Alexandr Korol

There was an incident on Nevsky Prospect, it was already 2015-2016, quite a few years ago. I was walking around St. Petersburg with a friend in the city center, we were on Italian Street and entered the Passage. When we entered the Passage, if you enter from Italian Street and walk through the entire Passage towards Nevsky Prospect, towards the exit to Nevsky, the antique shop was on the left. We went inside, and something strange started happening – when I entered, I felt all my thoughts disappear, as if I was in a state of maximum bewilderment, like being in a trance, as if I couldn’t focus on my thoughts, and the control of my mind – “where am I and why” – all of that just vanished. I told my friend what I was feeling, but I didn’t understand why. And that’s when I first learned how to find what I call “buzzing things” – I learned how to look for them properly. I began searching properly. I was standing in front of a huge display case, a shelf, and I wasn’t moving, just looking at each item. I’d glance at each item separately: three, four, five, six, like that, seven, eight, nine. And suddenly on the tenth one, it was like something ignited in my chest, and my head felt even more foggy. I thought, “Oh! That’s it, probably.” So I started again, eleven, twelve, then again eight, nine, and back to the tenth. And I thought, “Oh! That’s it. It seems to be it.” I looked around, and there were a few more rows with some objects, and behind one of them was an icon. I couldn’t tell if it was an object or an icon. I said to the woman, “Give me that icon.” She handed me an icon about the size of half an A4 sheet, something like that. There were very expensive items there, seriously, costing a million or five hundred thousand rubles, and I knew I would never be able to buy something like that. I wasn’t very knowledgeable about these things back then. I asked, “How much is this icon?” The woman replied, “Three thousand rubles.” I said, “What? I’ll buy it.” And when she handed me the icon, it felt like my whole body was about to stop feeling anything. Can you imagine? I thought, “Wow, what is happening?” She placed it into a kraft envelope, and I have a photo where I’m walking around the city with it. It was so strong that even through the kraft bag, the icon was emitting energy. And it wasn’t just me feeling it. Imagine, even my friend, an ordinary person who doesn’t have any particular interest in spirituality or anything mysterious, a regular socially-material person, when I brought the icon near his face or turned it towards him like a beam, he could feel this beam passing through him. I’d move it across his body, and he’d feel