Altai, Belovodia & the Physics of Time

If there have been people during the last few days visiting this blog in the hope of a new post, I apologize for the unusually long delay in putting up this one: I had no internet connection for all this time… Now that the technical aspect is again working properly, here is the new post at last!  And this long interruption has given me time to start also on the next post, which then should be ready to be posted soon as well.

Having again mentioned young Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi towards the end of my previous post, I felt I had to re-read once again, still with the same keen interest, her first book, ‘Entering the Circle’, looking especially for the moments when she has an unmistakable contact with her soul, something she herself learns to notice because of the specific ‘symptoms’ (my word) she experiences when that happens.
This is very important, so I decided to make of it my next post – this one – for it constitutes a major difference with Castaneda’s description of his training with Don Juan, Don Genaro etc, where no such contact with his soul happens at all, it all concerns only the occult planes and the contact with the powerful but obscure and dangerous beings and forces that, whether we are conscious of it or not, do try to invade us and make puppets out of us.

During Olga’s few days away from her big hospital in Novosibirsk and inside the two remote villages of Siberian Altai where she goes, she too will encounter  those hostile occult realities she has had to face already through some schizophrenic patients; this time, once back in his Altai village, her ex-patient Nikolai, the young man who has guided her and her sick friend Anna there, realizes that he isn’t becoming insane as he feared, but simply being changed into the new ‘kam’ (the real Altai word instead of ‘shaman’) needed for replacing his uncle Mamoush, the old kam who just died; the problem is, Nikolai’s normally friendly consciousness inherits at the same time the devious intentions towards Olga from Mamoush, for perpetuating the kam-lineage he and now also Nikolai belong to; but in the other village, Olga’s own newfound feminine mentor, the healer Umaï, although strange and sometimes scary in her behavior while she quite effectively cures an Altai woman and then also Anna, is actually a wise, warm and often smiling woman-kam from another lineage, dedicated to good; she protects Olga and very soon makes her discover the Spirit Lake within herself and her true Spirit in it, ever to guide her if she calls upon it.

The images, symbols and terminology aren’t the same as the ones from, say, the traditional spirituality of India, but still the inner realities perceived and the characteristic feelings are essentially the same, so I’ll summarize the part leading to the Spirit Lake, and then quote from what is said about it:
As conscious individualized energy, entranced Olga experiences herself at first as the undulating smoke rising from the fire lit in the middle of the isba’s earthen floor on which she lies, then as the fire itself going up, then as a snake struggling to come out of some very deep, resistant waters, desperately swimming up and up to reach the surface:
‘Finally the moment comes when I break out of the water and float on the surface of the ocean. Instantly it becomes a place of peace and calm. I love this ocean and could float like this in it forever. Nothing disturbs me. There are no thoughts other than appreciation for this water that now holds me up. I begin swimming. I swim and swim until I see the coastline. I realize that land meets that mysterious body of water on all sides and that I am swimming in a big round lake. Now I notice what is on the coast. It looks like a city. I can see buildings, cars and people. Panic takes me again. This is my city, my friends and my relatives. I don’t want to go back to them. I want to perceive nothing but the soft, flowing water.
A soft, feminine voice comes through my panic. “Be calm. I will talk to you now.” It is Umaï’s voice. I don’t know what language she speaks, but I know it is Umaï and somehow I understand her words.
“Now you are in your inner space, the place of the Spirit Lake. This is your first conscious time here. Each of us has this inner space, but during the lives of most people, it becomes smaller and smaller. As we go through life the world around us tries to fill up and kill this inner space, your Spirit Lake. Most people lose it entirely. Their space is occupied by legions of foreign soldiers, and it dies.
“Now you have experienced this space within yourself. Now you know it. You will no longer be afraid of the world around you. Your space will never be filled up with anything but yourself, because now that you have experienced it, you recognize its feeling and its pulse. You will continue to explore it. Later you will also learn that there is an important Inner Being who lives there. You will need to meet and learn to understand this Spirit Being. I will help you do this when you are ready.”‘

All this is already important enough, but even more is told to Olga then:

‘Umaï’s voice is soothing, and I hang onto every word as she continues.”This next thing is the greatest secret I could tell you. We have the task of building two things while we are in our physical lives. Our first task is to construct the physical reality in which we live. The second task is the creation of ourselves – of that very self that lives within this outer reality.
“Both tasks require equal attention. Keeping the balance between them is a very sacred and demanding art. As soon as we forget one task, the other can capture us and make us its slave forever. This is why the place of the Spirit Lake, the home of the Inner Being, becomes empty and dead for so many people. They come to truly believe that the outer world is the only one worth their attention. Sooner or later they will realize their mistake.
“For you, the main danger is not this but only in exploring your inner self. This is why you were already so interested in other people’s minds. You were using that information to try to understand your own psyche. You must learn to accept the importance of creating your own reality. Believe me that your work in the outer world has an absolute and equal power and ability to satisfy. Don’t be afraid of the shore around you now. Everything you see there is your own manifestation, and it is ridiculous to be afraid of your own creation. I will help you.”‘

By revealing this truth to Olga, Umaî helps her already to learn how to protect herself from her own possibly threatening creations:
1/ by remembering that outer situations in her life are only that, her own creations; and
2/ by not accepting the reality of those situations, but on the contrary asserting her own inner power to change them.

I personally appreciated particularly the remark about Olga’s way of being, more turned inward than outward, as I myself have the same tendency; the advice given by Umai has helped me to be less fearful of the threats from the outer reality, and sometimes already I have been successful in transforming them  into a more positive reality. Thank you, Umaï!… And Olga too, for writing this book!

Speaking of threats, we have to remember that all this was happening in Olga’s life while still under the Soviet regime.
One of the book reviews I copied for my first post about ‘Entering the Circle’ contained among other things this summary of the events that follow:

‘The author’s involvement with shamanism is fraught with danger, for in the Soviet Union, interest in the occult can lead to psychiatric commitment. But Kharitidi manages secretly to incorporate her new powers into her practice at the hospital. During her trance voyages, she visits Belovodia, more commonly known in the West by its Tibetan name of Shambhala, where a parallel human race with advanced spiritual knowledge hints at a radical new future for humanity. Others are also discovering Belovodia, Kharitidi learns, particularly a Soviet physicist researching the nature of time.’

What was put there in a nutshell I need now to expand about, for the ‘Conscious Evolution’ purpose of this blog:

One of Olga’s patients had been a sweet, idealistic and naive very young man, Victor, whose only crime at seventeen had been to say openly or even write things like ‘Soviet society is imperfect and could be improved in many ways’.
Interest in metaphysics and ‘anti-soviet’ ideas were always diagnosed as schizophrenia and ‘treated’ in ‘special clinics’. It was after having been sent to such a ‘special clinic’ that young Victor had been brought to Olga, a broken man:
‘(…) all his answers carefully memorized and rehearsed, (…) repeated without change: “I was sick. I understand it now. I want to continue taking my medicines to prevent the disease”.
‘There was only one time that I saw even a trace of remembered animation on his face. He had noticed a forbidden samizdat book that had been secretly reproduced for me on a copying machine by a friend. It was by Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and mystic, and I normally kept it hidden in my desk. After Victor glimpsed it, our relationship slowly began to change. It was the beginning of his trust for me.’

When reading Olga’s story for the first time, how moved I have myself been to discover the precious help Sri Aurobindo’s books had represented for all those Russian people oppressed also inwardly, by the heavy materialism inherent to the Soviet regime… How glad I have been to learn one of those books had been the silent, secret bridge between Olga and Victor.

He had never been really insane, and didn’t need any medical care except for recovering as much as was possible from the terrible ‘treatment’ he had received. Worried, though, about sending him back home to an egocentric and vain mother who rejected him, all the more now with the stigma of having been in the ‘crazy house’, Olga kept him in the hospital under her own safe wing for as long as she could extend his stay, but in the end, he had to be discharged and sent home.
‘After his release, Victor had written me a short letter telling about his attempts to find a job. He had been rejected at the few places he had tried, but he still hoped to find something. He also mentioned that his mother had sold all his books while he had been gone.’

Six months later, it is this poor Victor’ suicide, when she is informed about it upon returning to hospital duty after her Altai leave, that shakes Olga with deep enough sorrow to bring into her a new determination: she will discretely start making use of the changes that have occurred in herself and in her whole understanding of sanity, insanity and healing, for the sake of her patients, even at the risk of being discovered.

By one of those ‘coincidences’ that start happening in your life when you are aware of your Inner Being, a patient not really sent to her knocks anyway ‘by mistake’ at her office’s door in the hospital, and she gets invited to visit this Dmitriev, a renowned physicist, at his laboratory in the very important and highly respected ‘Academy cum City of Science’, Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. In spite of her original intention not to go, after Victor’s death Olga finds herself following not that mental decision, but her intuition, and eventually she does go to that laboratory, another turning-point in her life: confirming by direct personal experience the usefulness of the cutting-edge, strange-looking new equipment devised by Dmitriev, Olga’s consciousness shifts frequency and enters for a short while the dimension of this very Belovodia she longed to learn more about.

There she meets at last in person the man in white who had acted as her inner guide already in several major ‘dreams’: this masculine being is actually a part of Belovodia…. and so is Umaï, he reveals to her, so Olga needn’t worry, Nicolai’s claim that Umaï had died was a lie, she cannot die; but it wouldn’t be good to remain too attached to her emotionally, for that would hamper Olga’s own growth. Olga does have a deep inner connection with the tattoed mummies from an ancient unknown culture, and those mummies themselves are linked with Belovodia too: although they are seemingly dead, ‘their intentions are alive’, she is told. The discovery and opening of those tombs is one of the visible signs that a new evolutive step is already started on Earth. For individual human beings as well as for humanity at large, the most important thing is to be in contact with one’s Heart Self, which for humanity is precisely Belovodia/Shamballa, so it will come to be known more and more, also with the help of scientific devices like Dmitriev’s invention and the notes users like Olga are able to write while in a deep trance inside.

A few days later Olga has on her own another ‘dream’, at the end of which Umaï appears again to her, to reveal some more invaluable inner secrets for the true Healer Olga is indeed meant to become.
Following trustfully the advice received from Umaï, she has so much success with even supposedly ‘incurable’ cases that she can see these new approaches do work. Her colleagues and superiors see it too, but she presents her strange methods as taken from innovative experiments elsewhere!…
Every time, calling upon her ‘Spirit Twin’ inside herself makes her behave and speak in just the right, if apparently crazy, way, to help a patient… or, when she is finally suspected of ‘subversion’, to escape being found out by the dangerous interrogator she has to face… This moment turns out to be one of the funniest moments in the whole book!!!

Akademgorodok

Longing to have another session inside the curved, tubular ‘mirrors’ of Dmitriev, Olga goes again to his laboratory… only to find that in the meantime he himself has been able also to reach Belovodia, following the same wavelength frequency route that she had spontaneously and unwittingly used. Just to curl up again inside the ‘mirrors’, and there to read Dmitriev’s moving notes of his own visit to Belovodia, is enough for Olga to go back home fully satisfied again, as if she had had the experience herself. The story of Belovodia as told to Dmitriev traces the origins of humanity and of its various main religions back to that area of the world, and particularly the Altai region, long ago, when its climate was entirely different and this specific people there very developed spiritually.

It is so moving to realize the long foreseen vision that this people must have had of our times, of this later period of humanity when we would become ready to welcome again this spiritual wisdom that patiently waited for us to grow enough, and these beings who in the meantime, from their secret and protected realm of existence, have helped us at every step through their inner influence – or, as in the case of Umai, also through their physical presence with us here… Even mummies not so dead as they seem to be have helped and are helping still, through their ‘alive intentions’!
How beautiful and encouraging those teachings are, that together with Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, have shown Olga Kharitidi, and all of her readers, and now all of mine too on this blog, the great promised evolutive Future that is joining more and more our far evolutive Past to form in our Present the New Earth and the New Life we need so urgently!…