Contents

The BOOK of KNOWLEDGE

ABOUT the BOOK

“The Book of Secret Knowledge from the Library of the Universe” by E. Zhmachinskaya

There are books that are timeless. “The Book of Knowledge” by Alexandra Kryuchkova, written in the spirit of magical realism and based on a series of documentary films about Raisa Akhmetovna Mansurova, the first of which, “Miracles of Healing”, shown on the Channel 1 of Russian Television on September 1, 2009, has already been reprinted 13 times, with a total circulation exceeding 10,000 copies.

“Who is Mansurova?” the reader might ask.

R. A. Mansurova, a doctor of psychology, has worked closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as with international medical and scientific organizations, for many years. Having conducted a series of studies with famous geneticist, professor, and academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Peter Gariaev (1942–2020, founder of the Institute of Quantum Genetics, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine), Raisa Akhmetovna has been organizing trainings and seminars around the world for over 20 years. Her students learn the art of self-regulation and understand the unlimited resources and potential given by God to each of us. Thousands of people have not only overcome serious illnesses but also firmly embarked on the path of spiritual self-development. In “The Book of Knowledge”, unlike other authors, Alexandra Kryuchkova, a participant of the TV film “Miracles of Healing”, a seminarian, and a student of Mansurova, managed to present serious material (from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle to modern discoveries in DNA and stem cells, neurolinguistics and psychosomatics) in a simple and accessible form – through dialogues with the main characters, who found themselves with her at a mountain seminar in China.

The novel consists of two parts: “A Path to the Light” and “The Book of Knowledge”. If at the beginning of the book the door to Another Reality only opens slightly, and a person learns to truly live here and now, without playing games invented by society and people, in order to realize their purpose and embark on the Path to the Light, the main part of the book, “The Book of Knowledge”, is a fascinating journey through Another Reality, where step by step the reader comprehends its spiritual content and learns to separate Good from Evil, ascending ever higher up the Stairway to Heaven.

The novel is autobiographical. In the interview with Evgeny Stepanov for the magazine “Children of Ra”, A. Kryuchkova, who makes no secret of her experiments with Time and Space, answered the question, “Alice walks barefoot on broken glass and hot coals, enters the Temple of the Soul, listens to the Music of the Spheres, merges with Heaven. Could this book be based on real events?” gives a clear answer, “Even as a child, someone told me, ‘Never write about anything you haven’t experienced yourself’.”

In the interview with journalist Margarita Palshina for Kulturologia news (April 2016, “A Path to the Light. The Book of Knowledge”), Alexandra shared the backstory of writing the book. The writer’s answers to questions about what magic is, whether she is a Teacher, and about the rules for those who have chosen the way to the Light, are very interesting.

“The Book of Knowledge” has been published since 2009 under various titles and by various publishers (West-Consulting, RIPOL Classic, etc.). Some chapters have been published in the prestigious magazines “Children of Ra”, “Russian Bell”, “Persona Plus”, and in the anthology “M.A.G.I.” The presentation marathon began at the Union of Writers and reached Red Square, where the author met with fans of “Another Reality” at the stand of the editor RIPOL Classic at the book fair 2016.

The book has got numerous positive reviews from Russian and international readers and was awarded from professional writers’ organizations: “Best Book of the Year 2008–2011” (Moscow City Organization of the Union of Writers of Russia), “Literary Olympus” award in the Prose category (League of Eurasian Writers, 2011), the “Living Word” E. P. Blavatsky award (Creative Union “Indifference”, 2015), and the “Magical Realism of the 21^st century” Carlos Castaneda and George Gurdjieff award (Open Literary Club “Response”, 2020), the “Book of the 21^st Century”, nomination “The Path of Knowledge” Carlos Castaneda (Moscow City Organization of the Union of Russian Writers, “Literary Republic”).

I’ll allow myself to quote some reviews of the book, published in the prefaces of the previous editions, with which I fully agree after reading “The Book of Knowledge” myself.

“Alexandra Kryuchkova is a true Warrior of Light, and her novel is a reference book for those walking the Stairway to Heaven.”

Dmitry Tseselchuk, Chairman of the Union of the Literary men of the Russian Federation

“I am amazed by the author’s encyclopedic knowledge… Kryuchkova never ceases to amaze me with both her style and the plot. She is a master of literature, parapsychology, and a sensitive individual. How gracefully and stunningly the story of the clairvoyant Alice is woven into the fabric of scientific material and presented to the astonished reader in an accessible form. Bravo!”

Vadim Shiltzyn, writer, member of the Union of Writers of Russia

“My hat’s off to the author, it’s impeccable! A treasure trove of knowledge, indeed! The Path to the Light is thorny, but worth it!”

Irina Lezhava, writer, member of the Union of Writers of Russia

“Infinitely talented! The plot captures the mind, like a mystical treatise that cannot be deciphered immediately, but the truth is already there. The parable-like nature of the text transports you to a world of ancient wisdom, answers all questions, and returns the reader to our reality completely refreshed! Incredibly, A. Kryuchkova truly manages to connect with any reader, even the most skeptical. There’s an invisible author-reader connection, something so rare in contemporary Russian literature…”

Elizaveta Azarova, literary critic

“A book beyond time and for all times. The author’s Another Reality is our life, full of miracles we don’t notice. A kind, bright, and intelligent novel, the original of which is in the Library of the Universe!”

Alexey Ponomarenko, reader

“The main character, Alice, is a clairvoyant. She writes amazing poetry and paints wonderful intuitive pictures, experiments with space and time, and becomes aware of her dreams while asleep. Alice lives, unlike other characters caught up in games. She is real. And everything that happens to her is the absolute truth. Alice follows her destined, often very difficult, path, and signs sent from above suggest that she is on the right path. As a result of her captivating adventures, Alice finds herself on a higher rung of the endless Staircase leading to Heaven, she becomes a Teacher, transmitting Knowledge to the world. For me, the novel became a global metaphor of life, and the image of Alice is a universal symbol, a chorus of voices representing all the people who inhabit this world. I’ll pass on ‘The Book of Knowledge’ to my children and grandchildren, just as treasures are passed down from generation to generation…”

Elena Erofeeva-Litvinskaya, journalist, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, Vice President of the International Association of Citizens of the Arts, Spain

“By reading this book, you will understand your purpose in the world and change your destiny, learn to solve problems and find a way out of seemingly dead-end situations, gain the key to healing your body, soul, and spirit. You will also discover your hidden resources and talents, boldly realize your dreams, master the language of nature and the stars, recognize signs, travel in dreams, move through time and space, connect to the information field, and, realizing and feeling that the world is like a mathematical formula or a symphony, where each of us has his own sign, own note, you will become a true White Magician, using the energy given from above for the benefit of yourself and the world. This book, written in beautiful literary language, with a touch of irony and self-irony, will become your true friend and assistant, to whom you will return again and again for advice at different periods of your life. And, of course, it will be forever treasured on a shelf in the Library of the Universe, as one of those books that Time has no power over…”

Margarita Palshina, writer, journalist, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, winner of the international Golden Pen of Russia award

For me personally, Alexandra Kryuchkova has become a beacon in the realm of the Unknown. If you are truly interested in learning something new about Another Reality, don’t hesitate to read “The Book of Knowledge”! It’s quite possible that it really did come to our world from the Library of the Universe!

Elena Zhmachinskaya,

member of the Union of Russian Writers,

Head of the Creative Union “Indifference”

Newspaper “Literary News” / “Literaturnye Izvestia”, No. 1 (199), 2022

“A Path to the Light. The Book of Knowledge”, interview with A. Kryuchkova by M. Palshina (2016)

Readers have been awaiting Alexandra Kryuchkova’s new edition of the book about Another Reality (“The Book of Black and White Magic. Another Reality”, RIPOL Classic Publishing House, Moscow, 2016, Secret Knowledge Series), which consists of two parts, “A Path to the Light” and “The Book of Knowledge” for a long time.

Even during its writing, when Alexandra posted individual chapters online, readers from all over the world sent letters asking, “Where can I buy this book?” This is what usually happens with Books of Knowledge and true Wisdom, which can provide answers to numerous questions of existence and help a person change their destiny for the better.

The first author’s edition, in a print run of 3,000 copies, immediately sold out across Russia and ex-countries of USSR. A portion of the print run reached the United States, where it was highly praised at seminars by Raisa Akhmetovna Mansurova, a doctor of psychology and parapsychologist who teaches people the art of destiny management and self-regulation.

This Book of Revelation, a rare combination of theory and practice of Secret Knowledge, is truly multifaceted and unique, as it touches on various areas of the Unknown, that have come down to us from the depths of centuries, and also recounts the discoveries of our contemporaries. The writer reveals the laws, principles, and mechanisms of magic not only through examples from the mysteries and teachings of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chaldeans, Sufis, and Christian theosophists, but also in dialogues with real people from the modern world, walking with the main character along mountain paths at R.A. Mansurova’s seminar in China.

Finally, the Book of Knowledge was reissued by the Russian publishing house RIPOL Classic and has arrived in bookstores.

We publish an interview with the writer of the book, Alexandra Kryuchkova.

***

M.P.: Alexandra, why and for what purpose did you write this book?

A.K.: Having experienced the death of my parents and my own near-death state in early childhood, I constantly encountered manifestations of Another Reality in my life, both in dreams and waking life. I really wanted to find answers to the questions: Who am I? Why and what for was I brought back here, to Earth? What am I doing here? Why are people born if they have to die? What are life and death? What will happen to us afterward? What is there, in the world my parents left for? How is it structured, where is it located, and can one enter it while in a physical body? What are dreams, time, another dimension? Who are ghosts, and why do some see them and others don’t? Who are magicians, sorcerers, psychics, fraudsters or true wizards? How do miracles work? What is our soul, spirit? What about angels? Who is God? Is everything predetermined, or can we really change our destiny? I read relevant literature, met interesting people, traveled to Places of Power, and conducted research in the sphere of Another Reality, until one day I decided to compile the information I had got in order to share it with readers. I wanted to convey the Knowledge in the form of a book, written in a simple, human language, accessible to everyone.

M.P.: Is the clairvoyant protagonist Alice a fictional character, or is your book a true Magician’s Diary?

A.K.: When I started writing my first stories, as a child, a wise man told me, “Never write about anything you haven’t experienced yourself.” And I followed his advice.

M.P.: In this book, the reader is introduced to both the secret knowledge of ancient civilizations and the achievements of modern science, which is fundamentally different from the generally accepted understanding of magic. So what is “Magic”?

A.K.: Magic is our life. Everything that surrounds us in the world is Magic. Our every step, every action, every word, every thought is Magic, because all of this entails certain consequences in our lives, depending on which our destiny is constantly changing one way or another. Therefore, every person from birth is a Magician, the creator of their own destiny, their own Reality.

M.P.: So, does the title “The Book of Black and White Magic” refer more to the global, universal concepts of Good and Evil?

A.K.: Absolutely correct.

M.P.: But Evil tends to wear the mask of Good. How can an inexperienced Magician distinguish between these two complex categories?

A.K.: By analyzing actions and their consequences.

M.P.: Can a White Magician use Evil’s methods to defeat Evil?

A.K.: A person who calls himself a White Magician but uses Evil’s methods is a Black Magician. Good will triumph over Evil in any case, it’s a matter of time. And this is one of the laws of the Universe.

M.P.: You dedicated the book to your Teachers, Raisa Akhmetovna Mansurova and Vladimir Grigorievich Kurilov. Aren’t you a Teacher yourself?

A.K.: I am one of the links in the chain of transmission of Knowledge. I pass on to people the keys to those doors to Knowledge that have been opened by me to one degree or another, although, as Socrates said, “All that a man knows and can understand is nothing in comparison with what he does not know, he doesn’t understand.” But people ascend the Stairway to Heaven at different rates, so each Soul is a Teacher for someone and a Student for others. Simultaneously.

M.P.: In the book, you also talk about your acquaintance with Nonna Khidiryan, the winner of the “Battle of Psychics” on TV TNT. Did communicating with her help in writing the book?

A.K.: Not only in writing the book. Nonna is a true White Magician; she has always supported me in difficult moments on my way to the Light.

M.P.: What do you think is the most important rule for a person who has chosen the Path to the Light?

A.K.: One should remember that each of us faces our own Life Exam, where it will no longer be possible to lie or bribe our way out. Don’t think about rewards, do your best as good deeds, for those around you and for the world as a whole. Live every day as if it were your last before the Exam of Life.

M.P.: The book explores in detail the causes of various diseases, including instructions for working with oncology. What is fundamental to healing?

A.K.: The most important thing for everyone to remember is that nothing in their life happens by chance. Cancer, like any other disease, is the result of a cause, but it’s curable, and this is a scientific fact… The cure rate, unfortunately, is low because finding the true cause and eliminating it is the most difficult part of healing, but it’s possible.

M.P.: You describe the mechanisms of interaction with the Information Field, working with time and space, and give practical advice on creating a Wish-Fulfillment Program, but still… What advice would you give to people who have decided to turn to magicians and healers? How can they avoid making the wrong choice of specialist?

A.K.: Read my book and start creating your own destiny.

Margarita Palshina,

writer, journalist, member of

the Union of Writers of Russia,

winner of the international

Golden Pen of Russia award

Magazine “Literary Moscow”, No. 2, 2022

“The Library of the Universe in One Book!”

ISBN 978-5-7949-0970-8,

The Union of Writers of Russia, Moscow City Organization,

NP “Literary Republic”

Moscow City Portal, News: April 27, 2016

“The Book of Black and White Magic Will Help Change Your Destiny”

Kulturologiya. rf, April 2016

“A Way to the Light. The Book of Knowledge.”

“Love doesn’t demand anything”, Interview with A. Kryuchkova by E. Stepanov (2010)

Today our guest is Alexandra Kryuchkova, poet, writer, artist, author of 17 published books of poetry, as well as co-author of more than 60 collective editions, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, the International Association of Citizens of the Arts (Spain), the regional public fund for the promotion of modern poetry “Svetoch”, the Open Literary Club “Response”, etc.

For faithful service to the national literature, she was awarded literary prizes of A. S. Griboedov, V. V. Mayakovsky, A. P. Chekhov, etc. She got a diploma of O. E. Mandelstam as a laureate of the poetry contest “Gallery of Selected Poems” in the nomination “Philosophy of the Soul”.

Alexandra Kryuchkova is interviewed by Evgeny Stepanov.

E.S.: Alexandra, first of all, please tell us a little about yourself.

A.K.: I was born and live in Moscow. I started writing poetry and prose at about the age of eleven. I remember that my mother was categorically against my creativity, because she believed that the fate of all poets was far from the best, and she was probably right. But I continued to write without thinking about what I was writing for. It was an urgent need of the soul for self-expression. I was just following my own Path. Every person in this world is a creator.

E.S.: How do you come up with poems?

A.K.: Sometimes they come on their own. First you feel vibration at a certain frequency, it is always different, then the lines come. As a rule, you don’t know what will be in the next line, what you will hear about, what you will write down. But it doesn’t happen always that way. Sometimes you just need to throw out on paper what has accumulated inside, in this case, it’s a feeling turned into words.

E.S.: Do you have any favorite poets?

A.K.: The poetry of the Silver Age is closest to my soul. As a child, when I sang in a church choir, I read Blok, then I discovered Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky. It’s difficult to single out any person and his works in its entirety, rather, some poems by various poets.

E.S.: You write poems on different topics, but poems about love prevail. What does love mean to you?

A.K.: Love is a feeling that is familiar to everyone, although everyone understands it in their own way. Love for me personally is the most important feeling in life. It can be different: love between a man and a woman, love for parents, for children, for God, for nature, and so on. When a person is filled with love, no matter what kind of it, he is able to create miracles. The power of love is the greatest power in the world. It’s stronger than death. Love is Life, and the absence of Love is Death. The power of Love in me speaks in verse.

E.S.: Should love be mutual?

A.K.: It’s wonderful when love is mutual, but True Love doesn’t demand anything in return and doesn’t even ask for it; one’s soul needs to grow up to such Love, going through fire, water and copper pipes. Unfortunately, most people are accustomed to living in order to consume, and if they give, they want to take something in return.

E.S.: One of your recent books is in the series “Playing Another Reality”, a very mystical and esoteric one. Why did you name it that way?

A.K.: Many people believe that Another Reality is a game. People think that Alice, the main character, is playing, but in fact, people are playing. They play different games in the Earthly Reality. Alice lives in Another Reality without playing. It’s like a look from Another Reality to the Earthly one.

E.S.: Alice walks barefoot on broken glass and hot coals, ends up in the Temple of the Soul, listens to the Music of the Spheres, and merges with Heavens. Is this book based on real events?

A.K.: Even as a child, I was told by a person, “Never write about anything you haven’t experienced yourself,” although there is some fiction in the book.

E.S.: Alice is a clairvoyant. Can you predict events?

A.K.: At the age of eleven I visited the place where people usually don’t return from, and after that the knowledge of upcoming events sometimes really comes down to me from There.

E.S.: Despite possessing this gift, Alice is unhappy. Why?

A.K.: The Open Door to the Space where there is information about everything, or, in other words, hypersensitivity, as a rule, doesn’t make life easier and doesn’t bring happiness in itself. I knew about the upcoming death of my parents, but I couldn’t change anything.

E.S.: So is the future predetermined?

A.K.: Not exactly. The future is multivariate, being created by a person every second, every moment, with every word, deed or lack thereof, which instantly affects the future. Every step a person takes changes the possible options of the future, which are like an open fan. At some point, you just know that at a given period of time in a particular situation there is only one option left, no other options. If this case, you can’t change anything. You just have to take it for granted, and this is the most difficult thing in life.

E.S.: One of the main characters is the Man Who Was Not. You don’t even give him a name. Does he still exist in our earthly reality or not?

A.K.: This question is asked to me by almost everyone who has read the book. Let everyone answer it themselves, because whatever the answer is, it doesn’t change anything.

E.S.: The first edition of the book is illustrated with your paintings of the Girl with the Moon Cat. Were they painted after the book was written, as illustrations for the text?

A.K.: No, both the Moon Cat and the Girl appeared earlier. I just wanted to paint something. I sat down at the canvas and saw the pictures I painted later.

E.S.: Did you study painting?

A.K.: No, but I believe that everyone knows to paint since childhood. Everyone paints differently, and that’s great. My paintings are purely intuitive painting, self-expression of the soul. There is no need to look for correctness in them, but they do have meaning. Many people told me that they had seen what I depicted in my paintings, and this once again confirms the existence of a certain Primary Source, Information Database or Another Reality, it doesn’t matter what they call it, but hypersensitive people living in the Earthly Reality can get there. Many famous artists, such as Salvador Dali, painted Another Reality.

E.S.: Do you like Salvador Dali?

A.K.: I feel some of his paintings. It’s difficult to explain and cannot be characterized by the word “like”. I like individual paintings by many artists, but, as in the case with poets and writers, I cannot single out one of them as my favorite.

E.S.: Is your book just a story about the supernatural and our hidden resources or something more?

A.K.: This book makes everyone think. Who are we in this world? What are we doing here? Why did one come down here? What mark will one leave on Earth? And for those who have entered a dark period in life, the story, on the example of the main character, will help to realize that the Void is temporary, it can be overcome by being filled with Light.

E.S.: In conclusion of the interview, what would you like to wish our readers?

A.K.: To know themselves, find their own Path and follow It, giving Light, Good and Love into the world.

Evgeniy STEPANOV,

President

of the Union of Writers of the 21^st Century,

poet, writer, PhD in Philology

Magazine “CHILDREN OF RA” / “DETI RA” No. 11, 2010[1]

Magazine Hall “GORKY MEDIA”[2]

This book is dedicated to

you, my Reader!

as well as to:

my parents, grandmothers, grandfather,

my son Andrey, our cat Josephine,

my Teachers — Raisa Akhmetovna Mansurova,

Vladimir Grigorievich Kurilov and… Ray,

the Patriarch Alexy II,

the Higher Forces,

all the poets of the Silver Age,

and all the characters of my Another Reality,

without whom it would hardly show up.

 https://magazines.gorky.media/ra/2010/11/aleksandra-kryuchkova-lyubov-nichego-ne-trebuet-vzamen.html

 https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=2361

PART I. PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY, or a Path to the Light

PROLOGUE

“What does this mean to you?”

asked the Man Who Was Not.

“A game,” I answered.

“This is not a game,” Raisa Akhmetovna corrected me. “People are playing,

we are not.”

“You are one of us, I recognized you right away, even at the airport, when you met me with the delegation,” Maria, an Italian woman, said in a whisper.

“What do you mean one of us?” I asked.

“You are a clairvoyant. You communicate with the Other World. You have the key. From the Door…”

My officemate at my first job didn’t yet know what “idealizations” and the Space of Options were, but due to certain problems, she went to a clairvoyant, taking with her the maximum number of photos of all her loved ones and not so, in order to understand who was who. The next morning, I waited with interest for the story about the results of her campaign.

Marina gave me a strange look, closed the door to the room and said solemnly,

“You have a pillar!”

I remained silent, waiting for the continuation.

“The clairvoyant looked through the photos, said that you are not tall at all, but very tall, because you have some kind of pillar… of energy or something else, coming out from your head, sorry, I don’t remember exactly, but she sees it!” Marina said in a conspiratorial tone, looking for something above my head, but obviously to no avail.

“I see, the stone flower doesn’t come out,” I said.

“Oh, if I were a clairvoyant!!! I would be the happiest person in the world! I would SEE everything!!!”

I remained silent. I don’t like arguing with people.

Many years ago I came to Malta. That day an excursion was planned somewhere. I walked down the hotel stairs. The Russian group had already gathered in the hall around one of our tourists, who was talking very loudly. Suddenly, a woman noticed me and shouted, “Do you see? Look, look at her!” Everyone followed her advice, but I got afraid that something was wrong with me. I examined myself from head to toe, and everything in my appearance seemed to be human: body, dress, shoes, bag… I approached the group and was about to ask what her scream meant, when the woman took my hand and, meaningfully looking at those around, said, “Don’t you see? There’s a glow above her head!”

Next was Rome. They told me that I was going to the Shareholders’ Meeting. Before, I didn’t know what it was – the Meeting of Shareholders. It turns out that this is when people start drinking heavily already at the airport of their hometown A, an hour before the plane departs for city B, and stop drinking on the way back at the same airport in their city A after the plane lands from city B.

One of the evenings, playing the Shareholders’ Meeting game, we went to the central square of the city, where fortune-tellers, palmists and astrologers gathered and, for a small fee, offered to tell everything that had happened and not. Everyone wanted entertainment, but due to the too trivial fates of my colleagues, they decided to use me as a lie detector. As soon as the fortune-teller looked at my palm, she exclaimed, “Wow, you are a spell-caster! I see a series of books. Not now, later.”

The fortune-teller talked for a long time about my past, then about my present and said in the conclusion, “You yourself know what will happen to you. Why did you come to me?”

A few years later I ended up in India. One comes across palmists and astrologers at almost every turn there, moreover, some of them, a little luckier for some reason, are on duty around the clock in hotel lobbies in the hope that at least someone wants to know the truth. However, judging by the sad expression on their faces, not many people want to know it.

Returning to the hotel from another excursion to the temples, I approached the astrologer on the duty and held out my palm to him.

“You know everything yourself, and not only about yourself. Are you here to check how well I see? You are a spell-caster. You’ll have a whole series of books. Not now, later. You’ll become famous. You have been writing a lot and for a long time. Few people write as much as you, and even fewer write as deeply. You are an ocean. Nobody can contain you. They are not enough for your depth. People sit on the shore, look at the ocean and admire the waves. Some swim along the shore, but are afraid to swim far. And no one, not even those who try, can sink to the very bottom to know what is there. And there is a completely different world, ANOTHER REALITY. You belong to Another Reality. Since childhood. You had no childhood, right? You were born to be the SUN, but you became the MOON. Sometimes the SUN awakens in you, as your nature, you are drawn to it in order to become it, but the absence of childhood has already forever put the stamp of the MOON on your Subconscious, not allowing you to be the SUN. You are torn between communicating with people and being a hermit. You would like to leave for a monastery. At the same time, sometimes you explode and burn like the Sun, warming those around you and illuminating their path. You are a star. Do you see the star sign? In a few years, you’ll either die or be able to change your life completely, starting from your place of work, field of activity, environment and family, and ending with the country of residence. Look here!”

He pointed to the fork of the Fate Line. Up to a certain point, the two branches diverged in different directions, but suddenly broke off on the same segment. Exactly in the middle of the gap, a third line appeared and continued down to the wrist.

“Whichever path you follow out of the two possible ones before the age I told you and where both of these lines suddenly break off, you must step on your final and unique Path or… die.”

That Saturday evening in February I was standing in an underground passage next to a bookshop. I felt bad about what I saw in my near future. In the flow of people rushing to the metro entrance, I noticed an old nun. For some reason, I already knew that she would definitely come up to me and start talking morals, but I was wrong, she came up and smiled.

“You feel bad because you see, but God loves you – you have a golden crown over your head. There is a chapel nearby, in the forest. Take the trolleybus and go two stops. Today is Saturday of Parents. Light two candles for the repose of yours. You must save yourself for the Light.”

Having said this, the nun disappeared into the crowd.

I didn’t know that there was a chapel in the forest. I knew that there was a maniac there. For several years, he had been killing those who, apparently, were looking for the chapel in the forest. “I wonder if there was someone who was looking for the maniac who was looking for those who were looking for the chapel.” Having thought about that, for some reason, I obediently drove two stops on the trolleybus, went out into the street and began asking rare passers-by if they knew how to find the chapel in the forest. It was very dark and snowing. Passers-by shied away from me, as if I was asking how to find the book I needed in the Library of the Universe. Several paths led into the forest. I followed one of them. Darkness. Snow. Silence. No one around. Deaf forest. I walked for a long time. A very long time. And that nun began to seem to me just a figment of my imagination, when suddenly a Light started flickering somewhere in the distance.

1. The MAN WHO WAS NOT

We met by chance in a bookstore. When I say “by chance”, it means absolutely not by chance, but completely purposefully, that is, in a way deliberately programmed by the Higher Forces, based on cause-and-effect relationship, the chain of which we are not able to calculate logically. I don’t believe in randomness.

Previously, books came to me through people. Random people I met instantly disappeared in an unknown direction, having managed to tell me only the title of the book that was worth reading and the name of its author. They voiced what was really necessary at that time. I learned to meet the right books directly, without intermediaries, a few years before, and since then they stopped sending me people who ran past rapidly in the Space of Options shouting out the titles of the books and the names of their wonderful authors. For example, when I was focused on a comparative analysis of the religions of our world, I went into a church shop and inexplicably, but immediately proceeded to the farthest dark corner, where on the bottom shelf of the rack, a single copy of something in a purple hardcover without any identifying marks, except for the price tag, was gathering dust. It was a photocopy of the comparative analysis of religions published on January 20, 1893, with the notes of someone who had read it in the 19^th century.

That day, I was scanning the contents of the shelves in another bookstore, when He gave me a strange look and walked past, turning my life upside down. People often ask, “What is He like, this Man of yours, Who Was Not?”, and I don’t know what to answer, because I always look not at…, but through. I didn’t see His face, didn’t pay attention to His clothes. I felt amazing energy going beyond the personal space. The energy of a person who was stronger than me and could…

Sometimes I see people as geometric figures. Try it, I’m sure there is nothing easier, and you will definitely succeed. Sooner or later. If you really want to and if you are allowed to see. On the one hand, it’s quite funny, because it’s a kind of game, on the other hand, it’s useful, as it helps in communicating with these people. Ordinary people can be squares, triangles, circles, rectangles and zigzags (lightning bolts). Oh, yes, such people do exist too, take my word for it. Who are you?

For example, one of my acquaintances is a rectangle, and moreover, a vampire – the most terrible combination, probably. No, her ears are quite ordinary, and her teeth don’t betray her true nature at all. She speaks for a very long time, slowly and monotonously, in the sweet voice of the Fox from the fairy tale about Pinocchio, enveloping the victim with words, asking a lot of tedious questions or, worse, crawling into the Soul with indecently frank questions, which answers she doesn’t need in principle, but it’s precisely the fact that you get irritated and waste energy by responding that brings the vampire into a state of euphoria. Even if I say that I’m very busy, she’ll say goodbye for another ten minutes, because she understands perfectly well that I won’t be able to hang up because of my basic good manners. So, one day she called me while I was in the bathroom. I politely apologized and promised to call back, but she clearly didn’t like my proposal. She asked where I actually was. I told the truth. Then she asked what I was doing there, and I had the imprudence to answer honestly, “I’m cleaning my aura of negativity.” What else do they actually do in the bathroom after a hard day at work? However, for my acquaintance, the answer became almost the discovery of America, and she bombarded me with questions, “Why are you doing this? Do you have problems? Maybe you can tell me about them now. How do you do this? What temperature is your water? Do you pin your hair up or should it be loose? What brand of soap do you use? What do you think will happen if you add a few pinches more of sea salt to your bath than the amount recommended by the manufacturers and indicated on the label? Are you dissatisfied with something? Probably, there is someone next to you?!” Since then, when she intends to call me, I find myself unavailable. For example, in the subway, where the connection is lost, or my phone suddenly runs out of charge.

However, there are also not quite ordinary people. I see them as three-dimensional, complex-composite, in each of them there are simultaneously several figures nested within one another or intersecting in space. For example, I am a pyramid inside a sphere, which is pierced from top to bottom and exactly in the center by lightning, that goes beyond the scope of the sphere. I became such figure over time, being a triangle from birth, I turned into a pyramid, overgrew with a sphere, and was struck by lightning in the end.

Looking at the Man Who Was Not with a different vision, I immediately realized that He was a complex figure too – lightning inside a sphere located inside a cube. I needed him in order to remain on the Earth. In the last period, each facet of life, one by one, suddenly collapsed, pinning me in a corner, cutting off oxygen, curling up like a snake loop around my neck. Standing on the edge of the Void, I was looking for a Door to Another, unknown to me Reality, but on the same earthly plane, so as not to disappear into the Other World until the hour of my next incarnation.

I felt lonely and wanted to talk with a person like me, at least similar to me, in our common language, inaccessible to others. I thought about Nonna, a famous clairvoyant, winner of the “Battle of Psychics” on TV TNT.

I wanted to meet her, but I had no idea where she lived in our huge world. Sighing heavily from an unrealizable dream, I went into a cafe next to my house to enjoy a tête-à-tête with coffee at least, but at the next table by the window I found… Nonna.

“Hello!” I exclaimed in shock. “You are Nonna, I know! I need you.”

“What for? Is there anything I can do to help you?” She was surprised, because she always felt who she could help and who she couldn’t.

“I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay, sit down,” Nonna sighed with relief. “Sorry, I’m exhausted, a vampire has just called me.”

We looked at each other in silence for a while, then Nonna started, “You’re completely in a web. Torn between mother and son, you cannot combine them in this life. I see blood, a lot of blood, you are dead, just like me. You are one of us, you were There and opened the Door.”

I didn’t tell Nonna what “web” meant. Spiders were the most terrible phenomenon for me in the Earthly Reality. I delved into myself for a long time to find an anchoring point, realizing that the reason belonged to the current incarnation, since in my early childhood I hadn’t been afraid of spiders. Not getting to the bottom of the truth, I turned for help to Gera, one of my Teachers. She asked me leading questions, and I answered without hearing my own answers.

“Why are you afraid of a spider?”

“It’s scary.”

“Why? It’s so small and defenseless.”

I burst into a terrible laugh, “Defenseless? It’s huge and omnipotent!”

“What can it do to you?”

“It will kill me!”

“Imagine that you take it and put it in a box.”

“I can’t even look at it from the outside and imagine it. How can I take it with my hands?” I shuddered.

“Okay, I take it and put it in a box. In a gift box. I tie it with a ribbon and a bow. What is this box like?”

“It’s red. With black ribbons,” I answered automatically.

“Let’s make a fire. Look, I’m throwing the box into the fire. It’s burning…”

“It will never be burnt!” I screamed. “It’s immortal! Eternal! It was, it is and it will be! It never dies! Look, the box has burned down, but it’s alive! It’s crawling out of the fire!”

Gera sighed heavily. I almost cried. We parted on nothing, however, after walking about ten meters down the street, I stopped dead in my tracks because of an instant insight, a fragment from childhood that suddenly flashed before my eyes.

I was twelve. We were at our cottage. Sunday. Mom said that she felt really bad, that shouldn’t happen after the surgery, she urgently needed to return home to the city to call an ambulance. We were sitting on the bench under an apple tree. I kept silent. It was starting to rain. I felt that the several options for the future existed the day before abruptly collapsed into the only one – Death. I refused to believe it consciously and, as a result, I sent the terrible thought of Death to the Black Box of the Subconscious. And for a long, long time, almost until my mother’s transition to Another Reality, I would think that she would definitely recover sooner or later. I understood that I was about to weep. Not to upset my mother, I ran, “escaping the rain,” to the barn in the farthest corner of the garden, where my friend, the little White Rabbit, lived. It was raining. I ran very fast, weeping, biting my lips just not to scream in despair. Having pulled the door towards me with all my strength, I buried my nose in the center of a huge web, neatly woven along the width of the doorway. A huge fat black spider with a large cross on its back sat right in front of me, and I screamed, “MA-A-MAAAAAAA!!!…”

We talked with Nonna for a long time and even laughed at the ways the Knowledge used to come to us. She told me how my father had died. Then we opened our palms and held them opposite each other until Nonna said,

“You’re pushing, pressing hard! What a strong energy you have! I can’t stand that, put your hands away, put them away.”

When I told her the way I wrote spells, Nonna exclaimed, “Amazing! You dragged me along to another time! I fell through and saw a poor room, you and me inside, you were in another body, in something gray, some kind of shawl, and a kerosene lamp was burning there. What was that, Alice? Silver Age?”

I shrugged my shoulders, and Nonna continued, “Now I see a book, yours. With spells. Magic. On the bookshelves. It will be released in less than a year, and you’ll become a famous spell-caster, do you believe me? The number ‘37’ comes to me. Take care of yourself! You can die. Surgery or something else. I see blood, a lot of blood. And if you survive, so then…”

The fortune-teller in Rome predicted a terrible car accident for me, but she didn’t tell me when. The palmist-astrologer in India didn’t say what exactly, but said “36”. Nonna said “37”, a surgery or something with a sea of blood. However, I had already been dying, and Death is not as terrible as doctors.

I didn’t get sick with anything and had practically no contact with the type of people who played the game “Let’s heal everyone!” and called themselves doctors, until I died for the first time at the age of 11 and was brought back. My cousin dreamed of joining them since childhood. Every time she stated that out loud, our grandmother sighed heavily and, like monks fingering a rosary, listed all the items that her granddaughter due to her girlish memory would be able to forget during a surgery in the patient’s body. However, someone was very lucky, since my cousin didn’t become a surgeon. She works with those called insane here.

However, after resuscitation, my physical body liked to play pranks. Periodically, it asked questions that puzzled the doctors. At first they tried to treat me like ordinary people, but my body’s reaction was exactly the opposite of the expected. Then they used a creative approach, setting up experiments, prescribing everything in a row. As a child, my mother taught me to be obedient and patient, but one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and demanded at least some kind of diagnosis. The doctors resisted for a long time, pretending not to understand what I wanted from them, because all those years they tried so hard to help me, and despite the fact that several times due to their efforts I had ended up more There than Here, I was still alive. Apparently, I was too tired, so I showed excessive persistence, and a miracle happened. I was given a referral for an examination, as a result of which it turned out that what was happening to me was unknown to science, and, accordingly, I had to negotiate with my physical body directly, without intermediaries. Believe it or not, I was happy about such diagnosis. The doctors were upset just as much as I was overjoyed.

Once I came to a widely advertised center at a very cool hospital, in which, judging by what was written about it everywhere, even a fairy tale would become reality. I just came. It was impossible to get through by phone, no one had answered any of the numbers listed on the website and in other advertising sources for several weeks.

Having found with difficulty the doctor’s office for those who came without a referral, that is, for those who paid their own and quite a lot of money for a consultation, I got in line and patiently sat at the door for several hours, reading a smart book so as not to waste time. When I finally entered the office, the doctor first asked if I had an appointment with her. I asked how that could be done. The doctor silently handed me over a business card with the same phone numbers no one had answered. I said that I knew them by heart, but, unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to get through for several weeks. The doctor, in a completely calm voice, looking into my eyes, answered, “Right, and you won’t be able to. They have been out of business for a month now.”

Deathly silence reigned. I asked if there was another way to make an appointment. The doctor answered categorically, “No!” And again silence. Despite the fact that I had spent several hours in line, I was only the third and last person who wanted to get a paid consultation at their unique center that day. Somehow I didn’t want to leave there without paying anyone anything, so I just asked to listen to me, promising to pay a little more than the official price of the issue. The doctor thought for a long time and…

…didn’t agree, apparently preferring to speak at someone else’s expense rather than listen, but kindly offered to go to another hospital department and ask someone else to listen to me.

I am a stubborn creature. An old nurse in another department couldn’t figure out for a long time what I wanted from her, or how I ended up there.

“I read on a website on the Internet that…”

“Where did you read it?”

The old woman didn’t know what the “Internet” was, but that word had a magical effect on her, as a result, she dematerialized, immediately leaving her post. I was about to turn around and leave, when a man of about forty-five dressed in white appeared at the end of the corridor. As it turned out later, he was the head of the department. He came up to me and broke into a smile, “Oh, one more Leila arrived! Why did you come, eh, Leila?”

“I’ve read that it’s a center where you practically work miracles…”

“Leila, how old are you? And you still believe in miracles!” the Doctor said with a grin in a flirting tone, but I didn’t know what to answer, so he continued, “Leila, what hurts you?”

“Nothing…”

“If nothing hurts, why did you come?”

“To ask. You specialize in Woozles and Wizzles, providing consultations for payment, right? So I came to ask. Where do they come from? What to do with them? Maybe some pills should be taken or, conversely, not. In general, what’s allowed, what’s not?”

“Oh, Leila, God knows why one has some Woozles or Wizzles, what’s allowed and what’s not! Live as you lived. Nothing hurts you. What for?”

“But then it will be too late!”

“Then you will be welcomed here!”

“Don’t you cure everyone here?”

“We?” the Doctor asked in surprise. “Do we cure? You know, Leila, I’ll tell you so, as soon as you get rid of some Woozle, some Wizzle will immediately appear! Exactly! Nothing hurts you! Tell me, why did you come, huh?”

“But it’s written…”

“Leila, are you married?” the Doctor didn’t let up.

“Yes,” I answered categorically.

“Maybe, think once more? Just kidding… almost. We have friends, they come to our department and sell magic water, supposedly it lets people get rid of all sorts of Wozzles and Wizzles. So people buy it, drink it, and… half of them recover. Do you think the water is magical? The most common, drinking one, just in bottles with a magical inscription. Do you want me to sell it to you too?”

“No, thanks,” I said, nodding sadly.

“Leila,” the Doctor smiled, “relax and live your life as long as nothing hurts! Believe me, no one knows anything about Wozzles and Wizzles. It’s just a game, you see.”

Almost since childhood, I was advised to remove a small mole on my small back, but somehow I had no time for that. And then, as luck would have it, free time suddenly appeared, in an unmeasured amount, and someone told me about a wonderful commercial clinic where supposedly no one had any problem.

I arrived, obediently paid for everything that could be pulled by the ears for the upcoming procedure, and entered the Surgeon’s office. He turned out to be a strong old man of the old school. I was asked to undress, go into the operating room and lie on my stomach. The nurse rattled their instruments. At that fateful moment, I uttered one of my signature phrases, “Not Novocain.”

The nurse smiled enigmatically and called out to the Surgeon, who was still in the office, and not in the operating room, “Have you heard it, Ivan Ivanovich? The girl is intolerant to Novocain!”

“Yes, I have!” the Surgeon said joyfully.

They silently bent over my back, rubbed it with something, and… I screamed in terrible pain, feeling them cutting me alive with a scalpel. The scalpel froze.

“Without anesthesia?” I was in shock.

“Well, you can’t stand Novocain, and we don’t have anything else!” the Surgeon commented and made another incision.

I screamed again. The scalpel froze.

“Well, the last time now,” the Surgeon sang as calmly as if nothing had happened.

My third cry made a doctor with very huge eyes materialize in the operating room from the next office.

“What are you doing here? Even my patient has already escaped!”

“We’ve already done it,” the nurse answered, smiling.

Leaving, I silently but meaningfully looked at the Surgeon, and he replied me just as meaningfully, “And what if during the war?”

I realized him playing war.

However, I was lucky to know other doctors whom I respected. They first listen carefully, then think and tell you what they have come up with, voicing the pros and cons, and if you agree…

That evening I went to visit a very smart and cheerful woman, a guru in her field, who, having read my spells six months before, said that I was practicing real Word Magic, and she was sorry to be too old to experience similar emotions.

That time I couldn’t believe my eyes – the doctor looked at least ten years younger!

“Hello, Spell-caster!” she exclaimed joyfully. “You won’t believe it! I met Him! Twenty years later! Imagine, all these years I knew nothing about Him! It turns out that He lives over the Ocean. He came here to give a lecture, slipped, fell, woke up in a cast, ended up at my friend in the hospital, and I stopped by her because of some nonsense! Now I write your spells to Him in text messages. Haven’t you met your Prince yet?”

“Maybe I have, but… He doesn’t think so,” I sighed.

“It seems to me, just don’t be offended, there is no person to understand and contain you inside. Our men today are quite dead, weak, lazy. They’ll burst from you! They feel that you are stronger and a head taller, and bypass you a mile away.”

“Illusion! I am the weakest woman in the world.”

“Humble yourself, dear! To write the way you do, one has to be hurt constantly. Over time, you get used to the pain, the threshold of sensitivity decreases, so they will send you another pain, stronger than the previous one, so that you write again. Don’t expect anything good ahead. Better get ready for the trials you have never seen even in your nightmares.”

I came to the Teacher, who had been once an ordinary doctor, and then became a real White Magician.

“I see, I see what’s happening to you,” he said, smiling. “What does he look like? How old is he? Who is he?”

“I don’t know anything about Him. I remember nothing,” I whispered.

“Still, try to remember. Imagine the place where you first met.”

I looked at the white wall opposite and tried to concentrate. Suddenly, the air began to acquire color and density, just a little more and I would have felt it with my hands. It vibrated and began to move in space. The room floated. I got into a spiral. The walls, unlike the air, lost their density, became foggy, dissolving into Another Reality. It seemed that either I would move in that place, or that place would move to me.

“No, I can’t,” I breathed out from overexertion.

“You can everything!”

I tried to concentrate again, but that time I just saw two shadows on the wall, like waves, running towards each other, turning into a single whole, disappearing and reappearing on the opposite sides.

“Seven seconds!” the Teacher exclaimed in surprise.

I looked at him with a silent question.

“You merge together in seven seconds. Your energy, I mean. You are very similar. You’ll see Him again. And more than once.”

2. The SPEED

For some reason, many people on the Earth like alcohol with a good snack. I like speed with good music without alcohol.

I had a dream on the night from Thursday to Friday, when all dreams tend to come true for those who believe that they come true dreamt from Thursday to Friday. For the rest, those dreams that should come true, come true regardless of the day of the week.

I’m visiting my friend. Everything is foggy, I can hardly distinguish her outlines, as well as the furnishings of the flat, which I have not visited yet in the Earthly Reality, because my friend has moved recently. We are silent, but somehow tragically. Then she asks what really happened. I know in the dream, it’s something very bad, that I don’t want to remember at all. I brush it off, I don’t want to talk, and tears well up in my eyes.

I find myself visiting my ex-classmate. The plot repeats. We are sadly silent. He carefully begins to ask, “How did it happen, why?” I’m in pain. I refuse to remember. I start crying. Why do they torment me with their questions if I am not able to talk about it?

I come to someone else. I don’t know to whom. All the same, but this someone is too persistent and makes me remember.

Wide road of four letters. My car is in my favorite left lane. Replaying the situation, or rather, watching a movie from somewhere above, I see every car: to the right, behind me and in front of me. Is it dark or cloudy? The bridge appears in the distance. In the left lane the speed is high, 150 or 160 probably. There is an accident ahead, or something else invisible immediately, so everyone starts to slow down, except my car for some reason, as if I’m not in it and it’s driving by itself. Why? Did I fall asleep driving? I look at what is happening, but I can influence neither my car nor myself in it. Everything has already happened. Nothing can be changed. I weep, remembering, and someone continues to torment me with questions, “How? Why?”

BANG!!! Bang… bang… There is no unbroken part left from the car. The tow truck doesn’t arrive for a long time… Did they really show me the accident predicted by the fortune-teller in Rome?

Gera advised me not to drive on Monday and Tuesday, so that nothing would happen, but I missed my Fox and gave up on the warning. Moreover, it was time to renew the insurance. At the insurance office, they announced me a discounted amount for impeccable driving and handed me some paper for signing to confirm that no other my car had been stolen during the previous three years. Since my previous Fox had been dematerialized under mysterious circumstances exactly three years before, I didn’t sign it. After twenty minutes of waiting for a reaction to the problem I had voiced, I received an offer to wait another hour or two hours for the final answer from the central office. I sent the insurance company far away and, apparently, for the rest of my life. After driving a kilometer, I stopped at a traffic light. The driver of the next car opened the window and began shouting and gesticulating, drawing my attention to the Fox’s paws. I got out of the car and found the right rear tire flat, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to get back home or to my office. Having left Fox in a secluded place, I continued my way on the metro. In the evening, at the nearest tire fitting service, I was told amazing news – the wheel was absolutely normal, not punctured. No one understood why all of a sudden… They just pumped it up (and I still drive). Three years before they could have just made me a flat tire as well.

I like to drive fast. It happens rarely, since I live in a very large city, where there are probably as many cars as people, and maybe even more. And sometimes it seems to me that many people in this world love their cars much more than people. In our city there is such a huge road, which is called a word of four capital letters, similar to the synonym for the biblical “Hell”, and not so much in sound as in meaning, MRAR. They move along the Moscow Ring Automobile Road in circles. You can also drive if you manage to get into the circle before half past seven in the morning. Then everyone stands in the circle.

MRAR is a game that everyone plays by their own rules. There are, of course, rules invented by someone once, we are forced to learn them and pass exams, but I haven’t yet met a person who has never violated these rules. For example, not to occupy the left lane if it’s possible to go to the right, because the left lane is intended for those who like fast driving or are just in a hurry. It’s a good rule, but usually, in the left lane, there’s always someone, whose life principle says, “The slower you go, the further you’ll arrive.” That one wants to teach others how to live according to the rules, absolutely not going to give way to anyone and under any circumstances, inclining other players go right till the curb. There is a special category of drivers who play checkers on the road. A tragedy occurred before my eyes. A man was driving at a speed about 180. I was driving in the second lane on the left at a speed of 140, when he sharply drove to the far left, but had not enough time to carry out his plan. As a result of the impact on the barrier separating oncoming flows, he was thrown to the far right. The car sank in the clouds of smoke.

Once upon a time I played checkers at a very high speed too. To be honest, I like speed more than checkers. I even wrote the spell “Speed” after one Boy gave me a ride at 220 during our business trip abroad (although he insists on 230). After reading the spell, my ex-classmate Alexey wrote, “I tried. Two days ago. It doesn’t help.” However, despite the repeated warning signs from Above, I didn’t stop. Thus, one evening, having left Fox on the street for about forty minutes, I lost it forever dematerialized. I haven’t played checkers since then. I drive exceeding the speed. Sometimes. When everything falls down and I find myself in the Void.

…He was a Boy. Although he was no long so young. Much taller and physically stronger than me, he seemed to me so small, that I wanted to think of something to make the Boy grow up, because it was unnatural to look at him up, really looking down from the top. However, the Boy grew in breadth only. In fact, we must give him credit, he was a good Boy, or rather, the right one, and so much that he risked becoming a patient of my cousin, who had never become a surgeon, but worked in the “yellow house” (why people call so the abode of the strangers, I still don’t understand, in general, people are a mystery for me). In the head of the Boy, absolutely down-to-earth and practical, there was a terrible program that someone had once written and implanted there. Perhaps even the Boy himself. The program, similar to a virus, killed everything that came into the Boy’s field of vision, if it was not the same as him. The Boy played the rules written in that program.

That day we went to negotiations. Getting into his car and not even having time to close the door, I heard the order, “Put the bag exactly in the middle on your lap!”

My small purse was slightly to the right of the indicated place. I looked with a silent question at the Boy, and he immediately explained in a metallic voice, “When I put in sale this car in 10 years, it will be valued more if inside on the doors, there are no scratches from all sorts of iron things on women’s bags!”

There were no iron things on my bag, but the Boy didn’t tolerate any objections.

We got lost on the way. When I saw the sign to “that place” and exclaimed, “To the right!”, automatically raising my right hand towards the sign, without even touching the window with the outer side of my palm, the Boy commanded, “Take a napkin and wipe the glass urgently! My car has these rules, and if you don’t, you’ll have to wash it entirely at your own expense.”

When we got out of the car, the first thing the Boy did was open the trunk, where, in addition to all sorts of boxes, he was hiding… a ruler. He took it and began to measure something.

“Why are you doing this?” I was surprised.

“While we were driving, the boxes slightly changed their location in the trunk, and each of them should stand in a strictly designated place so as not to come into contact with each other and with the walls of the trunk. Because when I put in sale this car in 10 years…”

I breathed in and out deeply.

On the way back, the Boy bought two pies. When I dared to hint that there were two pies, he kindly invited me to enjoy one of them. As soon as I began to untie the knot of the plastic bag, the Boy looked at me disapproving and said in disappointment, “That’s not the way to untie it! Give it to me, I’ll teach you to do it correctly.”

I haven’t eaten pies since then.

On New Year’s Eve, an employee of the PR department received souvenirs for gifts to our partners, including diaries. The manufacturer put the Boy’s company logo on them. The Boy asked me to check the quality. I brought him a verified copy. The Boy took… a ruler. As a result of his measurements, the logo on the diaries turned out to be printed half a millimeter (!) higher than the previous year, so the circulation had to be redone within 24 hours in order to give away the correct diaries in time. I laughed. Probably he had a ruler hidden under his pillow at home too. And maybe not even one… It was good that the Boy couldn’t read minds.

I cast my spells to him. He sermonized.

“Do you want to become God?” I asked him once.

“I want to become King,” he answered unexpectedly.

“But Kings and morality are not very compatible, are they?”

The Boy got silent.

Sometimes the Boy really wanted something. Something so human. I saw him suffer, torn apart by contradictions, because it was not at all right, but he really wanted it. In such moments the Boy began to reason out loud, building a logical chain of consequences of what would happen if he took a wrong step. I felt sorry for the Boy. His whole life until his last breath was planned by him minute by minute and event by event. He absolutely denied the existence of the Higher Forces with their own plans.

I decided to show him a miracle, Another Reality phenomenon. I took off my ring and hung it on a thread.

“Ask any question watching it. If you see that the ring is spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, because it’s my hand rotating it, tell me.”

The Boy laughed, but still asked questions and watched carefully, very attentively. Then he exclaimed, “Well… I don’t know. But it’s wrong!”

The four of us had lunch in the canteen of the Cinema University. The Boy was discussing with one of us, but obviously not with me, the 999^th episode of some television series and suddenly turned to me, “How can you live without watching TV?”

“She reads books,” the colleague retorted.

“Well, but how can you drive a car without checking traffic jams on the Internet before leaving?”

“I’m sniffing the air,” I answered the absolute truth.

The Boy winced in disbelief.

At the same moment, our table rose two centimeters into the air, moved to the right and landed safely on the floor.

“Bravo, Alice,” exclaimed the colleague, “even the juice didn’t spill!”

Since I told the Boy about the possibility of reading information from the air, he began to test the accuracy of my sense of smell. He called me in the evenings when I had already left our office and asked if there were any traffic jams on my way. As a rule, we left at the same time and lived in neighboring areas. The Boy always drove moving the right way, as it should be done according to the Internet information. I drove the way I felt. However, as a result, we moved the same way. And sometimes we even played speed together. Such game was some strange exception to the rules of the right Boy.

Apparently, the Higher Forces pushed us together so that the Boy would at least try to accept the idea that someone might be different from him and live differently. Not according to his rules. However, once the program implanted into the Boy’s head did its dirty deed, and we parted.

I met Alexey, the same ex-classmate who knew from his own experience what the speed game was. I could share everything with him, because he himself had been through a lot and was able to understand my feelings. He had known me since I was seven years old for who I really was, the real me, I didn’t need to be anyone else with him. The other day I read his 36-page story about the Void. He, like me then, reached the state in which it was no longer possible not to throw out the accumulated pain on paper.

“Love is the greatest medicine, it softens the pain and allows us to survive here and now, to get out of the Void. Later we get used to the pain, adapt to reality, it becomes easier for us, but to reach that later we need…”

“Yes, Alice. It seemed that fire, water, and copper pipes had long been passed, but no, those were flowers. A person is like a bridge which supports are cut down one by one and it falls into the abyss of Death. But you don’t need any earthly support. You have long belonged not to yourself, but to Another Reality. You are not like everyone else, you are not ordinary, deal with it.”

“I want to be an ordinary woman who is loved just because she exists. I have always loved, giving everything I had and asking for nothing in return, but no one has ever loved me. Besides, I didn’t choose Another Reality!”

“It’s not chosen. It chooses who it deems appropriate, without asking our opinion. It chose you. This is your Path.”

I returned home, where I was always welcomed by various magical attributes. For example, the magic ball I had found in the most ordinary – mystical – way on Lake Baikal.

I happened there in November at minus 20C. Baikal used to freeze in January, so in the evenings I sat on the seashore (I saw it as a sea, not a lake) and saw off the Sun. It was cold, but I took off my glove and held out my hand to it, the left one, hypersensitive. Huge waves of heat poured into me, and my hand didn’t freeze at all. One day a bird flew up to me. Whirling around right in front of my face, it whispered something, but I didn’t understand what exactly. When the Sun disappeared into the sea, I went to a mini-market where locals used to buy fish. I entered the souvenir shop and got surrounded by an uncountable number of stones in various shapes. I walked up to a display window and stopped.

“Can I help you?” the saleswoman asked.

I looked through, falling in Another Reality, “I need a stone. A ball. Like a globe. You can see water and lands on it. As if you are looking from above, from the height of an airplane, flying towards the Earth. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Wow!” the saleswomen exclaimed in unison and looked at each other enigmatically.

One of them reached into the tray under the very display window where I was standing, took out something wrapped in paper and, taking it off, reverently held out a ball in her palm. It was that stone!

“Locals come to admire it,” the saleswoman said proudly. “An extremely rare stone. Many even believe that it doesn’t exist in nature, but look, we have a book about stones. Read about it. “A rare natural stone of indigo color found interspersed in malachite, stimulates the work of the Third Eye. In Ancient Egypt, it was considered magical, opening the way to Eternity, and in India – the one leading the owner to the highest levels of energy and spaces.”

In that dream, I tried to reach the Higher Spheres, where the Music of the Spheres sounded. At first, there were the usual spiral, noise or even a hum there, an invisible Force lifting you up the Flow, which resembled a pipe, at a tremendous speed. Someone was nearby. Invisibly. During the first trial, I was stuck in the Lower Astral, but I really wanted to hear what that Music was like. Thus, rising higher and higher in the same Flow, I began to catch magical sounds at some point. The speed decreased, everything around was filled with Light, muffled and bright at the same time, and all that Light was permeated with Music. I heard It quite distinctly. I hovered in space, enjoying the sounds.

I smiled – I reached it.

3. The MAGIC of the WORD

I found Him, the Man Who Was Not, many, many months later. That day, in order to meet Him finally, I had to use again a dangerous technique of working with Time and Space. I use it extremely rarely, in critical situations, that is, when failure to achieve a result threatens with disaster. I can’t explain what happens in such case, even in terms of Another Reality – a huge distance is covered in just a few minutes. Usually, while moving in space, I close my eyes, and look at my watch only upon arrival. We met. I didn’t want to tell Him why, but I said that… There was nothing to lose. He was coolly surprised. I was afraid that I would never see Him again.

“Are you crazy?” he asked without any emotion.

I wasn’t surprised by His reaction. Of course, many people take me for crazy. For some reason, people tend not to believe you when you tell the truth, and, conversely, to believe you when you deceive them.

“No,” I answered calmly and not at all offended by His assumption.

“So who are you?”

The answer to this question, no matter how strange it may seem from the outside, interested me much more than, perhaps, it interested Him. I didn’t know what to answer, so I recited a few of my poems.

“I see, a spell-caster,” He said, thinking about something, and suggested visiting a haunted basement in the center of the city, where a lot of different people used to gather to cast spells.

I said, I didn’t want to go to the place with a lot of different people, because I had little interest in people, but He replied that witches sometimes needed to materialize and ground themselves. I promised to think about it, and we said goodbye. I had an official reason not to go, being already invited to cast spells in the district library, but even if I had had a hundred reasons, or not reasons, but a real cause, I knew in advance that I would have definitely gone with Him to that basement. I didn’t answer “yes” right away, since I wanted Him to write or call me. So we corresponded for the second day. I lived by His messages, as if each of them prolonged my life.

Flirting with the MWWN, I jokingly accused Him of giving me at our last date someone else’s magic wand, which I successfully gave back to Him. I complained that, despite my requests, He had never sent His photo to me, apparently, being afraid of a love spell. I said to have finally understood why the next meeting was scheduled for the date on which, according to the old calendar, exorcists cast out demons. In conclusion, I wrote, it was a pity that He saw me only as a spell-caster, and I secretly hoped for something pleasantly tender in response.

Oh, men!!! If you want to say something to a woman, better write! In messages, every woman can see what she wants to see if she wants to. For example, in commas, periods, spaces or ellipses, or even in their absence, as well as in the absence of the messages. If you call her, the result may be completely unpredictable…

The MWWN suddenly called me and said the following. His fingers were tired of typing messages for me. That someone else’s magic wand was nothing. It turned out that he had bought a magic ring to me, which, having forgotten to gift me last time, just as happily gave to someone else. He didn’t have His own photo, because He didn’t appear in them. He didn’t see me as anything, thought nothing about me and didn’t care at all whether I had demons inside or not. He didn’t care if I went with Him to that haunted place, and even, perhaps, I would do the right thing going to the library and not to the haunted place, because, according to His own experience, which He was ready to share with me (!!!), amazing encounters with people of the opposite sex sometimes took place exactly in libraries. Then He dictated the address of the basement. I was about to exclaim “Bravo!”, but kept silent, since He wouldn’t appreciate it. I remembered the phrase of a great woman, “If you need to explain something, there is no need any more to explain anything.”

I was often invited to cast spells, but most of all I liked reading to children. Children are such small people who have not yet acquired a shell. Light predominates in them, so they feel Another Reality. A little and very vulnerable girl who has no shell still lives inside me. When I cast spells to children, no matter how old they are, they look not at… (me, my appearance, clothes), but through… and see that little girl who is close and understandable to them. Children are fond of asking questions. Their questions are much smarter, deeper and more interesting than adults’ questions, so I like answering them. Many children write too, but often secretly, because they are afraid of being hurt, because they have no shell yet. I tell them the story of the beginning of my Path.

I was ten years old when suddenly and in large quantities I began to write both poetry and stories. It was not that my mother didn’t want me to become a spell-caster, she was categorically against it, being very scared that if I didn’t give up such activity, a hard destiny awaited me, like all those who cast. Mom gave me examples of the great spell-casters of the Silver Age: poverty, unhappy love, loneliness, death of their loved ones and, in conclusion, their own, and tragic! I was offended and tore my notebook, but… half an hour later I collected the small pieces and glued them together with adhesive tape. Mom didn’t talk to me for a long time, but she secretly took my creations to her office and read them to her employees.

Since then, I have been writing something down almost constantly. Without setting a goal to get on the list of officially recognized spell-casters, I followed the dictates of the Soul, step by step approaching the day when some of my works were published in the White Book, as Nonna predicted, and six months later I was accepted into the Most Important Society of Spell-casters of our Kingdom ...Mom, are you proud of me?

We met, me and the Man Who Was Not, and headed to the haunted basement. I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted to stay close to Him. However, as soon as we went inside, He grabbed me like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and threw me onto the stage saying, “You are a spell-caster, aren’t you? So cast!”

All people who say that they write poetry are divided into poets and spell-casters. Poets write poetry. They write and exactly poems. Poems can be good or not so good. With a beautiful or terrible rhyme, or without it at all, even where there is no need for its absence. Poems can be kept in a strict rhythm, or they can limp. All poets want to write poetry. Many people first retire to a proper place, take a notebook, a pen, sit in a chair and decide to write something. Some write with difficulty, being exhausted by every line or even word, in their opinion, such is the fate of a real poet. Others write, without straining at all, about everything in a row, not missing anything that comes under their feet and in their hands, happens in front of their eyes and even behind their backs, because they believe that the amount of writing will make them spell-casters.

Spell-casters, as a rule, write down or record poetry. And often, unlike poets, they don’t feel like writing at all. They feel a surge of vibrations in a certain rhythm, the Soul starts vibrating to the beat, and the words fall on their heads like an avalanche, sometimes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, when there is nowhere and nothing with to record them. For example, at night, when you are almost asleep, or in the snow or pouring rain outside, or while you are driving and crossing space at a high speed. Poems torment the spell-caster until he deigns to give up everything to record them on an earthly data storage, or they get offended and leave, never returning. Sometimes they dictate too quickly, and one never knows what’s next, but there is no time to think – just to write everything down maybe, and only re-reading, one delves into the meanings.

They don’t always dictate clearly, or rather, it’s not always audible, so after the dictation, in some places the spell-caster begins to rack the brains. Sometimes they prompt you how it should sound in the original, sometimes not. Sometimes you don’t know exactly the meaning of the dictated words, and you have to consult a dictionary to make sure that such word is appropriate in the context. However, it never happened in my practice that a word turned out to be inappropriate. Once I had to get the Gospel to clarify the description of a historical event. I read about it in all four Gospels in turn. When you read each of them from beginning to end, you don’t notice the difference in the description, but reading the same event described by all the Evangelists, you see it quite clearly. As a result, I had to replace two lines, since they touched on the place where the texts of the Gospels diverged. It’s surprising that, on the one hand, the verses come from Above, and on the other hand, all of them, with some exceptions, are a reflection of yourself, your thoughts, feelings, of what is happening to you in the Earthly Reality.

The spell-casters’ poems always carry meaning, but they are as laconic as possible to convey it. Like the poets’ poems, spells can have rhyme or do without it. The works of the spell-casters carry the very vibrations that permeated the Soul at the time of their recording, therefore, being read aloud to other people, they produce the effect of a spell – listeners are immersed in that very state of the Soul when the Flow captures and takes you to the single Primary Source, Consciousness turns off and gives you the opportunity to feel Another Reality around you and inside. Ordinary poets don’t connect to the Flow, therefore their works don’t possess such heavenly power, they are earthly. Of course, spell-casters have also ordinary poems. Anyhow, quantity means absolutely nothing for spell-casters. There are periods when spell-casters don’t write anything down for years. The poems stop knocking on the invisible Door, or they knock, but the spell-casters don’t open it for some reasons known only to them.

Some people believe that spell-casters should write poetry from childhood. However, everyone starts writing at different age, and the quantity of years one writes doesn’t say anything at all. Everyone’s soul grows at its own pace. Many people think that they need to enter special institutes to learn to write good. You can learn to write perfect poetry. It’s impossible to learn to write spells. They are written in Another Reality. Its Great Power is present in them. Only the one to whom It provided the Key to the lock of the invisible Door, can become a spell-caster. Poems always belong to the Earthly Reality, as well as the poets themselves. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I stood on the stage blinded by the light in the black-black basement. Yes, I am a spell-caster and do Magic. White Magic. The Magic of the Word. Every time I read, people looked at me as if I were a miracle, enjoying the flow of energies pouring into space, which I passed through myself and gave to them. They plunged into the lakes of Another Reality and, returning, didn’t remember what exactly I had read and in what sequence, but they talked about the magical state they had been during my reading. Their kind words used to warm me in return. However, there was a hungry flock of greedy vampires gathered in the black-black basement. I put my Soul into my words. I loved. He said I should take it as a game. Game with the Soul.

Returning home by metro, completely exhausted by vampires, I suddenly felt a colossal flow of energy beating to both palms. Good energy. I knew it as well as the opposite, negative one, which once used to enter me through my heels. Anyhow, I scanned the people opposite me and redirected the flow to the one who needed the energy much more.

I called Maria in Italy. Her abilities manifested themselves in early childhood. She showed the place where her mother would be buried in a year, although there was no cemetery there yet. After her mother’s death, Maria lived with the aunt, was often sick, more There than Here. When the war began, the girl left for Italy. Her personal life left much to be desired, but as she once told me, it’s always difficult to find someone who is stronger than you, but even more difficult if you can see. Maria saw everything that had happened to me lately, including specific dates and the appearance of people she had never seen, and the atmosphere of places she had never been, and ended our conversation, saying, “He was sent to you from Heavens to let you go your own Path. Pray to our Saint!” At home, I have a collection of Orthodox icons brought from Holy Places scattered around the world. There is an icon with the Saint, I knew nothing about at the time of purchasing, but I was drawn to Her. A few years later, I learned from Maria that She was the Saint protecting children with extrasensory abilities. That evening I turned to Her for help.

At night, I found myself in an intermediate dimension, from which one could pass to the World of the Dead. I realized myself, that is, I realized that I was sleeping, and it was a dream. It’s better not just to become conscious in dreams, but to take something from the Earthly Reality into the dream. The strongest ones know to take something out of the dream. I’m pulling out only texts for now, but once I took a ring into my dream. I have never parted with it since then.

An unfamiliar man and girl came up to me and said that I had to get the Moonstone from the bottom of the lake. Why me? And why Moonstone? Anyhow, I obediently moved to the shore. The bottom was invisible. The water was dark and didn’t move. Lake with dead water. Lake of Death? My Teacher says that the Moon is dead too. I lay down on the water surface without closing my eyes. Too deep! I would drown, having not enough breath.

“You can do it,” the girl encouraged me. “Everything is different here. You can breathe underwater or not breathe at all.”

I stepped into the lake, concentrated and went to the bottom, breathing. At the bottom, there was a huge shell with an irregularly shaped Moonstone, illuminating the lake from the inside with a ghostly glow. I pulled the stone ashore. What for?

4. A DREAM

“You are urgently called to school,” my son muttered when I crossed the threshold of our flat, and instantly disappeared into his room.

The teacher was no longer young and gave the impression of a fairly intelligent and kind woman. I could imagine anything of the possible reasons for the urgent call, except for what she said.

“I don’t know what to do with your child, it’s a nightmare! He wants to be the first in everything! Is this really conceivable? He raises his hand without waiting for me to finish formulating the question. He is the first to hand over the tests and begs to go to the blackboard. Not to mention the fact that he is always inventing some games for children and wants to lead them somewhere!”

I was ten or eleven years old when, during the winter holidays, my mother sent me to the largest and most famous in our Kingdom Christmas party, where parents were not allowed at that time. The central hall where the event took place accommodated an insane number of children of completely different ages. After the party, the children had to walk in a circle on the Square of the Three Cathedrals, which looked like a corral for horses and was fenced with iron partitions. Parents, standing behind the partitions in several rows, tried to get closer in order to find and have time to catch their kids out of a huge crowd of children wandering in that circle before they started another round.

The game “Find Me!” was a real stress for both children and adults. Firstly, because winter was still real then, the snow creaked underfoot, thus, after standing in the cold waiting for the kids for quite a long time, parents could catch a cold. Secondly, at that time it was customary to wear “uniforms” there. So it was very difficult to find among the thousands of identical felt boots marching sadly in a circle those on which your kid had struggled to put on the rubbers in the morning. On the other hand, the game developed the sixth sense – just feel yours!

My mother and I agreed that she would wave a scarf of the same color as the flag of our Kingdom at that times. However, it turned out that at least half of the Christmas party participants agreed on the same conventional sign. I felt sorry for my mother and decided to give her a gift – to go outside the first. I walked along the wide road to the magic circle, far apart from the main crowd. I don’t know how I managed that. I entered the circle and heard the joyful and excited exclamations of parents, “They are coming!” And I also heard them whispering, “God, who is so lucky? Whose child is this?” Then I saw my mother. She was smiling. So was I.

After my mother’s death, I often found myself in an unpleasant dimension, in a tense space with “gummy” time, where an inexplicable vacuum of something was felt. You leave almost all your energy there and come back completely exhausted. I usually passed into the World of the Dead (or rather, of those stuck between Here and There for some reason), where various entities live, including gray-wax ghosts, through a huge screen similar to a mirror, in a dream. My mother got stuck There, and we took turns visiting each other, she came to me Here, then I went to her There. The boundaries of spaces (dimensions?) became thinner even in grandma’s old flat, and There turned out to be right Here. First, the Door to Another Reality opens slightly, then you physically feel another space flowing into your local one, and almost immediately you hear Its sounds and, less often, see It.

Having adapted, I wasn’t afraid of drafts. However, due to the specific ability to take with me into Another Reality those nearby when the Door was opening, I was afraid for my son. I purposefully didn’t read him bedtime stories about Another Reality, tying him to the Earthly one. Once, when we were falling asleep and the Door creaked, I pretended that nothing was happening, but my son looked me in the eyes and asked in a whisper, “Have you heard that, mom? These sounds, what are they? Who is there? Tell me that you hear them too!”

I went to the child to say goodnight.

“Once I died, and then I was born,” the son suddenly said. “And then, when I die again and am born again, I will have a different mother.”

“Not necessary. Souls can meet in subsequent lives, but they don’t always recognize each other in their new bodies.”

“No, mom, we won’t meet again.”

“Why?” I was surprised.

“You will never be born again. I feel so. I know, they will let you stay There. And I began to see also a Man in Black. Who is he?”

“How do you see him?” I tried to keep calm, because after my mother’s death I had often seen the Man in Black; all wrapped in black cloth, he looked like a monk and, standing at the window, silently looked at me.

“He comes to me. Sometimes in a dream, and recently in the room, at the window. He always appears unexpectedly. I’m afraid of him. He’s all in black. Like monks. In some kind of cloth. I don’t know. I can’t see his eyes, but he looks at me in silence. I’m scared. Why does he come?”

“Ask him who he is. The next time he comes. Don’t be afraid, just ask what he wants.”

“It’s easy for you to say, you’ve never seen him! It’s more difficult in a dream. When I begin to understand that it’s a dream, I wake up.”

I saw my son several years before his birth. I knew how he would look like on the Earth. He was born an unusual child, preferred solitude and violently showed dissatisfaction when he was picked up or surrounded by calf tenderness. My son didn’t allow anyone to feed him with a spoon. His first word wasn’t “mom” or “dad”, but “myself!”

Before he started speaking, he often had nightmares and screamed heart-rending. I used to enter his room, turn on the light and observe horror pictures – he was fighting off someone invisible and didn’t react to me at all. I hardly managed to wake him up, but when he woke up and remembered where he was, he instantly calmed down and smiled.

In early childhood, my son had a favorite game with balloons. We used to come to the park, he asked me to buy him at least one, so I did. He took it and, as if unnoticed by me, released it into the sky. Then he turned to me and, looking plaintively into my eyes, asked me to buy another one. That could go on ad infinitum. It seemed to me that my son was teaching himself in advance to let go of everything earthly he really liked, just as in smart adult books we are taught to get rid of idealizations and attachments.

Later he began to talk in his sleep, very clearly and absolutely seriously, in an adult way, perhaps with his Teacher. “I can’t do this now,” my seven-year-old son once said in his sleep. And I was afraid that he wouldn’t become a Warrior of Light.

The MWWN disappeared… For several days, I clearly felt my astral body moving further and further away from the physical one. When one leaves, this starts about seven days before, the physical pain disappears a couple of hours before… I know this from my own experience. However, that time I wasn’t leaving, at least in the way people do because of illness, nothing hurt, just the other day I had received several bad news at once, cutting me without a knife. Not unexpected, I had a premonition of them for a long time. Anyhow, even if you feel and know that it’s impossible to change anything, you hope for a miracle until the last moment. No miracle happened. I didn’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone, except for Him. I sent Him a spell about me standing on the windowsill by the open window. He replied that standing on the windowsill in February was quite cool, at least for people, but I was a spell-caster, so it was even good for me to clear my head with fresh air a little. I wrote, I didn’t want to live and asked Him not to disappear.

“Don’t be sad, or wrinkles will appear,” he answered and disappeared again.

After exiting through the window, I found myself in an area that looked like a large, light corridor located in close proximity to the Earth. The Voice, neither good nor evil, absolutely impartial, guided me. Nobody condemned me for anything. We communicated mentally.

“Remember what you see to tell people,” the Voice said.

I visualized a sheet of paper and a pen and tried to write down, but almost immediately I realized the futility of the idea, I wouldn’t be able to take my notes out of There. The paper obediently disappeared into the air along with the pen. I waved my hand and looked around, closely examining the details.

The Voice led me along an intermediate state – corridor, where there were those who had just ‘died’. They were slowly floating in the distance. On the way, each of them looked through some pictures of the earthly life, as an exam. At the beginning of the corridor, everyone was shown the same pictures, a standard set revealing the Soul’s reaction to what was viewed, depending on which its further fate was determined. The deceased women were shown women with newborn children. Some souls began to rush about, being drawn to Earth to give birth to the babies they had killed in the womb. I was absolutely calm, so was the Voice, as if it knew that the subject didn’t concern me. I saw murderers, and then drug addicts, who were shown the places where they could quench their thirst. Tormented by the realization that nothing like that existed in Heavens, their souls felt an incredible attraction to Earth. I still remained absolutely calm. I remembered the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the books of a famous psychologist about idealizations and attachments.

One needs to get rid of them, still being alive in the body in order to die in a state no longer experiencing any attachments, i.e. unfulfilled earthly desires, otherwise one won’t be able to reach to the end of the corridor.

“Now look,” the Voice said calmly.

I stopped at the Window to the World. The Space of Light slowly decreased in brightness. I saw a city, cars and people, a metro station. It was raining. A woman came on a date with her beloved man. I saw them meeting. Astral tears started pouring from my eyes. The picture floated. The Voice looked at me with sadness, although it was invisible to me. An insane desire to live out love for the Man Who Was Not spun me around in a spiral and instantly pulled me back into my sleeping physical body. I collapsed into it and woke up horrified by hopelessness. To escape There from the nightmarish loneliness that day meant to be incarnated the next day in another newborn Here.

Escape to Another Reality lost any sense.

5. The TEMPLE of the SOUL

“Tonight you are going to RAM,” my colleague said in an orderly tone after listening to my retelling of the dream.

“No,” I objected, “I’m invited to the Beau Monde to cast spells tonight.”

“You won’t be casting any spells tonight. You need to get to know RAM. She comes twice a year for a week seminar. I just found out yesterday that she is here now.”

RAM, Raisa Akhmetovna Mansurova, sat in the center of the huge hall, talking about the amazing capabilities of everyone. A dazzling emanation along the contour of her earthly body seemed even to be real fire. We studied for five hours in the evening on weekdays and all day long on Saturday and Sunday. During the week of the seminar, I had the opportunity to talk privately with the Teacher several times. She read my manuscripts, looked in my future and saw the Light there. RAM taught us a lot, but I liked most meditating to music combined with mantras recorded during her expedition to Tibet.

…I closed my eyes. Having ceased to feel my physical body, I found myself in a picturesque place in the mountains, in a meadow with a babbling brook. On the right, there were ordinary mountains that I had seen in Tibet several years before in reality. To the left, there was an abyss, with other mountains behind, of Another Tibet, unknown to me. Somewhere in the distance, a small monastery rose on the top of a mountain to the right. The air took on blurry contours. Suddenly, I felt that I was about to see my mother. Mom had long been very, very far away, and it was difficult for her to gather herself into the earthly image that would forever remain in my memory, but I would still recognize her from a thousand foggy outlines. Being as transparent as she was, I realized that we could neither hug in an earthly way nor speak in words. My physical body was in the hall at RAM seminar, I could look at “Me in the Hall” from There and move Consciousness into it, observing “Me in the Mountains” from the side. It was a game of instant movement, and I liked it. I was incredibly happy to see my mother. We were walking There, at the slightly open Door, where ordinary and other mountains coexisted, and communicating in silence, I didn’t even formulate phrases mentally, because only feelings remained, and everything else was unnecessary. Mom led me to the monastery on the mountain, where the fire was burning, although perhaps I mistook for it a huge vat with incense, shrouded in the misty haze from which our bodies, my mother’s and mine, were woven There. It was funny – we were transparent, while the monks were dense, wearing real clothes. It was strange that they didn’t pay much attention to us, just glanced at us briefly and continued their business.

After some time, the monks began to walk clockwise around the vat with incense or a fire emanating smoke, dancing, chanting mantras and striking musical instruments similar to tambourines. Mom invited me to dance with them. I had a strange feeling of joy and absolute peace dancing with my mother and the monks, who looked at me as if my appearance There was completely natural. Mom called me to the abyss, a bottomless one. I had once climbed mountains higher than 5,000 meters, but at that moment we were at an altitude of hundreds of thousands kilometers above sea level… or Earth? Indescribably beautiful and majestic. I felt the Earth so far from There that I needed to fly to it, and for quite a long time. We stood on the highest mountain of the World, Another World. The black mountains seemed to be monks’ souls. The fiery red sky resembled a sunset, but the earthly Sun was barely visible at the bottom of the abyss. There was nowhere to go higher, that was the Highest Sky, the Sky of Fire color. Mom wanted me to walk over the abyss, she took my hand, although that was an illusion, I just felt her supporting me. I took my first step into the void. We walked with her through the Fiery Sky, like people walking through an autumn park. Then I realized it was time for my mother to leave, and her outline slowly dissolved, merging with so called God. The last mantra sounded, and it seemed that all that Fiery Sky was contained in the single sound – AUM.

The next day I found myself in the same meadow in the mountains. The level I found myself at the beginning of each meditation was below the level of the Fiery Sky, from where I returned to Earth. I knew in advance that my mother wouldn’t come and that I needed to talk to the monks. I moved to the left and discovered 108 springs with holy water, walked through them and went further, skirting the mountains. I saw the already familiar monastery in the distance, but the path ended at an abyss. I stopped in thoughts. Mountains surrounded me on all sides. A thin thread was stretched over the abyss. I suddenly felt someone approaching me from behind, turned around, finding myself with my back to the abyss, at the beginning of the thread leading to the monastery, and saw a smiling monk. He came so close that I instinctively took a step back on the thread. The monk continued to smile and hold me with his gaze so that I wouldn’t stumble, moving backwards, with my back to the monastery and my face to the monk. We walked slowly until I felt the ground under my feet. The monk pointed his hand in the direction of the fire, and I sat down nearby. I asked him for help, telling him about my emptiness, but he smiled back. The rest of the monks appeared and began to dance around the fire. I approached each of them in turn and asked to help me, but they smiled and silently invited me to dance with them. I realized that it was time to return to Earth, and I found myself on that highest mountain where the Sky was fiery red. I went into that Sky until it all merged into the single sound – AUM.

On the third day the Monk met me at 108 springs. I asked him for help again, but he silently smiled and showed the pool with holy water from the springs. I lay under the water with my eyes open, breathed and saw the smiling Monk bending over me above the water surface. He didn’t allow me to leave the pool while the water cleansed my astral body. I relaxed, closed my eyes and flew in a fiery stream at a great speed. Then the Monk made me understand that I was free, and I ran to the abyss over which the thread was stretched. The Monk looked at me with a smile, he knew that I could easily get to the monastery without anyone’s help. However, as soon as I set foot on the monastery grounds, I remembered the Man Who Was Not. I wanted to show him those magical places. I returned back to the springs, imagined Him as foggy as I was, standing at the edge of the abyss, took Him by the hand and guided with my gaze. He looked into my eyes, and I smiled at Him, just as the Monk had smiled at me the day before. I led Him to the Monastery and again returned to those 108 springs to lead my son as well. The Monk called me to the fire, and everything repeated – I danced with the monks, went to the top of the highest mountain to walk through the Sky of Fire color, and returned to Earth, when everything around me suddenly merged into the single sound – AUM.

On the fourth day, each of the seminarians brought four bottles of champagne. We had to walk on broken glass. Many people ask why this is necessary, thinking that RAM teaches walking on glass only. Firstly, during the previous three days not a word was said about glass. Secondly, walking on broken glass seven times was just a fragment of the seminar. The purpose of this action is to hack the program written in Consciousness as “Impossible! Forbidden! It doesn’t happen like that! I won’t succeed!” People live according to the rules of the programs implanted in them, so they consider their problem insoluble. If the program is rewritten, hidden abilities wake up and help to find the right solution. Having created a small miracle by walking on broken glass without cutting heels, a person begins not only to believe in miracles, but also to know that one creates them oneself, with God’s help, of course.

Television arrived. The glass was divided into two piles. The seminarians who had already practiced walking on glass lined up to the place for “the advanced people” and started walking as if on a soft and fluffy carpet. I froze at the carpet for the newcomers. RAM said I would be the first to go. Looking at the fragments sticking out pointing upward, I couldn’t believe that it was possible not to cut myself. RAM took me by the hand and asked to repeat just one phrase after her. I repeated and was sure that the Teacher wouldn’t let go of my hand until I had walked the entire carpet, but RAM, slapping me on the butt, ordered, “Go!” I took the first step. To be honest, I’m hypersensitive and, when going to the sea on vacation, I choose a sandy beach or pebbles, since it’s easier for me to learn to fly than to walk on stones with bare heels. That day I heard the glass crunching beneath me, digging into my heels, but felt no pain at all. I reached to safe land unharmed. The procedure should be repeated at least seven times. All the newcomers cautiously moved to the carpet for the advanced people.

“I am no longer here. You can do everything yourself,” RAM smiled.

I walked and walked on the glass. When they were taking my photo, a seminarian shouted, “Alice, show the swallow!” I had to jump on one leg on the broken glass to keep the swallow balanced until the next click of the camera because of the pauses between shots. During one walk in a bad mood, having taken the first step, I felt a sharp pain in my left heel. The rug seemed to be about to turn from green to red. I froze like a one-legged heron so that I could re-encode myself before landing my second heel on the glass. Afterwards we took off our clothes to the waist and lay down on the glass with our bare backs (including necks and heads). RAM pressed everyone into the carpet with all her might, turning one’s body on all sides, and did other exercises so that the glass would merge as much as possible with the naked upper body. The lying person rose not alone, but together with the pieces of glass sticking out from his back, like the needles of a hedgehog. RAM took out those needles, that left indentations, as from driven nails, but no blood, no cuttings of the skin on the back. Based on the color of certain areas of the back, RAM immediately told what health problems the person had.

Late in the evening we played a fifteen-minute game called “Tell someone you don’t know about something you don’t know.” RAM asked each of us to come up to three or four seminarians to whom we would be drawn and say the first thing that would come to mind. I came up to strangers and said something I couldn’t know about them, and they wondered how.

On the last day of our seminar, we were awaited by a special meditation “Temple of the Soul” with a short briefing beforehand. RAM asked each of us to clearly formulate a question we needed an answer to.

“When you get There, pay attention to the details. Who will meet you? Perhaps a relative or a friend, an Elder or an Angel, or maybe no one. It’s different for everyone. Take a look around. What does your Temple, or the place you will end up, look like? Someone ends up in a maze. Someone is in a castle. Try to go around it all, entirely. Go through all the doors, since the answer to your question is hiding behind one of them. If a door is closed, find the key and open it. Music without mantras will play during this meditation. I’ll guide you to the front door and leave you alone. I’ll warn you when time is running out so that you can return on time. One more request or advice. There are a little fewer of us now than usual, so it’ll be more difficult, but still, if any of you can, go to the Library of the Universe. Try it, will it work? Ask the Elder or the Guardian to show you a book. Open it and try to read. There will be some advice there. Perhaps the answer to your question. It happens that a book is written in an unknown language. Try to feel what it’s about. Sometimes the Guardian transmits information through you to me. As you leave There, don’t forget to thank everyone you have met.”

The music started playing. We closed our eyes. Unlike previous meditations, we didn’t lie down, we were standing. I had never thought that it was possible to meditate while standing, and, worse, I couldn’t imagine that Temple of my Soul. RAM guided us to Heavens, and I suddenly saw it, a silver-white and pyramid-shaped crystal, dazzling, or rather, almost blinding with its radiance, through the center of which a powerful flow of energy was pouring in a vertical direction. The Temple was located in the blue-black Sky so far that the Earth was invisible at all there. I came up to the front door. RAM asked us to recite prayers we knew, or just pray somehow with the Soul, and she left everyone alone with one’s Temple.

Being scared to enter it, I still opened the door and stepped inside. I looked around – not a soul. The architecture of the outer part of the Temple didn’t correspond to the inside at all, as if they were two different buildings. The two-story house had the shape of a cross, formed by two corridors intersecting at right angles. The first thing that caught my eye was the absence of a ceiling and roof, just a starry sky above my head. However, there was no need for a roof there – neither rain, nor snow. A completely different world. It was even great without any roof, since the whole Universe lived in my Temple of the Soul. The walls were whitewashed, like village houses on the outside. There were my paintings and pots of beautiful flowers on the walls and a lot of doors along the walls on both floors. The floor, doors and beams were wooden, dark brown. The Temple was very light, despite the absence of a light source and the presence of the blue-black Sky above. A wooden staircase, located to the right of the front door, led to the upper floor. It seemed unrealistic to go through all the doors of the Temple, but I went up and entered the first four rooms on the left. No one. Although, in one of them I found several coffin lids. I helplessly dropped my hands, sat down on the stairs and wept. Even there, in my own little house, I was completely alone.

Having gone down, I noticed a foggy niche with climbing green plants opposite the front door and decided to see what was there. Getting closer and closer, I suddenly saw… He sat writing something at a wooden table with old books on it. Without a headdress, but in green robes embroidered with gold, the typical attire of clergy for Trinity. Having noticed me, he smiled, as he had done for five years when I sang in the children’s church choir. The Patriarch wasn’t surprised by my appearance, as if he had known that I would have come. I cried from the unexpected joy of our meeting. The Patriarch looked alive and absolutely healthy, although he had left Earth exactly a month before. I looked into his eyes and asked mentally, “Why is everything like this? Why do I have such life? For what? What for? Why doesn’t anyone love me? I want That Man to…”

The Patriarch answered me with eyes filled with Universal Love, “You know everything yourself, Heaven loves you.”

“But why?” I asked again.

He pointed with his gaze at the books on the table, saying, “And you write too.”

“So that I write?”

The Patriarch nodded and handed me an open book with… words in Sanskrit. I got surprised, Patriarch and… Sanskrit? I didn’t understand anything, but he told me to go to my relatives and showed me exactly which door on the upper floor I needed. They all really gathered there: both grandmothers and their sisters, grandfather, mom and dad, aunt and uncle. I recognized each of them in the foggy outlines of astral bodies and was glad to meet them. Nobody asked me questions. Everything is known in Heavens about everyone living on the Earth. Only the aunt asked how her youngest daughter was doing. I replied that everything was fine. There was no pain left in me, I had let them go a long time before, and the other day, I had talked with my mom in the mountains and danced with the monks. Suddenly, I remembered about the Library of the Universe and returned to the Patriarch asking to take me to it. The Patriarch led me along the left corridor of the ground floor, a far door of which was the entrance to the Library. We walked through several halls, each was huge. We met people along the way. They came there to find their books and paid no attention to us. The walls were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and countless shelving flanked the central passage that connected the endless chain of halls. Everything was there. I looked around in confusion.

“I was told to find a book or books that would answer my question.”

The Patriarch smiled and led me to the bookshelves in the center of the hall, looked at me carefully, reached out with his hand to the top shelf, took out and handed me… my first two books, one of which titled “On the Road to Heaven,” and the title of the second had been made up of three names, two great spell-casters of the Silver Age and my own, “Marina. Anna. Alexandra”. I asked if I could get some other book by myself, he nodded. I walked to the far corner of the hall, took a ladder and climbed to the top shelf. My hand was drawn to an old book of dark green color with no title on the spine. I pulled it out and read the single word ‘WORD’ engraved on the cover in gold letters.

“You have three minutes left,” came the voice of RAM.

I put the book back. Having gone down, I ran into a famous priest. He smiled at me. “He’s probably looking for some information here, too,” I thought wondering if he was still alive.

“Say goodbye, go to the Door you entered the Temple through.”

I stood at the front door. The eyes of the Patriarch, as many years before, emanated Goodness and Love. I thanked him. “Mine” were looking at me from the upper floor and waving their ghostly hands.

“Open the Door, come out.”

I opened the door. The Patriarch blessed me at parting.

“Close the Door behind you, turn your back to it…”

After a couple of minutes, I opened my eyes. On the Earth.

6. The GIRL with the MOON CAT

I liked painting since childhood, my works even participated in exhibitions. I painted with gouache and watercolor, then I drew with a simple pencil. A few years later, I became interested in painting glass, wood and ceramics. Immediately after returning from the seminar, I felt an urgent need to paint what I had seen during the meditations. No, I am not a professional artist, my works are the expression of the Soul, transferring my feelings and emotions, something like intuitive paintings. So I depicted the meadow in the mountains where I had appeared at the very beginning and met my mother, the path at the cliff near the mountain with 108 springs, the thin thread over the abyss leading to the monastery, my walks in the Fiery Sky, exiting into the Astral through the seven colors of the rainbow, entering to the Flow, the Temple of the Soul inside and outside, the Library of the Universe and that book with the single word ‘WORD’ engraved on it.

Nonna called me. I told her about the seminar. We agreed to meet in the city the next day in the evening. Nonna asked to take some of my paintings with me, so I had to take them to my office in the morning. I placed the paintings against the wall. The colleague, who had invited me to attend the seminar as a must, came to visit me as usual and froze in front of my creations.

“Wow! I flew in that Flow too, just like you painted! Do you feel what kind of energy your pictures have? During meditation at my first seminar, where I ended up completely by accident, monks came to me, performed astral surgery on my broken leg, and I woke up and went home without crutches.”

“Could you paint something for me, too, Alice?” asked Svetlana, financial director at the Boy’s company.

We worked with her in the same office room in silence. When my spells were first officially published, I couldn’t help jumping for joy, so we started talking. Svetlana asked me to tell her about Another Reality, and later, after reading many wise books and meeting my Teachers, she became a different person. Being an eyewitness to such phenomena as lifting of the table into the air, Svetlana often recalls the day of our acquaintance and can’t imagine what a boring life she would have now if I hadn’t started jumping around our office with joy. Subsequently, I painted her soul in an opening lotus flower. Oddly enough, despite my lack of any skills in portraiture, as, indeed, in another types of painting, all of Svetlana’s relatives and friends, not knowing what was painted there, claimed that it was she.

Nonna and I met in a cafe on the outskirts of the city in the evening.

“What are you doing, Alice! Your paintings gave me goosebumps! You painted Another Reality. Amazing! Your paintings transfer us There.”

We talked for a long time in our own language.

Nonna’s speech looked like the following.

“I sat at my desk yawning. Afraid to oversleep. The Teacher came up to me and said, ‘Nonna, stop looking at the clock!’ I felt so ashamed. Think about it, if you don’t realize it, absenteeism becomes an issue. And I want to sleep so much!”

Nonna studied at the Academy There while sleeping Here. To get to that Academy in a dream, as well as anywhere else, I mean a specific place There, one must become aware of it while sleeping. And then wake up on time Here so as not to be late to a specific place Here and not to forget everything that you have been taught that night There. In general, you see, it’s not easy, but interesting.

Suddenly, Nonna’s gaze stopped somewhere behind my shoulders.

“Listen, take out the Temple of the Soul again, what it looks like from the inside,” Nonna asked, shifting her gaze in turn from what I had painted to what was behind me. “Turn around! Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”

My earthly vision was poor. At first I didn’t even understand what exactly to look at. Suddenly, I discovered that the far part of the cafe was decorated, unlike ours, identical to my Temple of the Soul.

“A sign,” said Nonna, “you are on the right Path. You and I were supposed to meet exactly in this place and exactly after you painted that. Well done!”

I told her what was going on at my work. The Boy was overplaying with his rules, the company began to get problems, I would have to look for another place soon.

“Listen, let’s play a little game with you,” Nonna suggested, and I happily agreed. “Imagine a bag of money. A big-big-big one.”

“Okay.”

“Have you imagined a big-big-big or just a big one?”

“A very, very, very big!”

“Very good! You play well. Now imagine a small thread going from the bag to the place the money came from. Now tell me, just honestly, where did you get so much money?” Nonna asked smiling.

“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully.

“How can you not know? Here it is, your money!” Nonna pointed to the empty space where I had just imagined that very huge and almost impossible-to-lift bag. “Mind you, this is your money, not mine! Just tell me where you got it from.”

“True, I don’t know!”

“Alice, why? I am not a tax inspector!” Nonna exclaimed offended. “Awake your memory! Now! Well, did you sell anything?”

“No, this is not trade.”

“Maybe… did you steal it?” Nonna asked with insinuating laughter.

“You know, I don’t do Black Magic!” I got offended.

“Okay, sorry. Well, do you produce something?”

“No, this is not production. You see, this is something personally mine. What I can. Something that only I know and can do.”

“It’s already warmer… Come on remembering, don’t be lazy!”

“I see books,” I breathed out.

“Great. What books?”

“Not these. Maybe they are about Another Reality.”

“Nothing surprising. You are here to tell about what is There. Just think, you pulled out the word ‘WORD’ from the Astral Tablets! Do you understand who you are? Perhaps, you can’t still come to terms with it.”

“I want love. An earthly one,” I said sadly.

“You and I ourselves chose such life,” Nonna stated. “We knew what would await us. We knew it There before coming down here. We both came for a reason. Nobody forced you and me to fall here, but we both wanted to touch these objects and eat this lamb. By the way, how do you like the lamb?”

“Maybe someone came here to eat lamb! I came to LOVE! Understand? With earthly love! I want to love! A man!” I exclaimed offended.

“Alice, you are stubborn as a sheep! Where do you see MEN in this world? Open your Third Eye wider! There are just BOYS all around. Who can understand you and me? You will meet, fall in love, and then be disappointed. For example, I see all ‘men’ at once. And I’m bored, because I already know everything in advance: who they are, what will happen next. Isn’t it the same with you?”

“The same. But sometimes I feel, this is he, while he thinks this is not me.”

“You came to tell people about Another World through the Word and paintings, deal with it! You should write and paint, create!”

“I can’t write in His absence!” I stated.

“It’s funny,” Nonna said thoughtfully, “once upon a time, in Ancient India, yogis had the Third Eye, but already weakly expressed. They periodically scratched it with special sticks so that it could see better. It means that men will still be sent to you so that you write, but kept at a great distance, because if one suddenly turns out to be HIM, and you realize your kindergarten dream of earthly love, you’ll obviously stop writing. Men for you are like that stick of the yogis, to stimulate the work of the Third Eye, so that you see Another Reality. By the way, I see an exhibition of your paintings,” Nonna said casually, biting into what once had been a lamb. “Of course, like with your book then, it seems unrealistic to you now, but it will happen. So paint, my dear, paint.”

“I’ve already painted everything I saw There,” I said sadly.

“No, not everything!”

“I really don’t know what else to paint!”

“If you can’t remember, this doesn’t mean at all that you don’t know. Therefore, sit down in front of the canvas and ask yourself, ‘What do I see There?’ You don’t have even to invent anything, your hands will do everything themselves, believe me. Your Path is creativity. You have to somehow combine it with work and money. In my opinion, there is no need for a fortune-teller, everything is too obvious.”

“Nonna, just don’t swear at me. Please, hear what I’m telling you now… I… WANT… LOVE… EARTHLY Love. Understand?”

“No, I don’t understand, and I don’t want to,” she said calmly. “By the way, what do you see about me?”

“You are a nomad. Wanderer. You can’t stay in one place for long. You’ll be moving. A lot of. Countrywide. Maybe even abroad. This is your Path. You have to help everyone.”

Nonna nodded in agreement.

“Nonna, but if you have to help everyone, so help ME!”

“I do help you… on your Path.”

“You are a sadist!” I couldn’t help exclaiming from a feeling of complete hopelessness.

The waitress brought dessert and was about to put it on an empty place on the table when Nonna said, looking at me reproachfully, “Get your bag away!”

“It’s heavy! I can’t move it by myself, and you don’t send me a man… Help!”

I did as Nonna had said. I took canvas, paints, brushes and suddenly saw There… a girl with a Moon Cat. They walked together in Another Reality. Both were ghostly, almost transparent, against the dark blue sky, very far from the Earth. The girl was recalling what had been on the Earth and what not. It’s enough There to imagine something as it immediately appears. As ghostly as everything There. The girl recalled her acquaintance with the Man Who Was Not and her spells written to Him, which He had just flipped through and never answered. The girl visualized autumn alleys in the park, since she wanted to walk with Him on the Earth, but she was walking along the Heavenly Alleys with her Moon Cat. The girl built a small astral house. She lived next to the majestic pyramids, the same as on the Earth, but There. The six sacred geometrical bodies of Plato’s and Ancient Egyptian symbols appeared before her eyes. So I painted what I saw through the eyes of that girl. She felt very lonely. At night, she used to open the Window to the World and look at the Earth with longing. The Moon Cat couldn’t understand her. The girl wanted to return, because she really wanted Love, earthly Love.

Once a year on the Earth they celebrate a day when everyone suddenly begins to recall you. It took me a long time to get used to this. It turns out that here you can forget about someone for a year, and then, on that very day, call or come and say a bunch of compliments so that the person doesn’t inadvertently think of being accidentally forgotten by you, and disappear again for a year. It’s a pity that on the Earth such a day happens only once a year.

Some days before I had to stop at a glamorous place where I didn’t want to go at all, because I knew in advance that I would definitely meet Him there, the MWWN. By chance, not according to the laws of the Earthly Reality, He was to be exactly in that place and at the time when I was there. After the spell-castings in the haunted basement, He disappeared, and I didn’t want to remind Him of myself, because He didn’t care if I still existed in the Earthly Reality or no longer. The other day I had a dream. We were sitting at the table in that glamorous place. He spoke to me about the stars, ordered to paint pictures for Him the way He wanted them, with such colors, of such size. I didn’t want to paint like that. That was why I didn’t want to go there, but I couldn’t help but go.

I was standing by the elevator when I saw Him approaching the building. The elevator arrived. I went in, pressed the button for the desired floor, “Please, close the doors! Let’s go! Please!” The elevator didn’t obey, the doors remained open. I felt Him coming closer and closer, climbing the steps, he would enter the elevator soon. Out of complete impotence, I leaned against the wall, lowered my head and closed my eyes.

“Alice? What are you doing here?” a familiar male voice said in surprise.

The elevator closed the doors immediately and started moving up. I sighed heavily. I didn’t know if He understood why I wasn’t surprised at our meeting. I didn’t know what to say. I was just silently looking somewhere through. He explained confusingly something about a difficult period, that He was very busy, but I turned off my hearing, since he was playing words which already meant almost nothing on the Earth. The elevator stopped. The MWWN expressed a desire to talk with me. We were sitting at the very table I had seen in my dream. He spoke to me about the stars. I listened silently. He ordered to paint pictures for Him the way He wanted them, and even began to show the way, but I interrupted Him, finishing what He had already said in the dream. I said that I didn’t want to paint like that. He was probably offended. Saying goodbye, I hinted that I would be pleased if He called me on Sunday to congratulate me on the day that happened once a year. He smiled and asked three times the exact date. I repeated three times that it would be the nearest Sunday. He said he would certainly not only call me, but invite me somewhere on such occasion the next week.

For better or worse, that Sunday I realized that I hadn’t had much contact with ordinary people for many years. I used to meet those speaking a different language, incomprehensible to mass, or if not speaking, listening and trying to understand, and even asking questions, smart questions, not to keep up a conversation or out of politeness, but in order to find out something interesting. My guests remembered me more than once a year. I showed them my meditation paintings with the Girl and the Moon Cat as protagonists. The guests tried not to look, but to see. Then we sat at the table like ordinary people exchanging mystical life stories. Svetlana asked me to tell a funny story about homeless people.

I often take the subway, since I haven’t recalled yet the way to get around the city without earthly means of transportation. That day, I was returning from work late in the evening in a half-empty train and, while reading an interesting book by a Teacher, I came to a chapter saying that under no circumstances one should experience negative emotions towards the homeless ones. The train stopped at the next station, the doors opened, several people entered it, and a bum fell down from Heavens onto the seat to my right. Everyone around grimaced and waited with interest for my reaction. Curiously and without negativity, I shifted my gaze from the book to my new neighbor. He was suitably creepy dressed and smelled like all homeless