Chapter 18
....He pointed toward the now familiar metal tube. "I will leave you here, but I will be in the next room. When you finish, let me know." He left hurriedly, before I could say anything, as if he was afraid I migh change my mind.
The door closed and I was alone in the room. It was completely insulated from all outside noise, so I was in total silence, surrounded by desks piled high with books, research papers and reports. My indecisiveness about what to do next hung like a fog in the air around me. The mirrored tube suddenly seemed intimidating. It looked like a small rocket ship, ready to transport me somewhere frightenly remote in time and space from my present existence. Or was it some kind of strange, mechanical womb, waiting to readmit my body and return it to my place of birth?
In either case, it certainly didn't strike me as a comfortable place for reading Dmitriev's notes. I stood silently in front of it until the rational part of my mind reconquered my imagination. Dmitriev obviously must have had a reason for his suggestion, so l entered the tube, carrying his notebook with me.
I curled up like an embryo in the same position I had chosen the first time. Enough light entered through the open ends of the tube that I could read Dmitriev's notes without any difficulty
I turned to the first page. I had never seen Dmitriev's handwriting before. He wrote in large, round letters that were easy to read:
It is eight P.M on Friday. I have just finished my experiment in the tube. It lasted for one hour and fifteen minutes. The following records will be written in the present tense to facilitate my memory.
I enter the tube knowing that my task for today is to find and then follow Olga's path and to learn as much as I can that will extend her own exploration. I sit in my usual position, with my legs crossed. I must use the timing techniques I have learned to go back and find the exact same channel of perception she passed through.
I close my eyes and imagine the figure of my own double. He strikes the same cross-legged pose as mine, but he is sitting up side down above my head, facing in the opposite direction. The tops of our heads touch slightly. I distribute my attention equally between both figures, filling up the double with the same energy and consciousness as my usual self. Soon our joined figures begin to rotate around the connection point between our heads. From the position of my usual image, we are turning in a clockwise direction. Seen from the side, our joined shapes look like a spinning swastika. I spin faster and faster.
The piece of time l occupy is changing, going backward. My task is not to follow Olga exactly but just to find the same level of vibration she did and then see where it leads me. My inner clock knows intuitively where to stop me for this, and I trust it to do its job. I concentrate all of my attention on facilitating the wholeness of my moving image.
At some point I feel it stop. A series of energy waves travels through different parts of my body until one of them passes straight through my heart. I feel a shock, as if l have been struck by something. I remember a phrase from an ancient Coptic gospel, "You must pay attention to me in order to see me, " and I know I must now direct all my attention toward this particular vibration gate. I must hold onto it without even a single moment of distraction.
I experience the familiar sensation of a new reality emerging into my perception. In the same way that a photograph gradually turns into visible shapes as it is being developed, forms and images are starting to reveal themselves for my vision. At first I see only the shapes of trees, their leaves moving slightly in the wind. Then a large courtyard reveals itself to me, surrounded on all four sides by low buildings made of reddish brown stone. I am standing in the middle of the courtyard, near a large, star-shaped flower bed filled with red and white flowers.
At first there appears to be no one else in the courtyard. I sense that the buildings are full of people and that they are working hard at creating something very significant. Then to my right I notice a man sitting on a bench. He is drawing something on the ground, using a long, thin stick as a tool.
The man looks very contemporary. His face seems familar to me, but I can't remember where I have seen him before. I know from past experience that I mustn't distract myself with details like trying to remember faces. I must concentrate only on the experience of the moment.
I walk closer to the man. Lifting up his hand, he greets me with a smile. He acts as if he knows who l am, and he gestures for me to sit on the bench with him. I know that I need to be very economical with my energy to keep myself in this place, so l avoid talking and instead transfer my thoughts to him simply by looking straight at his face.
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My thought to him is a question, and he nods his head as in agreement. Then he begins to speak. I hear his language as fluent Russian. "You want to hear the story of a legend." he says.
I mentally confirm this to him.
"Well, first you should consider the entire concept of a legend and try to answer the question of what separates legend from reality. Is there a difference between them? Of course, I know that at the personal level of considering a question like this you have gained a lot of freedom from your old way of seeing things, but you are still too rigid to accept that your own scientific research is a kind of legend being told by others."
I disagree strongly with this, because l feel fre from any attachments at all to my position as a researcher. He pays no attention to my thought and continues.
"Now I will tell you the legend of Belovodia, only I will tell it to you not as a piece of archetypal fantasy, but as a real story. You may decide for yourself how to accept it, But what am going to tell you is the real truth."
As he speaks, the man bends over and adds one or two small symbols to the design he has made on the ground.
"Long ago, so long ago that it doesn't make any sense to specify when, a great catastrophe shook the great continent now known as Eurasia. This catastrophe had been foreseen as a possibility by the elite inner circle of a sophisticated civilzation that existed in northern Siberia. The climate then was very benign, unlike how it is today in that region. The civilization that had evolved there was highly developed. Some of their advances were later duplicated by your own culture, but in general they were more different in their skills and attainments than you could possibly imagine.
"One of the immediate effects of the catastrophe was a tremendous change in climate. Their warm, favorable weather was instantly replaced by frost. Soon the entire land was covered with ice, and it became impossible for their civilization to survive. But even after its collapse, the leading elite made all possible efforts to preserve their knowledge.
"Theirs had not been a technological culture, like yours. Their main achievements had been in developing the inner dimensions of the mind. Before the catastrophe, their entire society possessed a beautiful spiritual intensity that in your materialistic culture is experienced only by a very few. They possessed incredible psychological wisdom. They were able to control their personal experience of time, and they had learned to communicate telepathically over great distances. They had great skills in projecting the future, and their social structure was the most effective that ever existed.
"After the catastrophe, those people who were physically able were organized for a migration to the far south. The spiritual elite chose to remain behind, and these men and women experienced a series of intensive transformations. From your point of view they met death. But they still formed a collective nucleus connected with the remnants of their people who were migrating to the south.
"Those who had walked away didn't understand this fully, but they knew that their elders and teachers continued to live somewhere in the north, and they governed their lives through connections with their priests and rituals.
"Over the years the migrants new lives became consumed by the pure demands of survival. Their memories of the past gradually faded away. With their collective attention turned toward the pressing needs of their daily material existence, the direction of their culture eventually became completely changed. But the thread connecting them with the knowledge and power of their spiritual elite has never been interrupted.
"This link is still alive, even today. But gradually, over the passage of so many thousands of years, it has become more and more hidden. Even for most of their priests, its memory manifests itself mainly in the form of legends and myths. Different names are now given to the ancient place in which the sacred knowledge is kept. Belovodia is one of them.
"Preseration of their spiritual knowledge was the goal of the spiritual elite from the very beginning of the migration. That is why they remained behind. But of course, for the spiritual knowledge to be truly alive, it must be continually integrated into the social lives of new, emerging cultures. That is how it happened for a long time.
"The migration of the original civilization, which I have told you about, was only the first one. Since then, many groups of people wandered into Siberia and were influenced by the mystical powers of the vanished civilization. The Altai region became a boiling cauldron for the creation of new cultures. Streams of humanity separated from there and traveled far in many different directions.
"One of them reached the territory of modern Iran, where the spiritual knowledge they carried with them became manifested in the birth of Zoroastrianism. Later, this same stream transferred much of its knowledge to Christianity. Another stream migrated to what is now India and Pakistan, and the establishment of a society there brought to life the treasure of the Vedic tradition. Tantric Buddhism, which gave the place of initial knowledge the name of Shambhala, was in direct communication with it for centuries. Those who went west became known as the Celts and were connected to the common source through the ceremonies of the Druids. In this way, the mystical heritage of this ancient civilization resulted in the Altai region becoming the original fountainhead for many of the world's great religions.
"There have always been people within each of these different traditions who were directly in touch with Belovodia. From time to time, knowledge from there has been opened up to your own civilization. This has happened at moments of real threat to humanity, such as the world wars. It is becoming open to you again now, because the power and energy you have accumulated are capable of causing many different kinds of catastrophes. Belovodia is becoming accessible to your consciousness to protect you by showing you other ways to live."
Then the man falls silent and starts to draw geometric figures on the ground by his feet. My perception is so overloaded from the many startling implications of his speech that l can barely concentrate enough to hold onto my presence here. I fight against my nearly overwhelming desire to jump into a discussion with him of evervthing said and of the hundreds of arguments I want to present, and instead try to concentrate my entire being on where I am.
From the expression on his face, I can see that he understands perfectly the struggle going on inside me.
Then he begins again, this time speaking very slowly.
"You may make the final decision about whether what I have said to you has been about legend or reality. But actually, there is no alternative except to see it as the truth that it is. This truth is a flower that has been opening its petals one by one, facilitating and supporting the beautiful treasure of human spirituality all over the planet.
"This flower is now ready to become fully open, and to be seen and understood as the blossom of all knowledge. This wil happen very soon. You may respond to it in any way that you wish. You may choose to fight against it, or you may choose instead to welcome its divine essence and living beauty."
Here Dmitrievs handwriting ended, except for a few odd-looking geometric designs sketched uncertainly at the bottom of the page. His notes said nothing about his return from his experience or his reactions to it. It simply stopped, leaving me feeling astonished and overwhelmed. I understood now why Dmitriev had wanted me to sit inside the mirrors while I read his notes. It had made his experience seem so vivid and powerful that I felt as if I had made his journey right along with him.
I walked slowly to the room where Dmitriev waited, sitting at his desk reading a massive volume on physics. He stood up and immediately led me back into the privacy of the room with the mirrors.
"Well, what do you think?" he asked. He seemed excited and nervous.
"I'm overwhelmed. I don't really know what to say, except that your material completely took away my need to do something myself in the mirrors today. It perfectly answered the questions that were the reason for my visit. You were right about that."
He took a deep breath. "You know," he said, "I really have been fighting hard against the truth of this experience. I didn't even write down my reaction to it, because I was simply too confused and overwhelmed to try. At first I tried to deal with it by making it seem trivial. I told myself it was nothing more than a purely psychological creation of my own unconscious. But this didn't convince me. Then I tried to construct an intellectual argument against the whole concept, using all the information available from modern research.
"Of course, I'm neither a historian nor an anthropologist, but I Have many friends in these fields. I thought I knew enough from them to reject the possibility that Siberia had ever been the home of some long forgotten, advanced, esoteric civilization. I have even done some new research of my own on it, reading many books and articles.
"And do you know the result? I didn't find any real proof that this had happened, but neither was there any proof that it hadn't. In the end, the only argument to be made against it was the circular one that since it wasn't true, it couldn't be true. That's all.
"At the same time, there were many hints that supported the real existence of Belovodia and what I was told about it in my vision. There was the proven fact of
Denisova's cave, one of the best-known archaeological sites in Altai, where traces of human life have been documented as belonging to the period of three hundred thousand years B.C. Then I remembered the startling comparative work that has been done between the Vedic tradition and the paganism of ancient Slavic culture. Among other things, their respective gods bore the same names and possessed similar functions.
"I even noticed that the typical hairstyle of the ancient Ukrainiar Cossacks was identical to that of the modern followers of the religion of Krishna, coming from India. Both shave their entire heads, leaving only a long tail growing from the top of the crown. The followers of Krishna believe he will pull them out of sin by this tail on the tops of their heads. I was just told by one of my friends, an anthropologist that some Japanese expeditions were being organized to explore the territory around Altai, to test the idea that the origin of their nation could be traced there.
"It was particularly fascinating to trace the connection between the name of the principal goddess of the Alta region, Umai, and other deities such as the Indian Kali and Buddhism's Tara. I came to the conclusion that they were all one and the same. Umai was embodied in Uma, the ancient Indian female spirit, who as a Shakti of Shiva is the power of light that makes perception possible. Uma is manifested as Kali in the Kalavada system and in the Kalachakra Tantra.
"Both systems were connected with belief in a time wheel. The most sacred aspects of their rituals were the ceremonial doorways opening into the roots of time, through which the initiated ones were able to reach Shambhala, or Belovodia, and to touch the mystery of immortality. There also are striking similarities with the
Zervanit tradition of ancient Persia, where the ability to understand and manipulate time was the essence of their spiritual practice.
"There are the same fascinating parallels in
Sufism. For many years
my good friend, Mr. Vasiliev, has led a group of scholars studying the work of
Gurdjieff and his predecessors. He told me just recently that in the part of Gurdjieff's work most essentially connected to the Sufi masters, he discovered the same idea of a time wheel that could be entered and used as a passageway to the mystical gate guarding the sacred land of Hurqalya. The name Hurgalya can be considered as the Sufi equivalent of Belovodia.
"Vasiliev learned that Gurdjieff also found among the Sufi masters the knowledge that the time wheel represented a stable primordial law, which could be grasped and understood through many different modalities of perception. For example, the practitioner who touches this law through meditation on mandalas opens the eyes of the heart with the assistance of the visual sense. The one who listens to the music of circles, especially in the way Gurdjieff taught this, reaches the same mystical experience assisted by the auditory senses. The same state can also be reached through dance, in which the seeker's entire body becomes the instrument leading to the sacred gates.
"The group of Gurdjeff's students who remained in Russia explained this concept further. They confirmed that whatever the mechanism that is used, if it is done correctly, the time wheel will begin to spin. And it will inevitably bring us to the final point of our destination, the mystical country of Belovodia. All this is most interesting, is it not?
"Yet if there really was an ancient, advanced civilization somewhere in northern Siberia, why have we not yet uncovered its physical remains? No matter how long ago it may have existed, why does it still lie so mysteriously hidden from our view? Well, perhaps the answer that can be found in the theories of the eminent historian and
ethnologist Lev Gumilev, whose mother, Anna Akhmatova, I consider to have been the greatest woman poet Russia has ever produced.
"While he was being held as a political prisoner in the Gulag, Gumilev studied the effect of the cosmic laws of transformation of energy on the evolution of cultures. One of the many concepts he introduced was that every civilization is characterized by the different materials it uses as the foundations of its existence --- wood, leather, fabrics, metal, bone, stone, and so forth. Because of wide variations in the materials they used as well as the climates they inhabited, different civilizations, he realized, would produce remains that would obviously be preserved very unequally.
"Civilizations relying heavily on stone and metals and existing in places with hot, dry climates would leave plentiful ruins and artifacts for future archaeologists to find. It would even be common to find well preserved, naturally mummified human remains, as has happened in parts of Africa, South America, and the southwestern United States.
"However, cultures that used mainly perishable materials like wood, leather, and fabrics, which then were subjected to a cold, wet climate like Siberia's for many thousands of years, would leave very few traces of themselves behind. If such a civilization had also been of exceptionally great antiquity, existing perhaps not tens but even hundreds of thousands of years ago, we could hardly expect to find much physical evidence of its existence.
"So, while I cannot yet point to anything absolutely conclusive, there are many strong hints that the initial motheland for proto-Indo-European culture was not restricted to the area right around the Black Sea, as is believed by many scientists, but might be expanded to include the region of Altai as well.
"You know, Olga, altogether this has somehow worked to dissolve much of my skepticism as a scientist toward new theories that contradict accepted beliefs and that may at first seem unconventional. I no longer think it is historically impossible that Belovodia once existed and that in some unknown way it continues to exist and inform human culture.
"Maybe someday there will be hard evidence to prove this beyond a doubt to our practical, logical, scientific minds. For me, my intuition is already enough. My heart feels so happy and satisfied with the information I was given that l am ready to accept it as a belief. This is where where I am so far. When you asked if you could come here again, I agreed partly in the hope that my experience could help you in your own search."
Furtunately I had never been nearly as conditioned to believe only in empirical scientific evidence as Dmitriev appeared to have and many of my own stereotype of the so-called real world had already been broken down by my own experiences in Altai. So for me, it was immediately easy and plausible to see Belovodia from the perspective suggested by Dmitriev's experience. In fact, the idea fascinated me. My reaction to it was as if I had finally received a long awaited promise of protection and support.
I thanked Dmitriev emotionally and left feeling excited and contented. I had received everything I could possibly have hoped for from my visit. Beyond that, during my trip home I didn't devote much conscious thought to the information he had given me. It didn't really seem to facilitate rational analysis. It simply "fit" as an intuitive concept that immediately resolved many of my previous conflicts and left me feeling filled with a spiritual ease.
Once again it was late when I got home, but I decided to stay awake at least long enough to write down everything I had learned at the Institute of Nuclear Physics while it was still fresh in my mind. After I finished writing, I was more conscious than ever of the fact that my experiences were creating a new identity. This identity was steadily growing within me, becoming more and more aware of itself. I knew that this identity was connected to my Spirit Twin and that I was in the process of becoming my true self.
I felt as if I had finally connected the ends of a very important circle in my life. Later, I would learn that the search for understanding actually follows a series of circles joined together to form an ascending spiral. As soon as we have completed each turn and it has become whole within us, forming an integral part of our experience, we are immediately exposed to the outer boundary of the next circle. Then we are ready to take the spiral path leading to the next level....
and it is just as well that he figured it out. No one can do the work if they cannot observe themselves without pity or bias. 
