Simple Truths of Life

For many months I had been actively reading books and articles on the Internet in English. I memorized new words, and if I met some unknown grammatical structure, I checked with my English grammar book, or searched the Internet to learn about still unlearned rules of English grammar in order to know the language as well as I could.

At the same time, I trained my memory, trying to repeat the whole sentence that I just read. At first it was not easy, but over time I began to see the result and soon I could remember all the words in the sentence.

When the next time came to pay for English classes, I realized that with my own education program I greatly overtook the curriculum, and it could no longer teach me anything new. I stopped attending English courses.

Working days went well. I liked to walk around Moscow, from time to time going to the shops in order to place cans of the company on the store’s shelves. All in all, I was very happy then. It is only a pity that I had to spend about forty minutes to get to the northern part of the gray metro line, but I never dared to ask the supervisor if it was possible to give me a closer district.

I also began to notice how time seemed to slow down when I was focused on reality, walking around an unfamiliar area during my walks from one store to another.

Speaking of time, correspondence with one girl named Yulia helped me to shorten it. She once wrote me via ICQ, looking for someone to talk to. As it turned out, she “lived” in a boarding school due to poor vision, and was a little younger than me. We spoke with her on completely different topics with absolute honesty. After a couple of months of such correspondence, which, as it turned out, she did not conduct with me alone, we exchanged our photos and decided to meet somewhere. Then suddenly her mother called, who was a salesperson in a food store as I recall, and began to ask questions about my education. She hung up when I said that I was not studying anywhere yet. Yulia said that she was ashamed of the call of her mother, and our communication soon went to naught.

While we were still texting one another, there was one funny case when Yulia did not put a question mark at the end of the sentence which looked to me like a negative statement. We almost started to quarrel over this, but then we realized that it was just a missed punctuation mark. We laughed, and everything returned to normal.

A little time ago, another incident happened in my life when people refused to understand me. I was putting cans up on the shelve in one of the stores, and a woman who worked there as a supervisor began to talk with me. It was a pleasant conversation until she asked me about my education. Upon learning that I was not studying anywhere, she immediately said something negative and condemning, then turned around and walked away. Like Yulia’s mother, she did not give me a chance to explain the reason why I did not officially study anywhere – that I wanted to study, but since I was interested in a lot of things in life, I simply did not know where to go; that studies required money that I earned by arranging products in her store; that I was studying English every day and finished what I missed in the last grades of the school…

There were times when I cried during difficult moments. I am not ashamed of this, because such moments helped me to understand that I was still a human being with feelings. Awareness of this helped me to gather my courage and gave me an impulse to move on through life.

But I was not an angel either. After Yulia, another girl wrote to me. She was a basketball player. We did not talk with her as actively as with Yulia. I remember one stupid thing that I wrote to her, answering her question about why I did not look for a girl in Russia, and I wrote then: “What for? To fuck her and then dump her?” – it was absolutely wrong thinking at many levels. I understood the contradiction of these words to my moral principles many years later… That basketball player wrote me another message, asking me if I was afraid of women. Now, when I am not afraid to know and remember the truth about myself, I understand that my answer should have been positive.

We met every Wednesday at McDonald's near Tverskaya metro station with other merchandisers and superiors in order to receive salaries and do other merchandiser things.

I would not be myself if I did not start liking a young girl who recently began working as a merchandiser in that company again. I do not know if she noticed this somehow, but once, after one of the guys in our company did not go to work and was waiting for the other merchandiser girl, that pretty girl playfully asked me: “And you’re waiting for me?” – unfortunately, having finished my business, I just got up smiling at her, said goodbye to everyone and went to work. I do not think I thought much about the crowd of people then, but I was definitely embarrassed by our supervisor woman, as I thought it would not be very professional to spend working hours right in front of the boss. Alas, I did not try to find out the phone of that pretty girl who was interested in me even though I had no hair then…

If you carefully read this book, you can recognize at this moment the repetition of history… I will come back to this topic later.

As for that girl, soon that same pretty guy began flirtatiously flirting with her, showing some figures on his hands. She clearly noticed this, and I, in turn, noticed that I had once again made a mistake. I tried to alleviate sadness with the thought that I was still going to leave Russia, and the girl would only be an obstacle, and her smoking also helped me not to worry too much. But how long was I destined to live with this new lie?

I think it is worth mentioning that I met girls working in a store that I came up to talk to. With one we even had a very good and pleasant conversation while we were waiting for the store to open, along with many other merchandisers standing nearby. Then I was not shy at all to speak with that sweet girl in a crowd of people. But in the store, she got colder and began to ignore my flirting. Then I did not know that Orthodox believers wear an engagement ring on their other hands than Catholics. Another girl ignored me, but the next day she talked playfully with someone, and most likely she was simply taken and did not communicate with other guys. The third one simply complained about a lot of work and ignored me, but what was a little upsetting to me was that the next day she was almost flirting and talking to a guy who had hair and, most likely, looks.

I remember when I first started working as a merchandiser, a fairly plus size woman who was older than me tried to flirt with me. But what turned me away were her facial expressions, which did not seem healthy at all. Unfortunately, I did not think then that I myself could look like that in the eyes of other people when I was not completely relaxed.

In the end, I continued to walk on the deliberate path, wanting to start everything from scratch in another country and forget about everything bad that had ever happened to me in Russia.

Despite my self-deception, I was still able to discover one of the simple truths for myself. Returning home from work, I often found myself thinking that I was lost again in my head: dreaming, thinking and talking to myself – I often thought through different variations of events in my head, and how I could act in each of them. Tracing the reason for my constant withdrawal into myself, I realized that the beginning were often thoughts about what to do in the future – for example, on the same day. I decided to try not to bother myself about what will happen when this or that event occurs, but simply to initially put in my mind a general plan of action and solve the details as they materialize. The effect of this decision was amazing! My productivity increased, as my mind was freed from garbage, and I could spend the freed up resources of the mind on a quick and correct assessment of the situation, and on the subsequent making of right decisions.

But there were days when I returned from work and could not get out of myself. And I thought why? Previously, I managed to do this, but here I seemed to have forgotten everything. I soon realized that the reason was in my thinking about the need to live in the present instead of actually living in the present. These are two opposite things, one of which is a characteristic feature of a focused mind on reality, and the other is a feature of the mind of a person who is living in his inner world.

Having cleared my mind, I noticed something else… During my readings about UFOs, I came across a story that said that aliens consider us not very smart, to put it mildly. I do not know if that story was true or not, but after many meditations, I began to work almost all day with my five senses and pay attention to what was happening in reality. I realized that a great many people were absorbed in their minds even while walking along a sunny spring street. This was the first time when I saw that I was not the only person who was absorbed in his mind when it was not required to be done. Yes, most of those people were not lost in themselves as much as I was lost a couple of years ago, but one way or another they also made a mistake – I was not alone.

I often recalled that I had lost four years of my life because of empty fantasies – I say empty because there are only two worlds on which our consciousness can be concentrated per unit of time: the external (the reality that we feel with the help of our five senses) and the inner (fantasies, memories, thoughts). Then I realized that if we take the age of sixty years, for example, I still had to live two-thirds of my life, and given the fact that fourteen years of that third were childhood, I still had a lot of time to enjoy life. I was able to reassure myself that even though I lost those years of my life, I gained invaluable experience which, as someone might say, tempered me no worse than the army. It is a pity that optimism was always replaced by a depressive state every time I came across a mirror… and the coming long years of life, which had just given me so much joy, almost instantly changed their polarity, and I could no longer live with the thought that I had to live my whole life with my scars…

Soon it became very clear to me that I could not save up money to study in America by working in jobs that I used to have, and the lack of higher education did not allow me to get a well-paid job. But I could not give up anymore, since I had been doing this all my life and as a result of this, I almost lost everything. It was then a weakness for me to retreat from my goals, and so I began to look for other solutions and remembered that I had always liked movies.

When I got the Internet access, I was downloading a movie every day and then watched it in the evening. I often liked to watch the actors acting out their roles. I also remembered how in early childhood I asked my mother to teach me how to write, and at the beginning of high school I wrote poetry. Of course, my childhood thoughts in verses about why parrots do not have a hose could hardly take on Pushkin, but still.

Then I decided to start writing scripts in English, which was no longer such a foreign language to me since I completely immersed myself in English at home. I watched TV shows and movies in English, in fact I started watching them right as soon as I realized that I rarely came across unfamiliar words when I was reading – all I had to do then was to learn to distinguish words by ear; then I read news, forums and study guides in English only. As a result of all this, soon it was easier for me with English than with Russian, which I hardly spoke in my life.

Of course, I realized that it was not easy to write a story that would please Hollywood producers. I was ready to painstakingly work on my screenwriting skills and learn from mistakes. Also, I did not want something grand. I just wanted to go to the USA and live there in my own small house, which I always dreamed about.

Also, I wanted to first make a career and only then look for a wife. This wrong idea came to me after two women refused to talk to me when they found out that I hadn’t studied anywhere. I thought that girls of my age would also not want to deal with a guy who has nothing in material terms.

Masturbation continued, and I felt worse and worse. It got so worse that one day I was walking up the escalator from the subway and I started feeling not well at all. My legs barely walked, being very heavy, and my head was almost spinning. Thanks to meditation, which I tried to practice from time to time, I realized that our thoughts and psychological state play a huge role in how our physical body feels. Trying to gain control of myself, I remembered this and completely removed everything superfluous from my head, focusing my consciousness only on the present moment. I was then positively tuned to all the data that my five senses sent me. Result? A couple of hours later, when I was returning home after work, I was already running down that escalator without any symptoms of poor health. I was completely healthy.

But each time the mirror reminded me of my real appearance, and the porn addiction’s return would follow to brighten up the emerging depression. There was a moment when for the second time I decided not to masturbate for a week. I wanted to prove to myself that everything would be fine with my heart if I stopped feeling his heavy beating every day. After a week, I felt great, and my heart no longer reminded me of its presence. But I had to ruin everything again…

However, I often masturbated in those months to prove to myself that I was in good health. If I stopped masturbating after I had health problems, the idea that I was not healthy might not leave me alone. I wanted to think by having proof that everything was great with me. And I really had days when I felt good after masturbation… which led to think about why I cannot go to porn sites again and do a physically pleasant thing if it does nothing bad to anyone? And so the cycle repeated itself again and again…

At the end of June, I began to feel constant pain to the right of my heart, under the ribs – was the continuing masturbation the cause of that – I do not know. The pain was not very strong, but due to the fact that it lasted several days I decided that it was a sign to quit my job because in any case I found myself a new occupation where I was, as I thought then, my own boss.

I wanted to go to the doctor to check my health, but since I used to be treated for a non-existent disease for 13 years, my opinion about doctors was not the best. Moreover, in the fall of the past year, I went to the doctor when I again felt unwell after masturbation, but then I kept silent about my dirty hobby. My heart was checked then, and after processing the data, the doctor quickly told me that I had arrhythmia and turned to another girl. Yes, that girl’s health situation was more serious, but she could give me more information, could not she? For example, asking me to wait while she would finish talking with that girl. Now, having gained wisdom and experience, I changed my position – but then I decided to go to an alternative clinic, which my mom had visited before. She learnt about it from an ad in the mailbox…

In that tiny “clinic”, located on the first floor of a residential building, they put headphones on my head and pointed some device at them. The computer pretended to be working on the calculations, and after a few minutes the female doctor returned. The leaflets with pictures of internal organs were printed for me. There were different geometric figures on them, each of which “showed” the degree of health of the corresponding organ. Based on this “analysis” I was prescribed vitamins and nutritional supplements. Then some of them really helped me. For example, black walnut helped me get rid of a constant feeling of malnutrition – one of the symptoms of the presence of worms in the human body.

I was assigned a second “examination”, and I decided then for the third time not to masturbate for a long time. Again, such abstinence went for me quite easily and I felt great, which was as if reflected on the second “examination”. I was still prescribed a couple of vitamins, and in total I spent on that “treatment” a good share of my saved money earned by honest work. Was it the sunshine of a cloudy nature, among which I was walking that day, which after many years made me realize that something was wrong, or had I already had enough life experience and technical knowledge to understand that all those devices simply could not do any diagnostics on health, but it finally dawned on me then that I was simply deceived – to which I found confirmation from the reviews of many people about that company. Well – “losing something, we always find something, and that something is always knowledge”. It was expensive education, and one of the vitamins once almost stopped my heart – this was the first time my heart skipped a beat and then I was not feeling too well. Naturally, I stopped taking those vitamins…

Is it possible that my heart stopped beating then for a moment due to rebellious masturbation to porn? I admit that it could have enhanced the negative effect of vitamins which would most likely be contraindicated to me if I went to an official doctor for a real examination… most likely…

As for my successful abstinence from masturbation, it was so successful that I stopped wanting to have sex in general – and it frightened me. All my life, one way or another I thought about sex, and I could not live with this unexpected emptiness. I went to porn sites to prove to myself that everything worked in me as it should…

There were still warm days outside on the street when I was again awakened by the unbearable noise of the bank’s air conditioners that did not allow me to study or write scripts. Sometimes I tried to put on headphones and turn on calm music without words, but even that did not allow me to fully concentrate on the intellectual and creative work that requires peace and quiet.

I called my father to ask him to drive me to the village. He did not work then, and we left the same day.

Mom lived in the village then, as she usually did in the warm months, but upon my arrival she decided to go to Moscow to write another complaint against the bank.

I was a little embarrassed when my mother told me that I shouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary alone at home, and my father parried her words by saying that I was already an adult for those things…

Unfortunately, I proved my father wrong when I began to masturbate in the evening on a video of a porn actress, which I had previously downloaded onto my laptop, along with several others. In addition to porn, I also had normal films and TV shows, which I watched to improve my knowledge of the English language.

But how could parents know? They never bumped me over this matter… I remembered how a while ago my aunt Zina came to my apartment in Moscow and when she was walking into the kitchen she managed to read a small part of the rules I wrote for myself on a piece of paper that I attached to the door’s glass so that I could see it every day and remember. The rules were as follows: do not masturbate; do not quarrel with mom; do not talk to yourself (stop fantasizing when it is not necessary); educate yourself and learn something new. The order might have been a little different, but masturbation was definitely in the first place.

I think at this point I should get a little ahead of myself and say that my parents never talked to me about sex at all, and therefore did not explain anything to me. Perhaps they even once saw me with the guy with whom we were fooling around out of childhood ignorance. I do not hold a grudge, but this is a lesson to other parents – you should teach your children about sex by yourself; but for that you need to know about sex yourself (I will talk about this important topic later in my book). At school, not only the teachers almost did not explain about sex, but also when in high school during biology lessons we were taught the anatomy of the genitals, many, if not all, students already knew about sex from the Internet, magazines, conversations with other people, and also from their sexual experience. Then the topic of sex caused some kind of weird smiles in adults, which psychologically had a certain influence on me, and I could not talk about sex as an ordinary thing that does not bother you at all.

At the dacha I tried to write something, but my head was constantly tired because of my imagination, and I could not work for long.

When I arrived in Moscow, I decided to go to a free lecture of one film producer from America. The only thing I took away from there was a saying about a cat sitting on the window, meaning that you should not give up if the first pancake came out lumpy, as they say in Russia. I also could not notice yet another blonde who came to the lecture with her friend. As it was usually the case with me in those years, I did not dare to go up to them and simply ask if they liked the lecture, for example, or whether they were writing something at that moment – in other words start a conversation.

That evening, when I barely walked a few hundred meters from the venue for the lecture, a blonde woman stopped me on the street and asked a question that seemed a little strange to me at the time, since I thought that she should have known the answer herself. After some time it dawned on me that perhaps she wanted to get to know me in this way, but because of the difference in age, or because of the facial expressions of my slightly strained face, or because of my lip – and maybe due to all three reasons – she did not try to continue our communication then. Of course, I understand that I can be mistaken about the real nature of the whole episode…

I think that because of the mixture of some religious texts that I read a long time ago in my search for the meaning of life, and because of the seemingly endless demands of my body to have sex, which often prevented my mind from being completely concentrated, I almost began to consider sex to be a sin and something bad.

Perhaps it was the above-mentioned events that caused the next dream, in which the merchandiser girl I liked and that not at all shy guy had sex. She lay on her back on a bed that was standing as if in pitch darkness, and his body was perpendicular to her – this was the same pose that Natasha and I tried for the last time, but then I still did not see this symbolism… I woke up and I had a very unpleasant feeling from that dream. There were several reasons. Firstly, I still liked that girl. Secondly, for a long time I tried not to think about sex since I already began to experience negative emotions when I heard from conversations of real people that they were having it. Then I thought that dream to be almost a mockery of me, not understanding its true meaning – that dream could have been another lesson for getting rid of errors…

Mistakes continued to be made, but there were also very positive periods in my life, one of which was destined to become the calm before the storm…

It was autumn, and I was finally able to put up with baldness – I found myself a suitable hairstyle that hid the bald patches of the head. The girls also liked it, as some young ladies clearly paid attention to me. One of these girls was walking with her friend along the street and constantly looked at me. I had just left a paid dental clinic then. I went there after accidentally detecting caries on the lateral side of the lateral tooth, but since there was a two-week queue in the free city hospital, I decided that it would be better to spend some of the money that I still had then, but fill the tooth as soon as possible. The first day I went to the clinic, I was not well – both because of masturbation, and because of an obvious upset stomach. The operation on the tooth was postponed to another day. Leaving the building, I was pleasantly surprised to see my dad, who by himself decided then to come for me and take me home, since the clinic was not in my neighborhood, but in his.

Another good news was that I put up with my lip, forcing myself to believe that there must be an operation that will restore the symmetry, and I would definitely do it when I am in the USA. Since I did not want to look for a girlfriend because of the tireless desire to leave the country, I had no great reason to solve the lip problem in Russia.

Humility with the two main negative realities of my body made constant fantasizing an unnecessary thing, as I no longer experienced stress while realizing that I had those problems with my appearance. In addition, I with benefit used my imagination for writing scripts, which also helped me, since I did not have a vacuum due to the lack of old habits – I simply redirected the negative erroneous action, habit, to doing useful work. I then wanted to use my imagination only while working on scripts, and by and large I managed to do it.

Earlier, I often had the thought that the fact that I needed to meditate to calm my mind meant that I was “worse” than other people who could be focused on the present moment without meditation. But I was able to overcome those thoughts and began to meditate on breathing every night, and noticed one simple truth – you wake up in the same mental state as you fall asleep. Then I always fell asleep a very happy and inspired person. And if earlier I could have problems falling asleep, in those days I fell asleep in a couple of minutes, just lying in bed without thinking about anything at all and not concentrating on anything. I woke up in exactly the same condition as I fell asleep that night. I was full of happiness and enthusiasm for the new day with its new studies and work on my scripts – and so it went on for a short time. If I used paint to show my spiritual and emotional state in those two years of my new life, it would be mostly bright colors which would only in some places have specks of dark tones…

I signed the scripts with an alias. It was an American name, because I did not want to have mine then, trying to get away from who I was and trying to forget about my life’s story.

Around that period of my life, I had a dream about New York. The city, which I often looked at with such admiration and charm on the Internet, felt just like Moscow. There was a slightly different architecture, but on the whole it could have been an ordinary Moscow district. And that was the main idea that I had in that dream – that the USA is exactly the same country. When I woke up, I reluctantly agreed with this “message”, but, while still being very stubborn, I did not change my goals. In fact, until that moment I did not really want to learn anything about the USA because I used to have a strange desire of unknown origin to be a “pioneer” and personally discover America once I was already in it. I did not want to learn about the country beyond its borders from other people's life experiences.

I also noticed that when I was completely relaxed, the asymmetry of my lip due to my old bite was almost invisible. This was a confirmation of my long-standing reasoning that the muscles of my right cheek, which I felt was more tense during fantasizing than the left, also played an important role in the fact that the lip seemed very crooked under tension. I should have been happy with this, but since there was still a barely noticeable asymmetry, I sadly thought to myself then that now there was no point in going to the doctor, and, accordingly, this asymmetry would remain with me for life.

Another consequence of my relaxation was that my eyes also relaxed, which also completely restored my vision that was somewhat blurry when my brain was overburdened. While still working as a courier, I even went to the ophthalmologist for eye diagnostics, but as it turned out, in my case I just needed to relax my mind and body in order to regain my vision.

In general, I was very optimistic about my future. I just wanted to live a happy life, believing that everything good should be given just like that. I thought that bad things and negative periods in my life, like my stuttering, were just accidents of our existence.

From time to time, I thought about going somewhere and asking women and girls what they thought about my appearance. Did they consider me beautiful and did my lip and balding head bother them? I never did this, which was one of the mistakes.

I noticed an unusual thing when while being outside, I could often get out of my mind and be focused on reality, but each time I entered my apartment I would immediately see how I was losing this state of mind and becoming absorbed in my thoughts. Perhaps the thing was that at home I had nothing to cling to with my attention, as everything was the same old way in our apartment, or it just reminded me of the past and the present… After some time, I began to gain focus of mind at home too, but I would still get absorbed in my mind after each arrival of my mother from the village, since I could no longer be in silence.

Here I need to talk about one very important and unusual incident in my life. There was a time when I caught a cold on the street, and at home I had a runny nose, a sore throat, and a fever. I knew that I would be ill for at least five days, since for about such a period I had always recovered before. Also, my mood always worsened greatly during the illness. At that time, I did not want to lose all the joy and pleasure of life that I gained through meditation and concentration on reality. It is a little hard for me to explain what happened next, but I will try my best. I was in the toilet when I decided that I would not be depressed because of all the sensations that we feel during illness. Then I realized that those painful feelings are simple data that must exist so that we can find out that there is a virus in us and we could take appropriate measures, and therefore there is no reason to experience bad emotions due to painful sensations, since those feelings are neither good nor bad – these are just data that we feel in this way for our own protection. I immediately turned that new way of thinking into reality and was instantly cured! I had absolutely no symptoms of the disease. The only reminder that the disease had really just existed was an unusual sensation in my throat that lasted for a couple of days. I felt that sensation for the first time and have never felt it again. The best way I can describe it is a sensation of throat that was sore and then was instantly cured. Then I did not know what, or who, is the cause of such healing, but I found the answer to this question after some time later…