My struggle towards integral life

As I was around turning 14 I realized I wanted to study psychology. Prior to that I was reading science fiction and fantasy literature extensively, hated school, and loved computer games. Around that age I encountered that there was this huge amount of serious literature called philosophy and psychology; and it dawned on me that I want to grow intellectually and socially rather than drinking vodka at disco parties as most teenagers do.

I wanted to choose my life, to make rational decisions about it, and not to delude myself—which, as I thought at that time, was what the most people did. I had an example of my family and many people around who made decisions according to their irrational biases and fears and eventually didn't win anything in the long term. I also started to write poetry and stories for myself because I found creativity to be the most important value at that time. I loved the flow state that tended to emerge during writing or drawing something I liked.

I naturally decided to embrace conscious atheism, for I saw and read how misleading and hypocritical herd mentality and conformists moral standards (associated, in some literature that I read, with fundamentalist religions) were. I looked for rational self-interest since I saw that most people around weren't actually following their own interests, they were playing mostly a passive role in their life; in fact, they seemed to be constantly acting stupid and making decisions that made their life only worse. And, of course, what I saw around myself at school was mostly ignorance, yelling teachers, drinking students—for whom to be called "smart" was considered an offense because it made them look different from the rest of the herd. I grew up in a low-income district where people live with few expectations from life and low self-esteem. It seems that most of my classmates from the first school where I studied have followed a path of studying at a poor college (or no college at all) and settling for a conventional altitude of life (one boy, who had been my best friend for a few years, now is something close to being a skinhead or at least ultranationalistic). 

In fact, for most students of the first school where I have studied during my early teens being accepted to a large university, such as St. Petersburg State University, seemed almost impossible. And yet I said to my parents that I wanted to study psychology at this university. I was lucky to embrace a rational framework that allowed me to envision my future life and set goals and achieve them. I was driven by my ambition and confidence in that I can achieve everything I want. Studying psychology at the university was my dream. I insisted on changing my school for a slightly better one. There I won an opportunity to study in USA for one academic year. A year that changed me because I saw a completely different life, the kind of life that was much more positive, much easier, made more sense than the constant struggle for survival that I witnessed in Russia.

By the time I was selected to go to America (I was 15) I already started to read different psychologies and philosophies. I attempted to read Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and so on. I found books on transpersonal psychology to be interesting, so I started to read a bit of Stan Grof. I started to attend introductory courses in psychology for the university. I decided that I have to pursue an academic career of clinical psychologist because this discipline seemed to provide the widest spectrum of knowledge, including both psychological and biological factors. It seemed like the most natural decision for me at that time, it came to me lightly, like a common sense.

Upon my return from the US I was devastated by seeing how dull life was in my home culture. I saw people doing meaningless actions in a meaningless state that doesn't care even a dime about its own citizens. I had to formally finish school, so I spent half a year re-adapting to the cruel reality of Russian hopelessness while pursuing my own studies and enjoying some private creative writing.

Second half of that academic year I devoted to preparing for the entrance exams to the university (in the Russian university system, if you pass the entrance exams with an excellent grade, you can get the full scholarship with a little stipend; and since my family wasn't able to pay for education, I had no choice but getting the scholarship). I was accepted by two universities, including, of course, St. Petersburg State University (the second university was just in case I wouldn't be accepted to the University so I wouldn't be drafted to serve in the Russian military which is notorious for breaking boys' lives and health); and I remember how surprised some of my relatives were who thought that I wouldn't be able to pass these exams.

At that time there was an experiment introducing new national examination system, something like American SAT, and in one subject I ended up scoring almost the highest grade, ending up being in the top 2 % nation-wide. My exams scores were much higher than it was necessary for getting a scholarship for studying the clinical psychology specialty at the University's Faculty of Psychology. I was 18 at that time; and it took me 4 years of life to achieve the dream that emerged in my life as I was becoming increasingly self-conscious. I was sure that I would find myself a good place in the academic system and would be able to have an excellent research career, most likely abroad, and I thought the university was connected enough with the world academic system for me to leave the country in two or three years and follow my individualistic enterprise and journey in the world.

Life turned out to flow in a different direction than my plans. The first thing that struck me as I started attending lectures and seminars at the university was indifference that permeated the system throughout. I was shocked to see a professor who obviously drinks a lot being rude to the first-year students (this professor was fired some years later). I was shocked to see a completely outdated curriculum with literature written around 1940s, clearly under the influence of Marxism-Leninism. Few of the teachers were actually interested in their interactions with students; and all of them received a salary that was (and still is) too small for them to bother about any quality or meaningfulness of education. There were some bright aspects, too, but the dark side was just too much to bear. I have quickly lost any interest in studying the university program. Instead of following the drive to fulfill my deepest dreams I felt that my ambitions get sucked into the Soviet swamp of "why would you care at all? Just do what we all do."

I was enraged, I was frustrated, I was depressed. Then, on my second year at the university, I had a series of profound mystical experiences that changed my life because from now on I knew what Stan Grof and other transpersonal psychologists were writing about in my own experience. I was buying all the books I could buy on the topic; and my friend told me about an integral psychology group in Finland that he was going to attend. I thought the very notion of the possibility of Integral Psychology (a kind of psychology, as I was explained, that integrates all the different schools of Eastern and Western psychology into one coherent system of knowledge and practice) was so splendid that I went to a bookstore and bought Russian translations of Ken Wilber's books, including Integral Psychology. I actually had some of his books on my book shelves before—but never read them—simply because I was purchasing everything that was related to transpersonal psychology; and the amount of books I bought quickly exceeded the amount of time I could have devoted to them. So I started reading Wilber and thought it was quite a challenge to grasp all these different concepts (different quadrants, stages and lines of development, states, spiritual traditions, psychological schools, philosophers and so on) that he mentions. Russian translations were hard to read, so I switched to articles and interviews published in English; and it was then when it dawned on me how clearly Wilber writes, how it all makes sense, and brings meaning that I lost somewhere during the first year of university back into my life.

On my third university year I already decided that Integral Theory and Practice was something that I want to connect my life with so I invested all the money that I had from the monthly stipend for subscribing to the Integral Naked website, a website where one can download lots of interviews and audio. I was listening and reading virtually everything I could have found on the Integral Approach; and it often happened that I was skipping boring university classes just to spend more time studying Wilber's works. By the end of my third academic year at the university I was so depressed by being increasingly aware of the gap between what I learned and knew and what I actually did and embodied in life that I provoked a conflict with a teacher (together with friends we wrote a complaint regarding extremely low quality of education at a specific course) and was seriously thinking about dropping out.

At the critical point, when I decided that I am going to follow an integral dream at any cost, I received an invitation to meet owners of one Russian company who expressed their interest in the integral approach. I don't want to announce publicly the name of the organization or its leaders because there are some serious private issues related to that whole situation that require a lot of sensitivity. Even though I had a creepy feeling during the first moment I saw one of the owners (the kind of a look in the eyes of the person that tells you how it all is going to end the very moment you see it; only some time later I read a book about rapid cognition that explained much of this creepiness), they stated their interest in the Integral vision and invited me to equally collaborate with them helping to transform the organization towards the Integral (there were some underlying reasons for their invitation because I had some previous contacts with them for a few months and previously declined their proposals for collaboration due to my university  schedule and a general disbelief in Russian businesses), and I found no rational reason not to explore whatever could emerge from this occasion. They were charismatic and interesting; and I was curious. I started to participate in that company's projects and offering my advice regarding the Integral framework.

After a few months of what evolved into a very close relationship, during which I got to know them better, I couldn't help but notice that one of the owners had a peculiar capacity to forget about any promise or agreement he made on the next day after making that promise or agreement. In fact, I got in such a deep ("friendly," as I thought) relationship with him that he started to tell me about some of the tricks instrumental in manipulating people into doing what he wants and eventually proclaimed that he wasn't actually interested in neither spirituality nor the Integral vision—which was in such a complete opposition to his public mask that I was shocked. (What I didn't understand until much later was that I was subject to his manipulations, too. This person has a gift to blind people and fool them into doing for free what they initially didn't want to do at all; and the long list of those who were fooled—in fact, were asking to be fooled due to any personal reasons—included me as well.) At first I thought it was a little subpersonality of his speaking the things that negated basic presuppositions for our collaboration but then I realized that it was actually the pathological core of his manipulative and exploiting self that guided his actions. (How can his interest in the Integral be explained? It's very simple:  the developmental model, such as Spiral Dynamics, that is incorporated into the Integral vision, if used inappropriately and improperly, especially by a non-specialist, allows one to "prove"—to rationalize and feed the illusion—that he or she is intrinsically better than the rest of the world and not a bad boy/girl—hence, the food for the superiority/inferiority complex. It can be very "nicely" used to label and pigeonhole people so as to prove one's own worthiness.) In any case, any projects we tried to do were stopped by constant quarrels among the owners; and they had no interest in actually doing what they were speaking about. Their words parted with their deeds significantly. No progress, running in circles, and profound frustration was the atmosphere.

But by the time I understood the total picture of this pathological environment our relationship went into a decline (later on I learned that the same situation with the same kind of broken relationships has been happening to that person for years—i.e. he keeps finding new partners/friends and then breaking agreements with them and making scape goats out of them). I still had a hope that the catastrophic situation can be changed and the pathology healed by integral care; but I was forced to leave the organization, mainly due to some tricky manipulations by that person; and I promised myself from now on to be more cautious, insightful, and wise at choosing partners in business and life. It was an important lesson on the necessity of coming to terms with the cruel reality and considering all the factors involved without ignoring anything, even the most sublime things. It was also a lesson that if one proclaims oneself spiritual/integral/etc. it is not necessarily true. Especially in Russia where everything that can go bad goes even worse. I realized how important it is for me to live my life as honestly as I can.

My collaboration with the company died prematurely nine months ago. Meanwhile my fourth year at the university successfully ended and the fifth year, the senior year, started. I am still considered a savvy and talented student with somewhat peculiar interests in the science of consciousness. It is three months before my graduation; and I am conducting my final empirical research assessing self-esteem in the structure of self-consciousness of patients with bipolar disorder and recurrent depressions. Next week, I will turn 23; and I don't want to spend my next five years fulfilling only half of my soul's deepest potential and wasting most of my life continuing to postpone the deepest visions I desperately want to embody. I enjoy talking with patients, I meditate daily, I have had profound spiritual and therapeutic insights, and my consciousness transforms rapidly; but my current Russian academic path is dissatisfying, for I always have to explain myself. How can I better manifest my inner abundance in the world? What can be the next chapter in my integral life? How can I live honestly and integrally and at the same time abundantly?

I don't know what my life is going to be in the following years. Sometimes I fear that I will never be able to realize my potential and follow my daemon, my soul purpose. Many things that I'm interested in I can't share with people around. Frequently, I feel like being lost, for what at the moment I want to do and what I can do to earn a living differ dramatically. It's a big challenge. But I'm happy to be increasingly embraced by the spaciousness of the World Soul. The treasures I have found on the path of the inner journey home are beyond any price. Without this Silence and Bliss anything else is meaningless.