Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (19 page)

It was when the professor’s assistant started talking about the nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov that the gap between the two worlds yawned again. I knew about him. A great librarian, the illegitimate son of a prince, he lived in one room, wore the same clothes all year round, and gave his salary away to the poor. Fedorov fascinated his contemporaries, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—
The Brothers Karamazov
was said to have been inspired by his ideas. But for me he was just an amusing footnote in the history of Russian philosophy. Deeply Christian, he took the notion of “the brotherhood of man” so literally that he proposed mankind stop procreating and study how to resurrect the dead. He believed it was man’s task to orchestrate nature and the cosmos in order to create paradise on earth.

Now here was the professor’s assistant, telling me that Fedorov’s grand vision had captured the imagination of a whole tradition of Russia’s natural scientists. The philosopher had dreamed about the colonization of space generations before anyone else. That was Russia’s destiny. That was where man’s path to immortality lay. Fedorov taught the man they call the father of Russia’s space program, the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. And through this hero of Soviet science the philosopher’s mystical and messianic view of space passed into popular consciousness in the Soviet period. Tsiolkovsky also wrote science fiction, and in his stories he developed many of Fedorov’s ideas about the colonization of space. Tsiolkovsky shared his mentor’s belief that the universe was constantly evolving and full of intelligent life. He maintained that man needed to develop his telepathic abilities in order to open up the secrets of the universe.

Among the scientists who shared aspects of this resistance to the Western scientific approach was the celebrated earth scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, said the professor’s assistant. While Western earth scientists tended to study separate elements of the natural world, what mattered most was their interrelationship, Vernadsky maintained. Long before James Lovelock’s “Gaia,” Vernadsky not only coined the word “biosphere” to describe the unified view of nature and the cosmos toward which he believed the natural sciences should aspire, he also built on Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of a “noosphere,” where man’s thinking became a force that interacted with the “biosphere,” changing its chemical structure.

Since the fall of communism such concepts had become part of the wider currency of intellectual and spiritual thinking in Russia. Its adherents, who called themselves Cosmists, maintained that this “noosphere” was growing more important all the time, particularly thanks to the Internet. Professor Kaznacheev was one of the pillars of Cosmist thought.

Having sketched out this grand framework, the professor’s assistant proffered an invitation which I later realized was a test, a way of determining whether I should be allowed to meet the professor. His laboratory contained a device they had developed that allowed ordinary people like me to understand what it meant to be in touch with the cosmos. The device reduced the magnetic field which covers the earth’s surface, he explained. By so doing it allowed ordinary people to share the experience of shamans and psychics. Would I like to try it out?

Having come this far, I was hardly going to refuse. I followed him down flights of stairs, to a damp room in the basement guarded with triple locks. There, he invited me to crawl inside a fur-lined sleeping bag in a huge metal cylinder.

What happened next takes me to the very edge of the sayable. After lying in the dark for a while, my heart started leaping about like a cricket in a box. Then everything went calm and the images began. A dark column seemed to rise out of my forehead. I found myself standing in a deep, dark canyon. This canyon came and went, alternating with a spiral. When that faded away, a brightly colored fairground carousel appeared. There were people riding the whirling wooden trains, cars, and animals. It was a merry scene, at least to start with. But even as I watched, something started going wrong. The movement of the carousel became chaotic, alarming. The painted wooden animals and engines were slipping. The center was not holding; it was falling apart.

Then this sequence faded and I found myself back at the bottom of that great dark spiral, which in turn evolved back into a crevasse. Black rocks rose up on either side and there was light streaming down on me. I basked in that light. This, this I wanted never to end. But eventually this image faded, too. I lay not knowing where my body finished and the world outside began. Everything around me seemed to be spun out of light. The rhythm of my breathing seemed to have changed. It was as if I was learning to breathe for the first time, learning to support this lightness of being through the way I breathed.

I climbed out of the cylinder reluctantly. When I described this magical experience to the professor’s assistant he seemed delighted. He not only asked me if I would like to meet the professor, he even offered me a lift back to Novosibirsk in the Institute’s chauffeur-driven black Volga. He also lent me that book about psychotronic weapons.

The prospect of trying to explain any of this to Natasha and Igor was more than I could face. I asked the driver to leave me at the city’s picture gallery. There, I sat among the pictures for a long time, trying to hold on to this luminous void, which seemed so vivid with energy and meaning. Only once had I experienced anything similar. Not long ago, after falling seriously ill on a skiing holiday in the Alps, I floated up and soared over the mountains, leaving my body behind on the bed in our chalet. Looking down on the places we had skied that day, I surveyed the distant valley below, with its neat arrangement of toy houses, fields, and roads. It seemed as if I were a particle of light, traveling through the air, free even to pass through mountains. It was enough for me to think of a place to find myself there. On my favorite Dorset hillside I planed the air currents, imitating the buzzards I had watched there over the years. I had come back from that experience reluctantly.

All afternoon I stayed in the gallery. When I returned to Natasha and Igor’s I said nothing about my day, and tried to hide that book. But Natasha, noticing my furtiveness, became inquisitive.

RIDING TWO REALITIES

The following morning I tiptoed out of the flat while Natasha and Igor were still asleep and waited outside a gutted arms factory for the Institute of Cosmic Anthropo-ecology’s black Volga to pick me up.

I was caught in the Slavic version of some Whitehall farce. It was not alarms and assignations I was dodging between, but different realities. On the one hand, there were Natasha and Igor, struggling out of the lower depths of Natasha’s self-imposed purgatory. On the other, there was the magic cylinder and this parallel reality up the hill in Akademgorod. Where Natasha’s father, the builder, fitted into this farce I dreaded to think.

We drove up out of the stacks and grime to the professor’s house in Akademgorod. A pretty wooden dacha, it stood in a clearing surrounded by pines. The garden was a sheet of white and blue—drifts of flowering lilies of the valley and clouds of brunnera. The scent of lilies was heavy on the air. It was sunny, and as we drove up the professor was standing by his front door, hand in hand with his little daughter. His face was rugged and his white hair stood up in a tuft in front. He stood with his feet well apart, as if braced for shocks.

We settled in his study on the top floor, looking out over the tall trees. I apologized for being scientifically illiterate. “Oh, don’t worry! I much prefer talking to writers and other artists from the West—your scientists are so conditioned by their tradition that they think I’m talking rubbish.” Had it not been for my experience in the cylinder, I would have thought so, too.

“My research belongs to a very Russian tradition which goes back to philosophers like Khomyakov, Fedorov, and Soloviev,” he said, referring to leading nineteenth-century Slavophiles. “What they all had in common was that they refused to believe you had to choose between religion and science—theirs was a God-centered universe. A whole line of natural scientists in Russia have maintained that tradition—men like Vernadsky and Tsiolkovsky. We call it the cosmos, they called it ‘the divine’—they’re much the same.”

Then he smiled: “I gather you had a good time in the hypomagnetic chamber? What you experienced is fairly typical. The chamber allows people to undergo the experience of shamans. To communicate with the cosmos. Let me explain …” The professor’s intellectual mentor, he went on, was a brilliant astrophysicist called Nikolai Kozyrev, whose career was destroyed when he was sent to the Gulag. From the sky over his prison camp Kozyrev observed that some of the stars seemed to be interacting with one another. It seemed to him that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics were not sufficient to explain what was going on. The universe seemed to be communicating with itself. Kozyrev proposed that there was a third force at work, a carrier of information. He called it “time-energy.” Kozyrev concluded that the universe was a single, conscious system within which living matter was constantly exchanging information on every level from cells to stars.

“That’s where my own research as a biologist began,” the professor went on. “I designed a series of experiments to find out whether, at the cellular level, it was possible to prove Kozyrev’s theory. I set out to try to isolate this dimension which, if it existed, was operating beyond the biochemical, and the cybernetic, too. Could cells communicate information to one another holographically, as Kozyrev was suggesting? I found that they could—and I repeated these findings in more than three hundred experiments. I found that one group of cells could transmit a virus, a toxin, or radiation to other healthy cells of the same type. They could do this over distance, in conditions where this could not have happened through infection or contamination. I also found that healthy cells could ‘protect’ themselves from long-distance penetration from damaged cells by means of a field immune system.”

The professor proceeded to tease out the implications of Kozyrev’s proposition. If all matter was constantly exchanging information, how about man? Why did he seem unable to do this? Or at least why was this capability limited to a few rare individuals, whom we called shamans? He found that at places on the earth’s surface where the electromagnetic field which covers the earth was at its thinnest, people’s ability to communicate at long distance was much stronger. Indeed, sacred sites all over the world were always located in such places. That was why civilizations always congregated in sacred spaces, he concluded: they went there to reinforce their direct contact with the cosmos. His theory was that consciousness had originally been communicated to proto-man from the cosmos. The hypomagnetic cylinder reproduced conditions similar to those found at these sacred sites.

In the course of our evolution, Kaznacheev explained, this original capacity of ours for communication with the divine became overlaid by the development of speech and reasoning skills. But it surfaced still in exceptionally gifted individuals, he said, and in times of crisis, too. “What do you mean by that?” I asked, thinking of Zarafshan. “Well, we found that ordinary people, often whole communities, rediscovered that capacity in times of emergency. In the last few years we’ve noticed it happening quite a lot.

“Do you understand what I am telling you?” the professor said, suddenly excited. “It’s really important! We probably understand less than one percent of what there is to know about living matter on the planet. Ninety-five percent of what we know is about inert, nonliving matter—chemistry and genetics. The irony is that just as all these things, like information technology, transport, and migration, are bringing our world together, we’re facing an intellectual black hole, a crisis in the state of knowledge!

“If we’re going to survive the crisis, we’ve got to understand that we’re part of a living cosmos, one informed by a higher consciousness. Our planet’s evolving—it’s facing a crucial stage of transformation—one which is only going to come about through mankind’s positive intervention.”

The professor’s mood darkened, and he became visibly upset. “The role of ‘time-energy’ in this transformation is crucial. It’s a power that can be used for good or ill. That’s what I need to talk to you about …” Russia had been in the forefront of research into psychotronic weapons, he explained. But ever since Soviet funding had dried up, this information had been in danger of falling into the wrong hands. The Americans had invited him over, rolled out the red carpet for him, he said darkly. But it soon became clear that it was the military potential of his research that interested them. He refused the funding.

The money was all in the West now, he went on. But people in the West were so far away from understanding such matters that they could not even take the prospect of psychic weapons seriously. The West’s military was pursuing its own researches, of course, but so successful were they in keeping it secret that few people had any idea how close they were to being able to exploit its full “diabolical potential.” The dangers of nuclear power paled by comparison, he hinted ominously.

In Russia, some of his former colleagues in this field had solved their financial problems by selling their knowledge, and not just for military purposes. The technology also had enormous therapeutic and healing potential. Every day people came from all over Russia to ask for his help. He was happy to give it, he said, but he would not accept money: to do so was to start on a slippery slope, to make himself vulnerable to all sorts of pressures. The question he had to ask me was this: did I know of any safe sources of funding in the West?

This time I refused a lift and traveled back down the hill to Novosibirsk on one bus after another to get back to Natasha and Igor’s. I needed time to think. I liked the professor. He was an endearing figure. With his tanned face and strong, stocky figure, he looked less like a scientist than like an explorer from another, more innocent age. I had enjoyed hearing him talk about his intelligent universe. I had listened as if to a bedtime story, happily, uncritically.