e left early for the training, and as it turned out, it was not in vain. Andrew tried to bring us to the secret glade,
reassuring us that he knew the road. For about half an hour, we strolled about the streets of the village, teasing all the dogs around. Finally, desperately arguing with each other where the turn was, our company came to a small lake.
“You are a dunderhead!” Kostya said. “Where is your glade?”
“Theoretically it should be here,” Andrew shrugged his shoulders.
“Aha, so it was driven by a flood to the other side? Let’s go back.”
On the way back we bumped into Eugene.
“Finally we have found at least one other living soul,” Kostya sighed with relief.
“Have you been lost in our Shanghai?” Eugene poked fun at us.
“Yeah, we relied on the memory of this dunderhead.”
“Where is the glade?” Andrew asked.
“Over there,” Eugene waved his hand in a completely different direction.
“I told you we turned to the wrong way! There was no hillside,” Andrew reproached Kostya.
“And how did you happen to come here?” Tatyana asked Eugene.
“Don’t you know? I can spiritually locate any man, I need only think about it.”
“Don’t joke with us,” Kostya said with a smile. “But really what are you doing here?”
“Do not ask me twice. I live here, l-i-v-e!” Eugene said in a funny way. “I had just left and saw your flock rushing to the lake. I didn’t even have time to open my mouth. Well, I thought, they will figure it out soon and go back. Just so! I saw you coming back five minutes later. I went to the road so that you didn’t take me for a sign-post.”
We beamed with smiles after such a successful meeting and arrived together at the glade. In that secluded nook, created with love by nature, almost everyone was there, including Sensei and Volodya. We loudly joined the others, greeting them.
Having noticed that it was again Eugene who brought our company to the place, Sensei asked jokingly, “Has this muddle-head organized an excursion for you again?”
“No, we have a new one now,” Kostya nodded to Andrew. “This one surpassed even Eugene.”
And then Kostya started to tell eloquently about our adventures. He was so carried away by the overall laughter of the crowd, he became so expressive that he blurted out at the end something unnecessary what we had decided to hide from Sensei: “Well, really! Now imagine entrusting him with disciples after that. He will lead them into such a dead end that he will not know how to get out of it.”
“Which disciples?” Sensei caught on the word, although it seemed to me he had not been listening too carefully before.
“Yeah,” Kostya became confused after he realized he had said too much. “There was a story…”
“Which story?” Sensei showed interest.
Kostya could do nothing but reluctantly tell all the facts. Andrew also joined the conversation, making an attempt to justify his behaviour with good intentions. Sensei shook his head after hearing all this baby-talk.
“You see… There is an old very ancient legend: Once upon a time a king had an only son. One day he heard that there was a great martial arts Master who was famous even among kings for his Wisdom. He was said to work wonders because he made an excellent Master from an ordinary village boy in just one year. The king made up his mind to send his son to him.
“One year passed and the king asked, ‘Well, has he grasped the way of the warrior?’
“‘Not yet,’ the Master replied. ‘He is too self-confident and he wastes his time on pride. Come back in five years.’
“In five years, the king asked the Master the same thing.
“‘Not yet. His eyes are still full of hatred, and his energy boils over excessively.’
“Another five years passed. The Master said to the king, ‘Now he is ready. Look at him! He is so strong, as if he were carved from a stone. His spirit is stainless. His internal virtues are full and perfect. His challenge will not be accepted by any warrior, as they would run away in fear just from his glance.’
And the king asked the Master, ‘Why did it take so long with my son? He is much smarter than that village boy.’
“And the Master replied, ‘It is not the mind but the heart is important. If your heart is open and your thoughts are pure, your spirit is stainless. And this is the main thing in the way of the warrior… The village boy came to me with a stainless spirit, and I just had to teach him the technique. Your son has spent years learning this Wisdom. Without this source of power, he would not be able to make a single step on the way of the warrior.’
“Rejoicing at his son’s success the king said, ‘Now I see that he deserves to take a throne.’
“‘No, father,’ the young warrior replied. ‘I have found something greater. Before my mind was limited only to material wishes, but now it is endless in spiritual cognition. The greatest power, all the gold of the world, fades compared to it like a gray dust under the foot of the wanderer. And the wanderer is not interested in the dust, he is fully devoted with each step to the new discoveries over the horizon.’”
Andrew hung his head ashamed. There was a long pause. But then Nikolai Andreevich joined our company and the discussion switched to other problems, including the meditations practiced by us at home.
“I felt again this paresthesia,” Kostya said. “Is this all right?”
“Of course. What is the main point in it? You have to feel these ants that appear with the first breaths in your head. You have to feel how they ‘run’ inside of your arms and, most importantly, how they jump out of the centre of your palms to the earth. That is, you have to feel your inward and outward breath. And you should not have any outside thoughts at all.”
“This is the most difficult thing to do. When I concentrate on the tip of my nose, the ants start coming to my head, catching on each other. And the most amazing thing is that I even do not notice when they appear.”
“Right you are. It means that we are not used to controlling our thoughts in our daily life. That is why they guide us to any direction they want, confusing us in their ‘logical’ chains. And the uncontrolled thought may lead mainly to negative things as it is managed by the animal nature of people. That’s why there are different spiritual practices and meditations, to learn to control the thought first of all.”
We talked a little more about the striking points of our home practice. And then it came to the next meditation.
“Today we will unite two parts of the meditation into one,” Sensei said, “so that you understand how it should work and try to reach it in your individual training. Now find a comfortable position…”
Following his words, we relaxed as usual and concentrated on the meditation practice. First, we concentrated on the tip of the nose as the last time. Then the Teacher said, “Do not distract your attention and vision from the tip of the nose. Take an inward breath through the bottom of your stomach, through your stomach, breast… Outward breath through shoulders, hands, chakras of the palms to the earth. With the outward breath, a small light flares up more and more. Breathe in… Breathe out… Breathe in… Breathe out… Concentrate on the nose tip… Breathe in…”
I was completely confused. As soon as I had concentrated on the ‘streamlet’, which I could feel clearly as partial movement through the arms, I immediately lost control over my nose tip. And as soon as I had concentrated on the ‘flashing’ nose tip, my ‘streamlet’ disappeared. It all happened when my ‘outside’ thoughts came to me. I was unable somehow to unite it all. During one of my next attempts, I heard Sensei’s voice, which informed us of the end of the meditation. As it turned out, this incident happened not only with me but with my friends as well.
“It is natural,” Sensei said. “You should not think it over, just observe. Then you will succeed.”
It seemed completely unreal to me. But I was encouraged by the fact that Nikolai Andreevich and the senior guys didn’t have any problems with this meditation. “It means that not everything is so hopeless,” I reassured myself. “If they can do it, why can’t I do the same? I just also have to practice hard. That is the point.” There I caught myself on the fact that even in my thoughts I had started to speak with the words of Sensei. While I was reflecting on this, one of the guys asked a question.
“So you want to say that the way to self-recognition starts with observing yourself and your thoughts?”
“Of course. Self-observance and control over your thoughts can be practiced little by little during everyday training. And for this you need an elementary knowledge base. It’s a natural way of any training, either physical or spiritual. Just a simple example. A man lifts a weight of 20 kg. If he trains for a month, he will easily lift 25 kg, and so on. The same happens at the spiritual level. If you are prepared, it will be much easier for you to master more difficult techniques.”
“But there are a lot of different meditations and modifications. It’s difficult to understand which one leads to the peak,” Kostya as usual made a show of his erudition.
“It’s too far to reach the peak. All these meditations that exist in the world practice are just an alphabet that has been never a secret. And the real knowledge leading to the peak starts from the ability to put together words from this alphabet and to understand their meaning. Reading the books is a privilege of the chosen ones.”
“Not so bad! Everything is so complicated,” Andrew said.
“There is nothing complicated in it. You just need the desire.”
“And if you have the desire but hesitate?” Slava asked.
“If you have doubts, someone should beat your head with a heavy hammer so that you understand that you’re a dunderhead. A person who hesitates is very much stuck in the material world, in the logic and egoism of his thoughts, his mind… if he possesses one at all.”
The guys smiled at these words, and Sensei went on, “If you sincerely strive towards self-recognition, with pure belief in your soul, you will surely succeed. It’s a law of nature… And the spiritually developed individual will succeed even more.”
Andrew said with a thoughtful view, “Well, the alphabet is clear, but I don’t quite understand about the composition of words. Is that also a meditation?”
“Let’s say it’s something higher - a spiritual practice, an ancient primordial technique that allows us to work not only with the consciousness but, what is more important, with unconsciousness. There is a set of certain meditations that lead to a respective spiritual level… It’s simple. The main point is that an individual should overcome his guard, his material thinking, with the desire to conquer the whole world… The same eternal truth as usual, and the same eternal stumblingblock. If an individual is able to overcome it, he will become human.”
“I wonder, if someone reaches perfection through training his body, does it mean something?” Yura asked.
“It’s one of the ways of alphabet learning.”
“Recently we watched video about martial arts with Yura,” Ruslan inserted into conversation. “And before it they showed a documentary on people’s achievements in self-perfection of their body. Just imagine such a trick, one guy put a spear edge to his throat, fixed its handle to a minivan and pushed it without hands, not injuring himself. Another one lay on his back under heavy things. And nothing happened! The third one smashed bricks with a blow of his hand. But the most interesting was in the end. They took an ordinary bull bone and poured highly concentrated acid over it. Of course, it was destroyed. Then they poured this acid over a man. It immediately destroyed his clothes but brought no harm to his body.”
“Incredible!” Andrew exclaimed. “I can’t believe it!”
“It’s not unusual,” Sensei said, evenly as always. “The potential of a human is limited by his fantasy.”
“And what was that, Qigong?”
“Well, let’s say, aside from Qigong, there are a lot of similar techniques. But the source of the knowledge, including Qigong, is the same. That is, this is a work with energy ‘Qi’ – the constructive energy of the air.”
“I have read somewhere that ‘Qi’ is life energy, and you call it constructive. Why?” Kostya asked.
“Because energies, chakras, channels, and even energy centers in different teachings are known by different names. For example, under the energy ‘Chi’ in yoga, they mean noble recoverable energy. But in the science of Lotus under the ‘Chi,’ initially it meant a powerful destructive energy. The same is true with ‘Qi’.”
After keeping silent for a while, the Teacher added, “People just assume but they don’t possess precise information about the real nature of this knowledge. Therefore they mix up the meanings. As they say, it’s better to stand on the head than to hang in the air.”
“Hmm, that’s true,” Volodya agreed. “If to paraphrase my favorite poster that is an eyesore to all in front of our house, ‘There is no such obstacle that we can’t create for ourselves!’”
The guys smiled.
“What is Qigong in relation to the art of Lotus?” Andrew came back again to the serious issues.
“For you to understand it, Qigong like kindergarten and the Art of Lotus is like an academy. One of the first stages in learning the highest art is full control over the thoughts. If you can control your thoughts, everything will be under your control.
“Oh, it will be possible to…” Slava started to talk with excitement.
“No, impossible, because you will control your thought. That is, you will not be able to do something negative and wrong. That is the whole sense. We learn and practice Qigong, but in the Art of Lotus we don’t train, we recall all things hidden in our soul.
“And those body phenomena we have seen in the film, is it possible for us to learn them?” Ruslan asked, thinking about something.
“Of course. It’s easy if you can use this energy in the right way.”
“And what is needed for it?”
“Elementary skills, concentration of breathing, a certain understanding of the essence of this phenomenon…”
“I just can’t grasp it,” Jura said in a thoughtful way. “How did that guy manage to break bricks with his hand?”
“Did you want him to break them with another part of the body?” Eugene poked fun at him.
“It’s possible to break them with another part as well,” Sensei smiled, “if you want strongly enough to do so. The point is that with a certain concentration and breathing exercises you can accumulate the Qi energy in any part of the body, in this case in the hand. And at the moment of the blow, the chakra opens up in the palm, and all this power is released to break something. It’s very important, I say it again, the very process of mind concentration, that is, the process of focused concentration.
“Does it have any effect on the change in the level of brain activity?” Nikolai Andreevich asked.
“Sure. It launches a very interesting process in the brain. To put it in medical terms, a beta rhythm may be registered at the moment of the blow preparation and full mental concentration. A few minutes before the blow itself, an individual stops thinking about what he is doing. At this moment, his mind activity changes from beta rhythm to alpha rhythm, and it’s similar with the shock state. In this state, a blow is being struck. It is like a stoppage of time, perhaps. It’s not difficult. Just physics. That’s all.”
“We have one soldier in our platoon who breaks bricks,” Volodya joined the discussion. “The others tried to imitate him but didn’t succeed except with board punching.”
“It’s natural,” the Teacher uttered. “The mistake of many people is that they try to think too much, to analyze the situation. That’s why they are not successful.”
“Can you break bricks?” Andrew asked, unable to resist a temptation to see everything with his own eyes.
“It’s easy, just take a hammer and go forth,” Sensei joked.
“No, I meant with a palm,” Andrew specified.
“Why should I dirty up my hands? It’s better to break them with a piece of paper.”
“With a piece of paper?”
“Yes. I’m not sure about the bricks, but if it’s something wooden, easily. Does anybody have a sheet of paper?”
We started hastily looking for it in our pockets. Volodya tore a piece of paper out of his notebook, about five centimeters wide. Yura found a dry branch not far from us, around 3-4 centimeters in diameter.
“Does anybody want to try?” the Teacher suggested.
The guys in turn waved a piece of paper over the stick like true card-players, but nothing changed. Volodya had to tear off another piece of paper. Sensei wanted to give a piece of paper to me and Tatyana.
“No, no, no,” we waved our hands. “If these guys were unable to do it, what we can say of our muscles?”
“Muscles don’t play any role. It can be done by anybody who doesn’t doubt his abilities.”
With these words, the Teacher gripped a piece of paper between his forefinger and thumb in his outstretched hand. He concentrated and started to do a range of breathing exercises. After that, the paper started to vibrate a bit, its movement was gradually slowed down, and soon it stopped moving at all, becoming straight. In less than a minute, Sensei raised his hand slowly and cut the stick with one smooth movement. The cut looked as if it were made by something iron and sharp.”
“Gosh!” our amazed group exclaimed.
We looked first at the branch, then at the paper, and after that at Sensei with one silent question, “How did he do it?”
Nikolai Andreevich assumed with doubts in his voice, “Was it a trick? You might have broken the branch with your finger in the very last moment.”
“Really?” It was Sensei’s turn to get surprised. “Have you ever seen a trick like this?”
He threw a piece of paper that went into the nearest tree just like a knife blade, complete with a metal sound. We had hardly put our lower jaws back in place as we rushed to the tree, as if there were an answer to the eternal question from Shakespeare, ‘To be or not to be?’ Nikolai Andreevich himself took out a paperblade, even tasting it. It was circulated. This piece of paper seemed to be an ordinary iron plate, with all typical features. We stood completely at a loss, unable to believe our own eyes. Suddenly the plate in Slava’s hands started to lose its shape, gradually turning into an ordinary piece of paper. Slava noticed it, threw it into the air, and jumped quickly away with a piglet scream, causing the same reaction not only in us but in the senior guys as well. Volodya was the first who collected himself. He carefully picked up the former page of his notebook and said in a bass voice, “Why are you making noise? It’s just a piece of paper.”
We looked at the Teacher.
“It’s all right. It has just lost its power.”
When we calmed our stormy emotions, Sensei explained, “You have seen one more feature of the energy Qi - its ability to accumulate ions of metal. Since Qi is constructive energy, I concentrated and mentally inserted ions of iron into this piece of paper. My thought was implemented by Qi which, through my breath, brought these ions from the air into the paper. That’s why the paper turned into a metal plate for a time. Qi is a free energy - that’s why it dissolved in a few minutes, thus returning this plate to its original form.”
“Great!” Ruslan said with admiration. “And is it possible to Qi something like 2 kg of gold?”
The guys burst out laughing.
“Theoretically it’s possible.” Sensei smiled. “But in reality it’s like the saying in the Winnie the Pooh cartoon, ‘If there is honey, there is no honey.’ Remember physics: in order to retain ions of metal, you need strong molecular links. And these ions are connected by the energy Qi mixed up with psychic energy. Qi is the connecting link between ions of metal, and psychic energy creates any shape for a short period of time. But there will be no density at all.”
“Wow!” A hum buzzed through the crowd.
“That is the practical use!” Kostya discovered for himself. “And here I was thinking what’s the use of all of this? That’s great!”
“We can do so many things with it,” Ruslan said with a smile.
Everyone’s eyes shone with joy, and the guys started to discuss how to make use of this knowledge. Sensei observed all our excitement, keeping silent. And the more we boosted the situation in jokes, the gloomier and more serious his face became. Finally he said, “I see, guys, that you have too much animal nature in yourselves.”
“We’re just joking,” Ruslan uttered, trying to make an excuse for all of us.
“Many a true word is spoken in jest.”
“Right,” Volodya agreed while he was silently observing our jokes. “Otherwise it will be the same story as with the ninjas.”
We didn’t understand whether he was joking or telling the truth.
“What do you mean?” Andrew asked.
“What I’ve said,” Volodya said in a bass voice.
We looked at Sensei with a question in our eyes.
“Yes, there was such a story,” Sensei said. “Once a whole clan of ninjas was liquidated because they used spiritual knowledge with selfish motives.”
“We have not heard about it,” Ruslan said. “Tell us.”
“Yes, tell us,” we backed him up.
“There is nothing to tell… So long as ninjas trained their body and mastered their skills, they flourished. Nobody paid attention to them, actually. They were just hired assassins. But when ninjas started to master spiritual practices and learnt something, they started to use this knowledge for their material enrichment. It was a real hour of triumph for ninjas, so to say, their heyday and decline at the same time. They won fame immediately as invincible superkillers. Due to spiritual practices, ninjas developed their extraordinary abilities. They were able to turn everything into a weapon: any piece of paper, anything available. They learnt perfectly how to camouflage, to jump into a space and from a very big height, without any harm to their health and so on.”
“That’s great!” Slava burst out.
“Do not admire them,” the Teacher said after Slava’s exclamation. “And moreover do not create idols from them. They were just a gang of hired assassins who killed from behind, from an ambush. They were foul dregs and nothing else. They were directed by their material nature… They didn’t have any honor. And honor is one of the features of the general spirituality of a human, not just of a warrior, that is, when he is guided by high moral values. A man without honor is nobody and nothing.
“And what happened to the ninjas?” Jura asked.
“As is usual in such cases, when they started to use spiritual practices for gaining their own material enrichment, they were liquidated.”
The guys bombarded Sensei with questions. But Ruslan was the most insistent of all, “How did they get this spiritual knowledge if they used it for their own devious purposes?”
“They didn’t get it. Ninjas stole it. More precisely, they wormed out the technique of meditations through deceit. And then they grew this seed of knowledge themselves. But they used it for bad things. That’s why they were punished.”
“Who punished them? You said yourself that they reached such a height that they became invulnerable to people,” Andrew put his question to Sensei.
Sensei grinned and cited his favorite saying, “You see, for every Vijai there is a Rajah… If there is military science, there is somebody who guides it. The same thing happens with spiritual practices. If there are spiritual practices, there is someone who controls the use of these practices. This knowledge is thus called spiritual as it is meant for spiritual enrichment of the individual, not material enrichment, especially not through killing living beings.”
“I have read that ninja schools still exist,” Kostya remarked.
“Yes, but the truth is, modern ninja schools are just a miserable parody of those that existed in ancient times. They still have their techniques and instruments. But all this training is focused on the material physical level. And the door to further perfection is closed. As the law says: spiritual for spiritual… And if you guys strive to learn the Art for material profits or satisfaction of your megalomania,” Sensei shook his head, gazing upon us, “no good will come of it.”
“Why?” Slava asked.
“First, you will never learn anything. Second, if, of course, you are lucky enough, you will gain at least schizophrenia.”
“Yes, it’s a nice future,” Ruslan said smiling.
“Well, there is no such threat for you,” Eugene said chuckling.
“But we are not going to kill anybody,” Andrew was looking for excuses.
“Physically, maybe not. But your thoughts contain too much of a beast. And this is the first step towards aggression and violence.”
“What should we do now?”
“Control your thoughts every second.”
Keeping silent for a while, Sensei added, looking at Andrew, “Have you ever thought about who you are in fact? Who you are in essence? Have you thought how you perceive the surrounding world? Not from the point of view of physiology, but from the point of view of life… Who are you? How do you see, how do you hear, why do you feel, who in you understands and, who exactly perceives? Look inside of yourself.”
Sensei continued addressing the guys, “Have you ever thought at all about the infinity of your consciousness? About what is the thought? How is it born, and where does it go? Have you thought about your thoughts?”
“Well,” Andrew became confused, “I think all the time, reflect on things.”
“It seems to you that it’s you who thinks and it’s you who reflects. But are you sure that these are your own thoughts?”
“Whose else? This body is mine, therefore the thoughts are mine as well.”
“Try to analyze them, if they are yours, at least for one day. Where do they come from, to where do they disappear? Dig through your thoughts thoroughly, and what will you see there except shit? Nothing. Just violence, just ugly things, just the desire to gorge yourself, to put on fashionable clothes, to steal, to earn, to buy, to raise your megalomania. And that’s all! You will see for yourself that all thoughts generated by your body end with one thing: the material supply around you. But is it really you inside yourself? Look into your soul and you will face the beautiful and eternal, your true “I”. All this external vanity around is just nonsense… Are you aware of it?”
We stood silent. Suddenly the scene seemed very familiar to me. It already happened to me once, in exactly the same way down to the smallest details: this word-for-word discussion, and this glade, and these bright stars, and most importantly, this voice familiar to the innermost of my heart, this kind face… I knew that it had already happened. But when, where? I tried to exert my memory, but I was unable to recollect it. I shook my head a little to get my mind out of this deadlock and back on track.
Sensei went on, “You have lived 16, 22, 30 years, and you, about 40 years. But each of you, do you remember how you lived? No, there are just some miserable scraps connected by emotional splashes.”
“Yes,” Nikolai Andreevich said in a thoughtful way, “life passed so quickly that I didn’t manage to notice it. All the time I spent studying, working, dealing with insignificant, endless family problems… There was no time to think about myself, about my soul, since there were always urgent matters.”
“Exactly,” Sensei agreed. “You think about the future and about the past. But you live in this very moment called ‘now’. And what is now? It’s a precious second of life, it’s a gift of God that should be rationally used. Tomorrow is a step into uncertainty. It’s not improbable that it may be your last step in this life, a step to the abyss, to infinity. And what will happen there?
“Each of you believes that he has plenty of time on the Earth, that’s why you don’t think about death. But is it true? Each of you may die any second, for any reason, as on the one hand you are a biological being. But on the other hand, you are not just a biological being, you are a human who possesses a particle of eternity. Having realized it, you will understand that your fate is in your hands and a lot of it depends on you, not only here, but also there. Just think it over: who are you, a perfect biorobot or a human, an animal or a spiritual creature? Who?”
“Well, a human… maybe,” Ruslan said.
“Exactly, maybe. And what is a human, in fact, have you thou