16 January 2003 Newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda

Interviews

16 January 2003 — Newspaper “Moskovskaya Pravda”

Probably, I will not be original with my first question: What is the meaning of human life in general?

I think the meaning of life is not limited to one certain idea. Everyone has their own meaning. All people, during their lives, try to solve certain inherent problems that pertain only to themselves — plus other tasks which involve making a particular decision. The problem is that we all resemble a map for ourselves — with an enormous number of blank spots. The entire human life involves a process of cognition of oneself, a process of filling in these blank spots.

What does the process of learning consist of? Is it a commitment to certain teachings or religious movements? Or is it enough to have one’s own psychoanalyst, as is seemingly customary in the West in order to help the patient to bring out subconscious impulses and desires?

Any help is good, if it truly allows a person to understand themselves. However, simply attending religious services or psychiatric sessions, it is impossible to comprehend truth. For this to happen, one must first strive towards genuine understanding of oneself and one’s place in the world. Only through the process of self-perfection will ways forward emerge for the person. And there are a lot of different ways. This is not without reason that most Eastern philosophies and teachings are based on a single postulate: that there are many paths towards Truth — and that everyone chooses the path closest to them once they are sure that it really leads to the Light. This demonstrates the way in which Oriental religions and teachings are the most progressive. They do not reject, but they treat all other movements and beliefs with respect.

Do you think that this is the right approach? After all, dogmatism is inherent in us. For example, Orthodox Christians consider an indulgence, adopted by Catholics, the direct route to hell fire, therefore concluding that the entire movement is imperfect. Catholics might have a grievance against, for example, Protestants. And Christianity as a whole may have a huge grievance against, say, Krishna worshippers. And so on... the process is endless. Crusades, Muslim Jihad, and other sects are all links in the same chain, demonstrating the intransigence of religious canons and dogmas.

In fact, the inconsistencies in various teachings and religions have been invented by people during many centuries of the official Church. This has been done for the sake of the church’s authority or any other form of government. However, there is nothing truthful in these contradictions. Sheltering behind the name of their Messiah, the leaders of all nations and heads of all states have been doing things that are, in fact, not godly at all.

I know that you — a historian — have studied, in depth the history of many world religions and the majority of various teachings. I know that you have been to India, the Himalayas, and Tibet many times. Moreover, in the course of your travels, you have met and talked with people of different faiths and religions. Have these experiences, taken together, led you to a particular perception of the world?

Undoubtedly, the amount of knowledge I’ve accumulated has played a huge role in my quest to understand world order and my place in it. By my birth and upbringing, I am an Orthodox Christian, and from early childhood I studied the history of Christianity and the life of the great Russian saints. Later, I became interested in other religions too. In no way has it affected my religion, but received knowledge made me incline still more towards the opinion that, basically, absolutely all religions teach the same things: compassion, decency, non-violence, and, most importantly, Love. Love for one another, for the world, for life, and as the paramount Love — Love for God. Yet I still didn’t know how to reconcile this discovery with my faith within myself.

However, having set off on the path of comprehension, nobody proceeds without Higher Help. And apparently, thanks to this assistance, my childhood dream came true: in 1995, I visited India for the first time and spent my very first night in the town of Darjeeling. Perhaps it was here that true understanding came to me. It happened like this: Early in the morning, before dawn, I was woken by the singing of a mullah in a Muslim mosque right in front of my window. I’d barely had time to enjoy his amazing voice modulations when suddenly I heard the bells of the Church of St. Andrew, which was located nearby. Immediately after this, the chanting of mantras in a Hindu temple seamlessly blended into that morning music. I was absolutely captivated by the mystery of sounds — it was one melody of life: not in the least disparaging or denying each other, Muslim, Orthodox, and Hindu temples were all greeting dawn, welcoming the Sun — the source of human existence. Precisely then, I suddenly clearly understood that the division of people by race, nationality, and religion is simply a convention and that in fact we are united, we are the children of the only one Father. We have all been created to learn to live solely according to his laws.

A little later, I had the chance to visit the Temple of All Religions. It is the temple of the One Creator, within which there are shrines of all world religions. Icons, crosses, and images of the Buddha can be found here, as well as numerous Hindu gods, the Quran, Upanishads, sacred books and scriptures and much, much more. They do not belittle each other but simply emphasize the truth of each shrine, because these have all come from the One God. All of this has finally convinced me that my perception of the world is right. Remaining an Orthodox Christian, I have come to love all religions, among which none is unworthy. All of them teach Love. And Love indeed is the only thing that can move the world.

I happened to talk to a young Muslim woman and asked how she treats people of other faiths, to which she replied: “With love.” For me, it still seemed unusual, and I asked how she, as a Muslim, could treat other beliefs with love. Do you know what she replied?

“I have so much love in my heart, there is not enough space for hatred.”

I was amazed and captivated and later I became convinced that, fortunately, many people of various religions and beliefs are able to regard Love as being paramount.

And was it then you realized that you need to teach people to love? Was it then that you decided to devote yourself to creativity, bringing enlightenment and love?

It is hard to say exactly when that moment was. Since childhood, I have always wanted to help people. But I didn’t know how to do this. Having graduated from the history faculty, I began work as a teacher at a school, hoping that I could be of help to children. Then I decided to become a doctor, and even started to study for this profession. But human sufferings made me abandon my intention, as it now appeared that this was not my path to realizing my love for people. I had always been looking for my path and I finally found it. Books, music, poetry, and children’s fairy tales — all these, although minor, are my sincere contribution to serving humanity. And different people write to me: old and young, men and women, educated and not so educated. They all say the same thing — there is something in my creativity that has helped them understand themselves, cure themselves, and sometimes it has even given them the strength to carry on living.

Let us talk a little about your work. I know that the very first thing you ever wrote was the blank verse of a Celestial Warrior. And that this verse came to you out of nowhere; you just wanted to write something, and it happened.

Actually, not exactly. It so happened that my long reflections on how I can realize my dream — to serve people — had led me to understand that I needed to write. First I wrote poetry and prose, then music. I do not know where it came from, but my first attempt to write something (the poem of the Celestial Warrior) showed me that I could do it. And when I realized that books and music were my way, and since then, other lyrics and melodies came to me, quickly and easily.

Does this mean that you have some kind of special gift or, as they say, paranormal abilities?

Everyone has such abilities. It’s simply that in some people they are more developed than in others. I think that in the process of working with themselves, any person can discover various potential abilities. Personally, I have never thought about my paranormal abilities: I live the way I live, and I feel the way I feel. What is a paranormal phenomenon and what is not doesn’t concern me. It seems that having found my path in life, I am now in a light stream. It is through this that I obtain everything related to creativity: music, poems, beautiful melodic words and phrases.

One last question: What do you appreciate most of all in your present life?

Not only in the present but more than anything in my entire life, I appreciate Love. As far back as I can remember, I have always been full of love — firstly for my parents and for the grandmother I lost in my early childhood. I believed that they lived in heaven, so I loved both the sky and the sun that shone upon us. I loved the trees, a river, rain and my prayers. All of these reminded me of the fullness of life — and so, how could I not love? The longer I lived, the more I was filled with love: love for my children, for my profession, for the work that I do, and so on. Love is infinite and it alone brings true happiness. A person cannot be happy if they are unable to love. The Creator, the embodiment of True Love, could not have created us incapable of loving, for he made us in his own image and likeness.

28 January 2003 — Radio of Cheboksary

At sometime during their life, each person asks the question: What did I come into this world for and what will I leave behind me? Certainly, this question has come to me as well. Looking at the world around me, of course, I involuntarily thought: Can I change something in this, or should I accept that the voice of one person is the voice of no one, that I am a small person, and nothing depends on me but everything depends on the powers that be?

Yet, even a little bee does a lot of work during its very short life. From such microscopic offerings, probably, a treasury of the spirit of humanity as a whole is created, if each of us brings at least a grain of Goodness, Mercy, Compassion, and Understanding. And then there will be more of these qualities in the world...

Reflecting on what I could do, I just came to an impasse, because I could not even put three words together beautifully. I thought: “Well, someone writes poetry, someone cures.” I had always dreamt of becoming a doctor. Once in a school, in the village Bolshoe Yanikovo [Chuvash Republic, Russia], we wrote an essay: “Who I would like to become,” and I wrote about wanting to be a doctor — to reduce people’s suffering and on the part of doctors to offer patients more sympathy and heartiness. I wrote that my mother’s sister had died in childbirth, and that I would like people not to die. For some reason, I thought that doctors were all-powerful people. Surely, very much depends on them: sometimes a simple word treats maladies that medicine cannot cure.

While studying history at university, for some reason I always chose the topic “The Role of Personality in History” for term papers. Through my study, I realized that one person can change the historical course of a particular country and even sometimes of the entire world. Of course, these are outstanding divine personalities who can change the course of the evolution of the whole of humanity, and on this depends the Evolution of the entire Cosmos, too.

I went on to work at a school, teaching history. A new subject — “Person and Society” — had been introduced and I saw how children were keen to learn about world religions and about prominent personalities: Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Muhammad, the greatest saints, philosophers, and reformers. I would talk about them as living people. I would speak gently, and I never had to admonish my students, because the whole class listened attentively.

I noticed that this was bringing some kind of enlightenment to people, and I wanted to spread my knowledge in the wider world. Yet it was difficult for me to choose the path of a writer, although I did love literature.

The first line of my first book was born on 27 October 1992...

I felt the grief of people I didn’t know and may never come to know, but I thought that, by writing poems or an article, somehow I could connect with that person, and maybe make their life easier. When I began to write 77 Pearls Shining on the Beads of Time, I wanted to do it in the form of newspaper articles. I even had an image in my mind of an Afghan war veteran, who is alone, in a wheelchair. Abandoned by everybody, he was in a state of despair and hopelessness. I did not know what I could do to help him. And so, focusing on the image of a desperate person, I started to write the “Lesson of Love.” It was dedicated to Love and religious tolerance, since intolerance is the main cause of religious conflicts.

Going back to my first line, I was waiting — not passively, but I was as if breaking through something, I was praying, appealing to Heaven, Eternity, to help me serve humanity. Humanity — perhaps that is overstated, since service to others begins with helping our own neighbours. If you have assisted at least one person, you have taken your first step on the path of service to the Great Cause. Lying down to sleep, I would put a pen and a blank sheet of paper beside me, and all day they would be in front of me too. I prayed constantly: “O Lord, my life is a blank sheet of white paper. I don’t want to pass away without having written a single line. What would be the meaning of my existence then?”

And so, on 27 October, I woke up with the first phrase, resounding in my head as my own thought: “A Teacher was talking with the Fire for a long time...” This phrase seemed so amazing, I recorded it. Then came the following line: “And the Fire told him the parable of a Celestial Warrior.”

Line by line, I was breaking through layers, like a flower appearing through asphalt, and the “Parable of a Celestial Warrior,” who would come to help people, was born. People did not understand his Kindness, his Light, and his Service; they stoned him, he was crucified, slandered, and killed more than once. However, having gone back to Heaven, the warrior watched the Earth and had only one wish: to return and save humanity with Love. And I decided, following the example of this warrior, that I should endeavour to build my own life path, always trying to triumph by Love alone.

In recent times, many catastrophes have occurred on the Earth and ethnic conflicts never subside. What happens to the planet Earth, and to all of us who live here?

Looking back at the historical development of humanity, we see endless wars. Unfortunately, they have not ceased and, indeed, have acquired other forms. Currently many people, hiding behind the banner of their religion, incite ethnic conflicts. Yet any sensible person, understanding the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Zend Avesta, will know that there is no call for war. They will see, for example, that Islam means “submission.” Where are calls for war there? These are all inventions of those at the helm of power who, sheltering behind the names of the greatest Bearers of Light, launched wars.

If we look back at long ago Judea and the image of Christ, we will see nothing but Love. This Greatest Spirit brought the Word of Love. He brought the Law of Love. And what callous and evil souls they must have had to hide behind the name of Christ in order to start wars. How many wars with the blessing of the church leaders there were! And if it’s been said: “Love your enemies,” how blasphemous this whole inquisitorial system looks, which lasted for decades. Of course, the Inquisition and torture tools have already left the stage of history. But perhaps it is even more terrible when they attempt to morally destroy those who are destined to carry the Light, who elect as their cause the Service to the Light.

Two days ago on the radio “The Voice of Russia,” I issued an appeal to the Indian people, in association with Republic Day. And there was also a question about the causes of conflicts. I pointed out that they exist only because there is not enough Love in the world, and that we don’t follow the word of the Great Saints. After all, they told us of Love, of brotherly relations, and of religious tolerance. But unfortunately, debates arise around teachings and philosophical concepts instead of following them and through our example to be exactly what is in consonance with our soul. Indeed, the best way to honour the saints is to emulate their lives. And no matter where a saint lived, which name they bore, and which religion they represented, the essence of their messages was the same: service to humanity, bringing Good, Beauty, and Love into the world. I believe that if there is more Love, there will be no such conflicts.