Dedicated to those who in their quest of Truth pass through Death... |
Harmony (Greek,
Latin – “joint”, “accord”)
Philosophy
& Practice
By Andrei
Shkarubo.
Part 1: Table of Contents:
-
Introduction.
-
Harmony - ways of pursuit.
-
Social harmony - dreams and reality.
-
Personal experience.
-
Early works.
-
Necessity of New Dialectics.
-
New on the site.
To
Reader’s attention:
As one can see
from the title of the work “Harmony – Philosophy&Practice”, the
subject of harmony will be treated wholly, i.e. both in theory and
practice.
In accordance with a learning principle
“From particular to general”, the initial articles will be devoted mostly
to practice; primarily to harmony problems, the most acute of which are
visible in social and spiritual conflicts, as well as the crisis of human
consciousness.
Only after this, an article is to appear,
devoted entirely to theory: new dialectics (methodology), i.e. creation of
harmonious, whole and full, vision of Reality; method of its assessment
and interaction with it.
Only after full expounding of dialectics,
ability to penetrate into the essence of any process or phenomenon, the
focus will be shifted to creation of a model of harmony, which is one of
the main goals of this work.
As there are but two major levels of
theory comprehension: a) passive-consumer level, expressed in blind
following of definite laws-commandments of some particular theory;
b) active-creative level, taking place
when the following of the laws of theory becomes so deeply conscious, that
it makes possible to create one’s own principles of such following,
depending on the requirements of the rapidly changing Reality,
In view of this, theoretical issues are
presented to the first level of comprehension with the help of analogies,
understandable to all; while the second level is given an abstract core of
the issue, often expressed in notions of physics, which at the moment give
the most precise picture of Reality.
Many
of this site’s
materials are presented in information-compressed form so as not to break
their wholeness. Such compression makes it practically impossible to
comprehend this information adequately, if you “gulp” it all and at
once.
For
its complete and correct perception, one should bite, chew and swallow it
gradually, in a measured and conscious way, the way a yogi consumes his
food, assessing all aspects of the product: form, color, smell, taste,
etc., because the goal of the reading, just like eating, is a full
energy-information exchange with the surrounding world, without which no
subsequent synthesis, creation of one’s own product, nor life itself, is
possible.
One
must stress that the intensity of such exchange, in other words, the depth
of understanding-digesting of the product is greater, the less is the
volume and speed of its consumption.
Those
who consume information, like food, as a habit, or for the sake of
enjoyment and entertainment would have to read those materials repeatedly,
or discard them outright, for they will be useless to them: this
information is for those who are seeking on their own to understand and
reorganize their own experience into knowledge, and their own knowledge
into outlook, after acquiring which the person no longer needs to bump his
head against the wall so as to learn the Truth. From now on he can simply
see it.
In cases of use of this
site's materials the reference to their source is obligatory.
Harmony
– ways of pursuit.
Everything that has at least once been
aware of its separation and vulnerability has personally experienced the
shattering blows of the outside world, which has unexpectedly and
unexplainably become strange and hostile, everything is seeking,
consciously or subconsciously, an inner quiet, and equilibrium with the
environment. They are pursuing it differently, choosing different ways,
and passing on those ways different stages.
This
pursuit makes all beings, living or nonliving, move and interact with the
environment, thus changing it and changing themselves, coming by and by to
the understanding of Harmony, a science of integrated, proportionate
and synchronized development with the aim of achieving inner and outer
balance, prevention of conflicts, crises and decay - development's
customary negative effects which the modern-day buffs of anti-crisis
management are straining to escape.
Harmony is, in effect, an applied
philosophy, which, first, requires possession of an integrated, deeply
abstract knowledge, second, ability to realize it.
On
individual level, the human pursuit of harmony is at the bottom line of
the following of various esoteric teachings, of studying secret spiritual
practices, which restore man’s unity with God and Nature, give powers to
escape disease, old age infirmity, and death.
This
path, the path of yoga (Sanskrit “joint”) has always been individual. It
has been pursued by the few; its main goal, the enlightenment, has been
reached by the tiniest fraction of them.
Those who chose this path inevitably fall out the society, which sooner
or later becomes the impediment to their spiritual growth.
It’s
not as if the society didn’t seek harmony. It’s just that the speed
of society’s movement is much too low in comparison with the speed of its
most impatient members; it's this disparity which often creates an
illusion of their moving in opposite directions. Not to mention
the fact that the movement itself is not always rectilinear…
The
society’s pursuit of harmony, peace, and general well-being assumed the
form of various religious teachings, with their invariable
principle-commandment of love – of God and one’s neighbor – love as a
means of achieving a state of general harmony – Heaven.
But
the growing social division of labor (labor specialization) was
making social relations increasingly sophisticated, which led to the
rising influence of the state and its various structures on the life of
its citizens and the society in general.
In
such conditions, neither the commandment to “love your neighbor”, nor a
politically correct advice to “give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give God
what is God’s” could assuage the growing class strife.
The
growing estrangement between people was pointed out by Benjamin Disraeli,
a 19th century British prime minister, who likened the rich and the poor
to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who
are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they
were…inhabitants of different planets”.
Social harmony – dreams
and reality
The
dream of universal harmony, Paradise, was giving way to a dream of social
harmony, Justice, which was expressed in various communist ideas, the
topmost of which, Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” was the first attempt
to give scientific (dialectic) analysis of the evolution of social
relations which, according to K. Marx, were conditioned by industrial
relations.
The
theory he created, dialectical materialism, was developed enough to be
realized in practice, but it lacked wholeness, which made social relations
resulting from it unstable. The human paradise proved short-lived and the
communist system based on the Marxist-Leninist teaching collapsed.
The mankind was again forced to go
back to tackling its different isolated problems: like economy, ecology,
humanitarian issues, including human rights, and so on.
But
practice shows that by treating symptoms one cannot cure the disease; so
the knowledge of numerous remedies, often contradictory, is useless unless
one knows the root-cause of the disease, the mechanism and algorithm of
its progress which in fact determines what remedy, when and how one should
apply.
Although Karl Marx’s dialectical
materialism could no longer give a universal remedy for social harmony,
the society was still seeking it: In early 1990s, for example, a Concept
of National Security (“Water of Death”) emerged in Russia, a collective
work presented by Gen. K.P. Petrov, an expert in the theory of
management.
This
work gave for the first time a really comprehensive, deep analysis of the
social crisis in Russia and suggested its solutions. But being a
collective work, it was painfully eclectic: It contained everything
important and essential but lacked the understanding of interrelations and
proportionality between its elements, which determines harmony.
The
absence of wholeness created an effect of a curved mirror in which all
elements seemed to be reflected correctly, but the overall picture looked
totally distorted.
The
absence of deep abstraction and, consequently, universality of
understanding, was also evident in the authors’ language, which totally
lacked simplicity and clarity, as well as bright analogies from every-day
life comprehensible to all.
This
failure most clearly revealed the cause of society’s inability to discover
the secret of harmony: the eternal contradiction between the
fragmentary nature of quantitative material knowledge and the wholeness of
qualitative spiritual Knowledge;
between temporary knowledge, subject to
personal or corporate interest, and the Eternal Knowledge, subject to
Truth;
between knowledge obtained by labor
and accessible to all and the Knowledge obtained by self-sacrifice,
self-renunciation and accessible to the few.
The society held together only by
personal interest manifest in the division of labor cannot achieve
harmony, it’s doomed to self-destruction.
Personal experience
It so
happened that I was to learn early the inadequacies and injustices of the
society, and in such conditions the issue of achieving personal harmony
became for me the issue of survival, both spiritual and physical.
This
happened when my father, an Air Force officer, was transferred to the
Cosmonauts’ Training Center, and I, a kid of 9 at the time, began to live
in Zvezdny Gorodok (Star City), a closed military base where lives and
thoughts of its residents were, and still are, under constant control of
the security services.
So my first brush with authority
happened when I went to our local school in Zvezdny. Being a disciplined
person, capable student and a loyal friend, I sincerely believed that my
duty to the family, people and society was fully observed.
So
when I was told privately that I was also supposed to snitch on my mates,
I refused outright, esteeming my friends’ trust more than good disposition
of those in power.
At
the same time, and the same confidential proposition – to inform on those
cosmonauts who “allow themselves too much” – was made to my mother. Her
answer was equally negative. So to make an example of us a campaign of
rabid persecution was launched.
As a
result of which, a year later, I was infected with TB after receiving an
anti-TB inoculation, which in my case was strictly forbidden, but
nonetheless administered despite numerous warnings and protests. Of course
officially TB was not diagnosed, unofficially they admitted it and
promised treatment, if mother agreed to work as informant.
As
any cooperation with those blackguards was out of the question, I, in
order to survive, had to take up, at the age of 12, herbal medicine and
yoga; studying it on my own, because yoga, as everything else which
contradicted the official ideology, was deep underground.
So 10 years later, I was already a
staunch opponent of the regime, a dissident seeking, like most of us, to
emigrate, appealing for help to international organizations and the US
embassy in Moscow, living under constant surveillance of KGB, receiving
ungratefully the free and generous psychiatric help of our most humane
communist state which our sick minds libelously called fascist.
In
short, I was obliged to learn the reality of social relations in a
psychiatric hospital, and met my teacher there. The next few years of
close contact with the enlightened one helped me figure out and summarize
my life experience, both in the sense of personal spiritual development,
yoga, and in the sense of relations with society. This man actually gave
me a vector of further development, though he approved neither my
adherence to classic yoga, nor my professional human rights work.
Early works
Years
later, I acquired my own power of insight in the abstract core of things,
resulting in my writing in 2000 the first part of my work on yoga “The Art of Human
Harmonious Development” in which I expounded the principles of
work of the physical body and the mind, the principles which are
determined by the laws of wave physics.
It
was evident for me that the living and the nonliving worlds exist
and evolve in accordance with the same universal law, and the very
division into living and nonliving results from the limited perception of
the modern man.
I was
pleased to learn that I was not alone in my beliefs when I met physicist
Yuri Ivanov, an author of a line in physics he calls
“Rhythmodynamics” which, many prominent scientists recognize, is
becoming a methodology of natural science.
A
30-year experience of yoga practice, in the course of which I managed to
get rid of a very difficult chronic form of TB, and the acquired knowledge
of the mechanism of the work of human mind and body made me offer my help
in treatment of tuberculosis, the epidemic of which in modern Russia is
acquiring a scale of a national catastrophe.
But the people to whom I turned
with my offer of help, and in whose care the nation’s health was, used to
ask me: “What’s in it for you?” - being clearly baffled by my proposal.
Those who were initially willing to give it a try would soon scuttle away
from me as if they’d seen a ghost – as I’d suspected and as it proved
later, the cause of this was the FSB’s ban on any contacts with me…
It became completely obvious to me
that no physical and spiritual well-being, harmony, would be possible
without changing the relations between man and state, first of all its
security services, which had no interest in public and individual good
because they live as long as Fear and Division live among people;
the well-being of the man and society, the freedom and democracy spell
only death to them.
So in
2001, I wrote a work “Spiritual
Rape of Russia” which was devoted to this issue, the more so, as
the human rights NGO, “Glasnost” Foundation where I had worked since its
inception, was tackling the problem of relations of the Russian society
and the secret services, as well as fighting the abuses of the KGB-FSB; in
other words, my understanding of this problem wasn’t limited to my
subjective personal experiences.
Although the work was devoted to
concrete issues: the principles of manipulation of both the individual and
national mind, the spiritual genocide perpetrated by the Russian secret
services against their own people, this work, like the previous one, paid
much attention to the abstract core: by expounding the structure of the
mind and the principles of its functioning, it outlined a methodology
applicable for analysis of any process or phenomenon.
Although I knew that my attempts to
attract public attention to the fact of planned destruction of
spirituality in Russia would be utterly futile, I nonetheless tried to
offer my work for publication both in the independent and opposition
press, with invariably zero (neither “yes”, nor “no”) result.
Still
attention was attracted, for I soon received a couple of proposals. It
wasn’t difficult to guess who was behind those proposals, judging by their
deliberate ambiguity both in form and content.
Thanks to this ambiguity, I went on
pretending that I saw nothing in their haze of hints and allusions, until
I was openly offered to lead an occult group for Kremlin officials and big
businessmen. Seeing that this proposition roused no interest on my part,
they added “Money and women no problem…” The latter argument made me burst
with laughter, and I was forced to say that I simply didn’t like “to throw
pearls before swine”. As usual in such cases, the reaction of swine took
form of reprisals.
The failure of my attempt to bring
the knowledge I’d obtained to those people and social strata which might
need them most showed that the ruling regime, its secret services, sought
to create in Russia a hierarchy (“the vertical of power” they call it)
based both on wealth and information division – a crazy idea in the age of
information revolution, and suicidal to the state, too.
It
was evident that the issue of “the man and secret services” had to be
extended to “the man and the state”, which was done in 2002 in my next
work “The Logic of
Political Absurdities” provoked by absurd, farcical legislative
initiatives of the ruling party.
The methodological part of this
work, unlike its predecessors, presented a model of an utterly abstract
system functioning on universal principles of old Hegelian dialectics, the
principles, which were expressed with the help of physics, its notions and
laws, which at present time give the most precise picture of the
world.
Applying this model for the
assessment of the present regime’s characteristics and its current
policies, I came to conclusion that the rule by arbitrary lawmaking would
soon be replaced by arbitrary judicial-administrative rule, which would
most likely deteriorate into open arbitrariness, the rule by terror – an
inevitable outcome, considering that the high-handed regime has turned
into brazen one from permissiveness and impunity, and has now been baring
its fangs and raging mad each time it encounters any sign of opposition to
its arbitrary rule.
Need
of New Dialectics
Half
a year later, I had for several months to examine, within the framework of
NED program implemented by our “Glasnost” Foundation”, the situation with
non-governmental organizations in Russia. The majority of their
representatives, mostly from the human rights NGOs, confirmed my
conclusions on the political situation and perspectives of its
development, saying that the human rights movement would be unable to
withstand the all-out attack, which the ruling regime of the Russian
secret services launched against the civic society, unless the human
rights movement itself becomes an independent political force which would
exercise power not for the sake of class interests, i.e. control over the
division of public product, but for the sake of the rights of an
individual and interests of society.
Although we’d reached understanding
that what mattered for the present Russian society was not so much the
nature of a goal it might choose, but the democratic mechanism of its
realization, without which, as life has proved, neither the social
justice of communism, nor the free enterprise of capitalism were possible,
because the striking idiosyncrasy of the present regime in Russia is
that it’s capable of sponging on any form of social relations;
despite this understanding, we,
nonetheless, could hardly do anything about it: The barely concealed
systematic destruction of the opposition didn’t bypass “Glasnost”
Foundation, which was forced to suspend its activity due to financial and
organizational problems.
For me personally, it spelled the loss of work and inability to find
any other, as well as the loss of a small land allotment, which for nearly
three decades helped my mother and myself survive through hard periods of
political reprisals and poverty, the allotment which the present regime
snatched away deliberately, without any legal justification, as soon as
their security services became convinced that I wouldn’t work for them,
even if they strip me of any means of subsistence.
After the ostentatious rape of the
opposition bent to the ballot booths, the ruling regime took on visibly
fascist features, and the opposition leadership, both left and right, have
begun talking, though timidly and inaudibly, of an emerging police,
fascist state – after this, analyzing in effect a qualitatively new
political situation, I saw that the regime’s collapse was not just
inevitable, it was just round the corner.
What required clarification was
whether the regime’s collapse would be the result of an organized struggle
of opposition, trying to draw a lesson from its defeat and thereby to
regroup, or, on the contrary, the collapse would result from a total
degeneration of socio-political relations and, consequently disintegration
of the state.
Being
aware that the democratic movement in general, and human rights one in
particular, were unable to offer any serious resistance, I addressed my
next work “End of
Illusions – Necessity of a New View on Reality” to the communists
who, after their defeat in parliamentary elections, announced in their
press a free discussion about the causes of their crisis and ways to
overcome it.
Judging by the fact that neither
the communist press nor their website dared to publish the article, one
can easily guess that neither the free debates, nor the fight against the
fascist regime in Russia were actually on the agenda of those political
brokers who do their “opposition” business.
It was also clear that there were
no structures in out society capable of putting up any effective organized
resistance to the regime: the society was atomized and the Russian
population, scared by the problem of physical survival, would be forced to
accept those cannibal kind of public relations which the present satanic
regime had imposed on them by guile and coercion.
Some extra tension due to emerge when the young and capable would rush
to fight for a chance to join and succeed in the cannibal hierarchy would
only speed up the inevitable disintegration of the Russian society and its
structures, the state.
But
to prove it one had to apply a grade more detailed analysis, a grade more
complete methodology.
Discussing with my friends the
future of Russia, asserting that this regime and its state were heading
for a speedy end, I, until then, was always backing my words with
analogies comprehensible to all; at the same time I was aware that full
proof required not only skillful parallels and their interpretations, it
also required that I present both a special code-syntax which brings
meaning to the reality perceived, as well as the principles on which this
syntax is based.
Such task demanded a more
systematic, a more abstract presentation of the methodology I’d so far
used; moreover, I was increasingly convinced that the true causes of
the crisis lie much deeper, being hidden not so much in man as in Time
itself, which determined the way of development of our civilization.
All this has set me toiling on the
main part of my work aimed at understanding and reaching harmony, the part
devoted to New Dialectics, which unlike the old one is to give not
just a collection of general, abstract characteristics of various
properties, states and processes, a collection which usually can only
explain a phenomenon, post factum too, but to give a whole abstract model
capable of explaining the meaning of the proceeding and presenting a
correct forecast of the future, to give a model based not just on the
notions of Time and Space, at the moment basic for any science, but on the
principles of the work of consciousness, because Time and Space are only
the result, the function of a certain way of arranging, decoding of
perceived reality. That’s why those basic notions, as well as their
derivatives, are always relative and conditional: they are determined only
by the level of our consciousness.
To simplify the understanding of
this rather complex issue, just like the whole of the New Dialectics, I
chose to present my previous works as one whole, because they, first,
explain the principles of work of our mind and body, i.e. the apparatus
which we use all the time and of which we’ve accumulated vast experience,
though subconscious;
the
apparatus which determines the way we perceive (decipher) reality and
interact with it, in other words, determines how we see, what we see and
how we react to it;
second, those works are devoted not just
to the problems of inner harmony, the harmony of the body and mind, but
the problems of harmony of interpersonal relations and relations between
the man and state.
The
task of this New
Dialectics is not simply to explain the objective causes of the
emerging problems of the man and society, but to give a new vision, which
might help avoid and overcome those problems.
Because the old vision leads only to a
mechanical-materialistic approach in solving personal and social problems,
which usually finds its expression in the removal of physical
manifestations of the “evil”, and resembles a process of cutting
down grass, after which it grows even thicker. In the former Soviet
Union they went even further and tried to root out the “evil”,
although skeptics warned them that one cannot root it out unless one
exterminates its seeds, which everyone harbors.
The
New Dialectics is also an attempt to understand the seed of evil, the
root-cause of disharmony, which’s emerged and is now rapidly growing in
the man and society.
September 1, 2004. A.
Shkarubo.
P.S. Dec.1, 2006.
Downloading the New Dialectics page, the readers are to find that this
work is left unfinished yet. There are two major reasons for this: first,
the dry academic style of presenting material may provoke the readers of
this page, especially those unable to think independently and therefore
relying on borrowed truths and stereotypes, to question the author’s
competence, or rather his formal education.
That’s why some of the materials which should have been included in the
New Dialectics page were presented as fiction in my play Untrodden paths
where two lunatics in their Plato-style dialogues expound the nature and
mechanism of New Dialectics as a universal methodology of analysis of
various processes and phenomena, and use it to analyze the socio-political
processes of the past and present; in other words, build the foundation of
a new world outlook.
Which is natural, because new vision creates new awareness.
I don’t know if my attempt at creative writing helped in any way
comprehend the subject, but at least it helped express one of the key
ideas of my work: Truth is revealed not to those who have degrees and
positions, but to those who have inquisitive mind and pioneering spirit.
The former comes from men, the latter from God.
The other reason why these complex philosophical issues were presented
as fiction was a weak hope to acquire a broader audience.
This hope is not dead yet, despite the critics’ reviews blaming the
author for various breaches of the laws of drama, and tedious
philosophizing.
I humbly accept this criticism: any plea, any reference to the works of
classics, say Plato’s Dialogues or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
would be as ridiculous as citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in the Russian court.
In the end, I’d like to stress that many of the author’s thoughts and
ideas fundamental to New Dialectics are not unique. One can find similar
or close things in the works of William Strauss and Neil Howe on cyclical
nature of historical processes, in various works on anti-crisis
management, on the web-pages of the Cycles Research Institute, and other,
both modern and ancient sources of human
knowledge.
