Andrei: Really? Well, on the other hand, why not – bearing in mind that there’s no hole in the country they won’t stick their nose in.

Victor: Of course, they do. How else can you explain the fact that all our underground groups in yoga, martial arts, and esoterica in general are controlled by the KGB, sometimes even guided?

Andrei: You mean they are hiding more from the public than from the authorities?

Victor: Of course!

Andrei: And their goal – control and modification of conduct?

Victor: This too. You seem to know the issue and catch on fast.

Andrei: Yes, I read a few reports on similar CIA programs and occult sects created in the US for those purposes. It’s hard to hide such things in a democratic country with its Freedom of Information Act.

But what did you write about this to cause the KGB to send you here?

Victor: Nothing yet. They sent me here for creating a new dialectics and using it in analyzing the present political situation as well as for giving forecasts for the future that warn about the complete disintegration of our political system – which they, for some reason, call communist – and for warning about the consequences which might take place if the regime, clinging to power, should resort to methods of control and manipulation of the public mind.

Andrei: I see. But how are your dialectics related to yoga? It seems to me that dialectics is part of philosophy.

Victor: It’s directly related.

Andrei: Excuse my pestering you; it takes me a while to understand things; but I still don’t understand what yoga and dialectics have in common, and what forecasts one can give on the basis of dialectics?

It seems to me the best thing it can help us do is to explain processes and phenomena – post factum at that.

Whereas the things we are witnessing here and now, to say nothing of the future, either have no explanation or those explanations are similar to the claptrap of our scientific communism: I mean its theory lacks a scientific approach, while what we have in real life, in practice, can be defined as neither socialism, nor communism.

Victor: Yeah, foolishness in theory is fascism in practice. That’s why I created the new dialectics: the maxims of the old one are no longer adequate to understand the modern picture of the world. So I significantly extended their number, and gave them a deeper contemporary interpretation, assembling them all into a single analytical model, methodology.

Andrei: Where did you get those missing maxims from, and the model itself?

Victor: See, that’s where yoga and dialectics are linked. As you know, yoga studies not just our body, but our mind as well.

Andrei: Sure.

Victor: The whole of our logic, all of our theories, are based on maxims – notions, concepts, judgments – which to our mind seem self-evident and therefore do not require any proof.

Andrei: Yeah; so?

Victor: It’s yoga which showed me in practice that our minds can vary significantly and the picture of our perception is rather conditional and always relative, being the function of speed, or frequency, of our perception.

Andrei: Beg your pardon?

Victor: Let’s say if you want to study the work of the wings of a bumble-bee hanging over a flower, your eyes would be useless there: the speed of the wings’ movements is incomparable faster than the speed of your perception; therefore the perceived picture is appropriately chaotic; the understanding of the perceived is nil.

But as soon as the speed, frequency, of your perception begins to approach the speed, frequency, of the wings’ movement – no matter whether it’s due to yogic training, or you just film it using a high-speed video recorder – then with the growth of the speed of perception, you begin to make out of general chaos, to distinguish certain elements, episodes.

The problem at this stage, though, is that while you’re detecting one thing, you can’t detect any other; there’s simply no time for this.

This, incidentally, is the gnostic cognitive cause of all our conflicts: one catches a glimpse of one thing; another, of something else, its opposite, which provokes a dispute, often aggravating into a conflict, in which, sooner or later, the truth is born: that is, a third party emerges which initially disproves, if not defeats, both, then brings them together by producing a new integrated vision and explaining the faults of the old rivals. It’s possible, though, only if the speed of perception of this third party equals the speed of the process under study. The picture of perception will be static only in this case.

Andrei: Static?

Victor: Sure. It’s as if you were driving a car and caught up with a train going in the same direction. At this moment you’d be static relative to each other, and the picture perceived by you would be static and whole. That is, you’d be able to see all the elements of the picture at once, with all their interrelations; in other words, you’d see and you’d comprehend.

Andrei: Still, I don’t quite follow where these additional maxims would come from.

Victor: As I said, they come from a higher level of consciousness and, appropriately, higher speed of perception. While prior to me the only thing they could detect was, say, that the bumble-bee’s wings move up-and-down, I can make out and take into account such things as frequency of their movements, their amplitude, their angular and linear speed, and lots of other factors which, if considered, could both explain and predict any maneuver – whereas for an ordinary eye such maneuvers would seem just chaotic.

Andrei: The analogy is more or less plain. But the issue itself hasn’t become any clearer. Besides, frequency, amplitude, speed are the notions of physics, not philosophy.

Victor: Quite right! It’s only too natural that our material world obeys the laws of physics. Our social relations, too, can be modeled and calculated the way they model and calculate, say, the trajectory of a spacecraft.

Аndrei, finishing his scrubbing and wringing out mop, remarks with bitter irony: So your work is actually a new edition of a dialectical materialism, isn’t it? Why did they lock you up then, for furthering

Marxism-Leninism?

Bachkov popped in: Finished? Hurry up or you may miss your breakfast.

Andrei: It’s Ok, we haven’t finished our talk yet.

Victor, smiling: You’d better go. A stomach stuffed with oatmeal is better than a head swollen with my ravings.

Andrei: Why so?

Victor: With oatmeal, you only risk spending your time in the toilet, with my ravings – time in a psychiatric hospital.

Andrei: OK, I’m going, just want to remind you that we are already there.

An empty mess-hall. Andrei, getting his bowl of porridge and a cup of chocolate, sits close to Sasha, who’s already had his meal and is now waiting impatiently for something.

Andrei: Had your breakfast?

Sasha: Uh-huh.

Andrei: Won’t you go to get your medicine?

Sasha: Later. The boys in the kitchen are making chifir (a strong tea brew used as a mild narcotic).

Andrei: I see.

Nodding at Sasha’s forearm: You’ve got a beautiful rose tattooed on your forearm. So simple and so delicate.

Sasha: Yeah, I had a real artist for a cellmate in Smolensk.

Andrei: You were in Smolensk prison? What for?

Sasha: Burglary.

Andrei: Locked in a psychiatric ward?

Sasha: They did it later. I didn’t quite get along with the administration, you know.