Rasputin’s Enigma

I just finished reading Edvard Radzinsky’s investigation and reconstruction of Grigory Rasputin’s life and death. I cannot escape the fact that Rasputin deserves some serious writing, a comprehensive perspective. He, initially an illiterate peasant and a heavy drinker, became one of the few most influential persons in the last years of the Imperial Russia. I feel that before I am ready to author a serious work on Rasputin (if that ever happens) I need to write this short note now.

Grigory Rasputin gives his blessing

The renowned historian Radzinsky, who is famous for his exalted emotionality as exhibited in the TV shows that he hosts, concludes his Russian biography of Grigory Rasputin with a statement that Rasputin was a faithful Christian who ended up in lust and sin and “serving Antichrist.” I want to subject that Radzinsky’s statement from the concluding paragraph of the otherwise beautifully and neutrally written biography to doubt (it is understandable what presuppositions the statement seems to be based on) and note here that Rasputin is ungraspable with black-and-white judgments. As most phenomena in pragmatic happenings of the world he does not conform to simplistic labels “good” or “evil”; and as a complex personality that stirred and influenced some of the major events in pre-Soviet Russia and Europe Rasputin needs to be apprehended with a perspective of profound complexity.

There is no doubt that Grigory Rasputin was a Christian mystic and healer, that kind of personality which uses altered states of consciousness, shaman-like ecstasies, and what in some spiritual traditions is known as “subtle energies” in order to catalyze a therapeutic effect. At the same time he was a man coming from the lowest and most underprivileged class (caste) of Russian society—peasants—which is essential to remember in order to be realistic about the probable structure of his personality. 

Why Radzinsky calls Rasputin a person who believed that he served Christ while in fact serving Antichrist? “Father Grigory,” who in pre-Revolutionary 1910s has had the reputation much alike to that of a controversial rock star, with (mostly exaggerated) rumors about sex orgies and alcohol parties always surrounding him, belonged, as Czarina Alexandra firmly believed, to Holy Fools, Russian Orthodox Christian variation of what is known in the East as “Crazy Wisdom.” Indeed, in the last years of his life (he was violently murdered in December 1916 by high-profile conspirers who deserve more than a passing mentioning) Rasputin appeared to have transformed into a drunkard in the brutal state of Russian binge drinking (zapoy)—and it is interesting to note that, according to reports made by the secret police, he was able to become sober when it was needed (that is, whenever Czarina summoned him for a healing session with her only son Alexey who suffered from hemophilia) within a very short time. 

But it is unfair to make an absolutistic, reifying statement that his apparently open views on human sexuality—and his use of sexual energy (known in India and China as prana or chi) for mystical purposes—were “sinful” (at least if we don’t really use the word “sin” as an excuse to label and negate the multiplicity of people and attitudes). In fact, the remarkable book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Human Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá shows that our assumptions regarding what is normal, what is and isn’t sinful in terms of sexual relationships are largely misinformed and require further investigation and reflection. Our common assumption that the Eurocentric conservative model of sexuality (with its emphasis on monogamy) is universal appears to be false and distorted; and, as Ray Harris points out in a number of his works, the totality of human sexuality is more like a spectrum with different styles appropriate in different contexts (see, e.g., his article on Integral Sexology).

Grigory Rasputin became both a hero and a victim of his time. Rasputin managed to achieve that which seemed impossible: coming from a poor peasant family he entered the elite circle of the most powerful people in Russia, appointing and firing ministers together with his clique that operated under the auspices of the Czar and Czarina. But in the largely mythic mentality of Russian society at that time his unorthodox (for mainstream “moral majority”) views, enormous vitality, folk sexuality, simple origins, provocative behavior and multi-faceted personality made him a victim of the constant social pressure that always came with shadow-driven attacks. 

The combination of sex, spirituality, and power triggered the entire spectrum of mass projections on what the nature of Rasputin’s relations with the Emperor’s family was—including insisting rumors that he was sleeping with the Czarina (caused by repressed sexuality of the masses) or that he was cooperating with German spies during the World War I (caused by war paranoia and seeking for a scapegoat in the times of a crisis). It is important to note that Rasputin and Czarina Alexandra used all their political power in an attempt to prevent the World War I; and it was their opponents who were outraged by “the peasant’s influence” on international affairs. The World War I brought the Russian Empire to its end; and many Rasputin’s enemies died with its demise, as history of the 20th century has demonstrated. Indeed, history tends to have that appearance of an ironic bitch sometimes.

Victor Tsoy — Red-Yellow Days

It’s the last song that Kino finished recording in studio before Victor Tsoy’s death in a car accident. It is on the last Kino’s album titled “The Black Album” (1990).

Red-Yellow Days
Victor Tsoy

My train stayed in the depot for too long.
I leave again. It’s time…
On the doorstep wind waited so much for me.
On the doorstep autumn is my sister.

After the red-yellow days
The winter will begin and will end.
O my woe from my wit,
Don’t be sorrowful, look up with a smile,
And I’ll return home
With a shield or maybe on a shield,
In silver or maybe in poverty,
But as soon as possible.

Tell me about those who are tired
Of merciless street dramas
And about the church built of broken hearts
And about those who walk into this church.

After the red-yellow days
The winter will begin and will end.
O my woe from my wit,
Don’t be sorrowful, look up with a smile,
And I’ll return home
With a shield or maybe on a shield,
In silver or maybe in poverty,
But as soon as possible.

And I dreamt: the world is ruled by love,
And I dreamt: the world is ruled by dream.
And above it all splendidly shines a star,
And I woke up and got it: oh my…

After the red-yellow days
The winter will begin and will end.
O my woe from my wit,
Don’t be sorrowful, look up with a smile,
And I’ll return home
With a shield or maybe on a shield,
In silver or maybe in poverty,
But as soon as possible.

Reconnecting with the spiritual roots of the Western civilization

This is it!

Peter Kingsley speaks about the same profound connection with the Ancient Greeks’ vision for our Western civilization that I have been experiencing for the past couple of years. We can call it the ultimate resonance with the intentionality of the Past that created our Now and is a source for forming our future.

I couldn’t avoid the understanding all our Western civilization is really a dream of the great Ancient visionaries, not only of pre-Socratic mystics but also of the great spiritual leaders. I experience profound (trans)personal connection with some of the thinkers from the past and from the present.

The words of Plato and Plotinus speak directly to my Heart. The similar connection I have experienced with the gigantic personalities of Vasily Nalimov, Vladimir Bekhterev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you really think about it, every manifestation from the past has never gone anywhere. The sentience is as alive as ever; and the individual suffering must be released into the freedom of the vast expanse.

It’s not just manifestation of impersonal Unity, it’s also manifestation of quite a (trans)personal intentionality, very unique self-sense of a visionary passion that we must ponder about.

Reconnection with our own cultural roots is a must.

A comment I wrote to my friend JF as a response to this interview:

I can’t believe I found another living person who resonates with the deeper truths about the European spiritual lineage that I discovered this and last year. When I embrace the contemporary world with my awareness, I couldn’t escape the understanding that the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that existed for the last two thousand years was in fact a direct product of the great mystics’ powerful visions and of all-transcending and all-including intentionality of Christ’s personality, which in turn emerged from the background highly influenced by Platonic non-duality, Egyptian mysticism, and Eastern contemplation.

By the way, this vision is almost exactly the vibratory level that Vasily Nalimov referred to in his works, when he spoke about and embodied the profound resonance with the geniuses of the past, the past which is our memory to be re-lived.

And here I wonder how this relates to Russia and the great Eurasian conglomerate of cultures; how this dissociation from the roots contributes to the poor condition of the state and its people; and how the profound meaning can be found in the fact that there’s so much suffering, that so many people, they were so radically sacrificed and put six feet under into the abyss of unbeing, while they’re actually so vital, so alive, and so crying for our help.

I couldn’t stop myself from recalling Alexander Vertinsky’s song: “Я не знаю зачем и кому это нужно, кто послал их на смерть недрожавшей рукой, только так беспощадно, так зло и ненужно окунули их в вечный покой.” [“I don't know what for, or who needed it, who sent them to death with an untrembling hand, but so ruthlessly, so evilly and so needlessly they were put to eternal peace.”] It is not a coincidence that Vasily Nalimov quoted this song in his major works when he wrote about the Karmic tragedy of that peoples in Russia suffered.

Why? What for? What is the ultimate meaning? WHAT WILL JUSTIFY ALL THESE DEATHS, MURDERED CHILDREN, MOTHERS, AND FATHERS, BROKEN HOPES AND UNENDING SUFFERING?

The Bremen Town Musicians

In 1969, a Russian musical cartoon The Bremen Town Musicians started its voyage into the hearts of citizens of the Soviet Union. It resonated with the social revolution and the civil rights movement of The Sixties in the West, and due to this fact received harsh criticism from the USSR establishment and government for "noxious Western influence."

Within the two consequent years more than 28 millions Soviet people watched the cartoon and listened to the music. Two decades later, in the ruins of the collapsing empire, the songs from this cartoon fostered my early growth and development. For all my life I have remembered the subtle joy of freedom from these songs. 

Lives of several generations were guided and transformed by the sun beams of hope brought forth by this music. Such is a power of music. Let's remember and listen in silence and reverence.

International Transpersonal Conference (Moscow, Russia)

I am honored to be included to the list of presenters at the International Transpersonal Conference 2010 (Moscow, Russia). The list of presenters also includes Stan Grof, Alex Grey, Stanley Krippner, Dimitry Spivak, Jim Garrison, Bernard Lietaer, Andrew Cohen, Jenny Wade and others.

I will be giving two presentations (on June 24 and June 26). The first will be about the altstates.net project (one of the few projects of that kind in the field of altered states of consciousness research that is supported by a mainstream scientific organization) and the second will be about the Global Dialogue: Russian Contribution program I have been co-developing together with Dr. Mark Tourevski, Dr. Joachim Faust and others for more than a year.

Unfortunately, I couldn't visit Alex Grey's seminars and he leaves on the day I come to Moscow but I wrote a letter that I gave to my friend in Moscow so he would pass it to Alex.

Everything happens so quick in Russia (and the brand new world at large)...

Interior Gulag

A few days ago I defended my thesis (that is, diploma). Basically, it means the end of the 5-years journey that fragmented my life and taught me an important lesson. The lesson is, if you want to jump into something for five years you had better be very conscious about what you are doing.

There was no joy. But there was a sense of freedom. Whole life is in front of me, and there are no deadlines, credit tests, and papers. I am responsible for my actions and for who I am.

Last week, just a couple of days before the thesis defense,  I watched a Russian movie Karaul (1989). It is a movie that is worth being watched by anyone. I perceived it metaphorically as a story about what I have recently been calling "interior Gulag." Most Russians who were born in the USSR have it. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian social system which forced replication of specific patterns and states of consciousness in its citizens. One of the specific states it has been reinforcing in order to ensure that its citizens act as parts of a mechanism was the state of being a prisoner who is forced to do things he or she doesn't want or need—useless things, pointless stuff, hard meaningless work. Many people in today's Russia continue to live as if it was the Stalin's time and they were in Gulag.

I want to write about it in more detail. But now I am too tired.

Please be well.

The bus episode

I took a bus to get home from the gym this evening. I like to use public transport even though I live within a walking distance from that place. In Russian buses there is usually a special person, the ticket collector, who both sells tickets and checks whether you have one. As I was standing inside the bus looking into the window I suddenly heard the ticket collector's yelling at someone.

She screamed, "Get off the bus now! You want the entire bus to smell like you?"

I looked there and saw that the ticket collector was yelling at an old homeless man who sat there; and there was indeed that garbage stink of a person who haven't washed himself for weeks. The homeless man looked at her and said stubbornly and somewhat fearfully, "But I have paid for a ticket! I can leave where I want."

As the bus was approaching the bus stop the woman started to scream hysterically in the loudest way possible, "GET OFF NOW, YOU STINK! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAR YOUR STINK ANYMORE! DO YOU WANT ME TO CALL THE BUS DRIVER NOW TO GET YOU OFF THE BUS BY FORCE?"

To which the homeless man repeated, "But I bought the ticket. I can leave where I want. I will leave on the next stop."

The woman continued yelling; and the man said, "Calm down, I'm leaving on the next stop anyway." The ticket collector understood that she can do nothing to get rid of this dirty old man and went to the farthest part of the bus.

The man left the bus on my bus stop. This particular old homeless man looked intelligent, he might even had a university education (as many people who lost their homes do), and I wonder how hard it was for him to get money to pay for one ticket to use the privilege and ride wherever he wanted. I also wonder whether he left the bus on the bus stop he originally intended or he just felt uncomfortable and didn't want to annoy the ticket collector.

In Russia, as in so many parts of the world, homeless people have no rights at all. It is in  a huge contrast with the developed Western countries such as Finland where homeless people receive money from the government (about €500 per month in case of Finland). Once, when I was in Helsinki, my friend pointed a person in the street to me and asked whom do I think he was. I had no clue; and he said that's a hobo. I was shocked because most Russian professors dress worse and look poorer than this Finnish "hobo." (In fact many Russian professors barely receive €500 per month while the prices are not that different.)

When I told someone about this bus episode I had tears in my eyes.

Psychopathology of everyday life

I have been writing a lot about many different ways pathologies exist in personality and society. This interest of mine in pathological states and conditions didn't emerge out of simple curiosity; these are the practical questions asked by life itself to figure out. Since there is a spectrum of consciousness (that is, our consciousness is multilevel and multidimensional) it appears that there is also a spectrum of pathologies that can emerge at any stage of development and then progress through our being-in-the-world. Any kind of behavior, including pathological (with corresponding interior states), seems to be in some way an adaptive response of the mind-body system to certain circumstances in life. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, characterized by the dissociative defense mechanism seems to emerge in an attempt of psyche to chunk traumatic experiences in pieces so as to defend the structure of the conscious self from the experiences it can't digest yet.

In classical psychiatry there are "bigger" psychological pathologies that structure the entire life around them (psychotic to borderline) and there are "smaller" pathologies (neurotic) that, even though they affect the matrix of experience, allow one to live more or less adaptive social life to some point. Wilber and some other authors argue that the continuum of psychopathology isn't limited by the psychotic to borderline to neurotic sequence and there are also role/script pathologies, identity pathologies, existential pathologies, and various spiritual pathologies (each corresponding to the stage of development where it emerged). In fact, Wilber divides psychopathologies into three broad categories: prepersonal (psychotic to borderline to neurotic), personal (role/script to identity crisis to existential), and transpersonal (psychic to subtle to causal). The last category is still not well-studied in terms of its cohesive integration with the prepersonal and the personal which are more conventionally known levels of pathology; and Wilber's model of consciousness and its pathologies has been in its own development, so certain aspects of the transpersonal category must be revisited (to my knowledge, no official work has been published yet introducing the last installment of Wilber's view on spiritual pathologies; the world is still waiting for the revised edition of Transformations of Consciousness, a book that Wilber calls one of his most important works, to be published).

In order not to distract us from the simple point of this post (those of the readers who are not interested in a technical psychological talk can skip to the next paragraph), I will just briefly mention here that, since there has been a new understanding that we can speak of vertical and horizontal development, with the former being a structural (structure-stage) development towards higher altitudes of consciousness and the latter being a state (state-stage) development that is characterized by an increasing access to various spiritual states of consciousness that can be occurring to some extent at any altitude of consciousness, what Wilber previously saw as pathologies in the transpersonal structures of consciousness (which are very advanced stages of vertical development) now can be seen rather as pathologies in the ways individual consciousness (being at any level of development) embraces spiritual states of consciousness. To my opinion this is very important because it leads to the conclusion (in a form of hypothesis) that in the worst cases one person can combine both structural and state pathologies. For instance, if a neurotic person undertakes meditation practice (such as, e.g., vipassana or Transcendental Meditation), is stubborn enough, and doesn't receive care from a really qualified teacher, he or she can actually succeed in adding a spiritual state pathology to his already emerged structure pathology of neurosis; and those ought to be treated simultaneously. Not to mention that his neurotic self will be interpreting all state experience accordingly to the already pathological (i.e. incorrect, false, lying) view of the self and others. It doesn't necessarily take a conscious spiritual practice, there can be spontaneous awakenings towards deeper states dimensions.

Now, what's probably the most important is that if structural and states pathologies can emerge simultaneously in one psychological system then they will be naturally forming a kind of interpenetrated unity, something like a states-and-structures knot, and it can be very hard to untie this knot and to hermeneutically make sense of it. I know of one case when a probably borderline/narcissistic individual, let's call him S., had a series of spiritual experiences that led him into thinking that he, and he only, was Jesus Christ and others ought to listen to him and follow his commands for he, and he only, came to save the world. S. was already wanted by Interpol for crimes he committed in a different country (in Russia; the European country where he resided gave him asylum because he was a citizen of this country) but he thought that since he was Jesus Christ himself he will not be arrested. This led him to actually attempting to leave the asylum country and travel to Russia; and, as one would rightly guess, right on the border he was arrested and imprisoned (this is where my knowledge of the story ends). This JC experience (which may or may not be considered a some kind of false satori) wasn't initially a part of the pathological phenomenology of this individual; it was appropriated by his borderline "self" (actually, it can hardly be said that there is any self in a conventional sense in a person with the borderline psychopathologies) later on.

This case seems to present a person with a psychopathic personality disorder (Hare characterizes psychopaths as following: "Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse") who for several years was able to create a kind of predatory/criminal business in Moscow based on lies, manipulations, and so on; and for a few years he had been a millionaire until he lost everything and had to flee the country which led him into a crisis of personal insignificance and an idea that if he prayed to God enough his previous life would return to him. For his self-sense it has been absolutely okay to lie, manipulate, exploit, betray, show aggressive/destructive tendencies, etc. without any remorse for most of his life. The series of mystical experiences that emerged in his attempts to undertake a spiritual discipline to recover from the shock of losing everything was appropriated by his pathological self and led to emerging of what conventional psychiatrists would call a delusional idea ("I am [i.e., my ego] [virtually] Jesus Christ; and you must obey me"), which, if that person were under psychiatric care, could pose a serious problem for differential diagnostics (e.g., he could be treated as a schizophrenic psychotic rather than a borderline psychopath that he probably was which are different diagnoses requiring different treatment modalities—and without this delusional idea, thanks to his well-developed social mask, he could be misdiagnosed as borderline-to-neurotic or even neurotic).

I recall as one of the people who knew that individual personally and suffered from his actions for some years characterized S., "You could meet him and speak to him for some time and think that he is a nice person who is worth your friendship; and then he would suddenly hit you in the back with a knife by stealing from you or framing you or betraying you in any possible way—or even attempting to actually beat you or kill you." The most peculiar thing was that from the exterior point of view for long time this person seemed to have no problem adapting to his social environment; and he could have been that rich John Smith living in a private house that you pass by while driving into the city suburbs.

And yet encountering such a person in life and communicating with him/her is no game at all because in order to survive in the childhood such a person had to develop a ruthless psychopathic personality that subsequently became effective enough to betray and manipulate dozens of people and get a house in the most expensive place in Russia—which is incidentally one of the most expensive places in the world (the notorious Rublyovka district in Moscow, where all leaders and large businessmen dream to live; perhaps, this district can be called a psychopathic paradise, a place where the densest and the richest population of psychopaths in the world resides because most of the people living there earned their capital through 1990s in the times when there was no law, only brutal force and deception reigned). He could literally ruin your life; especially if you are a lay person not familiar with a complex compound individuality of a psychopath you will not be able to correctly recognize a psychopath as such. Survival drives such people to developing sometimes a very charismatic personae system (system of social masks) so as to hide the dark passenger beneath the social mask from the world. (Dark passenger is a term from the brilliant Dexter TV series which are based on novels about a charismatic serial killer written by Jeff Lindsay.)

I remember when I tried to convey these my insights about psychopaths and how deceitful they can be for the first time I encountered a blank stare or even an aggressive response; and I have pondered what would that mean. And then I realized that since there is that spectrum of consciousness and corresponding pathologies it is actually very easy for all people to develop a pathology of their own. So almost everybody has a skeleton hidden in his or her own closet. In many cases such a pathology isn't severe, it can be a common neurosis or a script pathology; but since most people are not familiar with classifications of psychopathology they irrationally fear that the little shadow monster that they have been trying to hide in the depths of their psyche is actually a big scary monster, the kind of monster that, if revealed to people, would destroy their lives.

At some point in life almost every individual has to go through a process of coming out (initially, coming out was the term for revealing one's own sexual orientation but I believe it to be a much broader process relating to any system of self-experience that one tries to hide from oneself and others; in the broadest sense it could mean coming to terms with one's identity and the way it is interrelated with the social world). We think of our "huge" monster as of something to hide from everybody; but in most cases it appears that if we actually have this "huge" monster to come out of the closet we encounter that it is a small, cute, and perhaps a little bit angry boy or girl who is not scary at all; and, in fact, no one actually cares about your little boy or girl because everybody is so much obsessed with their own closeted boys and girls (that they falsely perceive as monsters), some personal problems of their own that are common to everybody, that they simply don't see you and build excessive systems of defense just to avoid the pain of a small girl being left home alone or of a small boy being yelled at by a parent.

We experience this closeted and alienated chunk of experience of ours as something disturbing to us so we do our best to be blind about it and not to see it or hear it or feel it. So any time I attempt to speak about this psychopath issue openly there is a chance that another person would projectively identify with the psychopath in question (even though he or she probably has just a little and harmless neurotic subpersonality) and sense immediate danger of one's own coming out. This results in prematurely shutting down of any kind of such talk and triggering all kinds of avoidance mechanisms.

The difference between a psychopathic personality and a neurotic subpersonality within a more-or-less well-adapted self-system, however, is that while the latter senses its neurotic symptoms as egodystonic (something in my own existence that is dangerous or inappropriate for my sense of self) to the former it doesn't even occur that his or her psychopathy must be cured (the psychopathological—psychopathic—structure is so embedded into the personality system and self-sense that it is completely egosyntonic); and it is actually totally okay for a psychopathic manipulator to stay a psychopathic manipulator for the rest of the life; and for a psychopath there would be no compliance (willingness to be healed) in regard to the core features of his psychopathology. It's as if these individuals say, "My psychopathy is who I am, doctor, don't you even dare to touch it, and I want to stay the way I am; what I'm interested in is why I have this headache and also why I get divorced three times, please help me with that." (But, actually, since psychopaths are so identified with their psychopathology they can't even say that because they are that, the exploiting/manipulative maniacs, and it is what they do for a living; it's not observable for them.)

The mistake that we all do in communicating with psychopaths is that we are so blinded by our little closeted monsters that we do our best not to see somebody who is a real monster and a social predator; and it seems that psychopaths tend to be extremely dexterous at using this blind spot of ours that we so carefully sustain. They are experienced masters of exploiting our weaknesses. When meeting another person we usually think that he or she thinks and feels the same way we do or deny ourselves of doing instead of putting ourselves into his or her shoes and hermeneutically understanding that this other person that we meet is a microcosm of its own. Thus, we tend to simplify other person's behavior and personality while overemphasizing the complexity of our own. Why we do it? One of possible explanations that I can think of is that in order to actually recognize the complexity of other person (not necessarily a psychopath) we have to empathically understand him or her, dialogue with him or her, and cognitively reconstruct his or her experience in our mind-body system; in turn, this could lead to our meeting with some closeted aspects of our own self (the same principle works within Gestalt therapy; and initially there is always resistance to letting go of one's habitual responses, scripts, and patterns which manifests, for instance, as an anxious struggle against doing the Gestalt dialogue and fighting against the therapist or facilitator who offers you to explore such an opportunity).

This seems to be one of the complex reasons why it is so hard for us to address difficult problems openly and honestly and directly. It simply causes anxiety; and we tend to be too serious about our experience, so we resist feeling anxiety and the truth beneath it.

Last point I would like to emphasize about psychopathologies is that they seem to be cross-culturally widespread (even though in different kinds of societies they can take different forms). My examples are not limited just to Russia; the psychopathic S. that I described above actually grew up in a European country; furthermore, this post itself was inspired by a news article saying that Rodney Alcala, an American serial killer and rapist, was "sentenced to death as police fear he could be behind 130 murders." The news article goes on describing this person as extremely smart and charismatic and seemingly socially adapted:

The photographer, who is said to have a genius IQ of 160, often boasted of his winning an episode of the American version of Blind Date. However, the woman who chose him later canceled their date because she found him "too creepy."

I strongly encourage you to read about the crimes he committed and his behavior in the court. See below a footage of his participating in a famous American TV show after he was already a psychopathic serial killer. Look him in the face. It is not necessary for a person with a severe psychopathology to be a murderer, he or she may enjoy pathological lying, emotional or sexual abuse, spoiling or tempting an innocent, and so on.  There are different types of personality disorder. He or she can be more or less dangerous than this particular case (it can be a historical leader figure like Stalin or Hitler whose actions and narcissistic struggle resulted in deaths of millions and karmic consequences for the entire planet).

The striking thing is that they will show no remorse. This is not that rare and far from your life; this could be your neighbor. This is what the real monster in a human flesh looks like (and this is where non-judgmental relativism ends). I am convinced that we have no luxury to continue being blind about difficulties of life and avoiding to take the darkest sides of the Kosmos into the fullest consideration that is only possible. We have to come to terms with difficult aspects of reality and how we can be compassionate even towards these poor souls and yet always keeping in mind the whole picture, including all the evils they do to others.

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.

Russia is not a "normal" state

There is a pretty interesting news article that points to the unfortunate "uniqueness" of Russia. See below the excerpt from the article:

Norway urges cooler heads

Earlier, Norway's foreign minister urged all polar allies to keep a cool head and work together to solve disputes in the Arctic.

"We sometimes analyze Russia with old mental maps, with the mental maps of the Cold War, where we have instinctive reactions to what we see and hear," Jonas Gahr Store said.

"One should not put all mental maps to the shredder. But I think updating mental maps … analyzing it coolly is the responsibility of modern government."

Store didn't refer to Canada directly, but the Harper government has criticized Moscow in recent years over what it views as provocative conduct in the Far North. A Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed of the North Pole and Moscow has sent bombers close — but never into — Canadian Arctic airspace.

"Not everything Russia does in the Arctic, not every flag they plant, which is a symbolic gesture, has legal meaning," Store said. "And the more you react to that … you give it meaning."

Valuable natural resources

As much as one-fifth of Earth's undiscovered oil and gas is believed to be in the Arctic and climate change is causing the rapid melting of Arctic ice, opening resource-exploration potential.

Store said Russia has legitimate interests in the Arctic and much of the resource wealth is in its sovereign territory, which should minimize future disputes.

However, maintaining relations with Moscow is complicated because Russia is not quite a "normal" state, he added.

"Russia is in transition, and as some of their able analysts are saying, they are lost in transition.… It is not certain in what state they will be when that transition ends.

"We are all served by seeing that transition landing softly into something where Russia can still be called a democracy with rule of law, civil society, freedom of press and freedom of expression."

Russia is not a "normal" state, indeed, as I have been arguing in a few posts here, in this blog. The Norwegian minister seems to be very insightful.

I like to say that when Europeans or Americans visit Russia for the first time they meet white people of European outlook who live in a seemingly industrialized country and think that due to surface, exterior similarity they understand the culture very well. And yet Russia seems to be so alien—and even alienated—from the European and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations (don't forget that the country was isolated from the rest of the world for 70 years during the period of Communism) that this often-occurring misleading reliance on culturally insensitive extrapolation of one's own cultural experience to the Russian culture causes a lot of trouble and misunderstanding to both sides (not to mention the fact that Russians themselves are extremely ignorant of the interiors of the Western civilization; for instance, if for Americans the complex notion of liberal freedoms and principles of healthy individualism is built into the cultural background and is perceived as a social given, for Russians these signifiers have different signifieds—something that was learned from Hollywood movies, perhaps; in any case, something far more primitive). 

In Russia, it is completely normal for owners of large and not-so-large businesses to have a personality disorder (personality disorder—or  previously psychopathy—is called a "shadow syndrome" due to a difficult diagnostics), a borderline or narcissistic condition, and so on. I have met a couple of cases (who seemed to be spiritually oriented at first but then appeared as full of lies and manipulation) which shocked, terrified me enormously. Needless to say I've had to go through a difficult period integrating such an experience. If America has long ago transcended the stage of a chaotic capitalism, Russian "capitalism" is built on lies and power struggles rather than rational self-interest. It is absolutely okay to lie extensively in each and every aspect of business, to break agreements, to make decisions according to one's short-term impulses and personal neuroses. Your business can always be taken away; law doesn't work; courts make decisions in favor of those who have the most power and bribe with the most money. Stealing is okay and is a social norm—in fact, those who don't steal are poor, those who steal are rich. Same goes for bribery. If you don't bribe, your business will most likely be closed or  invaded because no one needs somebody who doesn't conform to what everybody does. The politics works the same way.

So, you may see that figuring out the integral picture of Russia and its place in the world is one of my current fascinations. This fascination was brought forth by realization that most foreigners, even those who live here, don't quite understand the true nature of the Russian culture the way it is now in its complexity and, well, abandonment; neither Russians themselves have enough self-reflection so as to get to know what is going on better (due to so much of dissociated and undigested history, including a comprehensive and unbiased synthetic vision of the 20th century). 

As a friend of mine, Dr. Elke Fein, argues, Russian politics comes mostly from self-protective action logic, which is a very early stage of development discourse. At first, when I read her arguments, I was trying to disprove them but the more I'm looking into the data the more I feel the truth of the theory that the dominant mode of discourse in Russian society and politics is that of the self-protective level. Here is the abstract of Elke Fein's paper, highly recommended:

Adult Development Theory and Political Analysis: An Integral Account of Social and Political Change in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Elke Fein

Abstract: I propose a reading of social, political and discursive change in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia which is inspired by an integral, above all developmental perspective. In view of explaining Russia’s current political trajectory, I make several arguments. First, I claim that Russian politics are still to a large extent determined by the effects of a threefold crisis of sense-making. Neither the collapse of the Soviet empire, nor the question of how to define democratic government nor the lack of a resilient national identity have so far been resolved and re-appropriated in a transformative manner. Second, I try to show how this affects various aspects and dimensions of Russian politics. Third, I engage in a brief overview of a number of adult development models, asking to what extent and how the characteristics of consciousness development, particular stage characteristics, and the general logics and dynamics of successful and unsuccessful development these models describe can be helpful to the analysis of Russian politics. Also, I discuss their compatibility and parallels with discourse theory and analysis as an increasingly popular methodology in Russian Studies. Of the developmental models reviewed, the theory of political development by Stephen Chilton and the self-protective action logic in Susanne Cook-Greuter’s model of self and identity development are particularly relevant for my purpose. On these grounds, it is argued that since Vladimir Putin’s taking office as Russian president and later prime-minister, politics and (official) political discourse have increasingly come to follow self-protective action logics as conceived by Susanne Cook-Greuter. This diagnosis, which could either be understood as a regression or as a realignment of internal and external dimensions of political development, can be explained as a reaction to Russia’s crisis of identity followed by a loss of internal stability and international influence connected to the dislocations mentioned above (Integral Review, 2010).

It is dramatic that such a great culture is in such a decline for such a long period—and there's no hope, or so it seems.

Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.

Privacy versus openness

I have noticed many times that when I (and, of course, others) attempt to raise an important or sensitive issue to discuss a graveyard silence starts to prevail throughout, especially when communicating with people from the West. I have not inquired deeply into this particular issue yet, but I tentatively connect it to a Western tradition of privacy, with its explicit and implicit cultural agreements. In Russia there is considerably less sense of mental boundaries and rational taboos (taboos and boundaries are multiple but more premental-rational).

By being a creature of a postcommunist country sometimes I realize that the notion of capitalist/individualist privacy seems to avoid my immediate conscious grasp. And sometimes I am just left astounded by the fact that my Western friends and partners in communication suddenly become silent or say a very superficial remark to a question that I am wondering about as of crucial and related straight to the matters of life and death, even if psychological. At times like this I am left thinking, "Oh shit, did I again address an issue too directly?" Also, I start to feel some kind of sorrow regarding the fact that this particular intersubjective space somehow self-contracted and closed from being dialogical.

And now I am perplexed in regards to one question: where does a sense of authentic privacy ends and a cunning mechanism of self-defense against the truth, the truthfulness, and the goodness starts? In therapy when a therapist addresses a sensitive trauma-related issue, the client does everything to build up resistance and avoid looking and feeling into the issue and recognizing it as one. He or she invents numerous ways of escaping the cruel reality. One of the ways to defend oneself is to simply ignore the therapist's provocations and invitations to exploration of transferential systems.

There is a striking drive in a person who was brought up in the West not to get involved and to keep distance. "This is not my business." "I have lots of, lots of things to do, no time for discussing this." In some cases it seems to result in an impulsive/compulsive reaction of building excessive boundaries and closing one's own eyes with one's own hands so as to keep ignoring a delicate but important issue; especially in the cases that require making a (even if workable) value judgment regarding, e.g., other person or community and so on.

What somehow relates to this is my increasingly growing awareness that the idea that one has first to take care of one's own backyard before doing the global work is utterly failing in the context of the global crisis. Among some of American conservatives there is an idea that USA should withdraw from any involvement with the world problems, conserve itself, solve its own problems, and only then go to take care for the world. (The same basic view, a kind of "we should take care of our asses first," is widespread around the world.) There is an important part of the whole picture in this point of view: when taking into consideration an integral picture and doing integral action one is ought to take oneself into account; if one secludes oneself from one's care, it may lead to a catastrophe or at least significantly diminish the effectiveness of actions.

But if one actually forces this idea of self-conservation into reality as the only means to fight against the crisis, this will actually lead to serious consequences. The world is highly interweaved nowadays; and one's attempts to seclude oneself from global action will not succeed; for instance, most Americans consume products manufactured in China; and this is one of the world powers to dialogically come to terms with (and we do not to mention here lesser powers such as Somalian pirates imprisoning American cargo ships or Russian leaders not being able to take care of the weapon-grade plutonium waste lying near Ural mountains in huge amounts—enough to destroy the entire world several times in a row).

There is no way to avoid the world and to become autistic and private again; there is no way for America or any other country to retreat into its previous monological autism... We are all too interconnected now. No freaking way you can take care of your own backyard before you take care of the planet; you have to do it simultaneously with setting priorities that are actually global (and highly sophisticated), otherwise everything built without a necessary awareness will fall apart (in a sense, your backyard is a part of the global backyard called the Earth). It especially relates to the US because it became so dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century; there is just no way to regress back into the cave after Americans have engulfed the entire world with their capitalistic system, worldview, and action.

(I would add here that one of the examples of everything falling apart is contemporary Russia which is said to be reigned, as Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, somewhat biliously formulated, by a "bunch of cowboys," the cowboys, I would add, who are basically incapable of single-handedly tackling the complex societal issues; hence, the suffering of the entire nation and a demise of an important, if neglected, sociocultural part of the European civilization. It will probably take the entire world to rebuild Russia and re-integrate its people into the global community; and now I sense that Russia is predominantly seen as a mean but persistent distraction and disturbance to the Western rationalistic plans for global peace and paradise. So much attention is paid to Africa now; but doesn't Russia deserve an equal amount of attention—or even more attention, given its difficult history, its influence in the world, and the multiple ways it is still being marginalized/ignored/oppressed both by the West and the East? I remind you that statistically and qualitatively Russia is probably not in a better shape than Nigeria; right now people are suffering in both places enormously—more than any human being in the world deserves—even if they are suppressing the suffering into the personal and collective unconscious and making themselves numb to and detached from their own pains.)

The global economic crisis as well as the global climatic change as well as many other global issues are positively not the national-level issues. They may have causes in each country's poor and imbalanced choice of politics and strategy over a certain period in history, but the systemic resolution of the global economic crisis requires a paradigm of global actions. Global climate change, or in general a worsening of environmental conditions due to industrialization and natural disasters that is undeniably occurring, is a vivid example of why taking care of one's own backyard first doesn't work: there is no point of trying to save your attachment to your home if the entire world is going to collapse. You can take care of grass in your backyard but the acid rain or radioactive waste will prove all your private efforts futile.

We ought to let go of being so much obsessed with privacy.

Evoking Global Citizenship

What follows is a part of the text I have been writing so as to apply for a small US Department of State grant which is available to me because I am an alumnus of the Future Leaders Exchange program (FLEX). In 2003 this program allowed me to become a US high school student and live with a host family in the glorious state of Virginia for one academic year. The cross-cultural depth of this adventure (and of several others) has been unfolding ever since; and this experience still influences my life and fuels my dreams in many ways. If you ever have an opportunity to live in another culture, do it.

The idea for this grant application emerged from a creative insight and includes organizing an event or series of events devoted to exploring the notion of global citizenship (also called world citizenship), a concept that becomes increasingly meaningful in my life. I connect this growing realization of myself becoming more and more a citizen of the world with the fact that my homeland is currently in a deep crisis better described as a sociocultural catastrophe. Intracultural tensions and a very poor, shallow life in Russia stimulates identity to weave oneself more and more intimately with the worldcentric values and seek for global expansion so as to include, among other things, the crying, corrupt, and hopeless motherland in a more compassionate embrace. But there would have been no ground for that development if I hadn't personally been so connected in terms of living emotions and actions with so many friends in different parts of the world. I love you all.

There is, however, a time pressure in terms of my university graduation paper on consciousness; and the deadlines for both the grant application and the first draft coincide (both must be finished in February). Consciousness research is my top priority for the coming months; I am basically waking, dreaming, and sleeping about it for seven days a week. This is why I don't know if I am going to make this particular dream come true this year. I also look into the possibility of attracting some larger partners, communities, and organizations who would be interested in this kind of social project. There's no fun to have dinner alone. I will be discussing this idea; and I am sure that even if we cannot make it this year it is certainly a project that is worth doing some time in the nearest future.

I am publishing this text because I believe it is important given the recent events in the world. A few months later it might not be as fresh as it is now. Incidentally, if you are interested in discussing it in detail, please let me know. — Sincerely, Eugene.

Evoking Global Citizenship: How Cross-Cultural Experience Helps Fostering Integral Consciousness (Excerpt) 

The world today is increasingly evolving toward greater complexities in terms of cross-cultural integration. American philosopher Ken Wilber, one of the major proponents of transdisciplinary and transcultural studies, noted: “During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world’s cultures are now available to us. In the past, if you were born, say, a Chinese, you likely spent your entire life in one culture, often in one province, sometimes in one house, living and loving and dying on one small plot of land. But today, not only are people geographically mobile, but we can study, and have studied, virtually every known culture on the planet. In the global village, all cultures are exposed to each other” (Wilber, 2006).

This awareness presents new challenges and opportunities to virtually every individual and community on the planet. The issues of world economic crisis, of poverty, famine, global warming and natural disasters can be solved only through cross-cultural international cooperation. From a moral standpoint that becomes increasingly influential in the today’s world, a disaster in one country cannot be left ignored by anyone in the world, no matter what their national identity, race, gender, creed or financial fortune is. Recent catastrophe in Haiti that, according to some estimates, caused more than 200,000 casualties proved the necessity of developing and implicating new mechanisms for integrating resources of individuals and organizations from multiple cultures so as to be more effective in dealing with these kinds of problems. In USA only, in a couple of weeks over 20 million individuals donated their personal funds to help resolving the crisis in that country (which was achieved through establishing such initiatives as the transpartisan by its nature Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund); the response of people in many other countries was the same, despite of all the differences we share. This proves the fact that cross-cultural awareness is important not only on the level of governmental regulation but also on multiple levels, including the level of common individuals’ civil initiative that is naturally sensitive to the issues of spreading the touch of compassion and mutually shared wisdom globally.

On July 2008, Barack Obama in his famous Berlin speech titled “The World That Stands as One” influenced millions of people worldwide by speaking of the ideals of global citizenship. He started his speech with these words: “I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” As a fellow citizen of the world he proceeds to address the fact that the world community should be perceived more and more as a closely interconnected global network: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.” And he invites every one of us, clearly speaking to the entire world community, to follow this ideal of global citizenship, cooperation, and trust: “Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations—and all nations—must summon that spirit anew.”

This speech is a remarkable historic wake-up call to the planet Earth. The challenge is, however, that the ideas of global citizenship and cross-cultural initiative cannot be adopted and implemented as a set of doctrines just in one day. The paradigm shift of the dominant mode of discourse in various parts of the world requires stable transformation of moral consciousness and other streams of psychological development in masses toward postconventional altitudes. Every individual has to go through a long journey of self-discovery prior to recognizing the truth of unity-in-diversity of all of us.

If we refer to the studies of moral consciousness by L. Kohlberg and of ego development by J. Loevinger and S. Cook-Greuter, we realize that the majority of world’s population still remains uninvolved with and detached from this altitude of morals, values and actions. Sufficient sociocultural, economical, and psychological conditions must be established in order to achieve the goal of transcultural planetary integration—the kind of integration that acknowledges both individual differences and commonalities shared among individuals in communities all over the world. How to reach more people is the issue to be addressed by everyone who is involved in this kind of global action.

The need to foster development of a more integral consciousness in individuals around the world so as to be able to fulfill ideas of global citizenship in practice becomes increasingly acknowledged by leaders in many socially-relevant fields of action-inquiry. Ken Wilber who developed a theoretical framework that offers a comprehensive account of complexities in individual and social evolution (along with other important thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas and Jean Gebser) influenced a number of world leaders to address these issues in a more sophisticated manner than had ever been conceived before.

For example, at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former U.S. President Bill Clinton described these ideas as crucial to successful development of programs based on the principle of global initiative: “I worry about all these grand ideas that we all promote here working to benefit ordinary people. If ordinary people don’t perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives then they can’t develop the higher level of consciousness—to use a term that candid American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about. He said, you know, the problem is the world needs to be more integrated, but it requires a consciousness that’s way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us” (quotation from the Ode Magazine article, April 2009).

In his more recent interview, Bill Clinton pointed out: “I was influenced by Ken Wilber's book A Theory of Everything, because he tries to point out that throughout history we get connected to people who are different from us before our heads get around the implications of that, and then as soon as they do there is a parallel level of interconnectivity and we have to get our heads around that. All of the public intellectuals in the world need to be thinking quite a bit about this question of identity and need to recognize that in view of the findings of the human genome about the similarities of all of us, even the husband and wife who at the minimum are 99.5 percent the same…” (Foreign Policy, December 2009).

We believe it to be self-evident that the important role of being real agents of change and cross-cultural integration in the world is played by the very people who in their living experiences were exposed to different cultures and traditions and who are embodied hosts of cross-cultural awareness. The cutting edge of social transformation toward global citizenship, raised mutual understanding, and integral consciousness can be found in the melting pots around the globe in which multiple cultures converge. One of such melting pots is situated in Northern Europe, in such places as Finland and the close-to-border with EU North-West region of Russia (especially St. Petersburg and its environments), which in the recent years became the point of convergence of multiple cultures, including members of Finnish-, Swedish-, and Russian-speaking communities. . . .

[Helsinki, Finland, was the first place within the direct reach that came to my mind when contemplating such a project. I have personal experience of cross-cultural interaction within a small trilingual community (actually, quadrilingual, for English serves as the international language there). There a profound mutual recognition emerged among members of three different and yet mysteriously interwoven cultures. The general notion, however, is relevant for many many other places in the world.]