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[Alexandr Korol]

this beam as if I were shining a super-powerful flashlight on him – that’s how strong the radiation from the icon was. Then I went inside the Yeliseyevsky store, sat on a bench, and began recording a video, saying how unusual I felt, how I wanted to capture this moment right then, that I had just bought the icon, and it was so powerful, and I was shocked. I had tried before, through books, to explain to people how to lead a proper lifestyle – in terms of being alone with yourself, keeping a journal, meditating, to feel your inner self, so that the parasitic thoughts would calm down – and here, all thoughts disappeared just from holding an icon, and you didn’t have to do anything. That was a shock for me at the time. And what’s interesting is that when I took the icon and placed, let’s say, a glass of water under it, if I held the drink over the icon for just half a minute or a minute, the water became oily and its taste changed. But the paradox was this: if I gave the water to someone, say, a friend, and they drank it, they would feel the same way, as if they had been “radiated” by the icon, like their body’s tension would disappear, their thoughts would vanish, and they’d become “here and now,” everything would become beautiful and spacious. How could that happen?

But what’s even more interesting is that one time, I was sitting with my phone, scrolling through photos, just looking for one specific picture. Suddenly, as I was flipping through, I felt this “bam,” like a beam again, and it disconnected me as if my thoughts disappeared. I looked, and it was an icon that had come up. That’s when I had a new realization – that it wasn’t even the physical icon I needed, but just a photograph of it; even the photo emitted a beam. I was in shock. But, of course, what did I do? I printed that icon and placed it in different directions around my apartment, creating a kind of temple for myself. I even did an experiment, and indeed, it worked, but of course, you don’t want to stay in that state for too long. Plus, you don’t want to trivialize it, so later I put all those photos together and started keeping an album. I have a photo album now, and in it, I’ve collected pictures of any places or objects I encountered in the world that emitted such strong radiation that my chest would burn, my hands would burn, and my thoughts would disappear – if something divine, so to speak, happened. I photographed everything and put those pictures in my album. So, I have this album in case I ever get completely lost in the socially-material world – I can open it, scroll through each photo, look at it, and it will bring me back.