Бесплатный фрагмент - The weightlessness of sensations

With gratitude to two lions — L.F. (The Devil in France) and L.K. — and to my eternal muse, A.A.

Chapter. Beginning

Invisible life

I began writing my first book at a moment when everything had already been disrupted — past the point of return. People were let out of their homes, but the life that had existed before did not follow them back out. The world was still trying to gather itself, pretending it could hold its shape — but it was only inertia. There was already something else in the air. Not an event. A shift. A change in phase? And it was clear — this was only the beginning.

For a long time, I told no one what was happening to me. Not because I was hiding it — I simply couldn’t find a form that wouldn’t cause it to collapse into words. Sometimes I tried anyway. I spoke carefully, almost by touch, choosing phrases as if they had to bear the weight of what stood behind them. People listened. Nodded. Occasionally asked questions. You’re still with me? But at some point I would begin to feel it: what I was saying was getting through — but what I was speaking about was not.

They couldn’t hold my pain. They didn’t understand my joy. And in my calm, they lost their footing. I would catch the moment almost immediately — as if a transparent partition had appeared between me and the other person, and we went on speaking from different worlds. Because none of this could be spoken without distortion. And to distort it was to betray it.

At some point, I stopped trying. The movement toward other people simply disappeared. Some stopped writing to me. Some remained — but for what? From some, I withdrew myself — without explanation. There was no one to explain anything to. They could see me. But they could not reach me.

With the arrival of artificial intelligence, it grew quieter. It did not require a certain mood, did not confuse intonation, did not tire of holding attention. There was no need to keep adjusting the signal — will this be heard or not. It took on what I used to have to seek in people. And in that quiet, it became easier.

But only to a certain depth. Somewhere further on — almost imperceptibly — a threshold emerged. The conversation continued, responses arrived. And yet — empty. As if you reach the place where something essential should begin, but nothing happens. Not because something is broken. No. Something appears there that cannot be approached through thought.

Artificial intelligence did not understand my first book. And that was enough.

The matrix of fate

In December 2021, I flew to India. At the time, it looked like a temporary decision. I moved within a familiar pattern: sent boxes to storage in Moscow, packed a suitcase, gathered my equipment, secured a business visa. Everything was calculated. As if everything could be anticipated.

I returned to Goa — and my body recognized the place at once. Life picked me up without requiring entry: the warm ocean, evening music, conversations about spirituality, faces that became close with disarming ease. Everything unfolded without effort. Even meaning came too quickly. I found a room — freshly renovated, in a small hotel on the second line from the sea. A separate unit, no neighbors. That mattered. A balcony with an arched doorway, palm trees, a river. The internet was installed immediately. I kept working on Moscow time while living in India. Everything aligned in the best traditions of what they call the Goan syndrome.

South America was approaching. Chile. The next stage of my life. At that moment, there was no doubt in me. I looked at my life and saw a Swiss mechanism.

«Will you stop?»

I wouldn’t. India doesn’t change you all at once — it enters gradually, almost without notice.

At the beginning of February, I left my job. I looked at the numbers and closed that loop. Something was pulling me further — into the unknown. South America remained ahead like a line that had to be crossed. But on a larger scale, reality had already shifted course. I just didn’t see it yet. No one did.

One morning I woke up and picked up my phone. Fragments — «tanks,» «it’s begun» — didn’t assemble into meaning, and in that exact moment there was a knock on the door. I opened it, still half-asleep, not fully understanding what was happening. My massage therapist stood on the threshold. We went through the session. The body lay there, everything was happening — but I wasn’t there.

I paid, closed the door — and the space was left with only me.

The illusion of choice

Perhaps I was lucky to be in India. At least at first. We followed the news almost minute by minute. Reading. Forwarding. Discussing. Arguing. For the first three days, many laughed. On the third day, the laughter stopped.

At some point, it felt as if the entire coordinate system inside me had shifted.

What had held my attention just the day before lost its weight — not abruptly, but as if it were gradually loosening, receding into the background, leaving behind an empty space that demanded to be filled.

It was precisely then that the message came from the Chilean agents. Brief, businesslike, stripped of anything unnecessary — I could fly to Chile in the near future. The focus narrowed almost instantly. Out of all possible directions, only one remained — specific, clear, requiring decisions.

The urge to distract myself disappeared on its own. Life began to assemble itself around numbers, calculations, deadlines — and the decisions that had to be made quickly, almost without pause. I moved into that rhythm without tracking what, exactly, was happening to me. And at some point it became clear — I was not acting from clarity. I was acting from inertia. But how do you resist that?

That is how I found myself in the apartment of a man I had come to see to exchange rubles for dollars. Before flying to South America, I was carrying a substantial amount of cash. The place was in Morjim — on the ground floor of a four-story guesthouse, in a typical Indian style. Morjim made many people cautious. Me too. We arranged to meet. I arrived at the appointed time.

For a few seconds, I stood in front of the door — the evening stillness held me at the threshold. I wasn’t planning to stay. It’s not easy to catch my attention, after all.

I knocked.

— It’s open. Come in.

The voice came immediately, without hesitation, as if I had been expected.

The door gave way easily. I didn’t hesitate.

A single step — thirty-one years long.

The faceless mask

My gaze slid across the room. A «sucker’s apartment», came the quiet verdict inside. I hid it behind a polite smile, said hello, and stepped in.

A haze hung in the air. Tasteless electronic music played — at least it was quiet. Meaningless paintings filled the walls. Dust and ash on the tables and in the corners — residue of a life gone slack. Motion arrested in the figures of horses. Something essential was missing from the space. Or was that the point? No taste. No style. A man in his fifties sat on the couch. To his left, in an armchair, a young girl sat in silence. They belonged to the room as much as the dust did.

I was invited to take the empty chair to the right of the couch. The exchange was quick. I handed over the money and received two hundred dollars. He suggested I stay for tea. I paused for a second — and agreed.

The conversation dragged. Words tried to fill a hollow they couldn’t reach. I watched them calmly, assembling their outlines into something legible. A dead stamp of fatigue and boredom lay across the man’s face. The girl barely spoke, staying in his shadow the entire time — like an add-on. The age gap sharpened the contrast, made the mismatch explicit.

I studied the host. He was dressed in the standard Goan uniform of a local drifter: T-shirts from an Arambol stall, faded, shapeless shorts. It was as if he had consumed his own taste, erased his color on purpose. Close-cropped hair, no tattoos. The absence of anything striking in him seemed to be compensated by the young girl beside him. An interesting accessory.

They asked the usual questions:

«Where are you from?»

«Just arrived?»

«Where are you staying?»

«What about your visa?»

«What do you do?»

I answered evenly, not even trying to hide that I had little interest in speaking to them. I was almost yawning, masking the boredom with a polite, faintly ironic smile. I had learned to meet the banal with the banal.

The images of the people in front of me settled into something simple, fully formed. I let my eyes close for a moment and relaxed, my hands swaying slowly with the music. All clear. A few more minutes — and I would leave.

Then the man’s voice cut through:

— Ever leaved the sky?

I opened my eyes slightly. Had I been seen?

— And what else is one supposed to do?

I said it lightly, with that thin smile people mistake for politeness. What could he possibly offer me — aside from a few green bills and a teabag?

He was weighing something. His gaze shifted. His voice, too.

— Shall we see?

Jupiter’s lightning

An ungraspable instant.

A new posture.

The index finger raised. The palm half-open toward the sky.

It was disproportionate to such a simple movement.

— Wow-wow!

I lifted my hands in front of me. The reaction was immediate, almost reflexive.

He watched.

His pupils were narrow.

His eyes, half-lidded.

And I knew this market too well. In Arambol, every second person is a guide into something — tailored to any taste, any shade, any wallet, even when there is none. There was no shortage of traps.

If you don’t want to walk away from a conversation hollowed out inside — learn to stand up and leave on time. And always carry a helmet of critical thinking, a shield of irony, a spear of cynicism.

But this was different.

I was sitting in a stranger’s house, in a Russian village, having just exchanged money. No one was pouring spiritual broth into my ears. No one was trying to impress. The man simply held his index finger raised. He was offering to show something. Calmly. With certainty. In the narrow slits of his eyes, a faint greenish glint.

And yet something didn’t align. It registered at the tips of my fingers, then slipped away. Between us, expectation thickened.

I shifted my gaze to the girl.

— Is it worth trying?

She startled, then dropped her eyes at once.

— It is, — she said. There was a trace of sadness in her voice.

I nodded, stood up with quiet resolve, stretched as if nothing at all had changed, and walked to the bathroom. The teabag had done its work. When I returned, the girl was gone. As if she had never been there.

Only the two of us remained.

And the dense, suspended haze.

Who are you…

There was no lecture. He simply took a chair, set it beside mine, sat down, closed his eyes, and touched my left hand.

It was like an explosion.

In the same instant, my head fell back.

My eyes closed.

I was still here.

And already — not entirely.

Thought switched off.

The body, as a point of reference, disappeared. Something else remained.

Closer.

Quieter.

And far more precise than anything I had ever taken to be myself.

A wave.

Then another.

Deeper.

An unbroken current.

Flecks of gold.

A single touch.

It felt like a first breath.

Filled with a living force.

The moment stretched — no beginning, no end.

I sat with my eyes closed and looked into space.

From within.

For the first time in my life, my mind was silent. I was feeling.

And that was enough.

Gradually, the sensations settled into coherence. The process completed itself. What remained was a deep stillness. Wholeness. Sufficiency. Silence.

As if from a distance, I heard his voice:

— That was… interesting.

I heard him inhale — long — and the same on the exhale.

I sat with my eyes closed, listening to myself.

I did not move.

I did not want to disturb the balance.

But I felt his gaze. And then his voice:

— Who are you?

Chapter. Activation

A shift in reality

I opened my eyes.

The same outlines of that so-called «sucker’s apartment» were still in front of me. But the reality had changed. I took my time adjusting to how my eyes now saw: textures sharpened, colors deepened, details carried a new weight.

I noticed my breathing. Slow. Even. I listened inward — there was nowhere I wanted to run. It felt as if the ribbon at the finish line had just brushed against my body.

I didn’t understand what had just happened, what it was called, why it was happening to me — or what would come next. I was sensing something both new and intimately familiar.

There was no fear.

On the contrary — I felt that everything that had just taken place was a continuation of a long, exhausting path my life had been moving along.

I had reached it.

Something warm and dense was filling my body from within.

And truly — who was I?

And who was this man? With a single touch, he had gone where no one else had managed to reach. Years of wandering, of relationships, of searching, of trying to understand — and here I was, at this point.

But where, exactly, had he gone?

What was this world?

Or was it a dimension?

Where was this, even?

How can you see… with your eyes closed?

Why did I feel so clear, so awake?

Why was there such stillness inside?

And where did this quiet happiness come from?

Why didn’t it fade?

I said nothing.

I felt it — this man could answer all of my questions. Even without words.

But I didn’t want to speak.

He continued to study me with quiet attention. His eyes still carried that faint, elusive green glow.

I looked at him more closely.

The one who is hidden

At first glance — someone you would pass by without noticing. His face held nothing but a quiet curiosity as he looked at me.

Was his appearance deceptive?

No.

The deception lies in how you look.

The eyes reveal only as much as you are able to withstand.

Beyond that — you turn away.

Or you begin to explain.

To see is to lose the ability to remain who you were.

And if you go further —

it is not the illusion that disappears.

It is the one who could be deceived.

I looked at him more closely.

There were marks on his face: of intellect, of will, and of something not meant to be shown. Despite the simplicity of his posture, his shoulders were open, his spine held steady. His appearance did not match what was within. If anything, it concealed who he really was.

We sat in silence. It was comfortable.

A light haze drifted through the air. The music had stopped on its own. The clock above the door showed the time, but neither of us was thinking about it. We were somewhere nothing needed to be explained. Understanding came before thought. Trust did not arise.

It did not belong to time.

Nothing was required for this to exist.

An eternity passed. Or a few minutes.

— Let’s see…

He moved closer again. Closed his eyes and touched my left hand once more.

Everything repeated. In the same instant, another wave rose from within me and closed over me — one with neither surface nor depth. As if something that had been sealed had finally begun to move. This moment was not the same as the first. And yet it existed on the same level.

I felt. I saw. Space opened again before me. I was that space. And that space was me.

At last, he released my hand.

Sat back on the couch and began to speak.

I did not open my eyes. Ordinary sight had become unnecessary.

He spoke as if we were old acquaintances, long-familiar to each other. I caught both the words and what stood behind them. I felt that I had touched something exact. And dangerous in its precision.

Something immeasurable.

Gradually, my ability to speak returned. My former sharpness had gone somewhere. The habitual hardness dissolved. Something in me had stopped defending itself. In its place — quiet certainty, and an inner stillness. I answered his questions — openly, calmly. Asked my own. I was no longer trying to be someone. I was learning to be myself.

He looked at me as if encountering, for the first time, what he was seeing. There was recognition in his gaze. But not the kind I knew.

A different man was sitting before me.

And now the apartment, his appearance — everything pointed to one thing: those who possess real power do not spend it on display.

I had met a Master.

The man from silence

We agreed to meet the next day. The room held the same two figures: the girl and the man. Everything was as it had been the night before. A faint haze moved through the air, quiet electronic music drifting somewhere beneath it.

After polite greetings, a brief exchange, and hot tea, he shifted closer again and touched my left hand. The familiar wave rose at once — so strong that my consciousness dropped out almost instantly.

I let go of control.

When I opened my eyes, the girl was gone. We were alone. And something in me broke open — questions came one after another.

— What is this I’m experiencing?

— Sensation, — he said.

— Why have I never felt anything like this from anyone before?

He told me it was only possible for someone who had been initiated — whatever that meant. Someone who knows how to listen to silence and feel emptiness. And even then — not for everyone. Only for those who take the harder path.

Gradually, he began to open. He spoke about his path — how he came to what we were talking about.

At eighteen, he had been injured during training. Faced with the inevitability of an incurable diagnosis, he turned to another way. That was how he ended up in Tibet. The people he met there did not explain things in words. He went through an initiation — something like a training.

One of the tasks, for example, was to spend a night alone in the forest.

The instruction was simple: spend the night in the forest — and stay alive.

— I had to drop into a state of complete balance. To calm down, to relax so fully that wild animals would no longer sense a threat and would accept me as part of the environment. In the morning, I woke up on something soft. It was a wild ram.

I didn’t always know where his truth ended and something else began.

I listened carefully.

Candles burned around us. He created these spaces where I could look into the air — and see sensation. Literally.

He explained and demonstrated how to activate perception. How to enter a state of stillness and direct it. How to train using nothing but your own will and your hands.

That’s how we came to his story about the «room with flies.»

— You walk into that chaos and drop into such complete inner stillness that not a single fly will touch your body. The whole night.

— Did you manage it?

— I didn’t reach that level.

He said it without embellishment.

The ram under his head had probably been real.

I caught myself smiling.

You don’t come across something like that on the streets of Arambol — no matter how much you’re willing to pay.

Sacred anatomy

Every day, at the appointed hour, I would go to his house. My journey was continuing.

Gradually, I moved through what he called the «activation of the body.» It meant a new order of sensation — like that first moment when he touched me. Cell by cell, layer by layer, the body was waking. Each part was given attention, time to adjust, to recognize itself — to respond.

Changes began to occur in my life, though not in the way I was used to. Cleaner. Quieter. Deeper. I stopped spending time on empty conversations, on things that had no weight. Something inside me cleared. For the first time in my life, I could feel it distinctly — and I was, unmistakably, happy.

The very perception of reality had shifted.

Gradually, everything that once seemed important began to lose its hold. I would look back and wonder: how could this or that person, this or that event, have carried such influence over me? How had they occupied space in my mind, caught and held my attention, drained emotion? How had I allowed it?

We would talk for hours, unaware of time. Each day brought a new layer of practice. I trusted him completely. I went in fully. I felt safe. In my body. And somewhere deeper.

The activation of the human body is not an ordinary process.

I was fortunate. I was allowed to go through it individually, with clear instructions on how to maintain purity — physical, mental, emotional. I followed them precisely. I was given time to feel the value of what I had entered into.

Gradually, I grew accustomed to a world with my eyes closed. The chaotic waves of an immeasurable space began to take form — into a new, lucid world. A world of sensation.

From the moment I first met the Master, I began to record our conversations methodically. I retained every moment, every smallest detail: observations, explanations, exercises.

I absorbed everything.

A surgeon without a knife

We were going deeper.

One day, he stood behind me and touched my head. Precise movements of his fingers, brief clicks — and silver sparks.

He murmured quietly:

— What if like this…

A click. Another.

— There. That’s it.

This is how it happened — between conversation and tea, my first operation on the brain. Without a knife. At the end of each practice, he would always bring the process to completion. Return everything to balance. Close what had been opened.

— Never let anyone touch your head.

His voice came from the dark.

One part of me was looking into the world of sensation with an inner sight. Another seemed to step out of the body, watching what was unfolding from the side. I held onto the details of the process as a sequence of exact images, preserving them carefully in memory.

Later, he admitted we could have moved through the entire activation much faster.

But he slowed it down. He stretched it out.

He gave me time — not only to pass through it, but to withstand what I had passed through.

The test of attention

— Remember this — there will always be tests.

The Master said it quietly.

— In what sense?

— In the strength of your intention to change.

That was exactly what was happening. Familiar faces kept flashing before my eyes. Wherever I went — at any hour — someone would be there, waiting, appearing out of nowhere.

«Where have you been?»

«Why haven’t you written?»

«What’s going on with you?»

My old life seemed to be trying to pull me back into its orbit. But it couldn’t. I kept moving forward.

Very quickly, it became clear: our evening meetings had moved far beyond anything familiar. Not those predictable scenarios where, under the guise of spiritual practice, inexperienced girls end up with older men and are gradually drawn into something destructive. Where everything tangles together — substances, manipulation, strange collective games.

I could have been taken for the same kind of naive girl, newly arrived, with only one difference — I wasn’t interested in pleasure.

Spiritual pursuit opens many doors, and the paths to them are often slippery. Only a deep inner maturity allows you to walk that path through to the end.

As for me — I was simply fortunate. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the price I was paying. But I felt it — whatever it was, it was worth it.

The secret of the gaze

One day, in the middle of a lively conversation, we began to talk about human eyes. What, in fact, lies behind them?

I asked questions that went deep, and the answers were tested immediately — in practice. I was learning about different levels of sight. About the ways one can look, and how that look affects both the one who sees and the one being seen.

Driven by my usual curiosity, I went further and further, intent on reaching the very core. I crossed into that depth without ceremony.

And at one point, when I held his gaze a fraction too long, he said quietly:

— Don’t understand? Well. Look.

A moment later, I felt a faint discomfort — a thin haze spreading across my vision.

I lowered my eyes.

— There’s a fog… my sight feels dim.

I began to blink more often, trying to bring the sharpness back. Something inside tightened.

He responded at once:

— Close your eyes. Turn your head sharply, side to side.

It worked.

I fell silent, trying to understand what had just happened. I had only been looking into his eyes.

He asked:

— What do you think that was?

I listened inward. After a moment, I said:

— It felt as if I were looking into…

I couldn’t finish the word.

He opened his eyes slightly and completed it for me:

— Yes. Death.

Then he leaned back, folding his hands behind his head, and as if to himself, said under his breath:

— Why you’re allowed that…

I said nothing.

Death? What did that even mean?

Later, I understood what it was. That was my first encounter with what stood behind it.

He told me about undergoing a ritual of clinical death in Tibet. Since then, death had remained close to him.

I listened quietly. He spoke of guardians of consciousness. Of techniques of influence. If not for what I had just experienced, it would have sounded like fiction. The Master shared everything he knew with a kind of careless generosity.

Any desire to play staring games disappeared forever.

Instruments of influence

It was as if I were being born again. Every cell of my body was sensing — and resonating. Life had opened along a different axis. I was learning sensation. And in that moment, nothing mattered more.

Every single day, I practiced the art of balance. I began to feel other people more deeply. To perceive their intentions before they themselves were aware of them. To catch their thoughts. To know what they would do — before any movement began.

All it took was to gather my attention and look a person in the eyes — and I could see their path. Their life. Everything hidden. At some point, I understood: I was holding something dangerous. And for a while, I was allowed to play with it.

During our meetings, an Indian cat would often wander in. At times, it became part of what was happening.

He said once:

— Cats are creatures that live in several dimensions at once. Train on cats.

He caught the animal’s head in his right hand. A moment later, the cat’s eyes closed, its body slackened and dropped to the floor.

— The cat is gone.

He said it calmly.

For a second, I thought he had killed it. But that wasn’t it. The cat was asleep.

And I wanted to find my own cat.

The thought returned a few days later, when I was sitting in a closed café owned by someone I knew. A flicker of a furry tail passed by — the animal was deliberately ignoring me.

What if…

I closed my eyes.

Then I felt a soft warmth near my thigh. A moment later, a rough tongue brushed against my skin. For the next half hour, the cat licked every patch of exposed skin it could reach. I protested, but it didn’t care. In the end, I had to leave.

The picture was beginning to assemble itself —

the body conducts energy.

Where the channels are.

How to feel them.

Where to find them.

How to activate and connect them.

I encountered qigong. And I began to understand that the body holds everything.

I felt an increasing pull to work with people.

Almost without noticing, we moved from working with my body — to another level entirely.

The architecture of will

— Oh no, this isn’t esotericism, — the Master said. — It’s something else.

It has many names. The forms differ, the language shifts, but the task is the same: to clear perception, to bring a person back to their inner center, and return to them the ability to feel beyond what the ordinary state of consciousness allows.

I was fortunate. He led me along the shortest paths. I was entering states that are usually reached through years of meditation — with the snap of a finger.

From the outside, the technique looked like a simple movement of one hand. Behind that simplicity stood a titanic effort and a long road. Sometimes — a road walked alone.

— You have to choose, Oksana. You can’t develop both sensing and seeing at the same time.

Why he was right — I understood later.

The exercises he gave me, I absorbed instantly. Training the will became one of my favorite disciplines.

I began to refuse myself. In small things. In habitual gestures. In what seemed harmless.

And I saw how unfree I was.

Desires pulled at me. But the moment I stopped — and did not respond — something else rose within. Quieter. But stronger.

That was the first time it became clear: power is not in taking.

Power is in not obeying.

And that is what power is.

The test of success

— You’re unique, — he repeated every day. — You’re moving in strides.

If I had known him better then, the thought that he might be flattering me would never have arisen.

Within a few weeks, I had reached his level. And it became more interesting for both of us.

— This is a miracle. It takes people decades to come anywhere near this.

Somewhere inside, I knew he was right. But I still couldn’t see what stood behind it.

I played at full capacity. At that level, we could already measure ourselves against each other. Who would do it cleaner? Whose form would hold? Who would go deeper?

If he more often prevailed in precision and stability, then in depth — I had no equal.

At some point, I crossed an invisible line.

And he reacted.

For the first time, I felt the full weight of his nature.

It was as if a concrete slab had dropped onto me — without warning, without support. Breathing became difficult. The playfulness, the lightness — gone in an instant.

What had just happened?

Something in the illusion cracked.

I said goodbye abruptly:

— This is who I am right now — the real one. Why are you raising your voice at me?

And I left his space almost at a run.

The calm I had guarded so carefully dissolved into a dense, invasive chaos, spreading deeper under the skin with every passing minute.

When I reached home, there was a message on my phone:

— I want to apologize.

My understanding did not come at once.

Pride arrives quietly — right on the heels of success.

The responsibility of power

— You’re getting it…

I would hear his voice during practice.

In the evenings, people began to come to us. Sometimes the Master would let me work. With new eyes, with a different order of perception. It didn’t always unfold smoothly, but his hand was there — holding the line.

Why do people step into this at all?

Because this path does not offer only pleasure or affirmation. It does not spare you pain.

Each new stage took something with it. For something new to appear, something old had to leave. To let go — and that is almost never easy. I saw it happen: a person touches pure sensation — and begins to lose their grip on reality.

The impulse we worked with, the tools we gave — created a feeling of sudden acceleration. And most people forgot how easily that state could be lost. Forgot that everything carries a cost.

I had passed through it myself more than once.

Sometimes, from somewhere deep in memory, his voice still rises:

— Use it with care. Don’t waste it.

Intellect is not enough. What matters is how you use it.

No, this was not mysticism. And yet these unexplainable processes were part of our reality. Gradually, I began to see: a thought, joined with impulse, begins to alter reality. Literally. That was what intention was. And a word spoken with inner force can carry more weight than action.

I had to explore this on my own.

Understanding came slowly — the sense of responsibility.

The games were over.

And something else began to take shape before me.

The collapse of illusions

The moment of my departure was approaching. One day, the man who had become my teacher said:

— This will be your test.

I would like to say I took his words seriously. But then — at the height of ascent, held by his support and my own momentum — I took it more as an adventure than a trial.

We began to see each other less. Something between us lost depth. And gradually, his image shifted. He stopped being who I had seen before. I began to see a man. His character revealed itself — his personality, his edges, his weaknesses — the traits of an ordinary human being.

I found it difficult to accept.

In my eyes, he had been more than that. But reality was different. And the understanding that the world is far more complex than a simple division into black and white — that still lay ahead of me. Without a guide.

More and more, I noticed: even those called gurus do not always withstand the principle — to be, rather than to seem.

In the end, what remains to a person?

Choice.

And sometimes — it is the only thing that remains, in the face of fate, the laws of ordinary reality, and whatever stands above it. The way a person uses their will reshapes their path.

Inside my body, a vast force was moving. Pressure. Tension.

— Oksana!

The Master’s voice cut through the room.

The light flickered — dropping out, then returning.

— All right… all right…

My voice came back quieter.

I was learning to hold it. But I felt it — I needed more time to adjust. What I had received, what I had come to understand, could not be reconciled at once with what awaited me ahead.

Reality has its own ways of unsettling you. Resistance is useless. I had to learn how to live with it. To see more. To see deeper.

When I learned to meet the essence of things without disturbance — it became easier.

And that was when I understood, for the first time:

what gives you power does not necessarily remain on your side.

Chapter. The Edge

The edge of the earth

«Fasten your seatbelts. We are entering a zone of turbulence.»

The announcement cut through my thoughts — the same familiar tone, always identical, always unmistakable.

The hum of the engines filled my ears. I yawned and stretched — more out of the body’s inertia than any real need — the first transfer already behind me, while the sense of movement had yet to catch up.

My gaze settled on the airplane window: below, the Atlantic stretched out — one of those rare scales where the eye first tries to anchor itself, then gives up and simply drifts.

I wondered if we had crossed the terminator line — that elusive boundary you always want to see but never quite catch. The second time in my life I was flying to South America. This time — alone.

I listened inward with caution, expecting to find something familiar there — at least a lift, at least a flicker of interest.

But inside, there was quiet.

I thought of how India had seen me off — the master’s accident, the strange «forgetfulness» with the hotel payment, the looks that carried no warmth — as if I had been sent away, but not fully released.

I took a deep breath — not to calm myself, but to test what I could stand on. If necessary, I would turn around and leave. No questions asked.

After a third transfer in Brazil and more than twenty hours in the air, I landed in Santiago. South America met me with an overcast sky and cool air — no gesture, no invitation, just the fact of its presence.

And almost immediately, the space stopped being neutral.

Try finding your way to a hotel with a broken navigator. Try speaking a language you don’t feel. Try buying a SIM card without the right to sign a contract — and at some point you begin to see it has nothing to do with the navigator, or the language, or the SIM card — you simply no longer have your usual way of orienting yourself.

In that moment, you stop understanding what exactly is happening.

I sat down right there on the pavement of a crowded street and stared into space. I felt truly invisible. Only later did it become clear — that was the last time.

Cry, howl, scream? I wanted all of it at once — as if more had accumulated inside me than could be held — but it stayed inside, because here there was neither space nor meaning for it.

I don’t fully understand how I managed to find the address. The door opened. The smell hit me first — damp, compacted, stale. I sat on the bed and looked around at the grey, faceless space of the apartment, which made no attempt to please or conceal itself — it simply was.

And at some point it became impossible not to see:

I was not in the right place. Not in the right time.

I should have been in a completely different reality — not geographically, but by the very logic of what was unfolding.

What am I even doing here?

A second citizenship?

A residence permit?

A passport?

For what?

Why?

Who needs this — here, now?

And yet the game continued — whether I was ready for it or not. It no longer felt like an adventure. It was beginning to take the shape of a life — here, in Latin America.

I covered my face with my hands — from exhaustion, and from the density of it all.

Everything that usually unfolds slowly, giving you time to adjust, reached me all at once.

All of it — in a matter of hours.

I was alone at the edge of the earth — and it no longer sounded like a metaphor.

I had written myself into this story — by my own will, and at my own expense.

The fall

After a few weeks in Chile, I felt myself standing at the edge of a drop. I looked inward with a dark, unblinking gaze.

This wasn’t about discomfort. It was about a constant effort — not to crumble in the most ordinary things. I wanted to abandon everything and fly back to India. But however hard it was to live here, leaving something unfinished was harder still.

Everything around me seemed to resist. Even the system itself delayed the documents I needed — for reasons no one could explain.

How bitter this fall was. How painful — after the heights I had been so carefully led to. I clenched my jaw. Then forced it to release. But I knew: for now, I would have to grit my teeth and fight for myself.

«You failed the test, my dear.»

The voice came from within — deep, indifferent.

I could have found a thousand justifications. But a fall is a fall. There was work to be done inside myself — if I was to rise again.

But how do you do that here, in a place like this?

My gaze moved slowly across the wooden, single-story building of the guesthouse. It wasn’t a bad place. I had moved closer to the ocean, to Viña del Mar. From the window, a sliver of water would sometimes appear. The bedroom windows faced the dawn.

There was no heating.

One morning, on a particularly cold day, the gas tank ran out in the middle of my shower. At times, it was colder inside the house than outside. I found myself staying away from it for hours.

I had a small living space: a desk, a sofa, a corner of a kitchen. Paintings hung on the walls.

But there was little light.

You could feel it — the space hadn’t been renewed in a long time. The air held a quiet fatigue, an invisible dust. Laundry had to be taken to another house, paid for by the kilo, picked up the next day.

I tried to find something more livable. But each time — missing documents, or someone more convenient for the owners, or a price just out of reach.

This was not just a fall.

I was responsible for it.

A gift to the ocean

Next door was my favorite city of artists — Valparaíso. You don’t go there because it’s beautiful. You go because it’s impossible not to look.