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[Alexandr Korol]

shock state. You don’t understand what just happened, and it felt both extremely long and extremely fast at the same time. And as if you weren’t fully aware of your actions. That’s very similar to the state I often feel when writing a chapter of the book. I can get so deeply immersed in the topic I’m writing about that it’s like — I stop feeling my body, I completely forget where I am. It’s as if I can be sitting outside at a café in the summer, and yet become so absorbed while writing a chapter that I completely forget I’m outdoors, that I’m in a public place among people, that there is air, temperature, sounds — all of it seems to vanish. It’s as though I become like an autistic person whose every bit of attention is completely absorbed in the words, in the text I’m writing. One time — I’m not talking about the very first time, but one instance when I felt it strongly and took notice was on September 7, 2010, when the messenger Hope gave me these riddles on a sheet of paper; then, the next day or the day after, I met with Big Alexander. I clearly remember how we were standing outside the Vostaniya metro, with a crowd of people passing by. And as soon as we began talking — me, him, and a girl named Olya with us — it was as if we were completely oblivious to the people and the street, as if the temperature and everything else just disappeared, as if we were in a vacuum. And it felt as though, when you speak with Big Alexander and he speaks to you, it isn’t just a conversation; it’s as if he is inside your head, and you are inside his head, in some way like that. As if we’re communicating mentally — meaning, beyond just the spoken conversation — it’s like we’re also speaking telepathically. Everything he means when he talks to me, I not only hear it from his mouth, but I also feel how he’s describing it, what he’s feeling. And if he’s seeing what he’s describing to me, I start to see it too, as if even the image is being transmitted to me. How could I have known what this was? I thought it was some kind of shock state, but it was the same with the messengers — when Hope came, and when Lyubov came. I remember clearly a phone conversation with Lyubov, the Romani woman who had approached me outside the Bukvoed bookstore on Nevsky Prospect and handed me a note with her phone number. I called her afterward. I remember it exactly: I dialed and said, “Hello, this is Alexander.” And it was as if she were inside my head when I called. She answered, “Hello, this is Lyubov,” and then went quiet. And it felt like we had one shared mind — imagine that — when I was talking to her on the phone. Unlike with ordinary people, there were no thoughts, no doubts, just pure awareness, pure consciousness, pure intellect. I said: