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)...

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.

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.

Interiors of consciousness are engaging exteriors

Even though this blog is presumably devoted to explorations of interiors of consciousness, at some point the so-called "interiors" start to include pretty much everything, for the phenomena in the exterior world start to touch something deep inside you. It happens when your self-identity transcends an exclusionary identification with a more limited perspective on yourself and the world and goes beyond into the worldcentric and even Kosmocentric kingdom of perspectives.

You spontaneously begin to discover universals that are shared among all human beings of any race, ethnicity, creed, sex, faith, and so on. You begin to realize that all sentient beings share the same basic taste of duḥkha—or uneasiness, disquietness, anxiety, soreness—which is the Buddhist term for the basic sliding condition of one's unknowingness about one's own exclusive preconscious attachments to certain subjects-and-objects interrelations in the overall stream of phenomena that flows through all domains of the experiential matrix. All experiences and all perspectives are impermanent in that they actually seem to be vibrating and dynamically changing currents of dialoging aspects of the Kosmos. And even the most stable ones, such as certain physical laws of the universe, are considered by such brilliant folks as Charles Peirce to be more or less stabilized habits evolved through aeons of cosmic evolution:

For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical an scientific inquiry. One can sensibly seek, in Peirce's view, evolutionary explanations of the existence of particular natural laws. For Peirce, then, the entire phaneron (the world of appearances), as well as all the ongoing processes of its interpretation through mental significations, has evolved and is evolving. ("Charles Sanders Pierce" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If you are unaware of the sliding nature of the phaneron (as we naturally are more or less most of the time), then you tend to attach yourself to this or that experiential leaf that is being carried by the seemingly chaotic current in the ever-pervading ocean of global awareness. You are preconsciously attaching yourself to the plenitude of your adaptive personae, to your constructions about your own identity, to your intuitions about what it is like to be your own self, to your current state (or dynamic systems of states) of embeddedness with this or that whirlpool in the great matrix (mātṝkās); and when this or that aspect, or perspective, on reality transmutates, with you being unable to consciously follow its transformation by transforming yourself, you experience dying and suffering and soreness and pain and grievance—and you might even become attached to this newly-formed state of condition once again, indefinitely.

But when you become increasingly aware of the sliding nature of the world of appearances, you cannot help but start experiencing profound compassion and care for each and every aspect of it, for each one of them is so aesthetically perfect, so ethically tender (cf. the meaning of sawubona), so structurally unstable that even a slightest glance at a phenomenon makes it move beyond itself into the next stage of transformation. Compassion is the foundational artistic tool with which the superconscious artist constantly paints new panoramic snapshots of being. It helps to preserve, to cherish, to nourish, and to prepare for further stages of transformation.

That's the thoughts that emerged during my acquaintance with the recent story of Aleksey Dymovskiy, a detective officer of Russian militia, who has single-handedly attempted to voice (to cry out loud, actually) his concern regarding corruption and catastrophic condition in one of the local law enforcement units of the Department of Internal Affairs by courageously posting two videos on YouTube in which he stated that he just "had enough" of local corruption, fabricated cases, and working in an extremely stressful environment without holidays, without being paid, and without any health care. (See also a Times Online article.)

Even though Dymovskiy spoke about the state of art in the local unit, it is no secret to anyone who lives in Russia that precisely the same points apply to virtually all the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and militia (militsiya) in general. In St. Petersburg alone there has recently been numerous cases when militsiya members (of very high ranks) were caught at doing serious crimes (involved robbery and serial murders, not to mention the common practice of bribery that is widespread everywhere and became a cultural norm long ago). For instance, last year there was the notorious case of "black realtors" when some high-rank members of local militsiya were involved in murdering dozens of lonely people so as to sell their apartments (real estate prices in the major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow are extremely high—dozens and in many cases even hundreds times higher than the average income of an average Russian). In another case a criminal investigation department was found guilty of creating a widespread system of drug trafficking and distribution (which seems to be a common practice in Russia; the pandemic is systemic). Their name is Legion, for they are many.

Sadly enough, long time ago law enforcement system became the most feared seat of uncontrolled criminal pathology in the post-Soviet societies. Every day thousands of people all over Russia get abused, beaten, and killed in the streets by local patrolling militsiya whose vertical center of gravity seems to generally revolve around the opportunistic stage in ego development theory; red (power-driven) stage in Spiral Dynamics/Clare Graves's theory of values development; and preconventional stage of Kohlberg's moral development. In the psyche of a common Russian, any communication with militsiya is fulfilled with the fear for potential massive abuse. And all of it is just one, if all-pervasive, aspect of the ongoing sociocultural catastrophe in the Russian Federation and some other post-Soviet states.

Academic relief

Sweet. It seems my endless quest for a field in academia to fit myself into finally brings forth results. Today, I had a meeting with my professor; and we almost spontaneously (well, it takes long practice to be spontaneous) came up with a topic for my graduation work in clinical psychology. Ironically, the topic ended up being the one I have pursued for all the time: altered states of consciousness (ASC)—and, therefore, basically everything related to dynamic patterns of consciousness; psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and sociology of whatever it is that is included into the domain of the consciousness studies. The difference was that this time the professor really got inspired, and the ASC theme emerged dialogically (instead of my trying to covertly sneak this or that topic of interest into my study). I had been worrying about my graduation work for a long time, because I spent a lot of time waiting for any insight to emerge about what could possibly be done for my final research. I've looked for something meaningful and resonating with my strive for complexities; and what can be more complex and immediate than consciousness?

Now, when this area of life is clear and I hopefully know what to do, the next important challenge is about inviting more financial abundance and sustainability into my life. Apparently, research will take most of my time this year, but I still ought to occasionally eat something, drink something, even go out for a date once in a while, and of course I like to travel a lot and attend various seminars, not to mention buying expensive books. Guess what, it might come as a shock to you, but it really takes money to live. There are a few projects going on, some minor results, but still much work to do in this area.

Incidentally, it looks like in this country good money comes primarily to psychopaths and sociopaths of various sort, to those who are able to survive in an extremely hostile (psychologically and even physically) business environment, constant governmental and administrative pressure, needs for extensive bribing, lie, manipulation, and so on. I already had quite a broad experience of tasting the psychology of Russian business from the inside and looking closer at some of the exemplars of it… and, oh boy, it is so scary—even when you speak of an enterprise that seems innocent (and even "spiritual" or "selfless") to an outsider. No business, if it is successful, is "innocent" in Russia; and it is hard to meet a businessperson who wouldn't present some considerable pathological condition (exceptions, as it seems, are extremely rare). The disturbing list of clinical psychology of Russian business includes serious cases of dissociative identity, narcissistic personality, psychological abuse, borderline states, and existential emptiness (not to mention common neuroses). Psychology of Russia is destined to become one of the recurrent themes in this blog, so you'd better buckle up for this refreshing crosscultural perspective.

On freedom of speech and modern Russian history

If you read today's news in Russia, you would find out that today, October 30, is officially the Day commemorating the victims of political repression. Sixty years ago, had I written about the things I write (and about to write) today, I would have probably been imprisoned and killed. Thirty years ago I would have probably "only" been talking to KGB and having trouble in my everyday life. Awareness of that fact sends chills of self-reflection down my spine. 

I remember how on my freshman year in university (2005) I protested against being taught the Lenin's theory of reflection as a foundational worldview in our general psychology class. At the time I was naively into constructivist epistemology and thought that naïve materialism was too ancient to be seriously taught as a basic foundation for general psychology. For me it was like, "Come on, I went through so much trouble and self-sacrifice to get the scholarship; and now what I get is studying Lenin? You gotta be kidding. No, it seems you're not. You're absolutely serious. Oh. My. God." (And that's when my total disillusionment with the Russian academia began. Given the fact that I had almost no illusions regarding the Russian academia, it wasn't coming down to earth, it felt more like coming down six feet under earth altogether.)

I found the imposed ideology to be quite outdated and was sincerely struck by the cruel reality that almost twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed many of the faculty members still (successfully) tried to teach psychology the way it was taught in the communism-dominated past. That time I just had a "serious talk" with a teacher who strongly advised me against undermining the dominating paradigm as I would get into a big trouble at my exams. I didn't take that too seriously, but still decided not to stir up a hornets' nest and let it go. The point here is: in the early 1980s, I would have probably provoked something bad to happen to me in terms of academic career for such remarks.

Given the cruel history of the totalitarian regime in this country (which itself is grounded in the history of Czarist Russia), no wonder that, historically, Russians have so much trouble of directly and honestly assessing and addressing the problems of the way we currently live. For many decades, survival has depended on one's capacity to doublethink. Truthful self-reflection was a dangerous trait that may have triggered serious anxiety. Through generations this became an unselfconscious cultural norm; and some complex sociocultural defense mechanisms emerged over the centuries to perpetuate the cultural morphic field of this frequency.

Now it pervades the society as a hidden factor; and not many people are actually aware of how this cultural background works in themselves. Most attempts to take a different perspective on life trigger vicious self-defense as the center of developmental gravity in the population seemingly tends to self-defensive and conformist selves (in terms of Susann Cook-Greuter's ego development theory). Instant gratification under the condition of stressful chaotically-changing environment is the dominating mode of discourse in Russian business and politics; and there seems to be no space for complex systems solutions in the Russian mind. Collective reflexology at its best.