, quit smoking, I work out every

morning, and now I’ve got hold of these books about life, and children. I can’t put them down. Here I am reading up on the best way to have a child, and he says ‘Good-bye’! I can’t imagine anyone but you as the father of our...” When Inga’s words finally sunk in, Viktor gave her a boisterous hug, whispering her name over and over again. Then he hoisted her in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. Tenderly, as though handling a most precious treasure, he laid her down on the bed and began tearing off his clothes. With greater passion than ever before he embraced her as she lay on the bed. He began kissing her shoulders and breast, at the same time trying to remove her bathrobe. But all at once his efforts met with a silent protest, and she started to push him away. “Hey, calm down there... please!” Inga said to him. “That’s not the way. To put it in a nutshell, I’m not going to have sex with you today. Or tomorrow, or a month from now.” “What d’you mean, no sex? Didn’t you just tell me you agreed to have a child?” “That’s what I said.” “But how can you have a child without sex?” “Sex should be something quite different. Fundamentally different.” “How so?” “Well, it’s like this. Tell me, my dear, future, loving Papa, why do you want your child to be born?” “What are you talking about?” Viktor sat down on the bed in shock. “Everybody knows wh. There’s no two ways about it.” “You’re making yourself very clear. But still, let’s be specific as to what you want and which way you want to go about it. D’you want your child to be born as a consequence—a side-effect—of your fleshly desires? Or of our joint fleshly desires, for that matter? Or would you rather see him as the desired offspring of our mutual love?” “I don’t think a child would fancy being just a side-effect.” “So, then, the offspring of love. But, you see, you’re not in love with me. Sure, you find me attractive, but that’s not the same as love.” “You’re right, Inga, I find you very attractive.” “There, you see? And you’re very attractive to me, but that’s still a ways from love. We have to earn each other’s love.” “You must have been hitting some pretty strange reading material, eh, Inga? Love is a feeling, it comes

all by itself from goodness-knows-where. And it disappears goodnessknows-where. You can earn somebody’s respect, sure, but love?...” “But it is precisely each other’s love that we’ve got to earn, and our son will help us do it.” “Our son?! You really feel we’re going to have a son?” “Why ‘going to’? It’s already a fact.” “Hey, what does that mean?” Viktor jumped up. ‘Are you telling me you’re already pregnant? You’ve been hiding it from me, eh? Whose child is it? How far along is it?” “It’s yours. And it hasn’t started yet.” “So, it’s not there yet at all?” “It is.” “Listen here, Inga. I really have no idea what you’re on about. You’re talking some sort of nonsense. Can’t you put it, somehow, more clearly?” “I’ll try. You see, Viktor, you got this desire to have a child and you’ve begun thinking about it. Then I got the same desire, and I too began thinking about it. We know today that human thought is material. And that means, if we both have a mental concept of our child, it already exists.” ‘And where is it now?” “I don’t know. Maybe in some other dimension we don’t know about. Maybe, out there in some one of the galaxies of the Universe he’s running barefoot through the stars and looking down on this blue Earth where he’s going to get a material embodiment. Maybe he’s now choosing the place and conditions he’d like to be born in, and wants to let us know. Can’t you hear, or feel, what he’s asking us?” Viktor looked at Inga wide-eyed, as though seeing her for the very first time. She had never come out with reasoning like this before. He could not make up his mind whether she was serious or simply joking. But that phrase maybe he’s now choosing where he’d like to be born stuck in his mind. People are born in all sorts of different places—some are born in an aeroplane, on board ship or in a motor car. Many are born in hospitals in maternity wards, some at home in the bathtub. They are born wherever it works out for them to be born, but where would children like to be born? For example, he, Viktor, if he had had the opportunity and the choice, where would he like to have been born? In Russia, or in one of the best hospitals in England or America? But none of these alternatives struck him as being particularly appealing.

Inga interrupted Viktor’s train of thought: “I’ve already worked out a detailed plan for our joint preparation for meeting our son.” “What sort of plan?” “Listen to me carefully, my dear.” Inga spoke decisively like never before, either sitting in an easy chair or pacing the floor. “First, we’ve got to get ourselves in top-notch physical shape. From now on we shan’t smoke or drink. We have to do a thorough cleaning out of our insides, starting with the kidneys and liver, with the help of various teas and fasting. I’ve already selected a method. “From now on we shall drink only spring water—that’s very important. I’m already having five litres of spring water delivered every day Sure, it costs twice as much as in the stores, but never mind, we’ll get by. “Every day we need to do physical exercises to strengthen our muscles and intensify our blood circulation. We still need fresh air and positive emotions, which are not all that easy to come by.” Viktor liked Inga’s decisiveness, as well as her plan of action. Without giving her a chance to finish, he declared: “We’ll buy the best work-out equipment for our physical exercises, and hire the best masseurs. I can send one of my drivers to pick up spring water for us every da. The driver can also go and collect air from the forest—he can use a compressor to store it in cylinders under pressure, and then we can release the air in our flat a little at a time. Only I have no idea where we can get or buy positive emotions. Maybe we could go visit some fine resorts, like on our honeymoon trip? I mean it—a honeymoon.” Viktor’s mood was getting more and more upbeat by the minute—thanks both to Inga’s decisive and carefully thought-through approach to childbirth and to her desire to have a child by him. And he was glad to know that the son he had foreseen in his dream would be borne not by just some flighty female interested mainly in money but by Inga, who was taking such a serious and responsible approach to the matter. He really wanted to do something nice for Inga, whom he already considered to be the mother of his future son! He got up, quickly put on a suit, walked up to Inga and solemnly declared: “Inga, will you marry me?!” “Of course I will,” Inga replied in accord, as she buttoned up her bathrobe. “Our son should have official parents. Only there’s no point in going to some fancy resort for our honeymoon—that doesn’t fit in with my plan of

preparation for childbirth.” “What does fit in, then? Where else can we get positive emotions?” “We should go around the outlying villages and find a spot we both really like. It has to appeal to both of us, and that means it will appeal to our son too, when he sees it. We’ll buy a hectare of land there, and you will build a small house where our child’s conception is to take place. I shall stay there all nine months of my pregnancy, maybe with an occasional brief outing. We’ll plant a new garden right there on our very own plot of land. I shan’t give birth in a hospital, but in the little house on our family domain.” Viktor could not believe his ears. He could not believe that Inga—a smart, glamorous woman who used to be so keen on hanging out at fashionable clubs and popular resorts—could have changed her whole way of life so radically On the one hand, he was flattered by Inga’s vision—after all, she had his child in mind. On the other hand, did not this vision harbour just a hint of abnormality? He had heard from one of his friends of the existence of a series of books describing an unusual approach to childbirth. His friend had mentioned the importance of each family having their own hectare of land, and had given him this little book with a green cover called The Book of Kin. He had not got round to reading it, but he had heard that these books had been stirring up quite a controversy among the public. People who read them were beginning to change their whole way of life. All at once, Viktor’s eyes fell on a pile of books with green covers lying on one of the bedside tables. He walked over and read the series title: Ringing Cedars of Russia.1 Among them was The Book of Kin. Viktor now realised that all these unusual ideas Inga had about preparation for childbirth she had taken from these books, and she was getting ready to carry them out to the letter. He was still not quite sure whether this was a good or a bad thing. There was something disturbing about Inga’s unusual and unquestioning conviction. It was as though an invisible someone had changed her views and whole outlook on life. But had these books changed Inga for the better, or had they made her just a little quirky? Viktor kept rehashing the question over and over in his mind, and began to argue with her: “Inga, I know you got your ideas from these books. I’ve heard about them. Some people find them exciting, others say there’s a lot in them that’s simply fairy-tale-ish and can’t be proved. Maybe you shouldn’t just automatically believe everything that’s in them? Think about it—what’s the point in our taking a plot of land and building a little house and wearing ourselves out planting trees?

“I’ve got enough to buy us a fine mansion with landscaped grounds, a swimming pool, nice lawns, pathways and a garden, if that’s what you want.” “There’s a lot of things we could buy, of course,” Inga blurted out, very emotionally, for some reason, “even a facsimile of love. But I want us to plant our garden ourselves. All by ourselves! ’Cause I want to be able to say to my son when he grows up: You see this apple tree, son, and that pear tree and the cherry tree? I planted and watered them myself when you were just a little tyke. I did that for you. You were oh so little, and these trees were oh so little. Now you’ve grown, and they’ve grown too, and they’ve begun to bear fruit for you. And I’ve tried to make the whole Space around your little Motherland nice and beautiful for you.” Inga’s outpouring of emotion was convincing, and Viktor liked what he heard. He even started having regrets that nobody in his lifetime had been able to take him to a garden like that and say: “This tree here was planted and grown for you by your parents,” Yes, of course, Inga’s right, thought Viktor, only why is she talking only about herself, as if I don’t exist? Feeling a bit slighted, he asked: “Inga, why would you tell our growing son only about your part in this?” “’Cause you don’t want to plant a garden,” Inga calmly replied. “What a’you mean, I don’t want to? You bet I do, if it’s important for our future.” “Well, then, if we’re going to do everything together, I’ll tell our son we planted this garden for him.” “That’s more like it,” Viktor observed, comforted. For two months Viktor and Inga spent all their weekends driving around the outskirts of the city, looking for a place to build their future kin’s domain. It was a most pleasant undertaking, and right at that time it seemed to Viktor that there was no more important task in life than searching for the one place on the Earth that would satisfy his soul and, consequently, that of his future son. And so it happened one day that they came to the edge of a deserted village about thirty kilometres outside the city “There it is,” Inga said quietly, jumping out of the car first. “I feel something here, too,” responded Viktor. Later they made a second trip to the place, and spent a whole day looking over the site and talking with the local residents. They were told that the soil was not all that fertile, as there was ground water fairly near the surface. But that did not faze Viktor. He became more and more persuaded that this

particular land, along with the little birches growing on it, as well as the sky and clouds above it—that all of this belonged to him. To him and his future son, and to his and Inga’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And if the ground was not all that fertile, no matter—he would make it fertile. It did not take long to draw up the documents to purchase two hectares of land, and after four short months the plot sported its own pretty, almost fairy-tale cabin, built of kiln-dried logs. The cabin featured a sauna and a biotoilet, along with hot and cold running water straight from a well dug on the spot. And on the second floor—a cozy bedroom with a window overlooking a forest and a lake. Inga designed the layout of the cabin with all its furnishings. She also came up with a plan for the landscaping. Together they planted cedars, firs and pines around the perimeter of the lot, as well as little fruit-tree saplings. Every evening Viktor would hurry home to his little cabin on his future domain, where the mother-to-be of his child was taking care of the home front. All the women Viktor had known before not only receded into the background—they simply ceased to exist for him at all. Inga’s radical approach to childbirth engendered new feelings in him. They were still not entirely clear to him, and they were probably quite different from traditional love, but he was quite convinced that he could never part from her, and only she could bear... It was only with her that he could build a future. The two of them went in to Moscow together to attend courses on home childbirths. There was one peculiarity of Inga’s that Viktor found disconcerting—her outright refusal to have intimate relations with him. She kept insisting that their child should not be born as a result of fleshly lusts, but from Man’s infinitely greater and more meaningful desire, which was something else again. Now this time the author of these little green books has gone too far! thought Viktor. Come on, could it really be possible to do away with the factor of fleshly desire completely? But one day, as he lay beside Inga on the bed, not having any kind of sex in mind but thinking only of his future son, he touched her breasts. Inga at once pressed against him and put her arms around him... In the morning, while Inga was still asleep, Viktor headed over to the lake. The world around him seemed entirely different—it seemed unusual and joyful. What had happened the previous night he had never experienced before, either with Inga or with any of the other women he had known. This was no

ordinary sex. It was an inspired impulse of creativity Of course people are born and people die. But if they never experience anything like this over their whole lifetime, they are missing something—maybe the most important thing. But thanks to Inga, it did not escape Viktor. And he began to experience new warm—yea, fervent—feelings toward the one woman in his life: Inga. All nine months of her pregnancy Inga spent on the domain, going into town only occasionally She had it all worked out where the baby pram would be kept and where the crib would stand. She even had Viktor plant a modestsized lawn where she could walk with their little son. Her contractions began a week ahead of the expected time. Their future son was apparently anxious to make his appearance in his marvellous Space on the Earth. From the information they had received during their childbirth courses, Viktor knew what a father should do to assist during the labour, but the only rational thing he turned out to be capable of accomplishing was to ring up the midwife they knew and call for an ambulance to stand by in case of emergency. Inga had to draw the water in the bathtub herself, prepare the towel and measure the water temperature, while he paced the room trying to think what he should be doing, but could not for the life of him recall what it was. With no husbandly help to count on, Inga climbed into the bathtub on her own. The contractions continued, but each time one occurred, she simply drew upon her beautiful voice to sound forth on notes of joy and triumph. Finally, out of all he had learnt during the courses, Viktor managed to remember one thing:positive emotions. He glanced over at the windowsill and saw the flower Inga had planted in a pot there—now in full bloom. He grabbed the flower-pot and ran with it into the bathroom, exclaiming excitedly over and over again: “Look, Inga, your flower’s blooming! Your flower’s blooming! It’s come out, just look!” He was standing there holding the flower-pot when his son’s little body appeared in the bathtub. The midwife arrived only after Inga had already placed the tiny body on her tummy Seeing Viktor standing there holding the flower-pot, she snapped: ‘And just what are you doing?” “I’m giving birth to a son,” replied Viktor. ‘Ah,” the midwife nodded in agreement. “Then put your pot back on the

windowsill and bring me...” I need to tell all men... thought Viktor, as he ran about the house for the umpteenth time, true and lasting love comes only when together with your beloved you give birth to a long-desired child. CHAPTER NINE

A fine state of affairs! A fine state of affairs! We live out our lives, and we don’t even try to figure out what our society’s all about! And yet it is one of the most important questions in life. It’s one that’s troubled me for a long time now. I really wanted Anastasia to have a look at the documents on the building of the domains which I had brought with me, along with my appeal to the President of Russia and the draft legislation drawn up by my readers. After thinking it over, however, I decided not to show these documents to Anastasia. I didn’t want to risk upsetting her. Especially now, if it turns out she’s pregnant, she needs positive, and not negative, emotions. I finally decided to give the whole packet of documents to Anastasia’s grandfather and asked him for his opinion. “Oho!” exclaimed Grandfather, as he took the voluminous packet from my outstretched hands and remarked: “What d’you want me to do, Vladimir— read all this?” “Yeah, I want to hear your opinion about them—about how things have turned out.” ‘And what good would that do you?” “It would help me decide what course of action to follow.” “You ought to be deciding your own course of action, without any kind of advice.” “Does that mean you’re not willing to read these?” ‘All right, I’ll read them, just so you won’t take offence.” “I shan’t take offence. What sense is there in reading if you’re obviously reluctant to do so?” “Sense? The sense is in not wasting time on useless stuff.” Grandfather sat down on the ground beneath the cedar, opened the folder and began leafing through the pages, taking his time. Occasionally his gaze would pause and focus on a particular page. Sometimes he just kept turning the pages with a passing glance. After a while he said:

“Vladimir, I need to look at everything carefull. Why don’t you go take a walk in the meantime?” I walked about twenty metres off and began pacing back and forth, waiting for him to finish reading the documents I had brought with me (including the articles prepared for the almanac).2 I would like to share these with you too, dear readers. Talking with presidents: Please tell me, esteemed sirs—all you presidents, prime ministers and chancellors—who in fact is in control of nationstates? The question may seem strange at first glance. Any school-child will offer the reply: “Countries are under the control of the president, the government, the Duma.”2 But an answer like that simply points to the extent of the mass illusion at work here, and not just in our country All sorts of ordinary people are under the spell of this illusion, just like the rulers themselves. It can and must be dispelled with the aid of logical thinking. Those who are unable to discern the illusoriness engendered upon the Earth will die without having really lived, because the whole of their so-called life is but an illusion. And so—how to dispel this illusion?! First of all we should define what it means to ‘control a nation’. In the main, and perhaps exclusively, this refers to the control of social processes and phenomena. The chief person in this control system is called a president. So, let’s ask him: “Tell us, please, Mr President, are you in charge of drug addiction in our country?” “No,” the president will reply. “I’m not in charge of that.” “What about the rapid development of prostitution?” “No, I’m not in charge of that either.” ‘And what about widespread corruption and bribery?” “No.” ‘And the extinction of our population?” “What are you talking about? I’m not in charge of anybody’s extinction.” There are a whole lot of questions which he would have to answer with the phrase “No, I’m not in charge of it.” He has, in fact, no alternative, since giving any other answer would brand the ruler a criminal.

So it turns out that there are unmistakable large-scale processes taking place in society, influencing the lives of every single individual, but the supreme ruler and the whole host of officials under his command have nothing to do with these processes. What, then, are they, in fact, in charge of? Upon closer inspection, all they do, it turns out, is involuntarily and unwittingly supervise the concealment of the true rulers, who, you see, really do have a reason to hide. In any case, no president, chancellor or prime minister can possibly be the real ruler of a nation, either in theory or in practice. Their only task is to carry out someone else’s will under the guise of their own, and this can be attested by scholars—psychologists, for example. You and I can come to a similar conclusion if we make a careful analysis of our own lives. Haven’t our own lives been influenced by ‘someone’—say, in kindergarten, school or college? If they want to, they can bring us up to be communists, or fascists, or democrats, as in our present situation. And through this process of upbringing and indoctrination, they engender the corresponding social processes. “Reality should be determined only through one’s own self,” Anastasia has said. Her words are good, and true. But to understand reality, we need to reflect, contemplate. However, our prevalent way of life leaves precious little time for reflection, and so by default we use someone else’s definition of reality that has been imposed on us. In the case of a head of state, he has even less time for reflection than ordinary people. His daily schedule is calculated down to the hour and minute, and often not by himself. History also teaches us the impossibility of a universally visible ruler actually controlling a nation-state. It is known, for example, that in Ancient Egypt the pharaoh was raised by priests. Naturally, they knew in advance what many of the pharaoh’s future decisions would be. But even during the tenure of his reign they would still keep giving him advice. So in actual fact, the pharaoh was merely carrying out somebody else’s will. Rulers in the Orient also had wise-men at their courts and consulted with them. But neither the Egyptian priests nor the Oriental court wise-men, nor the sages of our Vedruss period, ever burdened themselves with affairs of state. Their principal task was that of analysis and reflection. Not affording such an opportunity to our present rulers and parliamentarians

renders them incapable of exerting an effective influence on the processes taking place in society It deprives them of power. This was confirmed to me by a well-known three-term deputy of the legislative assembly, who is also a professor with a Ph.D. in economics. But he confirmed this only after serving his parliamentary terms, when he finally had the opportunity to engage in reflection and analysis. It was confirmed in the scandalous incident reported in the press when a deputy of the present Duma complained to the Constitutional Court that the President’s Deputy Chief of Staff advised a group of State Duma representatives in no uncertain terms not to reason things through but simply to vote as they were told. Incredible as it may seem, the Deputy Chief of Staff, perhaps intuitively, turned out to be the closest of all to the truth. It was far quicker and more efficient for him to make decisions on his own than to have a crowd of people beating their brains out over these decisions—a crowd of people who didn’t have the opportunity to think. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that none of the parties in the State Duma have put forward even a slightly articulate platform that the public can understand. The situation with the ideas and programme already put forward by Anastasia offer the clearest evidence of the inability of the existing system to engage in independent decisionmaking. Anastasia’s programme has been supported by a great many people, and, as studies have shown, the overwhelming majority of these people lead a sober lifestyle and are inclined to reflection. Vast numbers of people in different parts of the country have overcome great challenges in their efforts to implement this programme. On the government level, however, there are people who seem incapable of even seeing what is going on in the public arena. Not only that, but counteraction has begun which has served to highlight precisely the influence foreign powers have been exerting on Russia, and the fact that the country is far from being under the control of its own government. This counteraction, of course, does not come from the ranks of the priests, who plan out programmes for centuries and millennia to come. It is simpler and more specific, and arises from the current system of world order, in which Russia has been assigned to the role of a supplier of raw materials for the West and a market for its substandard merchandise. By ‘the West’ I do not mean the ordinary people of Europe or America. I’m talking about a group of transnational companies and financiers who are

interested in their own profits. As we can all attest for ourselves, over the past decades their plans have been implemented at an alarming rate, while our rulers, to say the least, have done nothing to prevent this implementation. This is another fact clearly testifying to their lack of any kind of true power or authority. The only counteraction to the destruction of the state and the annihilation of a significant part of its population is the programme put forward by Anastasia. “But,” the majority of my readers might reasonably argue, “why do you continue to appeal to those who have no power and are incapable of changing anything?” I shall respond. 1. I am appealing, after all, not only to the authorities, but in the first instance to you, dear readers, in the hope that our combined efforts will enable us to understand the situation we find ourselves in—in the hope that this situation will come out in your interpretation in family chronicles. This is an absolutely vital step. Otherwise not only we, but our children, too, will have an unenviable future to look forward to. 2. I remember Anastasia’s question: “But who is to blame for the lack of acceptance of truth—the one who does not accept the truth or the one from whom he receives it?”3 I think that I am partly to blame for the lack of sufficient governmental support offered to those who have begun to set up their domains. I was not able to express the idea in a language government officials could understand. Sure, we all speak the same Russian language, but different segments of the population use it differently, and attach different interpretations to words. In short, I am unable to express myself in a language government officials understand. The President’s administration, the Government and the Duma are all comprised of people, just like you and me. They too have children, wives and grandchildren, for whom, as would any other parent, they wish a bright future. And if they should prove capable of understanding the situation, they will gain true power and will be in a position to significantly influence the positive processes taking place in our society. But where and how can we find the words capable of putting an end to this “vanity of vanities”?4 We must look! Otherwise new politicians will appear and will come up against the same system blocking their thought. Hence I am appealing to you, my readers, with a request to find together the words which will be understood by the various segments of our society. And so for the umpteenth time, I stand my ground and appeal to our

President and Government. TO THE PRESIDENT AND GOVERNMENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION As supreme ruler of the Russian State, you are undoubtedly more interested than anyone else in the prosperity of our country Like any head of state, you would like to be recognised by the public for having left the brightest of all possible legacies during your tenure in office—namely, laying a foundation for the prosperity of our nation and its people. Similarly, every Russian family desires to shape its life and daily routine in a manner worthy of human existence. And every mother who bears a child dreams about a happy future for her offspring, realising that such a future is possible only when the nation as a whole is heading in a clear and predictably good direction. It is on this premise that you are endeavouring to build our national institutions—our government, our ministries and our regional authorities. Nevertheless, no matter how sincere your desires and the endeavours of our state apparatus may be, our country continues to be plagued by corruption, drug addiction, prostitution, juvenile crime and many other social ills. Our environmental and demographic situation is becoming hopelessly entangled. Families are falling apart. The country’s overall population is in daily decline. We as a people are simply dying out. Everything you are doing is extremely important: the consolidation of the vertical power structure, the reorganisation of the state apparatus, the reform of the military, the doubling of the GDP in the economic sector. All our national indicators are on the plus side, the dynamics are positive, but... the public doesn’t feel it. The people of our country—our neighbours, colleagues and co-workers, relatives, parents and children—are all finding it more and more difficult to understand each other, to find kind and sympathetic words to say to each other, to build their mutual relationships on the basis of honesty decency and trust. Fear for tomorrow, for the future of their children, shows no signs of letting up. Are not these the most important indicators to consider? We see signs of an increasingly active struggle against social ills, but these ills are not abating. Why not? Why do the people’s desires and the President’s endeavours not correspond with what is happening on the ground? Isn’t it time we all faced the truth squarely in the eye and came to the conclusion that we are struggling merely with effects, and not with their underlying causes? Isn’t it time for you to openly admit that our country is

playing host to an ideology foreign to our society, and realise that there are certain definite forces underlying many of our ongoing social ills? As a professional KGB man, you couldn’t help but be aware of this. These forces have made such fools of our peoples that we are beginning to suffer from tunnel vision. Take a simple example: advertising. Both learned psychoanalysts and ordinary people will tell you that mass advertising is nothing but a device which exerts a powerful influence on the human psyche. With the aid of this device people in many countries can be persuaded to consume food products which are harmful to their health, or wear uncomfortable clothing, or vote for certain politicians. And this device, which can exert a colossal influence on masses of people, seems to be in your hands, in the hands of our national government. Isn’t that so? Most definitely not\ It is actually subject to other masters. Attempts to bring resolution to this question immediately give rise to accusations of violating freedom of speech. These accusations come from those who actually have no interest whatsoever in promoting people’s freedom of speech. The mass media are, in fact, in the hands of the world’s financial magnates. And they keep spreading this monstrous lie among whole populations, hiding behind the cynical excuse that it is advertisers who support all TV and all the interesting programmes we “so love to watch”. But, in fact, TV is not paid for by any advertisers. All they do is pass on a portion of the money they collect from the public, which they build into the cost of their products in order to pay for their advertising on TV, radio, public transport and the street. Thus it turns out that the public collectively are the real supporters ofTV operations—every time they purchase substandard consumer goods and food products containing chemical additives. They support mediocre and downright shoddy TV programmes and soap operas, which keep promoting the image of Man as a maniacally preoccupied Neanderthal. The science of imagery, and who governs the country’s ideology. Throughout history national ideologies have been created through devices which exert an influence on human society through images, through the clandestine ancient knowledge of the science of imagery5 Some of our learned chaps might object that there is no such science. But there is. And its existence is determined not by the will of academics, but by the very nature of Man. Man is created to think, and thoughts in turn form images. In recent times we are wont to associate the science of imagery with Ancient Egypt. We learn from history how priests created images to liberate nationstates or seize power over whole peoples. It was the same kind of knowledge that the SS troops attempted to master in

Hitler’s Germany, or the KGB’s Division 13 in Soviet times.5 Certain elements of this science are intuitively employed by modern political technologists in the West, and more recently in our own country Hence the terminology image-making, way of life, way of thinking1 a candidates image. To the political technologists it is quite unimportant what a candidate’s inner aspirations are, what kind of Man he is, whether or not he is good at his job. Money and the mass media help them create an image which will appeal to the public. And what people end up voting for in elections is not so much the Man himself as the image created for him by the political technologists. It won’t be long before we’ll all be voting for cardboard cut-out politicians and a papier-mache president! As for the shaping of images of whole nation-states and their peoples, these are the masterpieces of an incomparably higher-rank species of political technologists. Centuries of human history have borne witness to a host of examples of controlling a nation-state through images. The most salient and obvious example for people today of the work of these top-ranked political technologists—or ‘modern priests’—may be the history of our country and its peoples over the past century. We all know about the downfall of the Soviet Union, one of the mightiest empires in the world. But what preceded the formation of the USSR and what gave rise to its subsequent collapse? Precedent to the formation of the USSR was the creation of an attractive image of a socialist future and then of a communist state. Landowners and manufacturers were cast in the image of bloodsuckers of the proletariat. The tsar still reigned in Russia, and the monarchy seemed unshakeable. Yet at the same time an image was at work which was busy attracting followers, and these in turn found all sorts of ways to bring down the monarchy and create a new state—in the new image. The fall of the USSR was also preceded by the creation of an image—an image of the country as a totalitarian state, along with a discussion on the need to replace it with a new one—a happy, free democratic state along Western lines. The government and leaders of the communist state were cast in the role of bloodthirsty thugs trampling on freedoms and on the people themselves. The socialist order was painted as intolerable and leading nowhere. The image of communists created by theatre and cinema directors, actors and artists, on which whole generations of the populace had been raised, was now summarily shunted aside. But what was there to take its

place? The resulting vacuum began to be filled with images of flourishing businessmen, gangsters, prostitutes and Hollywood starlets. Our young people strove to imitate their habits and morals. There is no disputing the fact that material wealth is fast becoming the criterion by which prosperity is measured. Who attains it and how—that doesn’t enter into the picture. The need to build a developed democratic state has been proclaimed to all, but not a word has been (or is being) said about the insurmountable problems in other ‘democratic’ countries—drug addiction, colossal corruption, environmental degradation, mental depression, decline in birth-rate and a whole lot else besides. Women naturally refuse to have children when they see no future for their offspring. Never mind that people in democratic countries have no clear picture of their own future—our modern ‘priests’ find it necessary to present democracy in its present form as the only acceptable order for the structuring of human society. Why? Because the conditions of democracy as we know it make it the easiest system to control. It is all too easy to hide behind freedom of speech, freedom of business, freedom of choice and meanwhile throw the public a black lie. And this is done not by happenstance, but deliberately and with considerable forethought. Whatever image you latch on to, you yourself will become. These political technologists know what will happen next with the whole population. It’s not a difficult task to determine who’s behind the disasters happening in Russia. All one has to do is track where the country’s precious human and financial resources are being siphoned off to each time. The huge flood of emigration which fled Russia following the 1917 revolution took with it not only a significant amount of capital along with historical treasures and traditions, but, most importantly, human resources. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, a combination of reforms and a tempting image of prosperous, civilised countries siphoned off (and continues to siphon off) our financial and intellectual resources. The saddest part is that the latest image of our state is being summoned in the interests of annihilating the whole country and the peoples living therein. No military intervention is required at all. A more significant force than military weaponry is at work here. An image is at work. A combination of factors already perceptible to analysts has been put into operation. Quite a simple combination at that. Let’s try to reason it through. What are we building today? Where are we heading to? The political

technologists tell us they are building a democratic state on the Western model. And so, once it is built, we shall all be rich and happy. “But,” millions of our fellow-citizens quite reasonably argue, “if there already exist on the Earth developed states that are both democratic and happy, then wouldn’t it be easier simply to go and live there now?” And millions have left—and continue to leave—for Germany, Israel and America, putting their intellectual and financial capital at the disposal of these countries. And they become slaves there. The image is working! But what about those left behind in Russia? What are they to do? “Build a developed democratic state and become rich,” says the image. But what can a traffic cop, say, do to build such a state? Or a sales clerk in a store? Or a civil servant in an administrative office? That’s not clear to many people. Neither is it clear how one is supposed to become rich on a salary of three to five thousand roubles a month. But quite a number, after all, have somehow managed to wangle their way through. They drive around in expensive cars, build themselves luxury mansions and holiday at fancy resorts. Somehow they’ve wangled their way through... And now the whole country is beginning to follow their example. Sales clerks and customers, traffic cops and office In 2005 (when this book was written) this represented approximately US$ioo-i75, respectively, at the then current exchange rate—or US$200-350 in buying power. administrators, army officers and private soldiers, teachers and students. But those who know the science of imagery merely scoff at such efforts. “Come on,” they say, “catch a few scapegoats among the officers’ ranks. Then you can create a security service within the security service.” Here we are fighting not against causes, but against effects. The image has already done its work. It is capable of entering unhindered into the minds of politicians and generals, high-ranking government officials and ordinary people. Because it is image, it knows neither border guards nor closed office doors. It lures young girls from isolated Russian villages to faraway lands with its promises of a happy life, and then forces them to work as prostitutes in Cyprus, Israel or New York. For the sake of this promise of a happy life, officials are ready to take bribes and policemen to go into cahoots with criminals. This image has tremendous energy. In the meantime, all our politicians can do is keep mouthing over and over hackneyed phrases like developed democratic countries, the civilised West, thereby serving to reinforce the image that is so destructive to our country.

People are aware there’s something wrong with the country, and so they understand when you, Vladimir Vladimirovich,6 attempt to impose order, but how to accomplish this? Just consolidating your hold on power is not enough. In doing this you are strengthening not just your own power, but the power of the images too. Thousands of government officials now have more power, but being under the influence of the image, they will unwittingly act in the interests of the image, i.e., in the interests of the image’s creators. But the creators have already decided that Russia’s fate is sealed. Their actions have become unbridled and brazenly bold. Specially trained personnel have been sent to Russia for the purpose of strengthening the creators’ power by supporting an image which can only destroy the country. I can officially state that right at this moment specially trained people are operating on Russian territory— people whose job it is to keep track of, and correct where necessary, the ideological component of the state. I have a feeling you, Mr President, are aware of this, too. Let us give some thought as to why there have been so few positive images over the past few years in our nation’s literature, film and TV programmes —images capable of inspiring people, setting a pattern to follow and helping build a marvellous future for their children. We still remember and live by those images, but our children? We are assured that this is the demand of the majority, that everybody wants to watch only Hollywood starlets, gangster showdowns and sensational reports on bloody happenings. Nonsense! That’s not what people want! We are told: if you don’t want it, then don’t watch—if you don’t like it, don’t listen. That is called freedom of choice. But that’s not quite the way it is. Or, rather, that’s not the way it is at all. There is no choice here! Not for children, not for adults and certainly not for senior citizens. And unless you happen to be cold-hearted, cynical and soulless, you’ll discover the road to the promised prosperity is blocked. And there is no other road. Isn’t that the case all around you? Or all around us? All this depravity is being deliberately foisted upon us. Special covert selection mechanisms were put in place long ago. Any poets, innovative educators, writers and directors who have dared create positive images for Russia are cruelly persecuted. Everything is simply closed to them. This is partly the work, too, of Western spy agencies that claim to be fighting sectarianism. You can hear such declarations coming from the mouths not just of Russian special-service agents, but from social and political activists as well, including the highest officials of the Russian President’s administration—your administration. For example, Mr Surkov,10

your Deputy Chief of Staff, said during a newspaper interview: 10

Vladislav Turevich Surkov (1964-)—the Russian President’s Deputy Chief of Staff since 1999. During the previous decade and a half Surkov held executive positions with various Russian financial institutions and media organisations. A secret war is being waged against Russia by circles in America, Europe and the Orient, who still regard our country as a potential enem. They consider themselves to have rendered a service in fostering the virtually bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union, and now they are attempting to capitalise on their success. Their goal is none other than the destruction of Russia and the filling of its vast spaces with a multitude of petty quasistates. Such a statement is entirely plausible, even if just because the forces that overthrew the USSR still exist and, quite naturally, not satisfied with having achieved victory at one stage, they will definitely continue with a stepped-up offensive. And it is especially important here not just to state facts but to understand the mechanism by which the destructive influence operates. We already know that the collapse of the USSR was brought about not through armed invasion but as the result of an ideological manipulation of our people. Ideology—that is the principal means of either annihilating or reinforcing any nation-state. But any ideology can be used to influence masses of people if it has a well-built and efficient operating structure. It exists and it is not ours. It is not our images that are acting through it. But where has our own structure disappeared to? We destroyed it! In the USSR, apart from its ideological institutions and broadcast centres, the ideological departments of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the Ministry of Culture and the press, there was a huge network including so-called ‘Palaces of Culture’ and ‘Houses of Culture’,7 along with urban and rural district activity clubs. Such institutions afforded the opportunity for millions of young Soviet citizens to engage in amateur artistic and performance circles, including the holding of lectures and meetings, as well as the opportunity for the accepted state ideol-ogy to get through and be explained to the masses. At the beginning ofperestroika, when the ideology changed, this network of institutions was liquidated—their financing was cut off. It is difficult to imagine that a driver motoring along the highway who suddenly realises he is heading in the wrong direction, instead of turning

around and heading the right way, begins to dismantle his car on the spot. But something like that is what has happened in our country. When the decision was taken in society (not without the aid of certain forces, of course) that we were heading in the wrong direction, instead of turning around and using existing institutions, they were simply dismantled. And what was there to take their place? It was proposed to hand over the basic task of spiritually educating the population, especially the youth, to Russia’s Orthodox Church. However, more and more testimonies are indicating that, first and foremost, it is necessary to educate the majority of the clergy itself. As an institution of spirituality, Russia’s Orthodox Church was catastrophic in its failure to justify the hopes placed in it. Why? Simply because, through the help of the State, it only took a few years to open twenty thousand churches, while it requires centuries and a host of strict conditions to educate twenty thousand highly spiritual clerics who are truly capable of comforting and educating other people. And not the kind of conditions as when the state pours forth grants and favours, which only corrupt and attract opportunists and vagabonds. In that scenario the winners are not those pastors who are rich in spirit but those who are more devious and position themselves closer to the trough. It is not the congregation led by a spiritually minded prior that comes out on top, but the one that manages to obtain financing. After all, the process of attracting parishioners and raising their level of spirituality is a lengthy one—it can drag on for years. So the village priest is obliged to mend his own frock, unable to afford a new one, while his urban counterpart drives around in an expensive foreign car. This acquisitiveness and covetousness already plaguing the clerics of Russia’s Orthodox Church was brought up during a speech at the annual meeting of the Moscow Diocese in the Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour12 on 15 December 2004 by Alexei II,8 the Holy Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias, when he said: I_

Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour (Russian: Kafedral’nyj sobornyj khram Khrista Spasitelia)—the seat of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. The original church, built in the early part of the nineteenth century to commemorate deliverance from Napoleon’s armies during the War of 1812, was blown up on Stalin’s orders in 1931. After World War II the site was used to construct the world’s largest swimming pool. The cathedral was reconstructed on the site in the mid-1990s, following the collapse of the communist regime.

Today we are obliged to confront a series of negative phenomena— including the general static state of the church’s activity, the absence of dynamics in congregational life, the low attendance by worshippers at temple services and the lack of interest in religion on the part of the rising generation. The growing commercialisation of many aspects of congregational life is an alarming indicator of the dying out of the Orthodox consciousness, spiritual blindness and the disparagement of ecclesiasticism. Material self-interest all too often comes to the fore, overshadowing and stamping out everything living and spiritual. All too often temples deal in ‘church services’ as though they were commercial firms. Nothing pushes people away from the faith as much as the selfishness of priests and others who serve in the temples. It is with good reason that covetousness is termed a hateful, murderous passion and the only treason in respect to God—in other words, a hellish sin. The Patriarch outlawed taking payment for performing church sacraments— the rituals of communion, marriage, last rites and burial services—as well as commercialising the ‘services’ of the Church. But will clerics heed the ban imposed by the supreme church hierarchy, if they already transgress a higher law—the commandments of God? 8 Russia’s Orthodox Church—but is it Russia’s? Apart from everything else, Western spy agencies have exerted what may be the strongest and most destructive influence on Russia’s Orthodox Church (ROC).14 And this could have been foreseen, of course, if someone had only been assigned to foresee it. We know that major shifts in our country are always preceded by an ideological makeover. Could the departments of Western spy agencies responsible for the transformations in Russia required by their masters leave untouched such an important institution as ROC? Of course not! Otherwise their work would not be professional. Besides, the conditions in Russia at the time offered more than fertile ground for ideological diversion. Occupied with their own reorganisation, our spy agencies, to put it mildly, were busy with their internal ‘settling of accounts’, which I believe is still going on. It is impossible to know about every single operation perpetrated by a Western spy agency through ROC structures. But one in particular has struck a chord in society as a whole. Millions of Russia’s citizens, including the Church’s own clerics, have felt and continue to feel its destructive consequences. I’m talking here about the agency formed under the aegis of ROC which labels as ‘sects’ a wide range of secular and religious organisations, thus provoking negative reactions to ROC on their part.

^Russia’s Orthodox Church (Russian: Rossmkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov) —traditionally known as the Russian (Russkaya) Orthodox Church. Note that the author deliberately uses the word Rossmkaya in this phrase, emphasising its association with Russia (Rossiya) or the Russian Federation (Rossiiskaya Federatsiya) as a political entity, rather than Russkaya, which is used more in reference to the Russian people, language and culture. See also Book 7, especially footnote 11 in Chapter 15: “Opposition”, as well as footnote 3 in Chapter 20: “Pagans”. These ‘anti-sectarians’ have been acting in the name of the Church and even, as they claim, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexei II. In response to their actions people who formerly maintained a tolerant attitude toward the Church or even attended services as baptised members, have now simply torn off the crosses they used to wear around their necks. One more ploy of the ‘anti-sectarians’: in working to expose their straw-man ‘sects’, they virtually criticised and brought shame upon Russia’s Orthodox Church itself, dealing it a serious blow. After that, they decided to take control of the higher organs of state power in the Russian Federation. Having accepted the idea of a marvellous future for Russia (as shown in these books) with their heart and soul, people in various parts of Russia have turned (and continue to turn) to local administrations, asking them to grant them plots of land for the setting up of family domains. And, what is truly amazing, people for the first time are not asking for favours, or salary or pension supplements, but simply a small piece of their country’s natural landscape where they can create their own living (and not just survival) conditions. It would seem that this impulse which has arisen among the public is something that ought to be welcomed with open arms. And this impulse is no fly-by-night whim, but a lasting, well-thought-through desire, as the past four years will attest. This idea has encompassed various segments of the population: school pupils, scholars and entrepreneurs, teachers, doctors and pensioners, soldiers and politicians, artists, poets and writers—including academicians,9 governors and the wives of presidents of former Soviet republics. These people can help not only in solving many of the socio-economic problems our country is facing, but also in making drastic improvements in our country’s demographic situation, unemployment rate and national health, as well as in securing safe food supplies. But the main thing is to harness the mighty force of the people themselves, who, in creating their own Space, will strengthen their beloved country and nation-state which has afforded them the opportunity to do so.

Evidently, however, there is someone who is greatly displeased by these positive aspirations which have emerged in the Russian people. Occupiers in action Certain government agencies at the regional (and sometimes even local) level have been advised to treat the readers of my books as sectarians and terrorists, and, consequently, to counteract any initiative they may undertake, especially those wishing to set up their own family domains in rural areas. The mass media were ordered, under threat of sacking journalists, not to report on these initiatives. Or if there were any reference, it had to describe them as part of the ‘loony fringe’, calling everybody to go to the forest, back into the past etc. People working in the cultural sector were called upon to take countermeasures against anything connected with the books or the ideas set forth therein. Communications from readers clearly point to the activities of some sort of organisation operating on our national territory through agents in state and ecclesiastical structures and carrying out destructive policies. And don’t just take my word for it. This is confirmed by professional researchers who have familiarised themselves with a significant body of collected materials. A special term has even surfaced: ‘the Anastasia cult’. And to whom or to what does this term specifically refer? To me as a writer? To my Anastasia book? To the book’s heroine, whose name is Anastasia? To the millions of readers of these books? Or to their efforts to implement Anastasia’s idea about a marvellous and prosperous Russia? As it turns out, all of the above. It is a sad sight indeed to see both foreign and home-grown clerics—who are definitely not of any Christian faith—occupying the Orthodox Church and exerting their influence on state officials. Christianity for them is only a convenient cover. Their actions show clearly that they are far removed from any Christian morality. Their methods are ‘old hat’—the same methods of falsehood and violence that were used to destroy the culture of Ancient Rus’ in favour of a new ideology foreign to the people. I have written about this in my books.16 Right off they began accusing me of paganism. But what kind of an ‘accusation’ is that? It’s tantamount to accusing me of the desire to know the history of my country and the culture of my forebears. There is, however, some very happy, encouraging news. Life has begun more and more often to come out with situations where their unseemly actions are exposed as if by an invisible ray of light. It puts them, one might say, in a rather funny predicament. Judge for yourselves. See, for example, Book 7, Chapter 20: “Pagans”, especially footnotes 3 & 4.

1 Ringing Cedars of Russia (Russian: Zveniashchie Kedry RossII)— This was the original Russian title of the Ringing Cedars (or Anastasia) series. 2 the almanac— see footnote 1 in Book 7, Chapter 28: “To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series”. 'Duma— the lower house of the Russian parliament (see next chapter). 3 Quoted from Book 2, Chapter 7: “Who’s to blame?”. 4 Vanity of vanities—a quote from Ecclesiastes 1: 2. 5 Division 13— designating the unit of the KGB responsible for covert operations, including sabotage, assassination and even terrorism. 1

way of life, way of thinking—both these terms in Russian contain the word for ‘image’ (obraz). 6 Vladimir Vladimirovich—President Putin’s first name and patronymic. 7 Palaces of Culture, Houses of Culture (Russian: Dvortsy kuVtury, Domd kul’tury)— These functioned along the lines of community centres, including concert halls and recreation centres, to provide ideologically approved entertainment and recreational facilities for the public in Soviet times. 8 Alexei II (also spelt in English: Alexius II)—the spiritual head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Born Alexei Mikhailovich Ridiger in 1929 in Estonia, in 1990 Alexei II was chosen Patriarch of Moscow and of All the Russias (.Patriarkh Moskovsky 1 vseyaRusi). 9 academicians—members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (a very high rank indeed).

CHAPTER TEN

The Book of Kin and A Family Chronicle In 2002 Dilya Publishers1 issued the next book in the Ringing Cedars Series entitled Rodovaya kniga (The Book of Kin), in which it advised its readers: Our publishing house has taken the idea of a ‘Book of Kin’ to heart. As we were getting this book ready for press, we decided to set at once about publishing a blank ‘Book of Kin’ for you to fill in and thereby keep a record of your own family chronicle. Not long after Dilya published this Family Chronicle, in 2003 the Russky Dom1 2 publishing house put out a book under the title Semeinaya letopis (A family chronicle). One of its compilers was Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov.3 At the front of the book were featured guest forewords by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Alexei II,4 Patriarch of Moscow and of All the Russias. A family chronicle is not just a simple story about a few human destinies, or even about a whole family. It tells the story of a whole nation. The destiny of Russia is the history of families over successive generations. Such knowledge is indispensable for each citizen of Russia to become aware of his roots and his role in the history of our great Motherland. — Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of Russia The atmosphere of the family and home, relations with one’s relations, memories of ones forebears and the raising of one’s descendants—all this has tremendous implications for the moral strengthening of the individual and, consequently, of the nation. It is no coincidence that it is said among many different peoples that love for one’s Motherland begins at home. — Alexei II, Patriarch of Moscow and of All the Russias. The first one to put forward this idea was Anastasia:5 6 Just a few days will go by, and millions of fathers and mothers in many a land will be writing their Book of Kin, filling in its pages with their own hand. There will be a vast multitude of them—these Books of Kin. And all of them will contain the truths which begin in the heart, for their children. There will be no room in these books for artifice or guise. Before them all the lies of history will fall.

— Anastasia We shan’t go into details as to how Russky Dom followed the example of Dilya or who was responsible. The important thing is the implementation of the idea itself. Now we can see that this idea has the support of the President, the Patriarch and the Chairman of the State Duma,7 who presented copies of A Family Chronicle to schoolchildren on Knowledge Day8 Now what are the poor slanderers to do? Include the President, the Patriarch and the Chairman of the State Duma in their list of sectarians? Along with the former President of Ukraine, who signed a decree regarding family farms, granting Ukrainians not one, but two hectares of land each? And we must not forget Governor Ayatskov,9 who during an interview on NTV10 said of Anastasia’s followers: “The future of the country lies with them.” He has also encouraged his civil service staff to acquire land and set up their own family domains. Nor Governor Tuleev11 12 of the Kemerovo Region, who has granted land for a settlement. Nor the Supreme Mufti of Russia, Talgat Tajuddin,11 who responded to a question by a Sotvorenie Studios correspondent—as to what he thought of the Ringing Cedars Series—as follows: I love these books. I read them and get a great deal out of them. I feel that reading these books helps strengthen Man’s faith in God. After all, we need to nourish our faith in God day by da. But for that it is not only our eyes that must be open—more importantly, our heart must be open. Besides, our heart has been given to us for to love, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Megre’s books help us love God. He conveys this truth to people through the words of Anastasia. Perhaps theologians may have some reservations. Perhaps someone will call it just a hypothesis, but faith in God—and especially love for God—is something that starts growing bit by bit, and afterward becomes immeasurable. And long before we get to the next world, right here in this world Man can become happy and the Ringing Cedars Series helps us do this. On the eve of these events, evidently under pressure of the machinations and fear-mongering of these same ‘anti-sectarians’, one Orthodox archbishop (I shall not give his name, so as not to immortalise him) signed a letter threatening to excommunicate from the Church anyone who reads or distributes the Ringing Cedars books. This would mean that the archbishop would ‘excommunicate’ the Patriarch himself, who has supported the idea in creating A Family Chronicle, containing his and the President’s signed forewords. Even if the Patriarch

has never even held any of my books in his hands, that’s not the point—it’s not the paper with the printed text of the books, after all, that’s important, but the ideas set forth in them. Now that one of the ideas has been approved, I am convinced that it won’t be long before others will be granted official State support. But in the meantime... So perhaps it is time we drew the attention of our law-enforcement agencies to just who these so-called ‘anti-sectarians’ really are. By what methods or machinations do they operate, hiding so conveniently beneath the vaulted ceilings of Russia’s Orthodox Church? Evidently, they’re not there for prayers! The fomenting of interreligious discord, the discrediting of government agencies—that’s what they’re really up to. And it would be foolish to even suppose that some group of ‘anti-sectarians’ is that strongly concerned about my personal spiritual development. Their actions, rather, are testimony to their carrying out orders to stop any positive transformations from taking place in Russia. An illustration of their ideologically based diversionary tactics may be seen in the following example as well. The Jewish question Recently, for the umpteenth time already over the past millennium, passions have been inflamed over the ‘Jewish question’. There has been more and more talk about the spread in both Europe and Russia of extremist views, including anti-Semitism. The European Jewish Congress has linked this situation with the growth of Muslim populations in European countries, which are, they say, aggressively anti-Jewish. But there are many concrete historical examples testifying to the fact that aggression can be deliberately provoked. And this is now actively being pursued by certain circles. The provokers may even come from the ranks of the Jews themselves. One has the impression that some kind of order has been received regarding the organisation of pogroms. Jewish pogroms are very profitable to someone, and I’m talking about financial profit. Extremist organisations do not derive any financial benefit from pogroms—rather, they suffer losses. But these pogroms offer a palpable benefit to countries where Jewish members of the financial oligarchy flee to legalise their multibillion-dollar incomes and obtain international immunity from prosecution. And for the sake of such financial benefit they are ready to subject to abuse ordinary and utterly harmless Jews living on Russian territor. This has happened over and over again in the annals of the long-suffering Jewish people.

What’s the point of a pogrom? The logic is simple. Public opinion is turning against the oligarchs, the financial magnates, as never before. According to government statistics, approximately 70% of Russia’s population believe that they should be immediately censured and dispossessed. Acting on the basis of law, the President, the Government and the Russian Prosecutor’s Office are attempting to investigate the activity of a number of oligarchs. They have declared war on corruption and it appears as though over the next four years the oligarchs may indeed be obliged to forfeit their financial holdings. Given the situation, they are naturally trying to get out of the country. But then there is the problem of how to legalise their transfer of capital to the West. The surest way is to provoke a kind of pogrom that will shock the world community. It’s easy to see what happens next. The financial magnates simply turn up in one of the Western countries while these pogroms are going on and declare themselves political refugees. Naturally this provides them with not only political asylum but also a legalisation of their financial holdings, even while they may still maintain at least partial control over resources and factories back home through dummy CEOs or trusted associates. And herein lies an important message for all Russian citizens, especially those organisations which call themselves patriotic. Don’t ever give in to provocation or stoop to the level of organising pogroms against synagogues. You will only be acting out somebody else’s script. It would be wrong to accuse all Jews of machinations and unseemly acts. Just like Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, Jews come in all stripes and colours. I offer the following as proof. I was once the featured speaker at a readers’ conference in Kazan,12 where the audience was comprised of different nationalities, including many Muslims. During my remarks I read a chapter from a book by the Jewish writer and poet Efim Kushner13 entitled Beskrovnaya revoliutsiya (A bloodless revolution). Before reading from it, I said that this was a Jewish writer living in Israel but writing about Russia, about her future. When I had finished reading the chapter, the hall broke into thunderous applause. Muslims, too, applauded this Jewish writer and poet. Why? How did it happen that supposedly aggressive Muslims offered their sincere applause to a Jewish writer? I_

Kazan,—capital of the Republic of Tatarstan (within the Russian Federation), about 1,000 km east of Moscow. The Republic has a predominantly Muslim population.

13

Efim Kushner (1940-)—Jewish poet and writer, who emigrated to Israel in 1990. The book mentioned was published in 2003 (it appeared in a Bulgarian translation in 2006) and includes favourable comments on the ideas set forth in the Ringing Cedars Series. Another reference to Kushner maybe found in footnote 14 in Book 4, Translator’s and Editor’s Afterword: “Hope for the world”. It happened because in his book he speaks about the marvellous future of Russia, linking it to the ideas outlined in the Ringing Cedars Series. He calls upon the Russian government to adopt a programme based on these ideas. I can tell you right off that he is not the only Jew who accepts and supports Anastasia’s concept set forth in the books. In Israel there is a whole club of readers who have been drawn to the books about this Siberian recluse. Israelis are composing songs in both Russian and Hebrew about the characters in the series. I have the distinct impression that in the final analysis, it will be the Jews who take the lead in putting the ideas into practice, and will draw peoples of many lands along in their wake. I can at least tell you that I have been informed that right there in Israel significant funds have been set aside for the construction of environmentally clean settlements. “Oh, those connivers!” people will say later on. “See, they’re stealing the Russian idea out from under us!” Pardon me, but they are not stealing anything from us. In fact, they are saving this idea! Will you kindly tell me who is preventing the Russian authorities from implementing the ideas in the books? After all, for the past five years, practically, it is these same authorities that have been targeted with a large number of individual and collective letters by Russians living in the Commonwealth of Independent States and elsewhere in the world. It is truly a comical situation that has developed. A host of researchers keep talking about the birth of a ‘national idea’ among the Russian people. But the way things are turning out here, it looks as though it will have its first implementation in Israel! Who’s to blame? Overall, every discussion on the Jewish question so far, at least those in the publications I have access to, seems pretty primitive. Almost all of them boil down to a routine statement of the facts: “Jews have taken over the press in various countries.” “Pretty much all the TV networks are in Jewish hands.” “Most cash flow is controlled by Jews.” All this is no doubt true, including here in Russia toda. But this is simply a statement of fact and nothing more. It is far more important to explain why situations like this have developed in various countries, with an enviable

consistency, over a period of centuries. I can tell you the following right off. It is simply that the Jews are obliged to do this, and we are obliged to fall into line with them, including on the legislative level. Judge for yourselves: the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted a law recognising four ‘basic’ religions, two of which are Christianity and Judaism. According to Christianity, the Christian is the ‘slave’13 of God. Wealth is not welcomed. In St. Petersburg, where I am writing these lines, I can see from my hotel window the huge Orthodox Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin of Vladimir, on the facade of which is written in large, gold lettering: Hear, Our Lady, the prayer of thy slave.14 According to Judaism, the Jew is the chosen one of God; to him belong wealth and lands, and usury15 is welcomed. Everybody knows what a huge influence religions exercise on Man’s mentality, character development and way of life. So let us be consistent in the logic of our actions. The highest legislative organ of our land has accepted these two concepts, at the same time designating who is to be slave and who is to be ruler. And, being the law-abiding citizens that we are, let us not keep deceiving each other, but let us accept as a given, according to the law adopted by our government, that the Jews have authority over us. Now there are some that will not be satisfied with such a position. Some will even consider such a statement absurd. But let us not close our eyes to the actualities of life. Let us see clearly the causes of what is going on, or we shall keep on tasting the consequences with an unyielding regularity. If someone is unhappy over the current situation, then by all means let us work together to find an alternative. The solution might be an idea acceptable with equal enthusiasm to Muslims, Christians, Jews and members of other faiths. Such an idea exists. Not only will it fix the situation, but it holds the future in its hands. There are specific facts and life situations that attest to this. Let’s create In an address to the Federal Assembly,17 the President of the Russian Federation set a goal of doubling the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) within ten years. Well, a goal is a goal. And measures must be taken

to reach it. The first step is to inspire the people with a vision. It is the people, after all, who must work to double GDP indicators. And what has been happening since this goal was set by the highest official in the current government? Incredible events began to take place. Instead of at least making an attempt at realising the goal, some highly placed officials began talking about how unfeasible its implementation was, while others insisted it still must be attained. And that’s it! Nothing more. These discussions have wasted precious time: the year 2004 ended miserably, with a GDP growth of a mere 6.4%. Right from the start this fascinating subtext as to whether the goal was feasible or not ran throughout the whole treatment of the subject by the press. But, again, with not even a single attempt at implementation. This situation points to the fact that the Russian authorities are heading for a state of utter helplessness. And it makes no difference here whether the officials in question are elected or unelected, they will find any excuse they can not to carry out the directive. Imagine how it would be if a commander-in-chief gave the order to prepare to attack, and his generals and colonels, instead of working out the plan of attack, began to discuss whether an attack was feasible or not. In that case defeat would be an inevitability, which is exactly what has happened. But could it be possible that the goal set by the President was really preposterous? We can’t judge until we try to figure 16 it out for ourselves. However, I’ll jump ahead of myself and say: it is feasible! I can just see my readers’ dumbfounded reaction: what’s all this about Russia’s Orthodox Church, ‘anti-sectarians’, Western intelligence services and the goal set by the President for doubling Russia’s GDP? Be patient. There is a very close mutual connection here. Think who would benefit by a doubling of Russia’s GDP. Russia herself, of course. Who would lose by it? Naturally, the West, which looks upon Russia merely as an overflow market for its substandard merchandise. And Western intelligence services, it seems, have once again had the upper hand (as usual), putting down the Russian President and his officials, ridiculing them even as the aforementioned goal was being set. But let’s go step by step. In order to double the overall GDP, it is necessary to first identify those economic sectors where an increase in output is essential, as well as those

where such an increase would be undesirable—the production of tobacco, wine and spirits, for example (Russia’s already drowning in her own booze and choking on her own tobacco smoke). You wouldn’t want to double the output of armaments, or build new casinos, or double the outflow of raw materials from the country. Which means that the remaining sectors of the economy are faced with the task of not just doubling but tripling or even quadrupling their output. These sectors have not yet been identified and, consequently, no specific goal has ever been suggested to them. Well, some may object, if we’re not sure we can double our GDP or not, how can we even think in terms of quadrupling? An impossible task! But I say it is possible! It is possible, and not only that, but it requires no additional capital investment. Take agriculture, for example, where production has been cutting back year after year, to the point where it has already begun to threaten national security It is the talk of politicians, Duma deputies and a number of government officials. But they’re not talking in the wind. In the case of some food categories, imports already account for up to 40% of the market. This is already a threat to our national securit. And what awaits us after that? I’ll tell you. By 2005 our country’s rural population is expected to shrink by 25%, which will exacerbate the problem even further. More specifically, it will make the country completely dependent on external sources—and then the government will be forced to pay for food not just with natural resources, but through sales of missiles, just to avoid being utterly torn to pieces by the population at large. This means a sea-change is required in the whole agriculture industry: it must double or even triple its production. However, this will never happen using traditional methods, where all proposals simply come down to nothing more than a requirement for additional subsidies. And it is not clear just who these subsidies are to be directed to, given that the able-bodied rural population keeps significantly decreasing in numbers. And if that be the case, not even the most state-of-the-art equipment or super-technology is going to help. There will simply be nobody left to work with it. Which means that our goal is first and foremost to have able-bodied people showing up in the countryside. Millions of them. Tens of millions. Not only that, but they must be people with a desire to reach out and touch the ground with love. If they don’t show up, there’s no point in talking about anything else.

To hear some officials tell it, however, getting people to show up like that would be nothing short of a miracle. It is not something they believe in. They haven’t believed in it even when it’s happened. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the miracle has happened! All thanks to one individual—the Siberian recluse named Anastasia. Maybe her words seem incredible and fantasaical to some, but they are right on. They have given birth to an enduring impulsion in people’s hearts and souls. Tens of thousands of people in various parts of the country have been wanting to chart their life-course in a rural setting—to set up their domains there and move in. The numbers of applicants are rising with each passing year. They are setting up their own regional action groups and demanding: GIVE US LAND! We are ready to take care of it. These people have united in a non-governmental organisation, which was founded at a conference in the city of Vladimir on 5 June 2004—an event which showed, for the first time in post-Soviet Russia, the rise of a popular force unparalleled in modern times. The hall was filled to capacity, as many came who were not registered delegates but simply wanted to listen and tune in to what was happening. By a vote taken at the conference, a people’s movement was set up under the name Ringing Cedars of Russia, with the basic aim of supporting the idea of kin’s domains. It was truly a people’s movement, opposed to neither the government nor any political party Rather, it aimed to reach out to all with the simple message: Let’s create. Thus a people’s movement was born with a clear and distinct programme, easily comprehensible to and solidly supported by the public. What benefit would accrue to the State of Russia by carrying out just one platform of this programme? Outwardly, it is a very simple platform, focusing on a single hectare of land, but envisaging the following wideranging results: 0

a significant improvement in the environmental situation;

• restoration of soil fertility; • a solution to the question of providing high-quality produce for the country’s population; • a significant (twofold or threefold) increase in wages across all sectors of the economy without risk of inflation;

• an immediate improvement in the demographic situation and in the general health of the population, including its rejuvenation; 0

a solution to the question of the nation’s defence preparedness;

• the termination of capital outflow along with, by contrast, a capital inflow into Russia; the return of her intellectual resources; 0

a significant reduction in (over the next few years) and eventual extirpation of: bribery, corruption, gangsterism and terrorism; • a coming together of neighbouring countries17 along with those of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and the three Baltic states) into a single powerful union; • cessation of the arms race and close co-operation among Russia, the USA and Eastern Moslem states. These points have been worked out not just by me, but also by a number of students in their graduating essays—e.g., the essay by the budding jurist Tatiana Borodina.18 They are also talked about in scholarly publications (e.g., by Professor Viktor Yakovlevich Medikov,20 a three-term deputy of the legislative assembly who holds a doctorate in economics). There are a number of privately published brochures on the topic, written by professional researchers as well as ordinary people. 20

Viktor Yakovlevich Medikov—a metallurgist and professor of economics, former Vice-Rector of the Siberian Metallurgical Institute, who served as a deputy both in the Communist ‘Supreme Soviet’ and in the first two terms of the post-Communist Duma. He gave the opening address at the June 2004 conference. For other references to Dr Medikov, please see the Editor’s Afterword to Book 1 and Book 7, Chapter 28: “To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series”. I shall attempt to jot down a few words of explanation in justification of some of these points. So, let us suppose that our country has decided to implement the programme proposed by Anastasia: Every willingfamily is offered free of charge one hectare of land for lifetime use with the right of inheritance for thepurposes of establishing on it their own kin’s domain. The produce grown on the domain, as well as the domain itself, is not subject to any form of taxation. The adoption of this programme will lead to the following results: • A significant improvement in the environmental situation. Practice has shown that people who have received land for a kin’s domain first of all set

about planting wild-growing trees, at an average of up to 200 trees per family, along with an average of 2,000 shrubs, hedges and berry bushes and 50 fruitbearing trees. Even using the most conservative estimates, researchers predict that the adoption of such a programme on a national level, if correctly implemented, will lead, right in its earliest stages, to about ten million Russian families setting up their own kin’s domains. This means that even in the first year or two following the adoption of the programme, and without any additional subsidies, two billion wild-growing trees will have been planted, 20 billion shrubs and approximately 500 million fruit-bearing trees. And that is just the beginning. • Restoration of soil fertility. As can be seen from practice, the first thing people do when they are granted land, not on a short-term lease but for their lifetime use, is to put their efforts into soil restoration. Not only that, but they are doing this not just by the application of organic fertilisers, but also by a more natural method, namely, the sowing of soil-building crops during the early years. • A solution to the question of providing high-quality produce for the country's population. You may remember the ‘struggle for the harvest’19 back in Soviet times—how schoolchildren, students and industrial employees were transported out to collective and state-owned farms20 to help bring in the harvest. I myself took part in these large-scale operations, weeding fields and gathering onions at a suburban state-owned farm. However, there was still no abundance of high-quality produce in the country. Today’s older generations, of course, remember how the potatoes sold in stores would be half-rotted, not to mention the most undesirablelooking vegetables. Then came the dacha movement.23 They began to allot people 600 square metres of land. And a miracle happened. Everyone is aware of the statistics. Ordinary people—all by themselves, without any support from government ministries or agencies—have provided 80% of the vegetables produced in Russia. (Unfortunately, all sorts of complications are being introduced these days, including higher travel fares, taxes on land plots, increased electricity rates.) And all this on just 600 square metres, where it is impossible to create any kind of economically viable enterprise or to plant tall trees which enrich the soil, or to put in water ponds and so forth. And all this carried out by people without sufficient knowledge or experience, working just on weekends and holidays.

A hectare of land will allow the setting up of a more economically viable enterprise. With the right kind of organisation, there will be a thirtyfold decrease in the workload per square metre. Not all at once, mind you, but I do emphasise: 3The term dacha (originally from the verb davat’= to give/grant), dates back to at least the eleventh century. It has had a variety of meanings, including country residences of the Russian cultural and political elite. From the 1940s on, with the emergence and rapid growth of food gardening by the urban population, the term has been used more and more to denote a country garden plot belonging to a city-dweller, usually together with a small cottage. The dacha movement referred to here arose during the Second World War, when the Soviet government began to allot small plots of land for food production to combat war-time food shortages, and has since grown to include approximately 20 million families. For further information, please see Book x (especially the Translator’s Preface) and Book 2 (notably Chapter 9: “Dachnik Day and an All-Earth holiday!”). it has to be set up properl. That given, both existing practice and theoretical calculations confirm that implementing the proposed programme will fully guarantee the country a sufficient food supply for all its citizens bar none. Now a word about quality. It goes without saying that someone growing agricultural produce to be used by his own family will not add any poisonous chemicals or chemical fertilisers to the soil. He will not grow any mutant produce. All this crap is being imported into our country and bought up by the public for no other reason than insufficient production here at home. Once a sufficient quantity level is reached, quality becomes the number one concern. I hope I’ve made myself clear? • A significant (twofold or threefold) increase in wages across all sectors of the economy without risk of inflation and a reduction of prices within the country on all forms of merchandise, leading to a reduction in social tension. Someone may wonder what possible link there could be between the implementation of the ‘Kin’s domains’ programme and a wage increase —let’s say, for a salesman, a trolleybus driver, a nurse or a teacher. But there is! And a direct causal link at that. Think about it. Most enterprises today are in private hands. People we call oligarchs enjoy fabulous profits—but at whose expense? Basically, at the expense of minimum wage-earners. And what’s the point of increasing their wages, let’s say, from five thousand to twenty thousand roubles a month,24 when there are still people queuing up just to get a job? There’s simply nowhere for them to go. 24

At the time this book was written (2005), the average wage in Russia was 8,500 roubles per month—approximately equivalent to US$300 at the

official exchange rate (or to US$600 in buying power). Wages vary greatly from one region to another, and full income amounts are often unreported (meaning the actual average is higher than that calculated by government agencies). It’s an entirely different situation with a family whose work on their own domain earns them an average of ten thousand roubles a month (which has been proved entirely feasible in practice) with a minimal cost of living. No utility bills or daily commuting expenses, or the cost of buying meals at city cafes. To attract domain dwellers to work in a factory or other private enterprise, one would have to offer them a salary at least one-and-a-half or two times the income they would earn from working on the domain, and cover travel and meal expenses besides. Today an oligarch who has privatised a factory or oil-drilling company can afford to live in a castle in London (that really happens) and earn up to a million dollars a month, while the workers slaving away to provide that income for him receive less than a tenth of one percent of what he makes. This scenario can be played out ad infinitum. Inevitably it leads to revolution, stripping the property-owner of his enterprises and the overthrow of the government permitting such inequities. The only way to prevent such a result from occurring is to reach an equitable sharing arrangement with the workers. Oligarchs will not come to this point voluntarily but, under pressure of circumstances, will give in. We mentioned the relationship between a domain dweller and the owner of an industrial enterprise. But those left living in city flats will also see their wages rise, to keep them at their jobs. They too, after all, are given a choice: stay working and living in urban conditions, or start building themselves a whole new way of life in the country. And one more question on this point: Why will this not lead to inflation or price rises? Inflation is always the outcome of certain concrete procedures, specially engineered. Price rises are simply a by-product. The cause is always Man’s estrangement from a natural way of life. It is an easy matter to increase prices on fuel and foodstuffs when people don’t have any of either to call their own, meaning that they are completely dependent on external suppliers. But try raising apple prices for someone who has his own orchard. Absurd! And what about fuel? But even here there’s a limit. Today’s fuel prices are so high that it is actually more profitable to till a couple of hectares of land using horses—which, by the way, supply a first-class fertiliser for the soil. • An immediate improvement in the demographic situation and in the

general health of the popidation, including its rejuvenation. It is no secret that the current demographics in our country are catastrophic. And even this word isn’t strong enough to describe it fully. If a country’s peacetime population decreases by almost a million souls annually, that’s monstrous! The leaders of such a country, I should think, would want to hide their identity from the public, as well as from their descendants. Discussions on the need to change the current situation amount to nothing more than pathetic babble. They don’t change anything. Not even increasing financial support for birthing mothers, as necessary as that may be, will lead to any substantial improvement. The history of many millennia shows that women cease giving birth when they see no prospective future for their children. It is necessary first to determine clearly and precisely the future development of society as a whole, as well as of each family making up that society. The Anastasia Foundation in Vladimir25 conducted a survey of families planning on setting up their own kin’s domains. Of the more than two thousand polled, 1,995 responded that they would be having children. Some wanted three or even more. Those who for health reasons were unable to have children of their own were planning to adopt them from orphanages. How to explain this phenomenon? It is simply that a Man who has built a marvellous living oasis is aware that he is building something lasting, and wants his children to enjoy life, too. As to rejuvenation and revitalisation of health, let us turn once more to practice. Look at how much livelier and younger your grandfathers and grandmothers behave once they get out to their dachas in the springtime. And it goes without saying that a pregnant woman who eats only environmentally clean produce, drinks clean water and breathes clean air cannot help but bear healthy children—significantly healthier than today’s examples. • A solution to the question of the nation’s defence preparedness. A significant reduction in weapons and, over the next few years, the eventual complete extirpation of bribery, corruption, gangsterism and terrorism. The military preparedness and morale of our armed forces today, including the nation’s law-enforcement officers, has slipped below the zero-mark and is heading deep into the minus side. It is no secret how challenging it is for local conscription offices to call up young recruits to military service. Refusal of military obligations is no longer considered shameful among today’s youth—on the contrary, it has become a mark of bravery. Those whose families are slightly better off attempt to buy their way out of serving; those not so well off try to ‘cut out’ any way they can, even to the point of self-mutilation.26

So it turns out that, by hook or by crook, the army drags in conscripts from the poorest segments of the population. Such an army is in no position to defend anyone or anything against a major enemy. Not only that, but it is potentially dangerous to the very country it is supposed to serve. Let’s take a close look at just whom the soldiers of the Russian army are called upon to protect. The Motherland, comes the standard response. But today the concept of Motherland has been seriously eroded, and it is a challenge to grasp hold of just what is one’s Motherland. It wasn’t that long ago that Russian officers and soldiers swore an oath of allegiance to the USSR, which was also considered their Motherland. Then all at once the borders changed and whole parts of the territory they were defending turned out to be ‘foreign soil’. The troops deployed in these parts were suddenly treated as invaders. They were left to defend the people on the part of the territory that was still known as Russia. But what kind of people were they really protecting? Oligarchs and bribe-taking government officials? Their own families? But if a soldier or an officer came from a poor family, who was he supposed to protect them from? For the past ten years now, government propaganda has proclaimed that we are building “a civilised, democratic state on the Western model”. But just think: how could today’s Russian soldiers do battle against the forces of NATO or the USA if they have already been brainwashed into thinking that their enemy is uncivilised and undeveloped, which must mean that ‘we’, by contrast, are ‘civilised’ and ‘developed’? Quite absurd. Is this some sort of psychobabble, or a deliberately invented tactic? An all-professional army has been touted as a panacea for getting out of this manufactured dead-end situation, but that is even more absurd. A professional army, as is known, is made up of mercenaries who take up arms for money and shoot at whoever they are told is the target. They carry out the orders of whoever pays the most. History is full of examples of governments afraid to bring their armies of mercenaries home. That’s how it was in Ancient Rome, and a similar danger exists in the USA. It is already happening in parts of Russia as well. A professional army must be kept busy in continual fighting, preferably not on the territory of the nation it is supposed to be serving. When an army returns to its home country, it will inevitably be in demand by forces opposed to the existing authority, or it will disintegrate into a large number of splinter groups, some of which may even be transformed into criminal gangs. For the most part, there is no such thing as unemployed armed mercenaries. If they are not given work, they will find it on their own, and in their chosen profession. Besides, an army consisting of people serving only

for money can be very easily bought off by a higher bidder. Just imagine a foreign military base located, say, in Georgia, Turkmenistan or Ukraine, whose soldiers are paid three thousand dollars a month, while ours get only five hundred a month. In fact, you don’t need to imagine this. There are already concrete examples right here in Russia. Just look at how many highly qualified and professionally trained officers of the former KGB are now working as security guards for commercial organisations, including foreign banks. So, what’s the solution? There is just one—one and only one. We must make sure that our Russian soldiers, officers and generals have something left to protect. 21 the government for settlement purposes. An officer should be able to choose his own particular hectare within these territories. And, when home on leave, he should be free to plant, either alone or together with his parents, a new garden, or dig a pond, or designate a spot on which to build a house. And if he is frequently re-posted to various parts of the country or even abroad, during the time he is billeted in officers’ quarters, barracks or a field tent, every officer of the Russian Army should be able to rest secure in the knowledge that back there, in a spot of his own choosing, the garden of his little Motherland—his own garden—is flourishing in the springtime. And the girl who has fallen in love with him will know from the little star on his epaulettes that her beloved has a future, has a Motherland, and a family nest for their future children. And even if, for the time being, she has to share with her beloved in the challenging conditions of an officer’s life, all the same, at least once a year they will visit their little Motherland and share their dreams and plans for the future domain. They will decide where the pond is to be dug and where the house is to be built. And even if they are obliged to spend their month’s leave on their own land in a tent, still they will be able to experience an incomparable sense of joy at beholding the marvellous future that lies ahead for the generations of their family to come. And even if the little trees of their future garden are still young and the green hedge they have planted around their domain is scarcely noticeable, these are still there, and they will grow and flourish, waiting for them, their creators. 22 afforded by modern technology. And the wife of a Russian officer will be able to spend the remaining months of her pregnancy in her own little house. Perhaps her home will be shared by her parents, or perhaps she will be alone

there, keeping in touch with friendly neighbours. But, most importantly, she will be surrounded and filled by the positive emotions she so badly needs. After all, she will be completely surrounded by the space of her little Motherland, belonging jointly to her and her beloved. And she won’t go off to have her baby overseas or even in one of those incubators we are accustomed to calling, for some reason, maternity homes. The officer’s wife will have her baby in her own domain, as many women are already doing. Possibly it will be under a doctor’s supervision, but it will be at home, in familiar, favourable and sympathetic surroundings—not in some maternity chair which has heard the moans and cries of hundreds of birthing mothers. 23 car. She will have far more than that—love and a future. Her main achievement is the restoration of her Motherland. This is her principal work, her principal task in life. And society should pay her a salary equal to that of her husband. That’s not much, of course, in return for her grand co-creation, but such a step will at least be an initial good-will gesture on the part of society and the State. Such a possibility already exists right now. Only one shouldn’t confuse things by bringing in higher-level economic considerations. Currently the oil pipeline is showering Russia with a rain of American dollars. And why is not a single drop of this rain falling on any Russian officer, his wife or child, or his little Motherland? Who thought up such arrangements, concealing themselves behind that supposed panacea for all ills—democracy? Is it ‘democratic’ when poorly-paid soldiers or officers of the Russian Army are obliged to defend wealthy oligarchs, their fancy detached houses along the Rublevskoe Highway27and their numerous counterparts in other regions of the country? That’s not democracy, that’s drivelocracy\ 27

Rublevskoe (pron. roob-LYOF-ska-ya) Highway (named for the former village of Rublevo)—an area in the western part of Moscow where many of Russia’s nouveaux-riches have built or bought expensive apartments or (what used to be a rarity in Moscow) detached single-family homes. And if such drivel doesn’t change, we shan’t have any defence or protection at all. There will be no protection for the average citizen, nor even for the president, let alone the petty and major oligarchs. The extermination of this drivel will spell an end to corruption, drug trafficking, and the notorious bribe-taking from drivers on the part of traffic cops.

Now tell me: why should a copper have to stand in the street and breathe into his lungs all the roadway dust and the exhaust fumes of all the expensive and not-so-expensive cars passing by? As though they were the cat’s pajamas and he were nothing but a nincompoop. He stands there watching out for their safety, for which he is paid a mere pittance. Indeed, if he didn’t take bribes from these cars’ owners, he would be ridiculed by his relatives who would think it utterly abnormal; his wife would tear into him and his children would turn away from a father who couldn’t even afford to buy them a pair of last season’s jeans. And he is not at all terrified of the police’s anti-corruption squads. So what if he’s sacked from his job? That’s no great loss. It’s not a job that will guarantee a living for his family in return for honest labour. It simply means he has to look for another. But what kind of job? What kind of job can he find where he can maintain his integrity and still provide for his family? And so he stands there in the dust and exhaust fumes and takes his bribes. And for this, society hardly condemns him, but pays him. So what?—we’re all becoming like this, society thinks. Now that’s terrifying! The fact that we’re getting used to it! We cease dreaming about other possible scenarios. We get accustomed to seeing the crowds of prostitutes, homeless children and street thugs. We get accustomed to the stage shows we call elections. Or is someone, in fact, accustoming us to these? After all, up until recently the most terrifying thing for an inhabitant of a Russian village was social disdain on the part of his fellow-villagers, observing: She’s a slut! He hasn’t kept his property up! And so, it’s time to bring back those days. The time will most certainly come when the most pleasant thing for a Russian citizen to hear will be society’s approval in the form of: He’s a good man! He has sensitive andproperly behaved children! He has a splendid domain! Then there won’t be any more crime, corruption or drug trafficking. It will surely come, that time. On a bench in a shady garden sits a greying, elderly man, tenderly stroking the chestnut-coloured hair of his three-year-old granddaughter, her head nuzzled against his chest, while his eleven-year-old grandson takes the general’s greatcoat hanging on the back of the bench and tries it on. Two large general’s stars adorn the epaulettes of the greatcoat, which once featured two small lieutenant’s stars. But that’s not the most important thing, the grey-headed general thinks, looking at his grandchildren. The most important thing is that he created and saved for his grandchildren this garden, this pond and the whole marvellous Space in his kin’s domain, his little Motherland in the heart of Russia. He

has saved Russia! And She is flourishing! His Motherland! A fresh cool breeze wafts the fragrance of Her gardens around the whole world. And interplanetary winds announce the flourishing of the Earth to other worlds. And the stars in the heavens burn with just a touch of envy, and dream of meeting visitors from the Earth, the wise and bright sons and daughters of God. It will come to pass! But in the meantime... Do you hear, lieutenants, how the heart of the Russian Land is beating, sounding the alarm?! How it is begging for you to take her, little by little, to yourself and plant gardens? She promises to return to each of you your Spaces of Paradise and give you the gift of eternity! Do you hear? You must hear! 0

The termination of capital outflow and a new inflow of capital into Russia; the return of her intellectual resources. I can theoretically prove that this will happen with the adoption of Anastasia’s programme in full. This has also been shown theoretically by famous scholarly researchers, as well as by students working on their graduating essays. There are arguments on both sides here. Only practice can offer incontrovertible proof. And that it has done. People of the Russian diaspora have been flocking from near and far to communities still under construction—communities which as yet do not have a solid legal footing. I know, for example, just in one community near the city of Vladimir, of a teacher from Turkmenistan and a young couple from America. A similar trend can be observed in many other communities now being built on the territory of Russia and Ukraine. People who can’t wait for a law on land grants are buying up land, endeavouring to work within existing legislation. They are buying back their Motherland. It is the duty of society and the State to refund their money Otherwise there will be a curse hanging over the head of anyone who has seen fit to take money from someone for starting to settle on the land where he was born. In any event, people are coming back, even if it is just one or two at a time for now. You can judge for yourselves what will happen under a favourable coincidence of circumstances—i.e., the adoption of a law granting every willing family a plot of land on which to set up a kin’s domain. Letter to the Russian President from Germany ANASTASIA, reg. society Schiitzlerbergerstr. 43 D-67468 Franlceneck Tel. +49 (6325) 955-99-39 Fax +49 (6325) 18-38-59 www.anastasia-de.com Email: [email protected] ANASTASIA, reg. society Administrative Office, President of the Russian Federation Staraya

ploshchad’, 4, Moscow 102132 Dear President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! This is a letter from former citizens of a country which no longer exists—the USSR. For various reasons many of us find ourselves living abroad. Germany has become a refuge for more than three million former Soviet citizens. While flocking over the border and discovering the Western ‘civilised Paradise’, many of us have recognised that at the same time we have lost our Motherland, without which no one can ever be happy in the fullest sense. Today in Russia a brand new idea has made its appearance, guaranteeing Man’s physical and mental health, an idea already appealing to many people of various nationalities, including those living in Western Europe. Thanks to this idea, we realise that right now it is Russia that possesses the spiritual potential needed for the re-birth of harmonious Man and the restoration of a harmonious State. Detailed information about this idea is available in the Ringing Cedars Series by Vladimir Megre, which to date has sold almost six million copies overall. It is Megre’s books that have given Russians living in the Commonwealth of Independent States and other countries a new and marvellous hope of re-birth, which is a vital need for every Man, family and State. The substance of the idea can be summed up as follows: Every family or citizen should have the right to receive, free of charge, one hectare of land on which to set up their little Motherland, their family domain, which can be passed down by inheritance from generation to generation. Man was born on the land and should have his own specific piece of his Motherland, created and cultivated with his own hands—and the hands of several generations of his family. In one of your speeches you stated that Russia was born and long lived in the countryside, on the land, and that that is its destined path. We agree! Having tasted the pleasures of Western civilisation, we are acutely aware that drug trafficking, prostitution, the plight of homeless children, thievery and murder, are all the fruits of this same celebrated civilisation. We are not even mentioning the most painful European problems—namely, the environment and demographics. Russia, too, has been experiencing these same problems in trying to reinvent itself on the Western model. Today it is becoming clear to many in the West that the path being followed by their democratic states is leading to a dead end, if not utter self-destruction. Russia has gone through difficult trials over the many centuries of its

history, all of which have served to nurture a special spirit among its people. It is thanks to this spirit that, at times of the most despairing spiritual and environmental crises, its citizens will be able to stand on the edge of the abyss and, in spite of everything, not only give birth to a new national idea —grow new life—but also to head off the catastrophe of self-destruction which threatens all mankind. We, as former citizens of the USSR, are fully aware of what is meant by the simple concept of Motherland. Whether we have taken out foreign citizenship or not, many of us have realised that our hearts and souls remain in the places we lived for most of our lives. We would like to return to Russia and start creating our family domains, establishing new-style communities. The activity of setting up a family domain will lead to an improvement in the quality of life for the whole commonwealth of people. We realise that a lot depends on us, on our labours, our capabilities, our experience. Many of us have taken on new professions in Europe, we have studied foreign languages, some of us have started our own businesses. There are quite a few of us who have begun studying the experience of Western eco-villages and non-traditional methods of farming. In our communities we shall build our own schools, clubs and hospitals. There may not be a need for special government subsidies, as our numbers include all sorts of experts, and we are prepared and able to seek out our own financing and opportunities. This kind of activity will lead to a fundamental improvement in the lives of the great commonwealth of people. Lands that have been unused, abandoned or have lain waste up ’til now, will become fruitful orchards, and on them will be born new generations of Russians with a new consciousness, with a new feeling for and outlook on the world. Moreover, we all desire to assist our relatives and family members now living in Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States. This will also help solve the problems faced by youth, the jobless and the homeless. We are prepared, right this moment, to muster the forces of several generations of our families, and also put all our capabilities, experience, knowledge and financial resources toward the goal of co-creating a proud, majestic and mighty Motherland of Russia. To implement this idea we ask your consideration of the following questions: 1. Every willing family or individual citizen should be granted the right to receive, at no charge, one hectare of land for lifetime use with the right of inheritance (but with no right to sell), whereon to create a family domain.

2. Simplification of the procedures to obtain Russian citizenship on the part of those who wish to create their own little Motherland and a vast Russia, who were born on the territory of the RSFSR28 or of other erstwhile Soviet republics and who formerly held citizenship in the USSR. Faithfully and respectfully, Future Citizens of Russia. Germany, 160 signatures. ” RSFSR—abbreviation for Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, i.e., the part of the USSR that after its formal disintegration became known as the Russian Federation. This letter, unfortunately, met no reply at all from Russia. Not even a simple pro-forma memo from some kind of official was received in response. The Russian-speaking community in Germany has in their possession a postal confirmation to the effect that the Administrative Office of the Russian President indeed received their letter. You know, this lack of response is already becoming a pattern. It’s not just you, but we who are living here in Russia too, we aren’t getting any reply either. On the Internet site {of the Anastasia Foundation} there is a whole section full of letters, some of them written in English, including letters addressed to the President of Russia. For five years now people have been writing on one and the same topic—kin’s domains—but to date there has not been a single reply, either to individually or collectively written letters.24 As you will soon realise, it couldn’t be any other way, since here in Russia there are forces which have pegged themselves higher than the President or the Government. They believe themselves to be higher than the people, too, only I think this is an ill-founded belief. Of course one can rise higher than a drunken people. But there is not and cannot be any power higher than a people in whose hearts lives not only a dream of the future but a burning desire to put such a dream into practice. It behooves me to respond to you, dear former fellow-citizens, on behalf of our government officials, on behalf of the President. First of all I must thank you people, you who now live in Germany, America, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Italy and France, Georgia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, even in Mongolia. It is thanks to your efforts that the books about Anastasia have been translated and published in the countries where you are currently residing. I didn’t know you personally, and so was unable to ask you to do this. But there is something I do know. I know how your hearts have been touched and how you went about approaching publishers and translators, and when you did not find a reciprocal understanding, you set about translating and publishing my books

yourselves. This happened, for example, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Canada and America. And finally you found some understanding! I felt this for the first time in Germany when I addressed readers’ conferences in Berlin and Stuttgart. Sitting together in the overflowing auditorium were Russian-speakers who had emigrated to Germany from Russia and native German-speakers who had no knowledge of Russian, in roughly equal numbers. I knew the two groups didn’t get along all that well. But here they were sitting side by side and good-naturedly trying to explain to one another the translation from Russian, which was, I’m sure, not always understandable. I used to consider Germans pedantic and not a strongly emotional people. But life has shown me otherwise. It was none other than a German farmer who, after reading about Anastasia, got into his car and drove all the way to Siberia. He went knowing neither the language nor the Russian road system, neither the Russian traffic police nor the weather. He got there. He returned home with Russian souvenirs for his friends. My great gratitude naturally goes out to all those who at their own initiative, and sometimes at their own expense, have translated and published the books abroad. But the books, after all, are not the most important thing. Something else is. Thank you all for your understanding and support of the ideas and dream that have come out of Siberian Russia. Now this dream is no longer just a Russian dream. Now it is yours as well, and in equal measure. May you succeed in preserving it, putting it into practice and passing it on to be perfected by your children. It is hard to tell who has performed the most significant service—Anastasia, with her impassioned sayings, the books themselves, or all those who have seized upon the idea and carried the torch forward? Anastasia has said: “I give the whole of my soul to people. In people I shall prevail through my soul. Prepare yourself, all wickedness and evil-mindedness, to leave the Earth”30 I thought these were just simple words. However, life has shown me that they are not simple at all. Anastasia’s dream has been lit with tiny sparks in the hearts of millions of people scattered across the globe—people of many different nationalities and faiths. This dream is no longer just her dream. It belongs to many people and will not fade. It is now the dream of the ages and of eternity!

30

Quoted from Book 3, Chapter 24: “Who are you, Anastasia?”.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One hectare—a piece of Planet Earth I’m often told: “Why do you make such a fuss over one hectare?—there are more important things.” But in my view there is nothing more important in our life right now than to return the Earth to its original flourishing state. And that is why I keep talking about a hectare of family land—behind it, after all, there is something immeasurably more significant. I don’t always have the reasoning and intellectual capacity—nor, perhaps, the temperament —to explain this, but when there’s even just a little breakthrough and people understand, well, I consider that a victory. One occasion in particular stands out. The year was 2003. Switzerland. Zurich. An international forum. I was invited by the organisers and allotted a time to speak. I began talking about an idea that saw its birth in Russia, but the audience didn’t appear all that receptive. Then there was a question from the floor: “How do you tie in this hectare of land with Man’s spiritual development? Perhaps the problem of land tillage is important enough for Russia, but these questions have long been resolved in Europe. We’re here to talk about spirituality.” A little nervous, I began my reply this way: I’m talking about a hectare of land and setting up one’s family domain on it, and some people might think that’s a rather primitive notion. We have to talk about the great teachings on spirituality, they say, because that is the topic of this prestigious European forum. I know—I was told by the organisers—that sitting before me in this auditorium are well-known innovative educators, philosophers and writers on spirituality from all over Europe, along with other thinkers on this topic who are no less important. But it is precisely because I am mindful of the composition of this audience here before me that I am specifically talking about a hectare of land. Ladies and gentlemen, I am convinced that concepts such as love and spirituality must necessarily have a material embodiment. The hectare of land I have in mind, the hectare Anastasia speaks about, is much more than a mere hectare of land. It is a Space through which you may be connected to the Cosmos. All the planets of the Universe will react to this

Space and, consequently, to you. They will be your friends, assistants and co-creators. In terms of the laws of Nature, look what happens to an ordinary flower—a daisy, for example. The daisy is inseparably connected with the Cosmos, the planets and the Sun. The flower opens its petals when the Sun comes up, and closes them when the Sun goes down. They are at one with each other, in harmony with each other. Not even trillions of kilometres or light-years could break the connection. They are bonded together—the great Sun and the little earthly flower. They know that only together can they be creators of a great universal harmony. But every single blade of grass on the Earth reacts not only to the Sun. It also reacts to other planets. It reacts to Man, to the energy of his feelings. Scientists conducted an experiment in which sensors were attached to an ordinary flowering house-plant, and polygraph indicators registered even the minutest energy impulses coming from the flower. Several people were sent into the room in turn. One of them simply walked past the flower, a second went over and gave it some water, while a third went in and cut off one of the leaves. According to the data registered by the polygraph, whenever the person who tore off a leaf entered the room, the plant would get agitated and cause the indicator to jump.1 A related phenomenon can also be often noticed: flowers fade when their owner goes away. The upshot is, that all plants react to Man. They may like a particular Man or they may not. Consequently, they may transmit to their planets a message of either love or absence of love. And now imagine that you have some kind of Space—say, a hectare of land. This isn’t just any run-of-the-mill hectare of land where potatoes are grown for sale, but a hectare of land on which you have begun to create, based on a particular level of consciousness or spirituality. You have your own territory on which there are a whole lot of plants cultivated not by hired workers, but directly by you yourself. Every plant, every blade of grass will react to you with love, and these plants, as living beings, are capable of collecting for you all the best energies of the Universe. They collect them and offer them to you. Plants feed on more than just the energy of the soil. After all, you are aware that there are some plants that can grow even without soil. Five thousand years ago in Ancient Egypt there lived priests who created a variety of religions. And these priests were in control of whole nations. These priests were the richest people in the world of that time. The basements of their palaces.

This is apparently a reference to the research conducted by the American polygraph scientist Cleve Backster (1924-). For further information see Cleve Backster’s Primary perception: Biocommunication with plants, living foods, and human cells (Anza, California: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003) or Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The secret life of plants (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), esp. Chapter i: “Plants and ESP”. were filled with trunks of gold and precious gems. They were acquainted with a whole range of secret sciences. The pharaoh turned to them for advice and money. But each of these highly placed priests had his own hectare of land, on which he permitted no slaves to work. These were the richest people of their day, with a knowledge of a great many sciences. They knew the secrets of a hectare of land. On the walls of the ancient temples of Egypt, the priests’ temples, was inscribed the warning: Do not accept food from a slave. This is Example One. Example Two. In Ancient Rome the senators issued a decree that if a slave was capable of working on the land and had been given land, then that slave could be sold to another master only if the land were sold with him, so as not to let any outsiders into contact with what was growing on that land. And why did the Roman senators give land to some of their slaves? And why did they give them money on top of that to build themselves a house? For one reason only: to obtain ten percent of a harvest which had been cultivated and nurtured with love and care by the Man growing it. It was only produce like this that could be at all beneficial. The Egyptian priests and the senators of Ancient Rome knew what kind of food was beneficial to Man. The produce we eat today is in no way fit for human consumption—it’s ‘dead produce’. There is a vast difference between berries one picks from a bush to eat on the spot and berries sold in a supermarket. It’s not just that they’ve already started to decay, but there’s no energy left in them. They are incapable of feeding Man’s soul. And I’m not even mentioning the mutant plants created by our technological world. So, if you don’t have your own hectare of land, there’s nowhere that you’re going to find food worthy of human consumption. You can take a little money and buy some sort of vegetables. But you must realise that those vegetables were not grown for you. They weren’t grown for any Man at all. They were grown for money. There is not a disease which cannot be cured by the Space of Love—a Space you have created with your own hands and your own soul. People are the children of God. The world of animals and plants, the air and the Space around us—these are also God’s creations. And everything taken

together is nothing less than the materially embodied spirit of God. If someone calls himself a highly spiritual person, let him show the material embodiment of his spirituality. Imagine God looking down on you from above right now. And He sees someone driving a tram, another one of His children constructing buildings, another standing in a store and selling things from behind a counter. These aren’t the professions God created. They’re professions for slaves. God didn’t want his children to be slaves. And He created a marvellous world and gave it in stewardship to His children. Take care of it and use it! But to do that, you must understand this world. Understand what the Moon is, what the herb known as the yarrow is... And what is a hectare of land? Is it a place where Man must work by the sweat of his brow? No! It is a place where Man shouldn’t work at all. It is a place through which Man ought to control the world. Tell me, who gives greater pleasure to God—a Man driving a tram or a Man who might have only a small piece of land but has transformed it into a Paradise? The latter, of course. Can people today open up a road to the Cosmos? Or can they be taught how to settle the Moon or Mars? Of course not! Because they’ll put weapons and pollution there, and end up having the same wars there as on the Earth. Yet Man, after all, has been created to populate other worlds. And this will come about only when Man understands and beautifies his own Earth. The way to settle the planets of the Universe isn’t technical at all, it is psychotelepathic. Man needs to become consciously aware of what constitutes the true beauty of the Universe. Your city of Zurich is considered beautiful. We can say a thousand times how beautiful it is. But what, specifically, is beautiful about it? Yes, it is very clean here. Yes, it looks as though there are many well-to-do people living here. But is land covered with asphalt truly beautiful? Is it really good to have little green islands popping up just in certain places? Is it good that there’s a dying tree—a majestic cedar—right in the centre of your city? It’s suffocating from the smog. It’s suffocating from exhaust fumes. And it’s not the only thing that’s dying and suffocating. The people walking along the city streets are suffocating from these fumes too. We should give some thought to all that we have managed to contrive on this Earth. And it’s best to talk about it in very simple terms. Let each one of us take a small plot of his land, pull his whole mind and whole spirituality together and create a very small but concrete Paradise. He will transform his little piece of land on our large planet into a flourishing garden, giving a material embodiment to his spirituality, following God’s example. If

millions of people do this in a whole lot of countries, then the whole Earth will become a flourishing garden, and there won’t be any wars, because millions of people will be completely engaged in a grand co-creation. And if Russians should then descend upon Switzerland or Germany, it will only be to delight in the contemplation of beautiful living oases, to learn from their experience in embodying true spirituality. Russia, unfortunately, is currently trying with all its might to be like the West. Russia’s politicians are peppering their speeches with references to Western countries as developed or civilised. They are urging their people to catch up to them in ‘development’ and ‘being civilised’. Our politicians still don’t know that we have the opportunity not only to catch up quickly, but to significantly overtake them. But this can come to pass only if Russia does a complete about-face and starts heading in the opposite direction. This is in no way to suggest I am trying to denigrate or insult your Western civilisation. But we’re talking here, after all, about spirituality, and we need to be honest and sincere in what we say to one another. Spirituality cannot be measured simply by material wealth and technological achievements. Such a one-sided, technocratic approach to mankind’s development will invariably lead to an abyss. No doubt those of you gathered here today will admit this, but then you must also admit that you are running out in front, with us right behind you. Try to stop and figure out what’s happened to our world. If you do manage to figure it out, call out to those running behind you: Hey, you’d better stop, chaps! Stop running. There’s an abyss ahead, and we’re already on the edge of it. Find another way. If we really listen to our hearts, together, we ought to go from simply talking about spirituality to its material embodiment. One hectare is but a tiny dot on the face of our planet Earth. But millions of these dots will transform the whole planet into a flourishing garden. Trillions of flower petals, along with the happy smiles of children and oldsters will tell the Universe that the people of the Earth are ready for a grand co-creation. And the planets of the Universe will respond: “We’re waiting for you, Man. We’re waiting for you, worthy son of God!” Our millennium has ushered in a great transformation on the Earth. Tens of thousands of Russian families have already aspired to obtain their own hectare of land. A father and mother who are actually creating a Space of Love for their children are more spiritual than the most celebrated wise-men who only talk about spirituality. Let the spirit of each Man spring up from the ground as a beautiful flower, a tree with fragrant fruit, and let this take place on every single hectare of our planet.

After these words, for some time absolute silence reigned in the hall. This was followed by thunderous applause. I spoke in Zurich on the following day, too. Once again, to a full house. A number of our former compatriots were present here, too. I don’t think I came across too coherently, especially since I was speaking through an interpreter. But people stayed, they listened, because it wasn’t just me that was talking with this audience—a higher power was speaking. Avery simple, specific, yet at the same time extraordinary, power, one that has been preserved for millennia in the depths of the human soul—a nostalgia for the true way of life for Man as Creator. And then I thought: Do I really need to explain to anyone that all Russia’s sons and daughters that have been blown away by an ill wind will most definitely return? Of course they’ll come back! You will remember Anastasia’s words:2 Mother Russia will greet crowds of guests on that day! They are all of the Earth asAtlanteans born.1 As prodigal sons they shall return. Let all the bards everywhere play on their guitars. And the old shall write letters to their children. And children to their parents. Both you and 1 shall become very young andpeople will feel young for the very first time. 'Quoted (approximately) from Book 2, Chapter 9: “Dachnik Day and an AllEarth holiday!”. 1 Dilya Publishers—the current publishers of the Russian edition of the Ringing Cedars Series, located in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The quotation cited did not appear in the English edition of The Book of Kin. 2 Russky Dom (lit. ‘Russian House’)—the name of (a) a publishing-house in 3 Moscow related to the Russian Orthodox Church and (b) a monthly magazine 4 it publishes. Archimandrite Tikhon sits on the magazine’s editorial board. 5 Alexei II—see footnote 13 in Chapter 9: “A fine state of affairs!” above. 6

Quoted from Book 6, Chapter 10: “The Book of Kin”. 7 State Duma (pron. DOO-ma)—the lower chamber of the Russian national parliament, corresponding to the House of Commons in the United Kingdom and Canada or the House of Representatives in America, Australia, and New Zealand. 8 Knowledge Day (Russian: Den’znaniy)—1 September, the traditional start of the Russian school year. 9 Dmitry Fedorovich Ayatskov (1950-)—Governor of the Saratov Region on the middle reaches of the Volga River. 10 NTV—abbreviation for Nezavisimoe televidenie (lit. ‘Independent Television’), a national private TV network created in 1993, which on its Internet site boasts more than 120 million viewers. 11 Aman-Geldy Moldagazyevich Tuleev (1944-)—Governor of the Kemerovo Region in Siberia, on the Tom’ River (a tributary of the Ob) just to the east of Novosibirsk. 12 u

Talgat Safich Tajuddin (1948-)—Supreme Mufti (spiritual leader) of Russia’s Muslims, formally known as the Chairman of the Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Russia and the European Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States. 13 Note that Russia’s Orthodox Church traditionally refers to every human individual as ‘slave of God’ Cab Bozhit). It is reflected even in the contemporary Russian word for ‘worker’ (rabochii), which literally means ‘Father’s slave’. The term is generally translated ‘servant’ in the Authorised Version of the English Bible. 14 Compare the wording of Daniel 9:17: “O our God, hear the prayer of thy servant...” Note, too, that in this citation the Russian term corresponding to Our Lady is vladychitsa, which has the connotation of ‘empress’ or ‘high ruler’. The Russian term corresponding to the Blessed Virgin of Vladimir is

Vladimirskoi Bozhei Materi, lit. ‘the Vladimir Mother of God’. 15 See, for example, Deut. 23: 20: “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury” (Authorised King James Version), rendered in the New English Bible as: “’You may charge interest on a loan to a foreigner”. 16 Federal Assembly (Russian: Federal’noe sobranie)—the name given to the bicameral Russian Parliament as a whole, which comprises the State Duma (or lower chamber) and the Federation Council (upper chamber), as established by the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation. 17 neighbouring countries—primarily those of the Commonwealth of Independent States, made up of most of the republics of the former Soviet Union (Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan etc.). 18 Ms Borodina’s graduating essay is entitled: “The legal status of Kin’s Domains in Ukraine: developmental perspectives”, and has been made available on a number of Russian websites. 19 struggle for the harvest (Russ, bor’ba za urozhai)—a term used in Soviet propaganda in reference to harvest time. Since collective farms were inherently inefficient, authorities were compelled to mount a campaign each year, urging vast numbers of people—from schoolchildren and students to industrial workers and soldiers—to help with the harvesting and ‘save the crops’ before they rotted in the field. People were generally expected to carry out this work either with payment in kind or without any remuneration at all. 20 collective and state-owned farms— two systems of agricultural management during the Soviet era. On a collective farm {kolkhoz, pron. kall-HOSS), it was claimed that workers as a collective owned their farm, sold their produce to the State and shared in the profits from the sale, while on a stateowned farm {sovkhoz, pron. sahf-HOSS), farm workers were paid a salary, just as in a factory. In reality, however, in both cases the quantities and prices were dictated by the state. 21 Every Russian army or law-enforcement officer, upon receiving the rank of

lieutenant, is to be awarded not only a little star on his epaulette, but at the same time the right to receive a hectare of land on which to set up his kin’s domain. The land grants shouldn’t be for ‘back lot’ waste lands, but for elite lands specially allocated by 22 If an officer’s wife becomes pregnant, within three months’ time, the State should build on the designated spot a modest home according to the plans selected by the parents-to-be, with all the amenities 23 The child of a Russian officer should be born only in his own family domain. Even if at the moment of birth the young lieutenant is somewhere far away, he will hear—he will most certainly hear—his child’s first joyful cry. And he will let no foe encroach upon his grand Motherland. He, this young lieutenant, a Russian officer, will not let a foe get past him, since at the heart of his vast Motherland is his own little Motherland—one he feels is very dear and close to him, one where his beloved walks in a flourishing garden, holding his wee son by the hand as he takes his own first baby steps in life. Society! Our society! The society comprising our nation is already today capable of seeing to it that a young mother—the wife of a Russian officer— need not worry about how to get food for her baby She should be provided for. Maybe not in the style the oligarchs’ wives are accustomed to, nor has she any use for the shallow fad of owning a supposedly expensive 24 Even more tellingly, during President Putin’s major Internet conference on 6 July 2006, over 10,000 conference participants asked or voted for questions specifically dealing with the allocation of land for kin’s domains. The seven most popular questions on the topic of agriculture (which the government declares to be a high priority) were all about the allocation of land for kin’s domains. President Putin chose to answer a wide variety of questions (including, for example, At what age did you first have sexual intercourse?”) but not a single question on kin’s domains. Four days later, Russia’s leading business journal Expert commented that this particular Internet conference served as a good indication of the most burning issues in Russian society today, and observed that allocation of land for kin’s domains was among them.

CHAPTER TWELVE

People power There is one additional question I would like to bring to my readers’ attention. At the moment you are engaged in the process of creating a people’s strategy for the future development of the Russian State. Part of this strategy has been published in issues of the almanac,1 part appears on the Anastasia site on the Internet. As I see it, the overwhelming majority of the materials is extremely interesting. However there is one question—about power and authority—that has not yet been sufficiently illuminated. Aet it is a most important question. I invite you to join me in contemplating it. For starters, I’d like to share my own reasonings with you. Power often changes. Just over the past hundred years, people have lived under the Tsar, the Communists and a series of democratic rulers. Power gets changed, but life does not get rearranged for the better. Why? Do bad people always come to power? Hardly. It is more likely that the current system makes any politicians who get elected to power ineffective penpushers when it comes to solving the problems involved in any real betterment of people’s lives. Take our legislative assemblies over the most recent parliamentary terms. It seems that we vote for normal, family-type people, and then once they’re in power they come up with, to put it mildly, some rather strange legislation. Why? Perhaps, in the process of coming to power, they fall into another world—a world isolated from the people? An apartment in the parliamentary living quarters, a car equipped with its own flashing light on top, a private office where the public is denied entry, along with all sorts of special perks and “vanity of vanities”. Anastasia’s Grandfather suggested an interesting piece of draft legislation concerning deputies of the State Duma. They should each be granted a piece of land and definitely live in a community built on that land, right out among the people. A law faculty graduate in Ukraine named Tatiana Borodina,2 has drafted a bill to this effect, and I think it is worth reproducing its major clauses here in this book, so that my readers can pass on the proposal to their own elected representatives in legislative assemblies at all levels. Moreover, I call upon my readers to be sure to take part in regional and

federal elections, but to vote in only those candidates who live in their own kin’s domains. But is it merely a passport stamp that defines someone as a Russian citizen? In many cases, a candidate on the ballot has Russian citizenship and a Moscow residence permit, but has a fashionable domain located in another country. Is he going to be mindful of the needs of ordinary Russian people? Most probably his thoughts will be oriented in a completely different direction. If a candidate has his own little Motherland—his family domain in Russia— and lives there among Russian citizens, his work can be expected to bring benefit to those citizens and to the Motherland as a whole. This much is becoming clear to many people. Students are even beginning to draft laws to assist the legislators. A law of Russia on Family Communities created by Russian People’s Deputies on all levels (draft) The law defines the legal, social and economic provisions for the creation and maintenance of Family Communities and Family Domains on the part of Russian People’s Deputies,3 thereby guaranteeing the right of Russian citizens—as proclaimed in Russia’s Constitution—to hold land as the foundation for the wealth of the nation. The law is aimed at the creation of favourable working conditions for Russian People’s Deputies, conducive to the development, drafting and adoption of federal legislation, as well as guaranteeing their maximum contact with voters. Article i. Basic terms and concepts used in the Law Certain specific terms used in the Law are defined as follows: 0

Family Domain—a plot of land from 1 to 1.3 hectares in size, granted to age-of-majority Russian citizens for their lifetime use, with the right of inheritance, with no tax obligations in respect to the land or its produce; • Family Community—a centre of population organised on the principles of local self-government, consisting of Family Domains as well as sociocultural and community facilities; 0

lifetime use—unconditional ownership and use of a plot of land, free of charge and in perpetuity; a

living fence— a hedge consisting of trees and shrubs planted around the perimeter of a Family Domain or a Family Community

Article 2. Legislation on Family Domains and Family Communities The procedures involved in granting a Russian People’s Deputy an allotment of land for the creation of a Family Community, as well as the definition of the legal status of Family Domains and Family Communities and their functions, are all governed by the Russian Constitution, the Russian Land Code, this Law, the Russian Law on Family Domains and Family Communities, as well as other applicable laws. Article 3. Basic principles of legislation governing Family Communities The creation of Family Communities by Russian People’s Deputies is subject to the following basic principles: (a) compliance with the law; (b) the setting of conditions for the implementation by all Russian citizens of their right to hold land as the foundation for the wealth of the nation; (c) the principle that ownership and use of the plot of land granted for the creation of a Family Domain shall be free of charge, unconditional and in perpetuity; (d) exemption of the owner of a Family Domain from payment of taxes on the sale of produce grown or goods produced on said Family Domain; (e) the creation of one Family Community by one Russian People’s Deputy of the current parliamentary term; (f) other applicable principles. Article 4. Purview of the La. The purview of this Law covers Russian People’s Deputies at all levels of government who are elected in accordance with electoral laws, as well as age-of-majority Russian citizens who have expressed a desire to live in a Family Community organised on the principles set forth in this Law. Article 5. Granting an allotment of land to a Russian People’s Deputy for the creation of a Family Community 1. Each Russian People’s Deputy serving a current or future term, within a year from the date of his election, shall be granted an allotment of land at least 150 ha in size whereon to establish a Family Community (hereinafter: land allotment). 2. Upon election as a Russian People’s Deputy under the proportional system from a political party’s or a party-alliance’s candidates’ list in a nation-wide election, the successful candidate shall be granted a land allotment in a region of Russia of his choosing.

Upon election as a Russian People’s Deputy by a majority of voters in a single-representative electoral district, the successful candidate shall be granted a land allotment on the territory of the district where he is elected. 3. A single Family Community shall not be created by two or more Russian People’s Deputies, neither shall two or more Russian People’s Deputies be permitted to live in the same Family Community during the same term of office. 4. The land allotment is granted as a single parcel of land (including any water resources thereon) from properties belonging to the State or already held communally Land may also be expropriated from people making fulltime use of it and transferred to a Russian People’s Deputy for the creation of a Family Community. 5. If required, land may be purchased from property owners for community needs, in which case the property owner must be given a minimum of a year’s notice in writing by the respective decision-making body, and must also give his own consent to the sale. The purchase price is to be determined by an expert’s assessment of the land’s monetary value, which is to be carried out in accordance with the methodology established by the federal Cabinet. 6. A plot of land recommended for inclusion in the land allotment for the creation of a Family Community by a Russian People’s Deputy, but which is in the possession of a physical or legal person, may, with the agreement of the property owner, be exchanged for another plot of land of equal value— either in the same region or in another region of Russia, depending on the property owner’s preference. 7. Russian citizens who own plots of land or shares in heal’ (individually registered) plots of land adjacent to the territory of a proposed Family Community, have the right to reassign their properties, without monetary payment, for the purposes of creating a Family Community by a Russian People’s Deputy, and receive in return a plot of land within said Community, whereon to create a Family Domain for their lifetime use. 8. A Russian citizen who owns ‘virtual’ shares in communal (not individually registered) plots of land, has the right to transfer his shares, either wholly or in part (no less than 1 ha in size) for the purposes of creating a Family Community by a Russian People’s Deputy, and receive in return a plot of land within said Community, whereon to create a Family Domain for his lifetime use. Article 6. Land composition in Family Communities 1. The land in a Family Community is comprised of the following types of

plots: • land plots for the creation of a Family Domain; 0

land plots for the creation of Family Domains on the part of children of a Russian People’s Deputy (no more than two plots per Community). 2. Land plots reserved for socio-cultural and community purposes are designated in accordance with the overall plan of the Family Communit. The aggregate of such plots is not to exceed 7% of the total area of the Communit. The said plots are under the jurisdiction of the Local Council of the said Family Community. 3. The remaining portion of the land allotment is to be divided into plots of land for the creation of Family Domains of no less than 1 ha each. The size may be extended to 1.3 ha depending on the peculiarities of the terrain and other pertinent factors. 4. Between all land plots walkways must be created, no less than 3 or 4 metres wide. Each plot owner has the right to plant a living fence around the perimeter of his Family Domain. 5. On plots of land designated for the creation of a Family Domain, Russian citizens have the right to plant trees and shrubs (including those of the forest variety), to create artificial reservoirs, construct houses and outbuildings and erect ancillary structures and other facilities, provided principles of goodneighbourliness are observed. Article 7. Order of distribution of land plots designated for the creation of Family Domains among Russian citizens 1. In the proposed Family Communities the Russian People’s Deputies have the right to be the first to select for themselves one land plot for the creation of a Family Domain for their lifetime use with right of inheritance. 2. Each child of a Russian People’s Deputy with a family of his own has the right to receive a land plot for the creation of a Family Domain for his lifetime use. 3. It is mandatory that one or two land plots in the Family Community be granted to refugees or to children from orphanages. 4. Russian People’s Deputies, at their discretion, have the right to grant to Russian citizens of their choosing up to 30% of the remaining land plots, whereon said citizens are to create their own Family Domains. 5. The remaining land plots should be given to Russian citizens belonging to a variety of social classes (entrepreneurs, social workers, pensioners, representatives of the creative intelligentsia, military personnel etc.). Land

plots are to be distributed among Russian citizens on the basis of a lottery conducted openly at a general meeting of future residents of each Family Community Article 8. Local Councils of Family Communities 1. The Local Council of each Family Community comprises those living in said Community, united by the fact of their permanent residence within the boundaries of said Community which constitutes a self-contained administrative-territorial entity 2. The Local Council of the Family Community has the right to create a representative organ of local self-government, namely, the Family Community Council, whose members are drawn exclusively from among the residents of the said Community 3. Russian People’s Deputies are prohibited from standing for election or being elected to the Family Community Council. In cases where a Russian People’s Deputy is elected to a Family Community Council, their election shall be declared null and void. 4. The procedures for setting up local self-government are regulated by the By-laws of the Local Council of the Family Community (hereinafter: Bylaws), which said Council has the right to adopt at one of its meetings or by a local referendum. The By-laws must be registered with the district office of the Ministry of Justice. Article 9. Status of land plots in respect to creating a Family Domain 1. Plots of land designated for the creation of Family Domains are granted— for lifetime use with the right of inheritance— only to citizens of Russia. It is forbidden to grant land plots for Family Domains to citizens of foreign countries or to stateless persons, except those who have been granted legal refugee status (but no more than two such families are permitted per Family Community created by a Russian People’s Deputy). I don’t know how much time I had spent walking around while Anastasia’s grandfather familiarised himself with the contents of the documents I had brought with me4 when all of a sudden I heard a loud and raucous outburst of laughter, which sounded not at all like that of an old man. He was still laughing when I dashed over to him. “That’s rich!... Oho, that really makes me laugh!... Thank you... Thank you, Vladimir! And to think I didn’t want to get into these at first!” “But now that you are into them, what’s so funny? After all, this is a most serious situation! And an extremely complicated one!”

“Extremely complicated for whom?” Grandfather asked. “For me and for my readers wishing to build the domains Anastasia talked about.” A detailed draft and commentary will be published in a forthcoming regular issue of the Ringing Cedars of Russia almanac, which you will be able to purchase. It would be a good idea for readers to bring this to the attention of Russian People’s Deputies at all levels of government.—Footnote from the original Russian edition. 4

See the beginning of Chapter 9 above.

Quite possibly in uttering these words I might have sounded irritated and hurt. Grandfather stopped laughing, looked at me intently and replied quietly and seriously: “To this day I cannot understand why my granddaughter would have anything to do with you, let alone bear children with you. Only don’t be mad at this old man, Vladimir. Maybe I don’t get it, which means others too may not get it, but it’s possible that in this ‘not getting it’ lies a great truth. And so I don’t have any bad feelings toward you. And I don’t condemn my granddaughter. On the contrary, I’m very excited about what’s been achieved.” “But is there anything specific you have to say about the contents of these documents?” “I’ve already said it—I’m excited about what’s been achieved.” “By whom?” “By my granddaughter.” “But I was asking you about what I’d written.” Grandfather looked first at the packet of documents and then, silently and intently, at me, before replying. “I really can’t say, Vladimir, just how necessary your appeal to the public really is. Maybe it is indeed important for them. As I see it, what I read simply confirms that even back ten years ago my granddaughter foresaw all these ups and downs, and long ago everything that seems to be working against you she’s turned into something beneficial.” “How can you call offending my readers and me beneficial” “Did you realise who’s been offending you and your readers?” “Some kind of entity that’s set itself up under the cover of Russia’s Orthodox Church.”

‘And it provoked a feeling in you of being offended?” “Yeah.” “Well, that’s good! Now it’s not just with your mind, but with the feelings that you and many of your readers have experienced, that you can understand how your forebears were defamed in the eyes of their descendants—how they were called pagans and for centuries were blamed for all sorts of misdeeds they never committed. You’re not the only one who’s tried to write about this. There have been quite a few historians over the centuries who have tried to refute this slander—but in vain. “What’s happening now is that the same tactics are being used all over again to discredit people who really want to reach out and touch God’s creations. There are quite a few of these people now, and they can feel by their own experience how their forebears were smeared like that. The souls of their distant ancestors are finding renewed strength through those being slandered in our time. Their forebears of yesterday will act like guardian angels, protecting their descendants of today. “Believe me, there can be no kinder and brighter force—no way—than that which is emerging in the world right now. If this is coming about for people today—if some invisible thread is capable of joining today’s son together with his parent who lived two thousand years ago—and if the thread that joins them together can be extended, then today’s Man will be joined together with God, his original Parent.” Grandfather was clearly trying to restrain his excitement as he told me this. But I felt I needed further clarification. “Maybe what you say is very important,” I observed. “But, you see, there’s been quite a bit of delay with the creation of family domains.” “But, just maybe, such a delay is necessary to give people the opportunity to figure things out and co-create a design for the future?” “Maybe. It’s all turning out rather unexpectedly As though the first book began with just simple actions, then with the second came readers’ clubs, and now, with The Book of Kin out, the Family Chronicle has come along.” These words made Grandfather laugh again, but he immediately cut himself short, and said with a kindly smile: “My granddaughter was clearly having a fun time with that Family Chronicle1. Maybe it was to comfort you and your readers somehow. But hey, look how she arranged it so that Russia’s supreme rulers and the Patriarch of the Church supported her idea! Even if it’s just one of her ideas. No mention of her philosophy, or maybe they simply didn’t understand it. Their names will not go down in the annals of old—they’re too wishywashy, not very bold.

“People will be eternally remembered in the annals of old who are right now, at least in their thoughts, creating their own God-pleasing domains. Whether they themselves chose the idea or whether it chose them, that doesn’t matter any more. Eternity awaits those who are co-creating a future for their children—and not just for their children but for themselves too. For the first time on the Earth, Man who is born for eternity will come back to eternity. “Vladimir, Em just beginning to understand my granddaughter’s achievements. It is possible that many secrets of life have been revealed to her. But there is one which even the high priests were not fully aware of. All they ever knew before was that human life could be eternal. Part of this knowledge allowed them, for example, to be reincarnated over and over. But this reincarnation was never complete. And this is why their achievements did not bring joy either to themselves or to mankind. “Now I am confident—and believe me—that Anastasia has full knowledge of the creations needed to attain eternity You might ask her about this and try to understand. And if she can come up with words that a great many people will understand, worlds worthy of a god-Man will be unfurled to their thought. “Take a walk over to my granddaughter, Vladimir, and have a talk with her. At the moment she is sitting under the cedar, down by the lakeshore. There may be significant revealings in the world all around when the words of eternity are found which are comprehensible to both mind and feelings. The aspirations of the great awakened civilisation will whirl upward. The whole galaxy will feel these great aspirations and will await with shivers of anticipation the touch of those capable of giving to the planets a new and marvellous life. Go, and be not slow.” I had already taken several steps when I was stopped by Anastasia’s grandfather crying out: “Vladimir, it’s high time that you and Anastasia’s followers started your own Motherland party.” ‘A party? What kind of party?” “I’m telling you! That’s what you should call it—the Motherland Party 5 Motherland Party (Russian: Rodnaya Partiyd)—Following the publication of this appeal, several groups of inspired readers and sponsors did set about establishing the proposed ‘Motherland Party’. However, since Vladimir Megre subsequently changed his mind and decided to align himself with the Edinaya Rossiya (One Russia) Party, loyal to the existing regime of Vladimir Putin (and invited his followers to follow suit), the proposed party

never got off the ground, and Megre’s move caused some dissension among his followers. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A new civilisation Anastasia was sitting beneath the cedar tree, wearing a light grey flaxen dress. With her arms around her knees and her head slightly lowered, she was gazing out at the smooth surface of the lake. I didn’t go up to her right away. For a while I stood at a distance, observing this recluse quietly sitting there by the lakeshore. No—that description really doesn’t fit Anastasia. The word recluse is better suited to the people who live in modern apartments. People live in these apartments and don’t even know their neighbours sharing the same floor.1 They walk along the street and couldn’t care less about the people they meet. And their attitude is entirely reciprocal. So, while there’s nothing frightening in someone living alone, it’s a lot more frightening when they’re alone amongst people like themselves. And so, even though Anastasia was sitting here alone on the shore of this taiga lake, her heart was beating in unison with millions of human hearts all over the world. Some call her their friend, some their sister, feeling like they’re related to her. fln contrast with North American practice, Russian apartment blocks, even the ones that appear massive from the outside, are usually divided into vertical sections, each with its own exterior entrance, stairs and lift (elevator). A given section might have four to six flats per floor around the stairwell and lift shaft. Hence there would not be very many “neighbours sharing the same floor”. In the meantime, her soft-spoken words wing their way through the endless flow of information thundering and dun-dering from TV screens and a host of other media. Her words waft by and people pick them up. And people who catch them may respond with guitar strings and songs, and often with actions. They re tune their life anew. And Grandfather... I saw for the first time how fervently he expressed himself as he asked me to have a word with Anastasia about eternity. I sat down beside her and she turned her head toward me. I felt a calming sense from the tender gaze of her greyish-blue eyes. For a time we simply sat and looked at each other.

I couldn’t help myself, but took her hand, gave it a quick kiss and then replaced it on her knees. Her cheeks were aflush with a soft glow, her eyelashes all aflutter. And without rhyme or reason a sense of unease came over me. How strange to feel uneasy over a woman one has known for ten years! And how delightful! And in an attempt to overcome my sense of awkwardness and unease, I broke the silence first. “I was talking with your grandfather just now, Anastasia. For some reason he quite unexpectedly and rather excitedly started saying something about humanity’s need for words on eternity He said these words should be the kind people can grasp not just with their mind or intellect, but with their feelings. Are these words really that important?” “Yes, they are important, Vladimir. But it is not the words that are important, but, rather, people’s conscious awareness. Words, of course, are necessary to bring it forth. A conscious awareness of eternal life will help perfect Man’s way of life.”2 “But what connection is there between our way of life and becoming consciously aware of eternity?” “A direct connection. People today believe that they have only a few decades to live, after which they must leave life behind and disappear into oblivion. Yet all along, Man’s life can be eternal. This must be brought out, so that everyone, or, at least, most people, may understand.” “But you talked about that alread. And I’ve included your words on this subject in several of my books.” “Yes, I did, but, evidently, what I said has not been understood, or the frailty of human existence has been drummed into people’s consciousness too strongly over the millennia. New words and arguments must be found.” “So, can you try to find them?” “I shall tr. We need to look for them, apparently, along with those who will understand.” “But tell me in your own words first.” “Fine. Perhaps we should put it this way... “Most people living on the Earth believe that they plan out their own life. They choose a profession, start a family, have children or, alternatively, decline to have children. But in many respects their decisions are not their own. A great influence is exercised upon them by somebody else’s will, acting through public opinion.

“For example, you have an object called a clothes hanger. At one point somebody decided to perfect this object by using Man himself as a clothes hanger. This gave rise to the profession you call modelling from the word model It is not an enviable profession, it is not part of Man’s destiny. “But somebody decided to make it one of the most attractive professions of all, and did so. They began to show off live models in a variety of colour magazine photos and TV shows, and to describe their supposedly happy lives—to tell about all the money they make and how rich people want to marry them. Millions of young girls began to dream of becoming the world’s next top model and thereby attaining happiness. “Millions of young girls all over the world began resorting to all sorts of measures in an effort to achieve this illusory glory One in a million made it as a famous model, essentially becoming a walking clothes hanger. The others experienced deep disappointment in their lives, as their dream was not fulfilled. ‘And this was due to their failure to determine their own destiny—they had begun structuring their lives under the influence of somebody else’s will. “There are many other examples that could be cited of men and women, and even children, chasing illusory values, neglecting their own purpose and destiny. “Tell me what you think, Vladimir—if human society is made up of people like that, where can it be heading?” “It’s heading nowhere, that kind of human society Out there, in our country —Russia—not a single political party nor the state as a whole has put forth any kind of programme for building the future. From what you have told me, Anastasia, I’m particularly interested in the definition of Man’s purpose and destin. What does it consist of? How can people discover it?” “Let your thought, Vladimir, as well as other people’s thoughts, try to grasp hold of God’s creations, His programme, His dream.” “But is that really possible—grasping hold of God’s dream, I mean?” “It is possible. After all, He has hid nothing, and still hides nothing from people—from children who are His very own. He has written no scholarly tomes—everything by example He has shown. And the first thing everyone needs to understand and feel is which of Man’s deeds to eternity lead. Think for yourself, Vladimir, why did not God, who created the living and multifaceted world, not create things like the car, the TV and the space ship in their present form?” “Perhaps He simply wasn’t up to the job, whereas Man is?” “God created

everything Man needs—Man has within himself a means of transportation as well as imagination through which he can see far better pictures than are shown on TV. Man is also capable of effecting the mastery of other planets of the Universe without the aid of primitive artificial projectiles. “It was God who determined Man’s purpose and destiny, as well as the programme of development for all life in the Universe. To attain the required understanding, Man needs to refrain from destroying His programme and to study for all he’s worth and ascertain the purpose of everything on the Earth.” Immortality. “God created Man immortal. To witness this, only three conditions are required to be observed: “First: create a living Space which will attract Man to itself and to which Man has aspired. “Second: there should be, somewhere on the Earth, at least one person who thinks of you with kindness and love. “Third: never even admit the thought that you can be overtaken by death— and this is extremely important. Even if you suggest to someone who is simply falling asleep that he is dying and he believes it, then he will die, in obedience to his thought. But even if an elderly man (in Earth terms) wears out his body and is lying at death’s door, but does not think about death, but pictures his life in the living Space he has been creating, he will be born anew—such is the law of the Universe. The Universe will not stand by and allow a life-creating thought to die. “You have a concept in your world known as natural selection. Even now God’s programme is selecting the best of everything for a re-embodiment. Before, however, there was not much to choose from. Now it is showing a multifold increase. Whoever builds a domain with love will be reincarnated again and again. “Whatever interferes with them will disappear from the Earth for ever, giving way to the birth of a new civilisation.” “But why a new civilisation,” I asked, “if the people are going to be the same, with the same vegetation and the same planet?” “The new civilisation, Vladimir, will be characterised by a new conscious awareness as well as by new perceptions of the surrounding world. This great principle, that has been given birth in people today, will remain invisible to ordinary sight until the appearance of the planet known as the Earth has changed. It will affect life in the Universe as a whole.”

“But how can the Universe change as a result of the Earth’s appearance?” “It can, Vladimir. Even though our planet is but a small particle, it is in close interaction with other parts of the Universe. Even if one small particle should change, its changes can influence the whole spectrum of the Universe.” “Most interesting. But couldn’t you show me, Anastasia, a scene from the future as to how the Universe might change?” “I can indeed. Take a look.” Love creating worlds Spring was in full bloom on the planet Arreta.1 Herbs very similar to those on the Earth, along with flowers on trees and bushes, were giving off their sweet scent. Ayoung man named Vladislav2 was walking along a pathway amidst the springtime splendour, on his way to a symposium. He was to give a talk on the origins of life on the planet Arreta. His debating opponent would be his childhood friend Radomir.3 At nineteen years old, Vladislav had an adequate store of data to defend his theory before scholars at any level. But the knowledge possessed by his friend Radomir was no less in scope. Radomir and his team would pounce on any weak points or unsupported reasoning in Vladislav’s arguments regarding events in the past. Liudmila4 would be there, too. Liudmila... As it happened, both lads had been in love with this girl right from childhood. They loved her, but never admitted it either to each other or to the girl. Instead, they were waiting for Liudmila herself to give some kind of indication as to whom she preferred. Vladislav had deliberately chosen a roundabout route to where the symposium was being held, in order to give more thought to his presentation. But something was interfering with his concentration. He had the impression that somebody was watching him. Upon hearing a rustle behind him, he did a sharp about-face. Someone darted from the path into the bushes and was lying still in the tall grasses. Vladislav took a few steps back the way he had come and caught sight of a figure hiding in the grasses under a bush. It was his four-year-old sister Katya.7 “So, Katerinka, you’ve latched onto me again, eh?” Vladislav tenderly addressed his sister. “I’ve got an important presentation coming up. Maybe you don’t realise it, but you’re getting in the way. Or maybe you do realise it —otherwise you wouldn’t be hiding there in the grasses.” “I’m not hiding, I’m just lying here,” replied Katya. “I’m looking at this flower, and all the different little bugs.” And she made it look as though she really were interested in a particular little flower.

“Well, now! Then you can just go on lying there looking at them. I’m off.” Katya jumped up at once and ran over to Vladislav. “Go ahead, Vadichek,” she started rattling off. “I’ll follow you ever so quietly, so’s not to interfere with your thinking. When we get to the place where all the people are, you take me by the hand so that everyone can see what a handsome and clever big brother I have!” “Okay Don’t try to sweet-talk me. Here, give me your hand. Only remember, when I or somebody else is presenting, don’t even think of criticising what the grown-ups say, like last time.” 5 Katerinka, now satisfied, grasped hold of Vladislav’s hand and promised: “I shall try with all my might not to criticise.” Representatives of the different regions of the planet Arreta, both young and old, filled the natural amphitheatre. Nobody carried pens, notepads or any kind of writing materials. Their natural memory allowed them to memorise what they heard down to the minutest detail. Vladislav carried no exhibits with him as he walked out on stage. With just the power of his thought he would be able to create holograms in space to show any scenes from the past he wished, or reproduce household objects or even feelings. With just a hint of uneasiness, Vladislav began his presentation: The planet on which we live is called Arreta. It is more than ninety sextillion years old. But life began here no more than three hundred years ago. For originating life here we are indebted to our forebears, two inhabitants of the planet Earth. To put it more specifically, the originating of life on the planet Arreta was due to the influence of the energy of love and the dream of two inhabitants of the planet Earth. For this reason I offer you some historical information about life on the planet Earth. The earliest period of people’s life on Earth was quite possibly similar to our own. They had agood knowledge and feeling of their planet and the purpose of the Universe. Earth-dwellers determined the purpose of all the living organisms of their planet, and made efficient use of them. But one day a disaster occurred. The consciousness of one of the Earth’s inhabitants was invaded by a virus which soon spread intensively among the other inhabitants of the planet. Our scientists have termed this virus death. The outward signs of this virus, as indicated by historical records, are characterised as follows. The people infected by it start to destroy their own perfect variety of life on the planet, creating in its place a primitive, artificial

world. This period of life Earth-dwellers themselves referred to as the technocratic age. The people infected by the death virus began mutating from rational beings into anti-rational beings. They gathered together in large numbers on small plots of land and built themselves dwellings that looked like stone tombs, piled one on top of another. Picture to yourselves a stone mountain with a whole lot of burrows hollowed out in it. It was something quite similar to these stone mountains that people built with their hands and called apartment blocks. The tomb-burrows in this artificial mountain were called apartments. A massive concentration of these artificial stone mountains with their burrows, piled up one beside the other, was called a city. These so-called cities were filled with air unfit to breathe and water unfit to drink, along with stale food. Even during Earth-dwellers’ lifetime, various organs of the human anatomy would begin to decay and decompose. Of course it is difficult to imagine human bodies walking around containing decaying and decomposing organs. But that’s exactly how it was. Historical sources indicate that people of the technocratic age even had a science they called medicine. They considered one of the big achievements of this science to be the ability to replace their internal organs. People did not understand that the very existence of such a science proved the inadequacy of their consciousness. It was not only people’s flesh that was subject to decomposition. There was an intensive degradation of their mind and consciousness too. Their thought slowed down, they even lost the ability to compute sums and invented a calculator. They lost their ability to create holograms in space and invented a device they called a television— a primitive mechanism displaying something like a hologram. They lost the ability to move themselves through space and began building artificial devices known as cars, aeroplanes and spaceships. From time to time certain groups of people would attack other groups and they would kill each other. But, most incredible of all, the death virus gave people the notion that they were not eternal, but existed only temporarily in the space they could mentally grasp hold of. More and more, the actions of people of the technocratic age transformed the planet Earth into a foul-smelling, smoke-stenched corner of the Universe. But the Mind of the Universe kept waiting for something, and refrained from destroying this deleterious place in the galaxy. “Stop, please, for a moment!” Vladislav’s presentation was interrupted by a

voice coming from the group of his debating opponents, headed by his friend Radomir. “It’s senseless to continue with your talk. It would have been impossible for something like that to happen on the Earth.” ‘All right, I shall break off my presentation, if you can really prove the improbability of what I have said.” From among the group of opponents one young man stood up and argued as follows: “We have reliable reports about the existence of religion in Earth society Religious treatises talked about the Earth and everything growing thereon as being created by the Mind of the Universe, which they called God. They worshipped him and performed many rituals in his honour. I trust, my dear presenter, that you will not deny that fact?” “No, I shan’t deny it,” replied Vladislav “Then tell me, how could they perform rituals in honour of their god and at the same time destroy his creations? It would be impossible to do both at the same time. Consequently, these densely populated cities you speak of could not have existed on the Earth. And people could not have fouled the water created for them by the God they worshipped. In any case, the Mind of the Universe could not have countenanced such chaos, or he himself could not have been termed a ‘mind’. On the contrary, it would call into question any speck of rationality in what he created—Man first and foremost. What have you to say to this, my honourable presenter?” “I say that the existence of a Mind, especially of the Universe, is the union of two great principles—Mind and Anti-Mind. “The age of the Anti-Mind was necessary for the people of the planet Earth. And if you will permit me, in the next part of my presentation I shall prove the existence of two great principles in Man.” “Fine, then, carry on!” the young man agreed, and sat down. Vladislav continued his presentation, now more confidently: The world of the Universe is the union of opposites. Man also reflects this union of opposites within himself. Amidst the incredible chaos that has taken over Earth-dwellers’ consciousness, all at once there appeared people capable of understanding... These people changed their attitude toward Earth’s creations, but not with words and not through the aid of religious treatises. They began to change their way of life. While not yet fully comprehending the scope of their creation, they referred to their actions simply as ‘the building of a family domain’. They did not yet know that by approaching the Earth with a new conscious awareness, they were beginning to revitalise the planets of the Universe.

They did not yet know that for them death would no longer exist, or that the children they gave birth to would be called gods by their descendants. They were simply building their family domains on the planet Earth. In the meantime the Mind of the Universe followed their activities with trembling anticipation. And eventually the day came when all the people of the Earth began to live in their marvellous domains. And the day came when... Look, I shall show you a hologram—it has two people in it. In the space in front of the assembly appeared a three-dimensional earthly landscape. Two elderly people, a man and a woman, were walking hand-inhand along a pathway leading from their domain to a nearby forest. They were clearly more than a hundred years old. Evening was coming on, and the sky was filled with still barely noticeable stars. The couple walked up to a cedar tree, and the elderly woman leant her back against it. “Here I am a grandmother now, and a great-grandmother, too,” the woman tenderly remarked to her companion, “and you’re still after me to go for a night-time walk under a starry sky, just like we did when we were young.” “But isn’t that what you want, too?” “Of course I do, my beloved.” He quickly grabbed her by the shoulders, gave her an impetuous hug and kissed her on the lips. Then he pushed the strap of her dress to one side, baring her shoulder. The now bright moonlight clearly revealed three birthmarks all in a row on the woman’s left shoulder. The man kissed each of these in turn. “ YDU ARE JUST THE SAME AS YOU WERE BEFORE, MY BELOVED, YOU ARE. I NEVER WANT TO PART FROM YOU.” ‘And part we shall not. We shall die and be born anew.” “We can’t afford to be born anew,” she said sadly “Just look, there’s hardly any free land left on the Earth—it’s all gardens and domains, everywhere you look. And it’s possible our grandchildren won’t have enough room. Probably the Creator failed to take this into account when He created the Earth.” “I don’t think so. There is some kind of solution, but we don’t know yet what it is. But I am confident that our love cannot be interrupted. You and I shall die to be born again.” “But where?” “Look, my beloved—on that star out there! Let our thought create life anew on that planet, similar to life on the Earth. Think about it—why else would

God have thought to create so many planets? It can’t be just a coincidence. Our thought has a material form—it will create life for us on that lifeless planet. We shall be re-embodied again and again. Our love will be forever the same...” “I thank you for this marvellous dream, my beloved, indeed I do. With you... I shall help you create life on that planet new.” “What shall we call it, my beloved, this planet of our new life?” ‘Arreta, that’s what it’ll be called.” “Wait for us, Arreta! In the meantime you can blossom out in gardens and spread yourself with herbs, the way I desire,” said the man, fervently and confidently. “Me too,” responded the woman. The hologram disappeared. Vladislav bowed to the assembly and stepped off to one side, making way for his friend and opponent, Radomir. Radomir stood in Vladislav’s place, glanced around at the gathering and began to speak. “I beg to disagree with my friend. I shall say right off: in his version of events there is a great deal that is unprovable and even contradictory. Like my friends here, I cannot believe in the existence of a period in people’s history which is so utterly absurd. “The hologram he showed, as we all realise, is only a whim of his thought and imagination and is lacking in confirmation. Though this hologram gave me a kind of strange sensation. It seemed as though my learned friend had taken it from a story already known—I just can’t recall what source it is from.” A hushed whisper spread through the amphitheatre, and cries of “Plagiarism!” could be heard. “Could it be plagiarism? Unheard of! But perhaps the presenter didn’t know...” “Plagiarism... Yes, there is a distinct impression of something we’ve seen before here.” Vladislav stood to one side and hung his head. He shuddered upon hearing a child’s cry from one of the back rows. ‘A-a-a-ah! A-a-a-ah!” his sister Katerinka kept calling out, refusing to be silenced. At least she’s just calling out, and not criticising the proceedings, thought

Vladisla. But he was wrong. After waiting for the inevitable silence to ensue, Katerinka declared in a loud voice: “Don’t even think of arguing with my big brother! ’Cause he’s very, very clever and sensitive too.” “Now there’s a weighty argument,” someone said, as snickering could be heard all round. “Quite true, very weighty indeed,” little Katerinkawent on. “And you, my Radomirchik, don’t you go fancying Liudmila. Just don’t go fancying her, and that’s it!” “Katya, keep quiet!” Vladislav cried out. “I shan’t keep quiet! Liudmilka loves you, and you love her—I know that for certain.” “Katya!” Vladislav cried out again, and headed over to where his sister was standing. “Liudmilka, what are you sitting there for?” exclaimed Katya. “Stop him. He won’t let me have my say! He’ll drag me away! By force!” A brown-haired girl rose from the back row, headed toward Vladislav and stood in his way Liudmila’s cheeks had broken out in a soft blush. With head lowered, she whispered: “Your sister’s right, Vladislav” Her whisper could be heard through the hushed amphitheatre. All heads turned toward little Katerinka, people smiled and applauded her. Inspired by the audience’s support, the little girl ran down to Radomir, who was still standing on stage. She took up a position right beside him and held up her hands to signal the gathering to quiet down. When all were silent, she started speaking again, this time to Radomir. “You know, Radomirchik, you almost played the traitor there. You must not criticise my big brother. He showed everything fair and square. He’s your friend. You’re his friend. So don’t you criticise.” Radomir glanced down condescendingly at the little girl beside him, and with equal condescension began speaking to her, as well as to the people in the amphitheatre: “I’m not criticising. I’m simply stating a fact. There’s not enough pieces of evidence in the hologram he showed. In fact, there’s none.” “There is one. Or maybe two,” Katerinka firmly declared.

‘And where might it be—or where might they be, if there’s two?” “One of them is me. And the other is you, Radomirchik!” the little girl confidently stated. With these words she undid two buttons on her dress and bared her shoulder. On Katerinka’s left shoulder Radomir glimpsed three birthmarks, exactly the same as they had seen on the elderly Earth-woman in the hologram. Radomir examined the birthmarks on the little girl’s shoulder, and his blood began rushing through his veins. He concentrated on trying to recall something. Then appeared before him a hologram which only he could see. A country scene on the Earth. There he is, kissing the three birthmarks on his beloved’s shoulder. Then she gives him a hug. She laughs and rumples his hair and kisses the end of his nose, still laughing as usual. The hologram disappeared. Radomir looked for a while longer at the little girl standing in front of him, her shoulder still bared as before. Then he suddenly bent over, took Katerinka in his arms and held her close. Embracing him, she rumpled his hair and gave him a quick kiss on the end of his nose. He kept holding little Katerinka in his arms, and she whispered in his ear: “Either you were in a hurry to be born, Radomirchik, or I was born later than I should have been. Now you must wait while I grow up. Wait fourteen years. You won’t be happy with anyone else—Em your better half!” “I shall wait ’til you grow up, my dear,” the lad responded quietly Exhausted by all the excitement, Katerinka now felt calmed down. She put her little head on Radomir’s shoulder and fell into a sound sleep. He stood there silently before the hushed amphitheatre, carefully holding in his arms his bride-to-be. With his mind, he began drawing letters of the alphabet in space. Those assembled read the text of the hologram he created: THERE IS PROOF. IT IS IN EACH ONE OF US! LOVE IS INFINITE AND ETERNAL IN THE UNIVERSE. Then, slowly and carefully, so as not to awaken the little girl asleep on his shoulder, Radomir headed for the exit. But he had forgotten to turn off the spatial expression of his thought, and so the hologram continued to sprout more letters. The audience realised that these words were not addressed to them, but they could not help reading them: You RAN BAREFOOT THROUGH STARS, NOT LOOKING FOR

LOVE, AND IN NO WAY SELF-SERVING, NO NEVER. THROUGHOUT INFINITE SPACE YOU ALONE DID PRESERVE WHAT WE SHOULD BE PRESERVING TOGETHER. These words were intended for a little girl of the planet Arreta, as well as for the Earth-woman—the goddess who had given life to their planet. The little goddess slept sweetly on Radomir’s shoulder. Perhaps she too was hearing in her sleep the words of her beloved. “That’s terrific, Anastasia! That means that when people follow the Divine programme and give the whole Earth a makeover, they will also have the opportunity to resettle on other planets?” “Of course. Otherwise the very existence of other planets in the Universe would be meaningless. But He has infused everything with great meaning. The love between two people—a dream, born in love—is capable of breathing life into any planet.” ‘And again, Anastasia, as I understood it, the people who are now building their domains will not die. They will only change bodies and be reincarnated in life on the spot.” “Of course. Their actions on the Earth are more needed than anyone else’s. They please God. And even people who have never managed to touch the earth with their hands, but have mentally begun to build their own future living corner of Paradise, are many times more needful to the Divine programme than hundreds of wise men sitting behind stone walls—men who have cut themselves off from God’s creations, simply talking about God and spirituality. “Their words are blasphemous and sad. Death without reincarnation awaits them. They can look forward to a fearful fate, but far from being God’s punishment, this is what they have chosen as their own destiny! “God has shone forth in the Universe with a new thought—it is not only a great energy, but a judge as well. Much has been said in treatises and legends about God’s judgement. It is now coming softly and invisibly, God’s judgement. It touches all the people now living on the planet. And every Man will be his own judge. “Whoever chooses life and creates living life will be eternal and resemble the grand Creator of the Universe. “Whoever visualises death in his imagination is doomed to death by his own thought.”

It seemed as though these words of hers, spoken with a soft and confident tone on the bank of the River Ob, were taken up by the Space like an echo over the Earth. Over the past ten years I have not been the only one who has learnt how Anastasia is able to create the future through her thoughts and words. As my boat took me further and further up the river, I could see her still standing on the shore. The Space around picked up her words on eternal life and repeated them over and over. From what galaxies, or from what worlds of the Universe, I all at once began to wonder, did Anastasia appear in her earthly likeness and impart a conscious awareness of eternity to the planet Earth? She is not one to lightly toss out words at random turns. And this has been confirmed in real life. And that being the case, my dear readers, I must offer you my heartiest congratulations! On your conscious awareness! We shall live for ever, cocreating life in the Universe. ’Til our next joyful meeting, dear friends! End of Part One Foot Notes THE RINGING CEDARS SERIES AT A GLANCE Anastasia, the first book of the Ringing Cedars Series, tells the story of entrepreneur Vladimir Megre’s trade trip to the Siberian taiga in 1995, where he witnessed incredible spiritual phenomena connected with sacred ‘ringing cedar’ trees. He spent three days with a woman named Anastasia who shared with him her unique outlook on subjects as diverse as gardening, child-rearing, healing, Nature, sexuality, religion and more. This wilderness experience transformed Vladimir so deeply that he abandoned his commercial plans and, penniless, went to Moscow to fulfil Anastasia’s request and write a book about the spiritual insights she so generously shared with him. True to her promise this life-changing book, once written, has become an international bestseller and has touched hearts of millions of people world-wide. The Ringing Cedars of Russia, the second book of the Series, in addition to providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the story of how Anastasia came to be published, offers a deeper exploration of the universal concepts so dramatically revealed in Book 1. It takes the reader on an adventure through the vast expanses of space, time and spirit—from the Paradise-like glade in the Siberian taiga to the rough urban depths of Russia’s capital city, from the ancient mysteries of our forebears to a vision of humanity’s radiant future.

The Space of Love, the third book of the Series, describes author’s second visit to Anastasia. Rich with new revelations on natural child-rearing and alternative education, on the spiritual significance of breast-feeding and the meaning of ancient megaliths, it shows how each person’s thoughts can influence the destiny of the entire Earth and describes practical ways of putting Anastasia’s vision of happiness into practice. Megre shares his new outlook on education and children’s real creative potential after a visit to a school where pupils build their own campus and cover the ten-year Russian school programme in just two years. Complete with an account of an armed intrusion into Anastasia’s habitat, the book highlights the limitless power of Love and non-violence. Co-creation, the fourth book and centrepiece of the Series, paints a dramatic living image of the creation of the Universe and humanity’s place in this creation, making this primordial mystery relevant to our everyday living today. Deeply metaphysical yet at the same time down-to-Earth practical, this poetic heart-felt volume helps us uncover answers to the most significant questions about the essence and meaning of the Universe and the nature and purpose of our existence. It also shows how and why the knowledge of these answers, innate in every human being, has become obscured and forgotten, and points the way toward reclaiming this wisdom and—in partnership with Nature—manifesting the energy of Love through our lives. Who are we?—Book Five of the Series—describes the author’s search for real-life ‘proofs’ of Anastasia’s vision presented in the previous volumes. Finding these proofs and taking stock of ongoing global environmental destruction, Vladimir Megre describes further practical steps for putting Anastasia’s vision into practice. Full of beautiful realistic images of a new way of living in co-operation with the Earth and each other, this book also highlights the role of children in making us aware of the precariousness of the present situation and in leading the global transition toward a happy, violence-free society. The book of kin, the sixth book of the Series, describes another visit by the author to Anastasia’s glade in the Siberian taiga and his conversations with his growing son, which cause him to take a new look at education, science, history, family and Nature. Through parables and revelatory dialogues and stories Anastasia then leads Vladimir Megre and the reader on a shocking re-discovery of the pages of humanity’s history that have been distorted or kept secret for thousands of years. This knowledge sheds light on the causes of war, oppression and violence in the modern world and guides us in preserving the wisdom of our ancestors and passing it over to future generations.

The energy of life, Book Seven of the Series, re-asserts the power of human thought and the influence of our thinking on our lives and the destiny of the entire planet and the Universe. Is also brings forth a practical understanding of ways to consciously control and build up the power of our creative thought. The book sheds still further light on the forgotten pages of humanity’s history, on religion, on the roots of inter-racial and interreligious conflict, on ideal nutrition, and shows how a new way of thinking and a lifestyle in true harmony with Nature can lead to happiness and solve the personal and societal problems of crime, corruption, misery, conflict, war and violence. The new civilisation, the eighth book of the Series, is not yet complete. The first part of the book, already published as a separate volume, describes yet another visit by Vladimir Megre to Anastasia and their son, and offers new insights into practical co-operation with Nature, showing in ever greater detail how Anastasia’s lifestyle applies to our lives. Describing how the visions presented in previous volumes have already taken beautiful form in real life and produced massive changes in Russia and beyond, the author discerns the birth of a new civilisation. The book also paints a vivid image of America’s radiant future, in which the conflict between the powerful and the helpless, the rich and the poor, the city and the country, can be transcended and thereby lead to transformations in both the individual and society. Rites of Love—Book 8, Part 2 (published as a separate volume)—contrasts today’s mainstream attitudes to sex, family, childbirth and education with our forebears’ lifestyle, which reflected their deep spiritual understanding of the significance of conception, pregnancy, homebirth and upbringing of the young in an atmosphere of love. In powerful poetic prose Megre describes their ancient way of life, grounded in love and non-violence, and shows the practicability of this same approach toda. Through the life-story of one family, he portrays the radiant world of the ancient Russian Vedic civilisation, the drama of its destruction and its re-birth millennia later—in our present time. To be continued... Book 8 of The Ringing Cedars Series The New Civilisation paints a vivid image of America’s radiant future, in which the conflict between the powerful and the helpless, the rich and the poor, the city and the country can be transcended and lead to transformations in both the individual and society. Vladimir Megre describes a new visit to Anastasia and their son, and offers new insights into practical co-operation with Nature, showing in ever greater detail how

Anastasia’s lifestyle applies to our lives and how her words already produce massive changed in Russia and beyond. ISBN 978-0-9763333-8-8 9 780976 333388 RINGING CEDARS PRESS www.RingingCedars.com 1-888-DOLMENS USS14.95 CANS19.95 AU$24.95

Rites of Love by Vladimir Megre Translation, Translator’s Afterword and footnotes by John Woodsworth Editing, Editor’s Afterword, footnotes, design and layout by Leonid Sharashkin Cover art by Alexander Razboinikov Copyright © 2006 Vladimir Megre Copyright © 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, translation Copyright © 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, afterwords Copyright © 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, footnotes Copyright © 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, cover art Copyright © 2008 Leonid Sharashkin, design and layout All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007934233 ISBN: 978-0-9763333-9-5 Published by Ringing Cedars Press www.RingingCedars.com 1 Arreta— The Russian name here is actually Talmeza, derived from the word Zemlya (Earth), spelt backwards. 2 Vladislav—a common Russian masculine name, originally meaning ‘{born] in love and glory5 (although often associated with the meaning ‘ruler of praise'). The subsequent variant Vadichek is an endearing form of this name. 3 Radomir—a Russian masculine name, derived from the words rad (‘joyful’) and mir (‘peace’). 4 Liudmila—a common Russian feminine name, derived from the roots Hud (‘people’) and mil (‘dear’).

5 Katya—an endearing form of the feminine name Yekaterina, derived from the Greek word katharos (‘pure’); related to ‘Catherine’ in English. The subsequent variant Katerinka conveys a hint of brotherly condescension.

Book 8.2 - Contents 1. Love—the essence of the Cosmos. 2. Do our lives correspond to the Divine programme? 3. Why does love come and go? 4. Wedding rites.. 5. Conception involves more than flesh 6. Into the depths of history.. 7. Russia erased 8. The elders’ mistake 9. The Creator’s greatest gift 10. Pre-wedding festivities. 11. The wedding rite 12. Conception 13. Telegony can be overcome.. 14. The psychology of Man’s genesis and appearance in the world 15. A rite for a woman giving birth without a husband. 16. Where should we have our babies? 17. The Vedruss birth 18. Not Radomir’s last battle 19. From the stars will they return to the Earth 20. Even in chaos there is a purpose 21. ‘Soulmate gatherings’... 22. A nuptial rite for women with children 23. High society ladies 24. Millennial encounter... 25. Anastasia’s wedding A voyage of self-discovery. Translator’s Afterword The Book of Flappiness. Editor’s Afterword CHAPTER ONE

Love—the essence of the Cosmos All of a sudden a figure appeared on the roadway ahead. He was standing practically smack dab in the middle of the travel lane with his back to my oncoming jeep. I began braking at once, so as to carefully go around this strange-looking greyheaded figure. When I got within ten metres of him, the old fellow quietly turned around

and I instinctively pressed the brake pedal to the floor. There in front of me on the roadway stood none other than Anastasia’s grandfather. I recognised him at once. His grey hair and beard were a complete contradiction to his incredibly young, sparkling eyes—a discrepancy which immediately set him apart from many of his peers. And the long grey raincoat of indeterminate cut from goodness-knows-what material was also something I was able to recognise all too easily. Still, I had a hard time believing my eyes. After all, how could this oldster from the Siberian taiga turn up here in the heart of Russia, on a roadway leading from Vladimir to the city of Suzdal?1 How, indeed? By coach and horses? How could this Siberian recluse hope to master all the intricacies of our transportation networks? Add to that a complete absence of any kind of identification documents. Money, of course, he could have laid his hands on, by selling dried mushrooms and cedar nuts,2 as his granddaughter Anastasia had done. But with no identification... Of course we have lots of homeless people without identification, and the police can’t do anything about it. But Anastasia’s grandfather is far from resembling your average homeless person. Sure, he was dressed in old shabby clothes, but they were always clean, and his appearance was wellgroomed, his face was bright and a light blush adorned his cheeks. I sat there, unable to move, behind the wheel of the jeep. He came over and I opened the half-door for him. “Hi there, Vladimir!” the old fellow greeted me as though there were nothing unusual about the circumstances. “You heading to Suzdal? Can you give me a lift?” “Yes, of course I can. Hop in! How did you end up here? How on earth did you manage to get here all the way from the taiga?” “How I got here isn’t important. The main thing is why I came.” “Well, why did you come?” “To take a tour into real Russian history with you, and to dispel your resentment toward me. My granddaughter Anastasia told me to. She said to me: ‘Grandpakins, you are to blame for his resentment.’ So here I am, joining you on the tour. That’s why you’re going to Suzdal, isn’t it?” “Yes, I want to go see the museum. And I really did feel resentment, only it’s gone now.” We rode for some time in silence. I recalled how frosty our parting had been

back in the taiga. In fact, we didn’t even say good-bye. It had happened like this: Anastasia’s grandfather had recommended I set up a political party. He suggested calling it the Motherland Party? The idea of forming a party based on Anastasia’s ideas had actually been noised about for some time, by various people. Many believed a political party was essential to make it easier for people to acquire land for the building of family domains and head off any kind of encroachment on the part of government officials, since none of the existing parties, regrettably, had even considered such questions in their platform. In view of the fact that there are some sort of powers opposed to Anastasia’s ideas and that all sorts of attempts have been made to discredit not only the ideas themselves but also people who have been attracted by them, as well as Anastasia and me, it was suggested to draft the party’s constitution without any reference in its ‘Aims and objectives” section to creating favourable conditions for the setting up of kin’s domains. Nor should there be any mention of Anastasia’s ideas, or the Ringing Cedars Series. The would-be organisers were trying to persuade me that this would be the only way to get the party officially registered. And so I decided to consult with Anastasia’s grandfather on this question, as well as on the topic of the party’s structure, its primary aims and objectives. I surmised that since he was well acquainted with the acts of the priests who were constantly setting up all sorts of societal structures and religions which had lasted millennia, he must surely know about the secret organisational tenets underlying such longevity. Besides, he himself was a priest of some standing.3 4 Quite possibly, even stronger than the ones currently ruling the world. If so, then he must certainly be aware of the principles underlying the priesthood itself, which had turned out to be more resilient than religion. Indeed, the priesthood was and is a suprareligious structure, since the priests took direct part in the creation of certain religions and secular institutions. This is clear from the history of Ancient Egypt and other countries. It followed that Anastasia’s grandfather would be able to set forth certain fundamentals for the Motherland Party, making it a most powerful, if not the most powerful, institution. I sincerely wanted to hear what he had to say on this, and so I took advantage of what I thought was a moment when he was not immersed in his inner contemplations, and said: “You were speaking about a party. My readers, too, have been talking about

this for some time. But some of them are recommending that I don’t include any mention in its constitution of Anastasia, or her ideas, or the books—so that the registration will go smoothly.” The grey-haired old fellow stood before me, leaning on his father’s staff, without saying a word. It wasn’t just that he kept his silence—he stared at me fixedly, as though seeing me for the first time. His eyes reflected more criticism than kindness. And when he did start speaking again after a lengthy pause, his voice, too, betrayed notes of disdain. “Registration, you say So, you’ve come to ask my advice? To betray or not to betray?” “What’s this about betrayal? I came to consult with you on how to proceed so that the registration will go smoothly” “Registration, after all, is not an end in itself, Vladimir. Even the party is not an end in itself. No ideas, you say, not even a mention? So how are readers going to realise that it’s their Motherland Party, and not just some mercantile traitors’ party? You’ve been asked to set up some kind of meaningless organisation—without any basis, idea, or symbols which would already guarantee leadership for centuries to come. And now you’ve come to ask me whether you shouldn’t follow their advice. Don’t tell me you couldn’t see through even this simple trick?” I realised I had got myself into a rather sticky situation, and so I tried to get out of it by asking another question: “I only wanted to see if there were some principles you could recommend including in the draft of the party’s constitution, its aims and objectives?” What happened next nearly drove me out of my mind. As it seemed to me back then, the old fellow was not only refusing to answer my questions, he had started making fun of me in a high-handed way First he looked at me wide-eyed, then he gave a kind of irritated chuckle and turned away, even taking a step back from me. But then he turned around again and said: “Don’t you understand, Vladimir? All the answers to the questions you raise should be given birth within yourself, and within everyone who joins you in creating the party’s structure. Sure, I can give you a hint. But tomorrow someone else will give you another hint, and then a third, and you won’t act —all you’ll do is focus your attention on the hints. Go right, go left, you’ll all go forward and then backward again or keep going round in circles because of the laziness of your minds.” I strongly resented this latter phrase. Over the years since my first meeting

with Anastasia I’ve been stretching my mind to the limit day and night. Maybe it’s starting to overheat from the constant stress of the work. I’ve published eight books now and have often taken to contemplating what is written in them myself. Sometimes I’ve found myself pondering the accuracy of particular phrases time and again. And surely the old fellow must know all about this. Even though my resentment was starting to become inflamed, I managed to restrain myself, explaining: “Indeed, it seems as though everybody thinks and reflects, and various political systems are set up—communist, democratic, centrist. But as someone once said, no matter what party we aim to create, it all ends up looking like the Communist Party’s Central Committee!” “That’s very true. That’s what I’ve been telling you—you’re going round in circles because of the laziness of your minds.” “What’s laziness of mind’ got to do with it? Maybe it’s simply that not enough information is available?” “So, there’s not enough information out there and you’ve come to me to get it, eh? But if your mind is lazy, will you be able to make any sense of it?” I could feel my resentment increasing, but I endeavoured to conceal my irritation and continued: “Okay, I’ll try to make my brain work harder.” “Then pay attention. The party should be structured along the lines of the Novgorod vieche5—I mean, in its early period. You’ll figure out the rest later.” This answer made me really angr. The oldster knew perfectly well that documents on pre-Christian Russia were nowhere to be found—they had all been destroyed. So nobody could ever tell how this Novgorod vieche worked, especially in its early period. That meant he was mocking me. But why? What had I done to make him—? Trying to restrain myself out of respect for his age, I apologised: “Excuse me for disturbing you. You were probably occupied in something important. I’ll leave you.” And I turned around to go, but he called after me: “But the aim or objective of the Motherland Party should be the creation of favourable conditions for the restoration of the energy of Love to families. It is essential to bring back the rites and celebrations which can help find one’s ‘other half’, one’s soulmate.”

“What?” I turned to face the old fellow again. “Love? Bring it back to families? I realise you don’t want to talk serious with me. But why are you making fun of me?” “I’m not making fun of you, Vladimir. It is you who are not capable of understanding what it’s all about. If you don’t train yourself to contemplate, it can take years to figure out.” “Figure out what? You have at least a rough idea what kinds of aims and objectives parties all over the world write into their constitutions?” “I have a rough idea.” “Then tell me, if you know that. Tell me!” “They claim they will definitely raise the standard of living for everyone, and will offer people greater freedom.” “Exactly. And in particular they promise industrial development, guaranteed housing and control over inflation.” “Nonsense. Utter nonsense!” the oldster chortled. “Nonsense??? Yes, it will be nonsense if I follow your advice and put in as a basic tenet of the party’s constitution: The Party will work toward the goal of helping every individual find their soulmate. ‘And you can add: The Party will restore to the people a way of life and rites capable of preserving love in families forever? “What on earth are you talking about??!! You—you want to make a laughingstock of me in front of everybody? Questions like this—like searching for one’s soulmate—this is what marriage agencies do, on a commercial basis. If I include statements like that in the party’s platform, it’ll end up being not a party but a dating service! And as for love in families, well, that’s a personal matter for families, and nobody, no political party, has the right to interfere in family affairs. That’s none of the State’s business.” “But don’t tell me your State isn’t made up of families! Aren’t families the basis of any State?” “They are, they are! That’s why the State is obliged to raise the standard of living both for families and for individual citizens.” ‘And what then?” the old fellow snapped. “By raising the standard of living in the country, will you then restore love to a great many families?” “I don’t know. But it is accepted that states should care about the welfare of their citizens.” “Vladimir, ponder for a moment what that word welfare means. Calm down and delve into its meaning. Now I’m going to say it just a little differently:

well-faring or faring well, that is, a state of well-being. If you think about it, you’ll realise that love alone is capable of raising any Man’s well-being to the highest possible level—not money or palaces, but only the feeling given to Man6 by the Creator—the state of love. “Love is the essence of the Cosmos. Living, thinking, with an advanced intellect. It is powerful, and it’s no wonder God was so excited about it, giving its great energy as a gift to Man. It is imperative to try to understand love, and not be shy about paying attention to it even on the national level. ‘And when the nation is comprised of a multitude of families giving birth to their children in love and creating a Space of Love, it will not suffer from lawlessness or inflation. Such a nation will have no need to fight against criminal tendencies; they will disappear from society. And all the prophets with their cunning philosophising will be silenced. Whether they foolishly neglected to mention it or whether it was simply beyond their comprehension is unimportant, but they led people away from the most important thing to a place where there is no love. “The priests knew about this, and consequently humoured the prophets. “For centuries mankind had been creating rites in aid of life and love. Whether these rites were suggested by the Creator or the people’s own wisdom had perfected them is unimportant. They, in fact, over the centuries, created a state of well-being and helped young people obtain love and joy in perpetuity. None of these rites was characterised by occult superstition, as today Each one served as a school of higher learning, an examination by the Universe. ‘Anastasia told you about the Vedruss7 wedding rite that dates back centuries. You mentioned it in just one of your books,8 but it deserves to be mentioned in every book. It is far from being fully comprehended by people living today, including you. “If you remember, she also told you about ancient ways of searching for your one to love. But again, you today have not been able to make sense of them. My granddaughter said: ‘I, apparently, have not created strong enough images.’ She takes all the blame upon herself, but I claim that the laziness of your mind (or minds) is also to blame. “Let the best learned men study the Vedruss wedding rite letter by letter. They won’t—and you’d better believe me, Vladimir—they won’t find a single occult or superstitious act. It is an act which is both rational and exactly suited to love’s creation. Compared to it, you will see how absurd are today’s wedding celebrations—traditions smacking of occultism and superstition.

“You must realise that Anastasia knows immeasurably more than she tells you. Her acts, her logic, her behaviour are not immediately understood even by the priests, who subsequently can only marvel at what my granddaughter has done. “Enquire of her and inspire her with your question. Ask her what rite the Vedruss people had for childbirth. “Don’t count on her to bring the subject up. She takes care to talk to you only about what she thinks interests you. But you don’t have the slightest idea of what tremendous hidden wisdom lies in the ancient rites. They are the creation of cosmic worlds. ‘Any world that forgets the wisdom of its age-old forebears deserves derision. It makes no difference whether an individual has forgotten on his own or under the influence of the priests who have mastered the occult sciences. “Enquire of my granddaughter and inspire her with your question. And summon your party to the creation of love. Until that happens, you are of little interest to me. You need to have the most obvious things explained to you at length. Show forgiveness to an old man. Go. I do not find it useful to talk and think of unpleasantries.” The old fellow turned and started slowly walking away I stood there all alone in the taiga, feeling I had been spat upon. The resentment I had felt right from the start of our conversation prevented me from making sense of everything he said. But subsequently, upon returning home, I mentally went back to our conversation in the taiga, pondering it and analysing it. I very much wanted to prove—perhaps not so much to Anastasia’s grandfather as to myself—that I had not become completely lazy of mind. I wanted to either disprove or confirm what he said—within myself. Back in the taiga, the oldster had told me that as long as people are content merely to listen to hints and not begin to think about the essence of life for themselves, society will never be free from its cycle of social upheavals. And Man will never be happy. I guess that’s the way it is. He also talked about the existence of some kind of programme created by God. Now, what might that be? To what extent does the life of Man today correspond with this programme? CHAPTER TWO

Do our lives correspond to the Divine programme? A Man was born in the operating room on the second floor of a hospital. The doctors were surprised to see an absolutely healthy baby. Days and months flew by like seconds. The child attended kindergarten, then school, then university. ‘Wise’ educators, teachers and professors instilled in him some kind of programme of life. The Man decided that the most important thing in life was to have lots of money, which would enable him to feed himself well, have an apartment, a car and clothing. And he began to work hard, sometimes even taking two shifts a day. Still, the seconds dragged out into years, and when he reached retirement he had been able to earn enough for a modest two-room flat and a used car. Long before retiring, he fell in love, got married, divorced and re-married. His first wife bore him a child, but after the divorce the child stayed with his mother. A child was born from the second marriage, but he went off to the Far North. They talked on the telephone once or twice a year. Seconds counted down the years of the Man’s old age. He took ill and died. Such is the sad fate of the majority of people living on the Earth today. There is a minority who manage to become famous entertainers, politicians, presidents or millionaires. Life for this category of people is considered to be more happy, but that is an illusion. Their cares are no fewer than anyone else’s, and their end turns out exactly the same: old age, disease and death. Was such a fate included in the Divine programme for residents of the Earth? No! The Creator could not predestine such a sad and cruel fate for His children. It was human society itself, under the influence of some kind of powers, that ignored the Divine programme and started down a path of self-torture and self-destruction. Perhaps somebody doubts the existence of the Divine programme of human life? After all, it is not something our scholars or politicians talk about. Religions propound God’s design, but invariably through intermediaries and mostly in different ways. About the only thing they agree on is that God exists. Philosophers and many scholars, too, believe in the existence of a higher, rational, intelligent being that has created the visible world and earthly life. It is impossible not to believe this. Everything comprising our world, after all, is too logically interconnected for it to be otherwise. Well, if that is the

case, then a supremely rational being could create only in a meaningful way, create only that which is eternal, and predestine a joyful perspective for all living beings—first and foremost, His beloved Man, made in His likeness. Man, in other words, is offered a specific way of life on the Earth which allows him to become aware of himself and all creation—to learn about and continue to carry out the Divine programme, contributing his own marvellous creations thereto. God desires from His son, Man, conjoint creation and joy for all from its contemplation.1 ^ee Book 4, Chapter 2: “The beginning of creation”. There is no doubt that God’s programme exists, and it is not just a select group that can become acquainted with this programme, but everyone who wishes to do so. The Divine programme is not set forth in letters or hieroglyphs on sheets of papyrus, but in living signs of Nature—Nature as God has created it—and which belong only to Him. The minds and intellects of the people of the Ancient Russian period still allowed them to read the grand Book of the Divine. Out of the billions of such letter-signs, the majority of people living today are acquainted with but a few, and we must begin anew to study the Divine alphabet. The book I am writing at the moment is not on a religious theme. It is not an attempt at sheer philosophising. This book is a call to research, to becoming aware of the Divine programme. I am not about to teach anyone or preach anything. I only want to acquaint my readers with information on the culture of our forebears, through the rites perfected by the ‘wise-men’9 through careful calculation and designed to preserve family love, and to call upon everyone to disprove or confirm the arguments presented. I was prompted to publish this material by the sayings and logical conclusions of the Siberian recluses, especially Anastasia. Publication is needed in order to let the information seep through to the level of one’s own feelings and, through collaborative efforts, to start to act according to the logic of life, as well as in the hope that our generation will begin to contemplate, and then accelerate the building of a new civilisation for themselves and their children. It is possible that Anastasia has conceptually outlined just the first point in the programme of mankind’s development, to wit: Human society should study the Divine programme, using the materials God has provided, and transforming the whole planet into a marvellous Paradise oasis, thereby creating a harmoniously balanced society for all living

beings. Man’s attainment of this level of life will open up possibilities for the creation of life on other planets and in other galaxies. Against the background of this grand concept, Anastasia first proposed the creation of family domains. Let us too begin our research by examining commonly known and outwardly simple issues. e® CHAPTER THREE

Why does love come and go? Oh, how many poems and philosophical treatises have been devoted to this very feeling! In fact, it is hard to find a literary work where it is not touched upon to some extent. Nearly all religions talk about love. It is considered to be a great feeling imparted to Man by God. The reality of our current human conditions, however, portrays the feeling of love as a most sadistic phenomenon. Let’s face the truth. Statistics show that sixty to seventy percent of marriages are doomed to failure. The failure comes after years of an uneasy coexistence on the part of two people who were once in love. Sometimes these years are marked by mutual insults, scandals and even face-smashing. The original beautiful and inspired feeling vanishes, only to be replaced by years of anger, insults, hatred and, ultimately, unhappy children. This is the sad result of what we call love today. Could such a result be considered a gift from God! No way! But perhaps it is we ourselves who turn aside from some kind of way of life inherent in Man, and that is why love vanishes, telling us, in effect: I can’t live in such conditions. Tour way of life is killing me. And you yourselves are dying. Remembering my conversation in the taiga, I recalled how unusually the grey-haired recluse talked about love. “Love,” he said, “is the greatest and most powerful energy in the Cosmos. It is never thoughtless. It has thoughts and its own feelings too. Love is a living, self-sufficient entity a living being. “By the will of God it is sent to the Earth, ready to bestow its great energy on every Earth-dweller and make their lives eternal in love. It comes to each

one of them, endeavouring to tell them, through the language of feelings, about the Divine programme. If Man doesn’t listen, it is forced to leave, not by its own will, but by Man’s.” Love! A mysterious feeling. And even though almost every Man who has ever lived on the Earth has managed to experience it, love remains largely uninvestigated. On the one hand, the theme of love is touched upon in most works of prose and poetry, and in most artistic genres. On the other, all the information these contain merely establishes the existence of such a phenomenon. At best, it describes but the outward manifestations of love and variations in behaviour on the part of different people under the influence of the feeling as it has appeared in them. But is it really necessary to investigate the feeling of love, which everybody knows? The extraordinary and brand new information I received in the Siberian taiga confirms that investigation is extremely necessary. We need to learn to understand love. I believe one of the most accurate answers to the question as to why love fades is simply that it vanishes when it finds no understanding. People in the past understood love. Judge for yourselves: more than ten thousand years ago the Vedruss people possessed knowledge enabling them to carry out actions which not only strengthened love but made it everlasting. One such action was the Ancient Vedic wedding rite. After the description was published in one of my books, many academic researchers came round to affirming that this particular rite was capable of transforming an initially flaring feeling into a permanent one. Comparing it with the rites of various peoples both past and present, I began more and more to draw the conclusion that the Ancient Vedic wedding rite was a rational deed thought up by the wisdom of the people, which is capable even today of helping many family couples find lasting love. However, let’s go through everything in order. And let us begin with the most important thing. Should we seek out our ‘other half’? ‘My other half’—‘my soulmate’—it’s a popular expression. Let’s see what it means, exactly I think many people will accept the following definition: a man or a woman close to you in spirit and their views on life, a pleasant communicator, someone you feel attracted to (including their appearance), someone capable of inspiring you to love.

Should we seek out our soulmate, or let our ‘other half’ be found all on its own, through the will of destiny? As many centuries of mankind’s experience has shown, a determined search is essential. This is attested in multitudes of stories in which stout-hearted young men have set off on long quests in search of their intended. There are a number of ancient rites which can aid this most important search of one’s life. There are ancient rites, too, which can help determine whether one has made the right choice. What if that ‘other half’ has come to you straight from the devil himself? Some of these rites I have already described in my previous books. I did not touch upon well-known rituals, but mostly introduced rites that are not commonly known and have not been encountered heretofore. The present book focuses on the wedding rite and, at the same time, the rite for determining whether one has made the right choice of partner, which I shall go over again in a different context. “Then get on with it—show us these miraculous rites,” some of my readers may be thinking. “Why bother with all these expositions?” But the expositions are absolutely essential! We need a vision of our reality today, otherwise we shall not understand the tremendous signification of the wisdom of the people. Everything in the world is relative and, hence, comparisons are crucial. So let’s now take a look and see which life situations in today’s world can facilitate a meeting and which may just get in the way. Strange as it may seem, in our present so-called ‘information age’, situations favouring a meeting of two ‘halves’ are getting harder and harder to find. People living in large, densely populated megacities are virtually cut off from each other by invisible barriers. Someone living in a modern multistoreyed apartment block is often unacquainted with his next-door neighbour.1 Passengers on public transport, even those standing jam-packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles, are all absorbed in their own individual problems. Pedestrians walking along the same street have no reason to communicate with each other. And in America, for example, you can’t even look closely at a woman without being suspected of sexual harassment. And so, just sitting in your flat or travelling to work or studies, there’s practically no opportunity to find your soulmate. Let’s say your work involves contact with a lot of different people. Let’s say

you’re sitting at a cash register in a large supermarket. But none of the customers passing by you every day thinks of striking up an acquaintance with you. It’s more likely they see you merely as an adjunct to the cash register. A college or university where a whole lot of young people congregate, though it indeed offers opportunities for conversation and coupling, is not a place for general selection of one’s soulmate, since an educational institution is designed with a completely different function in mind. Today the most acceptable locales for meeting people are generally bars, restaurants, discotheques and resorts. But encounters here, even those which end in marriages, do not, as a rule, result in a happy life in love and harmony According to statistics, ninety percent of such marriages end in divorce. The principal cause lies in a false image. And what might that be? Well, here’s an example. False images Back before I met Anastasia I took a two-week cruise on the Mediterranean Sea. Each day in the ship’s dining room my mealtime companions were three young people—two women and a man—who worked in a design institute in Novosibirsk. Each day the girls appeared in new and stylish clothing, with intriguing hairdos. It was a delight to chat with them. Nadia and Valia,2 as they were called, were always cheerful and outreaching. One time I found their male companion in his cabin, and I asked him: “What pretty and pleasant girls we have at our table! Maybe we can make some time with them?” To which he replied: “I have no desire to make time with riff-raff like that.” “Why ‘riff-raff’?” “’Cause I work with them in the same institute and I know what they’re really like.” ‘And what are they really like?” “In the first place, they’re rowdies. Secondly, they’re lazy and slovenly It’s only here that they try to keep up appearances and make people think they’re nice and smart. It’s quite clear they’ve come here specially to find themselves husbands among the wealthier class. Ifou’ve noticed how they play up to the Armenian men on board.”

I had an opportunity to see for myself the discrepancy he mentioned when I paid a subsequent late-afternoon visit to the design institute to see my table companions from the cruise ship. To put it mildly, they weren’t nearly as impressive as they had been on board, and all their former cheerfulness and pleasantness had somehow vanished. Which means that back on the ship they were putting on a false image. Many men and women in the world today try to find their ‘other half’ with the aid of an external image which doesn’t correspond with their real nature. Perhaps such a sad phenomenon is due to an obliviousness to other possible methods? In that case both parties end up being deceived. A man will give flowers and expensive gifts to an image which has taken his fancy He may go so far as to offer her his hand and his heart. Then, after marriage, all of a sudden he sees her real character, which doesn’t appeal to him at all. He feels a sense of irritation and a yearning for the earlier image which has now vanished. A woman all of a sudden sees that the suitor who only recently was so kind and attentive to her doesn’t love or understand her at all. How did this happen? But he never did love her—he only loved the image. The striking discrepancy between the artificial image and the real person is particularly evident in the case of entertainment celebrities, especially if you should happen to see them in their everyday lives. A situation no less unfortunate arises from the fact that women often change their outward appearance after marriage. When a man falls in love with a woman, especially at first sight, it is difficult to say what, specifically, has aroused the feeling of love in him. Perhaps it was the colour of her hair or the way she plaited her braid, or maybe her eyes. It is customary to think that the feeling of love is aroused by the whole gamut of external and internal traits. And when a woman changes her external appearance, she thereby takes away part of her appeal and weakens the love between them. Even if following a radical change of clothes, hairdo and make-up, everybody around tells her how beautiful and attractive she’s become, and even if these compliments ring true, and even if her husband gets excited over his wife’s new look, it may be only a matter of time before his love begins to fade or disappears altogether. After all, he has glimpsed a great many beautiful women who are a lot more attractive than his wife at present. Still, he has fallen in love specifically with her, and with the appearance she had when they first met. And all of a sudden that previous image is no longer there. And you will, no doubt, agree that in falling in love with the new image, he thereby betrays the image she

presented before. Why were people in ancient times so cautious about changing their clothing? Perhaps they didn’t have much in the way of a selection of fabrics? But they did. They imported silks from far across the seas, and they themselves knew how to weave cloth, either coarse or fine. They could do all sorts of designs on the cloth with different colouring agents, or embroider them. Perhaps they were lacking in imagination or finances? They had plenty of imagination—an abundance, in fact. Practically every other person was a fine artist or designer. You only have to look at houses from those times— how they are all decorated with wood-carvings. And every woman was a master of embroidery. As for finances, both people of modest means and even those well-off were very conservative when it came to changes of clothing or hairdos. They were extremely cautious about altering their own appearance, being careful to preserve their image. The current fashion world, especially women, is wont to change their image like a kaleidoscope. Such extreme fashion swings are extraordinarily profitable to the clothing manufacturing industry, when people throw out things that are still perfectly serviceable and buy new fashions in the hopes that they will bring something new in the way of a semblance of happiness. But no, it never comes. In its place appears only a new artificial image someone has created —an image people put on under the influence of aggressive propaganda. In all the round of modern life I never have discovered any efficient system of measures designed to help people find a life-long companion. Not only that, but I have been getting more and more the impression that our modern living—indeed, our whole way of life—is designed in such a way that we shall never meet our true soulmate. Maybe this situation even works to somebody’s advantage. A Man who is dissatisfied with life, who has no goals or meaning in his life, can be a profitable catch for many a man out to make money Not to mention profitable to the powers that be. As to the question of whether or not we are actually seeking out our ‘other half’, I think the answer will be: no, we are not. We don’t knowhow to. And there are no favourable conditions to facilitate the search. I attempted to discover sagacious hints on finding one’s soulmate in the rites of bygone centuries. I shall cite a few typical examples of wedding rites. Let us examine just how sagacious—or primitive—they are. I shall include my own commentaries as we go along, but if you don’t happen to agree with them, you can always cross them out, or white them out and write in your

own, right here in the book. I find myself tapping more and more into the feeling that Anastasia’s grandfather is right: if we don’t start thinking for ourselves, we’ll go on accepting any sort of crap as the wisdom of life. I shan’t even name modern weddings. Apart from drunkenness, tripping around in cars and laying flowers at the so-called ‘eternal flame’,3 there’s precious little worth saying. Let’s take a closer look, then, at some earlier wedding rites. ^layingflowers at the ‘eternalflame’ (i.e., at tomb of the unknown soldier)— a common practice among Russian newlyweds which takes place shortly after the wedding ceremony CHAPTER FOUR

Wedding rites I shall cite a typical rite from pre-revolutionary Russia with a view to examining it from the standpoint of social degradation in relation to love. Courting rituals in Perm.1 Weddings for the people of Perm involve a whole complex of preliminary operations. First, a father has to seek permission from the local authorities and from the parish priest before setting about courting a bride for his son. This kind of procedure invariably takes place without the participation of the groom, evidently according to ancient custom, and is limited to just the opinion of relatives and close friends called in to give advice. And these are the ones who will decide the fate of their closest relative’s future well-being. It happens that the groom first meets his intended only after the matchmaker has already reached an agreement with the bride’s father, and sometimes not until the day of the wedding. Rarely does a young Permian have a chance to court his future bride on his own. The groom’s father seeks out, on his son’s behalf, a bride with a fair-sized dowry, a maiden of character and respectable moral standing. Once the final decision had been made as to which girl is to be targeted, the courting itself begins, known as the kora-siom. This task is always entrusted to the family elder or, in his absence, to the godfather or one of the older relations, or to someone who has had experience in such matters. It is further explained how and what the go-betweens should sa. But it seems to me the whole process is utterly absurd, since the primary principle is

violated right from the start. As we can see, there is not even a hint of the young people’s love in carrying out this rite. Sad, too, is the fact that with this abusive attitude toward the energy of Love, they are implicating God. In preparation for the groom’s departure to bring back his bride, the groom’s mother (or matron of the house) places on the tablecloth a loaf of bread intended for the blessing of the groom, along with salt, beer and braga,10 and lights the candles in front of the icons.11 The groom prays and bows low at his mother’s and father’s feet, seeking their blessing. After reciting Jesus’ prayer, he takes up a position at the table as all the wedding guests approach, reciting the same prayer. One after another they reach out with both hands to present the groom with the gifts and goodies they have brought: a cooked shoulder or cut of raw pork, always with bread, and each one chants: ‘Accept these precious gifts, young prince”, followed by the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ” and so forth. At this the groom replies to each one individually: ‘Amen to your prayer”, before accepting (also with both hands) the gifts of food, placing each one first on his head and then on the table, and honours each wedding guest with beer and braga (on rare occasions, wine) as he recites Jesus’ prayer and intones: “Drink this to your health, (name of guest).” This naturally meets with a response from each wedding guest the groom addresses with the words ‘Amen to your prayer”. Taking the glass from the groom, he bows to the groom and intones: “May the Lord grant you long life, great happiness, good living,4 may He grant you to attain happiness, cattle, a full stomach, and bread and salt,5 obtain a young princess, accompany the princess to the church as her swain, retain a standing position beneath the golden crowns and maintain the law of God!” And then the guest takes a drink. And here is some more intriguing information. Permian women rarely preserve their virginity, but their grooms pay no special attention to this and do not avoid such women, but rather accept them eagerly, even those who are pregnant, anticipating the speedy arrival of another worker in the family. It is said that the fathers in some families, considering their daughters to be blameless, will resent any attempt at matchmaking, will swear and even chase away the go-betweens, sometimes even beating them, saying: “What, you’re telling me my daughter ispen-naT — that is, guilty (from the wordpenya, meaning guilt). ^good living—the Russian term here is zbit’ da byt (literally: “to live and to be”). This ancient expression indicates a distinction between life (which is given not only to Man, but also to plants and animals) and being (in the sense of existing in a space of conscious awareness—accessible only to

Man). The now largely forgotten meaning of this phrase is a wish not only for a ‘good life’ but also for spiritual fulfilment. So we end up not with a continuer of the family line, conceived in love, but a worker for the household. There are, in fact, many characteristic features of wedding rites which portray our ancestors as wild barbarians. I should point out, however, that none of the rites we know of are traditionally Slavic, even though they’re sometimes called ‘traditional’ in the literature on the subject. They stem from a period when the really traditional, wise rites were prohibited by the Church, with nothing rational offered in their place. So, for example: Removing of boots. It happened (and in some places still happens), according to a native Russian custom, that a newlywed woman is supposed to remove her husband’s footwear. In ancient times this custom generally signified meekness, a servile attitude, even humiliation, since who would take off another’s boots if she were not fully subordinate to the wearer of the boots? History teaches us that this custom existed at the time of Vladimir’s reign,12 along with the fact that the prince of Polotsk’s13 daughter was unwilling to remove her husband’s footwear. The same custom existed in Germany during Martin Luther’s time: on their wedding night the young wife would take off her husband’s boots and place them at the head of the bed as a sign of the husband’s domination over the wife, the man over the (enslaved) woman. Olearius and von Herberstein14 observed from their stays in Moscow that even princes’ and noblemen’s weddings included the rituals of footwear removal along with three strokes of the whip (the whip was then placed, together with baked goods, in a special box). This rite was continued in Lithuania before the Jagiellonian dynasty9 and is still preserved in peasant culture. As we can see, the taking off of boots and honouring the bride’s slave status is mistakenly passed off as a traditional Russian rite. But before the princes came along, Russia had no slavery at all. Hence this rite is not traditional for our people, but a transient custom not accepted by the people at large. But there is one situation which strikes me as even more stupid, cruel and immoral—a situation typical of wedding rites among many peoples as late as the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Directly the last food dish is placed on the table—i.e., the roast—the best man wraps up the dish, along with the bread and salt, in a tablecloth and takes it to a bed in the hayloft, to which the young couple are led immediately afterward. Whereupon the father of the bride, in handing over

his newlywed daughter to her husband, stands in the doorway of the hayloft and offers her seemly advice 14 about marriage life. After the young couple have reached the bed, the wife of the master of ceremonies, wearing two coats at once (one in the normal fashion, the other turned inside out), showers them with grains, coins and hops, and feeds the young couple on their bed. The next morning all the wedding guests show up at the hayloft and quickly remove the blanket so as to determine by well-known signs whether the newlywed girl has been chaste at the time of her marriage. This part of the rite may be considered the most sinister and perverted, even if the newlyweds were in love with each other. In the sight of all the guests, the young people, having eaten and drunk their fill, were supposed to go to their room to consummate their marriage without fail, accompanied and encouraged by the lustful—one might even say, perverted—stares of the guests. In the first place, after all the ups and downs of the prenuptial preparations, not to mention the wedding itself, the free-flowing libations of alcohol and the generous intake of food, it is best to hold off sexual intimacy for a period of time, so as to avoid the conceiving of a child in such a condition. Secondly, why should newlyweds enter into intimate relations the same day and, on top of that, be called to account for their actions in front of the guests? What if the bride happens to be having her period on that day? Allin-all, it is something resembling the imposed mating of animals, or even worse. Nobody in their right mind would think of bringing a bitch to a male dog— or a cow to a bull, or a ewe to a ram—when the female is not in heat. But the attitude here is: you’d better get on with it, or you’ll be put to shame. The following story was told me by a seventy-year-old man upon learning that I was investigating various rites: I was living in the country when I got married. They fixed me up with the one I loved. She was oh so quiet, and kind. Her name was Ksiusha.15 She was nineteen then, I was twenty. We had been looking at each other for about six months, and were probably in love. On the first night of our wedding, when everything was winding down, the two of us were sent to bed in a separate room. They placed a guard at the door, and the following morning they were supposed to hold up the sheet for all to see: was the blood of virginity there or not? The moment of decision for Ksiusha and me came. Maybe it was wedding jitters, or maybe

something I ate, but I got the feeling nothing was going to happen between Ksiusha and me. She did this and that, and began awkwardly showing me her breasts, then she kissed me, and later got undressed completely. Only there was no proper reaction in me to her caresses and undressing, and I got more and more embarrassed. I sat down on the bed, and turned my face to the wall. I felt Ksiusha’s cheek press against my back, I could feel her trembling and her tears running down my spine. I too began weeping for sorrow. There we were both sitting on the bed, crying our hearts out. After that I told her: “Don’t worry, Ksiusha, I’ll declare to everyone that it’s my fault.” And she replied: “Don’t—they’ll only make fun of you.” Before the dawn came, she did the piercing herself with her finger, and the blood came out. In the morning they showed off the sheet to the great amusement of the guests who were once more imbibing in an effort to counteract the effects of their hangover. They summoned us in their halfdrunk state, joking around and calling out Gor’ko, gor’ko!u before taking their next glass. Ksiusha and I lived together for six months in the country, then moved to the city and divorced. Turned out I couldn’t get anything to happen all those six months. I married again, and now I have four kids—three sons and a daughter—and grandchildren too. But that horrendous wedding I’ll never forget my whole life long. And I still remember Ksiusha to this day 16 CHAPTER FIVE

Conception involves more than flesh Those who have read my Book of Kin will remember that the Vedruss wedding rite I described ended with the loving couple, Liubomila and Radomir, conceiving a child.1 But back then I wasn’t about to ask Anastasia whether there were any particular aspects of the Vedruss civilisation concerning the conception of children, or whether or not it was worth paying special attention to this topic in any case. But, as though anticipating my question, she said: “The Vedruss people had a deep understanding of what was involved in the conception of their children. But for the moment I do not know how to talk about it in a way you will be able to understand.”

Later on, after my conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather and my search for various peoples’ rites capable of preserving love in families, I obtained some information on conception and realised that it had nothing to do with Anastasia—I was the one who had not been ready to comprehend what she said. Even now this question has not been sufficiently researched by modern science. Scholars have been attempting to clone Man, but it seems that even if they succeed, they will end up with an entity only superficially resembling Man. You see, it is not just the sperm and the egg that are involved in the act of conception, but something else besides—something invisible, something not tangible as matter. It is possible that any further exposition of the information I obtained will be shocking to some. I spent six months pondering whether it was something worth sharing with my readers or not. In the end, I decided that it was. Here is what it’s all about: Many families living on the Earth today are unknowingly raising children that are not their own in the fullest sense. This statement is supported by some weighty evidence. The scientific world has a term telegony. In medicine it is called the paternal impression phenomenon. They try to talk as little as possible about ‘telegony’. What’s this all about? The discovery began in England about a hundred and fifty years ago when Lord Morton decided to raise a new breed of horse with exceptionally resilient characteristics. At one point he crossed a thoroughbred mare with a zebra colt. But no offspring resulted, because of the genetic incompatibility of the two species. Some time later this purebred English mare was crossed with a purebred English colt. Subsequently the mare gave birth to a foal, only... with marked traces of stripes, as with a zebra. Lord Morton called this phenomenon telegony.17 Specialists in animal husbandry quite often encounter this phenomenon in their practice. Any dog-breeding club, for example, will dispose of even what was the most thoroughbred dam if it happened to mate with a mongrel. That particular dam would no longer produce thoroughbred pups, even if it were to be mated with the most thoroughbred sires. Pigeon breeders will not hesitate to kill even the most precious purebred pigeon if it has been violated by a non-thoroughbred male pigeon. Practice has shown that it will never produce purebred offspring.

Scientists in various countries have done a great many studies showing that this phenomenon also extends to people. There have been instances where white parents have given birth to black children—where a black-skinned baby has come into the world as a result of a liaison between the grandmother or mother of the birthing woman and a black man. The cause of this phenomenon always turns out to be a previous relationship with a black man on the part of the girl or one of her direct progenitors.3 But these are clearly distinguishable cases. How many others are there that are not clearly distinguishable? After all, union. And she subsequently observes (p. 366): “It would seem as though the Israelites had some knowledge of telegony, for in Deuteronomy we find when a man died leaving no issue, his wife was commanded to marry her husband’s brother, in order that he might ‘raise up seed to his brother’” (italics ours). 3

While dozens of scientific articles on telegony were published in the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th century—by such luminaries, for example, as pioneer statistician Karl Pearson (1857-1936), subsequent acceptance of theories based on Gregor Johann Mendel’s (1822-1884) ‘laws of heredity5 brought the concept of telegony into disrepute and many considered it “disproved”. However, present-day genetics is far from being able to fully explain the mechanisms of heredity, and throughout the 20th century a great many prominent scholars have been conducting experiments and drawing conclusions quite at variance with the materialistic approaches of ‘official’ (‘orthodox’) science. pre-marital relations are the ‘in’ thing today; That being the case, there’s no point in blaming the woman if she is not a virgin when she marries. It is our society, our monstrous sex propaganda and sex industry that have made her that way In the West parents supply their school-age children with condoms, realising that they’re no longer chaste. But what they don’t know is that there is no condom that can counter the ‘paternal impression phenomenon’, or telegon. This is evidenced in concrete examples in the case of both people and animals. Many ancient teachings and religions also speak about the phenomenon of telegony Even though they may call it something else, the substance is the same. Both scientists and wise-men of old have determined that the first man in the life of a virgin leaves his imprint on her in spirit and in blood—a mental and physical portrait of her offspring to come. All other men who enter into intimate relations with her thereafter for child-bearing purposes have nothing to offer her but their semen and diseases of the flesh. Isn’t this what’s behind the current massive lack of understanding of fathers

and children? Not to mention the degradation of our whole human society of today? A multitude of specific examples testifies to the involvement of some kind of energy in the conception of children. But if that is the case, then it is not just scientists but the public at large that should know about it. It is probable that our recent forebears had some inkling of it. They tried to make sure that a girl entering into marriage was a virgin beyond the shadow of a doubt. It is possible that this is what lies behind the custom in many cultures of locking the newlyweds in a separate room, and subsequently hauling out and putting on display the blood-stained sheet in confirmation of the bride’s virginity. Earlier ancestors of ours, however, did not consider virginity in itself sufficient to qualify someone to be a continuer of the line. They maintained that if a woman was engaged in intimate relations with one man while thinking about another, the resulting offspring would bear resemblance to the one she was thinking about. Such statements indicate that people of old assumed—and quite possibly knew for certain—that the most important factor in conception was thought. Or, more specifically the energy of thought. The phenomenon of telegony also testifies to this. A woman, perhaps subconsciously, retains information in her memory about the first man in her life. As a result, a child is born who either fully or partially resembles him. At first I hesitated to write about this subject for fear of provoking unpleasant questions among parents and their children, and between spouses —let them be happy in their ignorance. However, such happiness has not been all that noticeable. And perhaps one of the reasons it is not particularly noticeable is a lack of knowledge as to the culture of conception. The question of sex education courses for children in schools has been an issue for some time now People argue over whether they should be introduced or not. If such courses touch only upon the use of condoms, there’s no point in introducing the courses at all. If, however, children are told about the woman’s chief purpose, about the correct approach to conceiving children, in that case the subject is absolutely essential. For that, however, the instructors must have a thorough grounding in the very essence of the question, and have appropriate literature available. It is a subject that must be discussed, even though the mass media, unfortunately, serves up nothing but sex propaganda. There is a lot of talk in so-called democratic countries about human freedom. But can a Man be called truly free when important questions of life

are hidden from him, and in their place allegedly beneficial perversions are fobbed off on him through some kind of supposedly ‘free’ propaganda? In a situation like that it turns out that Man is ‘liberated’ only from a true and happy human life. Still, I wouldn’t have written about telegony if I hadn’t learnt from Anastasia about how to correct this situation, even if the marriage-bound woman has already had a relationship with another man. Not only that, but it turns out that the Vedruss people had a momentous rite through which ‘stepchildren’ could become one’s own in blood and spirit. Our pagan ancestors, the Vedruss all the more so, were very well acquainted with what is known in modern medicine as the ‘paternal impression phenomenon’. And through the help of special rites they were able to protect their young people against it. With the aid of particular acts or rites, wise-men, too, were able to erase the genetic code of the ‘first sire’ and make even girls who had been raped during enemy attacks absolutely clean. As proof of this, they were not afraid to let their sons take such women in marriage. However, there is one ‘but’. It is impossible to understand and reproduce pagan (and especially Vedruss) rites simply through a knowledge of their outward aspects. They must be experienced through^A/mg. What’s the use in just writing about it? It is essential to love, it is essential to prepare for the appearance of the child, it is important to give birth only at home, at the very place of conception. “To preserve love in the family for ever, it is essential to combine—into one —three points, three feelings, three planes of being”. But what’s the point in simply re-stating the words? An intellectual understanding is far from sufficient—it must be felt. The philosophy of our forebears must be felt. And the first essential act must be one of sheer repentance in respect to our forebears, who are now called pagans, who have been slandered and whom we have betrayed. We betrayed the traditional Slavic culture of our fathers and mothers—a culture that lasted for tens of thousands of years. Instead we started calling Christianity ‘traditional’ for Rus’.18 But in Rus’ it has been around for a mere thousand years. There’s no way it can be classified as ‘traditional’. Why is repentance necessary? For the simple reason that if we go on thinking of our ancestors as wild, dull-witted barbarians (as we are urged to believe) but still adopt their rites, those rites will have no effect. After all, all such rites are founded on a knowledge of the Cosmos, of the designated purpose of the planets and on a knowledge of the power of mental energy,

the power of thought. Even if we try harnessing the tremendous energy of our thought with the aid of their rites, we shall not obtain any positive results, since our thought will be contradicted by another thought of ours—namely that the Vedruss people were ignorant. Hence a paradox: you’re an ignorant fool, but your acts are marvellous. The one excludes—or, at least, contradicts—the other. Perhaps the culture of our forebears is being deliberately concealed from us? After all, a bunch of ignorant and disoriented people cut off from their roots are easier to control. Perhaps this is God’s retribution to our civilisation? Popular wisdom says “What you sow, that shall you reap.”19 We have broken the ties with our forebears, and consequently the threads linking us with our children are also being broken. We can get another glimpse of the elevated culture of our pagan forebears in the question of conception of children by examining the traditions that are even today preserved in modern China and especially Japan, where a man and woman about to enter into intimate relations for the purposes of conceiving a child undergo a special rite of purification. The beliefs of Ancient China, Japan, India and Ancient Greece—and these are traditionally ancient pagan countries—lay tremendous emphasis on the matter of conception. So what, then, can anyone do who desires to bring forth good offspring? Should they first spend a lot of time studying the volumes of literature on this subject—besides spending a lot of time on studying treatises on choosing one’s soulmate, and on the education of children? I can tell you right off: there’s absolutely no need to waste part of one’s own life on such study I myself spent several years—not studying such sources, but simply familiarising myself with them, and I came to the sudden realisation that the Vedruss people have condensed all their monumental works into a system of simple, cheerful and rational rites covering all events of one’s life. It gives the impression that God Himself helped them in formulating these rites, as well as in understanding the essence of Man’s existence. Before attempting to apply the experience of our ancestors, we need to determine: which ancestors? I mean, how many years ago? And which territories of present-day Russia were settled by our forebears? As is known, history textbooks, including those written in Russian, tell about people’s lives in Egypt and Rome of five thousand years ago. These countries have carried out (and are still carrying out) archaeological

excavations, which draw huge crowds of tourists every year. Russian history, on the other hand, if we take the word of even our own history books, covers a mere thousand-year period. That would mean our country’s territory before that time was somehow home to a culturally backward people, or maybe there wasn’t anybody there at all? Either that, or possibly somebody’s been deliberately hiding our history from us? Indeed, they have. I have already written about this,20 but now I should like to present some archaeological data. I shall tell you about Arkaim, a place which has a direct connection with the question of telegony According to Anastasia’s grandfather, it was there that three and a half thousand years ago a remarkable discovery was made. CHAPTER SIX

Into the depths of history Arkaim—Academy of the wise-men. In 1952 satellites sent back to the Earth photographs of several unusual circles clearly delineated on the surface of the Southern Ural steppe. No one doubted that these circles had been artificially produced, though nobody could say exactly what they were. A debate was raging in both scientific and occult circles of the time as to where one should look for the original Indo-European homeland. Not without some justification scientists posited that the many European peoples, as well as those of India, Persia and part of Asia, could be traced back to a single source—a mystery people known as Proto-Indo-Europeans. Many researchers have dreamt of finding the remains of the land where once lived the legendary White Aryan race. Researchers have been attempting to reach the fringes of the lost ancient and precious knowledge which the ancient Aryans possessed. When excavations began in the Arkaim Valley, archaeologists announced to the academic world that an ancient city dating back more than forty centuries had been unearthed, and that it had been inhabited by people of the ancient Indo-European civilisation. The researchers started calling Arkaim1 a city, a temple and an observatory, all at the same time. Whoever is interested in the academics’ hypotheses can read about them in specialised literature on the subject. I shall pass on what Anastasia’s grandfather told me about Arkaim. The

logic of his thinking is much more accurate and intriguing than the logic underlying the scholars’ scientific hypotheses. He stated right off: ‘Arkaim is not a city and not a temple. The part about the observatory is true, but that’s not the main thing here. Arkaim is an academy—that’s what it would be called today It was in Arkaim that the teachers of the wise-men lived and worked. Here they engaged in research on the Universe; they also determined the interrelationship of celestial bodies and their influence on Man. Their tremendous discoveries were never recorded, nor did they make long speeches in public. Through their many years of research they worked out the rites, presented them to the people and subsequently kept track of how effective they were. They made corrections as required. They were able to sum up their lengthy researches in a brief word or two which signified the substance of their discovery. “For example, there are some very early rites, such as the Saviour of the Honey21 22 (14 July) and the Saviour of the Apple23 (19 July). People did not use any new-crop apples until the Saviour of the Apple feast, or any new gatherings of honey until the Honey feast. “Through their lengthy researches and observations the wise-men discovered that up until this date the apple does not give any significant benefit to Man, even if it is ripe. And this goes far beyond just the apple. Many berries, edible herbs and root vegetables beneficial to Man ripen before the Apple feast. If Man began to eat apples too soon, he would not have room left for the produce that was more beneficial to him at this very time. “It was these wise-men who discovered that the particular sequence of fruit and vegetable ripening in Nature is no mere coincidence. It is this very sequence that constitutes Man’s divine dietary regime, which the science of the centuries to follow would be searching for in vain. “Volumes of treatises could be written about how they conducted their research. The wise-men, however, never compiled any, and did not burden people with the task of reading them. They imparted their conclusions to people—in readymade form—in just a few words. And people believed the wise-men. Their advice invariably proved true in life. “Besides, there is no comparison between the Vedruss wise-men and their counterparts in Greece, the Egyptian priests or today’s acclaimed academic lights. The Vedruss wise-men never received any honours or rewards for their remarkable discoveries. They could not accumulate wealth or power that, say, the Egyptian priests enjoyed. And they were not given the kind of

adoration showered upon many in church hierarchies toda. The only thing a wise-man could expect upon arriving at a certain settlement was food and any replacement clothing or footwear he might need, as well as a place where he could lay his head, though some wise-men might decline the offer of shelter in favour of sleeping under the stars, in the open air. “Beyond that he enjoyed the people’s sincere, unfeigned respect. Over the centuries such an arrangement ensured the selection of only the best teachers and thinkers among the people. “The receptive populace also showed their gratitude by building, according to the wise-men’s own designs, complexes like Arkaim where the wise-men could retreat for meditation and a mutual sharing of thoughts. Here they would tell each other of their discoveries and describe the rites they had come up with based on their discoveries. It was something on the order of a supreme academic council. “Most of the time ordinary people didn’t even know who was behind any given rite, or whom they had to thank for a particularly insightful and effective rite. “There was one wise-man, for example—an acclaimed philosopher, astronomer and psychologist—who devoted ninety years to the study of how to combat the phenomenon we know today as telegony. “He discovered a cure and offered people an effective remedy, consisting of a rite of only fifteen minutes in duration. True, the preparation for the rite took a lot longer. Why don’t you ask Anastasia, Vladimir—she might tell you about it. “Only I’ll say right off: this rite can be felt only through an understanding of the feelings of love possessed by our distant ancestors, the philosophy of their love. The farther back you manage to go with your thought, the more you’ll be able to make sense of the rite.” To be more thoroughly persuaded of the truth of what Anastasia’s grandfather has said regarding Arkaim, let us take a look at its architecture. Arkaim has the form of a circle with an exterior diameter of approximately 160 metres. As you can see, that’s rather small for a city. But I shall still call it a city, as scholars at the moment are doing. It is surrounded by a two-metre-wide perimeter trench, outside a massive exterior wall. The wall was five and a half metres high and five metres thick. There were four entrances in the wall, the largest facing south-west; the other three were smaller, located on opposite sides.4 All the entrances led directly into the only ring road, about five metres wide,

which separated the dwellings attached to the outer wall from the inner ring of walls. This ring road was covered with logs, under which, for the whole length of the street, ran a dug-out two-metre-wide ditch, which connected with the perimeter trench. Thus the city had its own storm-drainage system: surplus water would seep through the logs into the ditch and eventually into the perimeter trench. All the dwellings attached to the outer wall, like lemon sections, had doorways on the main street. No more than thirty-five dwellings were discovered around the outer circle. That’s not much, even for a village. Next we see the mysterious ring of the inner wall, which was even more massive than the outer one. Three metres thick, it reached a height of seven metres. According to the excavation findings, there was no entrance through this wall except for a small passageway at the south-east point. Hence, another twenty-five interior dwellings, identical to those around the outer perimeter wall, were practically cut off from everything by the thick, high inner wall. In order to reach the little passageway to the inner ring, one had to travel the whole length of the ring road. This had a hidden significance. Anyone entering the city had to travel the same path as the Sun. Finally, Arkaim was ‘crowned’ by a central plaza almost square in shape, approximately 25 by 27 metres. ^opposite sides—i.e., north-east, north-west and south-east. Judging by the traces of fires spread out in a particular pattern, this plaza was used for some kind of rites. Thus we see the schematic figure of a Mandala—a square inside a circle. In ancient cosmogonic24 texts the circle symbolises the Universe, the square— the Earth, our material world. Ancient men of wisdom, who had a perfect knowledge of the structure of the Cosmos, saw how naturally and harmoniously it was constructed. And so in building a city, it was like recreating the Universe in miniature. Arkaim was built according to a pre-determined plan as a single complex whole, oriented with extreme precision to celestial bodies. The design resulting from the four entrances in Arkaim’s outer wall forms a ‘rightfacing’ swastika, reflecting the clockwise movement of the Sun.25 The swastika (in Sanskrit, ‘connected with good’, ‘the best success’) is one of the most ancient sacred symbols. It is encountered as far back as the Upper Paleolithic period7 in the cultures of many of the world’s peoples—

including those of India, Ancient Rus’, China and Egypt, as well as of the mysterious Mayan people in Central America, to name but a fe. The swastika may be seen in old Orthodox icons. It is the symbol of the Sun, success, happiness and creativity Correspondingly, a backwards (‘leftfacing’) swastika symbolises darkness and destruction—the ‘night-time Sun’ of the dwellers of ancient Rus’. Both swastikas were used, as may be seen on ancient ornaments—in particular, on the Aryan jars found around Arkaim. This has a deep significance. Day takes the place of night, light the place of darkness, and a new birth takes the place of death—and this is the natural order of things in the Universe. Hence in antiquity there was no such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ swastika—they were perceived as a unified entity (like the energy of yin and yang in the Orient). Arkaim was outwardly beautiful: the ideal circular city marked by distinctive gate-towers, burning torches and a beautifully formed facade— probably featuring some kind of meaningful sacral pattern. Everything in Arkaim, after all, was fraught with meaning. Each dwelling was attached on one side to either the outer or inner wall, and faced either the main ring road or the central plaza. In the improvised ‘entrance-hall’ to each dwelling was a special watercourse, which emptied into the ditch under the main street. The ancient Aryans were thus provided with a sewer system. Not only that, but each dwelling had its own well, furnace and a small cupola-shaped storage area. From each well, above the water-level, two earthen pipes branched out. One led to the furnace, the other to the storage area. What for? Quite brilliant, actuall. We all know that if you glance down a well, you will invariably feel a current of cool air. So, in the Aryan furnaces this cool air, passing through an earthen pipe, created such a strong draft that it was capable of melting bronze with no need for bellows. There was a furnace like that in every dwelling, and all the ancient blacksmiths had to do was to perfect their craft and compete with their artistic rivals! The other earthen pipe leading to the storage area ensured a lower temperature there. The famous Russian astroarchaeologist Konstantin Konstantinovich Bystrushkin researched Arkaim as an astronomical observatory and came to the following conclusion: Arkaim is not just a complex installation, but it is subtle in its complexity In examining its schematics, one can easily see parallels with the well-known Stonehenge monument in England. For example, the diameter of the inner circle of Arkaim is always reported as being exactly 85 metres. In fact, it is a circle with two radiuses—40 metres and 43.2 metres. (Try drawing it!)

Compare that to the radius of Stonehenge’s Aubrey Hole ring,9 which is also 43.2 metres! Stonehenge and Arkaim are positioned at approximately the same latitude, and both are at the centre of a bowl-shaped valle. The distance between them is almost 4,000 km... Researchers have determined that on the basis of all the known facts, Arkaim amounts to a horizon observatory. Why a ‘horizon’ observatory, specifically? Because the measurings and observations made there are based on the moment of the rising and setting of the Sun and the Moon on the horizon. The recording of the moment of ‘disengagement’ (or ‘touchdown’) of the lower edge of the disc on the horizon allows the accurate determination of the place of this event. If we keep track of sunrises on a daily basis, we shall note that the actual point of sunrise shifts from day to day Reaching its northern limit on 22 June, this point then moves south to its opposite apogee on 22 December. This is part of the cosmic order. That means there are four visible points of observation of the Sun each year —two points of sunrise (on 22 June and 22 December) and two corresponding points of sunset on the western horizon. Add to these two more points—namely, sunrise and sunset during the equinox (22 March and 22 September). This offered a sufficiently accurate determination of the length of a year. However a year is made up of a whole host of singular events, and these can be determined with the aid of that other celestial body, namely, the Moon. Regardless of the complexity involved in its observation, people of old knew the laws of its movement across the empyrean. Here are a few of them: (1) The full moon which occurs closest to 22 June is observed at the point of the winter solstice (22 December) and vice-versa. (2) Lunar events can be observed near the points of the solstice on a nineteen-year cycle (‘high’ and ‘low’ Moon). As an observatory, Arkaim allowed astronomers to follow the events of the Moon. It is possible to note eighteen astronomical events just on these huge circular walls alone! Six of them are connected with the Sun and twelve with the Moon (including the ‘high’ and ‘low’ Moon). By comparison, researchers at Stonehenge were able to identify only fifteen cosmic events. In addition to information about these amazing factual events, the following data were obtained: the Arkaim unit of measurement of length is 80 cm. The centre of the inner circle shows a displacement from the centre of the outer circle by a factor of 5.25 Arkaim units, which is close to the Moon’s orbital inclination: 5°9’ plus or minus 10 minutes. In Bystrushkin’s opinion, this reflects the correlation between the orbits of the Moon and the Sun (for the terrestrial observer). Correspondingly, Arkaim’s outer circle is dedicated to

the Moon, its inner circle to the Sun. Not only that, but astroarchaeological measurements have shown a link between some of Arkaim’s parameters and the wobbling of the Earth’s axis—this is getting into some pretty sophisticated science, even in terms of modern astronomy. And so we see that by any stretch of the imagination Arkaim hardly falls under the category of ‘city’. Its extremely small rooms offer no accommodation for families, but serve as an ideal space for philosophical reflections. Historians know that in ancient times so-called ‘wise-men’ were considered to be scientists and teachers. Consequently, it is possible that Arkaim, as one of the most celebrated scientific centres, could have belonged exclusively to these ‘wise-men’. There were simply no other scientists around in those times. It is also known that the wise-men devised and adjusted their rites on the basis of their knowledge of the Cosmos. The question is: what has become of these unique rites today? What kind of obscurantism has destroyed them or is concealing them from people’s view? What is the message of Sungir? And now I should like to bring to your attention some even more sensational news, eclipsing that of even the pyramids of Egypt or the ruins of Ancient Rome. This information is also needed, as Anastasia’s grandfather said, in order to better understand the phenomena and knowledge of the Universe prevalent in our ancient forebears’ time. And for that we have to delve as deeply as possible into history. The Siberian recluse said, furthermore: “If your thought can dig down to three thousand years ago, you will begin to gradually feel the knowledge of three millennia. If it can go as deep as five thousand years, then five millennia, though not everything you discover will be comprehensible to you. You actually need a minimum of nineteen thousand years.” This attempt to dig into our country’s historical past seemed to me utterly unfeasible. I was already prepared to go off to India or Tibet where, it is said, one can learn more about our ancestors than here at home. But, as it turned out, there was no need to go anywhere. Everything was available right here, and now I invite everyone reading these lines to cast his thought about our forebears more than nineteen thousand years back in time. The archaeological finds I am about to describe were made (by mere chance) on the outskirts of the city ofVladimir, which, according to official

sources, is approximately 1,015 years old. In 1955, while excavating a clay pit mine for the Vladimir Ceramics Factory, Alexander F. Nacharov discovered in one of the buckets the bones of some very large animal, which had been resting at a depth of three metres. Archaeologists were informed about the discovery. The first excavations thereafter simply astounded the scientists. Buried on the site were the remains of people, jewellery, clothing ornamentation and everyday objects, all testifying to some kind of ancient culture. Further investigation confirmed that our ancestors had arrived on the banks of the Klyazma River10 as early as the Old Stone Age, approximately 25,000 years ago. Now somebody could be wondering whether they might have run about on all fours, dressed in home-made skins and carrying clubs! Not at all. The scientists were amazed by another finding. On the skeletons themselves or close by were a whole lot of jewellery and ornaments which aided in reconstructing the appearance ofthe clothing worn by these ancient people—something similar to either overalls or a perfectly civilised dress. The finding is such that if we are not going to relegate these remains to the category of buried extra-terrestrials, then we shall have to completely revise our whole historical outlook on the world. In one of its halls the Vladimir State Museum of History and Ethnography mounted a special exhibition dedicated to these unique findings. It put out a booklet stating that the Sungir site is the most interesting archaeological monument in Russia, and is known to archaeologists the world over. It has hosted a number of international scientific conferences. Sungir represents one of the northernmost settlements of Ancient Man in the Vladimir Region on the Great Russian Plain. In terms of richness of both objects and state of preservation of such ancient remains, it has no compeer anywhere in the world. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists and paleobotanists, we have a fairly clear picture of how people lived back then, in this incredibly distant time-period. Here, on the edge of a glacier, was where the tundra used to begin, dotted here and there with islands of fir, pine, birch and alder groves. The animal world was quite diversified. According to the booklet, “ancient Sungirians hunted the reindeer, wild horse, Arctic fox, wolverine, bison, brown bear, wolf, Arctic hare; they also

went after the black grouse, junglefowl and herring gull. And of course, they hunted the mammoth—a huge animal, now extinct, almost four metres tall and weighing six tonnes. This represented for them a much sought-after trophy: meat, skins (indispensable in constructing dwellings) and tusks (a solid and superb material for the preparation of both weapons and ornaments.” The inventory of objects made from bone and horn is most interesting: shaft adjusters, hoes, spearheads, arrowheads and beads from mammoth tusks, jewellery made from the fangs of the Arctic fox. A small silhouetted figure of a large-headed horse came to be recognised as a rare example of primitive art. This famous Sungir horse was decorated with tiny dotted ornaments and red ochre. The number of dots on the figure—a multiple of five—testifies to the use of a quinary counting system among inhabitants of the site. A sevenbased system points to the knowledge possessed by people living 25,000 years ago. But it is the unique burial sites of these ancient people that have brought global fame to Sungir. In 1964, in a heavy layer of ochre-coloured rock, was found the skull of a woman; lower still were the remains of an elderly man. On his chest was a pendant made from a pebble, while on his arms were twenty-five plate bracelets made from mammoth tusks. In addition, on the skull, all along the arms, legs and torso almost 3,500 beads were arranged in rows. The pattern of their arrangement on the skeleton allowed scientists to reconstruct the embroidered costume of this ancient Sungirian. It was reminiscent of the far clothing worn by Arctic peoples today. At the bottom of the shallow grave they discovered a knife and some kind of scraper made of flint. Just as much a treasure was the next burial site, unearthed some five years later. This grave contained the remains of an adult body, but without a skull. Beside it lay a necklace of mammoth-tusk beads, a ring and a pair of reindeer antlers. But farther back, at 65 cm below the upper grave, were found two skeletons of children. A boy of twelve or thirteen and a girl between seven and nine had been placed in the grave in a stretched position, their heads pressed tightly against each other. Children on their way to ‘the next world’ were accompanied by hunting weapons made from mammoth tusks: eleven darts, 3 daggers and two spears made out of split and straightened tusks, one 2.5 metres and the other 1.5 metres long. The grave also yielded mammoth-tusk ‘rods’, very expressive figurines of a horse and a mammoth, carved discs of an apparently ceremonial nature and connected with the worship of the Sun and the Moon. The children’s clothing, too, was embroidered with thousands of

little beads, and fastened across the chest with pins made of bones. The back of the costume had been outfitted with threads of beads in the shape of animal tails. This finding testifies to the complex rite of burial and the developed religious beliefs of the ancient people of the Stone Age. One may confidently assume that they believed in the afterlife. Multidisciplinary archaeological investigations have been going on at Sungir, with a few interruptions, ever since 1956. For almost twenty years the project was under the supervision of the famous archaeologist Dr Otto Nikolaevich Bader.26 Anthropologist M. M. Gerasimov,12 along with his students G. V Lebedinskaya27 and T. S. Surnina succeeded in reconstructing the external appearance of the ancient Sungirians. As is known, anthropologists are often able to reconstruct a person’s face with sufficient accuracy on the basis of the skull. This offered a rare opportunity indeed to gaze upon the faces of ancient people—an opportunity I decided to take advantage of. A wise, intelligent-looking face on the adult male. A slightly sad expression on the young girl’s face, a thoughtful one on the boy’s. And yet the presumptions about hunting, and especially the mammoth, I believe, were not entirely accurate. I brought Anastasia’s grandfather to this unique exhibition in the Vladimir museum. The old fellow slowly made his way around the displays, without stopping at any of them. Then he stood in the middle of the hall and bowed four times, each time shifting his position by ninety degrees. When I told him about the scientists’ conclusions, he began to refute a good deal of it, explaining: “These people, Vladimir, never hunted mammoths. Mammoths were their household animals, and a very great help to families, also a way of transporting heavy loads. They performed a greater variety of tasks than elephants do today in India, which are controlled by mahouts, or drivers. “Standing on a mammoth, the Sungirians could gather fruit from very tall trees and store them in woven bags and baskets, and then carry them to wherever they liked. “In the domain glades, the mammoths cleared out young underbrush from the forest encroaching on the glades or, depending on the task assigned, would shake and then pull up trees so as to enlarge the glade. Whenever people had to move from one place to another, they would load their belongings, utensils and food supplies onto the mammoth.

“This was a very kind and industrious household animal. Even a small child could put his fingers around the end of its trunk and lead it about at will. Indeed, children often played with the mammoth, making it suck up water into its trunk and then give them a shower. The mammoth took great pleasure in watching how the youngsters jumped and squealed with joy. “The mammoth was especially delighted, too, when his wool was combed out and removed by a special, rake-like instrument. A Man would wash the wool, dry it and then use it for his own purposes, for example, in making a bed. “There was absolutely no need for these people to hunt the mammoth. This can be deduced just from the information available in the booklet, which contains quite a few contradictory statements.” “Why contradictory?” “Think about it. They list all sorts of wild game which could easily be caught in sufficient numbers with the aid of special traps. If a Man killed a mammoth, which weighs six tonnes, he could not possibly eat all its meat right off.” “But what if there were a whole lot of people?” “There couldn’t have been that many. Back in those times people didn’t live packed tight together the way they do now in cities or towns. Each family tribe had its own lands. Each family had their own territory, their own home. On an area of three square kilometres might be living fewer than a hundred people. Even collectively, they couldn’t eat a six-tonne mammoth in just a few days, even if they didn’t consume anything but meat during that time. The rotting meat would start to decompose and attract a huge number of insects. It could have started an epidemic.” “But maybe they invited people from other territories to some kind of feast?” “What sense would there be in travelling several kilometres just to eat meat which there was enough of at home?” “But if you say the mammoth’s decomposing carcass could run the risk of provoking an epidemic, the very same threat could be posed by a household mammoth when it died.” “Vladimir, a mammoth would never die in the family surroundings. When it got old and felt death approaching, it would walk a little ways from the house and trumpet three times, before heading off to a cemetery for mammoths, where it died. You should have known that yourself, as that is what wild elephants do in India today. Before they die they trumpet and then leave the herd.” “So that means we have a very distorted understanding of how the ancient

people fed themselves?” “Yes, that’s right. Perhaps it’s an attempt to justify your current barbarity in regard to the treatment of animals. The farther you go back into history, the fewer people you’ll encounter eating meat. They had a sufficient supply of growing things to sustain themselves. As for animals, they took from them only what the animals themselves gave to Man—milk and eggs, for example. Meat could have been harmful to the stomachs of the first people. ‘Another argument in favour of the premise that hunting was not a basic source of food for primitive people is its illogicality by comparison with other ways of obtaining food.” “What other ways?” “From tamed, domesticated animals. Picture to yourself a Man whose household includes a female mammoth, a cow and a goat, all of which can be milked, yielding a daily supply of top-quality fresh produce. This Man’s household also includes domesticated fowl: a goose, a duck, a chicken, all of which provide eggs with little effort on his part. He has the opportunity of gathering honey and pollen from bees, and a great many root vegetables and edible herbs are also at hand. “Then all of a sudden it appears as though the Man is going out of his mind. He kills all his domestic animals—which, apart from everything else, have also been guarding him when he is asleep—eats them and begins hunting for wild game, thereby putting himself in danger without guaranteeing himself and his family a regular supply of fresh produce. “In place of friendly surroundings and the love expressed to him by his household animals, he ends up with nothing but an aggressive environment in which it is virtually impossible, one might say, for his household to survive.” “But did the first people really begin right off to domesticate and train their animals? Maybe that came along at a later period?” “There would have been no later period for Man if he had taken an aggressive stance from the start. You must be acquainted, after all, Vladimir, with situations where an infant alone in the forest may be fed even by carnivorous wolves—the very same forest where a pack of wolves could tear an adult to pieces. What would account for the discrepancy in their attitude toward Man?” “I really can’t say” “Because in the first instance the infant Man has no aggression, while in the second we have aggression and fear which create unease in the surrounding environment.

“The first people had no sense of fear or aggression. It was love that was dominant in them, along with a genuine interest in the world around them. Consequently, it was no effort to domesticate or train animals and birds. Their primary concern was to determine the purpose of every creature they encountered on the Earth. This they did. As far as the animals go, you already know that they find their own highest benefit in Man’s feelings of love and care for them. “Meat was first consumed by a less-than-complete Man, one drained of the energy of Love. It seems that he either went out of his mind or was infected with the most terrible disease—a disease which has come down to the present day” “But what connection can there be between love and Man’s first consumption of meat?” “There is a direct connection. A Man living in love is incapable of killing.” “Possibly. But can you determine why these children died 25,000 years ago? Why were they buried in such an unusual manner, head to head like that?” “I could tell you, of course, but it would be a very long story Besides, it is not important for you to know why they were overcome by death, but for what purpose.” “For what purpose?” “There you go again, Vladimir, constantly asking questions. Too lazy to think for yourself. Only don’t blame me for speaking like this, the way you did back in the taiga when you let resentment take over. Think, instead, on the whole point of my telling you things. What I say will bring you more harm than good if you don’t begin to think for yourself. “I speak, and you listen, and instead of working out your own conclusions in your thought, you are merely taking note of mine. You have set yourself up a goal of finding conditions in the past under which love could remain with people forever, and then reintroducing them in this present day. That’s fine, the path is correct, and the goal is the most important of all. “You are trying to determine how many ages ago love began to dwell with people. Look: here is a date right before your eyes. Think about it. Right in front of you lie two child skeletons. Their death at such a young age is meaningless unless people can realise what important information is concealed in their burial. “Their death will acquire meaning if you retrieve this information right now.” I didn’t resent the old fellow for his remark on my laziness of mind. I had

long realised that he was using some kind of methods of his own, trying again and again to teach me how to control my thoughts by alternative means. But I, after all, did not go through the same school as they, training their thought from childhood. I went to an ordinary school, which quite possibly serves to do just the opposite—to switch thought off. So here I am standing in front of these child skeletons, straining myself mentally, without being able to grasp how I can look on them and learn at least something about the love that existed 25,000 years ago—if it existed at all at that time. “It did exist,” the old fellow suddenly said. “What made you decide that? There’s not a word about love on the museum signs.” “Not a word, but so what? Look carefully Judging by the skeletons, these are children. The boy is twelve and a half. The girl, she’s eight. “On their skeletons are hundreds of bone beads. On the basis of their arrangement your scientists have determined what kind of clothing the children were wearing. But is that all the bone beads can tell us?” “What else can they tell us?” “That their parents, Vladimir, loved these children very much. They loved their children and they loved each other. Only loving parents could get involved in such time-consuming ornamentation of their children’s clothing. We can also tell that they had more than enough free time for artistic pursuits and for designing and then making fine clothing. “Note that the objects found in the grave include absolutely no weapons capable of killing.” “What about the darts? Aren’t those weapons?” “Of course not. And they’re not even harpoons for catching fish, since there are no barbs on the ends. The end of the object they’ve called a ‘dart’ is not even sharp. A thin, lightweight dart like that could hardly kill or even wound any creature.” “Then what was this object used for?” “For training and controlling animals. See how it resembles a stick animal trainers use today? Elephant drivers, for example, use sticks like that to control their charges.” “But why did they need to make them out of bone? They could have also taken a real stick and not wasted time straightening out the bone and putting ornaments onto it.” ‘A wooden stick couldn’t last very long. Animals, on the other hand, get

accustomed to a single object—its shape and even the smell it acquires from contact with the master’s hand.” “Right, then—everything you say sounds rather convincing, but there are other objects which resemble arrowheads. And arrows were meant for killing.” “In the case of these specific people, who were not of the very earliest period of human life on the Earth, arrows were intended for scaring away carnivorous beasts when they attacked. “There are also some objects that look like hoes. These, indeed, were instruments for planting seeds and digging up roots.” “But the jewellery? Look, this necklace is made from the fangs of an Arctic fox. And scientists assume that the clothing was made from leather. So, they killed animals after all!” “Your scientists are right about their clothing being made of leather, but there was absolutely no need to kill any animals for this purpose. There were reptiles which shed their old skin on a regular basis. Reptiles might die for some reason, and then ants would eat out their insides, leaving the skin untouched, which turned out to be very useful for making clothing. Given such circumstances, it would be silly to waste time on killing an animal, cutting up the carcass, processing and drying the skin or softening it. What for? Since it was possible to acquire a ready-made skin in an ideal condition. In the Divine Nature all Man’s needs have been provided for in advance. As for the necklace from a fox’s fangs, it was a lot simpler to take them from a skeleton already worked over and dried by Nature.” At this point I’m going to interrupt, for a moment, Anastasia’s grandfather’s account about the archaeologists’ unique findings. In the booklet put out by the Vladimir State Museum there are drawings showing two exhibit halls—the Sungir Architectural Park and the Sungir Museum Complex. It mentions that international conferences have been organised around these unique findings. However, I would not advise any great haste to visit the excavation site of this ancient civilisation. There are no actual pavilions on the site—only the remains of unfinished construction. And the archaeological work is not proceeding at any intensive pace. The State has no funds for such important projects. They are going ahead, one might say, thanks to the level of enthusiasm both of the scientists involved and of the local authorities. 1 Vladimir (pron. vla-DEE-meer), Suzdal (pron. SOOZ-dal)—two of Russia’s oldest historic cities, located not far east of Moscow. For further information

see footnote 1 in Book 5, Chapter 6: ‘A garden for eternity”. 2 cedar nuts—referring to the fruit of the Siberian cedar (Siberian pine, Pinus sibirica), known in the West as ‘pine nuts’. This tree is akin to the European stone pine—see footnote 4 in Book 1, Chapter 1: “The ringing cedar” (esp. the 2nd edition). 3 See Book 8, The New Civilisation, end of Chapter 12: “People power”. 4 Anastasia’s grandfather inherited the priesthood when his own father, Moisey, passed on. The first reference to the family’s priestly status comes in Book 7, Chapter 7: “A conversation with Anastasia’s grandfather”. 5 vieche (also spelt: veche)—an ancient form of self-governance in which a circle of local residents collectively discussed and decided questions of importance by general consensus. In later times, the term vieche was used to describe an assembly of freemen which served as a governing council in a number of cities of Western Russia from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, even longer in the city of Novgorod (about ioo km south of St. Petersburg). Not unlike the Ting in Scandinavian (esp. Icelandic) communities, these latter assemblies had the power (among other things) to enact local legislation, appoint and dismiss princes, wage war and conclude treaties with other territories. 6 Man—Throughout the Ringing Cedars Series, the word Man with a capital M is used to refer to a human being of either gender. For details on the word’s usage and the important distinction between Man and human being, please see the Translator’s Preface to Book 1. 7 Vedruss—referring to a people prevalent in pre-Christian Russia, from which Anastasia is descended—see Book 6, Chapter 4: ‘A dormant civilisation”. Ved is a Slavic root signifying ‘awareness’ or ‘to know’. 8 See Book 6, Chapter 5: “The history of mankind, as told by Anastasia”. 9 wise-men (Russian: volkhvy)— a reference to ancient ‘scientists’ with

particular knowledge of the workings of Nature, often possessing exceptional powers. For further information, see footnote 13 in Book 7, Chapter 20: “Pagans”. 10 braga—a mild, home-made brew. 11 ^icons—sacred paintings on wood. Every Russian Orthodox church features a multitude of icons, but at least one icon stands or hangs in a corner of the living or dining room in practically every Orthodox household, often with candles in front. 12 Vladimir I (?-1015)—Prince of Kiev (980-1015), who accepted Christianity for Rus’ in 988. See footnote 4 in Book 7, Chapter 20: “Pagans”. 13 'Polotsk—an ancient city in what is now Belarus, formerly under Polish and Lithuanian control, before the territory was absorbed into the Russian empire in 1772. The Polotskian princedom lasted from the 10th to the 14th centuries. 14 Adam, Olearius (born Adam Ohlschlager, 1603-1671) & SiegmundFreiherr von Herberstein (1486-1566)—Austrian and German diplomats, respectively each of whom travelled to Russia in his time. Von Herberstein (sometimes spelt von Herbenstein), a German mathematician and geographer, visited Moscow in 1517 and again in 1526, setting forth his observations in a work entitled Notes on Moscow affairs; Olearius (also known as Omarius), a member of the Kaiser’s council in Vienna, followed suit in the mid-i630S, and later published his Description of my travels to Muscovy. 15 Ksiusha—an endearing variant of the name Ksenia. 16 Gor’ko, gor’ko! (lit. ‘Bitter, bitter!’)—the traditional call at Russian wedding receptions for the bride and groom to kiss (and thereby sweeten the ‘bitter’ wine). 17 The ‘zebra’ was actually a quagga, an equine mammal of South Africa, with

zebra-like stripes, which is now extinct. The experiment, conducted by a Scottish peer, the Right Honourable George Douglas, 16th Earl of Morton (1761-1827), was reported in a communication he wrote to the Royal Society of London in 1820 and described in many journal pieces of the past —for example, byJ.C. Ewart of the University of Edinburgh in an 1899 article “Experimental contributions to the theory of heredity. A. Telegony” published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. 65 (1899), pp. 243-51; and later in Menia S. Lye’s article “Pre-natal influences” in The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 7, no 5 (February 1907), pp. 362-67 (see esp. p. 365; here, as in some other sources, the experimenter’s titular name is misspelt Marion), lye also mentions a female hybrid resulting from the first 18 Rus’ (pron. ROOS)—the name of the East Slavic state of the first millennium of the Common Era (A.D.). See footnote 5 in Book 7, Chapter 12: “The ultimate taboo”. 19 20 See, for example, Book 6, Chapter 5: “The history of mankind, as told by Anastasia”. 21 Arkaim (pron. ar-ka-EEM)—located in the Chelyabinsk Oblast of Russia, near the border of Kazakhstan. For further information on Arkaim, see: Genadii B. Zdanovich, ‘Arkaim Archaeological Park: a cultural-ecological reserve in Russia”, Chapter 20 in: Peter G. Stone & Philippe G. Planel, The constructed past: experimental archaeology, education and the public (Oxford & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 283-291. 22 Saviour of the Honey Feast Day (Russian: Miodovy Spas)—a Russian Orthodox Church holiday (actually celebrated 14 August) to mark the beginning of the Assumption Fast. New gatherings of honey are brought to churches on that day for blessing before sharing with parishioners. 23 Saviour of the Apple Feast Day (Russian: Yablochny Spas)—a Church holiday coinciding with Transfiguration Day, celebrated at the mid-point of the Assumption Fast (actually 19 August). On this day farmers take grapes to the churches—or, in their place, apples from the new crop.

24 cosmogonic—relating to cosmogony, the astrophysical study (or a theory or model) of the origin and evolution of the Universe. 25 clockwise movement of the Sun— that is, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. 26 Otto Nikolaevich Bader (1903-1979)—an internationally recognised archaeologist of Soviet Russia, accorded membership in the Italian Institute of Prehistory and the Society of Prehistoric Archaeology in France. As early as 1924 he was appointed head of the Archaeological Division of Moscow’s Central Industrial District Museum, and, in 1931, Academic Secretary of Moscow State University’s Institute and Museum of Anthropology He went on to hold a number of other prominent positions in Russian academe. Mikhail Mikhailovich Gerasimov (1907-1970)—a prominent Soviet anthropologist, archaeologist and sculptor, who specialised in the re-creation of the outward appearance of a human being on the basis of skeletal remains. He has created reconstructed portraits of historical figures such as Yaroslav the Wise, Tamerlaine, Ivan the Terrible and Schiller. 27 Galina Viacheslavovna Lebedinskaya (1924-)—a specialist in remains reconstruction. Following Gerasimov’s death in 1970, she succeeded him as head of the Waxed Reconstruction Laboratory at the Ethnographical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

I arrived at this unique place on a weekend. In one of the pits I saw two men taking soil samples from the side of the pit and carefully placing them into plastic bags. They turned out to be workers from the State Archaeological Institute. They confirmed that Sungir is considered the richest archaeological site for the study of Ancient Man anywhere in the world. The Vladimir Museum exhibition is the only one of its kind in Russia. They said that tourists sometimes visited the Sungir excavation site, but mainly tourists from Japan, since there is an even fuller exhibition on Sungir at the Tokyo National Archaeological Museum. It seemed pretty strange that the people in the Land of the Rising Sun show more respect to our ancient forebears living on our country’s territory than we do ourselves. Thankyou Japanese friends, for protecting the culture of our joint forebears. We talk about Russia’s lofty mission, about spirituality and the need to support the national image, but what support can we talk about if foreign tourists see our relationship to history through their own eyes? Well, the only thing we can do is hope that possibly our more civilised descendants will learn what secrets still remain to be discovered in Sungir. I managed to find out that 25,000 years ago our forebears were civilised people, who knew how to love passionately and preserve love forever. A family-centred society1 To all appearances, in order to bring back lost effective traditions and rites capable of preserving love in families, it would seem necessary to obtain full information about the life of our forebears. To this end we must delve even deeper into our historical past, right down to the family-community-centred society, when a husband and wife who loved each other created a friendly family community together with their children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. In today’s world a husband and wife simply cannot hold on to even their closest relatives—their children. No sooner do their offspring approach adulthood than they try to get out from under their parents’ wing. They go off to live in a university residence, or rent an apartment—often at considerable expense, but they still go. And we’re not just talking about children! Many couples separate even before children come along, or shortly after their appearance. The family-community-centred society existed many millennia in Rus’

before the princes came along. It was characterised by an absence of divorce and stronger family units, in comparison with subsequent social structures in our history. Only genuine love is capable of starting a family line. In the past it was much easier for grown children to leave the family than today I’m talking about the early period in Rus’, before the arrival of the princes. If two young people who loved each other weren’t happy with their relationships with their parents, they could leave home and set up their own dwelling on whatever territory they took a fancy to. They could start by nourishing themselves on what they found in the forest; then they would till the ground and establish a household. But they didn’t go away. That means the founders of the family line treated them with understanding and love. We need to study this period and from it draw into our modern way of life grains of logic capable of helping build strong families today. But how, by what means can we access information about this era in people’s lives, when Russian history describes only the Christian period? Another factor necessitating an investigation into our people’s historical past is the importance of determining whether the ancient rites and culture disappeared all by themselves, having outlived their usefulness, or whether the traditions of many millennia were deliberately destroyed. If they disappeared all on their own, then there is no point in digging into the historical past, since the people themselves rejected their ancient culture, not seeing it as useful, which means it would not be accepted today either. If, on the other hand, the ancient traditions were deliberately destroyed, then we must look into the question of by whom and for what purpose. We must seek them out, find them and present them to society for evaluation. It is possible the ancient rites and traditions conceal within themselves such important secrets of human existence that without uncovering them we shall continue to move toward an abyss, die out and torment ourselves with family strife. We often talk about large-scale wars. Family conflict, however, is often more painful for each of its participants than news about war in Iraq or events in Israel. Recalling everything I knew about Ancient Russian history, I decided that, strange as it might seem at first glance, the only thread leading through the vast labyrinth of historical falsehoods was the conqueror Genghis Khan2—in other words, the three-hundred-year period of the so-called ‘Tataro-Mongol Yoke’ in Rus’. Why? Because this period began shortly after the Christianisation of Rus’, when the traditions of our ancestors had not yet been completely annihilated. Not only that, but Genghis Khan was just about the brightest, most

interesting and enlightened personality of his time. It is not only that he and his descendants conquered half the world, but it is fascinating to see how they did it. I can tell you right off that their army played only a secondary role in this process. We know from various historical sources that Genghis Khan sent expeditions to many lands, as far away as China and India, which supplied him with wise-men. He spent a great deal of time conversing with men of wisdom. He was attempting to determine the purpose of human existence on the Earth, and to find immortality In other words, he was gathering the wisdom of various peoples and could well have possessed information about the social structure of Ancient Rus’. And it turned out, in fact, that he did. I am convinced that it was thanks to this information that his family, his sons and great-grandchildren were able to hold the so-called elite of many countries in subjection over the centuries. And I mean exactly that—it wasn’t countries or their peoples that he held in subjection, but their elites that were usurping the peoples of these countries. Somebody might wonder what on earth the knowledge of ancient family traditions and love-preserving rites has to do with the successful subjugation of states. You shouldn’t be surprised—there is a simple direct relationship, and such knowledge is more powerful than millions of soldiers’ swords or even the most state-of-the-art weaponry. I shall not bother describing the whole three-hundred-year period of the Tataro-Mongolian hold on Rus’. I shall cite just one episode—albeit a very typical and interesting episode—the subjugation of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality, on which I have collected information from various sources. Let’s try to arrive at some conclusions together. A mysterious manoeuvre Chronicles, modern historical sources and church literature all talk about a mysterious and even secretive manoeuvre on the part of Batu Khan3, grandson to Genghis Khan, on the outskirts of the city of Vladimir in 1238. What is the mystery here? This is how the chronicles tell it: “Having taken Riazan4 in 1237, in the spring of 1238 Batu Khan and his cavalry pushed their way into the city of Suzdal...” As subsequently reported in a multitude of ecclesiastical sources, he burnt Suzdal, exterminated part of the population and took the remaining part captive. A lot is said in these sources about the “atrocities committed against the people”. Secular historians, on the other hand, describe the situation more accurately

and impartiall. Thus, for example, in the materials available in the VladimirSuzdal State Museum the event is described as follows: The Tatars set up their camps at the city of Vladimir, while they themselves went and took Suzdal, and plundered the Holy Mother of God (cathedral), and burnt the prince’s court, and burnt the monastery of Saint Dmitry, and plundered others; and the old monks and nuns, and the priests, and the blind, and the lame, and the deaf, and the labour-weary and all other people were slaughtered, while the young monks, and monks, and priests, and their wives, and the deacons with their wives, and their daughters, and their sons —all these were led away to the Tatars’ camps, and they themselves went to Vladimir. As we can see, Batu Khan did not take anywhere near the whole population captive. And he killed off the old high-ranking monks and took the young ones captive. He didn’t burn and plunder the whole city, but only the prince’s residence along with Suzdal’s churches and monasteries. And now let us try to solve a superhistorical myster. Why (as the document says) did the Tatars “set up their camps at the city of Vladimir, while they themselves went and took Suzdal”? Any military historian—as, indeed, any modern army commander—will tell you that this manoeuvre completely goes against standard military tactics. To establish a camp under the walls of a major fortified city and then leave it and move one’s troops to a smaller target—that is tantamount to suicide. The distance between the cities of Vladimir and Suzdal at the time was equivalent to 35 kilometres. With the roads rendered impassable by the spring rains, it was a good day’s journey on horseback. The taking of Suzdal required a minimum of several more days, and then a day’s journey back. It wouldn’t have taken any more than a day for the soldiers defending Vladimir to go out of their fortified city on a foray and rout the defenceless enemy camp. All they had to do was seize the spare horses, the spare quivers of arrows, the supplies, the wall-storming ladders and stone-throwing devices, and they would have shorn the enemy not only of the possibility of launching an attack on them, but of their battle-readiness in general. But they never went out. Why not? Perhaps they didn’t know that Batu Khan’s troops had left the camp? But they kne. They could have easily seen that from their battlements; besides, their scouts would have reported it. Possibly Batu Khan’s forces were in such great numbers that more than enough guards had been left behind to repel an attack on the camp?

This is the way historians initially explained it. They said the Golden Horde’s troops numbered almost a million. Then they changed their minds and reduced their estimate to 130,000, some even to as few as 30,000. Naturally it is tempting to explain one’s defeat by citing the enemy’s significantly superior numbers. More objective scholars have begun to say that moving a million-strong army at that time was an absolute impossibility. A million swordsmen together with equipment would mean three million horses. If a herd like that were kept in one place, even in the summertime, they would die of hunger, since the grass all around would be trampled down. And in the wintertime no amount of feed supplies would be enough. So the figure was reduced to either 130,000 or 30,000. A humiliating figure indeed. With a scant hundred and thirty thousand men Batu Khan quietly went about conquering Russian principalities and whole countries too. But even this figure is inflated. To subjugate the Russian princes of that time using the knowledge left by Genghis Khan to his descendants, there was simply no need for even a fifty-thousand-strong army Ml that was required was knowledge of the way of life of the Russian people, Russian families, and the proper strategy based on such knowledge. After setting up camp at the city of Vladimir, Batu Khan did not go with a whole army to Suzdal, but sent a small detachment to take it. This is why the people of Vladimir did not leave their fortified city to rout the camp and destroy the enemy’s military facilities. Do you know how many days and nights it took for Batu Khan’s small detachment to conquer one of Rus’s spiritual capitals of the time, surrounded as it was by more than a half-dozen monastery fortresses—this legendary city of Suzdal? No time at all. He simply arrived, entered the city and burnt the prince’s residence. The prince, meanwhile, had fled together with his armed garrison. It was no effort to cut down every last one of the high-ranked clergy and take the young monks captive. And the Mongols later caught up with the prince and his garrison at the Sit’ River and destroyed them too.5 6 How could that be? someone may wonder. Where were the brave Russian people, their indomitable and freedom-loving spirit? I can tell you right off that there was nothing wrong with the Russian people and their spirit. Logic suggests that the people applauded Batu Khan’s small detachment on its return journey from Suzdal. They served kvas and bragal €> to the warriors along the whole route back to their camp at Vladimir.

The reason is that the people of that time did not look upon Suzdal as their city Rather, they viewed its royal inhabitants as traitors and its clergy as foreign aggressors and enslavers. This led to the flare-up of a number of rebellions on the part of the people against unbearable oppression. Documents at the Vladimir-Suzdal State Museum put it this way: By the end of the thirteenth century Suzdal had eight monasteries. Founded by the princes and representatives of the Christian religion, they played a major role in assimilating new territories and served as fortresses in the event of enemy aggression. ... In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Church owned a third of the best lands in the country and was endeavouring to subjugate the power of the Grand Princes to itself. From the end of the fifteenth century on, the State made repeated attempts to limit the landholdings of monasteries and churches, along with attempts at secularisation (in other words, complete eradication). The question of land provoked two ideological tendencies within the Church: Josephism7 8 and the NonPossessors Movement.11 The first defended the monasteries’ property interests, while the second emphasised the idea of inner self-perfection and condemned the monasteries’ acquisitive pursuits. The ideological leader of the Josephites was Father Joseph, abbot of the Volokolamsky Monastery, while the Non-Possessors Movement was championed by a monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, Nil Sorsky. The monasteries and clergy of Suzdal, as major landholders, came down solidly on the side of the Josephites. However, in the sixteenth century the authority of the Grand Princes did not manage to carry out its intended secularisation of the Church’s wealthy landholdings, which continued to increase, even though on a limited scale. Quite a trick! A third of Russian lands ended up in the hands of the Constantinople-derived9 clergy and its puppets. Monasteries were transformed into large-scale slave-owners. And it wasn’t the monks who tilled the ground and raised cattle, but the peasant serfs. The princes were already trying to reclaim part of the country they had lost. But that was by no means easy! And just how was this ‘enriching’ the souls of the peasants, whose primordial family lands had now become monasterial property at one fell swoop? What was offered to people in exchange for their centuries-old traditions and rites, which were now labelled ‘barbarian’? The same archival documents show what happened here:

Fees and penalties imposed on the peasant serfs of the Pokrovsky Nunnery in 1653 From each household—two altyns,10 a chicken and lamb’s wool from the first shearing. On the purchase of a: Horse—2 dengas.11 Cow—1 denga. On the sale of: Grain, horses, cows, hay—1 altyn for each rouble received. Log houses—1 denga per internal corner. For settling disputes: Regarding field-lands—2 altyns, 2 dengas. Regarding household lands—4 altyns, 2 dengas. Court fees: For travel to the site of a dispute—1 denga per verst.12 For travel in cases of acquittal—2 dengas per verst. From the guilty party—1 altyn for each rouble assessed. From the vindicated party—7 altyns, 2 dengas. For taking an oath—4 altyns, 2 dengas. Wedding fees: From the groom—3 altyns, 3 dengas. From the bride for a table—2 altyns, 2 dengas. From a groom from outside the district—2 grivnas.13 From holiday beer-making for weddings or funerals—1 bucket of beer. Penalties: For alcohol distillation for one’s self without a permit, or for sale—5 roubles, a beating with a cane, and arrest. For consumption of wine except on holidays—8 altyns, 2 dengas, and a beating with a cane. And here is a description of the property of the highest-ranked church official: List of people and property belonging to Metropolitan Illarion: 16 elders, 6 overseers in charge of properties, 66 personal bodyguards, 23

servants, 25 singers, 2 sextons, 13 bell-ringers, 59 craftsmen and labourers. In total: 180 persons. Weaponry numbering 93 pieces, silver dishes weighing 1 pood14 20 pounds, pewter dishes weighing more than 16 poods, 112 horses belonging to the Metropolitan’s horse farm, 5 carriages, 8 sleighs and chariots, 147 books. (From the inventory of the Metropolitans household, iyoi) A most extraordinary document. It is free of any kind of historical inaccuracies. It simply provides an impartial inventory of the Metropolitan’s household property. However, it also begs a great many questions. What kind of properties did the Metropolitan have that required the services of six overseers? Why a whole twenty-three servants for one man? And were the ninety-three pieces of weaponry also intended for the conducting of church rites? Note that none of this was the monastery’s property—it was just the Metropolitan’s personal effects. The monastery had its own. Just who was such a large contingent of guards supposed to protect the Metropolitan from? He had more bodyguards than the first American presidents. The large contingent of guards, like the high monastery walls, were designed to protect the Metropolitan from the Russian people, of course. The walls of the Suzdal monasteries had no strategic significance in terms of military policy. But why then do almost all historical sources describe the high monastery walls with their embrasures as fortresses, designed to protect the people from the enemy? Why were not these so-called fortresses capable of holding out for at least a month? Because they weren’t at all designed for defence against any external aggressor, let alone a smart one. For the soldiers under Genghis Khan’s grandson, in any case, such fortifications were no more than a distraction. If the possessors of these mock fortresses had not acceded to the enemy’s demand for immediate surrender, the Mongols would have thrown up an embankment a little higher than the walls and dragged their stone-throwing devices up onto it. There are many possible scenarios here. One of them involved putting a bag into the stone-launcher attached to a long rope, and launching the bag over the monastery wall. Before it hit the ground, the bag would become undone, showering the people hiding behind the wall with infected meat. After that, all they had to do was shoot the people as they attempted to escape through

the main entrance gate. The only thing that the high monastery walls served as a protection against was their own people, the peasant serfs—or, rather, the monastery slaves— who from time to time rebelled. It was none other than the Constantinople clergy who applied their lofty ‘spirituality’ to the inculcation of serf law15 in Rus’. One document from the Suzdal Museum archives attests to the following: Church landholdings prevailed in Suzdal in the seventeenth century, as they had before. Monasteries and the Metropolitan’s residence were major feudal landlords, with enormous financial resources at their command, not to mention the free labour of many thousands of peasants. Thus, the Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery16 placed fifth among all Russia’s church-based feudal landlords. Its prosperity depended wholly upon land grants and contributions. In the second half of the seventeenth century the earlier established fiefdoms did not increase in size, as the inordinate expansion of monastery lands was held in check by the State. The peasants were subject to a double exploitation—first by the landowners (the corvee and tribute system) and secondly by the State (taxes payable in both money and kind). Or take this quote from a similar document on the history of the SviatoPokrovsky Nunnery:17 The full and free life enjoyed by the nuns was made possible by the labours of peasant serfs and the enormous staff of servants; the landholdings of the Pokrovsky Nunnery grew, thanks to rich donations and grants on the part of Russia’s most elite families, including princes and tsars. So there we have it: more lands—more serfs and more wealth. But let us return to the thirteenth century. What, then, actually happened with the arrival of Batu Khan’s detachment at Suzdal? And where do traditions and love enter the picture? The population of Suzdal at that time was fewer than 4,000 inhabitants. It consisted mainly of the prince’s armed garrison and servants, craftsmen and clergy with their host of unpaid servants, hiding from the people behind the monastery walls. All around Suzdal and Vladimir lived tens of thousands of peasant families, who were the only ones capable of worthily resisting an aggressor. But they didn’t do this, they didn’t rise up in arms, they didn’t go to the monastery walls to protect the clergy. To put it simply, they hated the clergy Note that

they didn’t hate God, only their oppressors. The people loved and revered God. It was for this reason that the people didn’t rise to the defence of the city of Vladimir. Batu Khan waited six days before storming Vladimir. He waited until the news spread that it wasn’t the people he was taking captive, but their enslavers. He waited and took the well-fortified city in a single day It was to this end that he made the foray against Suzdal. The foray was of no military importance, but it served to deprive the authorities of support from the populace at large. And then what did the Mongols do? Realising that they could find no better overseers and tax collectors than the princes in collaboration with the clergy, they began to issue the princes licences to govern and the right to collect taxes from the Russian people, a portion of which was to be handed over to the Horde. Many monasteries were exempted from taxation. All of this is confirmed by specific documents. Just so people don’t go pointing the finger at me or the scientists or secular historians, let us turn directly to literature from the Church itself. There is a fairly decent historical book published by the Sviato-Pokrovsky Nunnery—with the blessing of Evlogii,18 19 Archbishop of Vladimir and Suzdal, which states: Saint Fiodor, the first Bishop of Suzdal, was from a Greek family. He arrived in Rus’ in 987^ in the entourage accompanying Saint Michael from Constantinople. Saint Michael baptised Grand Prince Vladimir at Korsun,20 and subsequently became the first Metropolitan of Kiev21 After the baptism of the Kievans in 988, the prince, who had been accorded apostolic status, travelled around the Russian cities together with his sons and Saint Michael, on a zealous proselytising campaign. Bishoprics were established in Chernigov, Belgorod, Pereyaslavl, Novgorod and VladimirVolynsk.22 As can be seen from these reports, as well as from other sources, foreign ideologists were descending upon Rus’ en masse. Complete with hired bodyguards and the prince’s own contingent, they began to travel around the Russian cities, breaking down foundations that had been in place for

millennia, planting an ideology profitable to the Church and government of the day and establishing foreigners in charge of cities. Many historical documents testify to how the people resisted, though it appears they were poorly organised, and they did not expect treason on the part of their own prince. It was this treason that was largely responsible for the massive foreign invasion that befell Rus’. The saddest part was that it was done in the name of God. What an incredible sacrilege! What if Prince Vladimir and the bishops from Constantinople actually believed sincerely in Christ’s commandments? But subsequent events show that their real masters were the exact opposite of God. They were the servants of this opposite, with the advanced ability to manipulate the people, to subjugate to themselves their spirit and their will. They suggested to Man: you are God’s slave, actually meaning: you are my slave. And Man began to forget that God has not and cannot have slaves. Man is the son of God, His beloved son. All the quotations reproduced in this book are taken from historical documents. I gained access to them not by going to some super-secret archives, but simply by paying 15 roubles23 to get into the State Museum and 30 roubles for the right to take pictures. I photographed the displays set up for general viewing. One of them was entitled: Monasteries as ecclesiastical feudal landlords. And that is by no means the only official State source. There are many of them. One that exerts an immeasurably greater influence, for example, especially on the young, is a Grade 10 high-school textbook published by Prosveshchenie24 in 2003 and recommended by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. This is a high-quality publication under the editorship of A. N. Sakharov25 and V I. Buganov26 On page 63 it says: Along with this the Church persecuted the old folk pagan culture and came out against the Roman model of Christianity, calling it ‘Latinism’ and apostasy. This damaged Rus’s relations with countries confessing the Catholic faith, and contributed to Rus’s isolation from Western European culture. Church facilities began to introduce slave labour. Some clerics and monasteries engaged in usury and victimised people. There were cases where prominent politicians active in the Church took part in political machinations. Thus there frequently arose a discrepancy between the words of the Church and its deeds, and this provoked a feeling of discontent among the people. The textbook also mentions that Prince Vladimir, who baptised Rus’ in 987,

“...was the son of Sviatoslav40 by a slave of his mother’s named Malusha. Consequently he was accorded a secondary ranking among the Prince’s sons”. 39

Viktor Ivanovich Buganov (1928-1996)—historian, author of books on the sociopolitical history of Russia from the 11th to 18th centuries. He has also published a number of chronicle manuscripts. 40

Sviatoslav (P-972)—Grand Prince of Kiev, who brought many lands—as far away as the Oka River (near present-day Moscow), the Balkans and the Caucasus—under the control of Rus’. He also established alliances with the Hungarians and the Bulgars. It further states: Vladimir spent more than two years in foreign parts, and when he was approaching Novgorod, he had with him a strong Varangian41 contingent. He quickly took control of Novgorod and began preparing for his trek south. Along the way Vladimir conquered Polotsk, where he killed the reigning Varangian prince Rogvolod and his sons, raping Rogvolod’s daughter Rogneda and forcibly taking her to wife.27 41

Varangians (Russian: Varyagi, equivalent to Vikings)—Scandinavian (mainly Swedish) explorers and traders who used the Dnieper River through Russia and Ukraine as a conduit to the Mediterranean and Black Sea merchants. According to the Chronicles, they had significant interaction (and intermarriage) with the Slavs and took an active part in the political life of Ancient Rus’. The textbook goes on to describe how the Kievan prince Yaropolk, Vladimir’s brother, came to negotiate with him. “No sooner had he entered the hall than Vladimir’s bodyguards ran their swords through him.” We also read an account of the baptism and the imposition of a sacramental obligation to pay the Church 10% of the tribute collected from the people. It should be remembered that at that time the Church was in subjugation to the Patriarchate of Constantinople (Russia still did not have its own patriarch), which means that 10% of the tribute money collected from the Russian people was at the disposal of Constantinople. Might it not be in historical facts like these that we uncover an answer to the question as to why the people didn’t rise to the Church’s defence when Peter the Great closed a third of all Russian monasteries and melted down church bells to produce cannon, or when Catherine the Great went about ‘secularising’ (i.e., confiscating) monastery landholdings, which meant that formerly wealthy monks were obliged to beg for food and live at the mercy

of the tsar. Or, when the Bolsheviks started killing clerics and blowing up churches, why some of the people themselves participated in the plunder of church property. My remarks on the subject of the Church are based on historical facts and documents. I have resolved to call upon sensibly-minded members of the Church hierarchy and its wise elders who I am sure are out there, to transform the modern Church into a highly spiritual institution, one capable of helping society escape from its economic and spiritual crisis. Love and the State’s military preparedness But what link can there possibly be, readers might wonder, between the conquest of Russia and love? The connection is quite direct. After seizing Russian lands, enslaving the Russian peasants, prohibiting rites capable of leading to love, the Constantinople assault force thereby began to hinder the formation of strong loving families and especially family domains. This meant, in effect, the immediate imposition of serf law. Love among slaves, as a rule, is a most unhappy love. In order for the feeling of love ignited in young people to be preserved, one’s own Space is required. If it is not there, love, as a rule, vanishes. And what Space could be possessed by slaves? None at all. Let’s think: why, over the many millennia before the princes came to Rus’, was our territory never conquered? There was the Egyptian army, after all, and the Roman legions, but all these hosts with all their well-trained and well-equipped soldiers did not succeed in conquering our lands. To answer this question, let us suppose that Genghis Khan’s troops had launched an invasion of pre-Christian Rus’. At that time, the territory of our present-day country was inhabited almost exclusively by people living in family communities. At the approach of any army, no matter what its size, the members of the community would hide part of their food supplies, take the remainder with them—along with their household livestock—and head off into the forest. Their horses and cows were loaded up with family belongings. An invading army could move into a territory only so far as the provisions they carried with them allowed. But this was already an army on its last legs. The return journey would be impossible. They couldn’t go hunting in the forest, as that had to be done in small groups (any larger groupings would scare away the game), but once they penetrated the forest, small groups would quickly fall into traps and perish. They ate, for the most part, the meat of their own emaciated horses, whose

numbers kept rapidly decreasing, so that any kind of movement became exceedingly difficult. Our ancestors would set up a whole bunch of clever traps all along the route of the foe’s retreat, both in the forests and on the rivers. For example, they would sink a huge tree with prickly branches and stretch a cable tied to the tree across the water and fasten its other end on the shore. Whenever a boat approached the spot, the tree would float to the surface and catch the side of the boat in its branches, and then sink again, overturning the boat in the process. In the meantime the retreating soldiers would be met with a hail of arrows and harpoons launched from the shore. But when the retreating soldiers stepped out on the bank, after gathering together the rest of the troops that had been spread out along the flotilla, there was nobody to be seen. The people annihilated any enemy that invaded their Motherland. After all, they had something worth protecting. This was no abstract Motherland defined only by a beautiful word with not even a clump of native soil to back it up. They had their own family land, the same land that their ancestors had called home, and now it was where they lived along with their families, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And there was love in their families. And they protected their dear mothers, fathers and children. They protected their love! And that was why they could not be conquered. CHAPTER SEVEN

Russia erased Anastasia’s grandfather and I rode along in silence. As we approached Suzdal and could see its buildings in the distance, I said to him: “Look, there’s Suzdal! It’s a city around a thousand years old. Part of the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality. In fact it was one of the religious capitals of that period.” “Why are you going there, Vladimir?” “I want to pay another visit to the museum, and take a look at the ancient sites, so’s I can get a picture of how people lived over the past millennium.” “Try to get a picture before going into the city. Everything that lies around it is worth immeasurably greater attention than the city itself.” ‘All around are just fields,” I protested, “with the occasional dilapidated

village here and there. No information to help with the picture.” “Vladimir, stop the car. We shouldn’t be talking while driving.” “Don’t be afraid, I’m a good driver.” “I’m not afraid. I know, and so I’d better be quiet.” I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. After a few moments I realised that I couldn’t really drive and have this conversation at the same time. The difficulty was that, just like Anastasia, her grandfather sometimes spoke with certain special intonations, so powerful that the listener could perceive visible images, almost like holograms in space. This kind of speech allowed the possibility of showing scenes of the past or future, or even on another planet, as Anastasia once did.1 It’s hard to tell just what is behind this phenomenon. Possibly hypnosis, possibly some kind of mysterious abilities enjoyed by people of the priestly class. Or maybe it was something possessed by everybody living on the Earth back in ancient times. A talented actor on stage can also create all sorts of pictures and images for an audience with the help of intonations and his own emotions—albeit not as vivid and detailed as those of Anastasia’s. Still, it is actors above all others who confirm, through their mastery, the existence of such possibilities in Man. It turns out that people of long ago didn’t need television, with its huge network of personnel and technology, including satellites even. It turns out that in losing his natural, God-given abilities, Man replaces them with awkward artificial substitutes which are far less perfect. And he even boasts about it, calling his inventions a significant achievement. The saddest part is that mankind today is losing its capacity for logical thinking. This is more than just a sad state of affairs. It is a most frightful epidemic, capable of transforming modern humanity into a bunch of mad rodents, devouring one another and destroying their own living environment. Suicide-rodents. What Anastasia’s grandfather was to tell me in the field needs to be understood. It gives rise to the following conclusion: in losing the ability to think logically, the people of the Earth no longer are able to see and understand the unenviable situation they are being pushed into. Judge for yourselves. I had stopped the jeep at the side of the road. The grey-haired oldster got out and headed into a field. I followed along behind. Before long he stopped and bowed low to the ground, saying: “Health to your thoughts and aspirations, dear people!”

He uttered this greeting most sincerely and with such a tone that it seemed as though there really were people standing there in front of him. Then something happened that I can’t put a name to, at least not for now. At first there was some sort of stirring in the air, and a barely noticeable mist arose from the earth. It seemed to be congealing, and soon afterward I could clearly see the outlines of some kind of human figure becoming increasingly distinct. And, finally, there standing before us was an elderly man with a powerful physique. A headband encircled his light-brown hair. He had a calm expression on his face, with just a trace of despondency. Behind him, in the distance, I could see gardens, copses and beautiful wooden mansions. It looked as though the barren fields of a moment ago were now populated with a whole lot of families. The man standing before us was speaking in inaudible tones to the Siberian elder. The vision lasted for several minutes. Then it slowly began to dissipate, as though being erased by an invisible hand. What was being erased was the genuine Rus’, not a Rus’ someone had simply thought up. The vision disappeared altogether when Anastasia’s grandfather turned in the direction of Suzdal. He stood there silently staring toward the city, then turned to me and asked: “What, do you think, Vladimir, was the original purpose of the city we see in the distance?” “What’s thinking got to do with it? Everybody knows this from their history: Suzdal was where the clergy was cloistered. The first Christian bishops lived here. The monasteries and the kremlin2 where the elite lived are still preserved toda. That’s a historical fact.” "kremlin—the Russian word describing a fortress in the middle of a city, the most famous example being the Kremlin in Moscow. “Yes, you’re right, historical. But all Russia’s ancient cities have two histories. The original history is more significant.” “I guess we’ll never be able to rediscover the original history” “We shall know, Vladimir. You will figure it out through your own logic and you will even be able to see it. But start by determining the reason these cities sprang up, along with their original purpose.” “I would say their purpose lies in the fact that they made it easier to live together and defend themselves against enemy invasion. For example, apart from the clergy and the elite, Suzdal was home to many craftsmen. They produced equestrian harnesses, carts, sleighs, earthenware pots, ploughs and harrows. They would sell these items and live off the proceeds.” “Who did they sell them to?”

“To the peasants, of course,” I responded. “That’s it,” the old fellow confirmed. “They sold or bartered their handicrafts for produce. And the produce came into the city from all the many outlying domains.” “Yes, of course.” “But which d’you think came first, which was primary in this place—the domains or the city?” “The domains, I would say The builders and the craftsmen would want to eat every day If they started to build things in the open fields, there would have been nowhere to get their food from.” “Correct. So we’ve come to the conclusion that a little more than a thousand years ago the fields around this city were the site of marvellous, rich domains. And the place where the city of Suzdal sits now was the site of their kapishche.”28 “What is a kapishche?” “It’s a place where people gathered together from all around for fairs, to exchange goods and procure household effects. They shared experiences with each other. They put on massive celebrations with singing and dancing, and some of which were designed to help people find their soulmates. “This was also the place the elders of the families gathered for a vieche4 and adopted unwritten rules for living. They could censure a wrongdoer for his crime, although such instances were rare. Their censure was even a more fearful sentence than physical punishment.” ‘And who was in charge of this whole land?” ‘A hired hand. I really can’t think of an alternative term. A hired hand was the administrator in the kapishche. But he wasn’t really in charge. Rather, he carried out the decisions taken by the elders. “For example, when they desired to put in a new tethering-post or a new road or build a big barn, it transpired that people from each domain would be assigned to carry out that decision. Sometimes the hired hand would be required to find other hired workers like himself. “It was also his job to keep the whole kapishche clean and neat. Let’s say they had a fair, and after it was over, people dispersed to their homes. Then the tethering-posts might have had to be fixed and the horse-droppings cleaned up all over the place. This task would be carried out by the hired hand and his assistants. If he performed his work carelessly, the elders could sack him from his job. And then either the hired hand would go and look for work at another kapishche, or he would stay where he was, but be demoted to a hired hand’s assistant. It was difficult for the elders to maintain hired

help, as just about everyone wanted to live in their own domains. Thus it might happen that hired hands for kapishches could be acquired from foreign lands. “The Vedruss social order of Rus’ before the princes rose to power lasted for many thousands of years. It was superior to all the state social orders we know today, and it extended to all the continents of the Earth. “When the Earth was overcome by corruption, Egypt and Rome fell into slavery, but the Vedruss social order in Rus’ still lasted five-and-a-half thousand years.” “But why did the Vedruss social order give way to corruption, too?” “Which are you most interested in—Rome, Ancient Egypt or Rus’? Pretty much the same thing happened in all three.” “If they’re pretty much the same, then let’s go for Rus’. I already know that it was subject to external invaders, resulting in the destruction of the traditions and culture of the great Vedruss civilisation.” “There were invasions, but there’s much more to it than that. The Vedruss social order underwent its first changes in other lands, back when there was no foe to invade. There were no armies. There were no wars or military campaigns, because there was nothing that could lead to them. The whole Earth at the time was made up of marvellous domains. People’s culture and concepts were truly outstanding. Everybody knew that to take vegetables or fruit out of someone else’s orchard by force or stealth was not only improper —it was useless and dangerous to one’s self. “Only through produce that was given freely and with desire could benefit be acquired. “Neither was it considered proper to take household animals from someone else’s domain by deceit or by force. A cow would not have let a stranger come close. And somebody else’s dog might have shown itself to be not a friend, but a foe. And a horse might have taken the occasion to throw a rider if it were not its own. “With concepts like these, who would dare invade? Such concepts made invasions absurd. Corruption, in the main, came from ignorance, or rather from treason or betrayal, even in little things, of the culture of one’s forebears, their way of life. The family chain leads us to God. To betray one’s forebears’ meaning of life is tantamount to killing God within one’s self. “Yes, in Rus’, of course, the people were deceived, through the priests’ well-honed manipulative techniques—techniques which are still active in

our own time. Back then the elders overlooked this subtle play, and their mistake is still being paid for by subsequent generations even today” CHAPTER EIGHT

The elders’ mistake From a hired hand to a prince At the beginning of the present era many countries were already ruled by emperors, pharaohs or tsars. The form of government under which a large state is controlled by one Man is unnatural. It has never brought and will never bring a good, happy life to a single nation on the face of the Earth. This form of government benefits the priests, who manipulate countries through their rulers. It is difficult, after all, to negotiate with all the people at once, a lot easier to deal with just a single individual.1 Only in Rus’ they did not succeed in setting up a single ruler. Everyone there was guided by the tribal elders’ council. These councils were not something that could be corrupted or forced, under threat, into a decision that would lead to the oppression of the people. Who would make such an obscene decision for one’s children? Several times, through various subterfuges in different places, the priests’ assistants attempted to set up a princely authority, a single ruler over the people. In this particular area, for example, events unfolded as follows. One day a stranger from afar arrived at the Vedruss kapish-che situated where Suzdal is now. Like the wise-men, itinerant minstrels, and craftsmen, he was offered food and lodging. The stranger stayed two weeks, but did not engage in any useful activity. The hired hand in charge questioned him: “What useful contribution, stranger, can you make to our kapishche?” And the stranger replied: “None at all, but to you personally I can render an invaluable service. I have heard rumours that the elders are not happy with you. In a year, maybe even half a year, you will be let go. If you take my advice, on the other hand, the elders will be crawling on their knees before you. You can have your pick of girls from any domain to wife, whereas right now there’s not a single one that would live with you. I can make it so that it will be your decisions, and not those of the tribal elders, that will be carried out.” The hired hand in charge of the kapishche (and part-time janitor) agreed. He

listened to the stranger, an agent of the priests. And the stranger proposed: “When people gather for a fair at the kapishche from all around and stay until the following morning, during the night you will cut your face with a knife, and leave the kapishche along with your trustworthy assistants, so that you can return in the evening with broken-winded horses. During the night I and my assistants (they are already here in the guise of artists and craftsmen), will take the horses away from their tethering-posts, and you will bring them back in the evening, saying you recaptured them from the miscreants. “In your wounded state you will ask the elders for an armed garrison for their own protection. They will agree. You will take my companions into your garrison: they will all meekly obey your command.” The hired hand agreed to the criminal act. He did everything according to the stranger’s proposal. When the ‘wounded’ man returned toward evening with the herd of stolen horses, he learnt that not only had the stranger’s henchmen stolen the horses —they had also killed three people, and burnt the smithy and a barn. The ‘wounded’ hired hand appeared before the elders. He told how he and his assistants had given chase to the miscreants, but they were outnumbered, and his assistants were beaten back. And then he began asking the elders for the resources to maintain a strong armed garrison. He asked them to grant him the authority to take decisions on his own in the interests of general security. The elders were taken aback at the hideous crime and agreed to maintain the garrison, only they were unwilling to pull their own sons away from the domains. So it was decided to bring in strangers to form a garrison, and allot them a tribute from each domain. Other kapishches followed their lead and also began to create their own armed garrisons. Indeed, since they now had power, the hired hands began transforming themselves into princes. They started waging war against each other, justifying this to the elders as a necessary preventative first strike. The princes supposed they had achieved considerable authority In fact, for centuries now, they have been strictly following the priests’ advice, often without realising it. Such a system of authority came together all by itself. The hired hand remained a hired hand—he merely exchanged masters.29 The new master was exceptionally cruel to his hired hands. For thousands of years the priests’ hired hands kept killing each other, conspiring and hatching their schemes, aspiring more and more lustily for power.

You surely know yourself from history how many deaths the path to princely power is strewn with. They even resorted to slaying their fathers and brethren. Pretty much the same thing came about in various countries, and little has changed, even today. Thus the time of the princes had its start in Russia, too, just as it had in other lands long before. You know the rest of the story, I dare sa. And the armed garrisons are still around today, still serving somebody’s interests. The armaments and weaponry may have changed, but the essence is still the same. And the crimes have not abated—they keep multiplying, and keep getting more and more sophisticated. The elders made a mistake. It is a mistake which, if you form your own political party, you will not want to make again. A mistake not to be repeated. “What, precisely, was the elders’ mistake?” I asked. “Was it in forming the garrisons with foreign mercenaries? But the way things have turned out now, a state can no longer survive without a militia or an army” “The garrisons here, Vladimir, are not the underlying cause. It goes a lot deeper, into the psychological. “I don’t know how to put it more clearly. It has to do with forgetting the precepts of our ancestors—God’s precepts. Think about it: God gave each and everyone equal authority Consequently, the only social structure that can claim perfection is one where there is no centralised authority—where every individual is endowed with equal power. “When you give somebody your vote, you are not bestowing authority on anyone. By voting for someone, you are simply placing them in subjection to the existing system, and voluntarily relinquishing the authority God has given you. And over the centuries most people’s minds have been perverted: it is the job of the ruler and the government to deal with all important questions for us, they think. These people’s thoughts don’t even touch the question of the order of life.” “So, that means that there’s no longer any point in voting at all? Well never establish a party that way By law, we have to vote.” “Well, if you have to, then vote to make sure no one individual is able to control people’s lives.” “If you’re talking about the vieche3 gatherings they had in Vedic Rus’,” I said, “that’s totally impossible today People can’t keep constantly coming together from different parts of the country Besides, there’s no way a party like that can ever get registered.”

“Why do they need to come together? Just turn all the modern inventions at your disposal to a good purpose. Use any kind of communications link—the computer, for example. As for registration, isn’t that a bit ridiculous for a party of the majority of the people? You ought to be registrars yourselves. ‘Anyway securing some kind of registration isn’t the main point at issue. The main thing is not to allow the setting up of any centralised authority Anybody working in the central apparatus, if it is absolutely necessary according to your law, should be strictly hired staff—with no access to financial control. Besides, money should never be concentrated in one place.” “But the law requires all parties to elect a central committee,” I observed. “So, elect all party members to it, or at least every tenth person in the party” “There’s something else to think about here. I got really angry at first when you said the party’s main goal was the restoration of love to families. I thought you were making fun of me, that you were trying to make me into a laughingstock.” “I remember.” “But now, I’ve given quite a bit of thought to this question and have come to the conclusion that it really is not just one of the main goals, but the main goal. And that the question of finding one’s soulmate requires specific conditions to be set up, special events to be organised. The rites of Ancient Rus’ should be made public, and we need to get not only science but also culture and ideological propaganda involved in working out these questions. They need to be resolved on the state level. The degree of civilisation of any given state needs to be judged on the basis of the number of happy, loving families living therein.” “ Congratulations!” “On what?” “On understanding that.” “Congratulations are still premature. I can’t for the life of me think of a way to formulate this goal without people laughing at its constitution, or at me, or at our future party” “So, let them laugh.” “What d’you mean, let them? If people start laughing, then I’ll be the only member of a party with a constitution like that. It will end up being an unregistered party with a laughable constitution, supported by a single individual, and an ordinary member of the party at that.”

“Why just a single individual? There’ll be at least two. I shall be supporting it as well. And the two of us will raise some money and hire ourselves an executive secretary” “You serious? What, you’re going to join the party, too?” “No. I shan’t be joining it. Anyway, as you point out, I can’t be registered under your law. But I’ll be supporting the Motherland Party with my whole heart from right there in the taiga. ‘And if you’re concerned about there just being the two of us, remember that all great causes have always begun not with a mass of people, but with just a single individual. Years down the road, humanity will indeed laugh, but not at you. They’ll be laughing at themselves, and they’ll be happy.” “Okay, I’ll try. I’ll give some more thought to drafting the constitution. And I’ll ask my readers to think about it, too.” “If I were you, Vladimir, I’d ask Anastasia to tell more about the wedding rite. In the Vedruss culture, after all, it began right at birth.” “How on earth could a wedding rite begin at a Man’s birth?” “Vedruss people considered the primary birth to be not the appearance of the body, but the illumination of love. Nobody in today’s world can illustrate this the way Anastasia can. Ask her to re-create a picture of life in a Vedruss family.” CHAPTER NINE

The Creator’s greatest gift Childhood love It was with childlike joy and inspiration that Anastasia began telling me about the Vedruss rite associated with the energy of Love:30 The activities of the Vedruss people amounted to a continuous learning cycle. It was a great and joyous school of conscious being. All Vedruss celebrations could be described as tests of mind and skill. They all involved, one might say, reminders to the adults, as well as wise lessons to the young. But even during the days of intense harvest gathering, the Vedruss people worked with a joyous heart. Their work was imbued with meaning that went beyond material creations. Look, Vladimir—see, it is haycutting time. A magnificent, clear day. The whole settlement, from the littlest ones to the greatest, is heading out to the meadows with the first rays of the Sun. See, there go two drays carrying a

whole family Only the elder family members have stayed behind to keep the household animals company. But the guys—the young lads—are riding horseback, with only collar-bands on the steeds and long lengths of rope in their hands. On these horses they will use these long ropes to cope with the task of dragging the stooks of hay over to the main stacks. The stately muzhiks31 in the carts hold their scythes poised, blades up, while their wives and older children sit beside them with their rakes, ready to start raking up the hay the men will be cutting. Also riding on the drays are some very small children. What for? Just for the fan of it, out of curiosity, to mingle, frolic and play, and to observe the grown-ups on this day. The people are by no means dressed in rags. See their clean white shirts, and the women wearing flowers entwined in their braids, and embroidered dresses. Why are they dressed up in their best, as if going to a celebration? The answer, Vladimir, is that they are under no constraint to actually cut hay. They all have their own piles of hay back in their respective domains. Though naturally it does not hurt to have some community stacks in reserve. The main thing, however—the tacit purpose behind all the general activity —is to show themselves at work in their neighbours’ eyes. To steal furtive glances at each other, and give a chance to the young guys and girls to get to know each other in a common activit. That is why the young people, even from outlying communities, are so happy to turn out for the haymaking. Now it has begun—look! The scythe men are moving forward steadily, all in a row. Not one of them must fall behind. Their wives are raking up yesterday’s cuttings to be dried, singing as they work. The young people gather the dried hay into stooks. Those slightly older will build the haystack. See those two guys standing on top of the haystack? One of them is eighteen, the other, twent. They are piling the hay on the stack which those six smiling girls are handing up to them. The guys have taken off their shirts. Perspiration is streaming down their tanned skin. But they are trying to keep up with the merry girls below. There are two guys up top, and there ought to be four girls throwing up the hay from below, but it turns out there are six of them down there, laughing and joking, trying to drown the lads in hay. The guys’ father comes over to the haystack to get a drink of water. He has

quickly sized up the whole situation. His two sons are trying to keep up with the six girls. They simply cannot afford to get done in. Besides, in the group of nimble, laughing girls below there may be two brides for his sons. After taking a drink the father calls up to his boys: “Hey, there, boys! I don’t feel like cutting any more for now. How about I climb up there and help you? Seeing as how there are six down below instead of four.” “Why, Father?” answered the elder son, not slacking off for a moment. “There are two of us up here stacking hay, my brother and I, and we haven’t even got warmed up yet!” “It’s as though I’m still asleep!” added the younger, as he somehow inconspicuously wiped the perspiration from his brow. Down below the light-headed girls took notice of his movements. One of them called out over the general laughter: “Watch out, don’t let the sleepyhead get wet!” The father broke into a smile of contentment, before rejoining the row of scythemen. The train of four steeds, which the young men were leading by the bridle, was on its way to the haystack from the farthest meadow. The last horse was led by the youngest, whose name was Radomir.32 He had turned eight just before the start of the summer, and was now into his ninth year. But the boy Radomir was very well developed for his age. But it was not only his physical height that elevated him above his peers. He had a quicker grasp of knowledge than did the others, and he excelled in festive games. And here at the haymaking he swelled with pride at having been given work usually assigned to kids just a bit older. He was in no way going to lag behind his elders. He himself was trying to bind up the stooks as quickly as possible, and the horse obeyed him. Even though he brought up the end of the ‘train’, he was still not lagging behind. Just a little distance away, a chorus of younger children could be heard in play, over by the edge of the forest. As soon as they took notice of the train of horses dragging the stooks, they rushed over to catch a ride on them. The kids rushed headlong to their goal, only one little girl, barely four years old, lagged behind. The others had already reached the stooks when she took a mind to try a shortcut and anxiously started running across a swampy stretch of ground. This small swamp had almost dried up, but one could still find patches of elevated ground dotted around. The dear girl jumped from

hillock to hillock, very close to the horses dragging the stooks. All at once, however, trying to jump to the next patch of ground, the girl slipped and took quite a fall, scratching her knee badly on a stick and getting her dress and her face all muddied in the process. She picked herself up, but fell back at once and started screaming at the top of her lungs, smarting with annoyance at her plight, just as the last of the stooks came by and began to recede into the distance. The stately youth Radomir heard the little girl’s cries. He brought his steed to a halt, and followed the sound of her cries to the swampy ground. Here he found a dear little girl with clothes and hands all muddied, sitting in the midst of a puddle, using her tiny fist to wipe away the tears, and bawling with all her might. Radomir took hold of her under her arms, picked her up out of the puddle, set her down on a dry patch of ground safe from harm and asked: “What’re you bawling for, little one? Is it that bad?” Still crying, she tried to explain through her tears: “I was running, running—see—I was jumping from patch to patch, trying to catch up, only I took a bad fall. All the stooks had gone, and I was lagging behind. Now all the other kids are having fan riding on the stooks, and I ended up in this puddle.” “They haven’t all gone,” Radomir responded. “Look, I’m still here, and there’s my stook. If you can stop your bawling, I’ll give you a ride on it. Only you seem to have got so dirty all over. Now stop that screaming once and for all,” he demanded. “It’s making me deaf!” Radomir took hold of the hem of the little girl’s dress. Finding a clean patch of dress, he put it up to her nose and commanded: “Come on, now, blow your nose!” Completely taken aback by this move, the little girl let out a loud “Ow!” and covered the front of her exposed lower torso with her hands. Now she blew her nose hard—one! two!—and stopped crying. Radomir let down the hem of her dress, and stared with a critical eye at the filthy and dishevelled little girl standing before him. “You’d better take your dress off altogether,” he said. “Shan’t!'" she declared firmly, “Take it off, I shan’t look. I’ll rinse out your dirty dress in the lake. You can sit here in the tall grass while you wait. Here, you’d best take my shirt. It will go right down to your ankles—it’ll be longer on you than your dress.”

Radomir rinsed the little girl’s dirty dress in the lake while she wrapped herself in his shirt and peeked at him through the tall grass. As she sat there in the grass, the girl was struck by a piercing, frightening thought. She remembered once overhearing her grandfather telling her grandmother: ‘A terribly scandalous act took place in the next settlement—some good-fornothing lifted up the hem of a maiden’s dress before marriage.” “If he lifted up her hem, it means he’s crushed the poor dear’s life,” her grandmother had sighed. The little girl decided that something must be crushed in her too, now that a strange lad had lifted up the hem of her dress. She examined her little arms and legs and, even though they seemed to be in working order, nothing crushed, her fear did not dissipate. If grandfather and grandmother believed that lifting up a dress hem would crush something, then something of hers must be crushed, too. The girl jumped up from the grass and called out to Radomir, who had been rinsing out her dress in the lake: “You’re a dirty good-for-nothing!” Radomir straightened up, turned toward the girl standing in the grass wearing his shirt and asked: “What’re you carrying on about this time? I don’t know what you want.” “I’m telling you, you’re a dirty good-for-nothing. You dared lift up the hem of a maiden’s dress before marriage. You’ve crushed everything of hers.” Radomir looked at the girl’s mud-covered face for some time, then burst out laughing. After getting a hold of himself, he said: “Well, you’ve heard the song but got it wrong! Sure, lifting up the hem of a maiden’s skirt before marriage is a bad thing. But in my case, I didn’t lift up the hem of a maiden’s skirt.” “Y>u did, you did! I remember, you lifted up the hem of my dress.” “Tour dress, sure,” Radomir agreed. “But then you’re not a maiden, are you?” “How come I’m not a maiden?” the girl asked in surprise. “’Cause all maidens have protruding breasts, but you don’t. Instead of breasts all you have are two little spots which are hardly noticeable. That means you’re not a maiden.” “Then who am I?” the little girl asked distractedly “You’re still a little one’.

Now you just sit there in the grass and don’t say a word. I haven’t the time to talk with you.” Once again he stepped into the water, finished rinsing out the dress, then wrung the water out of it and laid it out neatly on the grass to dr. Then he called out to the girl: “Come down to the water, little one. You need to get your face washed.” She came to him obediently, and stood quietly while he washed her face. “Now let’s go to the stook, and I’ll give you a ride.” “Let me have my dress back first,” the girl asked, almost in a whisper. “It’s still too wet. You can stay in my shirt for the time being. I’ll bring your dress along with me. It will have dried out by the time we get to the haystack and you can change there.” “No! Give me back my dress!” the girl insisted. “Maybe it’s wet, but I’m going to put it on anyway It can dry on me.” “Have your own way, spruce yourself up,” said Radomir, as he handed her the wet dress and headed over to his horse. The little girl quickly put on her dress. She rushed to catch up to Radomir at the stook. “Here I am,” she said, panting away ‘And here’s your shirt back.” “Okay You’re my bad luck charm. All the other lads are heading back already, and here I’m stuck with you. Climb aboard!” He helped the girl climb onto the stook. He took hold of the bridle and they started off in the direction of the haystack. The little girl sat on the stook in her wet dress, jubilant as it whisked smoothly over the ground. She was riding the stook all alone, not in twos or threes like the other kids. She sat there all by herself. Her face was beaming with joy, as though she had suddenly been turned into a goddess. If only her girlfriends could see her now, not as part of a train, but all alone. He was carrying her all by herself. She noticed the way Radomir led the horse by the bridle, and couldn’t take her eyes off his back. Her little heart began to beat faster. She felt a sensation of warmth permeate her whole body Naturally, she was still too young to realise what was going on: she was in love. Oh for the love of childhood! It is the ultimate of purity—the precious gift of God. Only why does it sometimes make an early start, and perturb a little one’s heart? Why? What does it mean when it comes early like that? It turns out that there is truly great meaning in early love, something the Vedruss people well knew. Upon arriving at the haystack, Radomir came back to the stook.

“Climb down, little one. Don’t be afraid, I’ll catch you.” Catching the little girl in his arms, he set her down on the ground and asked: “Whose kid are you?” “I’m from the next settlement. My name is Liubomila. My sister and I are visiting, helping our brother,” she replied. “Go on then, go to your sister,” Radomir admonished, walking away He did not turn back even once to look at the little girl. She stood there, watching everything: how he untied the rope from the stook, climbed up onto a barrel from where he could leap onto his steed. Then he took off at a gallop to fetch a new hay stook. Love as a fully fledged member of the family. Little Liubomilka returned home with her sister. It was already the family’s supper-time. But Liubomilka didn’t want to sit down to the table. Clinging to her grandmother’s skirt, she begged: “Can we go for a walk together in the garden, Grammykins? I want to tell you about a miracle—just you alone.” Upon overhearing this request, the father protested: “It’s not proper, daughter dear, to go off when the family’s about to sit down to table, let alone take your grandmother with you...” But when the father looked into his daughter’s face, he broke into a smile. The Vedruss people knew the grace of childhood love. They knew how to treat love kindly, to embrace it as a heavenly gift to the family, to refrain from making fun of it and to respect its every trace. They valued the grace of its great energy, and so the diverse energies of Love would come to them with great joy. “You and your grandmother go for a walk in the garden and eat some berries,” said the father, feigning an air of nonchalance. Little Liubomilka sat her grandmother down in a far corner of the garden and right off began excitedly telling her story: “Grammykins, I was playing with my friends there at the haymaking, and they ran off to have a ride on the stooks. I didn’t feel like joining them. I was just minding my own business. All of a sudden this most kind and handsome young lad stops his horse and comes up to me. Yes, indeed, Grammykins, he comes just as close as you and I are right now. And he was so handsome and kind. Here he stands in front of me and says: ‘Little girl, I invite you...’ No, he didn’t say that. He put it another way He said: ‘Little girl, not only do I invite you, I beg you to take a little ride on my stook.’ And I had a ride. There. You see,

Grammykins? Has something happened with him?” “Something’s happened with you, granddaughter dear. And what might his name be?” “I don’t know. He didn’t say” “First of all, my little Liubomilochka, tell me the whole story, and try to remember the way it really happened.” “The way it really...” Liubomilka hung her head. “The way it really happened? I took a fall into a puddle, he came along and washed out my dress, then he gave me a ride on his stook, but I guess he never told me his name. He called me ‘Little one’, and when he left, he never once looked in my direction.” Liubomilka finished her story and began crying. She continued through her tears: “I stayed standing there, and watched him go away. Only he never looked at me even once, and what his name was he didn’t say” The grandmother gave her granddaughter a big hug, stroking her dark blonde hair, as though stroking the energy of Love within her. And she whispered, as though saying a prayer: “O great energy from God! Turn and help my granddaughter with your grace. Do not burn her still immature heart. Give her inspiration to take part in co-creation!” Aloud she said to Liubomilka: “Granddaughter dear, would you like this very good lad to always have eyes for you alone?” “Yes, I would, Grammykins. I would!” “Then you should not let him come by or see you for three years.” “But why?” “When he spied you, you were all dirtied by the mud. He saw you as a crying, helpless little girl. That is the impression he still has of you. In three years’ time, if you yourself make the effort, you will be older, smarter and more beautiful.” “I shall try. I shall try the very best I can. Only tell me, Grammykins, how should I try—what plan should I follow?” “I shall share all my secrets with you, granddaughter dear. If you earnestly try to follow them, you will be more beautiful than all the flowers on the Earth, and people will rejoice at your presence. You will not need to wait to be chosen, you yourself will have your choice of lovers.”

“Tell me, Grammykins, and I shall do everything you say. Only tell me faster!” Little Liubomilka was trying to hurry her grandmother up, tugging impatiently at the hem of her dress. And, slowly and solemnly uttering the words, the grandmother told Liubomilka: “You need to get up earlier in the morning. You spend your mornings just lazing around. You should get out of bed, run to the stream and wash yourself with pure spring water. When you get home, have a little porridge to eat. But you always demand sweet berries instead.” “But Grammykins, why should I try doing this all at home if he’s not there to see me?” Liubomilka asked in surprise. “He won’t see how I bathe in the stream and eat my porridge each morning.” “That, of course, is something he won’t see. But your efforts will be reflected in your outward beaut. And the energy will be made apparent within.” Liubomilka tried to follow her grandmother’s advice. She did not always succeed, especially that first year. But on those mornings her grandmother would come to her, sit down on her bed and say: “If you don’t rise with the Sun and run down to the stream, you will not become more beautiful this day” And Liubomilka began rising early By the second year she had become accustomed to the new regimen, and easily went through the routine of washing in the morning and cheerfully eating her porridge at breakfast. Now the three-year waiting period recommended by her grandmother was almost at an end—only one month remained. People were gathering at the kapishche4 from all around for this season’s fair. Liubomila and her elder sister Yekaterina watched as carriages regularly passed by their domain on the way to the fair. And all at once they noticed one carriage pull off the road and approach their gate, where the sisters were standing. And lo and behold, there in the carriage... Liubomilka recognised him right off. There sitting with the other passengers and holding the reins was none other than her beloved Radomir, looking just a little older. The little girl’s heart began trembling when the carriage came up to their gate and stopped. An older gentleman among the passengers, probably the father, said: “Cordial greetings, my maidens. Please convey my respects to your father and mother, and all your elders. We would like a drink of your kvass. We

forgot to bring our own along on the journey.” Liubomilka rushed into the house, calling out: “They send all of you greetings. Where’s the pitcher? Our pitcher with the kvass, where is it? Oh, yes, it’s in the pantry, keeping cool.” And off to the pantry she dashed, overturning a pail of water standing by the door in the process. Turning around, she rattled off to her grandfather and grandmother: “Not to worry! I’ll mop it up when I come back.” Grabbing hold of the pitcher, she ran out to the gate, where she stopped to catch her breath. Restraining her excitement, she opened the gate, walked out with stately stride and handed the pitcher of kvass to the gentleman. While the father of the family was drinking the kvass, Liubomilka kept her eyes fixed on Radomir. But he had eyes for Yekaterina. When his turn came to be handed the pitcher, he drank up the remaining kvass, then jumped down from the carriage and held out the pitcher to Yekaterina, saying: “Thank you. This kvass was prepared by kind hands.” Liubomilka watched as the carriage drove off, then, running to the deep far corner of the garden, collapsed on the bench and began weeping bitterly. “Why so sad again, Liubomilka?” Grandmother had come over and sat down beside her. Through her tears the girl told her grandmother what had happened: “They came to us and asked for kvass, and the boy was there who gave me a ride on the stook three years ago. He’s even more handsome now. I ran and brought the kvass in a pitcher. They all took a drink, and said how good it was. He took a drink too, and then gave the pitcher to Yekaterina. Not to me, Grammykins, but to her, my rival, Yekaterina. And it was her he thanked, not me. She’s a real dingbat, that sister of mine. She must have been chatting him up while I was getting the kvass. He looked back at her and even smiled. My own sister—a rival! A real dingbat!” “Why are you blaming your sister? She’s not at fault. You are.” ‘Why am I to blame, Grammykins? What have I done wrong?” “Listen carefully Your sister made a colourful embroidery pattern, which she neatly applied to the sleeves of her dress. You wanted to do everything yourself, too, but on your dress the sewing didn’t come out straight. “Besides, your sister can speak in verse, she’s better than anyone at singing koliadki,33 and you’re unwilling to talk with any wise-men who can teach you to recite and compose verse. The boy you’ve chosen—no doubt he’s a pretty smart lad, he has an appreciation of beauty and intellect.”

“Does that mean I have to study another three years, Grammykins?” “Three, perhaps. But it could be five.” True love will most certainly be reciprocated. Ten years went by One day Radomir was walking through one of the regular holiday fairs with his best friend, who had the unusual name of Arga.34 Arga had a flair for creating marvellous pictures and doing fantastic woodcarvings. He could fashion statues of clay that looked as though they were alive. This was a talent he had inherited from his grandfather. From his father was derived his blacksmith’s art. The two friends took little interest in the long rows of carts with their vast array of savoury offerings. Nor was the young men’s attention attracted by the rows of assorted dishes and household utensils. In fact people did not come to the fair for any material acquisitions at all. The main attraction was talking with others, getting to know them, sharing their experiences with them. The lads decided to head over to the place where they were getting ready for a colourful show by visiting performing artists. Suddenly they heard themselves being hailed: “Radomir! Arga! Have you seen it yet?” Radomir and Arga turned around to see who was calling to them. Three young men from among their community friends were standing a little distance away, engaged in animated conversation and beckoning Radomir and Arga to join them. “Seen what?” asked Radomir as he approached. “That extraordinary shirt,” answered one of the three. “It’s made from smooth fabric, and embroidered with very unusual ornaments. There’s probably some secret meaning in them.” A second lad corrected him: “The shirt’s really good, but the girl selling it is much prettier. I’ve never seen a maiden like that at any fair anywhere.” “So, where do we find this marvel?” asked Arga. The five boys headed over to the carts displaying jewellery and ornaments, marvellous handicrafts and fine clothing. One cart in particular had drawn a bigger crowd than usual. Everybody was admiring an exceptionally beautiful shirt, hanging on a wooden hanger. The fabric was rippling lightly in the breeze, and people could see how different

it was from the usual shirts made of coarse cloth, exuding, as it did, a feeling of lightness and tenderness. And the patterns embroidered on the collar and the sleeves were extraordinarily delicate and fanciful. ‘A pattern like that is the mark of an accomplished craftsman,” Arga said aloud in excitement. “Never mind the pattern, squeeze your way through the crowd and see who’s sitting beside it,” said a neighbour from their settlement. After making their way around to the other edge of the small crowd, the friends managed to approach the cart and catch a glimpse of the maiden. Her eyes were blue as the sky, her dark blonde hair in a tight braid was tied. Her eyebrows were like two brown arches, her lips betrayed just the faintest hint of a smile. Her movements were gracious, but seemed to be entwined with some kind of energy. It was some time before the lads could take their eyes off the maiden. “She’s clever with her tongue, too,” the tallest of them quietly observed. “She can speak in verse and comes up with witty sayings.” Another added: “She’s kind of tender, but as aloof and inaccessible as a high cliff. Try talking with her.” “I can’t,” answered Radomir. “She’s taken my breath away” Arga spoke to her first: “Tell me, fair maiden, are you the one who crafted this magnificent shirt?” “I am,” the maiden replied without raising her eyes. “I wove this shirt to while away the boredom, to make the winter nights shorter. Sometimes I would do some embroidery at dawn.” And what kind of price are you asking for your handiwork?” Arga enquired, so that he could keep hearing the maiden’s tuneful voice a little longer. The maiden raised her eyes to look at the young lads and it seemed as though her gaze was carrying them away into heavenly heights. She let her gaze rest just for a moment on Radomir, thereby dissolving him, as it were, into the blue. From that point on he felt as though he were in some sort of unusual, unreal dream. “What price again? Let me explain.” The beautiful girl sitting on the cart went on: “I can give this piece without payment only to a kind and courageous young man. I shall ask only something trifling for myself as a souvenir—a colt, for example.” “What a beauty she is! And such a worthy reply, she’s a true master!” Loud exclamations could be heard from the crowd. “A colt,’ she says—‘just a

trifle’! Yes, a real beauty all right, no doubt about it!” The exclamations went on, but the crowd did not move along. Then suddenly the whole throng divided into two halves. There was Arga, leading a dun-coloured stallion by a halter rope. The steed was unbroken and hottempered, and kept bucking and prancing on the spot. Whispers spread through the crowd: “Now that is quite a horse! Such a marvellous steed! Could the fine young man have decided indeed to give it away?” Arga approached the cart and said: “My father gave me this steed. I offer it to you, my beauty, in exchange for the shirt.” “Thank you,” the maiden calmly replied. “But I did say, and people heard me say, that the shirt is not for sale. I can only give it away to you, or perhaps to some other young man fine and true.” ‘Aha, the beautiful maiden is frightened!” Mocking voices rose from the crowd. “Of course, the steed is hot-tempered, and too flared up to handle for many a young man. A while ago she was expecting a tame and gentle mare, and now she’s got cold feet! See, she’s given up the game. So, anyone should be careful. It’s a downright shame when a steed is unbroken and hottempered.” The maiden looked out at the crowd with an artful smile and jumped down from the cart with an amazingly lithesome style. At this point all the exclamations from the crowd ceased at once. The girl’s torso was absolutely stunning, as though refined to perfection by a master artist. She stood before everybody standing around in all her beauty, smiling at the steed. She took three steps in Arga’s direction, seemingly floating toward him, barely touching the ground. Completely taken aback, Arga suddenly let go of the halter-rope. The hottempered stallion reared on its hind legs. But the maiden managed to catch hold of the rope with her hand. And then... And then, to everyone’s amazement, her left hand deftly squeezed the stallion’s nostrils. Letting go of the rope, she began caressing the steed’s nuzzle with her right hand. And the hot-tempered stallion all of a sudden calmed down. She inclined his head toward the ground. At first he put up some resistance, but eventually began bowing to the ground—lower and still lower. And then the steed suddenly fell to its knees before the maiden. A grey-headed oldster stepped forth from the crowd and said:

“Only the old wise-men know how to tame a beast like that, and not even all of them. But you are still a young maiden! What is your name? And whose girl are you?” “I am Liubomila, from the next settlement. And whose am I? Nobody’s. I am simply the daughter of my father. And here he comes, that strict father of mine.” “If only I had been strict!” said the father, who had just come back to the family cart. “What have you been up to this time, my little gal?” “Nothing much. I’ve just been playing a bit with this little colt.” “A bit? I see. Let the steed go. It’s time we got on the road home.” Love, too, was teaching in the Vedruss school. What had happened to Liubomila during these years? Where had she learnt such wisdom and agility all of a sudden? In the Vedruss school. People studied their whole lifetime in this school, from their early childhood to their most advanced age. Every year they sat for exams. The school programme had appeared right at the beginning of creation in all its minute detail and then become further enriched over the centuries. The wisdom was imparted unobtrusivel. The lessons were not at all like those in your contemporary schools. You once told me, Vladimir, about a certain expression used in your society. When it turned out that a child is mischievous and rude and bad habits show up in him, people would say that he was brought up by the street, that he’s been granted too much freedom. The Vedruss people had no fear about granting freedom to their children. It was common knowledge that the system of festivals and rites was so intricately and skilfully thought through that all children were absorbed in preparation for them. Even though it seemed as though they were playing, they were actually teaching themselves various disciplines, often without the help of adults. Examinations in the Vedruss school were like one festival or celebration after another. With their help the adults taught the children, and they themselves learnt from the children. Take the Festival of the Koliadki, for example. During the festival days children walk about and sing koliadki to all their neighbours. The verses and melodies, along with the accompanying dance movements, were all composed by the children themselves. Children started preparing for their performances long before the start of the

festivals, eager to learn from adults, their families, their peers and the wisemen as to the best way of mastering verse composition, along with singing and dance movements. Not all children had the same abilities, of course. Those that were not as quick to learn as others would ask their parents to tutor them. And sometimes parents found they could use their children’s thirst for knowledge to draw them into helping around the house and grounds. A little boy might badger his grandmother, for example: “Grammykins, dear, read some verse to me. Please do read, I beg you. I don’t want to fall behind and be worse than the rest. My friends might not take me with them to sing koli-adki next time.” And the grandmother would answer: “I’ve quite a bit to do. Perhaps you could help me, and then I would be able to read you some verse this evening.” The child would be eager to help all day long and afterward would listen intently to his grandmother, and try to memorise all her verses or songs, and implore her to teach him the appropriate dance moves. Then he might implore his grandfather, and perhaps his mother and father, too, to tutor him just a little bit more. And he would be grateful to his parents when they offered him a lesson. Compare this approach, Vladimir, with the lessons children get in schools today—in literature, let us say. You are right, there is absolutely no comparison. The Vedruss children aspired to become poets themselves, right from a very young age. The parade of merry festivals in the Vedruss period was a system that helped people learn about the order of the Universe and in turn teach their children the simple wisdom of life. The wise-men were itinerant teachers and sources of information in regard to what was going on in the world. The bay-ans1 and bards, too, not only reminded people of events of the past, but gave portents of the future, commending the world of marvellous feelings or reprehending unworthy ones. Such lessons were constantly taking place in every settlement, but nobody would ever compel their children to attend. !

bayan (pron. bahTAHN)—see footnote 4 in Book 4, Chapter 33: “School, or the lessons of the gods”. On the role of bards, see Book 2, Chapter 10: “The ringing sword of the bard”.

It was felt that each teacher himself should attract children’s attention to the stories of science he was planning to tell. Over the centuries rules such as these helped perfect the abilities of the wisemen-teachers. You asked, Vladimir, whether any wise-men-teachers, in an effort to attract children’s attention, would simply play some sort of game with them instead of actually giving them a lesson in science or the arts. Indeed, if such a thing were to occur, the wise-man would be relieved of his wise-man’s status. In talking with their children at home, parents would perceive right off that the children had not been properly taught. News of his dishonourable conduct would be made known in other settlements, and no matter what community he thought to visit, he would probably be asked to leave. Before the appearance of love within herself, the little girl Liubomilka made no attempt to attend the wise-men’s lessons or listen to the songs of the bards and bayans. The parents would not have forced their children to attend, but might drop a surreptitious hint at an appropriate occasion. It was Love that enfolded little Liubomilka in its energy In Vedruss families the appearance of love was greeted as a new member of the family sent by God to help them. And they knew how they could, in harmony with Love, make the little girl’s life marvellous. This was why the grandmother advised Liubomilka to go and study with the wise-men. Not just to study for the sake of studying, but with a specific purpose—to become the very best she could be for the one she loved. Liubomilka consented, and decided that the next time a wise-man presented himself who could teach people to sing songs with a beautiful voice, she would indeed go see him along with her friends. But the wise-man they needed never came. Liubomilka decided she would simply go listen to the next wise-man that showed up. She did, and began to listen to his lecture. This wise-man began talking about the specific function of various plants, the fragrances these gave off, and about how plants could be used to treat Man’s diseases. “What do I need this for?” Liubomila thought to herself. “Indeed, this is neither here nor there—everyone knows how to treat: Mama, grandmother, sister—they all know. And even if I should learn more than anyone else about the various herbs, how will that be noticed by my intended? He’ll never notice it.” So Liubomilka listened to the wise-man without paying too much attention. She sat there on the log simply for her girl-friends’ compan. And sometimes she would get up, walk out and wander about the little glade. She was glad

when the wise-man ended his lecture and everyone made ready to go home. Then all of a sudden the elderly wise-man turned to Liubomilka: “Tell me, little girl, you did not find my presentation interesting?” “It’s just that it’s really of no use to me, it does not fit in with my secret aspiration,” little Liubomilka informed the wise-man, almost in a whisper. The wise-man-teacher broke into a faint smile. The perspicacious old fellow knew all about little girls’ secret aspirations, and remarked: “You know, little girl, you may be right—I can allow that this knowledge has nothing to do with you right now. After all, you are still pretty young. But for older girls I explain how they can become beautiful and create a Space of Love for the one they love. When he sees this Space of Love, he will definitely want to know who was able to co-create such beaut. And he will be so excited to meet whoever steps forward as its creator. I shall also reveal to the maidens the secret of how to weave a garland, how to prepare a tea of herbs for their beloved, and what to use in washing in the morning to make their bodies smell flower-sweet. I shall further be explaining...” Little Liubomilka listened to the elderly fellow and began to regret more and more that she had not gone to his classes. He stayed in the settlement for more than a week. He revealed to the maidens important secrets, which she knew nothing about. And Liubomilka asked the wise-man: ‘Are you going to be staying much longer in our settlement?” “I shall be on my way in a couple of days,” he responded. “In a couple of days?” The little girl could not hide her disappointment. “Hmm, in two days... Then I would kindly, kindly beg of you to spend your last two nights with us.” “I have already accepted invitations to other homes,” responded the wiseman. “But if it means so much to you...” “Yes, I very, very much need to learn from you about the different herbs.” Each evening the old wise-man spent his whole time talking with the lovesmitten Liubomilka. He knew that the inspiration of love would help this little girl grasp the essence of the subject in a day or so, while even a year might not be enough for some others. When it was time for him to leave, Liubomilka escorted the wise-man to the outskirts of the settlement, and he told her: ‘After me another wise-man will be coming here. He will be talking about the stars and the Moon in the skies, about the Sun and about worlds invisible to our eyes. Whoever succeeds in understanding him will be able to light a

guiding star in the skies for her beloved, and that star will shine for them both for ever. “Then along will come a wise-man who knows how to tame wild beasts— indeed, how to render even the most headstrong steed obedient to your beloved and a faithful friend to him. 1 Here and throughout this section of the chapter, the Russian term (or family is rod./ rodovoi, which refers not just to the family in any particular moment of time, but rather to the tribe, clan ox family line, which includes all forebears in addition to the present generation and all future descendants. See also footnote 7 in Book 4, Chapter 33: “School, or the lessons of the gods”. 2 Genghis Khan (Mongolian: Chinggis Khayan; real name: Temujin, 11621227)—the founder, reformer and unifier of the State of Mongolia (1206). After uniting the nomadic tribes of north-east and central Asia, he organised campaigns of conquest throughout Asia and Eastern Europe, thus forming the largest contiguous empire in world history. 3 Batu Khan (also known as Baty, 1205-1255)—the son of Jochi and grand 4 son of Genghis Khan, who inherited the leadership of the so-called Golden Horde (Mongolian: Allan Ordyn Uls; Russian: Zolotaya Ordd)—part of the Mongol Empire that covered much of present-day Russian territory (along with Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus) for almost three centuries, beginning in the 1240 s. 5 6 This battle took place 4 March 1238. Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich was beaten and beheaded by the detachment commander Burundai, who later presented the prince’s head to Batu Khan as a trophy 7 Josephism (Russian: Iosiflianstvo, also known as the Possessors Movement) —a movement defending the ownership of land by the Russian Orthodox Church, led by Iosif (Joseph) Volotsky (or Volokamsky; secular name: Ivan Sanin, 1439-1515), later recognised as a saint. Not to be confused with the 20th-century use of the same term, designating a movement opposing the

Russian Orthodox Church’s kowtowing to communist authority following the 1917 revolution (in this case named after Metropolitan Iosif (Joseph] of Leningrad). 8 Non-Possessors Movement (Russian: nestiazhatel’stvo)—an opposition movement to Josephism, rejecting church land-ownership, led by Nil Sorsky (secular name: Nikolai Fedorovich Maikov, 1433-1508) and a Greek immigrant, Maxim Grek (secular name: Mikhail Trivolis, 1475-1556). 9 Constantinople (original name: Byzantium, now Istanbul)—the seat of the Greek 10 Orthodox Church, from which the Russian Orthodox Church was derived. 11 denga—a mediaeval coin worth half a kopek. The plural of this word (1den’gi) is the current Russian generic word for ‘money’. 12 verst (Russian: versta)—an old Russian measurement of length, approximately equivalent to 1 kilometre. 13 14 pood (rhymes with ‘food’)—an old Russian unit of mass approximately equivalent to 16.4 kg. A pood was divided into 40 funt (pounds). 15 serf law (Russian: krepostnoyepravo)— a feudal system prevalent in Russia (as in other European countries), binding the peasants to the land, subjugating them to the will of the landowners, church and political authorities. In Russia it was introduced by the Law Code {Sudebnik) in 1497 and not officially abolished until 1861. Even after abolition, most peasants, being granted no land of their own, had no choice for survival except to continue in their servile relationship with the landowners. Slavery-like conditions persisted throughout the Soviet period: peasants could not leave their village without a special permission from the authorities, and were compelled to do unpaid labour. 16

Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery—one of Suzdal’s principal monasteries, founded in 1352 by Boris Konstantinovich, Prince of Suzdal and Nizhegorod, as a fortress designed to protect the city from enemies both within and without. 17 Sviato-Pokrovsky (lit. ‘Holy Veil’) Nunnery—situated close to the SpasoYefimiev Monastery, founded in 1364 by the then Prince of Suzdal, Andrei Konstantinovich (brother to Boris), in gratitude for protection from a violent storm. It received special attention from the Grand Princes of Moscow, including Vasily III and later Ivan the Terrible (the first to proclaim himself tsar). 18 Evlogii (secular name: Yuri Vasilevich Smirnov, 1937-)—consecrated Archbishop of Vladimir and Suzdal in 1990. He is an author of two books: Eto bylo chudo Bozhie (This was God’s miracle) and Premirnoe sluzhenie (A humble service). 19 987—the year before the official ‘Christianisation’ of Rus’ by Vladimir I of Kiev (988), through his baptism at the hands of Saint Michael of Kiev—see footnote 6 in Chapter 4: “Wedding rites” above. 20 Korsun (also known by its Greek name Chersonesos)—on the southern tip of the Crimsean Peninsula, in what is now Ukraine. 21 St-Michael was appointed first Metropolitan of Kiev by Nicholas II 22 Chrysoberges, who served as Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople from 984 to 996. 23 15 roubles—equivalent to approximately US$0.50 at the time. 24 Prosveshchenie (lit. ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Education’)—a general educational 25 publishing house founded in 1931 (named Uchpedgiz up until 1964) as a state-controlled enterprise for the publication and distribution of textbooks

and educational literature. The textbook in question is entitled: Istoria Rossii s drevneisbikh vremen do kontsa XVII v. (History of Russia from the earliest times up to the end of the 17th century). 26 Andrei Nikolaevich Sakharov (1930-)—historian, author of books on the politics, ideology and culture of Ancient Rus’. Not to be confused with the nuclear physicist and political activist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (192127 Rogvolod (also spelt: Rogvold, Rogvald, Rognvald, Ragnvald, 936-982 or 920-978, depending on source)—Scandinavian-born Prince of Polotsk (on Polotsk—see footnote 7 in Chapter 4: “Wedding rites” above). Rogneda (also spelt: Ragnhild, 962-1002)—reportedly a descendant of the Ynglings royal family of Norway She bore Vladimir four sons (including Sviatoslav the Wise) and two daughters. It is also reported that after being divorced by Vladimir she entered a convent and took the name Anastasia. Her story was the basis for composer Alexander Nikolaevich Serov’s (1820-1871) opera Rogneda, which had its premiere in 1865. 28 kapishche—pronounced KAH-peesh-cheb. 29 In Russian, the word for ‘prince’, kniaz’ (formerly spelt koniaz), is derived from kon’ (horse) and originally meant ‘a herder in charge of horses’. This original meaning of koniaz’ survived in parts of Russia until the 19th century. Also, a Russian proverb says: iz griazi v kniazi (‘princes [are derived] from dirt’)—preserving the memory of the fact that it was the most marginal members of the society that became the princes. 30 shan’t say where or how this meeting with Anastasia took place. I’ll start right away to set forth her description of one Vedruss family’s attitude toward love. Whoever manages to make sense of it and feel the significance contained in the culture of their love, may also be able, perhaps, to figure out the great wisdom and cosmic dimension of the Vedruss rites. 31 muzhiks (English plural of muzhik, stress on last syllable)—the Russian term for a hardy male peasant, or rural dweller. In modern Russian the word is also used in a broader colloquial sense, roughly equivalent to ‘guy1 in

American English usage. 32 Radomir (pron. ra-da-MEER)—a name first encountered in the section entitled A union of two—a wedding” in Book 6, Chapter 5: “The history of mankind, as told by Anastasia”. See esp. footnote 2 in that chapter. The name Liubomila (with its endearing variants Liubomilka, Liubomilochka —pron. liu-ba-MEE-la, liu-ba-MEEL-ka, liu-ba-MEE-lach-ka, resp.) is encountered in the same chapter (footnote 4). 33 koliadki (pron. kaldTAT-kee)—songs traditionally sung during winter solstice celebrations, venerating the Sun and light which bring forth life and joy as well as bountiful harvests and family happiness. The term is derived from the ancient Slavic name of the winter solstice holiday—Koliada (from kolo = circle, annual cycle)—the beginning of the new solar-year cycle. (The Latin word calenda, signifying the first day of a month, and English calendar are derived from the same root.) As part of the Koliada celebrations, children went from one house to another offering good wishes to the families, who offered them holiday treats in return. It was expected that the children would make up songs on the spot for each particular family —an opportunity for them to demonstrate their creative abilities. In the Russian Orthodox Church the term was later applied to what we would call Christmas carols. Koliadki are still practised to the present day. 34 Arga—pron. ar-GAH.

‘A bard, too, should be coming to you. He knows how to write verse and come out with such songs that many people will fall in love first with the voice, then after that, everything expressed in the song. And he can also teach dance.” “Tell me please, which wise-men should I not bother going to hear?” Liubomilka suddenly said to the old fellow. ‘After all, I can’t spend all my time listening to wise-men.” Once more the old fellow, cleverly concealing a smile, answered the girl in all seriousness: “Yes, you are right. If you go hear all of them day after day, then there simply will not be time enough for play. You do not need to go and hear every single one. Why, for example, would you want to learn how to draw? Or embroider clothes with ornaments and imbue them with meanings that only your heart knows? Why would you need this kind of teaching, if you have an older sister and she, I believe, will turn out to be an unsurpassed master thereof? ‘And why would you, for example, go and learn how to instil feelings of kindness in a shirt you sew—a shirt that will protect its wearer from many ills? “Or learn how to make fresh porridge with love for your dear ones, which will satisfy not only their flesh but their soul as well? The taste of that porridge will be unsurpassed. But that is something that can be done to perfection by your sister’s friend who lives next door. ‘And when you want to obtain a beautiful dress or shirt to present to someone as a special gift—a gift that will arouse everyone’s elation—you can always ask your sister and she will come up with a marvellous creation. ‘And if, in the end, you want to treat someone to an extraordinary dish of porridge or kvass, you can always ask your sister’s friend.” “I shan’t ask anybody/” Liubomilka suddenly blurted out, even stamping her foot, quite forgetting herself. “Those are my rivals!” ** “Rivals? In what way?” the old fellow asked in all seriousness. And Liubomilka did not blush but responded: “There’s this boy—he’s the best of the bunch, only he doesn’t pay any attention to me, ’cause these dingbats managed to grow up ahead of me. They kept smiling at him all the time. I saw it when they danced the khorovoc8 at the ka-pishche. And I’m supposed to present him with a shirt

my sister made? And kvass prepared by her girl-friend? No way! Never!" 8

khorovod (pron. hur-a-VOT)—a circle dance accompanied by choral singing, traditionally popular among Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The khorovod is one of the ancient rites venerating the Sun. The dancers would almost invariably move clock-wise, symbolising the movement of Sun across the sky (as seen from the Northern Hemisphere). The dance, music and song served to put the participants into a trance-like state, so as to help them reconnect with the spiritual forces permeating the Universe. “But why should it not be that way? You say he is the best of all the lads.” “He is the best. That I know for sure.” “Then answer me, why should not the best lad receive the very best shirt as a gift, and the best porridge, and kvass besides? And...” The old wise-man paused, and very quietly, almost to himself, he added: “I think it is only just for him to have the best bride of all.” “Bride!” Liubomilka’s cheeks flushed. “Yes, bride,” replied the wise-man. “Indeed, should you not wish him only good? Let him have the best bride of all!” Liubomila looked at the wiseman, not able to utter a word. She was filled with feelings which set her on fire. And suddenly she began running off. But after a short distance she stopped, turned around, and cried out to the wise-man: “I agree. He does deserve to have the best bride of all. And that bride will be me\” Liubomilka eagerly paid a visit to every wise-man that came to the settlement thereafter. She was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and the wise-men could hardly believe the surprising questions she asked. She memorised in her head everything the men of wisdom said. In a learning situation this is possible only when a child not simply attends the classes, but actually comprehends where he will apply the knowledge received. When instruction proves too gruelling for the pupil, it can be counterproductive. When a Man has a specific goal that can be mastered through the study of various disciplines, learning for him becomes an exhilaration, and the assimilation of knowledge proceeds a hundred times faster. And when love enters into the equation, the resulting effect is unsurpassed. Love is capable of scanning the thought of any wise-man. Just a few words spoken by the teacher can be sufficient not only to explain the whole subject to the pupil in the blinking of an eye, but even beyond that, to further engage his thinking.

Love—a great energy, the gift of God—was paramount in Liubomilka’s instruction. Back at home the little girl followed her Mama and grandmother’s dinner preparations with great eagerness. She had them explain all their actions in full detail, and tried her own hand at creating various dishes. And the little one came up with some rather unusual creations. Once at Maslenitsa1 a group of relatives had come to join in a meal. Two stacks of pancakes stood on the table—one of them cooked by the girl’s mother and grandmother, the other by little Liubomilka herself. The guests found her pancakes much tastier than the others. And this now-not-so-little girl watched from a far corner of the room as her stack of pancakes began disappearing faster than the other. When the whole family sat down to the table on a weekday, Grandfather would be the first to taste the cabbage soup from a wooden spoon. And he would say: “I know for certain who made this soup. It has a pleasant and tender taste that no one else can match.” “Hear, hear!” the girl’s father added. “Not only does it contain flowers from unusual herbs, but there is feeling in it.” Little Liubomilka found learning the disciplines no chore at all. In her life she became a craftsman without peer. She herself blossomed into an extraordinarily beautiful woman. From the first wise-man she had learnt without realising it the truth of great love: if you wish to be close to God, become a goddess yourself. CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER TEN

Pre-wedding festivities The children grew up. The time came to search for soulmates. Festivities were a great help to young people in this important undertaking. Young Vedruss people would gather in the evenings at a designated place, usually just outside the settlement. They would light a bonfire, chat among themselves or sing songs. And once a week there would be a common festivity involving three or four settlements all told at one of their favourite spots, where they would similarly light a bonfire, sing songs and chat among themselves. But there were some festivities which were especially useful in helping young people find their soulmates.

While such festivities were outwardly quite simple, their simplicity harboured a great inner significance. ‘Rucheyok’ There was a game called Rucheyok,2 for example. Young people lined up in pairs, one couple after the other, took each other’s hands and raised them high, forming an arch overhead. To start with, boys were paired with boys, girls with girls. The first pair—or anyone left without a partner—would go to the end of the ‘stream’ and, bending over, pass under the arch of raised arms to the head of the line. Those passing through the ‘stream’ were not supposed to lookup. They were to slap somebody’s arm at random, thereby selecting him or her as a temporary partner. Whoever was selected followed suit, and the two of them then stood at the head of the line of couples. Those left without a partner went to the end of the line and chose a new partner in a similar fashion. The game was simple, but think about it, Vladimir: upon clasping hands for the first time, the young people could convey a great many feelings for each other without words: recognition, gratitude and love, or, on the other hand, revulsion. As the game went on, the couples switched, and it was easy to compare which pair of hands held the most pleasant feeling for you. ‘ Chastushka-go vorushka’ This ancient wedding game was the most complex of its kind. Modern chastushki, which people still sing today, are derived from it. The game, known as Chastushka-govorushka,3 can be described as follows. Two rows of people stood facing each other. One row was made up of young men, the other of young maidens. The last girl in the row dedicated a four-line chastushka to the last chap in the men’s row, standing opposite her. Her singing would be accompanied by dance movements. Directly she finished, the rest of the girls quickly stamped their feet twice and clapped their hands three times. And if the lad standing opposite her did not succeed in composing or recalling from memory a worthy response, the girl started singing a new chastushka to the next young man in line. If the lad managed to come up with a worthy answer in the time allotted, the conversation would continue between them with the use of poetic witticisms. But that did not happen very often. In spite of the fact that young Vedruss people knew a great many verses, still, not everyone was able to think up a worthy reply in the brief time available, especially since their rivals were trying their hardest to distract them from the sidelines by all their stamping and clapping.

At one of these get-togethers of young people from different settlements, Liubomila was present. Radomir’s five friends who had caught a glimpse of this extraordinary girl at the fair kept stealing glances at her. His closest friend, Arga, could not take his eyes off her at all. 3 When the Rucheyok game began, the usually bold and decisive Radomir walked under the couples’ raised arms with the full intention of taking Liubomila’s hand and making her his partner. But all of a sudden he got ‘cold feet’. He could feel her as he passed by between the two rows. He would have felt her even if his eyes had been closed. But as he approached the spot in the ‘stream’ where she was standing opposite her girl-friend, he slowed down ever so little, and found himself moving as in a dream. He ended up choosing a lad from a neighbouring settlement. His friend Arga, however, turned out to have more self-confidence. When it came his turn to pass through the ‘stream’, Arga picked Liubomila right away, grabbed her hand and took up a position with her at the head of the line of couples, much to the envy of all the other young men. Afterward they questioned him: “What was it like when she held your hand? Did she squeeze it tight or not?” “I don’t know,” Arga replied. “I cannot remember aught. It just seemed as though my hand caught on fire. Touch and see for yourselves—it still feels hot.” “What a gal!” the fine young lads exclaimed in amazement on the spot. “She’s so hot with passion, it’s as though she’s burning with a flame from some mysterious fire!” Radomir in turn heard all of this without saying a word. His own internal yearnings had been burning for some time—ever since that day he first discerned this wondrous girl at the fair. He had been thinking about her day after day, first thing upon waking in the morning. She even appeared to him in his dreams, but even there, it seemed, he could not bring himself to touch her. Always successful in any undertaking, Radomir had a reputation as a poet, but now all of a sudden even the simplest of words to describe her utterly failed him. When the Chastushka-govorushka game got going, he stood in the middle of the row of young men, next to his friend Arga. Liubomila was almost at the end of the maidens’ ro. When it came her turn to sing and dance the chastushki, she began her song with ease. At once it was clear to all that here was an extraordinary maiden indeed, impossible to beat.

She switched themes in a flash. She sang couplets no one had ever heard before. One after the other she won out over all the young men, even though she herself was the youngest of all. When it came Arga’s turn, he was still able to give a response to the crafty maiden, albeit not without a bit of a glitch. He replied to Liubomila with a quatrain, but she, without even waiting for the stamping and clapping, suddenly changed topic and offered up such a smooth new witticism in verse that Arga was completely thrown off the track and didn’t even attempt to counter with one of his own. Next it was Radomir’s turn. Liubomila began singing to him, jauntily dancing to the rhythm of her verse: Bold and eloquent you are, Much you know, oh yes! D’you recall how in the lake You once washed my dress? Some listeners laughed, thinking Liubomila was making a joke with her couplet. Some, including Radomir himself, could not figure out what it was all about. And, not being able to figure it out, he found it impossible to offer any kind of answer. So Radomir could give no response to Liubomila. When the stamping and clapping came to an end, signifying the deadline for reply was up, he realised that his time had irretrievably gone b. This was something he could not allow. As though completely forgetting himself, he now began moving toward Liubomila—first one step, then a second, then a third. By this time he had come right up close beside her. Everybody fell silent, wondering why the rules of the game had been defied. Radomir stood silently before Liubomila. And all at once, against this background of silence everyone standing in the rows heard Radomir utter, with audible aspiration, the Vedruss declaration of love: “With you, my marvellous goddess, I could co-create a Space of Love to last forever.” Everybody waited with bated breath to hear what response this fierytongued maiden would come up with. But all of a sudden she became very meek. At first she deferentially lowered the gaze of her fiery eyes, but then raised them again. Tears began rolling down her cheek and she whispered: “I am ready to help you in your grand co-creation.”3 Finally Radomir recognised in the maiden standing before him the same little girl whose dress he had washed in the lake so many years ago. He

recognised her, and took her by the hand. As they walked along side by side, they no longer had eyes for anyone else. The two rows of young people stood facing each other in silence as they watched the couple’s love head into eternity. u ought to be deciding your own course of action, without any kind of advice” (Book 8, Chapter 9: “A fine state of affairs”). 37 Quoted from Chapter 6: “Into the depths of history”. 38 See the middle of Chapter 7 (in the present volume): “Russia erased”. 39 Quoted from Book 8, Chapter 13: “A new civilisation”. See the Editor’s Afterword to the present volume for a delightful illustration of the dangers of putting too much stock in printed books and words at the expense of one’s own logical thinking and feelings. 40 In a remarkable little book entitled The five clocks, former University of Toronto linguistics professor Martin Joos (pron. Jose, rhyming with ‘dose’) states that one of the hallmarks of great literature is the capacity to convey a variety of different meanings to different individuals, or to the same individual upon each successive reading. The dedicated writer, he says, can enable the searching reader “to educate himself indefinitely far beyond what the writer put into the text in the first place”.—Martin Joos, The five clocks. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967, p. 42. There is no question, to my mind, that this ‘capacity’ Joos describes is eminently inherent in the writings of Vladimir Nikolaevich Megre concerning Anastasia. 41 An approximation of the Russian pronunciation of Anastasia— see footnote 5 in Book 7, Chapter 28: “To the readers of the Ringing Cedars Series”.

Rites of Love—Book 8, Part 2 (published as a separate volume)—contrasts today’s mainstream attitudes to sex, family, childbirth and education with our forebears’ lifestyle, which reflected their deep spiritual understanding of the significance of conception, pregnancy, homebirth and upbringing of the young in an atmosphere of love. In powerful poetic prose Megre describes their ancient way of life, grounded in love and non-violence, and shows the practicability of this same approach toda. Through the life-story of one family, he portrays the radiant world of the ancient Russian Vedic civilisation, the drama of its destruction and its re-birth millennia later—in our present time. To be continued... Rites of Love Book 8 (part 2) of The Ringing Cedars Series This book contrasts today’s mainstream attitudes to sex, family, childbirth and education with our forebears’ lifestyle, which reflected their deep spiritual understanding of the significance of conception, pregnancy, homebirth and upbringing of the young in an atmosphere of love. In powerful poetic prose Megre describes their ancient way of life, grounded in love and non-violence, and shows the practicability of this same approach toda. Through the life-story of one family he portrays the radiant world of the ancient Russian Vedic civilisation, the drama of its destruction and its re-birth millennia later—in our present time.

ISBN 978-0-9763333-9-5 RINGING CEDARS PRESS www.RingingCedars.com 1-888-DOLMENS 9 780976 333395 US$14.95 CANS19.95 AU$24.95

Book 10 - Anasta of The Ringing Cedars of Russia book series A New Updated author’s Edition! © Vladimir Megre All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. www.vmegre.com/en Russia, First published in 2010 Translation by: Susan Downing We seek the cooperation of translators and publishers. For inquiries and suggestions please contact us at: PO Box 44, 630121 Novosibirsk, Russia. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: +7 (913) 383 0575 Skype: re.press *** It was the year 2010 according to the Gregorian calendar. On the planet Earth, the first humans were awakening from a ten thousand-year sleep. What lay ahead of them was to see what had happened to the Earth while they slept, to understand the reasons for it, to engrave a record of what had happened into their memory as an anti-virus, so that nothing like this would ever happen again. They engraved the many car accidents and wars. They engraved the stench in the air of the cities and the extensive pollution of the water. They engraved the numerous illnesses that had befallen humans’ physical bodies while humanity was in this sleep state. They engraved... But for the moment, they were unable to formulate the causes. But they will be able to. Of course they’ll be able to! They’ll return to the earth its primordial nature. A small child is walking through a glade in the heart of the vibrant Siberian taiga, smiling. Nothing frightens him, no one attacks him. On the contrary, the beasts are ready to rush to his aid at the first sign of trouble. The small person walks like a royal successor walking through his kingdom. He finds

it interesting to observe the lives of the bugs, the squirrels and the birds. To study flower blossoms and see how the blades of grass and the berries taste. He ’ll get a bit older, and then he ’ll perfect this beautiful world. And where is your child at this moment in time? What kind of air is he breathing? What kind of water is he drinking? How will he occupy himself when he grows up? But first things first. THE BEGINNING I decided to start this book by reminding the reader of the events that took place in Siberia more than fifteen years ago, so as to make the book easier to grasp for people who haven’t read the earlier books in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series. I’ll try to introduce some additional information about my first meeting with the unusual Siberian hermit Anastasia. Anastasia lives in the heart of the Siberian taiga, in the same spot where her parents and her ancestors once lived. The distance from the spot where she lives to the nearest god-forsaken Siberian village is about twenty-five to twenty-seven kilometers. There are no roads and not even any paths. You’d have a very difficult time managing a trip like that without a guide. The actual glade where she lives doesn’t differ much from all the other taiga glades. Except in that it looks somewhat cared for, and in the number of flowers. There are no structures in Anastasia’s glade, no fire pits. But it’s precisely this spot that Anastasia considers her family space. The first time I met Anastasia, in 1994, she was twenty-six years old. The Siberian woman Anastasia is a very beautiful woman, even extraordinarily beautiful. The words “extraordinarily beautiful” are not an exaggeration. Imagine a young woman, a bit more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, with a good figure, not waiflike, like contemporary models - but genuinely well built, and lithe, as if she were a gymnast. She has regular facial features, gray-blue eyes, and hair the color of golden wheat spikes that cascades to her waist. Perhaps you could see a woman anywhere who looks like her - on the outside. But I don’t think you’d ever come across the other, special qualities deep inside her that make the taiga-dwelling Anastasia extraordinarily beautiful. Everything about her external appearance speaks of ideal health it comes through in the fluidity and lightness of her gestures, in the springy way she walks, as if she were flying. You get the impression that her body contains within it some kind of other-worldly energy, whose abundance warms the surrounding space with invisible rays. Your body warms up slightly when Anastasia looks at you, and by squinting

at you with some kind of special gaze, she can heat up your body to such an extent at a distance, that your whole body begins to sweat, especially around the feet. Toxins leave the body, and afterwards, you feel significantly better. In general, I surmise that Anastasia’s knowledge of the properties of the taiga plants and some kind of internal energy enable her to cure a person of absolutely any illness. At least, she cured my ulcer with her gaze in the course of a few minutes. However, she categorically refused to do any subsequent healing. “Illness is a serious conversation between God and man,” says Anastasia. “Through this pain, which is both yours and His at the same time, He’s letting you know that you’re living in some unacceptable way. Change the way you live, and the pain will pass, the illness will recede.” Anastasia has one extraordinary ability: when she’s telling a story about something, pictures of the events she’s narrating arise in the listener’s consciousness, or in actual space. And the images she shows are much more picture-perfect than any modem television picture. They’re threedimensional, complete with the smells and sounds of the time she’s describing. It’s quite possible that at one time many people possessed these capabilities. If you bear in mind that in our technocratic time, man hasn’t invented anything that wouldn’t have existed in nature, then it’s possible that something perfectly analogous to our modem television and telephone also existed in early human civilization. Anastasia has shown me p ictures from the lives of people of a variety of periods, starting from the very creation of the world. Pretty much all of the events she shows are connected with her ancestors. If you were to try to characterize Anastasia’s capabilities in one phrase, here’s what you could say: the taiga-dweller Anastasia preserves the experiences and emotions of the members of her extended family - starting with the creation of the very first human - in her genetic memory, and she is able to call them up at will. She can also model pictures from the lives of people in the future. Anastasia’s life in the Siberian taiga differs significantly from the lives of people in modem cities. So that you’ll be able to understand the conditions in which she lives out her life, I have to say a few words about what the Siberian taiga is. It’s Russia’s largest expanse of open land, ancient and snow-covered. In European Russia, it extends for 800 kilometers, while in Western and Eastern Siberia, it stretches out for 2150 kilometers. As you can see, this is an impressive land mass. Today the taiga is considered the

Earth’s lungs, and rightly so - it produces the majority of free oxygen. You have to bear in mind that the taiga zones began forming even before the onset of the glaciers. So, by studying life in today’s taiga zone, we can learn about life on the planet Earth before the Ice Age. Remains of a well-preserved baby mammoth, now kept in the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg, were discovered in the permafrost. It’s hard for us to get a good idea of the animal world in taiga zones before the Ice Age. In today’s taiga, lynxes, wolverines, chipmunks, sables, squirrels, bears, foxes and wolves are numerous and widespread. The ungulates you’ll encounter include noble and northern deer, elk and roe deer. There are numerous rodents: shrews and mice. Among birds, woodgrouse, hazel-grouse, nutcrackers and crossbills are ubiquitous. During the winter, the great majority of animals settle into anabiosis or hibernation. This state of living organisms has been little studied by scientists and is generating greater and greater interest among those who study outer space. As far as the plant world is concerned, various types of bushes grow in the taiga: juniper, honeysuckle, currant and willow, and others. You find bilberries, cowberries, cranberry and cloudberries, all with marvelous vitamin content. Among grasses suitable for consumption, sour grass, wintergreen and ferns predominate. You’ll find majestic trees reaching forty meters in height: spruce, fir, larch, pine and a tree with unique qualities - the cedar, which scientists sometimes call cedar pine. I’ll say right off that, in my opinion, they really shouldn’t call it that at all. But what can you do? Let science focus on the pine they mistakenly call a cedar - I’m going to talk about the incomparable Siberian cedar. Why is it incomparable? Because the cedar gives unique fruits - cedar nuts - and deserves its own, separate name. The quality of the fruit of the Siberian cedar, these cedar nuts, greatly surpasses that of the nuts of cedars in other climate zones on the planet. Way back in 1792, the academic Pallas wrote about this in a letter to the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Cedar wood possesses special phytoncidal properties even once it’s been cut, so a moth will never take up residence in a closet made of cedar. And the Old Testament’s King Solomon, who also seems to have known of cedar’s mysterious properties, built a temple out of it, having given away several entire cities of his kingdom in exchange for certain specially chosen cedars.

But the priests were unable to perform services in the temple because a cloud formed inside it. (3rd Kings, 8:11.) After having pored over a multitude of sources that talk about the Siberian cedar, I’m inclined to suggest (and not without basis) that the cedar is a representative of the Pre-lee Age plant world, and that it may be an envoy to us from a different, more developed civilization (in the biological sense.) How was it able to survive the planetary catastrophe and come to life anew in our world? Cedar seeds can survive frost and are able to hold out for an extended period of time, so that they can come up during more favorable climatic conditions and adapt to a new environment. This adaptation continues up to the present day. What is so unique about the fruit of the cedar? Why is it that today we can state with certainty that they are the most ecologically pure and healing food product of our time? The cedar nut kernel contains the entire necessary complex of vitamins. Scientists from the university in Tomsk who have studied the properties of cedar oil added it to the diet of people who had served as responders to the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and who were suffering from radiation poisoning. The results of the experiment showed that the test subjects’ immunity began to increase. There are no contraindications for the use of cedar oil - even pregnant women and nursing mothers can use it. There’s one other mysterious fact about the cedar nut kernel. During periods when cedars do not bear fruit, the females of certain fur-bearing animals don’t allow males to come near them and don’t conceive. It’s still unclear how the cedars let the animals know that they won’t bear fruit in a given year. After all, the animals mate in the spring, but cedar fruits ripen only in very late fall, and it’s very difficult to tell, just by looking at a cedar tree, that it’s not going to bear fruit. There are a great many other plants in the taiga for the entire taiga animal world to feed on. Similar taiga-dwelling animals in Russia’s central zone get along entirely without cedar nuts. So why do females who have fed on cedar nuts consider it impossible to conceive and bear young without this food? It’s been noted that the fur of taiga-dwelling animals, particularly those from regions where cedars grow, is of much higher quality than the fur of all other animals. No matter how scientists and specialists fine tune the diet of the animals they’re raising on fur farms, they can’t manage to achieve fur of anywhere near the same quality. The fur of the Siberian sable from the

regions where cedars grow has always been the highest quality fur in the world. It’s well known that the condition of fur-bearing animals’ fur reflects the condition of their organism as a whole. So, if their condition improves when they consume cedar nut kernels, then the same should be true for humans, especially pregnant women. Our women might not be getting enough highquality food products to enable them to bear healthy fetuses, and this situation can’t help but degrade society. The fruit of the Siberian cedar disproves scientists’ opinion that agriculture is the great achievement of humans, evidence of their development. I think that agriculture came into being because human civilization lost its knowledge of nature and because people’s way of life changed. As a result, man began sweating in the fields to get his daily bread. You can draw your own conclusions. Let’s image that there are two fruit-bearing cedar trees growing on a parcel of land where a family of three people lives. You can be absolutely certain that the family that owns that parcel of land where the two cedars grow will never go hungry, even in the years with the worst harvests. And it isn’t just that they won’t go hungry, won’t live from hand to mouth - they will feed on the best, most refined food there is. One cedar alone is capable of producing - in one year - up to a ton of cedar nut that can be used as food, once they’re shelled. But that’s not all, not by any means. You can extract cedar milk from the kernel of the cedar nut, which is not only suitable for human consumption, but which you can also successfully use to feed infants. You can get world-class cedar oil from the kernels, which you can add to salads and other dishes and also use medicinally. After you express the oil from the cedar nut kernels, you’re left with an oilcake, which you can use to make excellent baked goods - bread, cookies, pastries, or crepes. The cedar also gives us a sap that’s recognized by official and folk medicine alike as a medicinal and prophylactic substance. The Siberian cedar doesn’t require any care at all by humans - you don’t need to fertilize or till around it. You don’t even need to plant it. Its seeds are planted in the earth by a little bird called the Eurasian nutcracker. It starts to become clear why it is that our ancient ancestors knew nothing about agriculture. It’s just because they knew much, much more. Maybe someone will say, well, the cedar bears fruit only once in two years, and if the barren year comes along in the same year as a bad harvest, then

how can the cedar remedy the situation? I’ll tell you. It’s true that cedars bear fruit once every two years, sometimes even less frequently, but its unique nuts can last from nine to eleven years if you don’t remove them from the cone. Of course, nothing is quite this simple today in our real life. The cedar has a hard time taking root near cities. It can’t tolerate ecologically polluted zones. But there are also encouraging outcomes. Many sources indicate that the cedar responds to human emotions, that it can take in energy from humans and, having increased it, give it back. I had the chance to convince myself of this personally. Seven years ago, twenty-five taiga cedar seedlings were sent to me. Together with the residents of the five-story building where my apartment is located, I planted these seedlings in the little wooded area bordering the building. I planted three of them along the edge of the plot of my country house. Before long, somebody dug up the cedars we’d planted in the wooded area. I wasn’t too terribly upset by this - I figured that if somebody dug them up, that meant people knew about their properties and would most likely plant them somewhere else and take good care of them. But one seedling still remained there. It had been planted near the brick wall of the garages located in front of the building. The soil there was so, so far from fertile. For the most part, it was constmction refuse covered over with a thin layer of fertile dirt. Nonetheless, the cedar took root and is still growing today. As far as its rate of growth and how smooth its trunk is, it’s quite different from the cedars I planted at my country house. And it’s about twice as tall. I got to thinking about why that would be, and I began to notice that when the people in the city come out onto their balconies, they often look at the cedar, and sometimes they remark, “What a beautiful tree we have.” And I, too, when I walk or drive by, happily admire it. In this way, the cedar growing by the garages receives human attention and strives to be worthy of it. Now, especially since the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series of books started coming out, there are many companies that put out cedar products, including cedar oil. I also asked my daughter and her husband to set up cedar oil production. I told them about the ancient technique I’d learned of from Anastasia. Polina’s husband Sergei made every possible effort to work in accord with both ancient techniques and today’s requirements for producing food products. We arranged for the production to take place at a medications factory under the control of experienced specialists. The expression was carried out using the cold pressing method, which is supposed to preserve

the greatest amount of the oil’s beneficial substances, and using wooden blocks. It was necessary to do this, because the cedar nut kernel and oil contain the entire periodic table, and certain elements can oxidize if they come in contact with metal. In addition, only glass containers were used during bottling. The oil we ended up with may also have been of better quality than if we’d produced it using other methods, such as hot pressing. However, it differed from the cedar oil I’d tried in the taiga. I got the impression that it contained less life force than the taiga cedar oil. I won’t go into detail about our extensive attempts to find the reason for the differences. I’ll start by saying that we saw a change in quality as soon as we moved the whole production process - from nut storage up to the pressing of the oil and its packaging - to a village out in the taiga a hundred and twenty kilometers outside the city. It turned out that you just can’t produce a high quality oil in an urban setting, even at a medications factory. At every stage of production, the kernel and oil come into contact with the air, and big city air is very different from air in the taiga, which is full of phytoncides. As a result of moving production, the products of this small company, which was perhaps not very technically well-equipped according to today’s standards, were of higher quality than those produced by all other companies, not only in our country, I think, but in the world. I’m happy to have played even a small role in the appearance of this unique product cedar oil. I think that this taiga company is really the only one that produces actual cedar oil, because the others produce the oil of the “cedar pine.” A great many products in the world are marketed as “ecologically pure.” But I immediately ask myself where these products are from? Where were they grown? Can you really call any product ecologically pure at all if its raw materials are grown and produced in an area surrounded by highways or big and small cities? I don’t think any product produced in areas like that can be ecologically pure, even if no toxic chemicals, pesticides or fertilizers are used to grow it. The cedar grows deep in the Siberian taiga, hundreds and thousands of kilometers from large cities. There are no highways there, and you can only ship this unique product out by river. Of course, our civilization’s filth can also end up there, but everything in the world is relative, and compared to giant cities, the air and water in the taiga really are immeasurably cleaner, and no one is pouring any poisons into the ground. And so, I think that there is no more pure, beneficial or healing product in the world than the cedar nut kernel and the products made from it. In telling about the Siberian taiga, I’ve given special attention to the cedar.

But in the taiga region there are also many other food products that are of much higher quality than those we’re already aware of. For example, cranberries, raspberries, cloudberries, currants and mushrooms. And to answer the question, what does Anastasia eat out there in the taiga, I can tell you that she eats world class ecologically pure food of a type that you can’t possibly buy, not even for a million dollars. Back in my first book I described how Anastasia lives out in the taiga and how astonished I was by her way of life. Now that so many years have passed since we first met, in thinking about her, I’ve come to the conclusion that the way people live in today’s giant cities looks unnatural and absurd if you juxtapose it with Anastasia’s life out in nature. At first glance it seems extraordinary, the way the wild animals bring food to Anastasia when she gives them a certain signal. But even a hunting dog today will bring its prey to its master. And a falcon released to hunt also turns its prey over to its master. Goats and cows in a village farmyard are happy to feed their owners by giving them milk. The wild animals inhabiting the area around the glade where Anastasia lives mark their territory, and within this territory they consider a person something like a pack leader. I think that over the generations, they were trained by Anastasia’s forbears, and then they themselves trained their offspring. Anastasia actually eats very little. She never makes a fetish out of food. Many people have been asking recently about how Anastasia makes it through the severe Siberian winter - when the temperature reaches thirtyfive to forty degrees below zero - if she doesn’t have any warm clothing or a heated dwelling. I’ 11 start by saying that if the air temperature out in the open gets down to minus thirty, it’s always significantly warmer in the taiga, and there can be up to a ten-degree difference in temperature. Anastasia has dug-outs at various locations in the taiga. The main one, where I myself have had occasion to pass the night more than once, consists of a spot hollowed out in the ground, about two and a half meters long, two meters wide and also about two meters high. The entrance to the dug-out is narrow, about sixty centimeters wide and a meter and a half high. The entrance is covered over with cedar branches. The walls and ceiling of the taiga bedroom are woven of vines with bunches of dried grasses and taiga flowers stuffed into them. The floor has been carpeted with dried hay. If s very comfortable sleeping in that kind ofbedroominthe summer. No sounds penetrate it, to say nothing of all those radio and electrical emissions that a person living in a multi-story building is subjected to.

In late fall, Anastasia fills the entire area of her bedroom with dry hay and enters into an extended sleep similar to the state scientists call anabiosis. Anabiosis as modem science explains it, is a state in which all of a living being’s vital processes, including metabolism, slow down to such an extent that there are no visible signs of life. Scientists have been focusing on this unique biological phenomenon as they develop plans for extended space travel. What primarily attracts them is the fact that creatures in an anabiotic or hibernation state use much less oxygen and do not need food. It’s been proven that their resistance to negative environmental factors increases. So, for example, it’s been shown that infectious diseases don’t develop in such animals, even when they’re artificially infected, and that many poisons which would be fatal for their organism under normal circumstances are entirely harmless to them when they are hibernating or in an anabiotic state. It’s even been proven that if you subject such animals to a fatal does of ionizing radiation, they will still survive, since their metabolism has greatly decelerated, and that once they awaken, their vital functions resume entirely normally. But here’s what’s interesting. If a person - who is a thinking being - falls into a deep sleep in the winter, then what happens to his Soul during this period? I haven’t come across any hypotheses at all about this in scientific writings. But it is an extremely interesting question. One day I, too, had occasion to partially experience the unusual state of anabiosis for myself. This happened when I was in the taiga in late fall. Where Anastasia lives, the days at that time of year are very short. When it began to get dark, Anastasia suggested I take a rest. I immediately agreed. The accumulated fatigue of city life and my taxing journey through the taiga were already driving me toward sleep. This time the dug-out was full of more hay than usual. Since I knew you don’t get cold sleeping in hay even when it’s below zero, I stripped down to my underwear and lay down, putting my jacket beneath my head. “It’s already time for you to be waking up, Vladimir,” Anastasia said, waking me. I felt her massaging my right hand, and I looked toward the entrance of the dug-out. Its opening was barely visible. That meant the sun hadn’t yet come up. “Why do I need to wake up? The dawn is just breaking.” “It’s the third dawn since you went to sleep that’s breaking, Vladimir. Should you not wake up, your sleep might continue for several months and even years. Your Soul, since it won’t need to worry about keeping your

body safe, will want to have a rest and wander around other worlds in the Universe. No one would be able to bring it back until it decides on its own that it wants to come back.” “So that means it wasn’t with me while I was sleeping?” “It was with you Vladimir, right alongside you. It was waiting for your sleep to become more even, and deeper, and then it would have been able to take its leave. But I decided to wake you.” “But why doesn’t your Soul leave when you fall into a deep sleep?” “My Soul leave, too, but it always comes back right on time. After all, I don’t torment it.” “What do you mean? You mean I torment my soul?” “Vladimir, every person who falls prey to harmful habits and thought patterns, and who consumes harmful food, brings torment first and foremost to his Soul.” “What importance does food have for the Soul? What, does it also consume the food a person eats?” “The Soul doesn’t feed on material food, Vladimir, but it is able to see, hear and actualize itself only through your body. If the body is unhealthy, if, for example, a person is drunk and his body is helpless, then the Soul, as if it were bound, has no way of manifesting and actualizing itself. It can only feel, only weep over the helpless body that has been destroyed by the harmful drink. It can only attempt to warm damaged organ of the body, and it will expend a colossal amount of energy as it does so. When the Soul’s energy is exhausted, it becomes powerless and leaves the human body. The body dies.” “Yes, Anastasia. What you’ve said about the Soul is interesting and, it seems, accurate. Because there’s a folk saying: when a person dies, they say that he ‘gave up his Soul to God.’ What we get in your interpretation is ‘the Soul ran out of strength.’ Hmm, I wonder - does my Soul still have strength left?” “Since it came back, that means your Soul still has strength, Vladimir. But please, try not to torment it.” “I will try. But wait, doesn’t a person’s Soul get a rest when he’s sleeping?” “The Soul is energy, Vladimir. A living energetic complex. Energy doesn’t need rest.” “But what do you think, Anastasia, where does the Soul go off to during sleep?”

“It can go off to other dimensions, soar among the planets of the Universe. And if the person wishes it to do so, it can gather information he needs. For example, if the person wants to learn something about the past or future, he can ask his Soul as he falls asleep to visit the time and place that interests him, and the Soul will fulfill his wish. But if the person sleeps an ordinary sleep that isn’t sufficiently peaceful, and if the environment is not ideal, then the Soul can’t go off anywhere. It has to guard his body.” “From whom?” “From all manner of hostile influences. You sleep in your apartment, Vladimir, and its walls are filled to bursting with electrical wires, and the wires give off radiation that adversely affects people. Sounds of the artificial world force their way in through the glass. The air in the apartment is not entirely healthy to breathe. Your Soul cannot leave you alone. It has to be able to wake you in the case of a critical situation.” “I get it, Anastasia. This dug-out I slept in is actually a great deal more comfortable than the most elegant bedrooms in today’s hotels and apartments. It’s like some kind of hypobaric chamber. The air here is ideal, and there are no harmful rays and noise, and the temperature is stable. And so I sleep much better in it than I do in my apartment. I understand that, and I’ve experienced it for myself. But I don’t get why it is, when you fall asleep for a long time, that it doesn’t bother your Soul that your body is resting in a dug-out where the entrance isn’t even shut up. And if there’s some danger say there are some intruders - there won’t be anybody to wake it up.” “Vladimir, any time anyone makes the slightest attempt to approach the glade we’re in, no matter what their intentions, the entire space within a radius of three kilometers is put on its guard. The animals, birds and plants begin sounding the alarm. Those who are approaching will be gripped by terror, and if they succeed in overcoming it and aren’t thrown off course, then the space - by means of the animals will wake the body and call the Soul back.” “What about in the winter, when everything’s asleep?” “Not everything is asleep in the winter. Besides, in the winter, it is easier for those who are awake to keep watch over what goes on.” I don’t understand everything Anastasia said about the Soul during her winter sleep period, but I have had occasion to see for myself the way the wild animals and birds bring Anastasia troubling or happy news. Now that I’m familiar with the way Anastasia thinks of sleep, I can draw the following conclusion: Modem man and mankind as a whole don’t have any opportunity to get

enough good sleep. Besides the fact that modem bedrooms can’t measure up to the natural one, we have to add one more factor that’s also of some importance: modem man is continually caught up in a whirlwind of everyday worldly concerns, and he often keeps on thinking about them as he falls asleep. And if that’s the case, then the question arises of how man is using the energy of his Soul - his Soul, which is capable of learning about other worlds when a person is sleeping and bringing him information about them when he wakes. Perhaps we need to construct our bedrooms so that no random sounds will penetrate it and so there are no wires and telephones in it. It’s possible for us to achieve this. It’s more complicated to manage the necessary air quality. And so, Anastasia, the hermit of the Siberian taiga, has become the heroine of the “Ringing Cedars ofRussia” series of books. She has borne me a son and adaughter. She now lives in the taiga, in my heart, and in the image of the heroine of my books. I don’t think I’ve been able to do this amazing woman’s beauty, her intelligence and her extraordinary capabilities justice in my descriptions. Really, it’s probably not even possible to do this using ordinary language. Even now, I only sometimes see Anastasia as someone who is close to me, as a loved one. More often I see her as unattainable and mysterious, as someone who possesses an inexplicable strength of spirit that she can use to create the future. Her characterization of our modem day reality and her story - or more precisely, the image she has created of the beautiful future of Russia and of the whole earth, have given birth to a beautiful phenomenon in society. Without waiting for decrees to be handed down from on high, or for government financing, tens of thousands of people have independently set about turning this image created by Anastasia into actual reality. You can understand the main idea for building our future country by reading the books in order. But if I were to try to briefly, not in its entirety, present the idea that is helping these positive transformations take place, I could characterize it using the following words. Anastasia thinks that every family should have its own plot of land that’s no less than one hectare in size. The family needs to transform this plot, which the taiga hermit calls a family homestead, into a heavenly living oasis that can provide for all of man’s material needs. The external appearance of the person’s living creation and the way the creator himself lives on it are indicators of the person’s spiritual makeup. She considers it unacceptable to bury family members in a cemetery. They must be buried only on the family homesteads. Then the souls of relatives who have passed on won’t suffer

because their bodies seem to have been tossed into some deep hole in a cemetery, far away from their loved ones. People who are buried on the family homestead will - with their spirit - help and protect those living on it. Cemeteries analogous to our modem ones did exist back in antiquity, too, but they were intended for animals that dropped dead from disease, criminals with no family, and warriors who died in a foreign land. Anastasia has told us how to set up our own family homestead so that we can free ourselves from physical ailments with its help. She has talked in relatively great detail about the ancient and very lovely rite of marriage that helped newlyweds - along with the power of their thought create the design for their future family homestead, and about how at the moment of marriage, with the participation of the parents, relatives and friends, what they had conceived in thought would materialize in the space of several minutes. I think that this rite is one of the greatest discoveries of our millennium. After all, by using it, newlyweds even today can acquire a house, a garden and a family homestead right during their wedding. Anastasia also asserts that for newlyweds who create their family homesteads in this way, love never fades, but actually grows stronger over the years. And she explains why this happens: “When a husband looks at his wife, he subconsciously associates her with his glorious homestead, too, and also with his child, who must also be bom on the homestead.” And one can believe in this. After all, the very best place on earth for each person is always his small motherland. His child will always be the most beautiful and best of all children. And Anastasia also asserts that if all people, or the majority of them, begin consciously creating their own family homesteads and turning them into heavenly oases, then the whole earth will be transformed. Natural disasters and wars will not occur on earth. Man’s inner spiritual world will change, and new knowledge and capabilities will open up to him. Man will be able to create beautiful worlds resembling the earthly world on other planets. She considers today’s technocratic method of exploring space and other planets a dead end, harmful for the planet Earth and the people living on it. The sensible way to explore the planets is through psychoteleportation. But if people are to be able to do this, they first have to demonstrate their ability to develop the Earth and express their spirituality in their way of life, not in words. Official critics might respond to the subjects of the books and to the taiga hermit’s statements in any of a number of ways, but their opinions aren’t really so very important. The people - the most important critics - have already expressed their approval in tens of thousands of letters and hundreds

of thousands of emails. They’ve expressed it not only in words, but in concrete actions, too, and the hundreds of large and small settlements that have arisen and continue to arise throughout all of Russia are a confirmation of this. Now, here’s where a riddle arises, one that’s as yet insoluble and cryptic: if a mass movement has been set in motion solely by the statements of a taiga hermit that have been introduced in books, then what kind of power lies behind her phrases? Perhaps they’re constructed in such a way that the letters combine into some kind of code. Perhaps, a certain rhythm of her phrases has significance. Anastasia usually tries to adopt the speaking mannerisms of those she’s talking with, to use his lexicon and way of constructing phrases, but at certain moments she’ll suddenly being speaking in some different kind of language that’s emphatic and flowing and rhythmical. She pronounces each letter of the phrases she utters very precisely, and you clearly sense an extraordinary energy behind each sound. And then you remember what she’s said verbatim, as if there’s some recorder at work in your brain. And that’s not all. Living pictures appear before the listeners, and the subconscious grasps the meaning of what’s been said. By way of example, I’ll give you an excerpt from Anastasia’s retelling of a conversation between God and the first man, from the book “Co-Creation”: “Where is the edge of the Universe? What will I do when I come to it? When I have filled everything with myself, when I create that which I have thought?” a man of the wellspring people asks God. And he receives this answer: “My son, The Universe is thought. A dream was bom of the thought, and it is partially visible as matter. When you come to the edge of everything, a new beginning and continuation shall your thought discover. Out of nothing will arise the new, beautiful birth of you, and of the aspiration, reflecting in itself your Soul and your dream. My son, you are endless, you are eternal, your creating dreams are within you.” There are several theories regarding Anastasia’s abilities. I’ll share mine with you, too. Anastasia’s abilities, which seem extraordinary at first glance, were actually inherent in all or the majority of the wellspring people. The effect the taiga hermit’s statements have had on many people’s actions is due not to some mystical force, but rather to people’s very own ability to embrace them with their heart and Soul. You get the impression that some memory has been preserved in modem day people’s genes, or in their subconscious: a memory of the way individual families and human society as a whole lived, starting back in the time of the wellspring people, when Man still understood how to communicate directly with God.

This way of life - the wellspring people’s - is significantly more advanced than today’s. Maybe it’s from those times when people still knew what heaven was. But I don’t think these people’s actions were connected to any specific religion. All the homesteads that readers of the books are building turn out differently from each other. The houses they put up don’t just differ in their external appearance. Some are two-story wooden houses, while others are one-story wattle and daub affairs. And the gardens, living fences and ponds are also constructed differently. It’s common knowledge that religious ritual requires all its participants to strictly observe standardized ways of acting and speaking. But here, we clearly see each individual’s personal creativity in the way they realize this beautiful idea. If people are thankful to Anastasia for anything, it’s probably for the fact that she has awakened within their Souls the aspirations of a human-creator. THE LITTLE TAIGA DWELLER More than fifteen years have passed since I met Anastasia, the hermit of the Siberian taiga. And when I learned that she was going to bear my son, I took great pains to move Anastasia to the city of Novosibirsk, even going so far as to try to intervene physically. Back then, it seemed unacceptable to me for her to give birth in the taiga, and impossible to raise a child outside social institutions. At first, Anastasia’s way of life in the taiga seemed strange to me, to put it mildly. But now the way people live in today’s giant cities seems even stranger. And when she was pregnant with our daughter and stayed in the taiga, as she’d done before with our son, my soul was joyous and calm. My views of life had changed radically in the course of ten years. Had Anastasia wanted to give birth somewhere other than the taiga - even if she’d been in the best maternity ward in the capital - I’d have fallen into depression and despair. And I’d probably have worried constantly about our child’s future if he’d ended up being raised and educated within today’s societal institutions. I’d rethought my priorities and my views of life had changed. Anastasia gave birth to our daughter in her family glade in the Siberian taiga. I wasn’t present for the birth, and there were no qualified doctors at her side, no modem medical equipment. But in my soul I was calm. I knew that she was giving birth in one of the most perfect maternity wards on earth

- in her family space. When Anastasia gave birth to our daughter, she asked what I would like to name the newborn. Without thinking, I answered - Anastasia. And it wasn’t because Anastasia had named our son Vladimir. It’s just that by the time our daughter was bom, I’d come to see Anastasia as a wise, brave and very kind woman. Her name had become synonymous for me with these qualities, and I wanted our daughter to inherit them. I couldn’t imagine anyone other than Anastasia raising our daughter. Even though at many points her approach to childrearing looks like a total lack of a conscious approach to childrearing, that’s far from the case. For example, here’s what happened one time with our little daughter in the taiga. This time when Anastasia met me, she was in a jolly mood, even playful, it seemed to me. She appeared suddenly when I was approaching the familiar glade where the three of them were now living. Wearing a light dress reminiscent of a Roman tunic, she stood on my path and smiled. I wondered where she’d gotten that dress. I stopped, delighting in the unusual vision. “It’s really something,” I thought. “So much time has passed, and she’s given birth to two children, but she looks just as young and extraordinarily beautiful as before. Look at me - I’ve grown old and gray, but she doesn’t age a bit.” I recalled how, waking up early in the morning, she’d take joy in the coming day and set off racing against the she-wolf, performing elaborate somersaults. Would she be able to do that now? As if she’d heard my silent question, Anastasia performed a double somersault with almost no running start at all, and then there she was again, right next to me. Her voice rang out. “Hello, Vladimir.” I wasn’t able to answer right away. A captivating aroma and extraordinary warmth radiated from Anastasia’s body. I shyly touched her on the shoulder. For some reason I hesitated to embrace her. And I responded lamely: “And hello to you, Anastasia.” She snuggled up against me, hugged me and whispered: “Our darling little daughter is such a smart and beautiful little thing.” Then Anastasia walked ahead of me barefoot through the grass. She stepped, putting one foot in front of the other, the way a model does on a runway. This wasn’t the first time she’d done this, but every time she does it, her gait

looks hilarious, and it raises my spirits. As we usually did, we headed straight to the lake to bathe after my trip. I already knew the purpose of this swim wasn’t just so I could freshen up after traveling. The main point of it was to wash away all the smells that weren’t native to this taiga glade. To do this, once I’d taken my first dip, Anastasia helped me give myself a brisk rub down with a paste she’d made of various herbs. Rubbing me all over, she joked: “You’re having less and less good food and your tummy’s a little distended.” “It’s dysbacteriosis. That’s what the doctors say. Practically ninety percent of the population has it,” I replied. Anastasia laughed. “Or maybe the whole problem is that the tummies don’t have enough will power? You yourself say that ten percent of the population doesn’t have this dysbacteriosis.” I had to walk around for a while with my body and even my hair coated with this green paste and then dive back into the water and splash myself with water. After I came out of the water and my body had dried off a bit, Anastasia removed her tunic-like dress and held it out to me. “It would be good for you to put this shirt on now.” Anastasia stood before me, her breasts exposed. They were a bit larger than they’d been before. A tiny drop of milk appeared on one nipple. “You’re still nursing our daughter?” I asked. “I’m supplementing with milk,” Anastasia answered brightly. She squeezed her breast with both hands and splashed me in the face with a stream of milk, then laughed and wiped the milk over my face. “If you put this on and belt it, it will look like a shirt on you. I’ve been wearing this shirt continually since I gave birth to our daughter. Sometimes she would sleep wrapped in it. She’s grown accustomed to its smell and to the way it looks. If you do what I tell you to do, it will be easy for our little girl to get used to you.” “But what will you wear now?” “Well, I have two very similar ones, and I’ve alternated wearing them. The one I’m offering you - that one I wore more. And I’d often fasten my hair with a little braid made of grass. Now I’ll go braid one like it for you, too, and meanwhile you can go observe our little girl a bit.” “Just observe her a bit? You mean I’m not allowed to touch her or have contact with her?”

“Of course you’re allowed, Vladimir. Even so, it’s better just to observe her at first. Even though she’s little, she already an independent being, so it’s better if you just observe her first, without pestering her. You can acquaint yourself with her habits and try to get a sense of her world.” “I know that when our son was bom, I just observed him at first, too. Tell me, Anastasia, how long before I can pick her up?” “You will feel when the time is right. Your heart will let you know.” It seemed to me that Anastasia wanted me to observe our little daughter on my own and try to figure something out, and that’s why she’d come up with some urgent tasks of her own. And I wasn’t against this way of doing things, either. I really did need to find some way to study how our child behaves, because to my daughter, I was just some “uncle” she didn’t know. And then this strange uncle suddenly goes and picks the child up for no reason at all and starts with his sloppy sentimentality, squeezing her and cooing to her to make himself happy. But maybe the child hates being cooed at, not just by strange uncles, but in general, no matter who’s doing it. I asked: “Anastasia, so where is our daughter now? If you go off to do your braiding, you know, to braid the tie, how will I find her?” “She’s somewhere around here, not far away,” Anastasia told me calmly. “Try to find her yourself Let your heart tell you where she’s to be found.” It seemed to me that I’d begun to understand a lot about life in the taiga glade. But each time something new would still amaze me. How can you allow a child who hasn’t even turned two yet to walk or crawl wherever she wants through the taiga and not even keep an eye on her while she does? And this is the taiga, where there are no people. In the taiga, where there are a great many wild animals. In the past I’d observed my newborn son and had seen him fall asleep against a she-bear’s belly, while the she-bear lay motionless, waiting for him to get a good sleep. I saw how the wolves would guard the infant and how the nimble squirrels would play with him. It was clear to me that the beasts living here in the glade or nearby it were like pets. Within the territories they’d marked, they didn’t fight and didn’t attack each other. A dog that lives in the same household with a cat might not touch the cat or might even become friends with it, but he might still attack a cat from outside the family. So it makes sense that here, too, the animals don’t attack each other within their defined territory, and they certainly won’t attack the human’s offspring. They revere the human living on their territory, so naturally they’ll protect the human child and consider it an honor to look after him. All the same,

this kind of situation was a little unfamiliar. For example, what might happen if the child were to go outside the marked territory? Other wild animals wouldn’t treat him the way his own do. Basically, in spite of the logic of it all, some unfamiliar feelings arose in me. “But what if I come across some wild animal while I’m looking for our daughter?” I asked Anastasia as she was walking off. “I’m still not used to them and they’re not used to me, either.” “They won’t do anything bad to you, Vladimir - you’re wearing the shirt, after all. You can walk around with complete confidence and not torment yourself with fearful thoughts.” Anastasia ran off to her little earthen home. After I came out into the glade and didn’t find anyone there, I set off through the forest surrounding the glade, since I figured our daughter might be close by. I decided that if I walked in circles, gradually increasing the diameter, then I’d be sure to catch sight of her. And I saw her before I’d even completed my first loop. Little Anastasia was standing alone between some currant bushes. She was holding onto one of the branches and examining some bug and smiling. I hid behind another bush and began observing her. The little girl was dressed in a short shirt-like dress, her hair bound with a tie woven from the strands of some kind of grass. Once she’d satisfied her curiosity about what was going on on the branch, she set off barefoot across the grass in the direction of the glade. Then her foot must have caught on a branch or in the grass, and she fell down. The little girl fell flat on her face on the grass, but she didn’t cry. Without a word, she braced her little hands against the ground and sat up. Then she crawled a meter or two on hands and knees and then got to her feet once more and, stepping slowly, continued along her path. Trying to remain unnoticed, I followed my daughter very cautiously. And suddenly, right before my very eyes, Nastenka1 disappeared. At first, shocked, 1 just stopped and stood stock still for a bit. Then 1 quickly ran up to the spot where she’d just been walking and began looking all around, but she was nowhere to be seen - not behind the tree near where she’d disappeared, and not behind the bush. The little girl couldn’t yet run fast enough to disappear from sight so swiftly. 1 began circling around the tree near where she’d disappeared, increasing the diameter of the circle with each round, but 1 still couldn’t see her. 1 stood for some time, trying to decide what to do, then 1 ran to the little earthen house where 1 figured Anastasia would be. She was sitting calmly at the entrance, braiding a headband out of grass

strands, and quietly singing. Not far away, a silver fox was rubbing herself against the tree trunk like an affectionate cat. “Anastasia, our daughter’s disappeared,” 1 blurted out. “1 was walking a few meters behind her, not taking my eyes off her. Then suddenly she up and ... it was like she dissolved into thin air. She’s nowhere to be found.” Anastasia reacted with surprising calm - she didn’t even stop her braiding as she answered: “Don’t worry, Vladimir. 1 think she’s probably in the old fox den now.” “Who told you that?” “Do you see the lazy way the fox is rubbing against the tree?” “Yes, 1 see.” “That’s her way of letting me know the child is in her den.” “But maybe she’s trying to tell you something else?” “If she was telling me about something bad, then she’d be showing her agitation. She’d run off a bit, then come running back and try to get me to follow her to help.” “All the same, you can’t be a hundred percent certain where our daughter is, especially since there’s no den at all in the spot where she disappeared - I looked around everywhere.” “All right, Vladimir, then let’s go and have a look together and see where our clever little one has hidden.” When we arrived at the spot where the little girl had seemed to dissolve, Anastasia pushed side some grass, and I immediately glimpsed the den. Its entrance was partially collapsed, and a little hole had formed. I glanced inside it and saw Nastenka sleeping peacefully, curled up on the bottom. “There! You see? She’s fallen asleep on the damp ground. And I don’t think she’ll be able to get out of there on her own.” “The grass on the bottom is dry, Vladimir. And when our little daughter wakes up, she’ll be able to solve the problem of how to get out of her shelter all on her own.” “How will she figure that out?” “If you want, Vladimir, you just watch, and I’ll head back and finish what I was working on.” I stayed put. After about thirty minutes, I heard a mstling sound in the hole. The little girl had awakened, but she was having a hard time scrambling out

of the hollow on her own. But she wasn’t actually even trying very hard to do so. After making her first attempt and testing her own powers, she let out a sound, summoning someone: Yoohoo! Hey! Not a cry, but an actual summons. And right away, the vixen that had been hanging around Anastasia earlier appeared. First she stood at the edge of her former den; she looked in, sniffed, and then, turning her back to the den, lowered her tail into it. The vixen tensed her muscles and slowly pulled the little child who’d grabbed onto her tail out of the den. The little girl trailed along behind the fox for about half a meter. After that she let go of the tail, got up onto her hands and knees, and then stood up on her own two feet. Little Nastenka took a look around, smiled, as if recalling something, and then, stepping slowly, she set off, smiling, in the direction of the lake. I continued to follow her, unnoticed. There were no wild animals around, and it seemed that no one in the taiga besides me was watching the little one. But a bit later on I realized I was wrong about that. It turned out that she and I were both being watched closely, and before long, I for the first time saw a conflict between my daughter and a wild animal in the taiga. When Nastenka had made her way out from amongst the raspberry bushes, she stood where she was for some time and gazed at the mirror-like surface of the lake. Then she took off her short little shirt and, stepping carefully with her bare feet, headed toward the lake. She was about five to six meters from the water when a tough-looking she-wolf suddenly sprang out of the bushes and, with several powerful leaps, put herself between the shore of the lake and Nastenka. The little girl slapped the beast on the back with her tiny hands, tugged at its fur and touched its snout. By way of reply, the she-wolf licked the child’s foot, but that’s where the mutual signs of attention or affection ended. Playing with the she-wolf evidently didn’t enter into Nastenka’s plans. She wanted to get to the water, which she first tried to do by taking three steps to the side and walking around the she-wolf that was standing at that spot. But as soon as the little girl tried to move ahead, the she-wolf once again blocked her path. Nastenka pushed against the beast’s side with her hands, attempting to remove the obstacle, but the she-wolf didn’t obey the child and stood there, as if rooted to the spot. Then Nastenka sat down on the grass, thought a bit and made an attempt to crawl under the she-wolf s belly. But this attempt did not meet with success, either - the she-wolf pressed herself to the ground. Evidently Nastenka understood that the beast was not letting her get to the water and that she could not remove the obstacle using force. She sat on the grass for some time, pondering something, then started to crawl and even

move away from the she-wolf and the lake. Before long she stood up, a small twig in her hands. She walked up to the she-wolf s snout, ran the twig along it and threw it in the direction of the forest. The twig only flew about a meter and a half. The she-wolf jumped for the twig and grabbed it with her teeth. As this was going on, Nastenka set off running toward the shore of the lake, her legs pumping away. The shewolf understood she’d been outsmarted, and with two headlong jumps, she caught up to the child at the water’s edge and knocked her off her feet. Nastenka fell onto her back, and her head touched the water. Pushing against the sand with her little legs, she tried to push herself further out, into the lake. The she-wolf grabbed the child’s foot with her teeth. She was probably trying not to cause the child any pain - her grip was light. Nastenka pushed her second leg into the she-wolf s nose, pulled the sole of her foot from the she-wolf s maw and, in high spirits, crawled off into the water. The shore in that spot dropped off sharply to the depth of almost a meter, and the little tot was submerged in the water up to her head, but right then she dove out. Working her little arms and legs, she kept herself on the surface of the water. 1 didn’t think our daughter could swim well. 1 ran out of my hiding place, intending to jump into the water, but when 1 got to the shore, 1 saw the shewolf swimming up to the child. Splashing about in the water, the little girl nestled against the wolf s side and took hold of the fur with her little hands, and they swam along the shore in the shallows. Nastenka let go of the shewolf as soon as she felt the lake bed beneath her feet. The wet she-wolf came out onto the shore and shook herself, the splashing spray glinting in the sun. She didn’t run away, but remained on the shore, attentively watching the child out of the comer of her eye and also - as it seemed to me - warily glancing at me. And Nastenka, standing in the water up to her waist, smiled and eagerly kept calling the she-wolf to come over to her. She’d slap her little hands on the water, and beckon her with a wave, but the she-wolf didn’t go to her. It’s possible that the beast didn’t like this watery business, or that the games in the lake seemed dangerous. Nastenka suddenly turned her little head in my direction and froze. For the first time I felt my little daughter’s gaze fixed on me, and I stood there beneath her gaze, powerless to move a muscle. I understood that she perceived me as some kind of baffling creature that had suddenly appeared in the territory she inhabited. She looked me over for some time, then turned away and came out of the

water onto the shore, taking her time, and walked up to the she-wolf lying on the grass. The she-wolf picked up the little dress in her teeth and gave it to the little girl. But Nastenka didn’t want to put it on her damp body. She took the clothing and set off in the direction of the dug-out at the edge of the glade. I continued observing her path through the taiga and thinking. A tiny child is walking, smiling, through a glade deep in the Siberian taiga, and nothing frightens her, no one attacks her. Quite the contrary - the wild animals are prepared to come to her aid at a moment’s notice. A tiny person is walking along, the way a royal heir walks through her kingdom. If s interesting for her to observe how the bugs and squirrels and birds live. To examine the flowers and test the blades of grass and berries to see how they taste. But at this same time, some other little girl of the very same age finds herself in a space bounded by four walls, and within it, she’s confined within four little playpen walls like some kind of little wild animal, and it doesn’t matter that the walls are pretty. And her kind parents buy up all sorts of plastic toys for her, and she tests them to see how they taste. Millions of little girls and boys in our world grow up in apartment-cages, like little wild animals. And then we want them to grow up into intelligent, free, and noble people. Well, these individuals can’t even imagine... freedom first of all means free thought, knowledge, and perception of the living universe. A child will be told about this living universe in school when he grows up a bit. Of course he’ll receive certain information about the great world of living nature, about the universe created by the great Creator, but he’ll never be able to perceive it through his own experience. You can’t replace the perceptions a person can receive in the first years of his life while living in harmony with the great world of the Creator, not through exerting effort or straining himself, but conversely, through playing. There are no school lessons or university lectures at all that can replace this. I’m not encouraging anyone to head out to the taiga with children. That would be idiotic. Even so, we have to do something. WHO DOES OUR DAUGHTER LOOK LIKE? In the evening, Anastasia was nursing Nastenka at the entrance to the little dug-out where the little girl sometimes slept on her own. I was sitting quietly alongside them, watching this interesting process. I got the impression that the feeding as such, as a means of satiating the child’s organism with mother’s milk, was not the main point of it at all. Grabbing Anastasia’s breast with her little hands, Nastenka smacked her lips

and nursed for a bit, but then she came off the nipple and looked at her mother’s face. And Anastasia didn’t take her eyes off her child, either. She paid no attention to me or to her surroundings. It seemed to me that it was as if mother and child became one during the feeding and communicated with each other non-verbally. This went on for about twenty minutes, after which time Nastenka fell asleep. Anastasia put our little daughter down in the dug-out on bedding made of hay and covered with fabric. She covered the sleeping child with the fabric’s loose edges and created a cozy little nest by mounding up hay from the sides. Then, she knelt there by the entrance for a short while, looking at her sleeping daughter. When Anastasia stood up and finally turned her attention to me, I asked her: “What do you think, Anastasia, who does our daughter look more like, you or me?” “Like all parents, of course you’d like it if she looked more like you, wouldn’t you, Vladimir?” “Ah, you guessed wrong. Sure, I want my daughter to have something of me in her, too. But she’s a little girl - she needs to be beautiful, and that means, she should look more like you.” “Does that mean you consider me beautiful compared to yourself, Vladimir?” “I consider you beautiful compared not just with myself, Anastasia. I think you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, even in international beauty contests. I’ve watched them on television. The contestants’ beauty pales by comparison with yours. You’re better than all of them.” “Thank you, Vladimir. What you said - is that a compliment? Or just an explanation?” “I’m complimenting you and explaining, too, and also marveling.” “Thank you. That means it won’t sadden you then, Vladimir, if I tell you that in her external appearance, Nastenka’s little face looks a tiny bit like you, but her little eyes and eyelashes and her figure are mine, and she’ll also have hair like mine. “When people resemble each other physically this also indicates that they resemble each other in their abilities, habits and in the affinity of their Souls. That means she’ll possess certain abilities and habits of yours. And certain ones of mine. But three components are always present in a newbom’s soul,

Vladimir.” ‘Three? But who’s the third one from?” “The third component is a particle of the Soul that resided in the person’s body in his previous life - perhaps a hundred years ago, perhaps a thousand or a million years ago. In a harmonious person, this third component does not disintegrate into particles, but waits for its chance, for the instant when it acquires a new body, through whose eyes it can see the surrounding world and through whose ears it can hear the sounds of this world, touch it with its hands, and utilize its gifts.” “But if our Souls have united into one whole in their new life, then does that mean they must know about all of each other’s lives?” “Of course, they must. And they do. Otherwise it would be impossible for them to unite. They wouldn’t be able to become one united Soul.” “Then it would follow that my Soul can see our daughter’s past life?” “Of course, it can, but you will perceive and see this only if you are able to abide in harmony with your own Soul and if your thought isn’t thrown off by all manner of distortions of the surrounding world, if it is able to concentrate.” “If you take me, then everything’s totally clear: I and people like me can’t see the past. But if you take you, Anastasia - it’s clear that you can find something out about our daughter’s past life through that particle of her Soul.” “I’ve been trying to glimpse and understand our daughter’s past life, Vladimir, and I’m seeing it as strange in some way. Our daughter’s life in her body was very short, no more than seven years long, and she lived many thousands of years ago.” “Well, if the child lived such a short life, there’s not much to learn about the past.” “Yes, not much, but it sometimes happens that even in the course of a very short life, a person carries out an act that can affect events that occur in subsequent millennia.” “I wonder, how can it happen that a child could carry out some act that could affect people’s lives for millennia? Can you tell me about it, Anastasia, or better yet, can you play back some pictures from our daughter’s past life?” “Yes, I can, Vladimir.” “Go ahead and play them back, then.”

And Anastasia began the extraordinary tale of our daughter’s past life. Or, rather, the tale of the little girl, a particle of whose Soul now resides in little Nastenka. INTO A DIFFERENT DIMENSION “As you know, Vladimir, some time ago on Earth there began an ice age. In those regions into which the glaciers advanced, the climate changed. The cooling made it impossible for many types of plants to grow. Areas that had previously been rich in forests, orchards and lush grasses interspersed with flowers, gradually turned into valleys covered with only scant vegetation. “The people who were living at that time in one of the valleys in the foothills decided that it was impossible to continue living the way they had been living under such cold conditions. They decided to leave their homes and head out in search of places with a more hospitable climate. “The men headed out and took the lead. Following their tracks, the head of the family line, Wood2, was leading the children, women and old folks out of the settlement. “The gray-haired, hundred-and-twenty-year-old elder walked at the head of the caravan of eleven mammoths laden with wicker baskets. The children were seated in one of them, and the others held food stores - after all, they didn’t know how long they would be traveling. “Along both sides of the caravan of mammoths, the people of his family line and all the livestock who had resided in the family homestead settlement were on the move, on horseback and on foot. It seemed that all the living beings understood that it was essential for them to set off for new climes, and they followed the person. Only the plants had remained in the settlement - they had no way to move. Plants, doomed to die. “Wood was thinking things over, trying to answer the questions he’d posed to himself: “Why had the undesirable changes in nature occurred? Why had the cooling begun? “Whose will had set this disaster in motion? “Might it not become a disaster for all of Earth? “Did man possess the power to do something to head it oft? “Might disasters result from man’s actions? “Wood understood that if the answers weren’t found, then a sad fate would await his children and grandchildren and his entire family line. He could see that all the adults who were now walking along in the caravan were viewing

the changes in the natural world as a tragedy - their faces were sad and thoughtful. Even the children had grown quiet and were on their guard. Only his little favorite, his six-year-old great-granddaughter Anasta3, was frolicking - she’d started up a game at the head of the caravan with the lead mammoth. “Wood observed his great-granddaughter’s game with the mammoth leader, glanc ing at them out of the comer of his eye. She plopped the tip of the giant, seven-ton mammoth’s trunk onto her little shoulder and made believe she was dragging the huge animal. And he, the mammoth, was playing along with her. Of course, he was carrying the whole weight of the trunk himself, touching the child’s shoulder only lightly with it. From time to time Anasta would stop, as if catching her breath, wipe the nonexistent sweat from her brow and say, ‘Oh, my, how big you are. You’re heavy and lazy.’ “The mammoth would nod his head, as if in agreement, flap his ears, and wipe his own brow with his trunk. Then he’d lay the tip of it on the little girl’s shoulder once more, as if he couldn’t move from the spot without her help. The game was funny and harmless. But the other game his greatgranddaughter started up next, Wood didn’t like that one. Here’s what it consisted of. “Anasta would scramble up the mammoth’s trunk, up to his head, and he would help her, curving his huge trunk and pushing the child higher with its tip. After getting herself settled atop the moving mammoth’s head, Anasta would sit there for a while, then suddenly utter a frightened ‘Oh! ’ and swiftly slide down the trunk. The mammoth had to be very dexterous to manage to catch the child right above the ground and prevent her from hitting the ground or ending up beneath his massive feet. “Wood was thinking over the past, trying to discover in it the reason for the disaster that had forced his people to leave their native valley, but his reflections were constantly being interrupted by recollection-pictures from the life of his great-granddaughter Anasta. He didn’t push these pictures away. He liked them, and they distracted him from sorrowful thoughts about what had happened. “At one point Wood even smiled, recalling the way Anasta had registered her objection to an opinion that had been posited during one of their lessons. He saw the whole picture, down to the smallest detail. “Wood was giving the lesson at that point. Children of various ages and three adults were sitting in front of him in a circle, beneath a spreading oak tree. Wood started off the lesson with the following words.” SNAKE GO-BETWEENS

“Many people know that our ancestors strived to determine the life’s purpose of all creatures living on Earth. Once they’d done so, they would teach the animals how they could become as useful as possible to people. The animals would then teach this to their offspring, and in this way our generation, just like any that came before it, has received a great gift from our forbears. And we, in turn, need to not just make use of it, but also perfect the abilities of all earthly creatures living around us. It’s our generation’s task to determine the life’s purpose of those creatures for whom our ancestors didn’t do so.” Having said this, Wood pulled a grass snake out from under his shirt and continued: “For example, we need to determine for what purpose reptiles were created and how they might serve man.” Those who were present looked at the grass snake that had wrapped itself around Wood’s hand, and said nothing. The first to raise his hand and ask to speak was a red-haired little boy about five years of age. Wood permitted him to speak. “I’ve seen that snake,” the little boy began, “or one just like it, crawl up to our nanny goat and suck milk out of its udder. The goat stood right where she was. That means she agreed to give it her milk.” “Yes, grass snakes and other reptiles can suck milk from cows or goats. You’re correct in noting that, Izor4. But at the moment,” Wood reminded those who had gathered, “we’re trying to solve the question of what benefit the existence of these creatures should bring to man.” “Yes, I haven’t forgotten about our question,” the red-haired boy went on. “I remembered the way he was drinking the milk, and I thought we should make a little hole in this creature at the opposite end from his head. He can drink the milk and lower his tail with the little hole into a pitcher so it fills up with milk. Then mama won’t have to milk the goat.” A disorderly choir of children’s voices could be heard from all sides: “You can’t put a little hole in...” “You shouldn’t put a hole in - it’ 11 be painful for the creature!” “The milk won’t run out of the hole if the creature itself doesn’t want it to.” “The main argument against the hole is the pain the grass snake will experience,” Wood said, summarizing. “And man shouldn’t cause earthly creatures pain. Your suggestion is not accepted, Izor.” Wood wanted to move onto the next question, but the red-haired boy wasn’t giving up. “If we can’t put a little hole in his tail, then we can do it some other way,” he announced. “When that creature was sucking the milk from the goat, it

got fatter and fatter. That happened because there was a lot of milk in it. We need to train the creature to crawl into the house with its milk and pour it out, into a pitcher. Then people won’t have to go out to the pasture with a pitcher to fetch the milk, and the dairy animals won’t have to leave the pasture and come to the houses to be milked. Many different creatures will crawl to the house, and when they see that the pitcher is empty, they’ll fill it with milk.” The children liked the red-haired boy’s idea, and they vied to outdo each other with their own additions to it. “And you could also get milk from them far away from home, if you feel like eating and your house is a long ways away.” “We need to train them to crawl up to a person with milk when they hear a certain sound. So we don’t have to go searching for them in the grass. You clap your hands, say, or whistle, and they’d race to crawl right over to the person.” “Well, I don’t feel like drinking milk that’s been pumped out of a snake they might add some snake thing of their own to it,” one little girl noted timidly. But the others immediately started arguing with her. “Well, with a cow the milk was inside, too, and everyone drinks that.” “If they add some snake thing of their own, then it’ 11 be even better. I mean, they, these creatures, are always clean, even though they crawl along the ground.” “Yes, exactly, they’re always nice and clean. I never saw a filthy snake.” Izor listened as the children discussed his proposal, and he even blushed from pride. “Your second suggestion is worthy of attention, Izor,” Wood said, praising the boy, and then he added: “We’ll discuss your second suggestion next time, and before then, everyone will think and give their opinion or propose their own suggestion for how to make use of creatures that crawl. And now I want to ask you what life’s purposes have been determined for the animals you know. Who’s ready...” Wood didn’t finish what he was saying. He saw Anasta’s little raised hand, her palm facing in his direction. This gesture indicated that the little girl disagreed with something and intended to lay her objections out to those present. “Tell us your objections, Anasta,” Wood said, giving his permission. “I’m against having creepy crawlers deliver milk to homes.”

One after another, the children began challenging Anasta: “But why?” “We don’t have to say no to conveniences!” “The creatures aren’t doing anything for man at the moment, and this way they’ 11 have something to do.” “People will have more time to do something nice instead of milking cows.” The little girl calmly heard out the objections and went on: “If the creepy crawlers start bringing man milk from the cow, then man himself will turn into a cow.” One of the adults who was present at the lesson couldn’t restrain himself: “What are you talking about, little girl? Explain what you mean.” And Anasta went on: “When a person receives milk from a cow or a goat or a camel or some other animal, he gives the animal his attention and feelings in return. If he doesn’t take the milk from the cow himself, and if she doesn’t feel his attention, then the milk won’t be as good. The person will give his feelings of gratitude to the crawling creature when he gets the snake milk from it. The snake will come between the cow and the person. It will be a go-between between all creations and the person. It will lure the person in with its enticing service and will milk him, sucking out of him the beneficial feelings that were intended for all the earthly creatures.” Everyone remained silent for some time, lost in thought. All at once a picture arose in Wood’s imagination: a spreading apple tree, studded with ripe fruit. Before it were standing a man and a woman. The woman was saying: “Look, my love - one apple has already ripened. It’s very pretty. The apple tree wants to give it to us. Reach up to the branch and bend it down and pick the ripe apple.” The man tried to reach the branch, but couldn’t. He wanted to jump up and grab hold of the branch with the ripe apple, but right then a snake appeared on the branch. It pulled off the apple, took hold of the branch with its tail and obligingly hung there, offering the fruit to Man. “Thank you, crawling one,” Man said and stroked the snake. The man and the woman moved away from the tree without thanking it. They gave the beneficial energy of their feelings to the snake. The apple tree shuddered, and half of its fruit, still unripe, fell to the ground.

And Wood broke the silence that had fallen: “Your protest is also worthy of attention, Anastochka5, and we accept it in part. We must all think carefully about replacing man’s direct connection to all that grows and lives on Earth with a go-between. We need to think about what that might lead to in the future. I propose that we return to this topic in our future lessons. But now,” he said, glancing at all those who had gathered there, “as we agreed to do earlier, please tell me the life’s purposes of the animals you know.” THE MOST IMPORTANT INSTRUMENT FOR BUILDING A HOUSE “Me! Me!” the impatient children’s voices poured out. “All right, all right,” Wood said, nodding, “Tell me one at a time, and each of you name no more than two animals’ life’s purposes.” One at a time, the children jumped up from their spots and spoke quickly: “Cows and goats give milk. They eat grass, and every day they come to a person so he’ll take the milk from them.” “Donkeys and horsies are meant to haul a person when he doesn’t want to walk on his own two legs.” “Chickens and ducks walk around somewhere and fly around somewhere, but nearly every day they come back and lay eggs so a person can come get them.” “We need a mammoth to lift heavy things and move or carry them to the place a person shows him.” The children were already going around the circle for the third time, striving to recall the life’s purposes of all the animals they knew. Finally Wood posed a new question. “Who can tell me under what circumstances animals work together and in what way a person directs them?” The very same red-haired little boy addressed those present, saying, “Can I tell?” And, hearing no objections, he looked at Wood. The latter nodded in assent. “Animals start working together when a person wants to build himself a home6. Now, the person uses a fife to direct the animals. First he plays a calling tune, and various wild animals come to him, and birds fly over. When they come, they sit down not far from him and wait - that’s the way our forbears taught them. When he finishes playing the calling tune, the person looks affectionately at all the animals and bows to them. And all the animals that have little tails all wag them joyfully when the person looks at

them affectionately. And the ones that can’t wag little tails express their joy in some other way, because the nicest thing for all animals is when a person looks at them affectionately. Then the person makes a different sound on his fife. Right away the bears run out from the group of wild animals and start digging a pit in the ground, right on the spot the person has marked with twigs. When the person thinks the pit doesn’t need to be dug any bigger, he makes a different sound on his fife, and the bears go back to their spots. When the new sound is played, the mammoths place stones in the pit the bears dug. This whole time, a whole lot of swallows are circling about the chosen spot, very impatiently waiting to hear their tune. And as soon as the person begins playing their pretty tune on his fife, the swallows race off every which way and come back again and again: they bring tiny little bits of dirt, straw and fluff in their little beaks , everything they use to build nests for themselves, and they lay what they’ve brought on top of the stones until they’ve got a wall of the home.” The little boy stopped speaking, and Wood saw that Anasta had once again gotten up from her spot and raised her hand with the palm facing him. Wood gave Anasta permission to speak. “Teacher Wood, I want to ask you whether the building of a home is considered pleasant and interesting work.” “Yes, of course,” Wood answered. “It is the very pleasant and creative act of a thinking person.” “Teacher Wood, but then why are children categorically forbidden to engage in this pleasant and creative act?” Wood knew of Anasta’s obsession with the idea of building her own little home. At home she’d brought up this topic with Wood many times, but he would always patiently explain to her why children weren’t allowed to build homes. Now she’d posed her question to Wood in front of the children and adults alike. Clearly she had a reason for asking. “She’s thought of something,” Wood concluded, and he began to answer: “If children, especially those who haven’t fully grasped the essence of the universe, pick up a fife and begin playing it, they might unwittingly distort the tune, and the animal builders will get confused and not know what to do.” “Teacher Wood, may I show you something?” Anasta asked. “Yes, you may, if it’s related to your question.” “It’s related,” Anasta replied, and she began to sing. She began singing ever so quietly. She offered up various tunes in her thin little voice, the very same tunes that adults would play during building.

“She didn’t make a single mistake,” one of the elders who was present remarked quietly. “That’s right, she didn’t make any mistakes,” agreed another. “But you know, she’s only heard that tune once,” stressed the elder who was sitting on a fallen tree in the last row. “The little girl has a good memory,” he added. When she was done singing, Anasta asked Wood: “Teacher Wood, did I make even a single mistake in even a single tune?” “You did not distort the tunes, Anasta. You reproduced them with total accuracy.” “Then I’ve removed the first obstacle?” “Let’s say you’ve removed it,” Wood admitted. “But there are also other conditions. One of the children may be allowed to build a home, as an exceptional case. This can happen if that individual - in this case one of you - tells about the design they’ve conceived and the elders pronounce this design innovative. Then they may permit the home to be built as an exceptional case, as a model.” Sensing that an extremely favorable situation had arisen, and that he could stimulate the creative thought of the children who were present, Wood said: “I propose that all of you who wish to do so present your designs in two moons’ time. First we’ll discuss all the designs and will pick the best one, and then we’ll propose to the elders that they examine it and hand down a decision.” Wood hadn’t been mistaken: both the tiniest children and those who were a bit older felt a burning desire to present their own unique designs. They all began whispering amongst themselves, evidently discussing what innovations they might introduce into the methods of building a home that had been worked out over the centuries. Understanding that there was no point in continuing class any longer, since the children were occupied with trying to solve the task that had been set for them and it was unlikely he’d succeed in shifting their thought, which was fired-up by its creative search, he stopped the lessons and dismissed those who were present. Two moons later, the day the children had long been waiting for arrived. Many up them came to class a bit early and, without waiting for the older ones, began telling each other what they’d thought up. By the appointed time, many parents had gathered at the lesson, too. When class began, each of the children, excited, took turns telling of his design.

According to established rules, Anasta was to present her design last. Out of the designs presented before her presentation, the best design turned out to be the one presented by a little boy named Alan7. He was a good-looking boy, eight years older than Anasta, a good singer whom all the domestic animals happily obeyed just the way they would a grown-up. Many of the girls in the settlement liked this boy, including Anasta. Therefore, if he were to win, she wouldn’t be terribly upset. “Better him than anyone else,” Anasta thought. Finally it was her turn to present her design. Trying not to show her excitement, she began to tell about it: “On the surface, my design doesn’t differ much from already existing ones. My innovation is in the wall. In the southern-facing wall. I’ll situate a beehive log on it. When the bees start bringing back flower pollen and the sun begins to warm the log hive, the bees will have to fan it with their little wings. Now, the log hive will be connected to the house by means of a small opening, and the air from the hive will fill the person’s room, along with the scent of the flowers.” The grown-ups began talking amongst themselves, discussing Anasta’s innovation. Finally Wood made a decision that everyone agreed with. It was decided to present two designs to the elders for consideration: Alan’s and Anasta’s. Anasta wasn’t pleased - she didn’t particularly feel like being rival to the boy she liked. The elders came together the next day to consider the designs, right at the next lesson, which a great many people had also come to attend. Anasta’s design was deemed best. The solemn announcement was made by a grayhaired, stem-looking elder. But he did note: “Anasta, we have deemed your design worthy of attention. It really does contain an interesting innovation, but we cannot allow you to build the home. We can’t turn the building of a home into a child’s game. Only a man and woman who have decided to create a family may build a home. That is the inviolable mle. Do you agree with this rule?” Anasta said nothing. The lump that had risen in her throat prevented her from speaking. She had worked on her design with extraordinary inspiration. She had imagined and even sensed her little home. In her thoughts she was already living in it, sleeping on her soft sleeping spot, looking out the window at the beautiful flower beds through the curtain woven by a little spider, and breathing in the subtle scents of the flowers the bees had brought back... Right then Alan rose from his spot. “Might you allow me to say a word about the inviolable mle?” He glanced

questioningly at the elders and then continued. “Of course it’s fair, and it can’t be changed, but there’s a way to do things so that the mle won’t apply to Anasta.” The people and the children were looking at Alan in disbelief. A voice rang out. “And just how could that be done?” “Allow me to demonstrate,” Alan said. An elder consented. “Go on, then, show us.” Alan walked up to Anasta and stood opposite her. Then he removed the family pendant from his neck and placed it around Anasta’s neck: “Will you marry me, Anasta?” he asked. Those present gasped. Anasta was struck dumb. Only her eyes shone and looked over the youth before her, from toe to head. “Do you say yes, Anasta?” Alan asked. Anasta nodded energetically, then quickly took her own family pendant off her neck and held it out to Alan. But he didn’t take it. Instead, he knelt down before the little girl so that she could place her beautiful pendant on him herself. The people watched what was happening in astonishment. Then Alan took Anasta’s little hand and addressed the gray-haired elder, saying: “Now there’s no obstacle for Anasta, and the inviolable rule does not apply to her.” “All right,” the elder began, a bit unsure, somehow, “but people come together in order to raise a family. Anasta’s still too little. She can’t bear children.” “Yes,” Alan agreed. “She’s little. But she will mature with each day and each year. And the day will come when she will be a fully mature beauty. I am sure that I will see that day and that I will not go back on my decision.” After conferring with each other, the elders gave Anasta permission to build the small home, under the condition that it would be disassembled after eleven days, since it wasn’t permissible for the home to be unoccupied, and Anasta wasn’t yet allowed to live apart from her parents, due to her age. On the appointed day, nearly all the residents of the family homestead settlement came together on a hillock. Anasta stood beside her flower bed. Beforehand, she’d marked out the border of her little home with sticks and twigs. She was very nervous, after all, so many people would be watching her actions, but she was especially nervous because among these people was

Alan. Some unique feelings toward this young man had been bom within her after his proposal that they join their lives together. The village head walked up to Anasta and opened a pretty case before her. Inside it there lay a fife the most important instrument for building a house. With trembling hands, the little girl took up the fife, covered several little holes with her small fingers and brought the fife to her lips. But no tune issued forth - Anasta felt that before beginning, she needed to calm herself somehow. She pressed the fife to her chest and, gazing at the people standing on the hillock, she thought, fast as lightning, about what she could do to calm herself down. But her nervousness was only growing. Then a youth came out of the group of people and headed toward Anasta. It was Alan. He walked up to the little girl and said: “I know this tune, too, and I can play it. You’ve laid out where the house will be located and how big it will be. You were victorious in our competition. That means this will be your home. All I’ll do is play the tune.” With eyes shining with tears, the little girl looked at the stately youth and whispered with lips trembling with excitement: “I want to do it myself, Alan. Thank you, but I need to do it myself, I definitely need to.” “Then listen to me carefully, Anasta. Breathe in some air and hold your breath. Hold it for as long as you can and then exhale, but not all at once, but in three steps. Exhale the last time so that as little air as possible remains in you. After that, begin to breathe evenly. From your very first breath, you should think only about your breathing. Forget about everything around you, and as soon as your breathing settles in normally, begin playing. I’ll stand behind your back and look at the people on the hillock. I won’t let their glances and thoughts through, won’t allow them to touch you, and you, calm and confident, will build your little fairy tale home.” Anasta did everything just the way Alan had instructed her. She brought the fife to her now-calmed lips and... the calling tune filled the space. After a bit the wild animals began gathering from the forest and the pastures. When enough of them had gathered, Anasta brought the calling tune to an end, went and stood in the middle of the oval that marked the walls of her future little home, and began playing once more, a different tune now. Three bears immediately came out from the group of animals and hopping, ran up to the oval Anasta had drawn, walked around it in a circle, sniffing, and started digging a pit alongside the twigs Anasta had laid out. They were trying, trying very hard. Suddenly two little bear cubs just couldn’t hold back and jumped into the pit that their mother was digging.

Thrown off, Anasta stopped playing. Everyone froze in place. Then the shebear grabbed one of the cubs by the shoulder and, giving it a slap, set it down outside the pit. It rolled off, head over heels, and she went through the same procedure with the second cub. Then she roared at them, as a warning, looked at the little girl holding the fife and waved a paw in her direction like a conductor. And Anasta began playing the fife once more. When the pit had been dug, Anasta changed tunes - there rang out low, sedate and rhythmical sounds. And one after another, mammoths walked out toward the pit, each carrying a stone with its trunk. The mammoths placed the stones and continued their work until they had filled the entire pit with them. Now the fife’s low, rhythmical tones were replaced by modulations resembling the twittering of birds. The swallows that had been circling above the building site suddenly disappeared, as if on cue, but reappeared before long. They landed on the stones, first here, then there, laying down something from their beaks. The little feathered builders were able to bring just a tiny bit of building material in their beaks, but there were a great many of them, and they carried out their actions unusually swiftly and in unison. And so, the walls of the home grew before everyone’s very eyes, accompanied by the fife’s melodious modulations. DON'T GET AHEAD OF YOURSELF Wood’s recollections of his great-granddaughter Anasta’s life just wouldn’t leave him alone, and he even chuckled a bit, recalling one particular instance. It was getting toward evening. Wood had washed his feet off in the stream and was getting ready to go to sleep when he suddenly heard a child crying, or not even crying, but sobbing. He turned around and saw Anasta running toward him. She looked unusual: her face was all smeared with something black, and hay was sticking out of the opening of her dress. She ran up to Wood, limping a bit, sat down on the earthen mound outside and, taking her head in her hands, began lamenting her sad state. “Oh, woe is me, Granddad! My life is just coming to an end.” Now that Alan had proposed to her, the little girl wanted to grow up as soon as possible, and when she’d wake up in the morning, instead of running off to the stream pool to get washed, she’d take a straight pole, stand it up against the wall of the house and score it, to mark her height. And then at the stream pool, before taking a dip in the water, she’d look at her reflection and wonder how long it would be before she’d get breasts like the ones grownup women have - the kind of breasts they nurse little children with.

“Have a drink of water, Anastochka and calm down. Tell me what’s happened.” Anasta swallowed some water from the pitcher and, through her sobs, began telling Wood the tale of her woe. “I knew it, Granddad, I knew it... They are all crazy about Alan because he’s the handsomest and the smartest. I’ve been worried that in the time it takes me to grow up, one of the grown-up maidens will make my Alan fall in love with her. She’ll make him love her. And today, when it was just getting towards evening, I saw them, these maidens, walking to the glade, toward the mountain, and they were talking about my Alan. And I realized I can’t wait any more, can’t wait ‘til I grow up. I have to take action now. That’s what I decided, and I started to take action. “I took a little piece of coal and made up my eyes, the way the grown-up maidens do it. Then I took a beet and painted my cheeks and my lips. And I even covered over my birthmark with clay. The birthmark that’s right here, on my forehead.” Anasta pulled aside her bangs and showed Wood the birthmark on her forehead that resembled a tiny star. “Why in the world did you try to paint over the birthmark, Anastochka? After all, you can’t see it - your beautiful hair covers it,” asked Wood, concealing his smile. “Sure, it covers it. But the wind blows, and it comes uncovered.” “Let it come uncovered. I, for example, like your birthmark very much. It resembles a little star.” “Agh-h-h,” Anasta said, wailing again. “You like it, Granddad, but I don’t like it one bit. It’s like I’m marked somehow. Mama doesn’t have a little star on her forehead, and neither does Papa, and you don’t have one, either, Granddad Wood. Who drew it on my forehead? Who was it who mutilated me? Agh-h-h...” “No one mutilated you, Anastochka. Quite the opposite - they adorned you. If you start doing kind deeds for people, they’ll start saying that this act, say, was done by the little girl with the little star on her forehead. And if you do bad deeds, people might say, that was done by the little girl with the spot on her forehead. People see any person’s appearance as beautiful if his deeds are beautiful.” Wood stroked his great-granddaughter’s head and then asked, “Anasta, tell me: why is there some hay peeking out of your dress?” “I made two little wads of hay and tied them to my chest with a ribbon, so my chest would be the same as the grown-up maidens’. And I put hay in my shoes under my heels, too, so I’d be a little taller. And then, all grown up, like a maiden, I went out to the glade where they get together with the young

fellows. I got there and I saw Alan standing there along with the young guys, and the maidens had gathered together a little ways away from them and were talking amongst themselves, sneaking glances at Alan. And Alan himself was glancing at the maidens.” And once again Anasta got all worked up and started crying again, and then went on, through her tears. “I saw him, Granddad, he was sneaking glances, sneaking glances. I knew that before long they’d get into a circle and take each other’s hands and they’d do a circle dance and sing and look at each other. And so I’d be able to get into the circle, too, I went up and stood next to the maidens. “One of them was just staring at me. She looks and looks and then she up and starts roaring with laughter and all the rest of them too, when they see me, they start roaring with laughter. And all the guys standing with Alan, they were laughing, too. Oh, woe is me! Woe is me, Granddad Wood. I was standing there alone, and they were all laughing and laughing. Looking at me and laughing. One guy fell right over onto the grass - he was rolling around and laughing.” Wood looked down, trying to hide his smile, and asked: “Was Alan laughing at you, too, Anastochka?” “Alan wasn’t laughing at me, Granddad Wood, not at all. Alan hit me.” Wood was astonished. “Lie hit you? What do you mean, he hit you?” “Just what I said, Granddad Wood. He hit me. First he walked up and picked me up. Picked me up the way you’d pick up a little child,” she told him, blubbering. “And I... I so wanted to be a grown-up... But he... he picked up me up like a little kid and took me behind the bushes. There he set me down on the path and said, ‘Go along home, Anasta. Wash up and don’t be such a dummy any more.’ And I... I said I wouldn’t go, and so it would be convincing, I stomped my foot a few times. Then he took me by the hand and spanked me. Like this and like that,” Anasta said, slapping herself on the hip with her palm, all the while lamenting, “Now I’m all beaten up and unhappy and abandoned and unmarried.” “What, did he take back his pendant from you?” Wood asked. “No, he didn’t take it back.” “Well, that means you’re still married,” Wood said, reasoning with her. “All the same, even if I’m married, I’m still beaten up and wretched.” “Did it really hurt so much when Alan spanked you?” Wood asked. “I don’t know, Granddad. I don’t know. I didn’t feel any pain, but the bitter insult was stronger than any pain.”

“Calm down, Anastochka. I can see that Alan spanked you out of love, so you wouldn’t do things people would laugh at you for. That means he was shielding you from taunting in the future.” “Out of love? Do people really spank you like that when they love you?” “Well, of course, that’s not the best method, but perhaps at that moment Alan couldn’t think of anything better. And you know, Anastochka,” Wood went on, untying the bundles and taking the little wads of hay off her chest, “don’t try so hard to be grown up. You’ll grow up without making any effort at all. And at the moment you need to be thinking about other things, my dear little girl.” “About what, Granddad? About what?” “You lie down on my lap, Anastochka, and I’ll sing you your favorite song, the one with no words.” Anasta laid her head on Wood’s lap, blubbered another time or two and, at the very first notes of the familiar tune, drifted off to sleep. The next day Anasta ran up to Wood, joyful and excited. Before she’d even stopped running, she announced to Wood: “He came by my little home. He came by. At first I wanted to hide when I saw him through the window, but then I just sat there, quiet as a mouse, so he’d think there wasn’t anyone in the home. Alan walks up to the little home and takes a seat next to the entrance. He takes a seat, Granddad Wood, and he says, ‘I know you’re home, Anasta. You’re a very smart little girl, a quick study, and I’ll wait until you become a beautiful girl. Believe me, I’ll wait, but don’t you get ahead of yourself any more.’ And I sat there and didn’t say a thing, and I wasn’t at all mad at him any more. I felt like running out and hugging him and even kissing him, like a grown-up, on the cheek, but I didn’t do that. I sat there, quiet as a mouse, so as not to get ahead of myself. “Alan sat there a while longer near the entrance to my little home, then he got up and left. And I ran to see you, Granddad Wood, to tell you about it. And you know what else, Granddad? You know, Alan, when he was sitting there at my place, he drew three little flowers on the wall of my little home one bigger one, another a bit smaller, and a third, tiny-tiny one. I saw them when I ran out. They’re very pretty.” Wood hugged Anasta and said: “Does that mean you’re not wretched any more and woe is no longer you?” “Now I’m joyful, and I feel like making something unusual and pretty, so everyone will look at it and be happy and say, ‘Very pretty, great, good,’

and so Alan will hear that and be proud of me.” “That’s a very correct decision that’s come to you, Anastochka. Create beautiful creations in a burst of inspiration. Only in that way can we win the love of humans.” WE HAVE TO THINK Putting an end to his reminiscing, Wood turned to his great-granddaughter, who had thought up a new game to play with the mammoth walking at the head of the caravan. He said: “Anasta, you’re keeping the mammoth in a state of great tension with your playing. Is it really right to treat an inoffensive, kind animal that way?” “Actually, Granddad Wood, I’m keeping him in a state of pleasant tension. I’m distracting him from sad thoughts. And see, Granddad Wood, I distracted you from your gloomy thinking,” Anasta said, jabbering away. “Yes... Many people’s thoughts are gloomy right now. There’s a reason they’ve come up. But what about you, Anastochka, can it be that you don’t have any sad thoughts?” “I don’t, Granddad Wood.” “Does that mean you don’t understand why the adults of our family line are gloomy?” “I do understand, Granddad Wood. They’re gloomy because the cold glacier is advancing. Many plants are dying from the cold. The people from various settlements have had to leave their family spaces8. And no one knows where they’ll have to go and how long they’ll have to walk.” “That’s correct...” Wood said pensively. And, somewhat astonished, he asked his great-granddaughter, “But, what, aren’t you sad to take leave of our family space, Anastochka?” “I’m not sad, Granddad Wood. As soon as that sad, leave-taking thought came up, I immediately rejected it, and now I don’t have it in me any more,” Anasta said, jabbering away again light-heartedly and bobbing up and down on the mammoth’s trunk. It was as if the mammoth walking alongside Wood understood he needed to carry the little girl alongside her great-grandfather and give them the chance to spend time with each other. Wood was both astonished and intrigued by his great-granddaughter’s answer. What mysterious method she had managed to use to cope with the sad thoughts? And he asked: “Anastochka, can you tell me how you managed to reject the sad thoughts, what method you used?”

“A very simple method, Granddad Wood. I decided to remain with my family space.” “Remain? You decided to? But you didn’t remain. After all, you’re leaving it behind, along with everyone, Anastochka.” “For the moment, I happen to be leaving it behind. I’m accompanying everyone on their journey to a far-off land. But as soon as we come up onto that rise, the one you can see in the distance, it will be noon, and I’ll need to be heading off back. I’ll be back on my motherland by evening. The morning will dawn and it will rejoice at seeing me. I’m already rejoicing right now myself. I can just imagine how much my motherland will rejoice at seeing me.” Wood didn’t respond to his great-granddaughter’s words with alarm. He figured she had been joking or was just imagining going back in order to drive the sad thoughts off. Deciding to play along with the nimble-witted little girl, he said: “Yes, the entire space will rejoice at seeing you, but what will you do there all alone?” “First of all, I’ll make up a hill of dirt and grass around my flower bed,” Anasta replied, jabbering away, “and the little hill won’t allow the cold glacier wind to blow on my beloved little flower. I need to be right alongside that little flower when it blossoms. If nobody’s there next to it, the little flower will get very sad. “‘What did I bloom for?’ it will think. ‘What for, if no one is going to rejoice at my beauty?’ But I’ll be right there and I’ll rejoice.” “The little flower will stop blooming, Anastochka and there will cold spells, the like of which we’ve never before seen. Many plants won’t be able to bloom in the cold. A huge glacier is advancing upon our family space,” Wood said, as if musing to himself as he ascended the rise Anasta had mentioned. “Yes, a glacier is advancing.” “I’ll stop the glacier, Granddad Wood,” the little girl suddenly blurted out, jumping off the mammoth’s trunk and enthusiastically jabbering on. “I still don’t know how, but I’ll definitely stop it. Something there, on my motherland, will give me a hint about how to stop it. I feel it. I feel it ever so strongly. Something will give me a hint, and I’ll be able to do it. “There’s a hint, there, on my motherland. It’s there, but everyone has left. No one thought of the hint. And no there’s no one the hint can hint to. Everyone thought about howto leave, where to go to get away from the cold. But no one wanted to give it some thought together with the hint and think about howto push the glacier aside. And you yourself said it so often at our

gatherings, Granddad Wood, that we have to think.” Wood froze in his tracks. The caravan leader stood still, too, and the others who had been following behind the mammoth also stopped. The gray-haired head of the family line looked intently at his greatgranddaughter, saying nothing. What Wood did a minute later - he was never able to explain that later, not to himself, and certainly not to the others. He signaled to the people who were walking along the sides of the mammoth caravan to keep moving forward. But to Anasta he said: “The last one in the caravan is a mammoth that’s limping, the son of the caravan leader. You know him, and he obeys you better than all the others. Take him with you, Anasta, and when it gets very cold, you can follow in our tracks on him and catch up to us.” “Thank you, Granddad Wood,” the little girl cried joyfully. She grabbed him around the legs, snuggling up against him. “Thank you!” “How am I supposed to tell your mama and papa, your parents, what you’re up to?” “I’ll let them know myself once I get back home. There’s no need to say anything right now. Goodbye, Granddad Wood.” Anasta skipped along off to the last mammoth at the end of the caravan, and Wood followed his great-granddaughter’s receding figure with his glance, as if what was happening hadn’t quite sunk in yet. He continued on his path, and for some time there were no thoughts at all in his head. Only a few hours later did Wood ask himself, “Why did I give my consent? ‘We have to think.’ ‘No one thought about how to stop it.’ No one. She was the only one. Then he said, out loud now, “I did the right thing.” DUN THE MAMMOTH The huge mammoth Dun9 was walking at the end of the caravan, limping slightly. In his build and his strength, He resembled his father, the leader of the mammoths. When he was still just a young little mammoth, a boulder fell from the mountain and fractured his leg. The people tied sticks to the animal’s leg with ropes so the bone would knit properly. Dun had to spend many days lying on his own. It was at that point that a touching friendship started up between the mammoth, three-year-old Anasta and the kitten the little girl would bring along with her. Little Anasta would often visit the mammoth as he lay there with the

bandaged leg and bring him treats and talk to him tenderly. She’d taught the kitten to chase annoying bugs and flies away from the mammoth lying on the grass, and she’d place the kitten on his hip. But the main thing she did was to talk to the two of them and instmct them, the way grown-ups instruct their children. After she’d seated the kitten atop the mammoth, Anasta would stand before them and point at the sky with her finger, direct her gaze upward and utter the words “sky,” “clouds” and “sun,” and then she’d kneel down and stroke the grass with her hand and tenderly utter the words “the nice green grass” and “the little flower has a scent.” 1 Translator’s note: Nastenka (in Russian “HacTeHtica”, transliterated “Nasten’ka” and pronounced “NAH-steen-kuh”) is a diminutive form of the name Anastasia (in Russian “AHacTacira”, transliterated “Anastasiya” and pronounced “Ahnuh-stah-SEE-yuh”), used affectionately as a nickname. 2 Translator’s note: The name used here in the original is “Bya” (transliterated “ Vud” and pronounced “Vood”). The origin of this name is unknown. 3 Translator’s note: The name Anasta (in Russian “AHacTa”, transliterated “Anasta” and pronounced “Ah-NAH-stuh”) is meant to echo the name Anastasia. 4 Translator’s note: The Russian original is “Tbop” (transliterated “Izor” and pronounced “Eezore”). This name’s origin is unknown. 5 Translator’s note: Anastochka (in Russian “AHacTOHKa”, transliterated “Anastochka” and pronounced “Ah-NAH-stuhch-kuh”) is a diminutive form of the name Anasta, used affectionately as a nickname. 6

Translator’s note: The Russian word used here is “/IOM” (transliterated “dom” and pronounced “dome”). Throughout Anasta, this word both refers to the physical structure in which one lives and also carries the sense of a place where one can feel “at home.” I have translated this word as “home” throughout the book, so as to preserve both of these connotations and also the sound of the Russian original. 7 Translator’s note: The Russian original is “AnaH” (transliterated “Alan” and pronounced “AhLAHN”). 8 Translator’s note: The Russian phrase here is “po/iHoe npocTpaHCTBo” (transliterated “rodnoe prostranstvo” and pronounced “rahd-NOH-yuh prah-STRAHNSTvuh”). The first word has the same root as the first word in the phrase “po/iOBoe noMecTBe” (transliterated “rodovoe pomest’e” and pronounced “ruhd-ah-VOH-yuh pah-MYEST-yeh”), which I have translated throughout as “family homestead,” and the second word, meaning “space” or “area,” occurs throughout the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series in the phrase “npocTpaHCTBo JIIO6BH” (transliterated “prostranstvo lyubvi” and pronounced “prah-STRAHNST-vuh lyoob-VEE”) which means “space of love.” As such, the phrase “family space” brings together the two ideas of the family homestead and the space of love. 9 Translator’s note: The Russian original is “^aH” (transliterated “Dan” and pronounced “Dahn”). This name, although similar to the Russian name Daniil, also has other layers of meaning, including the root expressing the meaning of something given or granted.

The mammoth and the kitten would intently watch what the little girl did, and after a few days, during which she would regularly repeat her lessons, something astonishing happened. When Anasta uttered the words “sky” and “clouds,” the baby mammoth - and then the kitten, too - directed their eyes toward the sky. Upon hearing the word “grass,” they glanced at the grass. And upon hearing the words “the little flower has a scent,” the kitten hopped to the ground and began sniffing the little flower, the way the little girl had done. Anasta continued her lessons with the animals even after the mammoth had recovered. The little girl liked telling her four-legged friends about the meaning of each new word she learned from the grown-ups. And the young mammoth and the kitten liked the attention the kind little girl gave them. Like well-disciplined pupils, they would come to Anasta’s flower bed at noon. The little girl would usually show up at that time, too, and she’d give her charges their next lesson. If she didn’t show up for some reason, the four-legged pupils would sit waiting for their friend and teacher for hours at a time or else head off to look for her. When Anasta turned six, Dun the mammoth, who’d also gotten bigger, was pretty much the same as the grown-ups on the outside, but his behavior differed noticeably from the other mammoths’. Wood, Anasta’s great-grandfather and the head of the family line, was the first to notice that Dun the mammoth could understand human speech. It was the following event that preceded his conclusion. Wood was sitting in the shade of a broad tree and weaving a wicker basket for berries. Anasta would often spend time with her great-grandfather. She liked to listen to his stories and be part of all he did, and so she was right alongside him this time, too. His chatty great-granddaughter was quickly and animatedly telling him her thoughts on collecting berries, and she told him he had to make the basket pretty, because then the berries collected in it would be tasty. Right then Wood noticed that Dun the mammoth, who was standing ten steps away from them, was looking intently at Anasta and listening to what she was saying, as if he understood the meaning of the words and the sense of his great-granddaughter’s speech. “He must like the intonation of the little girl’s voice and the energy coming from her,” Wood thought. Noticing that there was almost no water left in the trough where the twigs for weaving the basket were soaking, Wood asked Anasta to fetch a little water from the nearby spring. But his ever-obedient and diligent great-granddaughter didn’t msh to fulfill Wood’s request. She just turned in the mammoth’s direction and quickly told him, “Dun, fetch a little water from the spring.” And then,

as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, she continued her animated story about the berries and the basket. The mammoth slowly turned around and steadily took one step and then another in the direction of the spring. Then Anasta said one more phrase. “Get a move on, Dun.” And the huge mammoth began to mn. Wood understood that unlike the other mammoths, Dun wasn’t simply carrying out certain commands. Rather, he could understand human speech far better than the other animals - he understood the meaning of the words and, what’s more, he understood the meaning of whole sentences. The mammoth brought a little water in his trunk and, at the little girl’s direction, emptied it into the trough with the twigs. “Thank you,” Anasta said, praising the mammoth, and she added, “Don’t forget to water our flower garden this evening. But for now, go to the woods and have some lunch. You can see I’m busy.” The mammoth answered the little girl with a nod of his head and headed for the woods. “What are the limits of the animal kingdom’s ability to serve man?” Wood thought. “To what extent can man direct it? Now, people thought up the wheel and everyone was so delighted by the invention and began looking for different ways of using it. But living creatures, who have already been thought up and are far more advanced than the wheel - we’ve stopped studying them entirely. Is our race doing the right thing? Where might man’s ignorance of the capabilities and life’s purpose of the varied nature around him lead?” That’s what Wood was reflecting on, and these thoughts made his heart uneasy. DON'T SURRENDER, MOTHERLAND! I'M WITH YOU! Seeing Anasta running toward him, Dun joyfully bobbed his head, flapped his ears and halted. The huge mammoth stretched his trunk out toward the little girl and lightly touched the little girl’s shoulder with its tip. She took hold of the tip of the trunk, pressed her cheek to it and tenderly stroked it. Then she gave the order, “Follow me!” and ran hopping off back in the direction of the family space they had left. The mammoth hastily turned around and ran after Anasta. When Anasta grew tired, she gestured to the mammoth to stop and scrambled up his trunk and onto his head. When she’d made her way up onto Dan’s back, she saw the kitten there, too. He had long since grown into an adult cat, but had still retained his nickname of “Kitten.” He started rubbing against the little girl’s leg and purring, expressing his joy and devotion.

The three of them made their way to the abandoned family space by late evening. Anasta sent Dun off to pasture, went into her little clay house, made her way in the darkness to her sleeping spot with the aromatic hay, lay down on it and immediately fell asleep. Anasta was up with the dawn. She ran out of her little home and, blinking and spreading her arms wide, she offered her body up to the tender, warm rays. After taking this sunbath, the little girl ran to the stream and, taking a running jump, went with a splash into the little creek with its clear water. The cold spring water burned Anasta’s body, but she splashed and laughed in delight. Then, after making her way out of the water, hopping and spinning around on the shore, as if she had no idea where to go and how to use the unusual energy that had filled her, she ran up onto a small hill. A cold wind was blowing. The little girl tied her shawl around her waist and threw its free end over her shoulder. She looked silently at the land where her family line had lived so very recently. The family space, where once the sounds of the voices of a great many birds and the chirping and buzzing of insects had unceasingly been heard, was now keeping some kind of fateful silence. Here and there the grass shone white from the chill of the night. The trees and bushes in the gardens weren’t blooming. Their little leaves were curled, as if in despair. And the family space, shrouded in the oppressive silence, with its withering but still living natural diversity, attended to the little girl with incomprehension. And all of a sudden, everything all around shuddered, when... A cry of desperate and confident joy pierced the oppressive silence like a warm ray of light: “He-e-ey! He-e-e-ey!” Anasta shouted, in defiance of the oppressive silence. “Don’t surrender, Motherland! I am Anasta, Motherland. I am with you.” She ran down from the hill and dashed to her flower bed, touching the tree tranks with her hands as she ran and stroking the little leaves of the bushes. “He-e-ey!” she cried out once more, running around the trank of a big, old apple tree with shriveled leaves. The little girl’s thin, high and joyful little voice was conquering the silence that had been oppressing the family space. And suddenly another voice joined hers, a powerful, low bass - Dun the mammoth was running from the pasture at Anasta’s cry. Running and trumpeting for all he was worth as he went. And next to the little girl you could also hear a loud, incessant “Meow, meow”, it was the cat with the nickname “Kitten”, meowing in support of

Anasta. Anasta stopped at the flower bed that she herself tended, the way all the children in the settlement each tended their own flower beds. The grass on one edge of the flower bed had turned gray, and the flowers had dropped, and only one still unopened bud remained on the little girl’s favorite flower. It was drooping toward the ground as if it had thought the better of blooming. But the sight of the drooping bud didn’t make the little girl sad. She was looking at it and smiling. She wasn’t sad, because she was imagining her favorite flower not drooping, but abloom in all its beauty. Squatting down before the flower that had been getting ready to wilt, she quietly and tenderly called out to it: “Hey, little flower, I’m here. Wake up.” Then she held her index finger in her mouth, then raised it, to determine from which side the cold wind was blowing on the flower. Having determined the direction of the flow of glacial air, she lay down on her side on that side of the flower, in an attempt to block the path of the cold air with her own body. Even so, the cold currents still enveloped the flower’s small body and stung its little leaves, preventing them from straightening up. Suddenly the cold streams of air stopped and Anasta felt the opposite - she felt warmth on her back. She turned - Dun the mammoth had flopped down on his side and shielded Anasta and her entire flower bed from the cold with with his own body. “Good for you, Dun! You smart thing!” Anasta exclaimed. Latching onto his fur, she scrambled up onto the mammoth’s back and, turning to face the wind that was blowing from the direction of the glacier, she joyfully and victoriously shouted out her “He-e-ey!” The cold wind blew even more strongly. Then, after thinking a bit, the little girl turned in the opposite direction and shouted out a summons and waved her arms, as if inviting someone invisible to come. The mammoth raised his trunk up high and trumpeted a summons, too. Kitten began meowing, calling. The cold wind quieted down, but some time later it started up again, only now it was blowing from the other side, and it was caressing the flower and the mammoth and the little girl and the cat standing on his back with warm currents. The singing of the few remaining birds greeted the life-giving streams of air. For several days, Anasta fought against the cold wind blowing from the direction of the glacier; again and again, she would mn to her flower as soon as the wind started up. And each time, the mammoth would he down next to

the flower bed, as had become his habit, blocking the cold’s path. Then the day came when the rejuvenated flower bloomed. Running up to the mound of earth, Anasta got down on her knees before the flower and kissed the orangey-red petals, touching them lightly with her lips. Then she took two steps to the side and admired the beautiful miracle and the extraordinary, beautiful creation - her flower. Since she couldn’t stay standing in one spot, due to the exuberant energy that had surged up from somewhere ins ide her, Anasta at first hopped up and down in place, and then her hops morphed into an unusual, improvised and rousing dance. Even Dun the mammoth was trying to dance along, shifting from one leg to another. Kitten was spinning around, now flopping down on his back, now jumping up again. And the living flower was waving its orangey-red petals at them in the warm breeze. And then Anasta stopped. She’d caught sight of two youths standing on the mountain. THE BROTHERS OPPOSITE Both youths were of the same height and athletic build. In outward appearance, they looked a great deal like each other, differing only in the color of their hair and eyes. One was Light-haired and Blue-eyed, the other Black-eyed and Dark-haired. The youths stayed where they were for a while, as if giving Anasta the chance to get used to their unexpected appearance. Then, at a leisurely pace, they approached the little girl. “Hello, little girl!” Dark-haired said, addressing her. “You need to act more quickly, little girl. You sensed intuitively that you will be able to stop the glacier, that you have within you powers capable of changing God’s program. Now, that’s impossible, of course. But you will continue seeking these powers within you. And I will leam more about Man than I currently know. I’m prepared to tell you about the world order and answer any question you might have, little girl. Only you need to act as fast as you can.” Anasta had no time to answer: the second youth began to speak: “Hello, Anasta. You’re pretty and sharp, you’re splendid, just like many other marvelous creations on the great planet Earth. My brother knows much about the world order, but you should, I think, listen to yourself above all others.” Anasta finally managed to greet the youths: “A good day and good, light thoughts to you.” “Hold on,” Dark-haired said, interrupting Anasta. “That’s just the way it

always is. It even makes me sick to hear those idiotic, thoughtless memorized words. There are two of us here. I’m dark, so why do people wish me light thoughts? “I’m dark, and my thoughts are dark and hostile. That’s the way I am, and that’s my life’s purpose within God’s program!” Dark-haired was growing more and more angry. “If I’m some kind of light little sniveling fool, a light thinker, then I won’t be me. Poof, and there won’t be anything left of me. You get it, little girl? All that will be left in front of you is one light little simpleton. There are two of us! You get it, little girl? And you shouldn’t only speak about what’s light. Take your thoughts back, if that’s what was behind your words, if your words weren’t just memorized parrot sounds.” “If my greeting has offended you, then I will change it and will say to you a simple, ‘Hello,’” Anasta replied. “Now, that’s more like it. ‘Cause otherwise, you and your light...” “Who are you?” Anasta inquired. “What family line are you from? I’ve never seen you before.” “Of course, you haven’t. No one has ever seen us. But our manifestations are present in all human doings, in every moment,” the dark youth told her quickly. “Yes, in each and every one. Now, of course, there are more of my manifestations - they are awesome. Almost all of humanity lives from disaster to disaster, dominated by my energies.” “Stop, my dark and talented brother,” said the light-haired one. “After all, we didn’t even introduce ourselves.” And, turning to the little girl, he went on: “Anastochka, try to understand what I say. Between the two of us, my brother and I make up the two complexes of Universal energies. The entire immense space of the Universe is filled with energy entities. When God created Man, He took an equal amount of energy from each of the entities, brought them into inner balance in some unknown way, and gave them to the person He had created. Out of everything, He created a person with inner balance. “When this happened, we all understood that Man must emerge as the strongest entity in the Universe. That’s why he’s not called an entity, but Man. But where his strength lies, what his capabilities are and whether they are limited - that is unknown. And when it, this strength, will fully manifest - this has, up to the present day, been known to no one in the entire Universe. Not even to us, despite the fact that we and our separate energies are present everywhere. We are always invisible. We always fill up space. We’re present in the water, and in every living wild animal and every little worm. And the energies of the Universe - each and every one of them - exist within each person.”

“You say you’re invisible,” Anasta said, astonished, “but you know, I can see you!” “Yes, you see us, because we solidified the air, solidified it so as to exhibit the kind of bodies you’re used to. The clouds up there in the sky, for example - you know they’re solidified air vapors, too. You get whimsical shapes when they solidify: sometimes you get ones that look like wild animals, sometimes ones that look like a human face or body. And in many ways the human body is made up of water that’s been solidified to different degrees. It must be the case that the Creator alone knows the meaning and ratios of the various solidifications of the human body. Our bodies resemble human bodies only on the outside. My dark-haired brother represents all the dark entities, while I represent all the light ones.” “But why did you exhibit this solidification in the form of the human body?” Anasta asked. “So you wouldn’t be frightened when you heard our voices, so you wouldn’t expend the energy of your thoughts on trying to guess where the sound was coming from,” Light-haired answered. “But what did you want to talk with me for?” “You set out in defiance of the elements, or, to be more precise, in opposition to a planetary disaster. You set out on your own, confident that you’d be able to prevent it. We are certain that this is impossible to do. God’s program includes provisions for a disaster, should mankind follow a ruinous path. That has happened, more than once. And we wouldn’t have paid any attention to your efforts. It’s just that all the Universal entities shuddered when the flower on your mound of earth bloomed. It bloomed, even though according to the Creator’s program, it should have died. But it bloomed.” “The flower bloomed thanks to the mammoth who shielded it from the cold breeze.” “The mammoth is but one link in the chain of events that you constructed.” “I didn’t construct anything.” “Your thought did the constructing, Anastochka.” “So does that mean your particles are inside me, too?” Anasta asked thoughtfully. “But I can’t feel them at all.” “A person doesn’t feel us, especially when he manages to balance our particles within him. When they are in balance, a third energy appears. And this third is found solely in the Universal entity that is Man. It appears when

we are in complete balance and it, this new energy, is all-powerful. It’s capable of creating new worlds. No secrets exist for it. This kind of person becomes a master of the Universe, a creator, and no one can even imagine his creations. They can be magnificent and unfathomable.” “Your particles are probably not at all balanced in me, since I can’t stop the glacier,” Anasta said with a sigh. “The flower bloomed, but everything around it in our family space is withering and dying.” “Anastochka, you are on the path to unity. You can attain it in the next moment or in three millennia. It’s for this reason that the Universal energies will strive to help you, so that they can learn Man’s great secret and their own future fate as well.” “What you said about the extraordinary power hidden in the unity of the opposites is so interesting. But if you know about this extraordinary power, why don’t the two of you just agree to unite?” The two brothers exchanged glances and cast their gaze over Anasta’s family space. Then they began looking in different directions. They were slow to answer, as if at that moment they themselves were looking for the right words to explain it. The little girl waited patiently. Finally Light-haired answered. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PROGRAM? “That’s impossible. My brother and I have different tasks,” Light-haired said. “Everybody has his own program. And nonetheless, only in Man can we, by each carrying out our personal program, also work on the overall plan and become particles of the new energy that’s found only in Man.” “But how in the world can you each work on something different, something opposite, and at the same time contribute to the overall good?” Anasta inquired incredulously. “We can, by continually outpacing each other by just a little bit. When you start walking, Anastushka, one of your little legs shoots out ahead, leaving the other behind. Then the one that’s lagged behind suddenly shoots out ahead. It’s like the legs are competing against each other. And in the end, together, by complying with the body’s thoughts, they move it forward.” Dark-haired entered the conversation: “Now that’s some example you gave. You even cracked me up,” he said, interrupting his brother. “If you’re going to imagine us as two little legs, then you’re a really short one, and I’m super long. I take a step, and the body goes right up over mountains, but you just loaf around, pretending to move. I’m leading mankind to a planetary disaster for the fifth time now, as part of carrying out my own program. And if the

Creator’s thought regenerates it all over again, it doesn’t matter - Bam! I’ll hit it all over again with a planetary disaster, so it won’t get out of line.” “Yes, you’re talented, my dear brother. You really have led the life of the whole planet to the brink of a global disaster. But your disasters don’t bring you any discoveries, any new knowledge, and they don’t add to your powers. But they do always give Man new knowledge. And mankind regenerates all over again.” “But before they do, they perish in hellish agony, along with all their knowledge.” “You and I, Brother, we don’t know the Creator’s program. Perhaps one day it will happen that mankind will prevent a disaster - an instant before it happens - and at that point an aspiration unknown to you and me will illuminate its thought.” “I’m sick of your light little dreamiekinses, my light little snotty-nosed brother. You listen to me, little girl, not him,” the dark-haired youth said, addressing Anasta. “I, little girl, will show you all my power in a form you can understand. My light little one there got a thing or two right. Human thought really is a huge energy, equal to mine in size, and way bigger than his. Each person, if he makes use of this energy properly, really is capable of making the world different. “But there’s another unseen energy-thought, too - collective thought. That’s when a great many of separate people’s thoughts come together into a unified whole. If all mankind’s thoughts came together into a unified whole and you got a mankind-wide thought - my brother and I would be like ants compared to it. “But I’ve learned how to prevent collective thought from arising. I’m the one who tosses various philosophical lines of reasoning and concepts out to mankind. And what you end up with is one billion people collectively thinking one way, and another billion thinking a different way, and that way they repudiate the first group. I, little girl, am the incarnation of all the dark powers of the Universe, and if you join forces with me, we will become a force second to none. I have a secret plan. You’ll get what if s all about, and you’ll help me. “Together we’ll turn all people into our playthings. We’ll play with their minds. I’ll make you mankind’s mistress, and one day you will tell me...” “I don’t like that plan,” Anasta replied, and added, “I will never take part in it, and I don’t think any other people would agree, either.” “You won’t take part? You, little girl, just don’t know yet, what an amusing game it is - making people think what you want them to.

“And don’t be so quick to say that people won’t follow my program. The wheel has already been invented - it’s primitive, so far, but then people will put two wooden wheels together with a pole, and that’s in line with my plan, my ingenious program.” “But what’s so bad about a wheel? When we had to haul food to the injured mammoth Dun, a little wheeled cart helped us do that.” “It’s all good, little girl. Just great, even. This wheel will be perfected. A great many wheels will be made. And people will see that it’s difficult to roll a wheel over the natural terrain, across hillocks and pot holes, through tall grass. And then they’ll cover a huge portion of the earth over with a stone shell, so the wheels will be able to roll along it unobstructed. “And, growing more and more numerous, they will roll along over the groaning earth, carrying some people atop them and ruthlessly crushing others beneath them. “You, little girl - try to find an answer yourself: what can be more powerful than the power which can send people to their ruin? But you won’t be able to find an answer within you, so go ahead and acknowledge my greatness.” Anasta pondered the question, but couldn’t find an answer within her. She looked once more at the light-haired youth. In response to the little girl’s silent question, Light-haired replied: “Anastochka, my brother has painted a sad picture for you. That’s his task, and he’s carrying it out in good conscience. I can see the question in your eyes: do I have a program, too? I do, and I also want to appeal to you to take part in my program.” “So what does your program want?” “To try to comprehend the Creator’s great creation: Man. To understand the greatness of His future achievements.” “But hasn’t everything on Earth already been created?” Anasta asked, astonished. “The fact of the matter is, Anastochka... You see before you a beautiful blooming flower. Each plant or animal is perfected in and of itself, but at the same time they are all interconnected, too. It seems that the Creator has created a miraculous, harmonious and perfected earthly world. But that doesn’t mean that this world can’t be perfected even more. “We can view the Creator’s creations as simply the rough material for a more perfected creation: for creating a beautiful and perfected way of life never before seen or imagined by anyone.”

“But who can be more perfect than perfection itself?” Anasta asked in amazement. “Those who issue forth from it: the Great parent’s son and daughter. For example, you, Anastochka.” “Me? But I can’t imagine how you could possibly alter what’s already been created. I, for example, have no desire whatsoever to alter the little flower that bloomed in my flower bed, even the tiniest bit. I even think that we shouldn't alter it, not under any circumstances, so that we don’t spoil its perfection. And why alter Kitten? Or how could you perfect, say, Dun the mammoth? By altering his trunk, or his ears? By altering it how? And what for?” “But see here, Anastochka, you altered Dun the mammoth.” “No, I never altered him,” she objected in amazement. “It’s true - you didn’t alter him on the outside, but your mammoth Dun carries out far more human instructions than all the other mammoths who have ever lived on Earth, and Dun’s understanding of what he’s instructed to do is qualitatively different. You’ll see that immediately if you compare him with your other mammoths, the ones that look similar.” “Yes, now I get it. I think he’s smarter than all the other ones. It’s just that before, I somehow didn’t give it any thought.” “There, you see? Not only the external form and build are significant. What’s inside and the life’s purpose are more important. And you were the very one who created and determined what’s inside of Dun, and a life’s purpose for him. And Dun the mammoth, who on the outside doesn’t look at all different from other mammoths created by the great Creator, is different nonetheless. Now he is a joint creation - the Creator’s and yours. And we don’t know who he belongs more to. After all, it isn’t only that Dun the mammoth can carry out a larger number of commands that are essential in every day human life. He’s grown more intelligent, loyal and responsive. Do you recall how one day you fell asleep on the dry grass beneath a tall, tall tree, and when you woke up, you saw Dun the mammoth standing above you, not moving a muscle? You got angry - there was some really unpleasant smell coming from him, as if he’d gotten smeared with some foul thing and had come on purpose to disturb your sleep with this unpleasant smell. You got up and set off walking toward your home across the wet grass, but before you did, you said to Dun the mammoth in a dissatisfied tone, ‘Dun, you’re forever straggling off from the herd. Now you’ve started coming here of your own accord, even when no one’s calling you. Go on off to your pasture, to your brothers.’

“You went away, walking barefoot through the wet grass, without looking back even once. Anastochka, do you remember that the grass was wet?” “Yes.” “And do you know why Dun the mammoth smelled so unpleasant?” “No.” “When you fell asleep, a thunderstorm began. Not only people, but animals, too, know that lightning most often strikes tall trees. Dun saw you fall asleep, and when the thunderstorm began, he got all agitated and came over to you, leaving his herd. He didn’t wake you up. He just stood over you, shielding you from the rain. Some lightning hit the tree you were sleeping under. One branch caught fire and began to fall. It would have fallen on you, but Dun the mammoth managed to cast it aside with his trunk. Then a second branch caught fire, and Dun cast that one off, too, but not before the fire had scorched the fur on the mammoth’s head, and it began to smolder, giving off an unpleasant smell. The scorched spot was unbearably painful, but Dun stood above you without moving a muscle, while you slept. And when you left after rebuking him for being a pest, he couldn’t even bring himself to take offense, and he forgot about the pain. He was overjoyed that you hadn’t been harmed, and later, when tending to his bum, he thought of you with tenderness.” Anasta jumped to her feet and ran to the mammoth, who was standing a short distance away. He nodded joyfully. Anasta took hold of the tip of his trunk, patted it with her hand, pressed her cheek to it then kissed it. The mammoth froze. He kept standing that way, motionlessly, his eyes scmnched up, even after the little girl had walked away from him and gone back to the light-haired youth. “I get it,” Anasta said to Light-haired. “Dun the mammoth has been remodeled. Maybe it happened all on its own, or maybe I helped him in some way. He does differ from the mammoths who were just created by the Creator. “Does that mean Man’s been given that right - the right to remodel?” “Yes, he’s been given that,” Light-haired answered. “So now think about this: in accordance with which program?” “In accordance with the good one.” “So go ahead and define it. Choose. Create.” “Do you mean that the One who created everything on Earth didn’t create any one program that Man has to live by?”

“I think that He presented Man with a great many options to choose from, but that He himself dreamt only of one thing.” “What?” “Only Man can find an answer to that.” “But where should we look for it?” “Inside you. By mentally imagining, analyzing and comparing various options for arranging life on Earth.” “Do you mean people live on Earth, but know nothing of the Creator’s program?” “People have been given great knowledge about using biological resources for development, but people possess various types of freedom, including the freedom to replace biological resources with technocratic ones. It’s up to them to decide whether to use their inner resources deep down inside them those, say, of a living tree that grows and senses biological rhythms and, by adjusting to them, regulates its own state depending on the surrounding conditions - or the exterior, superficial resources of a dead tree. When people step onto the technocratic path of development, they use the superficial resources - they fashion this or that implement out of wood and use it for fuel or for building material. “For some reason, people always choose the technocratic path. But it inevitably leads them to disaster. That’s happened more than once. After all, all planetary disasters are created by people’s thoughts. Thoughts that are followed by actions.” “But the glacier that forced my family line to leave its home - no people created that.” “Your family line, Anastochka, has already set foot on the technocratic path. And in accordance with the program of life, the glacier will overtake it and bring it to ruin. But life will rise anew. A new hope for human intelligence will appear. If someone stops the glacier, and only a person can do that, your family line will live in a technocratic world. And sooner or later the technocratic path will all the same lead it to disaster. True, if a person finds a way to stop the glacier - meaning, a way to avert one disaster - then in all likelihood, he’ll be able to avert the one after it, too. A short while before the next one, he’ll be able to illuminate people’s souls with an understanding of where they went wrong in their choices, and avert the disaster. Then mankind will be able to choose a new path and gradually and carefully dismantle his lethal inventions. But illuminating the souls of people of the technocratic world is an uphill battle.

“During a technocratic period of life, people cease to be intelligent beings. It’s necessary to appeal not to their minds, but to their feelings and, through their feelings, to inform them about the essence of the Divine program, and in order to do this, one has to sense and comprehend it for oneself.” “But haven’t you already comprehended it?” “Not entirely. Really, I think it’s impossible to completely grasp it in the way that one can completely comprehend my brother’s programs. It’s impossible to completely comprehend it. Completion is cessation of motion. In addition, I see no limit to how much you can perfect, say, your mammoth.” “What about other wild animals?” “Others, too. You know full well, Anastochka, that all animal offspring adopt their parents’ habits and skills. That means that each new generation will be a bit more perfected than the previous one, and if Man correctly determines all wild animals’ life purposes, if each subsequent generation continues perfecting the animal world around it - a world that will free man from all every day concerns - then in the very same way, human thought will be freed up for more important achievements.” “That probably is what can happen, if you’re speaking about wild animals. But now, I wouldn’t ever take it into my head to try to perfect the little flower - it’s very, very perfected.” “I think so, too, Anastochka. Even so, your beautiful little flower is but the paint that the Creator has presented to his daughter for her future creations.” “But why paint? After all, the little flower is a living thing.” “Yes, certainly, it’s a living thing and self-contained, and at the same time it can be no more than a tiny particle of the living picture that is great in its beauty. “Take a look at your flower bed. What looks most beautiful in it is your favorite flower. But if you plant two or three more of the very same flower in it, the way the flower bed looks will change. Then you can plant other pretty flowers, ones that don’t look like these, and the way the flower bed looks will change once again. “Then you can perfect the living picture by arranging the various flowers in a different order. There’s no limit to the perfection. It is in accordance with the Creator’s program to move toward it.” “Does that mean that Man was created in order to make everything around him lovelier and lovelier? In order to perfect the world the Creator gave him? Is that Man’s main life’s purpose?”

“To create glorious living pictures, to comprehend and perfect the animal world - of course, that is an important life’s purpose for Man. But I see the main one as something different.” “As what?” “As Man perfects the Divine world order, he himself will necessarily become more and more perfected, and there is no limit to be seen to this phenomenon. Great resources will open up before him.” “But why will he be more perfected? I mean, no one’s going to be instmcting Man while all this is going on.” “You, Anastochka, created a lovely flower bed and your experience helped you understand how to do that. You’ll try to make your creation next year even better. And you’ll do so, using your previous experience and feelings. That means that by creating the first time, you gained experience, knowledge and sensations that enable you to create something more perfected. And that means that your creation itself is instructing you. “Creation in divine, living nature perfects the creator. “And there is no end in sight to the heights such great creation can reachthere is eternity.” “I really want to live in a marvelous world like that, where everything can be perfected eternally, where the creator will perfect his creations and the creations will perfect their creator. I want my papa and mama, my brothers and Grandfather Wood and our entire family line to live in that world.” Anasta smiled, and her eyes shone. “I must stop the glacier. How do I do it? How?” “Human thought is the most powerful energy of the Universe. There is no limit to its potential. It’s important to learn to use it properly. But how to do this, using what means - that is unknown. Only Man has the power to make this great discovery.” “Most likely, my thought is still quite small and not powerful,” Anasta said sadly, sighing. “I want the glacier to stop, but it’s coming closer and closer, and it’s growing colder and colder every day. That means my thought is small. “If Dun the mammoth knew how to think about the glacier... He has a big head, and that means the thought in it might be big and powerful.” Anasta ran up to the mammoth and, slapping her palm against the trunk he extended to her in greeting, she said, excited: “You’re so big, Dun, and you have a big head. That means it might contain a

big thought. Think your thought, Dun. Stop the glacier. Because otherwise all you do is listen and listen. At the very least, take a walk over to the pasture, Dun - there’s less and less food for you all the time there.” Dun the mammoth stroked the little girl’s cheek and hair with the tip of his trank, slowly turned around and began walking off. The cat nicknamed Kitten took a running start, sprang onto the mammoth’s leg and, latching onto his fur, scrambled up onto his back. “Anastochka, it’s time for you and your charges to flee this place,” the lighthaired youth said, addressing the little girl. “There’s already ice on the other side of that mountain there. That isn’t even the main glacier yet, but even it can move the mountain that covers the valley, and carry away the gardens and homes where your family line lived. And it’s causing the temperature to fall with every day. The main glacier will press against this ice and the mountain will slowly begin moving. This will happen a few days from now.” “I will not flee this place. I have to see it, this ice, and understand why it’s advancing onto our Land. I have to think up a way to stop the glacier. Tomorrow morning I’ 11 go up on that mountain and I’ll see it.” Bowing to the little girl and taking his leave of her, the light-haired youth said, “I wish you auspicious and sharp thoughts, Anastochka.” And he addressed his brother, saying, “Let us go, Brother, and remove ourselves from the little girl’s sight. Let’s not bother her. Perhaps she’ll be able to understand and will learn how to control her thought.” “Come on then, let’s go. Of the two of us, you’ re the main hindrance. You got all carried away here, philosophizing and going on and on.” “Oh, wait! Please wait!” Anasta suddenly said, starting. “Each of you told about his program. That means I must also have a program, but I’ve never ever thought about it. Could it be I don’t have one in me?” “We’re getting out of your sight, little girl. You get busy thinking. Don’t slack off. You’ve hardly got any time at all left, only two sunrises,” said Dark-haired, without answering the question. And the youths left. WHO CONTROLS OUR THOUGHTS? Anasta was left totally alone. Slowly, she set off walking along the wilted grass of the valley where her family line had so very recently lived, and in the absolute silence that had fallen, she tried to comprehend how she could control her own thought. If thought was the strongest energy, the little girl reflected, then what could

possibly control it, this strongest thing? If this energy-thought exists within me, then what within me could be stronger than it? And why did the most wise elders teach us everything at the gatherings, but say nothing about how you can control your thought? Perhaps they didn’t know anything about this either? The strongest energy remains uncontrolled. First it heads off in one direction, then in another. Even though it’s inside me, all the same it’s also not mine, if I don’t control it in any way. And maybe someone will manage to lure it over to them and play with it, and since it’s inside me, then they’re playing some kind of game with me, too, but I won’t even know about it. All the way up until dusk, Anasta made efforts to reflect on the power of thought. And when she lay down to sleep, she made an intense effort to think about it. When she woke up in the morning, Anasta did not see Dun the mammoth next to her little home the way she usually did. He used to always be right there as soon as she woke up, but now he wasn’t there. Dun still hadn’t shown up by the time Anasta had bathed in the creek, either. She began calling him, shouting in the direction of the pasture, “Dun! Dun!” But, just as before, he didn’t show up. Kitten hadn’t been next to her that night, either, and he also didn’t show up in the morning. Anasta realized they had left. A mammoth needs a lot of vegetation to eat, and there was less and less of it all the time. That meant Dun had left so he wouldn’t die a senseless death, from starvation. And Kitten had gone off with him, too. “But I won’t leave,” Anasta thought. Tossing a coverlet woven from grass bast around her little shoulders, she resolutely set off for the mountain beyond which the glacier was advancing on the world. Wending her way up the path toward the mountaintop, Anasta once again made an intense effort to comprehend how this strongest energy - human thought - worked. What did she need to do in order to stop the glacier? When she’d reached the mountaintop, she stood on its peak, wrapping herself in her shawl in the wind. Harsh, bitterly cold air currents tousled her hair, now uncovering the star-shaped birthmark on her forehead, now covering it over again. But the little girl didn’t notice the cold air currents. She was taking in what was going on down below, on the far side of the mountain, whose foothills no longer sported any verdure. From horizon to horizon, as far as the eye could see, there lay ice. Blocks of ice were heading for the mountain. They were huge, and this wasn’t even the main glacier, but merely the first ice cakes that the more powerful ones were pushing along. That meant the mountain didn’t stand a chance against the giant masses, Anasta was thinking.

One side of the mountain had already grown cold, and there was no vegetation on it, and the second one would grow cold as well. As if confirming her words, the sound of cracking ice was heard, and a stream of water mixed with ice chips rushed out from beneath the ice, and the ice blocks traveled along the slush, coming closer and closer to the mountain, plowing up the earth before them and pushing along the felled trees. Anasta directed her gaze to the tallest block of ice and started at what she saw. There stood Dun the mammoth, his head pressed against this giant mountain of ice. Alongside the giant mass of ice, he no longer seemed so big. Anasta instantly recalled how attentively Dun had listened to her words about the power of thought that is capable of a great deal. She recalled telling him that probably there must be big and powerful thoughts in his big head. And he had understood all of that in his own way. He’d figured that if he were to put his big head with its big thought up against the ice block, then he’d be able to stop it from moving. Anasta raced from her spot and ran headlong along the path to the foothill of the mountain, to the spot where Dun the mammoth was standing. The wind, with its biting snowflakes, tore off the little girl’s scarf in a violent gust, but she didn’t pick it up. She jumped forward onto a rock, stumbled and rolled down, head over heels. And then she got up once more and set off running. When she’d gotten to Dun’s legs, she saw... A small depression had formed in the ice, beneath the mammoth’s head. The ice there had melted a tiny bit, and water was running down the mammoth’s trunk in thin streams. The mammoth was trembling from the cold. And down below, at his feet, Anasta saw that Kitten was trembling from the cold. He, his head pressed against the ice like Dun, was attempting to hold back the glacier’s movement. “He-e-ey,” Anasta shouted. “He-e-ey!” But neither the mammoth nor the cat responded to her shout. The little girl scooped up Kitten, who was trembling from the cold, and, cuddling him, began rubbing his little body. When he’d gotten warmed up a little, Anasta made him scramble up on the mammoth’s back. Kitten tried with all his strength to do it, but he fell. He was only able to make it up on top on his second attempt. Anasta stood up on the rock so she’d be as close as possible to the mammoth’s ear, and she whispered to him:

“Dun! My faithful Dun. You are very smart and loyal. You are kind. You know how to think - maybe not entirely correctly, but we’ll fix that. Thought isn’t just in the head - it’s everywhere. Dun, you should go to the other side of the mountain.” The mammoth stood there without moving. Only now and then a shudder would run through his body. And Anasta began whispering once more: “I am Anasta! Do you hear me, Dun? I am Anasta. I won’t leave here without you. Turn and look at me, Dun.” Dun the mammoth slowly pulled his head back from the block and turned it to the little girl. The thick fur on his forehead was wet, and he had a hard time raising his eyelids and looking at the little girl. Then, he made an effort and raised his trunk and touched its tip to Anasta’s shoulder. His trunk was totally cold. Anasta took it in her hands began rubbing it and blowing on it, as if by doing so she could warm the mammoth’s huge body. And she did actually warm it, not only with the warmth of her breath, but with something warmer and more meaningful as well. And the mammoth obeyed and followed Anasta, who led him by his trunk, as if she were leading him by the hand. Barely putting one foot in front of the other, Dun ascended to the mountaintop. There the exhausted little girl sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and, pointing to a slope that still remained green, ordered the mammoth to make his way down. “Dun, go down there. Go to your pasture. You’ll rest up there and get your strength back. And you’ll find some food for yourself there, too.” And she added, sternly, “Go, Dun, go down there.” The mammoth obeyed and began slowly making his way down along the path to the still green valley. When he’d taken ten or so steps, he turned to Anasta, extended his trunk upward and trumpeted out a summons, the way he’d done when Anasta had run through the valley, asking her Motherland not to give in to the glacier, when she had shouted out her “He-e-ey!” and conquered the silence. And just like she’d done then, Anasta summoned her strength and shouted out, “He-e-ey!” and waved to Dun as a sendoff for him on his downhill path. And Dun the mammoth made his way slowly down off the mountain, carrying out his mistress’ order. But she... After a brief rest, Anasta stood up atop the rock and once again cast her gaze over the giant ice masses that had filled the space before her as far as the eye could see, and quietly, but confidently, she uttered the words: “I am a person! My thought is powerful. I am directing my thought against you, glacier. You must stop and crawl back where you came from. With my thought I command you to do so.” Down below, the sound of a crack was heard once more, and the ice moved

a tiny bit closer to the mountain. A gust of cold air hit the little girl in the chest, as if trying to knock her off her feet. “Go back, ice! I command you! Back!” Once again a crack, and once again the glacier advanced toward the little girl. Anasta said nothing for a short time, gazing at the advancing glacier, and suddenly she smiled. “I get it. You are feeding on my thought, glacier. I get it. But now you will cease to exist.” Anasta turned her back on the glacier, sat down on a tree trank and began looking at her still green valley. But Anasta did not see flowers and grasses that were withering from the cold. Rather, she was imagining the meadows blooming in vibrant color, imagining that snow-white and pink flowers were coming out on the trees, that birds were singing and grasshoppers were chirring in the grass. Imagining Great-grandfather Wood returning to the valley and the entire family line returning along with him. And Anasta was running toward him barefoot through the grass. More and more quickly all the time... Anasta’s thought was speeding up more and more. She had enough time! In the space of a moment, she tenderly stroked a billion blades of grass. And she was able to imagine each one separately, from its root up to its little stem. She was able to send a little ray of sun to each one. Give each one a little drop of rain to drink and caress it with a breeze. Anasta fell asleep on the rocks near the trunk of a fallen tree. A cold wind blew against her back. But even as the little girl was falling asleep, her thought was at work and speeding up more and more. Hurtling lightning bolts coming from her thought touched everything in the space. Creation awoke. And the new was bom in the space, as if Anasta’s entire Motherland had risen from a deep sleep. The thought kept working, even when the little girl Anasta fell into a sleep that would last thousands of years. Her thought - the great human energy - lingered above the valley, caressing the bugs and the blades of grass, Kitten and Dun the mammoth. The ice blocks shuddered and cracked, but they could move forward any further, not even a millimeter. They were melting. Streams of melted ice skirted the valley and flowed into rivers and lakes. The glacier was melting, powerless to overcome human thought, the strongest energy of the Universe. WHAT WILL THESE PEOPLE COME TO?

Torrents of water from the melting glacier formed a large river. Its raging current swept up rocks and fallen trees as it went. It washed off and carried away the fertile topsoil, along with the vegetation and everything living in it. But the family valley that people had been forced to abandon was left untouched by the fearsome stream. The foliage on the trees in the valley yellowed and fell off, and there was no singing of birds to be heard. But some number of the plants continued fighting for their lives, adapting to the cooling that was unusual for these parts. And, amazingly enough, Anasta’s favorite flower still remained in her once very lovely flower bed. The valley was shielded by the ridge of mountains, atop one of which the little girl Anasta had fallen into a sleep that would last thousands of years. Two athletic youths, one light-haired and one dark-haired, stood at the foot of the mountain. They were looking at a huge block of granite that extended out over the ground. Drops of water were forcing their way along both sides. The dark-haired youth spoke with joyful Schadenfreude: “That’s what they get, these people who’ve lost their sense. Little by little, some time in the next two days, the water will gradually wash away the support around the rock, and it will collapse, opening up a path for the death-dealing torrent to make its way into the valley. The water will rush like a powerful waterfall, tearing off and carrying the mountain rocks away with it, and little by little it will erode the entire mountain and carry it away. Once the torrent that’s coming in on the right of the mountain has thrown this giant rock aside, it will msh into the crevice that forms, making it larger and larger, and it will change direction.” “Yes, if this block collapses in the next two days, before the torrent reaches the sloping lands beyond the valley and floods it, thereby lessening the water pressure, then it will rush with all its strength into Anastochka’s family valley,” the light-haired youth agreed. And he added, “Now I regret having taken form in a human body. Right now we need an animal with a powerful body, to prop up this block.” “Ha, ha, he regrets he’s not a powerful animal! Sure, you could have adopted its appearance, but then you would have had to resemble it, too. You wouldn’t have been able to speak like a human and realize that the block will soon be carried away by the torrent. “Yep, what are you jabbering on and on about, with your ‘family valley’ and your ‘ Anastochka’... It’s all the same to her now. Her Soul is soaring in the immense Universe.” “Soaring. Yes...” Light-haired said, thoughtfully and tenderly. “The thought

has been carefully preserved in it, and the dream. Awareness, great knowledge. All the same, she really did manage to stop the glacier. The Daughter of God grasped the power of human thought through her feelings. She altered God’s plan a tiny bit.” “Exactly - a tiny bit! And how much slobbery tenderness is there in your words? Just a tiny bit, I might add. A tiny bit. And you? ‘ She grasped it through her feelings’ and ‘Daughter of God’...” Dark-haired said, mockingly mimicking him. Speaking with abandon, he went on. “The raging torrent will rush into the valley anyway. It’s rushing after the crowd of idiots who don’t even suspect that they themselves - and their thoughts and actions that drew them away from the natural and toward the artificial - are the cause of the disaster. For now, their aspirations are still in the beginning stages, but we know how destmctive these aspirations are for them, and for the Earth and for the whole Universe. And so that they don’t suffer, and so that they don’t tear the surface of the Earth to bits, they will be destroyed - in accord with God’s program - at the very beginning stages of the disastrous aspiration. The raging torrent will overcome them. A huge, roaring tidal wave of water, rocks, fallen tree trunks and corpses of the formerly living will make its way unforgivingly toward them. “At first, when they hear the rumbling behind them, they’ll feel something is wrong and pick up their pace. But the rumbling will grow, and off in the distance they’ 11 see a huge wall moving toward them, bringing death. For them it will signify the Flood. They will all be gripped by terror - their mammoth-elephants, their kittens, their children and their old folk. And their Souls will fly up into the Universe, retaining within them only the horrors.” With a kind of venomous passion Dark-haired began using facial expressions and gestures to portray these people who had been gripped by terror. Mothers, pressing their infants to their breast, people who had knelt down with their hands stretched out to the heavens, feverishly praying for mercy. Others, running with their last ounce of strength and shouting. Darkhaired began running around in a circle, wailing, showing terror on his face. Then he stopped, glancing in the direction of the people who were leaving, and said: “My pale-faced brother, do you get it? Do you get what kind of unavoidable destiny will overcome these people? And so, that little girlie, asleep on the mountain, didn’t change God’s program in any substantial way.” “The way you’ve modeled the human future is not to my liking, Brother. We, Universal entities, can probably take some action. It’s not our business to remain indifferent. When we’re indifferent, then we do not exist.” “What does the future care about your ‘to my liking’, ‘not to my liking’, if

it’s unavoidable?” Dark-haired sneered. Without waiting to hear his brother’s answer, he turned sharply and saw... His light-haired brother had gone to stand beneath the granite block and all on his own, with his shoulders and arms, propped it up. The stream of water flowing along the edges of the block became significantly smaller. “Idiotic, senseless and irrational,” Dark-haired said after a brief pause. Then he was silent a bit longer, as if deliberating about something, and then he began shaming his brother with new-found strength, attempting to prove the senselessness of his actions: “There’s no one here, and thus, there’s no one to laugh at your total idiocy. Before you went to stand under that granite block, you didn’t even take the time to calculate how much it weighs. The water’s still oozing through, and the supports holding the granite up are eroding, and that means more and more weight will be pressing down on you. Do you understand that, you pale-faced idiot?” “By force of my will, I will condense to the density of the granite, and I’ll be able to hold my ground. I only need hold out for two days. I’ll hold out!” said the light-haired athlete. “Right! ‘I’ll hold out,’ ‘I’ll condense,’... Well, go on, then, condense away, to the density of the granite. But what’s your load-bearing surface area? Your load-bearing surface area is the size of the soles of your two feet. And along toward the middle of the second day, the whole burden will come to rest upon you, and you’ll sink into the ground like some kind of granite stake, shoving the smaller rubble off to the sides. As soon as you sink in up to your knees, the torrent of water will shove the block aside.” “I’ll straighten my arms out. Then I’ll be able to to hold out half a day more.” “Yes, of course, you’ll hold out. Only not for half a day. You’ll hold out, maybe for an hour more, you clueless blockhead. Then there’ll be a landslide. For all of eternity, since the moment of creation, never once has God’s program experienced a glitch. And I am in agreement with it. Given that mankind is stepping onto an absurd path of development, it’s better to put them down at the beginning of their path. Maybe a new civilization on Earth will comprehend its life’s purpose and then we’ll comprehend. The Universe will see new deeds, not today’s primitivism. Numerous times, the earth has experienced disasters that have washed away the filth that Man accumulated. “Who is it you want to save? Mankind, which with its very own hands will, in the future, create a living hell for itself and everything living on Earth? Do I need to remind you where the technocratic path will drag them off to in the future? Should I remind you? Why don’t you say something? Ah,

excellent! You’re condensing and petrifying. Are you already having a hard time talking? Don’t talk, then. Excellent! Stand there like a stone idol and look. Look at the pictures of the future life of the people you’re trying to save. I’ve always admired them. There’s the most unenlightened folly, absurdity and vanity in them. But you don’t like looking at them, these pictures. Go on and look now, my pale-faced, petrifying, motionless one. Look! But no, first listen and hear what you don’t want to hear. “If those who have left the valley aren’t destroyed, they’ll follow their technocratic path. They’ll multiply, and from one generation to the next, they’ll break, destroy and remold the great earthly harmony. And they’ll kill animals. Animals who are meant to serve them. They’ll construct a multitude of various soulless devices out of completely living material. They’ll start referring to their actions using the resonant words ‘industrialization,’ ‘scientific and technical progress,’ and they’ll invest these words with the implication of intelligent development. “Well, and what kind of development? Do they possess rationality? Are they developing in a rational way? Like crazy folk, they will destroy unsurpassed creations and call their own barbaric actions ‘progress.’ They are ill! A virus has taken up residence in their minds. And the epidemic will smite all of mankind. This virus is more terrible than the complete annihilation of everything on earth. It threatens the entire Universe. It is called... Have you already guess what word I’m going to utter now? More than once you’ve beseeched me not to repeat it and have turned away from me and hurried to walk off, away from me, but now you won’t turn away, you won’t walk of. What will strike this whole human civilization is... anti-rationality. “Struckby this anti-rationality, mankind will enter into the virus’ dimension. It will begin performing deeds unsurpassed in their idiocy and villainy, cloaking them in the words ‘progress,’ ‘advanced,’ ‘moral,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘spiritual’ when they speak to each other. Now that’s some kind of development, right? “No, I can’t get by without a visual here! Now, take a look.” The dark-haired youth traced a square in the air with his hand, and a hologram immediately appeared inside it. The hologram showed a twelve-story building being built. Two cranes were raising building materials up to the already complete stories. People in orange hardhats and blue coveralls who were busy doing the finishing work on the dwellings could be seen through the window openings. The dark-haired youth commented: “This incomprehensible thing here with a great number of cells - they’re

going to call that a ‘home.’ Anti-rationality is turning people into antipeople. They have distorted the concept and the meaning behind the words ‘my home.’ “They’ve replaced the home - a living space formed by a person’s thought, and reflecting his thought capacity - with an artificial, stone cell. And they’ve called it a ‘home,’ as some kind of travesty of Rationality. The Universe is not in need of their limited thought. It is becoming a breeding ground for anti-rationality and develops and strengthens its might. And this breeding ground is growing larger and larger.” The hologram stretched out from horizon to horizon, showing the building of a multitude of little boxes with artificial, stone cells. Some of them were collapsing, but the people in the orange hardhats were erecting new, even taller stone structures with a multitude of cells in their place. Dark-haired continued: “To gain the right to live in these cells, they will have to perform deeds that aren’t proper for a rational being - Man! Children of God! Goddesses! Take a look, my pale-faced brother, take a look at these deeds.” The dark-haired youth waved his hand once more, and a square with a hologram appeared once again. This time it showed a huge grocery store. A great many people were gathering all manner of items to purchase, placing them into metal baskets and walking up to one of the cash registers arranged in a row, to pay for the goods they’d chosen. “These are the beings from the stone cells. Every day they engage in various deeds that are worthless in terms of rationality, and they call their deeds ‘work.’ For their work they receive slips of paper that they call ‘money.’ Here you see them exchanging the money they’ve received for food. “In the beginning, God created everything so that all a rational person had to do was stretch out his hand and take the Divine creation that was to his liking and enjoy consuming it, thereby increasing the energy inside him and satisfying his body. But these beings have altered their way of life so much that there’s none of God’s food around them. The food they acquire in exchange for the slips of paper does not possess Divine energy. The beings who have created this way of life cannot be called rational. Their way of life is the result of anti-rationality.” The picture in the square changed, and now it was showing a close-up of a female cashier. One after another, people would come up to her cash register and lay out this or that kind of packages, boxes, cans and bottles on a little table in front of the woman. Smiling, the woman would say, “Hello,” to each of them. She’d take the packages, pass them over some kind of little

pane of glass, after which numerals representing the product’s price would light up on the cash register. The cashier would take some money from the person and say to him, smiling again, “Thank you for your purchase. Come visit us again.” And now there was a close-up in the square, showing the woman’s face at the moment when she turned away from the people who were standing in line and bent down to the floor to pick up a bag that had fallen. She turned away from the people standing before her for only a few seconds, and some kind of sad and doomed expression appeared on her face. Her eyelids began to close a bit, betraying an incredible weariness. The woman picked the bag up with one hand and pressed the other to her side, wincing in pain. All of this lasted just a very short time. When she turned back to the people, there was a smile on her face once more, and once more she said to each one, “Hello. Thank you for your purchase. Come visit us again.” The dark-haired youth commented: “You see, my brother? Before you is a being you call a goddess. She sits behind a register made up of a multitude of little screws and circuits, and she herself is less perfected than those little screws. The register has no soul and no rationality. It just acts in accord with its prescribed program. Now this being sits behind it twelve hours a day, tapping away at its keys and saying thank you to every person. What’s this being thanking each person who comes up for? For nothing - it is simply a robot. It should have rationality, but it sits and taps away at the keys of some register for twelve hours at a time. It will do that for half of its life, so that it can finally end up in a stone cell. “Rationality wouldn’t have allowed something like that to take place, so that means that the anti-rationality virus is at work in her, that this woman is not a person, but an anti-person, and that she is located in the dimension of antirationality. Her internal organs have been petrified, she does not receive normal food, and the blood in her veins is solidifying and stagnating because she has to sit for twelve hours at a time. She looks older than her years. Look! This is the way she should look at her age, if she were in the dimension of Rationality, if she were a person. Now I’ll show her in the natural dimension at this same time. Look!” A new hologram in the square showed a slender, blond beauty running along the side of a brook toward a naked little boy, her son. The beauty ran up to him, scooped him up in her arms and spun around, bursting into happy laughter. The two women, living in different dimensions bore little resemblance to each other.

The supermarket cashier sitting at the register appeared in the square once more. “This is just one little isolated instance,” Dark-haired said. “Would you say it’s totally uncharacteristic of all mankind? Take a look.” Next he spread his arms out, and the picture in the square spread out from horizon to horizon, and a picture appeared: hundreds of thousands of people were sitting behind various registers in tightly packed rows, tapping away at the keys. They were varied, these people. Very young girls and elderly women, and there were some men, too. Then a picture appeared in space hundreds of thousands of hands were tapping away incessantly at the registers’ keys. In the comer of the boundless screen the sun appeared, then the moon replaced it, then the sun appeared again, replacing a half moon. The daytime and nighttime luminaries measured off the days and months and years, like a clock. But the people who had filled the entire space from horizon to horizon, kept on tapping away at the keys of their registers, repeating, as if they were robots, “Hello, thank you for your purchase. Come visit us again.” “Look, my brother. Take a look. Now it will get even more interesting. Take a look at mankind’s future.” A hologram appeared in space, showing a close up of a person running with a sword in his hands, his face distorted by rage. It was replaced by a picture of a person lying on the ground in the mud, spraying machine gunfire. Then three people appeared who were shooting a cannon. And the entire space suddenly filled up with a multitude of people. They were shown as very tiny, so that more of them would fit into the space. With swords, pitchforks, scythes, machine guns and cannons, the people were cutting each other down and shooting at each other. They were strangling each other with their hands and kicking them with their feet. From up above, flying machines were dropping objects down onto the ground that was teeming with a mass of people. Upon reaching the ground, the objects would explode, sending up clumps of mud and the remains of human bodies. “Did rational beings create this mess, my brother? And they’re anti-rational because they’ve taken into their heads to justify this, too. They’ll call this mess ‘war.’ They’ll give various decorations to those who excel in this slaughter, and the ones who receive these medals will proudly wear them on their chest. They’ll learn to pass laws that justify this slaughter that will go on for centuries without ceasing.” Dark-haired waved his hands once more, and a hologram appeared in the space once more, divided into a great many squares. Each square showed the interior of various halls where people were sitting and listening to people

speaking from rostrums. “They have different names for this: a Congress, Parliament, Duma, or a House, but they’re all essentially the same thing. “Do you see the people sitting their, my brother? You can still see, so take a look. The people sitting before you are writing laws for various peoples and, if you lump them all together, for all mankind. They’ve been writing them for millennia, but there are no perfected laws - nor can there be. Do you get that, my brother? Of course, you get it!” Dark-haired roared with laughter. His spiteful laughter filled the valley, and its echo bounced off the ridge of mountain. He stopped laughing and, turning to the pictures with the people sitting in them, shouted, as if they could hear and understand him: “You’ll never be able to write perfected laws because you don’t know the most important thing. You don’t know the life’s purpose of each separate man and of mankind as a whole. This life’s purpose - the Universal life’s purpose - has been expressed in just four words. It is the foundation of all laws. It and only it, can string all the Earth’s laws onto itself, like beads onto a thread, or repulse them. But you don’t know what it is - you’ve forgotten it. “Do you get it, my brother? They’ve forgotten the most important thing, and now they’re in the dimension of anti-rationality. They’ve forgotten that their life’s purpose has been laid out in four words. What words are those? Do you want me to utter them, my brother? You do! Of course you do, very much. You’re always uttering them, in the hope that they’ 11 hear you and understand. You utter them, but they don’t hear. They don’t hear because they’re located in the dimension of anti-rationality, and if I utter them, if you and I utter them together, they’ll hear. They’ll start to take action, and they’ll become people. But I won’t utter them. “Let them deliberate until the next worldwide disaster, which will be unprecedented in scale and strength. It will approach inexorably, and they will be powerless to use their laws to stop it from approaching. These beings know of the approaching disaster. They even know why it will occur, and they can’t manage to change their way of life. They can’t manage at all. If you look at them, they still resemble people, but only on the outside. They themselves - just think about it, my brother - for centuries, they themselves have been inventing various mechanical substitutes for human capabilities. Just look what they’re turning into.” A hologram appeared in space. The right side showed the handsome, wellproportioned body of a youth, clad only in a loincloth, while the left side showed a girl in a short little grass skirt. Between them was a circle filled

with a great many small, multicolored circles. “In the circle I’m showing the capabilities with which each man was endowed inherently. They were capable of much...” Night replaced day in the hologram. The young man glanced up at the heavens and said, “Today in the heavens above me, nine billion, eighty two stars can be seen.” “My love,” the girl said, replying to the youth, “right now in the heavens above you, nine billion eighty three stars can be seen. There’s one you didn’t notice. It’s not at all bright. I will wait for you on it. We will create a space of love on it, and it will begin to shine with a bright blue light. For the time being, our star is barely noticeable.” “Yes, they were capable of much,” Dark-haired commented. “Their initial capabilities enabled them to create everything you can imagine. And even things you can’t. But once they start inventing mechanical, non-rational capability substitutes, they’ll begin losing their God-given talents.” Calculating devices appeared one after another and then disappeared, and as each of the instruments appeared, several of the little circles decreased in size, some of them actually turning into black dots. “They used to be capable of counting all the stars by glancing at the sky for just an instant, but they’ll get to the point in their inventions that they’ll be calculating ‘two plus two’ on calculators. “They’ll invent the telephone and will begin losing the ability to communicate over distance and imagine their loved ones’ whereabouts. “In the end, they’ll begin implanting artificial devices into their bodies,” Dark-haired went on, “and they themselves will turn more and more into a primitive, soulless device. It will be impossible to call them ‘people.’ Their rationality is stuffed down somewhere deep inside. Anti-rationality dominates them. It is simultaneously around them and within them. Take a look, my brother - now you’ll see my final little picture.” Dark-haired waved his hand, and on the screen, in the steaming air, hovering in the air, was a folded-out map of the Earth - that part of it where people lived very densely in the cities. And in each city, the stout tentacles of some monstrously large being were wending their way between the large concentrations of people, weaving in and out and shuddering. They were great in number. They encircled the cities and were also located inside them. Some kind of foul-smelling, dark-colored gas was being emitted from the great number of pores on each tentacle. But the people weren’t shrinking back from these terrifying emissions - they were breathing them. The people were building their homes close to the tentacles. From time to time, first in one spot and then in another, the reeking tentacles would burst, seemingly due to great pressure, and the people would msh to patch and smooth out

these blow-outs, so as to restore the monstrous octopus’ vital functions. “My brother, do you see the tentacles of the monstrous octopus? Perhaps you want me to show you the body of the monster that has covered the world with its tentacles? Naturally, you don’t even want to think and speak about this. But I’ll tell you right where this death-dealing body is located. I’ll tell you where the tentacles are coming from. They’re coming from the brains of these beings who used to be considered rational people. The monster’s body is inside their brains - that’s where they’re all coming from. And they are proud of their death-dealing progeny - they cherish it. They call the monstrous tentacles ‘roads’ and ‘highways.’” Dark-haired roared with laughter. “There you have it - the future of mankind! And you want to save to save those who are heading for the dimension of anti-rationality? You want to save them for that fate?” Dark-haired asked, turning to his brother who was holding the block of granite back, keeping it from falling. It wasn’t just little drops of water that were seeping around the block of granite any more - now the water was flowing around it in thin streams. The body of the light-haired youth supporting the block of granite was petrifying ever more intensely. Even his facial muscles had hardened, and he could neither speak nor blink. Only his blue eyes, still alive, were looking at the pictures of mankind’s future. The dark-haired youth stuck his palm beneath a stream of the water that was running off and said, his voice full of venom: “There’s precious little time left before the flood. Maybe I’d have time to say three or four more phrases to you, my brother, but I’m not going to say anything. Most likely you can’t hear me any more.” The dark-haired youth spread his arms out to the sides then bent his elbows, amusing himself with his athletic muscles, then shook his head, tossing his black locks of hair back. He spent a bit more time observing the streams of water flowing around the block of granite his brother was propping up, watching them grow stronger. Then he said: “It’s time for me to be going. It’s time. Now what has been preordained to come to pass shall come to pass. But... it shall not come to pass.” The dark-haired athlete strode up to the bock of granite and, taking his place alongside his light-haired brother, propped up the block of granite with his own shoulders and arms. The muscles of the athletic body tensed, and the veins stood out, but the dark-haired athlete slowly straightened out his slightly bent knees and raised the granite a bit. The water stopped seeping around the edges of the block only a few drops were still rolling off it.

The Universal opposites united in one for a short time, having changed God’s program. God’s program... Perhaps by uniting, they had opened up new possibilities for the program? After a short time, the raging, shattering torrent reached the plains, and the danger that Anasta’s family valley would be flooded passed - and along with it, the danger that the people who had left the valley would perish. The light-haired youth’s petrification began to gradually pass, a smile came to his face, and he regained his ability to speak. “Thank you, Brother,” Light-haired said, albeit it still with difficulty. “Only I don’t need any of your ‘thank yous.’ This disaster that was predestined for people, it’s passed. Now they’ll go even further along in their absurd worldview. They’ll stubbornly constmctthe anti-world. There will be more of them, and there will be a new disaster, on a bigger scale.” “There won’t be one, Brother. Maybe it’ll happen just an instant before any disaster happens, but the Soul particles, and feelings and knowledge that the little girl Anasta dissolved in the space will awaken within people’s hearts. And a great many women and men will stop the unprecedented disaster with their thoughts. And people living in the dimension of anti-rationality will suddenly see the light. They’ 11 begin to build a new world on Earth, never before seen by anyone. “They, the ones who have simultaneously experienced both anti-rationality and Rationality, will unite what is opposite within themselves, in harmony. And they will bring to life the Divine impulse of His dream in matter and spirit. Not simply will they bring it to life. To it they will add their dream's perfection." Anastasia fell silent. And I was silent, too, as I tried to make sense of what had been said and seen. Only after an hour or two did I ask her a question. COMING FACE TO FACE WITH OUR PRIMEVAL IMAGE “Anastasia, everything you showed me and told me about the dark-haired and light-haired youths and about the little girl Anasta - did all of that exist in reality, or only in your imagination?” “You can choose your own answer to that question yourself, Vladimir.” “What do you mean, I can choose it myself? You’re the only one who can say for certain whether it actually happened or whether you imagined it.” “Tell me, Vladimir, did any new information appear to you from my story?” “I sure did. Of course, I did. Information and images... I’ll say!” “So that means the information exists?”

“Yes, it exists. I need to analyze it, make sense of it. And I have questions.” “If information appeared, then it follows that its source also exists.” “Of course. There has to be a source.” “Information is an image. An image is information. If someone decides he wants to erase information within you, he’ll try to prove to you that the image doesn’t exist in reality. And as soon as you agree with the image’s lack of reality, then you yourself erase the information you’ve taken in from the image.” “Well, but if this or that image was created by a person, then who’s the information coming from in that case?” “From the image.” “Why from the image, if some specific person created it?” “If a child was bom to you, Vladimir, a child who imparted new information to all people - including to you, too - then who is the source of the new information?” “The child, of course. But an image - now, an image isn’t a child who has a material body. An image can be non-material, too.” “So, does that mean the difference lies only in that in the first case you can see a material body, but in the second you can’t?” “Maybe that’s not quite it. It’s just that when there’s a body, it looks more familiar somehow, more credible.” “A body you can see bears no definitive evidence. And what’s more, it can lead you astray.” “Now that’s true. It sure can! There’s even an article in the criminal code called ‘fraud.’ That’s when a criminal - who has a body - deceives someone for his own personal gain. I think I’ve got everything, Anastasia. If information appears, and what’s more, if it comes from an image, then all of that exists - you can’t deny it - and we need to analyze the information we’ve received. But when we get caught up in thinking about it - ‘does it exist or doesn’t it exist’ - then we’re wasting time and depriving ourselves of the information we’ve gained.” “Yes, you’ve understood correctly, Vladimir.” “There’s just one thing I don’t get. If every person can think up an image, and the image begins to exist, then how much information do we have to sift through in order to come up with what’s genuine?” “Not much at all. Certainly, every person can think up an image, but people

will not accept every image with their whole heart and soul, not at all.” “Well, yes, of course. Not every image. Really, thank you, Anastasia. It’s interesting what you have to say about the image. Tell me something else about the image. What’s your opinion - what is it?” “Man himself is, in fact, an image that has taken material form, and since he is a materialized image, man himself can use his thought to create and can materialize images. This is where his Universal power, a power unsurpassed by no one and no thing, lies. “If this or that person doesn’t recognize the capabilities within him that have been given him by the Creator, then that person himself blocks his lofty power and falls under the influence of other images and materializes their thoughts, until finally he destroys himself, his family, his family line, his state and the whole planet. “The artificial, technocratic world was also created by Man using the energy of an image suggested to Man by his antipodes. The technocratic world is fragile and transitory. Even the most advanced car, building or any other object of the artificial world disintegrates with each second and within but a few years turns to dust or, worse still, into waste products harmful for Man. “Man himself, by living in the artificial world, becomes fragile and transitory as well. For it is hard for a person who spends each minute looking at a multitude of disintegrating objects that lack autogenic capability, to imagine eternal life, create the image of his own eternity and materialize it. “The natural world that is visible to us has existed not for billions of years, but for significantly longer, for at the beginning it already existed within an as yet non-materialized image. The scientists who determined the Earth’s age calculated not the date of its birth, but merely the date of its materialization, as one of the stages of its life. “The natural world possesses the capability for autogenesis, and this capability renders it eternal. The Creator, who created eternity, is himself the very same. He is Alpha and Omega, and Alpha once more. “A great many people might say or think, ‘What was there before the birth of the Creator and of His extraordinary, multitudinous energies?’ At one time nothing existed. Nothing! But recall what the Creator said about ‘nothing’ to His son: ‘Out of nothing will arise the beautiful new birth of you and of the aspiration reflecting your soul and dream. My Son, you are infinite, eternal. Within you he your creating dreams.’ “But if out of ‘nothing’ arises something, this means that ‘nothing,’ too, takes part in the birth.

“By giving birth - out of ‘nothing’, in part - the Creator completed the circle and presented to Man the image of eternity. “The knowledge, understanding and perception of the energy of the image within him enable Man to not die, but rather to drift off into an ambrosial sleep. Upon awakening, he incarnates in the spot, time and image necessary to him and created by him before his sleep. “Gaining knowledge of the science of imagery leads to understanding the entire universe created by the Creator, and to the creation of new and beautiful worlds. “Lack of knowledge and understanding of the science of imagery leads unavoidably to unskillful interaction with the perfected, natural world, and to the creation of an artificial, primitive, unnatural world. “Lack of knowledge of the science of imagery turns entire states and peoples into puppets, into chess pieces in the hands of those who are acquainted with this great gift.” “But Anastasia, after all, images can be positive and negative. How are we supposed to figure out which of them bears useful information and which is misinforming us, perhaps for personal gain?” “Through your own self, Vladimir, and through your own image you will discern the value of any information.” “You mean every person has an image?” “Why of course, Vladimir. Every person has his own image. Each differs strikingly from the others. “Were every person to preserve his primeval image, then tell me, Vladimir, how would the world now look?” “Primeval? That means every person has - or used to have - a primeval image? What was it like?” “Divine! Such is the way our parent - the Creator - did create it in his inspired impulse.” “It - our primeval image - was it God, or what?” “It was the son of God, and so it remains.” “But where’s this primeval image of man gotten to? We can see images of drunks and dmg addicts on the streets. And images of prostitutes along the roads. And various images make fools of themselves on TV. Where can we get a glimpse of man’s primeval image?” “Within ourselves. Imagine it yourself. Go out to meet it. And joyfully will

it rush toward you. Joyful will the path be. Gradually coming nearer and nearer to each other, you will one day encounter each other. You will unite! Safeguard your primeval image. Do not give it over to others for their own delight.” “But how can I imagine it? There’s all sorts of information raining down on us about how man’s imperfect. “First they say he’s an eternal slave, then that he’s like a lab rat. One of my friends told me a while back that he read in some book somewhere that they said something like some alien beings created people and are now feeding on their energy and are training them to be imbeciles.” “Should you wish to be an imbecile, Vladimir, then go ahead and believe them. “Should you believe you’re a slave, you will give birth to a slave within you. “Should you believe that someone is feeding on your energy against your very will, you will waste away and really will give over your own energy. “Everything exists that you yourself believe to exist. “From the very moment of birth, they try to belittle the significance of Man - the son of God. But take note, Vladimir, behind this there always stands someone striving to elevate himself. He is, in actual fact, not elevated when compared to Man, and is unable to elevate himself. And only one path is left to him - to belittle the elevated one and prevent him from growing.” “Yes, Anastasia, you’re exactly right here. I somehow can’t recall even a single book or movie where man is presented as the strongest being in the Universe. It’s always the aliens that emerge as the strongest, and if the people are strong, too, then it’s always connected to some otherworldly powers. Now I understand what serious and ongoing indoctrination man is being subjected to, and of course, it’s no accident. There’s somebody who needs this very much. “If Man really were weak and didn’t possess some kind of mysterious and unknown power, then why be afraid of him? Why take such great pains to prove the opposite? “Anastasia, you’re the only one who sees man as the son of God and the strongest being in the Universe. But that means that a great many other images will come out in opposition to your explanation of what man’s image is. They have methods that have been developed over the course of millennia. “They’ve already created a great many images of powerless people.

“Plus many various teachings that belittle man. The press the world over is working for them, and the screenwriters and directors, too, and there a lot of them, really a lot. Looks like you’re on your own, Anastasia. But all the same you’re placing your hopes on something. Where are you placing them? Where, Anastasia?” “On my very own primeval image. And on your primeval image, Vladimir. On the primeval nature of those images of the people building homesteads. Those who will in the future set off to meet their true image.” “Anastasia, and they also say you don’t exist at all. And about me, they say I’m not the person I seem to be, not the way I appear in the books. Now I see that by doing what they’re doing, they’re trying to erase the information coming from your image, erase it in people. And they’re succeeding in part. There are readers, even among those who are building family homesteads, who say, hey, let’s not mention Anastasia’s name. Let’s not talk about the books and let’s not call our family homesteads family homesteads, given that someone has convinced the authorities that these names are bad. They even offer them various concessions for doing that.” “And you, Vladimir? How do you feel about suggestions of that sort?” “To tell the truth, Anastasia, even I had the thought that, given that these words are irritating to some people, maybe it would be better not to utter them. You know, so things would move along more quickly. Now I get that the process might move along on the surface, but it won’t be in quite the direction man needs. Now I get it: they don’t want us to utter the words ‘Anastasia’, ‘family homesteads’ and ‘ringing cedars of Russia’ because strong images and information immediately come up once we do. They want to deprive people of them. Am I understanding things correctly?” “Of course, Vladimir, behind each word there really does stand an image, and information. It is sometimes the case, that behind just one word there stands such a huge volume of information that it would be impossible for even a hundred volumes to reflect its image, to substitute for it.” “Well, you know, there are words that awaken different images in people. For example, the word ‘war. ’ Some people might see a liberating war behind this word, and others an invasive one.” “But nonetheless, when this word is uttered, in people’s imaginations there immediately arise a great many pictures of battles, of warring countries, of weaponry and many other things. And even if the pictures are a bit different, this is of no consequence: they are great in number, and similar, but there is but one word.” “‘Family homestead’ - can there be a great many different images behind

these words, too?” “‘Family homestead’ is a word-combination backed by the most powerful of images, images capable of settling a person in a Divine dwelling land1 2. Judge for yourself, Vladimir: the first three letters of this word-combination form the word “rod”u. “Rod” means the people who come into life one after another, and the first of these came from God. Each person bom today takes his place at the head of this great chain. It is within his power to settle his “rod” in one dwelling land or another. In a stone cell or in the beautiful space of his family homestead. Or - he can break the family chain altogether. It is within his power to nourish his family with Divine creation or with food that doesn’t bear the energy of the Soul.” “What does food have to do with anything here, Anastasia, if my family’s ancestors are long dead?” “Tiny parts of all your ancestors live on within you, Vladimir. Both your body and your spirit come from them.” “Well, sure, they come from them. But... But that means that each person bom anew bears a colossal responsibility for the fate of the entire family line.” “Yes, each one bears it, Vladimir, and each one is given the power to decide his own fate and the fate of his family line.” “I agree that we’re given that power. But the great majority of people don’t really think about their family line, and maybe their ancestors didn’t think about it, either. So does that mean the family line that stretches from the wellspring people3, from God himself, has disintegrated, fallen to pieces, that it no longer exists?” “Family homestead - please, Vladimir, think about it. Family homestead two words. One word-combination. As soon as a person utters it, then the person - who perhaps hasn’t yet even fully realized his aspiration - except subconsciously - has given voice to it: ‘I gather together my entire family line and settle it here.’” THE GATHERER OF ONE'S FAMILY LINE “A person who has established his family homestead can gather together within it the souls of people from his family line, and they will be grateful to him for this great deed. Like guardian angels, they will protect and guard the family homestead and the person who created it. Nothing in the Universe disappears without a trace; it only passes from one state into another. When a person dies and his mortal body is given over to the land, then trees and grass and flowers grow up out of it. It passes from one state into another.

But then, into what state does the main energetic complex - the human Soul - pass? “At first, it lingers, hovering at the place where the person’s body is located, and in some religions, people understand this and don’t immediately commit the person’s body to the earth. And when the person’s body does join into an embrace with the earth, when the person is buried in a cemetery, then the Soul hovers above the spot where the body has been buried. The relatives spend some period of time near the grave. The Soul, deprived of its body and so, of hearing and sight - cannot see or hear, but it can feel when people are speaking of it, or thinking of it. If they are saying good things, the Soul feels good, but if they are saying bad things, the Soul feels bad. “Then the people leave the cemetery. For a certain period of time, the Soul remains above the mound of earth where its body is buried, but it no longer feels anything, only emptiness. Modem people, caught up in the everyday bustle of life, quickly forget their deceased relatives. In modem people’s apartments, often nothing at all serves as a reminder of the deceased relatives. After a year or five or ten, basically no one remembers them any more, and the souls of the deceased end up in a complete void. And we are speaking here about the recently deceased, but you know, there are also those relatives who lived a hundred, or a thousand or a million years ago, and they all find themselves in complete oblivion. “A person who creates a family homestead can gather together his entire family line. To do this, he needs to call to mind his relative and imagine him or her, and then the Soul will give a little start. It will sense it’s being thought of, and no matter in which comer of the Universe it might be located, it will shoot off along this thought-ray to the place from which it is emanating. “A person isn’t able to remember all his relatives and continually think about them and recall them, but he can plant a small grove of trees, preferably family trees4, that live a long time. These include oaks and cedars. As he plants them, he should definitely contribute his own family thought, saying to himself: ‘I am planting this grove or alley in memory of the members of my family line. I am creating a family homestead, and may all the members of my family line who have lived in the past and who will live in the future gather together on it. ’ “As he plants each individual tree, it’s essential that he recall the name of one or another relative who has recently passed, and to imagine each of them and say a kind word about them. “A person isn’t able to recall each of his family members every minute and every hour, but the trees, which have received this information, will preserve

it within themselves every moment. The Souls of the relatives of your family line will sense this. And they’ 11 live in your homestead in the trees, the blades of grass and the flowers. The rays emanating from the trees are much weaker than those coming from people, but they are more constant. The Souls will sense this, and at first the Soul of the closest relative you’ve recalled will come to this spot, and after it comes, others will also gradually be drawn to this spot, too. “In nine years, there will grow up a grove of trees that were planted by the person, and these will be extraordinary trees. They will possess colossal, beneficial energy. No one will be able to sense this energy’s benefits - no one except the gatherer of the family line himself and his close relatives. “Imagine, Vladimir, what an extraordinary and kind thing it is that man will accomplish! He, like unto the Creator, will gather together anew his family line that had scattered through time.” “But Anastasia, you said that the Souls are an energetic complex and that when people die, some of them disintegrate into particles and give their energy to various bugs and plants and animals.” “Yes, I did say that, Vladimir. This happens when, during its life on earth, this energetic complex - the human Soul - is in disharmony with the surrounding environment to such an extent that it represents a danger to earthly existence. The Souls of the deceased preserve the complete complex when the imbalance has not yet reached a critical point. The more harmonious ones are the first to incarnate into earthly bodies. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of them all the time within the Universal space, and the program is now choosing from the best of a bad lot.” “But what if all the Souls of my family line have disintegrated into particles? Then will none of them come to the family grove I plant?” “Since you exist, Vladimir, that means that your family chain has not been broken, either.” “But what happens when a person is buried on the family homestead?” “When a person’s body is buried on the homestead he himself established, his Soul does not fly off into the Universal darkness. It remains on the family homestead, after all, it is there that the person planted trees and communed with the land. The Soul, which cannot see or hear anything, but can feel, will sense the warmth that the plants give it, and besides that, the people - this person’s descendants - will recall him more often as they come into contact with what he created.” “Anastasia, I know of one instance when the little old mother of some people I know came to their homestead to visit them. She was a little over

eighty years old. She’d just come to visit for a few days. She’d come to visit her daughter, just to see what in the world she and her husband had cooked up. Then she asked them to let her stay forever. And she stayed. She’d spend a long time sitting on a little bench. Sometimes she’d walk through the homestead’s little forest, and one day she said to her daughter and son-inlaw, ‘When I die, please don’t take me off to the cemetery. Bury me here.’ And she pointed out the spot she herself had picked out. When this elderly woman died, the daughter and son-in-law carried out her request. What will happen to this elderly woman’s Soul, if she didn’t manage to plant anything on this homestead?” “Her Soul will remain on the family homestead, even if all she did was sit on a little bench. She herself decided she wanted to be buried there. That means she was thinking about that before she died, and her relatives will visit the spot where she was laid to rest more often than they would go to a cemetery, and they will think of her more often. “You must not bury a person on a family homestead against his will, even if he has done something there. If that happens, it is essential to ask the person’s forgiveness, to go to the spot where he is buried and mentally explain to him why that was done, and ask for his help.” “Yes, Anastasia, it’s an interesting situation. But way back when, did people know about this? Did they understand it?” “Of course they knew, Vladimir. Even in the not so distant past many people had family crypts. You know about that. But in earlier periods of human existence, cemeteries didn’t exist at all. They came into existence when people appeared who had no family land at all: artisans in cities, domestics, various servants, and soldiers for hire. When they died, they needed to be buried, and so they’d carry their bodies off and toss them without their family members into the latrine pits where they’d throw sick animals. Or they’d bury them in common graves. A bit later on, when the cities grew larger and many various families lived in them, including well-to-do ones, then cemeteries began to appear. Well-to-do people would buy up small plots of land where they would bury their deceased relatives, and then other people would do the same nearby. As a result, cemeteries began to be divided up into - to put it in modem language - into upper class, middle class, and ordinary ones, for servants.” “Those kinds of cemeteries still exist today: if you want to get into Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow, you’ll need to bring a lot of money and effort to bear to get a good plot, and the plots are assigned by a special burial committee.” FOUR WORDS FROM THE UNIVERSAL LAW

“Anastasia, what about those four words from the Universal law, the words Dark-haired referred to, the ones that define the life’s purpose of each individual man and of all mankind as a whole - do you know what they are?” “Yes, Vladimir, I know these four words, those that define the common task facing mankind.” “Can you utter them for me now?” “lean.” “Then utter them.” Anastasia rose to her feet and, painstakingly speaking each word, said: “PERFECT THE DWELLING LAND.” “And that’s it?” I said, disappointed. “Yes, that’s it.” “To be perfectly honest, I thought they’d be some unusual, magic words.” “These are unusual, magic words from the Universal law. These are the most important words of all the Divine programs. With their help, it is possible to determine the degree to which both an individual person and mankind as a whole are necessary for the Universe. With their help it is possible to determine the usefulness or uselessness of the earthly laws conceived by people. “Perfect the dwelling land means perfect yourself. “All that exists within the Universe and on Earth represents through itself a united dwelling land, inseparably interconnected, and with man in the center. “Perfect the dwelling land means give birth to and raise children who are more perfected than you yourself. Each generation should be more perfected than the previous. For this to come about, the generation that comes before should present the following generation with a more perfected dwelling land. “In perfecting the dwelling land, man perfects his own thought. The perfected dwelling land quickens and refines man’s thought. “In perfecting the dwelling land, man comes to know immortality. “In perfecting the dwelling land, man turns the Earth into the most perfected planet of the Universe. “Earthly perfection permits and helps man to perfect other planets of the

Universe. “Universal perfection permits and helps man to create new worlds. “‘Where is the edge of the Universe? What will I do when I come to it? When I have filled everything with myself, when I create that which I have thought?’ a man of the wellspring people asks God. And replied to His son: “My son, The Universe is thought. A dream was bom of the thought, and it is partially visible as matter. When you come to the edge of everything, a new beginning and continuation shall your thought discover. Out of nothing will arise the new, beautiful birth of you, and of the aspiration, reflecting in itself your Soul and your dream. My son, you are endless, you are eternal, your creating dreams are within you.” Anastasia fell silent. Astounded by the unusual intonations and by the meaning of the words she’d uttered, I kept on looking at her. And with complete clarity, I suddenly realized: she isn’t simply a taiga hermit living in the Siberian taiga. Not simply an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Anastasia is a person from another dimension, a dimension where human Intelligence triumphs. She senses and sees this dimension of intelligence. She is worthy of it. Of a dimension in which a perfected, happy creator-man makes the planet Earth the most beautiful planet in the Universe. And the planets of the whole Universe, delighted by his earthly creations, call to him to contemplate them, too. To touch their surface ever so lightly, even with just their hand and, through a smile, give them a future. And how unbearably painful it must be for her to look at today’s earthly bacchanal. But she gave birth to two children, and wasn’t put off by the danger that the anti-rationality that rules today would swallow up the children. That means she’s convinced that everything will change on its own - or that she’ll change it herself. “Anastasia, given your world view, isn’t it painful for you to look at today’s reality?” “Very painful, Vladimir,” Anastasia whispered. “Then how do you bear such pain?” “By creating pictures of a beautiful future, admiring them and delighting in them. The joy of beholding them vanquishes the pain. And what’s more, there is even more benefit from such beholding: the way you imagine the future to be, is the way it will come to pass.” THE DIMENSION OF ANTI-RATIONALITY “Anastasia, can it really be that modem mankind actually does live in the dimension of anti-rationality that the dark-haired youth mentioned? And

what exactly is anti-rationality? How can we see this in real life?” “Thought or information appears, and we need to assess its reality only through ourselves.” “But how can we assess it, by what means? If a person is living in the antirational dimension, then he’ll think in the categories of anti-rationality.” “Yes, that is so. But rationality all the same remains within a person, although in a significantly smaller degree. “And if you mentally appeal to it, it is activated, and then you can use it to help you identify anti-rational manifestations. For now, we will speak no more on this topic, Vladimir. For now, go take a stroll here around the glade, around the taiga and reflect a bit. Here, in this spot, Rationality and antirationality are in balance. But in you they are not, and for that reason, help your rationality out - activate it from time to time.” “How do I activate it?” “Just mentally say within you: ‘Rationality.’ Or better yet, ‘ Raaatio-naaaliii-ty. ’” I was left alone and tried to reflect from a position of Rationality. And these are the conclusions I began to draw. The Artificial World Today’s community of people lives in an artificial world, not a natural one. It created it and slavishly serves it. We have created an artificial world and live artificial lives within in. The real, natural world is to be found along the side of the asphalt roadways along which modem mankind is rushing headlong toward an abyss. Artificial concepts have been implanted into the collective consciousness of modem people. Our scientists and “educated” researchers have, in their great wisdom, started to call modem medicine - which has existed for only two hundred years - traditional, while calling folk medicine - whose history is calculated in the hundreds of thousands of years - non-traditional. At the same time as they’ve begun referring to healers - and here I’m talking about real healers, who are well versed in the properties of medicinal plants - as charlatans. The result is that modem man ends up having to treat many diseases - ones that people just a hundred years ago easily cured themselves of, at no cost, using herbs from their very own garden - using expensive pharmaceuticals, on the advice of their doctor. Perhaps there should be two paths in medicine. We need to teach folk medicine in school and train specialists in medical

schools. Eighty percent of ailments can be cured using folk medicine, and this will significantly lower the burden on today’s medical facilities, which will make it possible to substantially improve the quality of medical service. But to do this we have to think in categories of Rationality. Artificial Plumbing Systems Mankind has buried millions of kilometers of metal pipes that they call plumbing systems in the ground. Colossal effort has been expended to manufacture these pipes and lay them in trenches. They require continual servicing and major overhauls, which come at the cost of people’s hard labor. Meanwhile, the water that comes out of the faucets in our apartments ends up being unfit to drink. And besides that, we have a natural plumbing system in the natural world - by which I mean not just rivers, but groundwater aquifers as well. Living, healing water capable of filling millions of wells flow through the Earth’s veins there. The natural plumbing system requires no repairs. But what’s more, it’s capable of purifying polluted surface water and of saturating a vital product with minerals and other necessary substances. But the city person’s modem way of life has deprived him of the opportunity to utilize the natural plumbing system that was designed and constructed by the Creator. The question arises: did man choose this way of life on his own, or under the influence of certain forces? In order to answer this question, let’s take a look at one more case. We’d be hard pressed to call it anything other than the mental illness of a society. What steps must the average family in Europe, America or Russia take in order to acquire their own apartment or home? The Anti-Rationality Mortgage For example, they’re advised to take out a mortgage. Or, more precisely, they’re advised to take out a loan from a bank for a period of twenty or thirty years, acquire a modest residence with the bank’s money and then, every month over the course of twenty years, pay the money back to the bank, with interest. If the family isn’t able to pay the money back, the apartment will be taken away. A young family has to spend twenty years living in fear of losing their residence and - as a rule - work at a job they don’t like, just so they can get paid more. Grovel at their boss’s feet out of fear of losing their job. But perhaps there’s no alternative to this kind of disconcerting situation? But there is! And that’s not all - the alternative actually shows that obstacles that stand in the way of young people acquiring housing have been artificially implanted into their young heads. These obstacles are virtual, and intrinsic only to virtual reality. I’ll give you a totally typical, real life example. 1

Translator’s note: The original Russian phrase here is “cpe/ia orinTaHna” (transliterated “sreda obitaniya”, pronounced “sree-DAH a-bee-TAH-nee-yuh”). It expresses of the area, space or spot in which one resides and is often rendered as “habitat.” However, in this book the phrase encompasses all that is part of the area where one lives as well as all the beings and energetic forces present within it. Thus, I have translated it throughout as “dwelling land,” as it is related to the phrase “cpe/ia orieTOBaHHaa” (transliterated “sreda obetovannaya” and pronounced “sree-dah ah-bee-TOH-vahn-nah-yuh”). See note 16 below for commentary on this phrase. 2 Translator’s note: The original Russian is “po/i” (transliterated “rod” and pronounced “roht”). Where “po/f’/“rod” occurs in the text, referring to the chain of family members stretching in the past or future, I have translated this using the phrase “family line.” See note 8 about other phrases in the book containing this same root. 3 Translator’s note: The original Russian word, coined by Vladimir Megre, is “nepBoncTOKn” (transliterated “pervoistoki”, pronounced “pir-vah-ee-STOH-kee”). The roots in this word express both the idea of coming first or being in an original position, as well as the idea of flowing water and source. Hence, these are the people who served as the source for all others, in both the literal and figurative meanings of this word. 4 Translator’s note: The original Russian phrase, “po/iOBtie aepeBBa” (transliteratred “rodovye derev’ya”, pronounced “ruh-dah-VY-yeh di-REV’-yuh”) contains the root “po/f’/“rod”, relating to “family line.” Thus, I have rendered this phrase as “family trees” to establish the link with the phrase “family homestead.”

A young man named Andrei lived in the city of Vladimir, and on the outside, he didn’t look much different from his peers. He went to cafes and discos; he smoked and used alcohol. When he read about family homesteads, he began dreaming of his own land and home. He didn’t have the funds to buy a plot of land and build a house, and his parents weren’t in a position to offer him financial help. In 2001, a hectare1 of land on a deserted spot overgrown with tall grasses near the village of Konyaevo, thirty kilometers from the city of Vladimir, cost thirty thousand rubles2. Nearly fifty families from among my readers have acquired their own hectares in this deserted spot and begun putting up structures. People mostly in their middle years, who possessed some financial reserves. Andrei also took a liking to this spot on the bank of a forest lake, and there was still some free land left there. Driven by his dream of having his own homestead, he stopped frequenting the youth club scene and, by working hard, was able to save up thirty thousand rubes in the space of only six months and acquire a hectare of land in the deserted spot. But where could he get the money to build a home? At that time in the city of Vladimir, a square meter of housing cost twenty thousand rubles, and thus, to build a home only fifty square meters in size, he’d need an additional million rubles. Andrei wasn’t about to take out a loan from a bank, just so he’d then have to spend twenty years paying it back with interest. At the age of twenty-three, the young man went to the store, bought a good axe, and in the course of a year, all on his own, put up a wooden home on his plot. That’s making a long story short. Here’s some more detail. First, Andrei got a job in a company where there were master craftsmen who knew how to frame a log house. From them he learned how to work with wood, while simultaneously earning the money to buy the logs for his future home. On this young man’s plot, a garden is now growing, a well has been dug, there’s a pond, and there’s a wooden home, and people who are new arrivals to the settlement put themselves on the waiting list for him to build them log homes. Now Andrei is an acclaimed and respected master craftsman. You could say that through his own actions, Andrei saved a million mbles. Or that he earned them. I think that’s not even important. He gained immeasurably more than a million - he gained confidence in his own abilities, and a home built with his very own hands. I think Andrei will manage to find a worthy girl who will enter this home and bear him a son and daughter, and the children will tell their grandchildren who it was who built the home with his very own hands, who put in the garden, who established their small motherland. Andrei’s story isn’t the only one of its kind. In that same settlement, there

are other families who have built their homes with their own hands. I remember how my father and grandfather also put up their own wooden home, and the neighbors next to them, my parents’ peers, did the same thing. More than half a century has passed, but people still live in these houses, just as they did back then. And this is where questions come up. How could it happen, that for half a century, society has been developing new building techniques, new materials, machinery and devices which would seem to be more advanced, but in the end... The average family has to work hard for twenty to thirty years to get a dwelling that it used to be able to provide itself with in the course of a year or two. For many families, the housing question has become insoluble, and the government has had to take it up. Did the given situation come about by chance, or did someone artificially construct it? That, however, isn’t important. The important thing is that the situation is absolutely anti-rational, but society, caught up in its everyday bustle, has turned out to be incapable of reflecting and analyzing. It’s gotten used to the situation and can’t imagine anything different. Society has gotten used to anti-rationality. And is ceasing to be rational. Why Does Love Go Away? Man’s modem way of life has given birth to a great many problems that we are strictly forbidden to discuss, and since they don’t get discussed, they don’t get solved, either. Billions of domestic conflicts take place all over the world, and they can get to the point where spouses fight with and murder each other. In so-called civilized countries, up to eighty percent of young people who enter into marriage divorce soon afterward. This process is preceded by negative emotions and stress of long standing, and children are made unhappy. Over the course of millennia, millions of localized wars have been going on practically all over the world between people who have attempted to establish a loving union. It isn’t only both sides in these battles that take the cmelest of beatings, but their children, too. This kind of situation has been presented to modem mankind as a given. It’s natural, they tell us - love comes and goes. But as it turns out, this kind of situation is characteristic only for people of the artificial world. It is not consistent with man’s true nature. For the first time ever, the taiga hermit has shown that young people’s initial attraction for each other is not love - it is but the urge to give birth to the

great feeling which arises when three components are united. She identified these components and showed us three ancient rites that help real love be bom. I have included them in previous books. I had to use the word ‘rite’ because Russian lacks a more precise definition that expresses these rational acts by young people who feel attracted to each other, and their parents. But the given topic, like many others, turned out to be forbidden for the mass media. And that’s not all - they began, using plausible pretexts, to make efforts to slander the source. It got to the point that on a show called “The Mysterious Anastasia” on Russian Central Television’s Channel One, certain individuals began collectively declaring that people were going crazy from reading my books with the statements of the taiga hermit. Ludicrous! They don’t go crazy from reading pom magazines or bloody thrillers or watching movies about violence, but they do from reading philosophical statements about love and man’s way of life? This position makes it clear that there are forces in modem society that program social disasters. They target people and act through them, making use of their ignorance about what’s really going on. And we can understand these people. Imagine what would happen if a person who’s read the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” book series starts asserting that by using three ancient rites, modem newlyweds can, during their marriage ceremony, in the space of thirty minutes and in plain view of all their relatives, create a family homestead on a deserted spot, along with a garden that will contain around a hundred plantings necessary for the family’s sustenance. That they can erect a home with all the necessary farmyard structures, along with devoted animals that seem to have been settled in them as if by magic. Modem people who haven’t read the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” book series might consider a person who asserts this fact crazy or gullible. But allow me to reveal a bit about this mechanism, the mechanism with whose help the given “miracles” really do take occur. According to ancient mles or rites - you can call them what you want - a pair of young people who feel drawn to each other go out to the outskirts of the settlement, find themselves a plot of land no less than a hectare in size and build a small hut there. Together, they create a detailed and thorough design for their future homestead. For all intents and purposes, they are also creating a space where the energy of love can be found. In their design, they indicate not only the spots where their future home and farmyard structures will be located, but also where absolutely all the plantings will go. Doing everything to create the design can keep them busy for anywhere

from three months up to a year. Once the design is finished, they go around to all their relatives - on both the side of the bride and the groom - and invite them to participate in the rite of marriage. And each time they’re at the home of this or that relative, they say, for example, “Ah, what a beautiful apple tree you have there.” These words serve as a hint to the invited guest about what he should bring with him to the rite of marriage. In this particular case, a slip of the apple tree that the future newlyweds liked. To someone else they’re inviting they might say, for example, “What a feisty little coat you have there.” That means that the guest doesn’t need to think about what gift to bring the young couple - he’ll give them a colt. And so on. During the rite of marriage, the newlyweds will tell their relatives and friends, as if they were taking some kind of great exam of life in their presence, all about the design they’ve created for their homestead, indicating in detail where everything should be located. Once they’ve finished the telling, they will give a signal, and the relatives and friends who have gathered together will set out their living gifts in precisely the spots indicated by the wedded couple. The newlyweds, all aquiver, will observe as their closet relatives and friends engage in the great joint action. Then the now-married young couple, having experienced great inspiration and emotional elevation, will be led away, each to his parents’ home, where they will spend two nights. In the space of this time, the relatives on the side of the bride and groom will move previously readied structures to the spot, piece by piece. At dawn on the second day, he and she will hurry to their newly created family homestead, to their first meeting as husband and wife. It is impossible to describe what will pass between them in their new home, full of nothing but positive emotions and an inspired, never before experienced, energy of love for each other and for their newly created space of love. What would have happened if the wellspring people had told such newlyweds that there will come a time when marriage will be carried out in an entirely different way? That two young people will come to some building, sign their names in some ledger and ride around in someone else’s car that’s been decorated with ribbons, all around a city that doesn’t and never will belong to them. After that, along with their invited guests, they will take their seats at a table in some restaurant and eat food that wasn’t prepared by their hands or by their relatives’ hands, and drink vodka, and that the then tipsy guests and relatives will shout “bitter-bitter” to them, demanding that they kiss each other in front of everyone. And that’s it. Next comes the so-called marriage bed and the lack of any pleasant after-effects from what has transpired. And what’s more, any space that the energy of love can fill is totally lacking.

“Such a thing couldn’t happen! It could never happen!” the wellspring people newlyweds will say. “Man is a rational being, not a crazed animal who would destroy love like that, love that is just an embryo and hasn’t yet grown strong.” So, who is it who’s really going crazy? Judge for yourselves, esteemed readers. To answer the question of why love goes away, we can say that real, fullfledged love simply doesn’t come to the majority of modem newlyweds, because there’s no appropriate space for it. What is love? It is a feeling, a great energy, that is capable of inspiring a person to create and that increases his spiritual powers and capabilities. It is a rational energy, it fills the space where two people in love are present and creates a unified whole for them, a space of love. Take a look at what happens nowadays. The newlyweds go to the marriage bureau to formalize their marriage. The marriage bureau facility isn’t their space, but simple a temporary spot where they’re spending some time, and what’s more, divorce proceedings take place in this very same facility. And the rational energy of love is unable to fill a space like that. Riding around in a car, often someone else’s, also isn’t fitting for the energy of love. And it can’t fill a modem apartment, either. Because after all, the energy of love can’t caress soulless, dying objects, and in a modem apartment, even in a very new one, everything is aging and disintegrating with each instant. Nothing is coming to life in it, and the energy of love can’t make its peace with that kind of disintegration. When it’s present in that kind of situation, it can’t give its blessing. What’s needed for the energy of love is a living space that’s been established by people - in the given case, by actual people who feel drawn to each other. It can’t be any other way. The proof of this is the great number of secular divorce proceedings throughout the world. The question of why love goes away deserves to be studied from all angles, and I intend to devote my next book to this, a book in which I will tell of the ancient land where people knew the secret of ever-lasting love. Today’s approach to love is truly anti-rational. Governing the Government There are various methods one can use to influence people - we’re not excluding the government here, either. And the most potent among them is the image. People grow accustomed to absurd conditions and images and accept them as givens. There’s an image that tells us that the government, including the State Duma, too, where laws are developed and enacted, must

definitely be located in the center of a big city. We’ve gotten accustomed to it being this way. But does this make sense? Where did the prophets receive their revelations? And where did the wise men do their reflecting? Whence did they bring us the Divine laws? Moses. He received the tables with the “ten commandments” after going into seclusion on Mount Sinai. Christ. He went off into the desert for forty days. Buddha. He spent several years deep in the forest. Mohammad. He spent months in seclusion in the cave of Hira on the mountain Jabal al-Nour. Philosophers and scholars - Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Kant and Nietzsche and many others - have also spent years living in seclusion. But where is our State Duma’s building located? Where do they write our laws, these wise men chosen by the people? Do you recall? Our State Duma’s building is located at the intersection of busy highways. Could we possibly create more absurd working conditions for our national chose ones? What do we have here, a roadside Duma?! What Causes Empires to Die Out I can cite a great many historical examples of images influencing human society and inducing planetary disasters. But for the contemporary person, particularly one living in Russia, the most obvious example will be the situation connected to the demise of Tsarist Russia and, later on, the fall of the USSR. “From a spark a flame will burst forth,” said the leader of the worldwide proletariat, V.I. Lenin, speaking of the Bolshevik newspaper “Spark,” in which the Tsarist regime was smeared. All according to plan, a negative image of Tsarist rule took root, and a new, beautiful image was created, an image of Soviet rule. Tsarism was toppled. A new empire - the USSR arose and began developing, an empire possessing a huge army and equipped with nuclear weapons. But only seventy years later, the great empire of the USSR collapsed into several separate states, ones not always inclined to be friendly to each other. It was the politicians who had signed the agreement concerning the division, as well as the economic and political situation, that political scientists identified as the culprits in the collapse. When we take a closer look, we can see all of this, too, as simply the result of the action of images. Let’s recall Solzhenitsyn’s gifted books about the GULAG and the works of other masters of the pen who smeared the USSR. Other writers at the same time were creating an image of the prospering

Western states where, unlike in the USSR, store shelves were groaning beneath an abundance of all possible products and happy and free people were riding around in fancy cars. And at the same time as they were speaking of the merits of Western civilization, they remained silent about the problems existing there. Russia’s future is also defined using images that are taking root in the minds and souls of the people living in the country. Unfortunately, this is a whole pleiad of images that are leading toward the annihilation of the state. The cult of violence and the cult of money are forming the image of destruction in thousands of movies in theaters and on television. “Catching up to the West” That’s what many of our politicians are propagandizing. No economic or military achievements and no calls to be patriots in our motherland are capable of opposing these images. The only thing that can oppose this image is a different image, an image of creation, an image capable of inspiring millions of people. And Anastasia has created it as a counterweight to the armadas of destructive images. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken up the image of a beautiful, future country and have contributed their own ideas to it and have begun making it a reality - they’ve begun building family homesteads. This grass roots initiative was in line with the government’s plans. Many well-known politicians, government figures, well-known academics, cultural figures and religious leaders have made positive statements about those who are building family homesteads. I’m not going to bring in their statements here, but anyone who wishes to do so can learn about them on the site Anastasia.ru. Now, of course, these statements have inspired people, but they are nominally off-the-record, although they’re also infinitely bold. After all, these rational words have resounded within the landscape of anti-rationality and penetrated it. Some of the taiga hermit’s assertions might seem fantastical, and that’s the way they seemed to me, too, when I first started spending time with her. Now, fifteen years after my first meeting with her, there’s much I’ve had to rethink. It’s we, contemporary society, who live in a dwelling land that is fantastically unnatural for living a rational life. Anastasia speaks about ratonal reality. She is establishing it, methodically, and she will establish it. I will try to help her, and hundreds of thousands of people are already helping. And here’s what else is interesting. In electronic and print media, literature and the movies, there are practically no positive heroes who commune with the earth in a rational fashion. Call to mind the way of life and dwelling land

of any main characters. For the most part, they’re shown in apartments, offices, restaurants, casinos, on the streets of big cities and in places like that. And if they do show a person who communes with the earth in a conscious way - and this happens extremely rarely - then this person is presented as immature, as an imbecile. Human society is methodically and persistently being indoctrinated about the kind of dwelling land where he should pass his life. Did this situation come about by chance? I think, and I am even convinced, that it did not come about by chance. It is leading us toward a disaster - a personal, social and planetary disaster. When I was talking with Anastasia later on, after I’d done some thinking on my own, I said, with certainty: “I am absolutely convinced that contemporary mankind is living in the dimension of anti-rationality. It thinks in the categories of anti-rationality, because it has no clear plans for how to construct a harmonious future. All it does is state the obvious - the fact that it is coming to an end - and speak about that.” THE YEAR 2012 These days, the date of December 22, 2012 is being widely and actively discussed, both in esoteric circles and among scholars, and on the Internet. Many people believe that the world will come to an end on that day. Why are people talking specifically about this date? It’s because this date is connected to a gloomy, apocalyptic prediction by the enigmatic ancient Mayans, according to whose calendar - and, by the way, experts admit that the Mayan calendar is much more precise than the Gregorian calendar we now use - on this day, on December 22, 2012, the current cycle of the socalled long count, the Era of the Fifth Sun, or the Epoch of the Jaguar, will come to an end. According to legend, the conclusion of Epoch of the Jaguar will be followed by years of death and destruction that will continue until the epoch of the renewal of mankind begins. Scholars recently ascertained that the date indicated in the Mayan calendar is significant astronomically. On this day an event will occur that takes place only once every 25,800 years: the Sun will come into alignment with the mystical energetic center of the Galaxy, and modem civilization will, for the first time, live through this rare astronomical phenomenon. Or it won’t live through it. It has been suggested that during the second millennium B.C.E., the Mayan forbears, whose monuments we encounter in Central America, came down from the mountains where they’d been living into the tropical forests and plains of the Yucatan. It is precisely on the plains that the Mayan civilization achieved its greatest flowering, in the first millennium B.C.E. The Mayans

knew how to write in hieroglyphs, and their math and medicine were at a very high level. They built stone cities and unbelievable ceremonial structures, such as the Great Palace at Palenque, and - here’s the main thing - they had a deep knowledge of astronomy. Up to the present day, no complete explanation has been found for the fact that the Mayan cities began to fall into disrepair long before the Europeans arrived. At the heart of the Mayan civilization’s astrology lies the Count of Days. The basis for generally accepted astrology (of Ancient Sumer and Babylon) is the arrangement of the planets around the zodiac circle. The Mayans also knew the zodiac constellations, but their Zodiac had 13 constellations, not 12. They included the constellation Serpentarius (which the Mayans called the Bat,) through which the Sun passes for only a few days. Now about the enigmatic calendar. The current cycle of time, which comes to an end in the year 2012, is measured starting from a very ancient date: the 13th of August in the year 3114 B.C.E. And this is rather strange, because, as I’ve already noted, the culture of the Mayans themselves is a minimum of a thousand years younger than that. Experts who study Mayan culture have not been able to reach consensus about how their famous calendar came into being. It’s been suggested that the Mayans acquired the calendar - along with their written language - from the Olmecs, whose culture has a more ancient history. And actually, archaeologists have made finds on the territory of the ancient Olmecs’ settlement at La Venta that confirm a certain continuity or interconnection between those cultures. But what’s more interesting is something else. When scholars took a look at comparative chronology, then it became clear that certain momentous events from the past of human civilization fully coincide with the beginning of the current cycle of the Mayan calendar, the 3114th year B.C.E.. Thus, it is roughly at this time that the mysterious megalithic structure of Stonehenge begins to be constmcted. Written language appears in Mesopotamia. In Egypt, following the unification of the Upper and lower Kingdoms and the founding of the fortress of the White Wall (Memphis in Greek,) mling dynasties are formed. In America they begin cultivating maize. One gets the impression that precisely at that time, a global cultural revolution took place across the whole planet and that people acquired new knowledge, under the influence of certain external forces. According to one of the theories, priests, shamans and holy men of that time came into contact with some repository of secret knowledge during their meditations. Of course, the predictions of the Mayan culture, the well-known prophesies

and official sources that speak of a planetary disaster are worthy of attention. Even so, it’s each thinking person alive today who can make the most important and reliable reckoning about the future. Let’s try to analyze in what direction changes in the ecological situation in Russia are tending. Let’s take the time span of just the last fifty years. The majority of the country’s population began living in big and middle-sized cities. People in the big cities have ended up without good quality drinking water. As if that weren’t enough, people have started having to pay for their most lifesustaining product. Fifty years ago, a situation like this would have seemed simply fantastical to society. Today society has gotten used to it. And it shouldn’t have done so. Water is a requirement for everything, and if society agrees to the ever greater pollution of water, then it does not have the right to exist. It isn’t someone up on high who’s sentencing man to this, but man himself. ”I’m Cancelling the Predicted Hell on Earth” This phrase was uttered by the taiga hermit Anastasia. I think it’s useful for the majority of people living on Earth to utter similar words and to perform acts that correspond to these words. Today this is a matter of life and death. Many people living on the planet Earth are taking note of the negative results of global warming. Scientists are spreading the word about changes in the Earth’s geomagnetic field and about the flooding of entire continents in the not-so-distant future. Such large-scale disasters have begun occurring right before our contemporaries’ very eyes, like the one in Indonesia, where more than two hundred thousand people perished, and in the USA, where New Orleans, a city with a population of a million, was flooded. Scientists are also spreading the word about impending changes in the Sun’s activity. Questions about the ecological safety of the Earth have arisen so keenly that they were included in the UN agenda in 2007, at England’s initiative. At the beginning of 2008, they were considered by Russia’s Security Counci. For the first time, assertions by those forecasting a global disaster began to dovetail with the way contemporary scientists and the leadership of many states viewed this topic. The priests of the Mayan civilization also spoke about how a global disaster would occur, and that it would take place in 2012. Many people have heard about this to one degree or another, but even so, public conversations about the 2012 disaster touch on only a small portion of what is spoken about in talks behind closed doors.

It’s only by hearsay that we can guess that the Japanese government is taking steps to resettle its population. According to the forecasts, England will be one of the first to be flooded and, evidently, that’s why it was the one to initiate the inclusion of ecological questions in the agenda for the meeting of the UN Security Council. It’s possible that the governments of various countries are acting correctly by not publicizing the current situation widely and in detail. Why sow panic in the people? But on the other hand, the majority of a population might perish because they’re out of the loop, and if that’s the case, then only the informed elite would be able to save themselves, taking one or two hundred slaves each along with them. Scientists are making predictions about which countries will be swallowed up by the elements, the way Atlantis was, and which ones won’t be subject to flooding. In Russia, for example, the coastal regions will be flooded, and Siberia will end up being the best place to live. Following global wanning on the Earth, an ice age will ensue. But what difference does it even make what kind of global disaster comes about, if society is in no condition to withstand the disastrous phenomena we already have today, such as the fumes that contaminate the air in the cities, the electromagnetic radiation that penetrates our dwellings, and many others? Is there an alternative to mankind’s sad future? Of course, there is. But all in good time. And so, at world forums, they’ve come to a clear conclusion: it’s possible that a disaster will occur in coming years. And so here’s where an interesting question arises: are leaders, the wealthy, and science capable of taking some kind of measures to avert it? Representatives of global science have been unable to answer this question. The governments of various countries, in an effort to affect the situation in some way, developed the socalled Kyoto Protocol, according to which all countries would be required to reduce harmful emissions into the atmosphere. Thus far, the protocol has remained unratified by many countries. What might happen in the future does, of course, cause us worry, but shouldn’t the disastrous situation that’s already playing out today - the situation masquerading as the triumph of civilization - cause us even greater worry? THE MAN-EATING OCTOPUS The picture that Anastasia or the dark-haired youth showed, in which people build their homes along the stinking tentacles of a man-eating monster is not

fiction at all, but the truest reality. A reality to which people have grown so accustomed that they accept it as a given. And the monster exists still and is growing in size. It is our roads and what moves along them. Information about this is available to everyone. We know, for example, that the length of the world’s major paved highways exceeds 12 million kilometers, which is, for purposes of comparison, three hundred times the length of the Earth’s equator, which extends for approximately forty thousand kilometers. The length of air traffic routes approaches 6 million kilometers, railway tracks are 1.5 million kilometers long, major pipelines stretch for roughly 1.1 million kilometers, and interior waterways - for more than six hundred thousand kilometers. The length of sea lanes equals many millions of kilometers. If we turn to the problem of pollution of the atmosphere by various means of transportation, then automobiles’ share would make up 85 percent! And you know, the problem here isn’t limited to harmful gases. We shouldn’t forget about such unfavorable ecological factors as noise and vibration. So, 80 decibels which is about the noise level on a busy city street - already has the potential to harm one’s hearing. And the development of various means of transportation and the laying down of highways doesn’t promote psychological health, either. And here, too, these factors directly or indirectly affect not only drivers and passengers, but also the many people who are outside the means of transportation and communications lines. Crammed roads, sitting for many hours in traffic jams, the fact that sometimes it’s impossible even to simply cross the road - all of this sharply heightens nervousness, leads to chronic stress and increased aggression and sometimes drives people to acts they not only never would have committed, but couldn’t even imagine themselves capable of committing, had they been in some other place. Yearly surveys of the condition of the natural environment in the various regions of our country eloquently express the acute nature of the problem of the ecological safety of all Russian big cities without exception. And experts unanimously recognize “the intensifying process of the automobilization of society” as the fundamental reason that the regions’ level of ecological safety has decreased. Even now, medical personnel are already testifying that “ecological stress” caused by the automotive and transportation system costs the average resident of a large city in Russia 4 to 5 years of his life. Here we’re talking about people and a person, after all, can not only perceive a problem, but articulate it, too. But what about the Earth, for example? Although the Earth can also articulate a problem, too, in its own way. It’s just that amidst the noise and clatter and fumes of ours lives, are we still capable of hearing the Earth’s voice?

What specifically is it about the automotive and transportation system that is killing the Earth? F irst of all, you need actual earth when you’re building transportation lines, just as you need water and air. In the USA, for example, there’s a statistic that the amount of land that highways, railways and airports occupy equals 101,000 square kilometers, while cities occupy 109,000 square kilometers. In Russia, the length of roads is greater than half a million kilometers. Well, roads are built on the land - what’s the problem? The problem is that when roads, pipelines and airports are built and used, the soil is destroyed: you get landslides and sink holes, and erosion advances. And then you get gullies that run along the ruts in dirt roads and grow wider, which exacerbates the situation even more. The further you go, the more happens: a large expanse of land alongside highways, railways and the oil and gas pipelines that come out onto the surface is polluted with a combination of lead, sulfur, petroleum products and other substances. Experts rank as most dangerous the strip of land that extends 200 meters outward along both sides runs of the busiest highways. This is the reason it is expressly prohibited to grow agricultural products, collect mushrooms and berries, and graze livestock, especially milkproducers, along the sides of roads. (There are known cases of children being poisoned by the milk of cows that have grazed around roads.) Near roads, the layer of air near the ground, up to a meter above the surface, is also devastatingly polluted with dust consisting of particles of asphalt, mbber and metal. You’ll find lead in it, along with other substances that possess carcinogenic and mutagenic functions. Those who are fond of taking a stroll or jogging along the roadside should give this some thought, and one should be particularly mindful of this when taking walks with little children - after all, when they’re in a stroller or are walking, they’re passing right through this hazardous zone. And here’s something else I’d like to add. Please note that the greatest number of harmful roadways is concentrated not in the desert or in Antarctica, but in places with the greatest concentrations of people. And huge cities and metropolitan areas take pride in their killer multi-lane ring highways. When putting their budgets together, all governments include major financing for constructing and repairing highways. What else could they do? After all, if there were no roads, the residents of metropolitan areas might be left without food and medication. Roads are the blood vessels that provide a person living in a metropolitan area with everything he needs. Stop! What we’ve got here is some kind of gibberish. It truly is rampant

anti-rationality. The blood vessels which - it would seem - we can’t do without, are in truth delivering to us a slow death. Ah, what spiritual, well-educated and intelligent people we want to seem to be! But if we leave monsters like this to the new generation, that means we are handing our very own children over to it to be ripped to pieces. Who does that make us in that case? And there seems to be no way out of the current, absurd situation. But it only seems that way. There is a way out. And it lies in the way we live both the individual person and society as whole. The exhaust gases from millions of cars, the smokestacks of giant and small companies and other sources that belch out harmful pollutants are but an effect, and not the cause that gave birth to them. The cause lies in the antirational, technocratic way of life. HEADING OFF A PLANETARY DISASTER Now, many people - starting with the UN and the governments of many countries and ending with ordinary people - are saying that we are on the brink of a planetary disaster. There’s also talk about how human acts are the cause of the disaster. It goes without saying that simply stating the fact that a calamity is approaching does nothing to head it off. We need concrete, efficacious measures that are capable of changing the situation for the better. But does an efficacious method for finding our way out of a crisis situation exist in nature? Yes, it does! Its “code names” are “family homestead,” “the ringing cedars of Russia” and “Anastasia.” These words and the images, information and philosophy that stand behind them are capable not only of leading the country out of crisis in very short order, but also of initiating a new phase of harmonious development in society. So that we can understand how this might come to pass, let’s first enumerate some of today’s problems. Ecology. There is not enough good quality air, pure water and healthy food in the cities. Transportation. Traffic jams many kilometers long have become customary in large cities. Because of poor roads in Russia, up to thirty thousand people die in traffic accidents each year. Corruption. There is much talk, including on the highest levels, about the scale of this phenomenon. A bureaucrat who embezzles from the treasury, a

bribe-taker and a bribe-giver are no less dangerous than enemy saboteurs. Unemployment. The most dangerous consequence of unemployment is depression. When this illness overcomes one person, he turns into a living corpse. If it overcomes a segment of society, then the state is in danger of dying out. Drunkenness and Drug Addiction. We’ve been fighting these afflictions for a long time now, and unsuccessfully. The Housing Problem. Despite all the efforts that have been brought to bear to resolve it, the situation is only getting worse. And now, let’s imagine the following scenario: Fifty percent of the population of Russia, America and Canada decides to live a healthy way of life and build a family homestead for their family on a plot of land not less than one hectare in size. The governments lay the necessary legislative foundation and grant these families the necessary amount of land so they can create settlements of family homesteads. On the previously abandoned lands of former collective farms, state farms and farmlands, the people who have received land begin building on an unprecedented scale. They build residential homes and the necessary farmyard structures. Those who lack sufficient means do the building using their own family’s labor. Those who have the means to do so hire construction crews. But what’s most important is that these people, each of them on their own hectare, are planting gardens and putting in vegetable gardens. Previously abandoned lands in the Far East, in Siberia and in the Central Region of Russia turn into blooming oases. In a state that has such oases, the food problem is entirely solved, since families who have changed their way of life not only entirely provide for themselves with first class produce, but are also able to feed the population of large and smaller cities. The threat of a collapse of the transportation system in big cities disappears. Since the quantity of cars falls by half, the air improves significantly. The housing problem is completely solved, since the housing that has been freed up is granted to all who need it. Unemployment entirely disappears, and the government need not worry about what will happen when unprofitable businesses shut down. Social tension in society falls sharply. Stratification into poor and rich no

longer elicits rage and envy in most people. People have found more important priorities than how much money one has. Consciously communing with the land opens up such possibilities and horizons for man that the technocratic mind can’t imagine them, not even in science fiction films. For this reason, I believe that all of us, all together, need to try to fathom what lies at the heart of the secret of this communing. Changing the way a significant portion of the population lives will eliminate the possibility of an ecological disaster on a planetary scale. Some might say that what we have here is a very rosy and fantastical picture of the future. How can a significant portion of the population suddenly experience the inspired desire to begin living a healthy way of life? To build family homesteads by acquiring some land that’s overgrown with tall weeds, and pay for it themselves to boot? And all thanks to some code names and phrases. That’s not realistic. That’s a fairy tale. I’ll tell you right off, there’s no problem where this question is concerned. The words and phrases are efficacious. Tens of people are showing us this in practice. In Russia there are already more than fifteen hundred settlements of family homesteads that have been set up by readers of the books in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series. There are the same kind of settlements in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. But what is fantastical, from the point of view of Rationality, is that government agencies have not aided these people enough and have, in some cases, opposed this beautiful aspiration. A chorus of voices on the international and regional levels is calling for measures to be taken to head off a planetary disaster. But the only people who are really taking actions aimed at heading off social and ecological disruptions are the people who are building family homesteads. More than a year ago an idea was bom: for each person who has founded a family homestead and who is planning to found one to declare his intentions and aspirations. The first time I read a draft of a declaration like this out loud was at a gathering in one of the settlements. The idea was picked up, and since then, the text has undergone a great many changes and additions. I’m offering it here with the most significant additions. FAMILY HOMESTEAD DECLARATION Declaration of My Family Homestead (Draft) I, a citizen of the Russian Federation, have familiarized myself with the philosophy of a way of life that has been set forth in fictional form in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” book series. The idea of creating a family

homestead has inspired me to take action. I have acquired a plot of land in a deserted spot out in the country, one hectare in size, with the goal of establishing a more perfected dwelling land for my family and my descendants, and in memory of our ancestors. I gave the given spot the name “Family Homestead.” On the land I acquired I have laid out a garden, dug a pond where fish will breed, and established several families of bees. I cultivate berries and vegetables. I plan to fertilize the land using solely natural and native means of fertilization. I believe that it will be a positive development if a large number of families who have the skills and desire to work the land, and who establish their daily lives on family homesteads located around large and small cities, are able to provide urban populations with a large quantity of ecologically pure vegetable produce and improve ecological conditions in the provinces. I consider it unacceptable that tens of millions of hectares of land in our country are not cultivated and are overgrown with tall weeds, at the same time as we purchase 60% of our food products from foreign countries, and that in addition, these products are also often of low quality and are harmful to humans, especially children. I believe that this situation not only threatens the safety of food in our country, but also destroys the populaces living within its territories. I believe that under such conditions, it’s counterproductive to accuse the government or anyone else of having made this or that mistake. Our entire society has made mistakes, and not only our country’s society. As a result, the societies of many countries stand on the brink of social disruptions. In the current situation, it’s essential for each person to think about what concrete steps he personally can take in the very near future to bring about positive changes. The example of countries that have placed their bets on farm economy shows the ineffectiveness and even destructive nature of this choice. Farmers who focus on earning a profit from growing agricultural products enter into a competitive battle with each other. In order to prevail, they must use pesticides and herbicides and raise harmful genetically modified crops, and by doing this, they endanger the lives of people of entire states. On the family homestead, a family lives and grows produce to meet its own needs and the needs of its relatives who live in the cities. Thus, a family living on a family homestead has a fundamentally different relationship with the land. The surplus produce from the homesteads will differ from all other produce that appears on the shelves of city stores in its beneficial nature.

The intensifying worldwide economic crisis creates the threat of social disorder in many countries. If we’re to come out of this crisis, we must have a fundamentally new philosophy of a family way of life, one that people will understand. And such a philosophy has been set forth in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” book series. I have accepted its fundamental concepts and they have inspired me to take the actions laid out above. More than a hundred families - families in which children are being bom and raised in a more perfected ecological setting - have each acquired one hectare of land and are already building their own family homesteads alongside my own family homestead. Practice has shown that they’re doing so not because of some infusion of capital, but because of this philosophy. I’m aware that thanks to this philosophy, tens of thousands of families in various regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are already building their family homesteads. Millions of families are planning to do so as soon as a more favorable legislative basis for this is established. Many families are planning to become small business owners and produce agricultural products. I fully support efforts by the Government and President of the Russian Federation to create favorable conditions for building small houses outside the cities, and to also make lands designated for agricultural use available for the constmction of small houses, and to allocate each family a plot of land. I believe that each plot should be not less than one hectare in size, since on a smaller plot it’s impossible to establish a comparably perfected and self-sustaining ecosystem and small-scale agriculture. If families are not allocated a large enough plot of land, the settlements around the cities will turn into consumers instead of producers, which will only exacerbate the food, ecological and social situation in the country. I consider it essential for us to urgently ask the Government and President of the Russian Federation to speed up their work in this direction and adopt the necessary law regarding family homesteads. I appeal to the President and Congress of the United States of America, to the UN, and to the heads of all states who have a vested interest in the flowering of the peoples living in them, and recommend that they examine and embrace the idea that creating family homesteads is the most effective plan for enabling countries to come out of the global economic crisis, avert the approaching ecological catastrophe, and avoid a food crisis. A significant portion of the peoples of Russia see the “Family Homestead” plan as a national idea. May it become an international national idea - and may our countries compete with each other to make the beautiful future a reality.

If the governments of various countries sincerely understand this idea, publicize it and support it, then the depression that is advancing on us can be stopped. An inspired, constructive international process will begin. The actions of thousands of Russian families have already proven the positive influence of the “Family Homestead” plan. More than fifteen hundred Russian families, who have already begun building their own family homesteads have signed declarations like this one. We continue to collect signatures. I wish all like-minded people success and inspiration as they creatively build a beautiful environment where their families can live - in various countries, and in the world as a whole! Signature of the founder(s) of the family homestead With the passage of time, this document, which has already taken on a life of its own, began to give rise in me to an ever-growing feeling of significance. I was getting the feeling that it’s not a passport, a diploma or any awards that constitute a person’s most important documents, but precisely this kind of declaration. Returning in my mind to this document again and again, I kept trying to understand why I was having these feelings. The text and language might vary, but they aren’t what’s most important here. What’s important is the essence. I read the declaration to Anastasia, told her about my feelings, and asked: “What do you think Anastasia, why do these feelings arise, and not only in me? I’ve spoken with many people, and they also experience the feeling that the declaration is very significant, but no one can explain why that happens. Why is it?” “You see, Vladimir, the feeling that this document is significant immediately arose in me, also. But like you and these others, what about it makes me feel that way, I am unable to explain that immediately. Perhaps we need to ponder it a bit together?” “Perhaps, but I’ve already pondered it a great deal. The feeling that it’s significant remains, but I still haven’t understood why that is.” Suddenly Anastasia drew herself up somehow and began to shine. She began speaking, pronouncing each syllable distinctly, just the way she always did when she was trying to emphasize something significant: “Vladimir, I think I am beginning to understand where its great significance lies. Look! When the Creator was creating the earthly world, before the great Creation, He first gave voice to his intention. He imparted it to all the entities of the Universe, and when they asked, ‘What is it you so fervently

desire?’ he replied, ‘Co-creation and joy for all who behold it.’” “But can it really be so important to impart your intentions to everyone?” “Of course. It is very important. For, imparting it to all means, above all, imparting it to yourself, as well. It means comprehending what is taking place, and believing in yourself. “Besides, having declared your intentions in words, you are already materializing them. By imparting them to all, you call upon them to join you in co-creation.” “Why do I need to call upon everybody? I mean, somebody might laugh at me, or oppose me, or be indifferent.” “Derision, opposition and indifference will be participants in the co-creation from the other side. They are needed to fill out this creation, within which you will bring everything into balance.” “I’m feeling an excitement inside, Anastasia. Where’s that coming from?” “Vladimir, I, too, feel excited. This document has appeared as a herald of a new era on Earth. The aspirations of the people who stand behind it are ho lding within them a great realization. For thousands of years people lived without determining their own lives. What were they striving for, and why? What should the new generations carry forth? Should they bear in mind where those paths went wrong? Which paths? Amidst the bustle of life, women gave birth children, but they offered no goals in life to those they bore. Their children knew not, what they were to carry forward. And they would die, the earthly civilizations, having lived out their empty lives. Only pottery shards remained of them, and arrowheads. The children would heed others’ opinions of their parents. “And what your grandfather wanted of life, Vladimir - he did not impart this to your father and mother in words. Nor did they impart that to you in words. You are their continuation. Tell me, what kind of continuation did they want in life?” “I don’t know. I can only imagine.” “You can imagine whatever you might like. But you know for sure that they did not impart it, their life’s aspiration.” “Of course they didn’t. Nor do all the other people I know.” “For the first time in perhaps billions of year, as if awakening at dawn, a man has said, ‘I have an aspiration. I will begin my creation, and my generations will live in a promised land around them3. And they will perfect the promised land around them. Of course, they will be more perfected than

I. But I will begin it all! And a little part of me will live on in my descendants. ’ “You can cite many examples of how that which we do not impart in words dies along with the physical body. “A man was thinking about how he might improve for his descendants the land where he lived, and he planted a cedar tree on his plot. Before long, the man died. Twenty-nine years passed, and the tree grew into a beautiful, spreading cedar, fifteen meters tall. Within but a year it would have borne marvelous, healing fruit, but people, children of the man who had planted it, cut it down. They thought, why do we need this tree here? It casts a shadow over part of our plot, and its shade is keeping the tomatoes and cucumbers from growing in their beds. And they cut down the spreading cedar, and they cut it down precisely because the man had not given voice to his intentions. “Genghis Khan conquered nearly half the world and brought Russia, India, China and Palestine together beneath his rule, so that there would be no war. He built roads, lowered taxes, and honored the traditions and cultures of various peoples, but he himself lived not in the palaces he had seized, but in a yurt. He sought to bring wise men from all over the world to him. Together with these wise men, he talked about how they could go about making people happy, and how to help everyone come to know eternity and immortality of peoples. Of all conquerors of the Earth, his empire endured the longest. He knew something. He attained and displayed it, but the empire collapsed all the same. And Genghis Khan has come down to us through the ages as just a conqueror. Who from among those alive today is able to say what his true intentions were? He didn’t give voice to them.” “Well, perhaps they were just destroyed or are preserved in scrolls somewhere now.” “Intentions should be preserved not only in scrolls, but in the hearts of the people. Genghis Khan wasn’t able to give voice to them so that they would be passed from generation to generation through the ages.” “Those are striking examples. It’s amazing - why, for millions of years didn’t people attach any particular importance to the need to give voice to their lives? Now I’m thinking the same thing, that this document presages a new era. Tell me, Anastasia, how will you give voice to your aspirations both before people and yourself?” “Why, all of my aspirations are already laid out in your books, Vladimir. If I were to add anything else specific, I’d say, ‘I will gather together the best sounds from the whole Universe and will embed them into combinations of letters and into musical notes.’ I will ask today’s poets, you, Vladimir, and

the bards to give voice to them. A great many people will sense them with their souls. Let people express them in a language they understand, let them model the dawn of the earth and its beautiful flowering. And when the melodies of man’s worthy land embrace the entire Earth, then I, amongst our kind neighbors, will help our grandchildren create their homesteads, and all the while, I will not forget my own family space. “But what should I say to myself, and how should I voice my own declaration before people?” “Each person needs to consider that on his own.” “Yes. Of course. Each person on his own. Even this draft I already have resonates with me. I’ll think on my own about what I can add to it to make it my own. “I’ll ask all the readers to consider it, too. “This document is essential. It’s an important missive from the founders of a family homestead to the future generations of their family line. It’s a directive that comes from the people and goes to those at all levels of power, a communication with them. It will be a good thing if each family keeps a beautifully designed document like this, like a kind of relic, alongside the family book4 of the family homestead’s founders or those who intend to found one. “A person will read it with awe and gratitude in his family homestead’s beautiful garden even a hundred years later, and he’ll read it and recall the founder. And another person, a hundred years later, a person who has lost his way in life’s whirlwind will suddenly come across it as he’s looking through his parents’ old things and will read about their unfulfilled intentions. And the person will have a burning desire to make them a reality. “And I think it would also be useful to send this kind of document to each member of local governments personally, and to the UN. “Similarly, I consider it essential to establish a yearly scientific and practical conference called ‘Family Homesteads of the Future.’ under the auspices of the UN.” MY LONELY LITTLE HECTARE Anastasia has one trait that is, in my opinion, a bit aggravating. She possesses a colossal volume of information and is happy to answer many questions, but there are some she categorically refuses to answer. Sometimes this categorical nature of hers annoys me, and sometimes it simply enrages me. But even when she sees my annoyance and rage, she nonetheless maintains her position.

For example, she categorically refuses to make a sample layout for a family homestead and its landscaping. “If I were to do that, I’d be meddling in your creation, Vladimir, putting the brakes on your thought’s motion. I would be the one birthing the design, not you. It would be as if it were not your own child,” she says, and then she brings in various other arguments, as well. But a serious and insoluble situation had come up for me that was precisely concerned with establishing a homestead. I spent a long time thinking about how to convince Anastasia to either help me or to say that the problem was insoluble so that I wouldn’t spend my time and have nothing to show for it. I made another attempt to win Anastasia over and convince her to sacrifice her principles. I picked a suitable time - it was a sunny day and the taiga was fragrant. Anastasia was sitting beneath a cedar tree, weaving her golden hair into a braid. I was walking back and forth near her, mentally selecting some weighty arguments. She was the first to speak. Smiling, she asked affectionately: “Have some complicated thoughts gotten you all stirred up, Vladimir? You’re right here beside me, yet at the same time, in your thoughts, you’re far from these parts.” I took a seat next to Anastasia and began to speak, trying to be as convincing as possible. “You see, Anastasia, a certain situation has come up, and I can’t possible deal with it without your help.” “What situation, Vladimir?” “Seven years ago, not far from the city of Vladimir, when I was having a look at the surrounding countryside, I drove onto a field in my jeep and got stuck. The vehicle was stuck up to its underside and the only way to pull it out was to use a tractor. While I was waiting for the tractor driver, I looked around at the abandoned field, overgrown with tall weeds. It was a rather pretty spot there. The field was surrounded by a mixed forest, and a stream flowed in front of the forest, and not far off, you could glimpse a big lake. And 1 thought, it would be a good thing if a settlement of family homesteads were to spring up here. People would build pretty homes, dig flower beds, put in gardens and build some normal roads. “And 1 could hardly believe it - that’s exactly what happened: a year later, on that very spot. People - readers of the ‘Ringing Cedars of Russia’ book series - began acquiring land so they could build family homesteads. The organizers suggested 1 take a hectare, too, and - 1 don’t even why, myself 1 agreed. Maybe right then 1 felt like supporting them. But 1 hardly did anything at all with my hectare, and sometimes Fd totally forget about it. 1

only called twice and asked people to sow some mustard on the land, to improve the soil. The lands there are not very fertile - there’s layer of fertile soil about fifteen to twenty centimeters thick, and below that there’s about thirty centimeters of sand, and below that, nothing but clay. “1 totally forgot about my hectare. 1 have an apartment and a country house not far from town. You know of it, Anastasia. And 1 have a place to live in Siberia, too. “But then, five years later, 1 happened to come to the spot where my jeep had gotten stuck. Even as 1 was driving up, 1 was astounded by what 1 saw. Can you imagine, Anastasia? Miracles do happen! Along both sides of the big lake, in the spot where there used to be a deserted space, there were homes. All different kinds. Big ones, solid ones and totally tiny ones. Driveways paved with gravel led from the main road to the homes. People had divided up the abandoned fields surrounding the lake into plots and were building up their family homesteads. “1 recalled how I’d dreamed there, by my stuck jeep, about family homesteads on just one field. But here, I could hardly believe it - people were settling all the fields surrounding the lake. A little island of the new and happy Russia was being bom on this deserted space, overgrown with tall weeds.” “That means your dream was powerful, Vladimir, and correct. They embraced it. And now you’ve seen the way it’s materializing, developing.” “I should have been more careful what I wished for, five years ago, by my jeep. If I’d known how everything would turn out, then I’d have nipped that dream in the bud. I failed to take one thing into account, Anastasia. “Now I’ll tell you everything in order. And this is where I desperately need your help.” “Go on, then, Vladimir, and tell me everything in order.” “F ive years later, I was riding along a gravel road in that very same jeep with one of the local settlers. One spot caught my eye, and I stopped the jeep by a hectare that was overgrown with tall weeks. To the left of it, on another hectare, was a construction trailer, and next to it - a beautiful home with a roof had been put up. It didn’t have any glass in the windows as of yet, but from all appearances you could see that people were making their family homestead livable. And to the right of the abandoned hectare was a beautiful, wooden home, too, as well as farmyard structures, and a bathhouse, and they’d dug a pond. It was as if this home on the right took great pride in its flower beds and, of course, in the people that had made it beautiful. And then I said to my travelling companion, ‘I get the impression

that these hectares of land have their own fates, and that their fates are ties with the people’s.’ “‘I think so, too,’ my travelling companion replied. ‘Probably, each person has his own hectare of land somewhere on Earth, but he doesn’t know anything about it, or has forgotten about it. ’ “I went on talking. ‘When huge fields are abandoned, individual hectares don’t feel so insulted, because they’re all in the same situation, like homeless children. But this is a different case. It’s insulting. The hectares to the right and the left are being set up, but this one, between the two of them, looks like an abandoned child.’ “My companion said nothing and even looked down somehow, as if he felt awkward, both for the hectare overgrown with tall weeds, and for the person who’d abandoned it. “And I asked, ‘Whose hectare is this?’ ‘It’s yours, Vladimir Nikolaevich,’ my travelling companion replied, without raising his eyes. “‘Mine?...’ “‘Yes. Well, we all got together and made a driveway onto it. We laid a pipe in the ditch and covered it over with stone. We put in posts to mark the driveway, and we planted little fir trees on both sides. But nothing more each person looks after his own land. ’ “I got out of the car. On my hectare, which is almost an exact square, a hundred meters by a hundred, and which abuts the forest, only tall weeds were growing. It didn’t just seem abandoned and lonely, like a homeless child. No, it was far worse off than a homeless child. Even a homeless child can go off somewhere, find himself some friends among his peers and somehow get himself set up. My hectare couldn’t do that. “I set off along the perimeter of the plot and suddenly saw two beautiful little flowers amongst the tall weeds. It was autumn. September. But they were blooming. You couldn’t see them from the road because the weeds were taller. ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘My hectare is striving to be beautiful, too. Who knows how the flower seeds got here, but my hectare grew them and is reaching out to me through these little flowers, the way a child reaches out with his arms, and it’s asking me to do something.’ “And some irresistible desire arose in me, the desire to set up this plot of land, no matter what, so that it would be no worse than other people’s plots, and maybe even better. I don’t know why that kind of desire arose. I wasn’t thinking of this plot of land as a family homestead for my family. I just wanted to make everything on it right and beautiful. And I didn’t just want to - suddenly some irresistible idea arose to make it the best of all of them.

Maybe later on it will draw my granddaughters to it. When it becomes the best in the world. “I’ve returned to my hectare many times in my mind. I’ve sketched out the layout of various outbuildings on paper and made a list of the plants that should grow on it. I had to finish my work on the book and take care of a great number of other day-to-day affairs, but this hectare continually stirred up my thoughts in a pleasant way and even led my thoughts away from unpleasant problems. It’s amazing, but it’s actually thanks to it that I’ve been able to overcome a whole series of day-to-day difficulties and psychological problems. You know, there really is something mysterious in man’s bond with the land. Some living link stands behind this bond. And the desire to make my land beautiful and well-tended has grown stronger and stronger.” “A good desire has arisen within you, Vladimir, even passionate, I’m sensing. It will also be of help to you.” “‘It’ who?” “Your hectare. You yourself say that it stirs up your thoughts and leads them away from unpleasant problems.” “There are very big challenges connected to that hectare, Anastasia. It’s kind of like a child with a congenital physical defect.” “What kind of defect?” “Nothing will grow on those lands except weeds. Vegetables won’t grow. And the people in those parts don’t have normal gardens. There’s a village nearby, it’s two hundred years old, but the village residents don’t have normal gardens, either. Those lands there have a very thin fertile layer, and then right below it, nothing but clay. In the spring the water sits on the surface for along time, and in the summer, too, if you get a rainy summer. Most plants’ roots can’t penetrate the clay. If you were to dig a deep hole in the clay, fill it with fertile earth brought in from somewhere, even then the tree might die. Water will collect in the clay pit in the rainy season, the clay will retain it, and the roots will rot.” “Vladimir, I do not think that the situation is so very hopeless as you’ve painted it. Tell me, how do the people feel about what is happening? Maybe they’re disheartened?” “No, they’re not disheartened. The majority of them, they sense that this is their family land, for centuries to come. Some of them, even their parents come to visit, live there for a bit and then ask to be buried not in a cemetery, but on the family homestead. Everything’s fine, but the fact that the land can’t bear fruit in a normal way is very upsetting to me. I even regretted

having dreamt of a settlement springing up on this spot. Now it’s like I feel guilty.” “What steps will you take now, Vladimir, in regard to your own hectare?” “I don’t intend to abandon it. I think there must be some way out.” “I also think so. You must search for it and find it.” “I’ve searched for it, but I haven’t found it. So, I’m asking you to please help.” “What task are you posing, Vladimir? Lay it out, in detail.” I was oveijoyed that Anastasia had asked about the specifics of the task, and I decided to formulate it in the most complicated way possible. Otherwise, I thought, it wouldn’t be interesting for her. I began to explain: “Anastasia, I’m asking you, I ask from the bottom of my heart, please arrange it so that apple trees and plum and pear trees, and cherries and sour cherries can grow on my hectare, and on other people’s, too. So grapes can ripen! And good flowers and various shrubs. And also arrange it so that all of this can be done at minimal expense. Something an average person can afford, not an oligarch who can put in millions of dollars.” “Is that all, Vladimir?” “No, Anastasia, that’s not all. I ask you, please. I ask you from the bottom of my heart. Arrange it so that all of this comes to pass in no longer than three years.” “Four or five years would be better.” “No, in three.” “You’ve set a fine task for yourself, Vladimir. I will genuinely rejoice when you solve it.” I actually got worked up to a fever pitch by that answer. I jumped to my feet, but restrained myself and didn’t say anything rude. I tried to calm down - as much as that was possible - and explain: “Anastasia, after all, I’m not just asking on my own behalf. Please understand. There are three hundred families there on that spot. Three hundred. They’re building family homesteads. They’ve understood what you’ve said, they’ve felt it deeply. It’s become their dream! But they’re setting up their homesteads on land that is totally, totally low in productivity. It’s even listed that way in the books. These people wouldn’t be able to get any other kind of land. Before, back before Perestroika, these lands belonged to a State farm. At that time, the State worked to improve those lands with a drainage system, by sinking pipes into the ground to drain

off the water, but even so, aside from grain, nothing would grow on them. “And now all those improvements are no longer in existence, the equipment has all been stolen, and there’s practically nothing that can be done. And would it even be worth doing, since it didn’t help? How can we improve the productivity of the soil on my hectare now? “And besides that, I can’t fully imagine the layout of my entire plot. I really want to make everything beautifully and quickly. I need to catch up to the people who are five years ahead of me. And so here I’m asking you to help, to do this layout for me and choose the plantings.” “Yes, certainly, Vladimir, the layout is very important. The layout - it is creation done with the help of the thought of the future, and then the materialization takes place. But if you farm out the layout to me, then what of yours will be materialized on that plot of land?” “I’m telling you - I’m also planning it myself, but I’m afraid of making a mistake. So, in practice I came up against something that would seem to be such a simple matter, like a living fence, and it turns out that it’s not a simple matter at all. You can work on improving it forever, but you need just as much knowledge as a space ship designer. You have to know what plant blooms at what time, what kind of soil it needs, how tall it will get over the summer, what kind of flowers it has and how they’ll go with the other plants’ flowers, and a whole lot more. I made a plan to build something out of cob, but the experts say it the rain will wash it away. Can you imagine - I’ll be building something and will hire workers, and then I’ll be a laughing stock.” “Even if you do make a mistake, Vladimir, then it will be your mistake, and it will materialize. For this reason, you need to do the layout yourself. Certainly, you can consult with someone, but in this case, the final decision must always rest with you. In the spring, Vladimir, it is all right for you to plant only annuals, and when they grow up, mow them down and enrich the soil. And do the very same the following year.” “I can’t wait. I want to do things fast. Otherwise I’ll lose more than a whole ‘nother year.” “Perhaps you shouldn’t msh? It’s better to do everything on a sound footing. What’s more, if you set yourself the condition of creating everything anew all in one year, then you will be extremely limited in your choice of plantings, and in the autumn, when all the annuals dry up and your living fence is left without any plantings, it might disenchant you. Now, if you do everything properly, then you will receive more positive emotions. Although certainly, it is also possible to do everything using a fast track approach.”

Anastasia grew thoughtful for a moment, and it seemed to me that she was considering the fast track approach, but here is what we ended up with. THE OBSTACLE OF LACK OF FAITH “What you are asking for, Vladimir, can be done. I sense that it can be done, but you do not want to seek the solution yourself. Rather than spending your energy on the search, you are expending it on convincing me to find a solution. “You have placed an obstacle before you, consisting of lack of faith in your own powers, and, as you try to convince me, you are fortifying this obstacle more and more. Beyond it, Vladimir, beyond your obstacle of lack of faith in your own powers, there are beautiful gardens blooming and glorious flowers growing, and amongst them are living happy people. Yet you cannot see all of this. The obstacle you have constructed keeps you from doing so. “If I find the solution, then it will grow more fortified still. What’s more, the solution might turn out to be very, very simple, and that would be an affront to you. You will think, why ever couldn’t I guess that myself? You will decide it is clear that you are not competent. “You have turned to me, perhaps thinking me a sorceress who is capable of bringing to bear powers unknown to man to solve your problem, but I am no sorceress at all. Through my feelings, I am able to take in from the Universe information about everything that has been, about everything that the Universe knows, but every person is also capable of taking in the very same information, if he does not erect the obstacle of lack of faith in his own powers. If he is physically healthy and if he thinks in an undistorted way. “The information of the Universe resembles that which a supercomputer can contain within it. A person who possesses a computer taps several keys and receives the information he needs. Now imagine, Vladimir, that instead of tapping several keys, you ask me to do that. A person is in continual need of information, and if he does not himself know how to tap these keys himself, then he will always need to have alongside him someone who does know how.” “Well, I know how to get information using a computer. I don 7 know how to get it from the Universe.” “It’s simple, very simple: seek the solution of your problem yourself. Believe that you, precisely you, will find the correct solution. The most correct one.” “Well, I’ve been thinking bout this, thinking about it for a whole year, and there’s no answer.”

“And I am telling you: the answer cannot make its way through the obstacle you have constmcted, and your fervent appeal to me only confirms this. I will not solve your problem for you.” Anastasia’s decisive refusal to help me outraged me. “Well, of course, you won’t. You’re firm in your convictions. No arguments can make you act otherwise,” I said, with bitter irony. “I repeat, again: there are three hundred families there, and God forbid the same situation arises for people building family homesteads in other places that has arisen here, but there are three hundred...” “Vladimir, perhaps God actually gave rise to this situation. Imagine: if there had been fertile soil there right from the start, then these people would not have received these spots. Perhaps God himself arranged everything this way, and those in power deemed these lands unsuitable for growing gardens. This situation made it possible for three hundred families to acquire this land and begin building family homesteads. Perhaps someone is even having at laugh at their expense and figuring that their heavenly oases won’t succeed, but the information will push its way through to one of them in the form of a tiny spark, and these spots will be lit up by billions of flowers on fruit trees and in the grasses.” “Maybe it will push its way through, that tiny spark, but look, we want to live today, now, and with a beautiful vision of the future, not with hopelessness.” All of a sudden I sensed a pleasant warmth behind my back and turned around. My son Volodya5 was standing next to me. Our eyes met, and the unusual warmth grew stronger. My son’s face looked like Anastasia’s and maybe a little bit like mine when I was young. His height was nearly equal to mine. His still youthful build was distinguished by its good proportions and unusual athleticism - one expressed through ideal balance, rather than artificially pumped up muscles. My son’s gaze... it resembled Anastasia’s affectionate gaze, and in this gaze there was also... You see, in his gaze you could detect an inexplicable confidence. An inexplicable and somehow calm confidence. It’s as if he has no idea that any difficulties even exist in life, or as if he can’t imagine any situations that man can’t overcome. Volodya bowed to me and then began speaking, addressing Anastasia: “Mama, I heard what you were speaking of here. Mama, please allow me to address you and express my opinion.” He bowed deferentially to Anastasia and silently awaited her reply.

This was the first time I had seen or felt the kind of deference and love he had for Anastasia. He probably couldn’t begin a conversation without her permission. Anastasia looked at our son attentively, in no hurry to answer. There was no severity in her gaze, but rather tenderness and respect. “Strange,” I thought. “Why is she taking so long to answer this simplest request of his? The speed of her thought is great - in the space of such a long pause she would be able to calculate a multitude of variations of the way events could play out. But here, there’s nothing to calculate.” Anastasia finally replied: “Do speak, my dear son. Papa and I will listen to you attentively.” “Mama, I feel it would be good and correct for you to help Papa. I feel it’s important for him to solve this problem. And if you help him, the obstacle of lack of faith in his own powers and his own intelligence will not grow more fortified, but rather, smaller. It will even crumble - partially, perhaps, but it will still crumble.” And Volodya fell silent. Once again, Anastasia did not answer right away. For some time she looked at our son affectionately, smiling, and then she said: “Well, of course you are right, my dear son - in the given situation, it really is necessary to help Papa. Volodya, you go ahead. Please help Pap. The two of you will find a solution, along with other people. It will be best if you begin searching for it right away, right here, and I will not hinder you.” Anastasia turned and began slowly moving away from us. After taking a few steps, she turned around and added: “You are faced with co-creating a very interesting and useful deed, demonstrably and significantly perfecting the dwelling land.” My son and I stood before each other. I asked him: “Tell me, Volodya, can you use all the information there is in the Universe, the way Mama can? Many thinkers speak of it. Stanislav Lem, a very famous writer, he said the Universe is like a supercomputer. We can’t get along without it. Do you have any success in utilizing it?” “Not in utilizing it as fast as Mama does.” “Why not?” “Because Mama is a purebred.” “What does that mean, ‘a purebred’?” I asked in surprise. “That means the wellspring peoples’ breed has been preserved in her.”

“And why hasn’t it been preserved in you? Oh, I get it...” And I thought to myself, “It’s because I’m not a purebred. That’s probably the way Anastasia explained it to him. But then why the heck did she agree to have a child with a non-purebred? She couldn’t find anyone else? Is that what it means?” My son looked at me attentively. It’s possible he understood what I was thinking about, and he said: “Mama loves you very much, Papa. Come along with me. I’ll show you two things.” “Let’s go,” I said, agreeing, and set off following my son. When we got to the entrance to the dug-out where I’d spent the night with Anastasia when we first met, Volodya moved aside a stone, thereby opening up a way into a longish little cave, or den. He stuck his hand inside and, as if taking something out of a safe, pulled out an empty cognac bottle and a stick. I recognized it: this was the bottle from which I’d drunk the cognac when we first met, when we stopped for a rest. “Wow,” I thought. “She kept the bottle.” “But what’s that stick?” I asked Volodya. “This is the stick you wanted to hit Mama with, when, before I was bom, she wouldn’t agree to give me to you to raise.” “She could have not saved the stick,” I said sheepishly. “Mama says that when you were holding this stick, a great deal of energy was surging through you, and now it’s very dear to her.” “But what does she do with them, with these things? At the very least, she might collect water in the bottle.” “Mama doesn’t collect water in it. She often comes to this spot, moves aside the stone, takes the bottle and the stick in her hand, looks at them, smiling, and says some words. She’s made it so that you’ll live forever, Papa. From time to time you’ll go to sleep for a moment and awaken in a new body.” I was stunned. “But how can you create such a thing with words?” “You can create a great deal with words, Papa, and especially when these words are uttered by Mama. Oh, and when she repeats them so often, besides.” “What words are these, Volodya?” I asked my son softly. And my son began, as if reciting poetry, to recite the words Anastasia would often utter at this spot:

“My love, you and I have before us all eternity. Life always comes into its own. A little ray of sun will shine in the springtime, the Soul will don a new body, but the mortal body, too, has reason to meekly embrace the earth fresh flowers and grass will rise in the springtime from our bodies. And should you, retaining your lack of faith, scatter to the winds as specks of dust in the vast Universe, then I, my love, will put you back together again from the specks of dust wandering adrift for eons on end.” “Volodya, I also heard Anastasia say these words one day. I thought it was just some pretty phrase she was uttering. I had no idea they had a literal meaning.” “Yes, Papa, they have a literal meaning.” “Well, how do you like that,” I said, drawing out the words. “Many thanks to Anastasia for eternity.” “Papa, say thank you to Mama when you see her. Say it to her with belief in her words, and she will be very happy.” “I’ll tell her.” “We need to solve your problem, Papa, the problem that’s now our shared problem. Let’s go to the lake. We’ll sketch out a layout of the hectare you’re talking about in the sand, and we’ll think about how to set it up. We’ll think very powerfully and we’ll think until the correct solution comes to us.” I walked behind my son and thought, “Well, but how? How can it come to us, this solution? There’s no answer to be found, not in the literature and not on the Internet. I’d searched for it everywhere, but hadn’t found it. I’d consulted with experts on agricultural methods, and they hadn’t given me any valuable advice. But he, Volodya, had clearly not read anything on this question. He didn’t have Anastasia’s capabilities. He didn’t know howto utilize information from the entire Universe. Then what could he use to help him find something there? But there he was, walking along, as if he was capable of solving the problem. We need to do something that will be more effective than meaningless expectations or searching.” And I decided I’d talk with my son. “Stop, Volodya. Let’s have a seat on that tree there. I need to have a serious chat with you.” “All right, Papa, let’s have a seat. I’ll listen to you attentively.” We sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. My son laid his hands on his knees and looked at me attentively with Anastasia’s gaze, but I didn’t know how to start off this not very pleasant conversation with him. Not very pleasant, but necessary.

“Now I’m going to say some things that may be not very pleasant for you, Volodya, but I need to say them.” “Go ahead and say them, Papa. I can endure unpleasant things. I won’t be offended.” “Volodya, you need to understand that Anastasia directed you to help me so that I’d stop pestering her with my questions. You won’t be able to offer any help whatsoever, not to me, and not to those people who are setting up their homesteads. You don’t have Mama’s capabilities, you don’t know your way around agricultural methods, and clearly, you don’t know what ‘landscape design’ is. Am I right?” “Papa, I think that landscape design is when a person is planning to create a space that’s beautiful.” “That’s more or less it, but in order to make it beautiful, people who have a knack for this also spend five years or more studying, sharing information and looking at various illustrations. But have you seen even one welldesigned homestead?” “When Mama and I went to the village, I saw the way, on the land around their houses, people...” “All you’ve seen is village gardens that have no design at all.” “Yes, Papa, gardens. But I’ve imagined how I would make my own homestead. I’ve reflected on that often and imagined it.” “Just imaginings alone aren’t enough. You need serious and comprehensive knowledge that you don’t have. And so, it follows that you have no basis for thinking. As for me, well, I’ve been thinking for a lot more than a year. And not just thinking, I’ve been consulting with experts, too. It’s all no use. And we won’t be able to get this business off the ground now simply with our thinking. But you really can help. I’ve hatched a plan. You should help me convince Anastasia to join in with us on solving this problem. If we give it all we’ve got, she’ll give in.” “But Papa, Mama already made a decision. And her decision is help. I cannot allow myself to try to convince Mama to reverse her decision.” “I see! He can’t allow himself!” I cried. “So, when Mama tells you to help, you obey her without thinking. But when your father asks, then right away it’s ‘I won’t.’ So that’s how you’re being raised! No respect for your elders! For your father!” “I have great respect for you, Papa,” Volodya objected calmly. “I will carry out your request and help you.”

“Now, that’s more like it. Now, let’s take a bit of a walk somewhere until evening, then we’ll go to Anastasia as if we’re really upset. She won’t be able to stand it and will start helping us.” “Papa, when I said I would help, I mean that I’d work with you to solve the problem of how to make the soil more productive, and make a mock-up of the landscaping for the whole homestead.” “Ah, so that’s how it is! You mean, you’ll help me solve it. Do you even get... Come on, you’ll get it...” And I set off walking toward the shore at a fast clip. I used a twig to sketch out a plan in the sand of the hectare abutting the forest. Volodya used various grasses and sticks, which he stuck into the sand on one side, to represent the forest that abuts the side of the plot opposite the road. I had sketched the layout of the plot just so Volodya could realize in practical terms of how useless his attempts were. But then it happened that I myself got caught up in searching for all possible options. We spent two days thinking about this problem of how to arrange it so that gardens would grow up and various vegetables would mature on not very fertile land. We went over and over it in our minds and discussed a great many options, but we weren’t finding a solution to the problem. And we weren’t finding a solution, because one of the conditions was to do everything with minimal resources. If not for that condition, then with enough money we could bring in fertile dirt on dump trucks, but we would need a minimum of fifty loads of dirt. Each load costs seventeen thousand rubles. It follows that we’d need eight hundred-fifty thousand mbles. The majority of the three hundred families couldn’t afford that. What’s more, in the spring, water close to the surface might wash out the fertile layer and carry it away as it ran off to the flat lands. In order to distract ourselves from what at that point seemed like the hopeless problem of improving the soil’s productivity, Volodya and I began designing the landscaping for the area. Or, more precisely, we attempted to arrange various structures so that they’d complement each other and the surrounding area. I explained to Volodya: “First of all we need to build the outhouse and the bath house, then the shed, the home, the garage, the root cellar and the greenhouse. We have to arrange all of this somehow so it will be both pretty and convenient.” We constructed a mock-up of the home out of sand and placed it at the center of the plot. The bath house and outhouse were next to the home, and the shed on the backside of the home. We created the greenhouse out of

sand, too. We laid a little white stick atop the oblong mound so it would look like glass or plastic sheeting. Clearly, this greenhouse wouldn’t fit in anywhere. We built it first to the right of the home and then to the left, but even so, it stuck out of the overall grouping like a sore thumb. And really, I didn’t like this so-called grouping itself, and, to all appearances, neither did Volodya. Gazing thoughtfully at the rough design, he said: “We’ve made some kind of mistake.” “And not just one,” I added. “Looks like there’s a lot of them.” “But even so, I think it’s one. There must be some kind of right approach, some principle, some view, or some other kind of thing that will solve all the problems at once.” “And what kind of new approach could that possibly be? I’ve laid everything out the way most people in the country do. This layout has been worked out over the centuries. It’s all we’ve got. People just can’t have been mistaken for centuries, not knowing some principle that might not even exist at all.” “It does exist. I sense that.” Volodya was silent for a bit and then added, “Or, perhaps it will exist. We have to think, Papa, and we’ll find it.” “And where the heck will we find it, if neither you nor I is in contact with this Universal data base?” “We’ll look for it within ourselves.” “Well, maybe you ’ll find it within you, but I’ll be sixty years old soon, and I probably won’t have enough time.” “We’ll have enough time, Papa. We’ll definitely have enough time. I’ll try very, very hard. I’ll find it. We’ll find it.” I had strained my thoughts to such a great extent, that even during the night, when I’d fallen asleep on the fragrant grasses in the dug-out, I kept going over and over all possible options in my dreams. In my dreams, the fruit trees and flowers grew quickly, right before my very eyes, but then they just as quickly wilted and fell without giving any fruit. A DUEL OF WIZARDS By the middle of the second day, we were considering this option: what if we didn’t drive ourselves crazy worrying about soil productivity and didn’t draw the spring waters off the plot, but rather, blocked the streams from draining off and chose plants that love water? This option proved somewhat sparse, and it lacked a good garden. At this point Anastasia came up, leading

our daughter by the hand. Little Nastenka probably figured that Volodya and I were playing some kind of game. She quickly sat down with us and began attentively looking over the mock-up. We’d already dug out a pit on it to represent the pond. On the edge there was a mountain of sand that represented the clay, since there was a lot of clay in the soil on the plot. So as not to sit there like a lump, I began running a stick around the perimeter of the hectare, deepening the boundary line. Then I threw away the stick and began simply looking at the sand mock-up. On all fours, Nastenka crawled right up to the mock-up, sat down at the edge, thoughtfully rubbed her little nose for some reason and suddenly... Her chubby little hand started raking the sand onto the boundary line and forming a little hill. She did this slowly and carefully. When she got to the middle of one of the sides of the hectare, Volodya, too, began making an oblong little hill on his side. And without knowing why myself, I also began raking the sand up onto the line with both hands. What we ended up with was a hectare framed on four sides with an earthen mound. Silently, we looked at what we’d created. Each of us, me included, was probably trying to understand what this might mean. Anastasia’s voice rang out behind my back. “Ah! I’ve got it! How great! You’ve found a very unusual solution! Now, now I will attempt to understand, to guess your intention more precisely. There! I’ve got it! You decided to take the already existing fertile soil on the hectare and spread a nearly meter-high mound of fertile soil along the perimeter of the hectare. And to use a portion of the fertile layer as well as sand. Great! You’ve increased the thickness of the fertile layer. “Around the perimeter of the entire plot, you decided to make two little walls of cob, four meters apart. There will be a lot of clay from digging the pond, and you can use it to construct these little walls. In this way, your mound will end up being inside a clay trench. Into this trench you will throw branches and rotting foliage from the forest, and then you will even out the earth on top of them. You will have a long, four-hundred-meter compost trench in which the elevated earth will be above the regular level of the whole plot. The clay walls will prevent the fertile layer from sliding off when the spring rains fall. “The elevated earth will warm up more quickly in the spring, and this will enable you to set out many plants two weeks earlier than usual. This means that you have correctly understood, that it makes less sense to make compost by digging a hole in earth where water stands on the surface for a long time, since the pit will fill with water, water which, in soil with much clay in it,

will have nowhere to go, and if you plant fruit trees in it, their roots can rot. “On this mound, already the first year, you will be able to plant com and sunflowers, and along the external sides - flowers. By autumn, already in the very first year, the hectare will be framed not simply by a mound, but by a mound on which a two-meter high green fence will grow. Closer on to autumn you will cover it over, spread earth over it again, and by the next spring, this mound will grow more fertile still. When the earth firms up, you will be able to set out on it fruit trees, vegetables and flowers. Over time, the clay walls might settle, due to moisture, but even so, the settled clay will still retain the fertile layer, and the plants’ roots will keep it from sliding off. “And those half-meter cob squares you will have built next to the pond what are they for? Oh, don’t tell me! I’ve got it. You will fill them with fertile soil you’ve brought from the forest, and you’ll plant fruit trees in them, and around the trees, vegetables and flowers. “ft’s great, what a simple and original solution you’ve found. You decided to raise the fertile layer in the necessary spots, increasing it to half a meter. The roots will be warm and comfortable in a little hill like that. And after that, the trees that grow will themselves do what’s needed. Each autumn the trees will cast off their foliage, and it will all rot, increasing the fertile layer. “ft’s great, ft’s as if you pushed a button and turned on a self-nurturing biological organism.” 1 understood that Anastasia was laying out the solution she had found, but making it seem as if we had found it and all she was doing was figuring it out. This situation did not humiliate me in the least. 1 was thrilled with the solution she’d found, ft was simple and beautiful and wouldn’t require large expenditures. But Volodya was not at all thrilled. He was staring fixedly at the mock-up of the homestead without lifting his head. My heart even felt like it would break when 1 understood what might be going on in his soul at that moment. He felt awkward before me for having assured me that he could find a solution. And probably before himself as well, for not carrying out the task Anastasia had given him. My son and I had grown closer over as we’d working on the design together over that day and a half, and I didn’t get offended at all any more at his stubbornness. I saw how Volodya was trying, sorting through all possible options for improving the soil’s productivity. And now I felt sorry for him, and I even stopped listening to Anastasia. Really, you can’t go and humiliate a child like that! It wasn’t enough that the night before, I’d kept telling him, trying to prove he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything - now Anastasia, too, with her ensuing criticism, had totally reduced our efforts to

mbble. She shouldn’t act that way. Or... It seemed to me that Anastasia was teasing our son on purpose, forcing him to rack his brains and speed up his thought. “And so what does this square in the middle of your design represent?” Anastasia asked. “It’s the home,” I replied. “Volodya and I decided to situate the home right in the middle of the homestead. There are various farmyard structures around it. We’ve laid a road from the gates to the home, and flowers will be growing along the edges of the road.” I was convinced that Anastasia would begin praising such a decision, which is why I said “Volodya and I,” although it had been my idea to situate the home in the middle of the homestead. I wanted to support my son in at least some way, but I’d ended up doing the opposite. “Now, where is the entrance into your home?” Anastasia asked. “On the driveway side, of course. You drive right straight up to the entrance, leave your car in the parking area right in front of it and go up to the veranda. There’ll be a table there. We can drink tea with friends and admire the flowers.” “As well as the driveway,” Anastasia added, her voice a bit needling. “As well as the driveway,” I replied, “if the driveway is done in a pretty stone.” “And what is situated behind the home?” “Behind the home are the pond, the garden, and a vegetable garden of some kind.” “That means your garden has ended up in the back yard. You’re drinking tea on the veranda with your friends, admiring the flowers, and everything that’s situated in the back yard is deprived of your attention. Vladimir, you know very well that all animals and plants need human attention. Without it, they are unable to fully fulfill their life’s purpose. “Plants can give a person the energies he needs, assuming they know precisely which energies he needs in the first place. But how will they learn about this if you limit your interaction with them? Vladimir, do you know what the purpose is of interacting with the plant world?” “I do,” I replied, trying to hide my disappointment that - as it turned out - I hadn’t been terribly successful in placing the home. Half the hectare, including the garden, really had ended up in the back yard. “And something else I don’t understand,” Anastasia continued, “is why you

didn’t remove that huge hill on the bank of the pond. It weighs down the space.” After hearing these words, Volodya couldn’t restrain himself any more. He stood up, bowed slightly to Anastasia as he’d done before, and said: “Mama, please permit me to clarify this for you.” “Please, dearson, clarify it.” They were standing opposite each other, son and mother. But for some reason, I got the impression that they were two great wizards of the Universe standing opposite each other. Now they were going to enter into a duel. A duel of intelligence and man’s capabilities. My God, how beautiful Anastasia was! How enigmatic and extraordinary in her capabilities and thought was this woman who had become the person closest to me. One life, and even two, would not suffice for me to reach her level. And our son, whose facial features somewhat resembled Anastasia’s, was also handsome and statuesque, but a bit foolhardy or excessively self-confident. Why was he entering into the showdown? And in my presence, to boot. He himself has said that Anastasia’s capacities exceed his own. Probably, he’s proud and decisive, but a bit foolhardy. Even so, I was rooting for Volodya with all my heart - I wanted him to emerge victorious in this competition, whatever form it might take. And it began. “This isn’t just a hill, Mama,” Volodya said. “Then what in the world is it?” Anastasia inquired with a smile, her voice a bit needling. “Well, how should I put it...” Slowly, drawing out the words, clearly trying to think up some rational explanation for the hill, Volodya suddenly said: “It’s the bath house, Mama.” I even started, so surprisingly absurd was my son’s announcement, but, without knowing why myself, I affirmed this, with a kind of gravitas: “Yes, it’s a normal contemporary bath house, a structure you really need on a homestead. If you don’t have a bath house, then where the heck are you going to wash and have a steam bath?” I tried to draw out the time every way I could, to give Volodya some way to get himself out of this fix and think of something. He would have been better off saying this mountain would be for skiing during the winter. He definitely was foolhardy. “And you can sleep in the bath house, too, before the home is ready,” I went on, continuing my line of reasoning. But now I didn’t know what to say next, and I fell silent.

“Strange. I see no resemblance between the mountain of clay and a bath house, and somehow, I see no entrance at all into this bath house,” Anastasia noted. Well, that’s it, I figured - my son really put his foot in it with this bath house, and he’s lost No more battle of the wizards. However, Volodya went on: “This is just a mock-up, Mama. The hill that represents the clay - we’ve made it out of sand, and the sand slides off, and it’s difficult to show the entrance.” Just as before, Volodya spoke slowly, and clearly he was thinking about something very strenuously as he did so. And suddenly it was as if his face lit up, and he kept on talking, but precisely and confidently now: “When we do it out of clay, then right here, on the pond side, we’ll form a small entrance into an oval chamber with a cupola. The chamber’s diameter will be two or three meters. The height will be two meters and thirty centimeters. The walls of the structure might be as thick as a meter. There are ducts in the walls to let out the smoke and hot air, and they all come together in one big duct that you can then close off with a plug. “There can be stones along the edges inside the oval chamber, and in the middle is where the fire will be lit. “The interior walls of the space will heat up. You’ll be able to admire the fire from the pond side, and if you don’t want to admire it, you can cover the entrance over with a door. When the walls heat up and the fire goes out, a person can go inside the chamber. His body will be warmed from all sides, from below and from above. The clay will emit a very healthy and beneficial warmth for the person.” “Yes, of course, that is a very healthy emission,” Anastasia said, now thoughtfully, “especially if you were to place a vessel there containing an infusion of medicinal herbs. Information about such a bath house did not exist in the Universe, and you could not have received it. This means you have added this information to the Universe, and now you...” I looked at the little mountain of earth in the mock-up and imagined this bath house, and around it - flower beds, roses, and the bank of a beautiful pond. And even just from imagining it, some kind of most beneficial warmth really was spreading through my body. I intuitively understood that Volodya had thought up something that hadn’t previously existed. That made me extraordinarily joyful, as if my body and Soul were both rejoicing. I began thinking once again about the overall homestead project, about how awesome and beautiful Anastasia was, both in body and mind. Naturally, she isn’t indifferent to this project and perhaps she deserved more credit than anyone for solving the problem of how to improve the soil productivity,

a problem that we’d previously considered hopeless. Wow, what a thing to think of- raising a regular compost pit just above ground level and turning it into a living fence. That meant she’d agreed to help after all, her principles notwithstanding. To help in some discreet way. I walked up to Anastasia and softly whispered: “You’re the one who thought all of this up. You found the solution. Thank you, Anastasia.” “We thought it up together, Vladimir,” Anastasia said, also in a whisper, “and perhaps those three hundred families you spoke of deserve the most credit.” “But they weren’t here while we were thinking.” “Perhaps they weren’t here, but they were there, on their hectares, also contemplating the best steps to take. And just imagine, Vladimir, what if they didn’t exist at all? Would you have thrown the whole family into a tizzy? Would you really have racked your brains so and demanded with such agitation that we find a solution? If they did not exist, you might not have given this question the slightest of thoughts. Perhaps they, these three hundred families are the main figures behind this project.” “Yes, I agree. We created it all together, and I thank you even more for that ‘together’, Anastasia.” And then I added, “And thank you, too, for the eternity you’ve given me. I was at the spot where you hid the empty bottle.” Anastasia added, with slightly downcast eyes: “And the stick.” “And the stick,” I confirmed, and started laughing. Anastasia also started laughing, a rolling, light-hearted laughter, and even little Nastenka began hopping around near the mock-up, swinging her little hands and laughing. Only Volodya, indifferent to what was going on, was still looking intently and thoughtfully at the mock-up. And I suddenly felt unbearably sorry for my son. Despite the fact that he’d managed to think up the extraordinary bath house, he - naturally, of course still considered that he hadn’t managed the task Anastasia had set for him. And he probably felt uncomfortable before me, too, for not listening to me, for arguing that we’d get along without Anastasia. He really had tried, but... I wanted to support him somehow, cheer him up. But how could I do that? I didn’t know. Volodya was looking at the mock-up intently, most likely trying to come up with something else of his own in it. He didn’t understand that we’d already

come up with what was most important. Late in the evening, before going to sleep, I asked Anastasia: “But where do Volodya and Nastenka sleep?” “In various spots,” Anastasia replied. “Nastenka will sleep with me sometimes. Why are you inquiring about this, Vladimir?” “Oh, no reason. I just wanted to talk with Volodya about something.” “Then call him.” “How do I call him? Do I shout, or what?” “Just call him. He’ll hear.” I called him. And a short time later, I saw our son coming in my direction. As before, he was intent as could be. When Volodya got closer to me, I asked him: “Volodya, when did you come up with the mountain of clay being a bath house, and why didn’t you tell me about that earlier?” “I decided to say that when Mama began criticizing our design and the clay mountain in our design. I decided to call it a bath house because you, Papa, told me, ‘First of all we need to build the outhouse and the bath house on the plot.’ The mountain was a bit too large to be an outhouse, and I decided to call it a bath house.” “But then you began talking about how it would be arranged and used. Did you think that up on the fly, just like that, or maybe you’re able to use the Universal information after all, like Mama?” “I can’t do it the way Mama does, Papa, but it’s possible that there’s some benefit in that, too. What I’m unable to receive information about - I try to quickly think that up on my own, and sometimes that works.” “I’ll say! It works like a charm! You’re a real inventor. I can’t get your invention out of my mind. I’ve even decided to make up a working model when I get back. I’ll buy a clay pitcher, put a hole in its base and cover its mouth with a cover of some sort with a hole for a pipe. I’ll light a candle inside it and leave it for an hour or two, instead of a fire, so we can see how it’ll heat up. Only a pitcher’s walls are thin, so we won’t have a perfectly accurate model.” “Papa, apply a layer of clay around the pitcher, and the model will be more accurate.” “Perfect, I’ll apply a layer of clay. Now, Volodya, please forgive me, well, you know, for being so hot-headed and saying that you have nothing to

think with. Don’t be angry with me.” “I’ve never gotten angry at you, Papa,” he answered calmly. “And I’m not angry at Mama. And of course you got it, that she was only pretending that we’d thought up that earthen mound along the hectare’s perimeter, actually, she and Nastenka gave us a hint.” “Yes, Papa, I got all that.” “But it’s not important, who thought it up. What’s important is that the problem with the soil has now been solved. Good for Anastasia, right, Volodya?” “Mama challenged us to a duel, Papa.” “A duel? She challenged us? I had that kind of feeling when you were standing opposite each other. Is that a kind of game, Volodya? To develop the mind, is that it?” “You could say it’s a game, but to be more precise, it’s a duel.” “That’s not a fair duel. Anastasia possesses information as broad as the Universe, but we don’t have that opportunity. How can we duel under those circumstances?” Volodya heard out my arguments and replied, with calm confidence: “I have accepted the challenge, Papa.” “Well, there was no point in accepting it. The chances are a hundred percent you’ll lose! Then you’ll get upset, the way you got upset today. I saw the way you were sitting there all upset, hanging your head when Anastasia was talking about the earthen mound, about the home in the middle and the back yard. And here you’ll get even more upset.” 1 Translator’s note: One hectare is equal to 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres. 2 Translator’s note: This is equivalent to roughly 1000 U.S. dollars or 750 Euros (for 2010). 3 Translator’s note: The original Russian phrase is “cpe/ia orieTOBaHHaa” (transliterated “sreda obetovannaya” and pronounced “sree-DAH ah-bee-TOH-vuhn-nuh-

yuh”). This phrase both echoes the phrase “dwelling land” (“cpe/ia orinTaHna”, transliterated “sreda obitaniya” and pronounced “sree-DAH ahbee-TAH-nee-yuh”) and is also meant to echo the Biblical phrase “promised land” (in Russian “3eMJia oOeroBaHHa” (transliterated “zemlya obetovanna” and pronounced “zeem-LYAH ah-bee-TOH-vuhn-nuh”). Thus, although “cpe/ia” is often translated as “habitat”, I chose to translate it here as “the land around you”, so as to retain the link to both “promised land” and the word “land” in the phrase “dwelling land”. See note 10 for discussion of the latter phrase. 4 Translator’s note: The original Russian here is “po/iOBaa KHnra” (transliterated “rodovaya kniga” and pronounced “ruh-dah-VAH-yuh KNEE-guh”). This phrase, coined by Vladimir Megre, refers to a book that each family creates when they establish a family homestead. In the family book, family members will write down information about the members of the family line and about the family homestead, so that this valuable information will be preserved and handed down from generation to generation for centuries to come. 5 Translator’s note: Volodya (in Russian, “BOJIO/IH”, transliterated “Volodya” and pronounced “Vah-LOH-dyuh”) is a diminutive name Vladimir.

“I must not lose, Papa. If I lose, it will make Mama sad.” “Well, then she should surrender to you in some non-obvious way, so that she herself won’t be sad afterwards.” “Mama can’t surrender.” “Oh, Volodya, Volodya - sometimes it seems to me you’re a bit foolhardy. Okay, what’s happened has happened. You go get some sleep, Volodya. I’ll go, too, and I’ll think about how best to situate the home on the hectare. Maybe I’ll think of something.” “Yes, Papa, you need to get a good sleep. I wish you a serene sleep, Papa.” My son and I went our separate ways, but I couldn’t go to sleep right away. I said to Anastasia: “Don’t wait up for me. Go to sleep on your own, Anastasia. I need to think about something for a bit.” I walked around by the entrance to the dug-out in the light of the white Siberian night, thinking about how to help Volodya. From time to time I’d look at the sleeping Anastasia. She was sleeping on her side, curled up into a ball with her palm beneath her head, and smiling a little about something in her sleep. She’s smiling like a child, the gentle beauty. But the day before - she sure had ripped our layout apart mercilessly! She’d called the spot where we’d put the home in the mock-up incorrect. Half the hectare had ended up as the backyard, she’d said. Of course, that really was the case. I needed to recall how homes were situated in the landscape design journals. Of course, Volodya wouldn’t be able to solve the problem of where to situate the structures, since he didn’t have the information. I’d have to think everything through. Otherwise, he’d lose all confidence in his own capabilities. I had such a strong desire to help my son that I sensed that I wouldn’t fall asleep until I’d thought up something useful. I’ve seen lots of country homes with various structures on plots of land, so that meant it was up to me to find the correct solution. But it wasn’t coming. Most of the houses I’d had occasion to see basically had their windows looking out over the driveway. It was getting long past midnight, but I was still walking back and forth along the dug-out, sorting through various options for situating the home and farmyard structures. And suddenly it came to me! It came to me just like that, somehow, as if it just empted, and I really liked what came to me. Well, I’ll give her an answer tomorrow! Yeah, I’ll answer her!

I started imagining the way, the next day, I’d answer Anastasia’s remark about the back yard. I’d start in an off-hand way: “Anastasia, you were saying something here yesterday about the spot where we put the home, about some kind of back yard.” “Yes,” she’d say. “I was saying that half of your hectare has ended up in the back yard.” “That’s not true, Anastasia. That’s not the way it all is. You just failed to notice a little indentation on the mock-up. That’s a veranda that goes around the whole home. When it’s hot, we’ll sit on the shady side with our friends, along the wall that’s on the other side of the house from the entrance. We’ll sit and admire the garden and the flower beds, and thus you don’t have any back yard. An open veranda runs all around the house.” “Yes, that’s true,” Anastasia will say. “I didn’t notice that.” I decided I’d come up with something good, and quietly, so as not to disturb her sleep, I laid down on the fragrant bed next to the sleeping beauty. During the night I had a strange dream about the bath house. It was as if I was walking into it and closing the door behind me. And the bath house lifted up off the ground and was flying into the sky, picking up more and more speed. THE FIERY BIRD I woke up around eleven o’clock. Most likely I’d slept so long due to the two days of non-stop mental exertion. As soon as I woke up, I once again wanted to see my son and talk with him about the bath house. To tell him this wasn’t simply a bath house. It was a multi-function structure. It could serve as an outdoor fireplace, where it would be great to sit with your friends or family. You could also dry clothing, mushrooms and many other things in it. You could bake bread and prepare tasty dishes in it. And it goes without saying that you could treat what ails you in it by warming your body with its extraordinary heat. I reflected this way as I walked to the spot where the homestead mock-up was, on the lakeshore. When I came out of the bushes, this is the picture that presented itself to me. Alongside the mock-up of the homestead lay an exhausted she-wolf, her legs smeared with clay. About two meters from the she-wolf, a she-bear was shifting from foot to foot in a small pit - she was working the clay. Volodya, kneeling, was was using the palms of his hands to smooth out the bath house he’d constmcted of clay on the bank of the pond. But no! You’d be hard pressed to call what I saw there a bath house. Even my fear at the presence of the she-bear and she wolf took aback seat, and I went up closer. The central part of what Volodya had constructed resembled the head and

torso of some unusual kind of bird. At the base was a small opening - the entrance to the interior room. Extending out from the central part of the structure that resembled an unusual bird were its two wings. They were embracing the space. Beneath one of the wings sat a man and a woman who resembled Anastasia and me. A little girl was playing in the middle. It was a cloudy day - the sun would by turns shine brightly and hide behind the clouds. The shadows’ play created the impression of a live bird that might lift off in flight as soon as the people went inside it. I could hear Anastasia’s voice - she had just come out onto the lakeshore, holding little Nastenka by the hand. “This is simply a hallucination of some kind. Since morning I have been thinking of nothing but your bath house. There’s something extraordinary in it. I need to figure it out. I even...” Anastasia stopped speaking, without finishing her sentence. She caught sight of what our son had constructed. Together with Nastenka, she went up closer, took a seat by the mock-up, put her arms around her little daughter and for a short while silently looked at the extraordinarily beautiful sculpture. And she began speaking, as if thinking aloud: “Earth, fire, water, air, light rays, man. And all of it in one bird. And such an extraordinary one - a bird resembling an eagle teaching its sons to fly.” “This structure is multi-functional,” I remarked to Anastasia, pleased by her delight. “You can not only warm up with your friends in it, but bake bread, too, prepare good and dry mushrooms and other things, too.” “Yes, you can. But you shouldn’t do that with friends. Only with close relatives, but more often on your own.” “Why?” “Vladimir, this apparatus might possibly function more effectively than a dolmen. You can meditate inside it.” During our conversation, Nastenka went up to the mock-up and for some reason was diligently poking at it with her finger. “Look, Anastasia, is our daughter Nastenka trying to destroy the mock-up?” “I think she wants to show that we need to make some small round openings in the cupola, make little windows that look out onto the four sides of the world. Then in the day it will be light inside, and at night the stars will be visible.” “And I planned to make a round window in the middle, too,” Volodya added. Nastenka, as if she’d understood that everyone agreed with her, stopped

boring holes in the clay with her finger and slowly - as if reflecting on some thoughts of her own - headed off in the direction of the forest. “Anasta,” I said in her direction, without even understanding why myself. Nastenka turned and looked at me intently. The breeze rearranged a lock of her hair and uncovered a birthmark on her forehead - it looked like a little star. The little girl smiled and continued her journey, whose goal was known to her alone. Anastasia continued silently examining what Volodya had constructed. She was trying to comprehend something. Never before had I seen her so concentrated. Finally Anastasia began speaking, as if reasoning aloud: “Five illuminated circles, and they will move in accord with the movement of the sun and of the moon. They will move across the walls and the floor of the interior oval or round chamber. That is very important. They will illuminate the person.” “Tell me, Anastasia. What about the person who’s inside this structure - will he be able to restore his health, just the way he’d be able to in any bath house?” “It will function more effectively than any bath house, or than all of them put together. The heated clay gives off rays that are very beneficial for a person. Blood will move more quickly through the veins, and the internal organs will warm and be cleansed.” “But specifically, what illnesses can be treated with a session in this structure?” “A person will receive a healthy effect on his entire organism. Thus it follows that it will be easier for the organism to fight off any illness, but it is possible to focus the energies and direct them to a specific organ.” “Well, take the kidneys, for example. How can you treat them? How can you direct the energies?” “You need to pour clean sand into a wooden tub, roll the tub into the center of the oval chamber, and when the sand has heated up, bury yourself in it. Only your head should remain outside. Before this you should eat a good amount of watermelon. The sand is very good at absorbing sweat that comes out of the pores.” “Well, sweat comes out of a person’s body even in a regular bath house. Why do you need to lie in the sand?” “But Vladimir, look - in a regular bath house, where does the sweat which comes, for example, out of the upper pores on the back, or the chest or the

shoulders flow away to?” “What do you mean, where? It runs down.” “Precisely. It runs down, along the other pores, thereby hindering them from perspiring. The dry, warmed sand is very good at absorbing moisture, and the sweat will flow out directly into the sand, rather than down along the person’s entire body. It is also good, when you’re in the sand bath, to drink a medicinal herbal infusion.” “And what about the liver? How can you treat that?” “Does this mean your liver is bothering you, too, Vladimir?” “Yes, it bothers everybody.” “Effective treatment of the liver in this structure can be carried out at three o’clock in the morning.” “Why precisely at three?” “At that time all the other organs help the liver cleanse itself of all the accumulated impurities within it. As well, if you place your palm on the spot where the liver is located and think of it with gratitude, and in your thoughts say to it ‘Thank you!’ then it will stir and begin to restore itself.” “How can that be - restore itself? What, is it alive, or something?” “Of course it’s alive, just as are all the organs of your body.” “But why can you meditate well in this structure? You said it might possibly be more powerful than in a dolmen.” “People who entered into a dolmen would go off into internal meditation. They were trying to transmit information to their descendants. The dolmen aided them in this. This unique apparatus is even more effective than a dolmen: it can help transmit information, but it can also, under certain conditions, receive information from the Universe and transmit it to the person inside, while hiding away deep within itself any negative information...” Anastasia suddenly fell silent, looked at our son and asked him: “Are you wanting to add something else to the homestead design, Volodya?” “Yes, Mama. But first I want to be alone for a bit and think.” “All right. We won’t hinder you.” She tookNastenka by the hand, intending to leave. But Volodya said: “Let Nastenka stay.” And Nastenka, hearing her brother’s request, quickly slipped out of

Anastasia’s arms and headed for the mock-up. Anastasia and I left. DON'T JUDGE TOO HARSHLY The next morning, Anastas ia and I decided to go over to her grandfather’s glade. I’d long been asking her to show me this spot, his glade, and besides that, I wanted to have a chat with him. According to what Anastasia has said, it would take no less than three hours to walk to her grandfather’s glade. Consequently, such a hike might take up an entire day, but it stretched out to two days. Even as we made our way through the taiga to her grandfather’s glade, Anastas ia and I spoke about homesteads. “You know, Anastasia, many people who build family homesteads feel they shouldn’t run electricity to their homestead or use all kinds of technology. Others do use it.” “And what do you think, Vladimir?” “I think that at the beginning stage, you can’t get along without technology and even without professional builders.” “You might possibly be right, Vladimir. Let the technical means that have accumulated over the centuries be used for good. A unity of opposites will result. But I think we must design life so that in the future we will gradually do without them.” For some time I walked silently behind Anastasia. I was stepping over the fallen trunks of old trees, skirting thickets of bushes along the invisible path and thinking my own thoughts, and maybe for that reason, I fell a bit behind. I even lost sight of her. But then, after I’d taken a few more steps, I heard Anastasia’s voice. “You must be tired, Vladimir. We can take a rest. Let’s take a seat.” I agreed. “Let’s. This isn’t the easiest path. We’ve only been walking an hour, but it feels as if we’ve gone ten kilometers.” We sat down on a tree trunk. Anastasia held out a handful of currants to me that she’d collected along the way. I silently ate the delicious berries from the Siberian taiga and continued to think about my unpleasant situation. Then I decided to tell Anastasia about it. “Anastasia, it so happens that for a number of years now I’ve been thinking about a situation I find unpleasant. In one of the books I told about the inception of Christianity in Rus and included historical facts and information from museums. And I ended up with negative information. This whole inception looked like a takeover of Russia. It seemed as if I’d laid out all the

accurate facts and conclusions, but now I have an unpleasant feeling in my heart, and for years, now, Fve been tormented by doubts.” “Why unpleasant, Vladimir? Is it because certain representatives of the Church have been responding badly to you?” “That’s not it - I’m already used to that. It’s something else I just can’t figure out.” “What is it, Vladimir?” “When I wrote about the baptism of Rus in such negative terms, then it ended up that I was saying something negative not about some specific person, but about everyone, all at once. Only afterwards did I get that no way I should have done that.” “And how did you come to that understanding, Vladimir?” “I spent the best years of my childhood at my grandparents’ place in the village of Kuznichi. I remember lots of details from living there. I remember that there, in the little Ukrainian hut, on a table in the comer, were Orthodox icons. My grandmother would decorate them with an embroidered towel and light a little lamp. “I also remember the way my mom would attend church, even with her ailing legs. I often recall my spiritual father, Father Feodorit, the archpriest of Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra monastery. To this day, I still keep the Bible he gave me. “And so it turns out that by speaking out negatively about Christianity, I was speaking out negatively about my grandparents, my mother and my spiritual father Feodorit. Well, and maybe about many good and worthy people, too. When I realized all this, then the first chance I got, I appeared on television, on Channel One, and apologized to the Church. But I didn’t feel much better after I did that. What else do you think I need to do to expiate my guilt before the people close to me? And before myself, too, maybe.” “I think you need to fully comprehend everything and summon up a positive image that will eclipse the negative.” “Of course, it’s easy to say ‘comprehend everything’ - Fve been trying to do that for more than a year, and I’m not doing such a great job. But tell me, how do you feel about religions? Maybe you prefer some, and disavow or even reject some other, false ones?” “Vladimir, I don’t understand what meaning you assign to the word ‘disavow,’ but I will try to show you the links in your family chain. Take this twig here. That will serve as your sabre for severing those links of the chain that you disavow.”

A depiction of a long chain of people holding hands arose in the space. The people of the first group wore crosses and little icons around their necks. “Do you see, Vladimir? These are your relatives of the Orthodox faith. And those wearing turbans are Muslims. They also figure in your genealogy. And now here is a large group of people who today are called pagans. Next, holding hands, come your forbears from the Vedic period. Behind them come the blurred outlines of people of the first race, and we can also say of them that these are people from the first civilization on earth. They are blurry because information regarding them has not been articulated in the space, but your relatives are present there, too. “The first person in this family chain was created by God, and he even now holds the hand of God. In all who follow also exists a particle of God. One day it will come to pass that the next person bom of your line will come to know all and will sense everyone. He will also link hands with God. It may be that this will be you, or it may be your great-granddaughters. The circle will be formed. The circle - Alpha and Omega and Alpha once more. “But now think and tell me, which of these groups of people would you like to remove from the chain?” “I have to think about which one... Wait, Anastasia. Wait. But if I remove even one group of people, then, you know, the chain will be broken.” “Of course, it will be broken.” “And if it is broken, then the person who breaks it can never come to know God, link hands with him and form the circle.” “I also think this, that he will be unable to do this.” “So what does that mean? Should a person accept absolutely all religions?” “Which religion to accept - that is the choice of each person, but I think we should disavow nothing from the path humanity has followed. It’s possible that all that occurred in the past is essential for today’s awareness. What you consider to be good is essential to accept. That which to your mind appears negative is essential simply to know, in order that it should not recur going forward. But not to be rejected.” “But what about if you don’t know? Will it necessarily have to recur, and in the very same way?” “Yes, it will recur. There will come a prophet who seems the bearer of the new. Those who have forgotten will hark unto him in delight, not knowing that in doing so they create nothing new.” “But really, it’s impossible to know with precision everything that has

happened to mankind since the time of creation. Historians distort even the most recent historical events to curry favor with those in power.” “Within you, Vladimir, and within each person alive on Earth there exists a particle containing all information of your family line, from creation up to the present day.” “I understand - this information is stored in each person on the genetic level, but how can we learn to make use of it? That’s the question.” “By not disavowing and not rejecting even a smidgen of your particle.” “But nobody has the least intention of rejecting their own particle.” “When you disavow information about the past that has come to you from outside, you at the same time reject that particle that is within you.” “But what about if this information is false?” “The particle with false information is also within you. It has been preserved so that you might gain insight into the lie.” “But Anastasia, really, you were the one who showed me and told me about how the black monks killed the Vedic Russian family who didn’t want to betray their faith and their way of life. I wrote about that in a book. The image of the Vedic Russians turned out very powerfully - that’s what many people have said. And I often recall it. Especially the picture when the wounded Vedic Russian, the artist, is lying under the pine tree, clutching to his chest the figurine he’d carved of the woman he loved. He’d loved her his whole life, but she’d married another. He kept on loving her, hiding his love. Only, when he’d carve figurines, they’d always end up looking like her. “He, an old elder, entered into battle with a whole enemy detachment, in order to lead them away from the family of the woman he loved, and he was wounded. And I wrote your words: ‘The Vedic Russian lay on the grass and did not moan. A small stream of blood flowed from his chest. The wooden pine tree did not know how to cry... ’ Well, do you remember?” “Yes, Vladimir, I remember this emotional scene.” “Well, so after this picture, then how can I - or someone else - not reject the black monks?” “Tell me, Vladimir who you feel yourself to be, that wounded Vedic Russian or the black monk?” “Me? Who am I? That means that’s why you showed this... To determine... But what’s this got to do with me?” “Back there, in the past, in that picture - your forbears were there. Who were they? What do you think, Vladimir?”

“I don’t know. I’d like it if they were the Vedic Russians. Of course they were the Vedic Russians! Because the black monks came to Rus from a different state. Tell me, Anastasia, have I understood all this correctly? Tell me!” “Vladimir, don’t get agitated. Take in the information calmly. Your ancestors really were Vedic Russians. But the screeching black monk, too, was your ancestor. “Everything arose from the Whole, and this means all are brothers. Forgetting this, peoples fight amongst themselves, thereby destroying within their ‘opponent’ their own selves. It was this way, perhaps, for a reason. With the beginning of the new millennium, a new era has arrived as a new awareness of existence on Earth. The era of the beautiful transformation of the Earth.” “It’s arrived? It’s already arrived? ... Basically, I have a feeling inside me, too, that something new is going on in the world, especially when I see the way people are setting up entire settlements of family homesteads in deserted spaces. Are they the ones who will lead the new era forward?” “Their awareness and feelings represent something new for the world.” “But on the other hand, you watch the news on television, and everything there is just the same as it’s been - right off the bat, they talk about who among the leaders met with whom, and how much oil costs, and how many years now have they been harping on about an economic crisis, but they don’t suggest anything of significant.” “On television, Vladimir, you are seeing news of the past life. The Universe is already alive through different dimensions. Commit everything from the past to memory. Leave nothing out. Take with you your ancestors’ prayerfed strength.” “How am I to understand that? What does ‘prayer-fed strength’ mean? What does it look like?” “From generation to generation, your ancestors would look upon an Orthodox icon each day, pray to it and dedicate to it their thoughts, their hopes and their requests. It would harken unto them and try to help, and with each day, the icon itself would grow stronger. It will help you, and has helped already. As well, esteem the rosary and the Koran that were given to you by the Grand Mufti of the Muslims. And the bible of your Father Feodorit. Remember with reverence the day when you appeared before people in the great Christ the Savior Cathedral. And the day when, in the most beautiful Lyalya Tyulpan Mosque, you sat before the people who had crowded into the hall, at a table, and alongside you were an Orthodox

priest and a rabbi. You spoke of homesteads. Ecologists spoke in support of you. Do you recall that day?” “Yes, I do recall. The Grand Mufti organized that event, and people of various faiths came to the mosque then, and they were all grateful to him. But I remember something different, too. I remember the slanderous articles in the press. I remember how there was an orchestrated attempt to ridicule me on television, on Channel One.” “Perhaps it is necessary, this slander directed toward you?” “Necessary? For what? What are you saying, Anastasia?” “You enter into a palace and a temple. A hero? Yes! Only you were unable to bear up beneath the brass trumpets and the fanfare of speech. How can you be saved from your self? By means of yourself?” “Come on, I have no self and no pridefulness. Only fatigue.” “So that means that it was due to fatigue, Vladimir, that one day, when you appeared in hall packed with readers in the capital of Belarus, you began to eject the bishop from the church publicly. That was due to fatigue?” “Oh, I wasn’t serious about that. They told me before my appearance, that he...” “And the crowd applauded you. The collective thought was energized and took off.” “And what’s up now with the bishop?” “But we are speaking not about him right now, Vladimir, but rather, about you. You wanted to understand how you feel about religions, to get a feel for this and figure it out.” “Yes.” “You must do this only yourself, but I will tell you of future events. Perhaps the information concerning them will help you. “It will happen before long, that more than a hundred and fifty leaders of various countries will come together. One question will they address, with scientists taking part: how to reduce the amount of harmful gases that are emitted into the atmosphere by human deeds. Gases that threaten the planet with disaster. But the hundred and fifty leaders of the Earth will be unable to make a decision that will save us, and they will go their separate ways. And the harmful gas created by mankind will continue to kill the planet. 1 What can you say about such a situation, Vladimir?” “What can I possibly say here? Heads of state have come together numerous

times to solve the question of how to improve the ecological situation, but to no end. Most people don’t pay any attention to these meetings any more.” “Why is that?” “Well, because not a single state has announced any workable proposals. And if there aren’t any workable proposals on the agenda, then what’s the use of meeting? It only makes people laugh.” “And what would you consider a workable proposal?” “The kind of proposal where the majority of people on Earth will change their life’s priorities. The desire will arise to perfect one’s dwelling land, instead of working at harmful manufacturing plants to get money to subsist on. No ruler is in a position to stop these harmful manufacturing plants, because unemployment will arise and there will be riots, and his power will end up being threatened.” “That means that heads of state are not in a position to stop a global disaster. But perhaps different authorities, spiritual authorities, are capable of doing this. The patriarchs of all the religions will come together, give their word before each other that they will call upon their congregations to perfect the earth’s dwelling land.” “Yes! Exactly! They’d be able to deal with this question more effectively and have an effect on the people and the authorities at the same time.” “And so that means that religions are important and needed. What do you think, Vladimir?” “Turns out, they’re important and needed. And it would be great if they could all together direct their efforts toward perfecting both the spiritual and material dwelling land. But we need specifics here, too. Your plan, Anastasia, is unsurpassed in terms of specifics, and people’s hearts and souls everywhere are embracing it. But there is one circumstance that calls into question how viable it is.” “What circumstance is that?” “There’s no doubt that the way of life for a family on the family homestead that you’ve shown is greatly superior to today’s way of life for people in cities and rural areas. And even now, the number of families living this way - without any support whatsoever from the government - is growing steadily with each year. And there might come a time when the majority of the Earth’s population will want to have their own family homesteads and live on them. And at that point, there won’t be enough hectares for every family that wants one. Even now, people are talking about how a portion of the population needs to be eradicated due to the fact that there’s not enough

living space and natural resources. According to these rumors, there should remain on Earth the so-called Golden Billion, plus two or three billion people who serve them. The Earth’s population is now six billion, and people are already raising the question of restricting births, like, say, China, where one billion, three hundred million people live in an area comprising 9.6 million square kilometers. “If people’s way of life begins to change in accord with your plan, then people’s life expectancy will increase. It’s a completely obvious and undisputed fact, that the life expectancy for a person living on a family homestead, assuming he has no harmful habits - here I’m talking about drinking, smoking and others - has an excellent diet, clean air and healthy water, will, on average, be twice as long. “A family living on a family homestead will want to have children, and such families have a significantly greater desire to bear children than those living in modem cities. So it follows that before long, new families won’t be able to get a hectare to build a family homestead. “I understand that there must be some way out of this. When God was thinking of all that’s beautiful, he can’t have set up this kind of dead-end situation that would incite people to battle for living space. Your grandfather has said it’s absurd and futile to explore outer space using current methods, and that there’s another method - he calls it psychoteleportation. But no matter how much you think about it, it doesn’t appear possible to understand it in a detailed way. Basically, people don’t believe it exists, and science doesn’t say anything about it.” “I am also aware that the psychoteleportation method of exploring outer space and the planets of other galaxies does exist. But no one in my family line is privy to the details or mechanisms of this method. I hope that people who are now establishing family homesteads, or their children or grandchildren will discover and grasp what helps it function. And this will definitely come to pass. “But I understand your anxiety, too, Vladimir. If a person already today cannot see at least a part of this mechanism, he will remain anxious, due to his uncertainty regarding his family line. It is essential for us to grasp at least a part of it. “I have been thinking tirelessly about it and searching, but I am finding only more and more confirmations all the time of its existence. It is possible that it’s essential for us to lay out the logical lines of reasoning, and to ask people who are familiar with science, with biology and programming, to think together. We must discover it all together. “Vladimir, we’ve arrived,” announced Anastasia. “This is the home... This is

Grandfather’s space.” THE FAMILY PARTY Anastasia’s grandfather had always been notable for his unusual behavior. Even when speaking about very serious things, he’d always use humor or try to trip you up. And this time, too, he remained true to himself. When we came out into his glade, we saw Anastasia’s grandfather sitting beneath a cedar tree with his legs crossed, looking intently at a staff stuck into the ground before him. It was clear that he’d long since sensed we were on our way to him, and besides, he couldn’t help but sense our presence, but he paid no attention to us whatsoever. And even when we walked practically right up to him, he still didn’t turn in our direction and didn’t greet us. We stood there silently for three or four minutes. Then I whispered to Anastasia: “You try saying something to him. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep standing here like this.” “All right, Vladimir. But I’m trying to grasp what he’s up to here,” Anastasia replied, also speaking softly. Then, all the same, she addressed her grandfather, saying: “We arrived quite a while ago, Grandfather.” And something totally odd happened next. Anastasia’s grandfather, turning to the staff, suddenly said: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, I announce a fifteen-minute break.” Then he stood up, led us off to the side and, completely serious, began explaining: “I’m currently leading a party meeting of the Family Party. It will continue for another forty-five minutes or so, so you will have to wait.” “How’s that, a party meeting?” I asked, surprised. “There’s nobody here. And besides, the Family Party hasn’t been constituted yet.” ‘Well, not by you, it hasn’t been,” Grandfather replied. “But I’ve constituted it for myself.” “How’s that, you’ve constituted it? Who’s joining it?” “I’m joining it all on my own. And I’m preparing for the convention.” “What convention, if there’s only you in the party membership?” “For now there is only I, but perhaps someone else will come along and constitute their own Family Party. And then we’ll convene.”

“But how the heck is something like that possible?” “Well, you yourself said that we need to come up with something new. And so I came up with the idea that each person can lead his own Family Party, so no one will use his authority and position to put pressure on the party rank and file. And at the conventions, everyone will be equal.” “And what kind of agenda do you have here at this meeting?” “The government’s report on the work it’s done in connection with perfecting the dwelling land.” “Well, and who do you have giving reports?” “Various people. After the break I’ll be hearing from the Minister of Railway Transport.” “But he’s not here!” “Not for you, but for me he is.” “How about him, does he know you’ll be hearing from him?” I wondered. “He doesn’t know. And really, why should I take him away from his work?” “But when and where will your convention take place?” “When the organizers set the date.” “What organizers?” “Other Family Party leaders.” Really, in spite of how comical Grandfather’s display was, I do think the idea of creating a Family Party, in which all are equal, deserves attention. The usual way of organizing a party won’t get us anywhere, except to something resembling the CPSU. And this is where I can see some grains of truth. Each person is free to act in accordance with his own heart and soul, rather than orders or a universal charter. Different party members can initiate the best actions and endeavors and advances. It seems to me that in this case you’ll end up with a lively community of people that develops on its own, in which each individual really can express his own initiative. As we took our leave of Grandfather, I said, matching his tone, and trying to be serious: “From this day forward I also constitute my own family party.” Why go on and on about it? It’s time for each of us to take action. Further developments connected to Anastasia’s grandfather deserve a separate book, and I intend to tell about them at a later date. EXPLORING VIRGIN PLANETS

On our way back, as Anastasia and I were returning from seeing Grandfather, our conversation once again turned to the possible existence of a biological way for a person on Earth to explore other planets and galaxies. I reminded Anastasia: “Anastasia, you mentioned that you think tirelessly about a biological way to explore other planets, and that you’re finding logical confirmations of its existence. Can you lay out these logical lines of reasoning?” “We can begin now, together, to analyze the situation. Further on you can continue on your own.” “All right, Anastasia, but you go ahead and start us off.” “First of all it’s essential to authoritatively establish the first fact. All that has been created in the technocratic world existed and exists in a biological and significantly more perfected form. Do you agree with this, Vladimir? Do you understand how important it is to establish this understanding?” “Of course, I agree. I’m not the only one who knows this. Many other people do, too. Man used to be able to do calculations in his head a lot better and faster - each person had his own inner calculator. Well, and so on. You can cite a great many examples here. “The example I like most is a person’s birth. It’s the clearest and most striking example, because two methods exist simultaneously in the world now - the technocratic and the biological. “The technocratic method is when scientists in a specialized institute take sperm from a man and an egg from a woman, mix them together in a test tube that they keep inside a special apparatus. They keep it at the necessary temperature and humidity, and basically, it takes a lot of fuss and resources. Now, the biological method is a lot simpler and more effective. A man and a woman in a bed... They enjoy themselves, and soon afterwards a person is bom.” “A good example, Vladimir, only, please, take note of one very important detail. Even so, when a person is created, even if it is via a technocratic method, what lies at the heart of him is the biological material.” “Yes, of course, that’s what lies at his heart. You can’t get anything without the sperm and the egg.” “And the biological method has no need to adopt anything from the technocratic world.” “Agreed. Not a thing. Well, except for a bed. Although you can get along without a bed, too. Basically, Anastasia, I totally agree, and I get it - the biological alternatives are significantly more perfected than the technocratic.

When the technocratic man thinks up his so-called inventions and brainchildren, he’s replacing existing and perfected biological mechanisms with primitive, technocratic ones. That situation is completely anti-rational.” “And nonetheless, time and time again, human civilizations, losing all memory of their natural capabilities, have replaced them with primitive, technocratic alternatives. “We are unable to imagine now, how one can get to another planet using a natural method. And in this very same way, people of a different civilization were unable to imagine the birth of a child in a non-technocratic way. “Many women today cannot imagine giving birth to a child without others’ help, without a maternity ward and technocratic equipment. If we continue further along these lines, then more and more children will be bom using surrogate mothers. “Something resembling farms will arise, where women who have been artificially inseminated will be concentrated. Their whole lives, they will bear children and give them up. They will be provided with food and lodging, but they themselves, each one of them, will see herself as an incubator for a human embryo. This has already happened in history, in one human civilization. “In this same civilization, the practice of cloning of people was also developed. As a result, a person in this civilization was unaware that it was possible to give birth to a person through biological means. Lacking awareness of this, lacking this thought, a woman had no possibility of conceiving a child, no matter how much she entered into intimate relations with a man. Now, if a woman did become pregnant by natural means after all, this was considered pathological, and the human embryo was immediately destroyed or was removed and grown artificially. “Vladimir, do you agree with the assertion that any technocratic achievement is preceded by a person’s act of losing the memory of his biological capabilities?” “Ido.” “But now, tell me, can a person use a technocratic method to transfer an image, a photograph of his family homestead, for example, from one point on Earth to another, or into outer space?” “Of course, he can, using a computer and the Internet. All he needs to do is choose an electronic address, scan this image into his computer, go onto the Internet and send it to the address he’s chosen, and it will come up there on the computer. You can print it off the other computer using a printer. You can also send it into space, too, if you know the spaceship’s electronic

address. You can send it to the Moon, too, and you can send an image from the Moon to Earth. That’s already been done.” “Good, Vladimir, very good. Only you have forgotten one very important detail. The most important.” “Which one?” “Before the person does all these various operations on the computer, the thought was bom in him to send off the image.” “I agree. I didn’t mention the thought because that goes without saying.” “But now, tell me, can a person use a modem technocratic method to transfer not only an image, but an object, too, to all the points you named?” “And object? I don’t think it’ll work with an object.” I thought about it for a brief time and then added, “Anastasia, I remembered that there are lathes that carve various designs out of wood, little sculptures, for example, under the direction of computer programs, and if you send the computer program tasked with carving out the little sculptures to a different continent via an electronic address, or to the Moon, then another computer there, if it’s hooked up to the same kind of lathe, will carve out very same little figure, and there will be two of them - one that my computer made and a second that the other computer will carve out. In that way, the little sculpture 1 have will be copied on a different continent, or on the Moon.” “So it follows, that one can use a modem technocratic method to transfer or copy and recreate an object, even on a different planet?” “Yes, one can.” “But do you understand what this means, Vladimir?” “What?” “This means, that there exists a biological method for transferring an object from one planet to another, and this means it is a thousand times more perfected, simpler, and can be accessible to any person. The biological method requires the presence of no technology whatsoever, ft is the human thought that is most important in it.” “Yes, 1 agree, and in the case of creating a child, the most important thing is the thought, but a man who’s thought about creating a child needs a woman, too, and a woman who’s thought about a child needs a man. Together they materialize what they’ve thought.” “Together they... “Vladimir, the possibility of creation and birthing of a person by a man and a woman is the highest achievement. This means that it is possible, all the

more so, for a person to create life on another planet using a biological method. For now it is unclear what components are necessary in order to materialize him.” “Yes, Anastasia, a tremendous discovery. It would turn out to be tremendous, if you or someone else could find or discover these biological components.” “We need to think. It would be possible to comprehend and sense much, were we to encounter that knowledge possessed by the people of the first civilization on Earth.” PEOPLE OF THE FIRST CIVILIZATION “I infer, I surmise, and the logic of life confirms this, that they possessed potentials greater than did God Himself.” “But who the heck are these mysterious ‘they’?” “These are the children of God. People of the first earthly civilization.” “The first civilization? Does that mean there were ones that came after? And how might the first civilization have differed from those that came after it?” “In the direction of its development. Mankind, Vladimir, has not always followed the technocratic path into the dimension of anti-rationality, toward disaster. In the beginning was the first civilization, which developed in a different direction. We will call it the biological path. They made use of all that was originally created by God. A person of this civilization would study the divine creations and, with their help, would perfect his dwelling land. The divine creations are perfected, but each generation must be more rational than the preceding one. Such is the way God programmed it. “ft could be no other way. Were it another way, God could not be called God, and His creations, lacking the potential for becoming perfected, would represent the end of creation. Man is the beginning of the great creation. “And now it is taxing for us to even imagine what the first civilization achieved, what heights, in its divine development, and how the planet looked during the period of their material life. “Naturally, people of the first earthly civilization might also have looked different than contemporary man on the outside, too. They had an ideal body build, and their physical health enabled them to hold within themselves immeasurably more energy than contemporary man is able to hold. Their original knowledge of the biological divine world that came from God, enabled them to perfect it. “All the scientific and technological achievements existing today in the

technocratic world existed for them in a significantly more perfected, biological form.” “Where’s the proof that this civilization and their achievements existed?” “If you see a grown person, Vladimir, do you really need proof of the fact that this person was at first an infant and then a child?” “No, I don’. The person himself serves as proof that he used to be a child.” “In just that way, today’s human civilization, too, serves as proof that there existed the first. And this first one could not be technocratic.” “All right, maybe it couldn’t, but we can see from historical evidence and archaeological digs that people of ancient civilizations who lived a hundred thousand years ago ran around in animal skins with clubs and hunted animals, as we’re told, and that they had trouble finding food for themselves.” “Archaeologists are finding people of the post-disaster period of technocratic civilizations. “Imagine, Vladimir, that on the earth is living a technocratic civilization, that it is achieving great heights in so-called technocratic development. But any technocratic path rends the planet Earth, impairs the ecology and disturbs the biosphere, and large-scale technology-induced disaster ensues. Those in power, or the elite, always know of its approachbeforehand and make preparations to save themselves. One of the civilizations, for example, constructed, in near earth orbit, an entire technological complex of a size equaling two ocean liners. On it they saved themselves from the disastrous changes that had befallen the earth. But this technological complex could not hold the people indefinitely, for it itself was mortal. The people who were saving themselves from the earthly disaster held out on it for around sixty years. Children were bom to them. But there came a time, when life on the artificial complex became impossible. The people, its inhabitants, began dying, and then the decision was made to return to Earth, and they returned. They landed in groups, in special capsules. On the Earth, which was cooling now after the great fire, grass was already growing up anew, and the animal world was coming back to life. Not all the people managed to end up in this kind of oasis. Those who ended up in the desert or on red-hot lava perished. Those who managed to land on a plot of land where life had been partially preserved, rejo iced at their luck. “Now I will show you. “Look, there they are - there are but six of them - coming out of their red-hot capsule. They are rejoicing at the little green grass and the air they can breathe. Here are two children, a little boy and a little girl. They’re

examining a currant bush and the bugs on it with interest. And here is an elderly man without any hair at all. He’s returning to the capsule, and before long he carries a box out of it. There is food inside it. The person sets the box on the ground, looks at the little boy and the little girl by the currant bush and walks up to their mother, who is standing nearby. “‘It’s best for you to go far away from this place and take the children with you. We have enough food left for no more than a week. Your husband has died and I am your distant relative, but I have no intention of protecting you when the fight for food begins.’ “‘Give us at least a day’s worth of food.’ “‘Take it yourself, but try to do it so no one will notice you, and leave quickly.’ “The woman walked up to the box on the ground, bent over as if adjusting her shoe, and quickly took three little tubes of some substance and hid them beneath her jumpsuit. Then she quickly walked up to her children and, saying something about wanting to show them some even more interesting bushes, led them off far away from the craft lying on the ground. “The people who had returned to earth possessed knowledge of the technocratic world. They could use computers and satellite telephones, operate an automobile or a spaceship, but their knowledge was now absolutely useless and even hazardous. All communications and the majority of machines on earth had been destroyed. Many of those that remained were radioactive and posed a mortal danger. “The mother who left with her son and daughter carried on her family line. And once again, for millennia, mankind developed in the technocratic direction. Archaeologists excavated huge ancient cities. They excavated the graves of the forbears, finding in them crude hunting weapons, and concluded that they were seeing primitive people at the beginning of their civilization. But they were seeing people at the end of their civilization. Archaeologists would sometimes find cave drawings of people dressed in pressurized suits. The scientific world put forth hypotheses that mankind arose from extraterrestrial beings, that in antiquity mankind had received knowledge from extraterrestrials. But, just as before, they did not even want to entertain the thought that in the cave drawings of beings in pressurized suits... they were seeing people at the end of their civilization.” “But then where is the first civilization now?” “It has disappeared. It disappeared suddenly, for some mysterious reason. At the moment of their disappearance, the people of the first civilization erased all information about their achievements from the Universal database. They

did this in some inconceivable fashion. Why they took such steps, one can only infer and surmise.” “Well, so what do you infer, Anastasia?” “I infer that, perceiving themselves as in control of the fates of Universal worlds, they also recognized within themselves the germs of the anti-world, anti-rationality virus and understood that they lacked within themselves sufficient immunity to it. And at that point, they detonated themselves psychologically, along with their achievements, leaving on earth those who were more infected with the virus of anti-rationality and anti-world than the others. So that they could follow it to its conclusion and come to fully know the dimension of anti-rationality. And now we, the descendants of the first civilization, will come to know conclusively the essence of anti-rationality, and one instant before the planetary disaster, we will bring rationality and anti-rationality into balance within ourselves. All the achievements of the first earthly civilization will open up within us in a new and more perfected form.” “But if, as you say, their knowledge will open up, does that mean they’re somewhere, that they exist?” “They exist within each person.” Anastasia suddenly broke off her tale and froze. “What’s happened, Anastasia? Why did you stop talking and freeze?” “Something has happened in the Universal space. I sense that, Vladimir. I sense the vibrations. Do you also?” “I don’t sense a thing. Just some little breeze started to blow.” “Yes, a breeze, but it’s variable.” “Well, maybe it’s variable, but what of it? Did something bad happen, or something good?” “I don’t know, Vladimir. Only one thing is clear: what has happened has disturbed the space.” “But where did it happen?” “On the shore of our lake, I think.” “And what, are you saying the whole Universe reacted to this thing that happened?” “It always reacts when interesting or unusual information appears.” “Let’s run over to our lake as fast as we can, Anastasia.”

We set off walking at a fast clip. At times, when the taiga would allow me to, I tried to run. Only once did we sit down to rest, and then once again rushed toward the lake. When we were already almost to the lake, I suddenly imagined what unpleasant things might be in store for our son, and I asked Anastasia to stop. “Wait, Anastasia. Hear me out, try to understand. Volodya’s under the impression that you challenged us to a duel. Is that right?” “Yes,” Anastasia replied calmly. “I won’t going into it right now, about why it’s an unfair challenge. There’s no time. But 1‘m asking you - please don’t criticize what Volodya has done during the two days we’ve been gone. “It’s clear that he’s been working on the mock-up from dawn to dusk. He’s been trying. I know. I saw it when he and I were thinking over the design on our own. But he doesn’t have enough information. If you start criticizing his creation, he’ll be very upset. He’s said to me, ‘If I don’t win the duel, it will make Mama sad.’ “Can you imagine? He’ll try and try, so he doesn’t make you sad.” “And you, too, Vladimir.” “Yes. And me, too. But you and I - we’re grownups. We should understand that there’s simply nothing else he can add to the homestead design. The earthen wall around the perimeter was a brilliant idea, but it’s already been articulated, and the pond’s been settled and you haven’t rejected where we’ve put the home with the veranda all around it. What’s left? F lower beds, raised vegetable beds - that’s the small stuff. The technical construction details aren’t significant. You need to understand, Anastasia, there’s no room left there for creativity. I mean, you yourself have already done everything. You gave us a hint, and didn’t leave anything for our son. At least praise him for trying.” “I cannot praise him just for trying. That would be humiliating praise.” “Humiliating? But putting a child in a position where there’s no way out that’s not humiliation? No, that’s not humiliation. It’s mockery.” “Please believe me, Vladimir. I am not mocking our son, not at all. Within him are little parts of you and of me. Information and knowledge gathered by your ancestors and mine. He has been raised and taught by Grandfather and Great-grandfather. Our son’s capabilities are yet to be revealed, but I am certain that they are great.”

“Maybe they are great, but I’m trying to explain to you, that there’s no area left for creativity, for him to display them. The homestead design has already been created.” “You feel it’s been created. But for a long time now, I’ve been under the impression that even so, neither you nor I, nor the people who are creating homesteads are aware of some key purpose of theirs. Many sense it intuitively, and for this reason the thought to create a family homestead draws people in. This thought is on the level of feelings. They are not fully clear or grasped. Something very important for the future and for eternity has not been grasped. “From the moment of man’s creation and up to the present, within him has lain all that was created in the beginning, and they, the man-gods of the first civilization, are secreted away within each person, in the form of a small and perhaps microscopic particle. It’s possible that they can see or feel what is transpiring. When I excessively precipitously put our son in a difficult position in regard to you, it is possible that this particle responded, that it couldn’t help it, and perhaps the time has come... It is possible that Volodya senses, feels the knowledge stored within him. His structure, this fiery bird, turned out too extraordinary in its beauty and function.” “Anastasia, please understand, you’re asking the impossible. You want our son to explain something to you or to create something, but you yourself don’t know what, exactly. You only feel some new potentials for the family homestead, but Volodya might not even know about your feelings.” “My feelings lie within our son, too, Vladimir.” I was walking behind Anastasia, fully aware that she wasn’t going to pull any punches with our son or praise him for no good reason. And she might even start criticizing him, too. But I wasn’t going to criticize him. I made a firm decision: I had to find some kind of words to say to cheer him up and praise him for trying. I fell a bit behind Anastasia. When I came out of the taiga, I saw that she, standing by a cedar tree, was focused on peering from afar at what was transpiring on the shore. And on the sandy shore of the taiga lake, surrounded by centuries-old cedars, Volodya was making some kind of incomprehensible structure. It was a simple square or rectangle that framed the earthen mound and enclosed it on both sides with little clay walls. The little walls at the comers were white and higher than along the sides. On the square’s inner edge was the pond, and next to it his unique bird, and in the middle of square, right on the sand, sat Nastenka. That was it. I understood that Anastasia wouldn’t be praising Volodya. There was nothing to praise him for. He’d made the bird before, and he basically wasn’t the one

who’d come up with the earthen mound. Either he hadn’t had time to construct the home and farmyard structures, or he didn’t know where to situate them. To tell the truth, the square was a little bit strange. I turned to Anastasia and said: “Volodya hasn’t managed to do anything special, and since that’s the case, there’s nothing here to criticize.” But Anastasia gave me no answer and didn’t even turn in my direction. It was at if she had lost track of everything and was focused on studying the square. I set off in the direction of the square my son was fussing with, but here’s where something incomprehensible happened. When I came to within a few steps of the homestead mock-up, I stopped. I didn’t have the strength to move further. It was as if the space around me was suddenly transformed. On the outside, everything was still the same, but my sensations... Unbelievably pleasant sensations that seemed familiar, or as if they’d come from another lifetime, were enveloping the whole surrounding space and warming my body from within. I was afraid to move -1 didn’t want them to go away. I just stood there and looked at a comer of the square. At a comer that was shaped like a little white home with a window and a door. I’d begun to come to, when I heard the voice of Anastasia, who’d walked up. She addressed Volodya who, kneeling, was smoothing out the uneven parts of the outer wall with his hands. “May I ask you something, my dear son?” Anastasia seemed agitated to me. Volodya stood up, went up to Anastasia, gave her a slight bow and replied: “I’m happy to listen to you, Mama.” “Have you found a new definition for the concept of a ‘home’?” “I’ve been trying to seek one out, Mama, and I decided that a person should simultaneously build a home for both himself and his hectare. Then they will be inseparably connected to each other and united in their space.” “Tell me about your mock-up, Volodya, and about how it is meant to function. Tell me about all its details.” “All right, Mama, I’ll tell you.” And our son began to tell her. It was as if, through his telling, the conventional labels of the extraordinary family homestead came to life in the mock-up. Volodya pointed to a depression in the wall. “This here is the entrance to the home, Mama. It’s located not on the road side, but the forest side.”

“You mean to say that this is the entrance to the territory of the family homestead,” Anastasia clarified. “The entire family homestead is the home,” Volodya replied, “and for that reason I called it the entrance to the home. And the person should wipe his feet before he walks in, if something has stuck to them, and even if nothing has, he needs to do this mentally. “Now this wall,” Volodya said, pointing to the greenhouse running along the hectare’s perimeter, “is the living wall of the home. The plants growing inside it will be warm and happy. This is a clay wall, heated by the rays of the sun that pass through glass - or the transparent plastic sheeting Papa has spoken of- from above. During the day, the clay wall will heat up, and during the night, when it’s cool, it will begin giving off warmth to everything growing inside. “There are rooms inside this wall. It’s a place where various garden supplies and tools the person will use will be stored. And in this space, Mama,” Volodya said, pointing to an oval extending out from the homestead’s perimeter, “a person can sleep and eat in the winter. “Next, there’s a compartment where the firewood is kept. The various domestic animals - chickens, swans, a goat, a pony, a hedgehog, peacocks and doves - are housed amongst the comers of the living wall that abuts the forest. There are two exits from their dwelling, one in the direction of the forest, the other into the home space. Papa has said that he often has to go away, and there won’t be anyone to look after the animals. Papa feels a person shouldn’t take on animals if he can’t give them enough attention and feed them at the right time. But I feel that animals shouldn’t have to depend on the person for food, that that demeans the animals. The person should create a comfortable dwelling land for the animals he likes, so that they can feed themselves independently and come to the person when he needs them. Many various wild animals live around our glade - our home - but there’s no need for us to feed them. On the contrary, they are happy to bring us food. I infer that we can create the very same conditions for animals on the family homestead, too, especially if it abuts a forest.” “It’s possible,” Anastasia said thoughtfully, and continued asking our son questions. “Volodya, on the road side, at the comers, there are two little homes with small windows. What are they for?” “Mama, I designed this for Papa. I know that Papa’s best childhood memories are connected to the time he spent living as a little boy with his grandmother and grandfather, in a little whitewashed clay hut with a straw roof. I built the little walls of this little village hut. I think it will be really good if Papa’s homestead has other elements, too, that will call up pleasant

memories from his life.” I quickly turned to the white... I began studying it. And I recognized it - my childhood home. I recognized the little whitewashed Ukrainian hut with a straw roof, with a little window and a door, and a little old bench beside it. I wanted to msh to my son and hug him, and then the pleasant sensations enveloped me anew and wouldn’t let me move from my spot. All I could do was to say: “Thank you, my dear son. It all really does look like it - the little window and the little bench, and the door.” “The door to your little childhood house opens, Papa. If you open it, you’ll immediately be inside the covered perimeter of your homestead, and you can pass through it, to wherever you want to go. “And Papa, I’ve also arranged various plants on the homestead space and have composed the necessary symbols out of them. “In the greenhouse, Papa, you can grow everything you like to eat in the spring and summer, but in addition to your favorite vegetables and fruits, it will be very good if you set up raised beds no more than eleven meters apart and with a diameter of no less than ninety centimeters. On these beds you’ll put in seedlings of, for example, currant and raspberry, and it would be good to put in at least one little cedar seedling on each side, along with grasses and flowers you’ve brought there from the taiga. And it’s desirable for them to come not from the edge of the taiga, but from deep inside it.” “It will be extremely difficult for people to do that, Volodya. Now me - I can do that, but I’d like a lot of other people who are building family homesteads to have this option, too. A lot of them won’t be able to put in plants from deep inside the taiga. “There are no roads in the taiga, you can’t use public transportation, and you can’t carry much out on our own, and then you still have to spend a long time hauling it back on public transportation. All of this will require no small financial expenditure. And when you add it all up, the plants you deliver from Siberia will cost significantly more than ones that are grown in nurseries and sold right on site or not far away. You know, there’s even a saying: ‘For a cow abroad you you’ll pay a penny, plus a hundred for her delivery.’ And besides that, can you explain why you should get plants from deep in the taiga, when you can dig them up in your local forest or get them from your nearest nursery?” “But those will be different plants, Papa. After all, you yourself have told me about how, for example, the milk agaric mushrooms that grow here and that you can eat raw differ significantly from the milk agaric mushrooms

that grow in the region of Russia you call the central region. The cowberries, too, differ. And Papa, the currants and raspberries differ, too. You yourself have written in your books, Papa, that scientists have spoken of this, too, such as the academician Pallas.” “Tell me, Volodya, is the way they taste the only reason we need to fill these raised beds with plants from deep in the taiga?” “That’s not the only reason, Papa. Taiga plants will not admit the antirational information of that world in which you have to live. When they’re set out along the perimeter, they will not let that information through onto the territory of the homestead. Local plants, which you call regionalized, have gotten used to it to a greater degree and will let it through. In particular, plants that do not produce seeds provide no barrier whatsoever to this information.” “I know about that kind of plants. They’re called genetically modified.” “Papa, it’s important for the perimeter of the homestead to be able to not let unnecessary, hostile information you don’t need through when it transports you to another spot.” I didn’t understand what my son had said and began asking him to clarify: “To what other spot? How can it transport me?” Volodya didn’t have a chance to reply. Anastasia, who was having a hard time concealing her agitation, began to speak: “You’ve come up with something very good, my dear son. It’s very important to concentrate positive emotions on the homestead. And, by wiping your feet when you enter, to not bring the negative onto it.” THE BURNING BLOOD OF THE ANCESTORS Anastasia took me by the hand. I felt the pleasant warmth of her tender palm. And I also felt how agitated she was, and I glanced at her face. Anastasia was looking into the center of the homestead mock-up. I also looked into its center. Nothing special there. Unless the little white sticks arranged in the center had caught her attention. Once again she asked our son a question. “Tell me, my dear son, what does the white circle located in the center of the homestead represent?” I began explaining, instead of my son. “It represents a small, round greenhouse. That’s what Volodya and I decided on. Our little white sticks represent some kind of transparent material - glass, for example, or polycarbonate, or plastic sheeting. For a long time we couldn’t stick it

anywhere. It didn’t go with anything. But now that Volodya has placed a greenhouse along the whole perimeter of the homestead, I really like it. Here you get both a greenhouse and a fence at the same time, and various utility rooms, too. And I also like it that Volodya made a small, round greenhouse in the center, too. Now it fits. Now it even goes really well with the whole perimeter of the homestead.” “I think that what we have in the center is not a greenhouse, Vladimir,” Anastasia said in a whisper, slightly agitated, as before. Volodya heard her and calmly said, addressing me: “Mama’s correct. The little white sticks in the center of the homestead do not represent a greenhouse.” “They what do they represent?” I asked our son. “In the center of the homestead, Papa, I have placed a circle of mirroring water.” I asked him to clarify. “Is it a mirror, or what?” “You can put it that way. A mirror with mirroring water,” Volodya calmly replied. “Hmm. Very original, actually. You’ve situated a round mirror on a small rise in the center of the homestead. The clouds are reflected in it, and the sun and moon can admire themselves in it. And streaks of sunlight will fly off it and go dancing throughout the whole homestead. There’s nothing like it in any landscape design, and I’ve looked through a lot of them. Very original.” “You’ve stuck little red leaves around the mirror, Volodya. What do they represent?” Anastasia asked, speaking quickly. “That’s a flame burning, Mama.” “Where did the flame come from?” “From oil and gas, Mama.” After this answer, Anastasia squeezed my hand a bit more strongly and asked our son the following question: “Did they allow you to light their blood on fire, Volodya?” “Yes. The Souls of our ancestors allowed me to light their earthly blood on fire, Mama. If they had not wanted this, then what came to me wouldn’t have come to me.” Suddenly Anastasia’s grandfather spoke, and I could sense agitation in his voice, too. “Perhaps that’s enough of distracting a person from important business. After all, you haven’t done all you’re going to do with the mock-

up yet, have you Volodya?” “No, I haven’t done all I’m going to do, Grandfather.” “Then go on and do all you’re going to do, and no one will bother you.” “Yes, go on and do all you’re going to do, Volodya. We’ll get out of your way for now,” Anastasia added and led me off to the side, away from the extraordinary family homestead design. When she’d sat herself down near the trunk of a large cedar, I asked: “Anastasia, I can feel that you’re agitated for some reason. Am I right?” “Yes, Vladimir, I’m agitated. Much of what our son is doing does not exist on earth today. Nor is there information about it in the Universe, either. That, which he has created in the center of the homestead - you called it beautiful and original. But it is not those words, not only those words, that describe what has been created. The construction Volodya told us about is an apparatus, and the main component of the apparatus is of unheard-of power, a biological mechanism. I can sense this, but I can not find a precise word to describe its properties. Perhaps such a word does not yet exist. We can only speculate about this device’s capacities, its unheard-of capabilities. But please, Vladimir, do not rush me. Allow me to gradually come to an understanding of what I have seen.” A GIFT FROM THE FIRST EARTHLY CIVILIZATION “I surmise, that all the separate details in the homestead design, when taken together, form a unified whole. It is possible, that the homestead is a biological device or mechanism, or something else previously unimagined by consciousness. We have to think. We have to solve this riddle. The elongated oval of your hectare is framed with an earthen mound with clay edges. The mound is covered over with some sort of transparent material. Inside are various plants. There must be something significant in them.” “Volodya said the plants can be ordinary ones, vegetables, for example, tomatoes, cucumbers, and various green, leafy plants. Basically, everything a person wants to eat. But you have to put in raised beds with a diameter of about ninety centimeters, spaced no less than eleven meters apart. On these beds you have to put out plants from deep in the taiga, because they won’t let the information of anti-rationality through. That’s what he was saying.” “Yes, they won’t let it through. In this way, the perimeter functions as a membrane.” “A membrane for what?” “For everything located inside the membrane. The greenhouse situated along the perimeter, where all the areas a person requires for living and for his

household needs have been incorporated, looks pretty and sensible. Within a few years, the need for the transparent dome will fall away. The most important thing remaining will be what is growing strong and firm beneath it. Our son has pursued quite an extraordinary goal. He has fenced the homestead space off from the pernicious influence of the anti-world and anti-rationality, using the most powerful fence you can possibly imagine. It is not the clay walls and the transparent dome that play the most important role in this fence, but the plants inside the structure. They will exert a psychological effect simply by being there, and they will help you immediately bring opposites into balance within you.” “How will they help me bring opposites into balance within me? That’s some kind of mysticism, or magic.” “There’s not a jot of mysticism or magic here, Vladimir. Rather, it’s science, the one you call psychology. Imagine: you drive up to your homestead, and from far off you can see the little white walls of the little home of your childhood, and this immediately calls up positive emotions in you. Then you get out of the car and wipe off your feet, once more mentally cleansing yourself of negative information. The gates open wide before you, and your gaze takes in the living magnificence of your family homestead’s space, which will never cease to amaze and delight you. Unlike a non-living picture, it will always be varied. New flowers have blossomed on the raised beds and trees, and the light playing in a new way, or the little flowers stirred by the breeze will enchant you each time. Then you will want to take a look at whatever might be transpiring inside the fence, and you’ll go into it. Its beautiful living richness and its airs will completely draw you away from the negative information of the anti-world.” “Yes, it really is great. The homestead will also play the role of my personal psychologist, and an extremely effective one at that. You’re right, Anastasia - each time I come back even to my country home after being gone for three or four days, each time it’s interesting to look at what’s changed in the garden, in the beds and in the greenhouse. “Now, of course you can’t compare a country home to the homestead you’re talking about. Of course, it’s much more effective. Look how much one bird on the bank of a pond means to us. Wow, to come up with something like that. It all started with an ordinary bath house, and it ended up with a magnificent and functional sculpture. Now I understand that it will also have a very strong psychological effect.” “It certainly will, Vladimir. The bird will greet you, both when you have only just crossed the threshold of the home, and when you light a fire, and then when you go inside the bird, so as to warm your body and soul.”

“Tell me, Anastasia, but why did you take such notice, or get so frightened when Volodya started telling you about the mirroring structure in the center of the homestead?” “The little walls of the little white hut from your childhood, the greenhouse along the perimeter with the living organism inside, the earthen bird with the burning heart who strives to carry a person off into the sky... It’s possible that it is a more perfected analog... The mirror in the center, reflecting the heavenly bodies...” Anastasia stood up and, pronouncing her words precisely, the way she always does when speaking of something significant, she said: “Vladimir, our son has created a mock-up... He has constructed a biological interplanetary ship.” “What???” I was amazed. “Anastasia, are you sure?” “Yes. I am sure. It’s possible that we need to use a different word to name it. I don’t know this word as of yet. But I am sure that the intended function of what we saw is to teleport the space along with the people located in it. “A person who builds a family homestead using the elements of this design will, without a doubt, be able to build his own world on a different planet, and this world will be beautiful. “In the center of the homestead is located part of the apparatus a person can use to transform (to psycho-teleport, to transfer) the space along with all its contents to other planets and other worlds. Part of... But then where... Fve understood it, Vladimir. Before us is a mock-up of a beautiful family homestead, and at the same time, before us is a mock-up of a perfected interplanetary ship. It is capable of moving at the speed of thought. Of reaching, in one instant, the Moon, Mars, or Jupiter. “Distance is basically of no consequence at all for it. It can cover a distance of one meter or a distance of a million light years in one and the same amount of time. It is capable of transferring people onto any planet in the solar system, and beyond its bounds.” “But Anastasia, scientists have proven that there’s no life on planets, at least not the closest ones.” “And that is why, Vladimir, I said it is capable of psycho-teleporting the space along with all its contents, including the dwelling land of all that lives in that space. In other words, this homestead can be transferred, or to express it more precisely, the given homestead can be copied and situated on a different planet.” “How about the people who live on the homestead? Will they be transferred

to the different planet, too?” “The people, too, if they are located on the homestead at the moment of transfer.” “But if there isn’t any fertile soil on the other planet, or if it’s three hundred degrees, or a hundred below zero?” “When the space is teleported, something akin to an explosion takes place on the planet, and as a result, the existence of the new space is secured.” TELEPORTING THE SPACE “Unbelievable information, Anastasia. It’s even hard to imagine that such potentials exist in man. Perhaps you’re mistaken in your conjectures?” “These are no longer conjectures, Vladimir, and I am not the tiniest bit mistaken. Previously this information did not exist in the Universe. Now it has appeared. But what is most important, is that the particle of mankind’s first civilization, which exists within me and within you, just as it does in each person as well, will allow this information in.” “You know, Anastasia, I’m only just now starting to understand how mighty those four words of the Universal law are: PERFECT THE DWELLING LAND. Turns out a person can perfect his land to such a degree that he becomes a god. I mean, because when he moves to another planet that hasn’t yet been made habitable, man will begin creating life there, like God did on earth.” “Man will never become a god, Vladimir. Each person is the son of God, or his daughter. And God, the creator and parent, wanted his children to be more perfected than he himself, and they most certainly will be, they will be! By bringing anti-rationality and Rationality into balance within themselves.” We heard the voice of Anastasia’s grandfather, who had come up without us noticing him. “Now that is real scientific progress. He will open up a new era for mankind.” Anastasia stood up. Her grandfather, an elder with graying hair, but an erect posture, stood there, leaning on his staff and looking thoughtfully at the shore of the taiga lake. “Granddad, are you speaking of Volodya’s design?” Anastasia asked her grandfather. “What can one possibly say when an epiphany comes? Throughout the millennia, he or they, - it’s unimportant, which have turned the living teachings of messiahs and scientific luminaries into incoherent

gobbledygook. He has shown the potentials of people living on the earth. He has created a new image of man. Or has brought back the man who was called the son of God. A man capable, like unto God, of creating on lifeless planets a life more beautiful than earthly life.” “People will have a hard time believing something like that,” I remarked to Grandfather. “Fine. Even if someone doesn’t believe, then what of it? What remains for an unbeliever who doesn’t believe in his might? To be bom? Yes! But to what end, if the ensuing life is meaningless, if it is death? And then again the question: to what end was he bom? “For millions of years, there has existed a multitude of teachings. And all about one and the same thing, that mankind should live in expectation of receiving something from someone. And mankind has done so, closing off its thought and rationality. It has not thought about why and to what end the Universe lights up the stars above man.” “And now what? Will our son become a messiah?” Anastasia said bitterly. “He will have difficulty holding his ground in the face of pridefulness. What’s more, the anti-rationality will msh to seek him out.” Everyone fell silent and, for some reason, simultaneously turned in the direction of the homestead mock-up. At the same time, Volodya was heading toward us, walking with a calm gait. He was carrying Nastenka. She was hugging him around the neck and pressing her cheek to his. Volodya stopped a few steps away from us and set Nastenka down on the ground. He bowed to us all and began to speak: “Mama. Don’t worry, Mama. I know that if I become a messiah, then people will direct their thought to me, with hope. And that means that they will not be directing their thought fully to creating.” “What have you decided to do, Volodya?” Anastasia asked our son. “I need to go. I will dissolve, insignificant, in the human crowd.” After these words, Volodya looked each of us, in turn, in the eye. The thought flashed in my mind that he was intending to leave forever. And as he was looking at me, I said: “Thank you, dear son, for your extraordinary, marvelous family homestead design. This will be the very best gift for my sixtieth birthday. And, really, the very best gift I’ve received in the sixty years I’ve lived.” “Papa, this design is a gift not just for you. I give it to all the readers of your books. Let them take from it all that they wish to take.”

“Let it be for all of them. That means, it’s for me, too.” “I want to give you a separate gift, Papa.” At these words, Volodya slipped his hand beneath his shirt, took something out and held his hand out to me. I watched as he slowly and carefully opened his fingers, uncovering the gift that lay in his hand. But when Volodya had fully opened his fingers, there was nothing on his palm. I looked at Grandfather, then at Anastasia, trying, with their help, to understand what my son’s gesture meant, and how I was supposed to respond to it, but they said nothing. “Papa, go ahead and take my gift to you,” Volodya repeated. I kept standing there, not understanding how you can take what you can’t see. Suddenly Nastenka walked up to me, took me by the hand and led me over to Volodya. When I came up to my son, I stretched my hand out toward his hand. He carefully placed something invisible into my palm. It, this something invisible, was pulsating and slightly warming my hand. I closed my fingers and placed the gift beneath my shirt, in the same spot Volodya had kept it. A tender and extraordinary warmth enveloped my whole body. “It will live in your home, Papa, and when you’ve built the homestead perimeter, ask it to fill the space.” Volodya bowed deeply to everyone, then turned around and began moving away from us, his steps confident. Then he suddenly vanished beyond the bushes, or dissolved in the space. And we all stood there, as if spellbound, and both when he looked each of us in the eye and when he was walking off, all we all did was to silently follow him with our eyes. And then I said: “Anastasia, I got the impression our son has left us forever.” Hearing no reply, I turned toward Anastasia. She was looking in the direction in which Volodya had headed off. Her body was shaking. A thin stream of scarlet blood was flowing from her lower lip. She had bitten her lip, so as to not cry out. I understood. This meant the anti-rationality would hunt our son, and Anastasia and me, as well. I saw Anastasia’s hands clenching into fists. The taiga froze. Some unknown sound resembling the rumbling of something huge was filling the space. I got the impression that the huge space was compressing and, when it opened back up, it might wipe everything from the face of the earth. I had already witnessed this kind of phenomenon before, when I’d lost consciousness while trying to possess Anastasia against her will, and also when I’d tried to strike her with the stick because she wouldn’t agree to give

our son to me to raise. Each time it started, Anastasia would raise her hands upward, as if waving to someone in greeting, and everything would calm down, before any sound even appeared. But now the sound was growing louder and louder, and Anastasia was not raising her hand upward. And I didn’t want her to raise it. On the contrary. I wanted this invisible and mighty thing to thunder and wipe from the earth all the filth that had accumulated on it. But Anastasia raised her hand. The space began to calm down. Before leaving the taiga glade, I went once more to the shore of the lake. I stood there alone and looked at the homestead mock-up our son had created, and I imagined it actually existing on my hectare that for now was overgrown only with tall weeds. Here I am, driving up in my car. I see the two white walls with little windows from my happy childhood. The gates swing open automatically, revealing a living picture of the finery inside, and I drive toward the entrance to the home. Stop! What the heck am I doing? I’m driving through all this magnificence in a roaring car! Through my own home! Go back! I leave my car at the entrance. The gates swing open, and I wipe my shoes, trying to wipe the filth of another world from my soles. Then I remove my shoes and leave them by the entrance and walk barefoot through my beautiful world to the pond, where there are swans swimming. My cat and dog are mn alongside me. In the distance, a rooster crows in greeting from one comer, and in another, a little goat bleats. And by the pond, on the sand, my grandsons and granddaughters are constructing mock-ups of their own family homesteads. And the woman I love, her beauty never fading, comes out of the garden, smiles at me and waves her hand in greeting. When it gets darker and the stars begin appearing in the sky, all the windows of the oval space will light up with a joyful light. Lamps will come on in the greenhouse and show the stars the living magnificence growing inside it. The stars will think, “There, on Earth, a very small point is glowing with an extraordinary luminosity. It is no bigger than one hectare, but its light caresses us.” The stars are not yet aware that there will soon be more and more points like that on the earth. And the whole earth will start shining with a blessed light and will caress the expanses of the Universe with it. I made a firm decision to make the homestead mock-up my son had created a reality. And perhaps it was a good thing that I’d gotten a hectare with unproductive soil, where the water takes a long time to mn off in the spring. But I will take it and make its soil fertile, make it into the kind of soil trees will bloom on in the garden, and flowers. I will perfect the dwelling land in that spot.

A LETTER TO MY SON Hello, Volodya. I don’t know where you are now, and so I decided to write you a letter through my book. I sometimes write you letters, but I have no idea where to send them. But something I publish in a book - I think you’ll read that. A book makes its way into many countries. It’s like a living thing. It can find various people all on its own, and perhaps it will find you, too. In September of 2009 I set about creating my family homestead according to your design. I don’t know who will live on it. Maybe you’ll want to, or Nastenka, when she gets older. There should come a time soon, when the representatives of anti-rationality will not hinder people like you. Maybe my grandchildren will want to live here, or my great-grandchildren. The moment has come, when I feel an urgent need to bring what you designed to life. I ploughed my hectare with a tractor and sowed winter rye on it. I sowed the seed by hand myself, and my neighbors helped me. I used an excavator to make the earthen mound all along the perimeter, a meter high and a meter and a half wide. I didn’t have time to make the little clay walls this year - the rains and the cold weather set in. I’ll start building them in the spring. But my hectare has been transformed even just from what I’ve done this year. It’s the only one framed with an earthen mound, and the rye has grown up in place of the former weeds. It even seems to me that it’s showing off a little bit before the neighboring hectares. I also managed to dig the pond this year - about thirty meters in diameter, and it will fill with water in the spring. I also bought up various fruit tree saplings. For now I’ve put them in on the grounds of my country home. I’m planning to move them to the homestead next fall. During the winter I’m going to have to decide how to make your fiery bird. I don’t think molding it out of clay should pose any particular problems, but how do I fire it then, so the rains don’t wash it away? And besides, too, it’s about three meters high, and in addition then you have the wingspan, which works out to about twelve meters. Then the thought came to me that I need to mold it out of clay, then saw it into sections and fire it at a factory. And after that I can reassemble the fiery bird on my homestead, on the bank of the pond. I’ve shown your creation to my friends -1 just drew them a clay capsule with a fire inside and explained how you can warm and heal yourself inside it, or just sit outside in front of the fire with your friends the way you’d do with an

inside fireplace. And they decided they want to build something like that at their places, too. Can you imagine how delighted they’ll be when they find out it’s not just a capsule you can warm your body and heal yourself in, but a beautiful bird, too, with a burning heart inside? How in the world were you able to create such a miraculous thing? Anastasia surmises that the people of the first earthly civilization are helping you. If that’s the case, then why shouldn’t they help everyone who’s set about building their family homesteads? However, on the other hand, since you’ve given your design to all the readers, then they really have helped everyone. Oh, and Volodya, your mama also said that your family homestead design is a great and beautiful missive to mankind from some civilization that’s unknown to contemporary people. Whether it’s on a different planet or in a different dimension, that’s not important. It’s entered into communication with contemporary people, and in the language of matter, too. And the contemporary society of people stands on the threshold of great and beautiful transformations. When your mama said this, I didn’t yet fully sense the significance of her words. But later on, when I was reflecting about them, I became convinced that she is totally correct. You know, Volodya, there’s a lot of talk in society about UFOs, about visitors from other planets, and we have no small number of treatises, of all possible kinds, supposedly written by great teachers, but what concrete results do we have from them? Nothing changes. People have been moving along their path, heading toward a sad end, and that’s just the path they keep on following. A picture even came to me. People are walking along a road and there’s someone dressed very oddly standing on the side of the road. And, as if to underscore his strangeness, he’s yelling: “I’m a visitor from afar. I’m a visitor from afar, a representative of great powers.” “Well, so what?” people say to him. “What will you bestow on us? If you’re a representative of great powers, then take drug addiction from the earth, and prostitution and wars, and take the various illnesses away, too.” “You don’t understand. I’m a visitor from afar...” But he couldn’t pique people’s interest. Only one person came up to him. “If you’re some great visitor from afar, then you probably won’t have any trouble giving me a hundred rubles for a bottle of vodka.”

And he got this answer: “I’m a great visitor from afar. You need to listen to me, give me shelter and food, even make a great fuss over me.” That’s more or less the back story with all the “great visitors from afar” who have come to earth. But things are totally different in the case of your design, Volodya. Without saying who he was, without asking for a thing, he simply offered: “Take a look, people, and if you like it, take it and be happy.” And when you left, Volodya, Mama spent a long time looking over your homestead mock-up with great attention. She said it’s extraordinary, lovely and multi-functional, but that it’s not a simple homestead. The details of its separate parts are closely interconnected, and all of them together are actually an interplanetary biological apparatus that is capable of moving a person - along with his dwelling land - to any planet, all in the space of one instant. This apparatus’ ultrastrong biological membrane extends along the homestead’s perimeter. The fiery bird is programmed to cleanse one of viruses. The internal arrangement and selection of plants suggest an eternal life-support system for those living inside this apparatus. The object with the mirrored water is, pure and simple, a launch button that initiates the biological program. The propulsion device of this apparatus is unsurpassed in terms of its generating capacity. It goes beyond the boundaries of specifications like rate of movement, for what lies at its core is unmediated human thought. Anastasia also said that all technocratic inventions have a biological analog or the other way around, to be more precise. And this biological analog is more perfected. Now, we, by using achievements in space exploration and in the sphere of computer technology as a launch point, can define the significance of those separate details of yours. I think that readers who happen to be programmers will comprehend more of what you have done. But here’s what’s bothering me, Volodya. The perimeter is a membrane. The fiery bird is a cleansing, anti-viral program. The mirror in the center with the torches is a launch button. I’ll make all of this, and maybe somebody else will make it, too. But there aren’t any instructions for how everyone is supposed to use this. All devices always come with instmctions, so people don’t break the devices or hurt themselves. And here we’ve got significant biological technology, and without instructions. A person might accidentally do something with the launch button, and his family will wake

up on another planet, without even intending to do so. They’ll want to come back, but they’ll have no idea how. I bought an octagonal mirror and torches. Out at my country home, in the evening, I placed this mirror on the ground and lit the torches around it, and it turned out really beautiful. But, I think it’s not totally safe to do that in your garden in the autumn. When the mirror poured out water, it felt like the trees were trying to come back to life. But deep in the autumn, they shouldn’t come back to life. I’m really sorry I didn’t have a chance to talk a little more with you, Volodya and ask you to clarify the intended purpose of this apparatus, what it’s for, and how we’re supposed to use it. Maybe the readers will be able to figure it out, or it will come to me later on, once I get it in place on my hectare. Now, I probably won’t be able to build the greenhouse around the perimeter of the homestead next year. I don’t have the money to do everything all at once. We’re hardly getting any royalties at all from America. Basically, I don’t get what’s going on over there - they’re making some kind of changes to the books without my permission. The domain name “Ringing Cedars” in English belongs to somebody. And can you imagine - they even have the domain name “Vladimir Megre” there, and a site with that name, and it’s being passed off as my official site. But I have no connection to it whatsoever. Polina’s tried to register the trademark in my name, and they asked her to pay six thousand dollars. I wouldn’t really care, but I feel bad for the readers. What are they being told on these sites? What products are being sold using those trademarks and logo? How can I sort it out? Where can I find the time to sort things out? But I decided that in my new book I’ll give the name of a website where people can communicate directly with Polina. And to ask Polina to publish the new book in English, too. But so far I don’t know how to get it published in the English-speaking countries. And something else, Volodya - I have a problem. We have to come up with a comprehensible and concise appeal to those in power in various countries. The goal of the appeal is to encourage each one of them to take whatever forceful measures they can to perfect the dwelling land on the earth. I’ve put together various versions of this message, but it always seems to me I could do it in a simpler, shorter and more convincing fashion. Here’s the latest version. Maybe it’ll do? What do you think? An Appeal Dear Sirs:

I have written a series of books called “The Ringing Cedars of Russia. ’’Many of these books ’ readers - people of various ages, nationalities, religious faiths and social statuses - are each acquiring one hectare of land for their families and are establishing family homesteads on them. Among them number doctoral students and PhDs, as well as simple workers. Ninety percent of these people have a college education and profound life experience. Each family on its own and everyone as a group - they are creating a dwelling land for themselves, their children and future generations that is more livable in all respects. In Russia and in the countries of the former Soviet Union, these people have already created more than fifteen hundred settlements made up of family homesteads, without any government support whatsoever. They include large settlements, with up to three hundred families, and small ones, formed by ten to fifteen families. I do not know how many people are taking similar steps - whether united in small groups, or for the most part on their own - in other countries where my books in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series are being published. But they do exist, and their numbers are growing steadily. Dear Sirs, people have talked a great deal in the world about the need to improve the ecological situation on the earth. In certain regions, this situation has already reached a critical stage, and a global disaster looms. For some time, now, conferences and symposia have been held at the governmental level with many countries, the UN and all possible NGOs. But, dear Sirs, where have we seen even the slightest result? The earth’s ecology continues to worsen. The only people taking real steps are the people who are founding their own family homesteads, people focused on improving man’s dwelling land. Dear Sirs, I am not asking you to discuss the merits or weaknesses of my books or me personally. I am asking you to examine the actual idea, from the position of rational thought. And if you are unable, by drawing on contemporary science, to propose anything more effective than this idea, I ask you to recognize its essence and accept it.” I don’t know to whom specifically I should address this appeal. I’d also like to touch on another serious question. I often think about it. I try to find a solution. The thing is, Volodya, that given your approach to life and the way you understand the meaning of existence, it will be hard for you to find a bride, a girl who understands you. You probably already know that from the time they’re little, many girls

dream of becoming an actress or a model, or of marrying a wealthy man and going to resorts and having a maid at home. If you suddenly take a liking to that kind of girl, a girl who hasn’t read the books and hasn’t heard anything about family homesteads - after all, love is unpredictable - now, don’t go trying to tell her about the homestead right off the bat. She won’t get it. Now, when I’ve made my homestead according to your design, then you go ahead and bring this girl there and show her this homestead. When you’re approaching it, you tell your girl that it’s yours, and go inside the homestead with her. Go in through the door of the white hut. The key to the door will always be in the spot where Grandmother used to leave it. And show her everything that’s there. Anastasia has said that when a woman sees a more perfected dwelling land than the one she’s previously been in, the desire to bear a child immediately awakens within her, along with an attraction to the man who’s connected to this land. Volodya, should you sense this kind of desire in your girl, then you can be certain that she will most certainly come to love you, and that her past, mindless inclinations will desert her. And Volodya, your little sister Nastenka often visits your mock-up and plays in it, building little flowerbeds inside it. Anastasia says she has fervent thought. Anastasia has told me about Nastenka’s past life, the one when her name was Anasta. That’s all for now. The letter has turned out kind of long, but I haven’t said everything I wanted to say. Be careful. Take care of yourself, Volodya. With all greatest respect for you, Your papa. AN APPEAL FROM VLADIMIR MEGRE TO HIS READERS Several Internet websites now share ideas that are very similar to those of the main character, Anastasia, in the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series. Many of these websites purport to be official and use the name “Vladimir Megre.” They even answer letters in my name. In this regard, I feel it is my duty to inform you, dear readers, of my decision to create an official international website, www.vmegre.com/en/. This will be the only official source for correspondence in all languages from my readers all over the world. By registering at and subscribing to this website you will be eligible to receive information on the dates and locations of upcoming reader

conferences, as well as other information. Our unified website will keep you, dear readers, informed about the Ringing Cedars of Russia movement throughout the world. Yours truly, Vladimir Megre © Vladimir Megre 1 Author’s note: In 2009, a climate summit of heads of state was held in Copenhagen from December 7-18, regarding capping and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Representatives of 192 countries participated in the summit.