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[Alexandr Korol]

whenever something happened, no matter what — any misfortune, let’s call it that — though you could also call it a circumstance or something else — I didn’t perceive it as misfortune, provocation, or a problem. At that time, I understood it as the language of God, the language of circumstances, that everything that happens is for the best. And that it is necessary this way, so there is no point fighting or trying to avoid it; it needs to be accepted and understood for what it means, but the meaning is positive. If, metaphorically speaking, your car gets stolen, maybe God protected you from getting into an accident. Or maybe if your relationship ended, God protected you from that person, meaning they weren’t good for you. If your boss thought you were bad and fired you, that was God’s doing — God wanted your boss to think that so you would change jobs. So there’s no point in arguing with the boss or trying to prove anything. And if you became a victim of scammers or something else, the attitude was that it just had to be that way; there’s no point in dwelling on it or looking for someone to blame or blaming yourself — that’s useless. That was my position back then. Now I’m trying to describe it, but at that time I wasn’t even thinking about it consciously. It just happened, and I was like a person staring blankly at one point, just looking at everything like “it has to be, okay.” But what do I remember next? I remember being in situations where there were people who tried not just to provoke me once, and I didn’t react, so it all calmed down. But when people absolutely cannot calm down and keep provoking you until the very end, just so you would pay attention to them and thus fall into that trap. And that’s exactly what pushed me, what I wrote about in my first book — one of my earliest books was “Attention Control,” and it was about exactly this. It’s like I saw that everyone wants to redirect my attention somewhere, but my attention is focused on some kind of good and faith in God. So I might be sitting in a cafe, believing in God, believing in good, and everything is fine, and then, say, some waiter says something nasty to me. But it’s like I didn’t let him in; as soon as he said it, I forgot about it a second later because I was still in my “cosmos.” But then he might do something else, like write a nasty note on a piece of paper and put it on my table, or throw a napkin into my drink. The point is that he wants attention, but he wants me to get angry or even just raise my eyes to look at him. And if I say, “That’s not right, don’t do that,” then I lose. And back when I was young — imagine, I was 20 years old — I understood this very well. I was so strong at that time, and I understood