1. Alien or Man?

the Ringing cedars of Russia Vladimir Megre English translation by John Woodsworth

Book 2. Ringing cedars of Russia (1997)

Alien or Man?

Before telling about further happenings connected with Anastasia, I should like to thank all the leaders of religious denominations, scholars and journalists, along with ordinary readers, who sent in letters, religious literature and comments regarding the events recounted in my first book. Anastasia has been called many things. The press has referred to her as Mistress of the taiga,1 a Siberian wizard-girl, a fortune-teller, a divine manifestation, the girl from outer space. And so when one Moscow journalist asked me: “Do you now love Anastasia?”, I replied to her: “I can’t really tell what my feelings are.” And all at once the rumour started flying around that I was incapable of grasping anything at all because of my immaturity in spiritual matters.

But how can one love when it’s not yet clear just who is there to be loved? After all, no one has yet been able to come up with a single definitive description of Anastasia. On the basis of her assertion: “I am Man, a human being — I am a woman!” I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of explanation for her extraordinary abilities. Initially everything seemed to be falling into place.

Who is Anastasia?

A young woman, born and living as a recluse in the remote Siberian taiga, brought up after the death of her parents by her grandfather and great-grandfather, who have also been living the life of a recluse.

Can one consider the loyalty of wild animals to her some-thing unusual?

Even this is nothing out of the ordinary Many animals in peasant farmyards get along peacefully with each other and treat their human masters with respect.

A much more difficult task is determining the mechanism whereby she is able to see things at a distance and can know details of various events, even those that occurred thousands of years ago, and to be completely conversant with our con-temporary way of life. How does this ray of hers work when it heals people far away, when it penetrates the depths of the past or peers into the future?

Philosophy professor Kim Ivanovich Shilin, who is also a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of In-formatisation (MAI), has written a number of articles analys-ing Anastasia’s sayings. In one of them he wrote:

Anastasia’s creative potential is a gift of God, a gift of Na-ture, which is universal, not merely a personal gift to her.

All of us collectively, and each one of us in particular, are

connected with the Cosmos.

The means of escaping an approaching catastrophe lie in a harmonious synthesis of our cultural principles. The development of this type of harmoniously pure childhood culture results in a “feminine” cultural type. This cultural type has been expressed most fully and clearly in Bud-dhism, but also in our Anastasia. It may be formulated in the following identification chain:

Anastasia = Tara = Buddha = Maitreya. Anastasia is in the fullest sense Man in the likeness of God.

Whether this is true or not is not for me to decide. Only I can’t understand why, then, she hasn’t written down any teachings, like all other enlightened people in the likeness of God, and instead has concentrated, all during her two dec-ades of conscious awareness, on dachniks.

Nevertheless, in reading what various scholars have to say, I have been able to conclude that she is not some kind of crazy person, inasmuch as there are at least hypotheses in the scientific world about what she has talked about, and experiments are being conducted on certain aspects of her sayings.

So, for example, to the question: ‘Anastasia, by what means do you discern and depict all the different situations of thousands of years ago and even decipher the thoughts of the great thinkers of the past?” she replied:

“The first thought, the first word was the Creator’s. His thoughts still live today, surrounding us unseen and filling universal space, reflected in material, living creations produced for the number one creation, Man! Man is the child of the Creator. And, like any parent, He could wish for His child no less than what He has Himself. He has given him all. And even more — freedom of choice! Man can create things and perfect the world by the power of his thinking. No thought produced by Man disappears into oblivion. If it is a thought of radiant brightness, it will fill the space of light and rise on the side of the forces of light. A dark thought, however, will fall on the opposite side. And today any Man may make use of any thought produced at any time either by people or by the Creator.”

“Then why doesn’t everybody use them?”

“Everybody does, but in varying degrees. To use them, one is obliged to think, and not everybody succeeds in doing this because of the vanity of daily life.”

“So, all you have to do is think, and the ability comes to you? And you can even discern the thoughts of the Creator?”

“In order to discern the thoughts of the Creator, one must attain a purity of thought appropriate to Him, as well as the pace of His thinking. To discern the thoughts of enlightened people, one must possess their purity of thought and the ability to think at the same rate. If a given Man has insufficient purity of thought to communicate with the dimension of the forces of light — the dimension in which radiant thoughts dwell, — then Man will draw his thoughts from their dark counterparts, and will end up suffering himself and causing others to suffer.”

I’m not sure whether this is directly or only indirectly ex-plained by Academician Anatoly Akimov, Director of the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics at the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, in his article in the magazine Chudesa i prikliuchenia (Wonders and Adventures) entitled “Physics recognises a Supermind”. He writes as follows:

There have existed, and there exist now, two schools of thought, two models of perceiving Nature. One model is associated with Western scholarship — i.e., knowledge gained on the methodological basis prevalent in the West: evidence, experiments, etc. The other is the Eastern ap-proach, wherein knowledge is received from an external source through esoteric means in a state of meditation. Esoteric knowledge is not something acquired, it is con-sidered a gift to Man.

As it turns out, at some point this esoteric approach was lost and a different route was embarked upon — one extremely slow and complex. Following this route, it has taken us over a thousand years to arrive at a level of knowledge which was common in the East three millennia ago. 6

I have the intuitive feeling that those are right who say that the matter filling the whole Universe on a field level is some kind of interrelated structure. In his book The sum of technologies, in a chapter entitled “The Universe as supercomputer”, Stanislav Lem proposed the existence of a gigantic computer-like Universal brain. Imagine a computer the size of the observable Universe (with a radius somewhere in the order of 15 billion kilometres), filled with elements taking up a volume of between 10 and 33 cubic centimetres each.

And here this brain which fills the whole Universe is naturally endowed with powers which we are incapable of imagining or even fantasising. But if you take into account that in reality this brain functions not according to any computer principle but on the basis of torsion fields, then it all becomes clear: the manifestations of the Absolute

proposed by Schelling10 or the Shuniat11 of ancient Vedic literature — these in essence constitute a computer. And there is nothing in the world apart from this computer. Everything else is some form or other of the Absolute.

This is what Academician Vlail Kaznacheev/2 Active Mem-ber of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, wrote about the Ray in his article “Living rays and a living field”13 in Chude- sa i prikliuchenia (Wonders and adventures) of 3 May 1996:

I0Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854) — German philosopher, who developed a dialectic of Nature as a living organism and an unconscious, spiritual, creative principle.

11 Shuniat — the Buddhist concept of the ‘void’, or the space in which all exists.

12 Vlail Petrovich Kaznacheev (1924-) — a prominent member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences from Novosibirsk, specialising in the inter-relationship between Man and Nature, including bio-systems and information processes. A decorated World War II veteran, Dr Kaznacheev has received numerous awards for his research and publications.

I3In America pioneer research on the fields surrounding living organisms was carried out by Dr Harold Saxton Burr (1889-1973), Professor of Anatomy at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr Burr discovered “that man — and, in fact, all forms — are ordered and controlled by electrodynamic fields which can be measured and mapped with precision... the ‘fields of life’ are of the same nature as the simpler fields known to modern physics and obedient to the same laws. Like the fields of physics, they are part of the organisation of the Universe and are influenced by the vast forces of space. Like the fields of physics, too, they have organising and directing qualities which have been revealed by many thousands of experiments. Organisation and direction, the direct opposite of chance, imply purpose. So the fields of life offer purely electronic, instrumental evidence that man is no accident. On the contrary, he is an integral part of the Cosmos, embedded in its all-powerful fields, subject to its inflexible laws and a participant in the destiny and purpose of the Universe” — quoted from E.F. Schumacher’s A guide for the perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 116-17, and used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. For more information see Burr’s Blueprint for immortality: The electric patterns of life (London: N. Spearman, 1972).

Vernadsky14 was probably right in asking the question: how does the ideal, which is mental, translate the planet Earth into its new evolutionary phase? How? If you say: only through labour, only through explosions or only through technogenic activity, such a primitive answer will not do.

There is factual evidence showing that Man is capable of exerting a remote influence on many electronic equip-ment readings. He can throw the measuring device out of whack, and that from far away. Here in Novosibirsk experiments are taking place on telepathic communication with Norilsk, Dikson, Simferopol and Tiumen,15 as well as an American centre in Florida, and the remote links between Man and Man as well as between the measuring device and the operator register accurately and reliably.

We are confronted with an unknown phenomenon — the interaction of living substance over huge distances.

These articles, unfortunately, contain many unfamiliar terms, along with references to works of other scholars. It would be quite a task just to read them all, let alone make sense of them.

4 Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) — a Russian scientist compared to Charles Darwin for his scope of contribution to the biological sciences. Vernadsky’s prime interest was researching how the human mind influences the development of life on the planet. He viewed human intelligence as a powerful evolutionary force capable of transforming the whole biosphere onto a new level. Vernadsky introduced the term noosphere (literally, ‘sphere of Intelligence’) to refer to the incipient state of biosphere controlled by human intelligence — the new evolutionary stage transcending the conflict between technology and Nature.

15Norilsk — one of the most northerly cities in the world, close to the Yenisei River, and a major mining centre. Dikson — a port in Russia’s Far North, on the Kara Sea. Simferopol — capital of the Crimea (now part of Ukraine). Tinmen — the oldest Russian city in Siberia, founded in 1581, which long served as a centre for the Russian colonisation of Siberia.

Still, I have found out that scientists are aware of Man’s capability to make contact at a distance. They are aware, too, of the universal data bank used by Anastasia. She calls it the dimension of the forces of light, home to all thoughts ever pro-duced by mankind. Modern science also speaks about this phenomenon, which it refers to as a supercomputer.

I then had to figure out how I, who had never practised any literary art, having never been trained for it, managed to write a book which continues to excite so many people.

When I was in the taiga, Anastasia told me: “I shall make you a writer. You will write a book, and many people will read it. It will have a beneficial influence on the readers.”

Now the book has been written. And one might suppose that it was all due to her involvement. But then one would have to figure out how she influences other people’s creative abilities. However, nobody has yet managed to figure this out.

It might make things easier, of course, to pretend that I myself possessed at least a little talent and was simply setting forth the interesting information I had learnt from her. Then, it seems, everything would fall into place. Everything would be explained. There would be no need to waste any further time on reading scientific or religious literature or badgering specialists with questions. And here Anastasia presented a new phenomenon for which neither I nor any of the people who have been helping me can find an explanation to date.

You may remember me writing in Book i what she said two years earlier: Artists will paint pictures, poets will write verse and they will make a movie about me. You will see all this and think of me....”

To my question “What do you mean, can she predict the future?” Anastasia’s grandfather replied: “Vladimir, Anastasia does not predict the future, she visualises it and turns it into reality”

Words, just words. Words come cheap. And to be honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to these words, dismissing them as mere metaphor, since I had absolutely no way of even imagining how accurately everything Anastasia said would turn out to be true in real life. But the incredible does happen!

Anastasia’s words are starting to come true in reality.

First there was the flood of poems. A few of these poems I published at the end of Book 1. Next, Anastasia clubs started springing up in various cities. The first of these was in the city of Gelendzhik, where they held an exhibit of paintings by the Moscow artist Alexandra Saenko, all dedicated to Anastasia and Nature.

I visited the clubhouse and looked at the walls hung with large pictures. The surrounding space seemed to change in appearance before my gaze.

From the many pictures Anastasia looked out at me with her kindly eyes. And the scenes! I couldn’t get over it — some of the pictures showed scenes from this second book, which hadn’t been published yet. And there was this glowing sphere, sometimes appearing right next to Anastasia. Later I learnt that the artist painted not with a brush but with her fingertips. Most of the pictures had already been sold, but left hanging for the duration of the exhibit, since more and more people were coming to see them. The artist presented one of them to me as a gift, depicting Anastasia’s mother and father. I couldn’t take my eyes off her mother’s face.

Offers started coming in from various film studios about making an Anastasia movie. And this was now something I was already accepting as a matter of course.

As I touched the paintings and sheets of poetry with my hands, as I listened to the songs and looked at stills from a film which had already been made, I tried to make some sense of what was going on.

And now there is a Moscow Research Centre devoted to investigating Anastasia phenomena, which has concluded:

The greatest spiritual teachers known to mankind for their religious teachings and philosophical and scientific investigations, cannot match the fantastic pace of Anastasia’s influence on the human potential. Their teachings have had a noticeable manifestation in real life only centuries and millennia after their first appearance.

In some inexplicable way, over a matter of days and months Anastasia has managed, without the aid of written doctrines and religious teachings, to directly influence people’s feelings, provoking emotional outbursts and causing a surge of creativity manifest in artistic creations on the part of a whole lot of people who have been mentally touched by her. We are able to perceive them in the form of works of art and inspired impulses toward goodness and light.

How is it possible that this lonely recluse, all alone in the remote Siberian taiga, has at the same time managed to soar over our lives in real time and space?

How does she bring artistic creations into being through other people’s hands? They are all about light, about good-ness, about Russia, about Nature, about love.

“She will cover the world with her great poetry of love. Poems and songs will shower the whole planet like a spring rain and wash away its accumulated filth,” Anastasia’s grandfather told me.

“But how does she do it?” I asked.

And the answer:

“She gives off inspiration and illumination by the energy of the impulse of her own aspirations, by the strength of her dreams.”

“What kind of power is hidden in her dreams?”

“The power of Man as a Creator.”

“But Man should receive some sort of compensation for his creations — honours, money, titles. And here she is giving them away and asking nothing in return. Why?” I asked.

“She is self-sufficient. Her highest rewards are her own satisfaction and the sincere love of at least one person,” re-plied Anastasia’s grandfather.

But so far these answers are not something I’ve been able to make complete sense of. In attempting to grasp who Anastasia really is and my own relationship to her in particular, I have continued to seek out various opinions about her, and read as much as I can in the way of religious literature.

In fact, I’ve read more over the past year and a half than in all the previous years of my life taken together. But what has come of it? I have managed to come to only one indisputable conclusion: a number of‘learned’ books claiming to be historically accurate, religious and sincere, are nothing but a pack of lies. This conclusion arose out of a situation connected with the historical figure of Gregory Rasputin.

In Book 11 cited a passage from Valentin Pikul’s16 histori-cal epic novel Uposlednei cherty (At the last frontier).

l(>Valentin Savvich Pikul (1928-1990) — one of the most popular Soviet prose writers of the 1970s and 1980s. His famous novel, At the last frontier — published in 1979 in the major literary magazine Nash sovremennik as an abridged version of the novel Nechistaya sila (The demonic forces) — significantly strengthened the popular image of Rasputin as a corrupted immoral debaucher. Pikul’s extensive use of documents of the period, including journalistic accounts, to give his works an authentic ‘historical’ feel, contributed to the popular perception of his novels as ‘historical chronicles’ (although this is not generally supported by historians and literary critics, who tend to dismiss them simply as adventure novels with an historical context). In 1981 At the last frontier was made into the ‘historical drama’ movie Agonia (Agony), directed by Elem Klimov (1933-2003), which won the prestigious International Federation of Film Critics award at the 1982 Venice Film Festival and became a must-see cinematic experience throughout the USSR. The passage below is quoted from Pikul’s At the last frontier.

Pikul’s narrative tells about a semi-literate peasant named Gregory Rasputin from the remote wilds of Siberia where the Siberian cedar grows. In 1907 he came to St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian empire. He not only endeared himself to the imperial family, impressing them with his predictions of the future, but ended up sleeping with a good many of the most prominent women in the capital. When a group of officers tried to kill him, they were amazed to find that even after swallowing the cyanide poison slipped into his drink, he was still able to get up from the table and make his way outdoors, where Prince Yusupov fired shots at him point- blank from his pistol. Even after being riddled with bullets, Rasputin would not die. His wounded body was thrown off a bridge into the river, then fished out and burnt.

The mysterious and enigmatic Gregory Rasputin, who im-pressed everyone with his stamina, grew up amidst the cedars of the Siberian taiga.

This is how a contemporary journalist described his stay-ing power:

“At age fifty he could begin an orgy at noon and go on ca-rousing until four o’clock in the morning. From his fornica-tion and drunkenness he would go directly to the church for morning prayers and stand praying until eight, before heading home for a cup of tea. Then, as if nothing had happened, he would carry on receiving visitors until two in the afternoon. Next he would collect a group of ladies and accompany them to the baths. From the baths he would be off to a restaurant in the country, where he would begin repeating the previous night’s activities. No normal person could ever keep up a regime like that.”

As with many other people, such descriptions also shaped my impression of Rasputin as a hopeless debaucher. But fate threw my way a different concept, as though trying to induce me to reconsider.

This is what the Pope of Rome, John Paul II, had to say about Rasputin:

“Today from the river comes unscathed the body (never found) of a holy monk. And his secret offspring will enter into the ark with prayer.”

What’s going on here? On the one hand he’s referred to as a debaucher, on the other — a holy monk. Where is the truth? Where is the lie?

There’s more. The text of some of Rasputin’s notes, writ-ten during a trip to the Holy Land, happened to fall into my hands (they were brought to Paris by a refugee from the USSR named Lobachevsky). This is what Rasputin himself wrote:

The sea effortlessly comforts. When you awake in the morning and the waves ‘speak’ — they dance and make glad. And the sunlight glistens on the sea, it seems to rise ever so quietly, and at that moment Man’s soul forgets all about mankind and fixes its gaze on the glow of the sun; and a happiness kindles in Man, and he feels in his heart the book of life and the higher wisdom of life — indescribable beauty! The sea awakens him from the dream of earthly vanities, and many thoughts arise all by themselves, quite effortlessly

The sea is a vast space, but the mind is even more spa-cious. There is no end to Man’s higher wisdom, no philosophy can possibly contain it. Another moment of stupendous beauty comes when the sun sets over the sea and its rays fill the western sky

Who can estimate the beauty of the sun’s twilight rays? They warm and caress the soul and offer healing comfort. The sun disappears behind the mountains minute by minute, and Man’s heart grieves a little at its amazing twilight rays. And then it grows dark.

And oh, what silence falls! Not even the sound of a bird is heard. Lost in thought, Man begins to pace the deck of

the ship, involuntarily recalls his childhood and all of life’s kerfuffle, and begins to compare the silence around him with the bustle of the world, and quietly talks with himself, desiring company to stave off the tedium inflicted upon him by his enemies...

So, who were you, you Sibiriak?1J A Russian named Gregory Rasputin? Where is the truth written about you, and where the lie? How to make sense of it all? What can one rely upon in trying to fathom the essence of one’s being, one’s destiny? What great works can help one discern between truth and falsehood? Where is the spiritual and sincere, as opposed to a mere pretence of omniscience? Perhaps one should try probing one’s own heart? I have never written poetry before, but I want to dedicate my very first poem to you, Gregory Rasputin.

People read Anastasia and come up with sincere, original poetry I have tried, too. And this is the result — for you. My apologies if the rhyme doesn’t always work out.

Dedicated to

Gregory Rasputin

“So you’re semi-literate?” “Why yes, semi-literate.

From the cedar forests — well, those are my roots!”

‘And barefoot?!” “Walking all the way from Siberia, You’re bound to wear out more than one pair of boots!

“I am going to the Tsar, to help our dear Batiushka18 Hold on just a little bit longer out there.

I am going to our Russia, our dear Russia-Matushka To give her a taste of our pine-forest air!

“What about it, hussars? You dashing rogues, freely Debauching the ladies, making bold in a brawl?

Just look at me, look, and see how one really Debauches — you scum, thinking you know it all!”

Peter’s city in fine Paris garb is assembling.

But watch, lest your corsets too tight squeeze your hearts! The Sibiriak enters, and ladies are trembling At the sight of this peasant from far eastern parts.

But as he went off to the morning-prayer service,

For others’ redemption from error to pray,

He heard his land calling — She spoke in a whisper,

The only one telling him this: “Go away!

“The flesh-eating age of the beast is upon us,

All drunken and growling, it leads men astray While your fiery soul has been keeping it from us,

It can no longer do so. You must go away

“You can’t hold the savagery back for much longer.

Just a moment, that’s all you will last — it’s too strong.

I am Russia! You cannot imagine my sorrow!

I know now: you never will finish your song.

“Go back to your cedars. My rebounding is certain!

And then you may ask whatsoever you will...”

“Oh how I’d love us to go to the banya!zo I’d beat you with besoms of birch, even pine,

My profligate Russia — for you I am longing!

I shall stay with you, Russia, for ever — you’re mine!”

The age of dark madness with fury came howling:

Grishka21 stumbled, his breast full of bullets that day While the blackness stood mocking, its dark visage scowling, Saying “Crawl, you Sibiriak! Go on, crawl away!

“You can hold me back only a half-second longer,

And then from the depths of my pit you’ll be shown A punishment frightful, more painful and stronger Than ever the world in its history has known!

“A hero you are, but you’ll be called a blasphemer.

From bottles of poison22 your image will peek.

And the scions you save will curse you as a schemer And spit on your soul, you Siberian muzhik A

“Crawl away It is I who now have all the power!

Fly away, if you like, to your heaven on high!

But a moment is left, see? Not a day, not an hour.

So give me my moment! You’re still going to die.”

“Bring on the Madeira, let’s head for the banyal And there I shall show you what’s real and what’s crass.

A Sibiriale, you say? I’m a down-to-earth peasant!

So what’s all the babble and gab about, ass?”

His body was shot through and drowned in the river,

Then burnt in a courtyard midst rubble and sand.

Today as spring winds blow their way over Russia,

They carry his ashes across the whole land.

“Well, muzhiksaid the blackness, still standing there mocking, “Where on earth is your tombstone, and where are your eyes? You can never bring back now the days of your living,

And your scions will see but an image despised.

“Show them the debt they owe! I give you power!

Show them the bills for your service unpaid,

Or is it your wish just to weep and to cower?”

Grishka spit a lead bullet: “You, Satan, are foolish!

As if I could care about either weeping or loans?

Come now, mу muzhiks — how’s the banya, dear fellows? Time for more boiling water to be poured on the stones?!”

Gregory Rasputin from the cedar forests of Siberia stepped into the life of pre-revolutionary Russia in an attempt to head off the storm of revolution, and perished.

Anastasia also lives amongst the cedars and is also trying to do good for people, also trying to head off something before it happens. But what fate has our society prepared for her?