Sensei of Shambala by Anastasia Novykh (poetry books to read txt) 📕

Everything will be all right.’ So, what do you think, I stood up in the morning completely different, even the pain slightly let go. Now, I have visited for a third time, and I feel completely revived. Otherwise, I just couldn’t find a place for myself... But what’s strange is that in the dream he had hair down to his shoulders, as an angel, and his eyes were so kind...”
“Yes, he has an unusual hair color, such a blond color is so rare.”
“What would we do without him? Really, probably, God sent us an angel.”
After these words, the very decrepit old woman who, up to this moment, had been dozing on the edge of a bench, unexpectedly squeaked, “Not an angel but an archangel.”
She again submerged into her drowsiness. This unspeakably surprised the whole crowd.
Finally some miner, judging by the black edging around his eyes, said, “I don’t know what kind of angel or archangel he is, but he is a great man! He put me back on my legs, though I don’t believe in God.”
“I also didn’t believe,” remarked a tough old man. “Thirty years I had the Communist Party membership card, and now look…” He pulled out a cross on a string and showed it to the crowd. “I have this cross. All this happened after one case. I will never forget it... That memorable day, I had to go to the shift. While the night before this I had seen our Igor Mikhailovich in my dream who said, ’Tomorrow come to visit me, don’t go to work. If you go, you won’t come back.’ Well, before that, I was receiving treatment from him, but then I had a break in treatment. I woke up in the morning and my back was hurting. Well, I thought, it probably ached at night; that’s why I dreamt of him. I got ready to go to work, and then I thought, why should I go? I will need to lift heavy weights. How can I do it? My back will collapse. Well, I decided to go to the chiropractor and obtained a leave permit. Can you imagine, that day there was an explosion in the blast furnace and almost my entire brigade perished. If I had been there, because I stand next to the blast furnace hearth, I wouldn’t be here now. So, how can all this be understood by a common mortal? I wanted to talk about this with Igor Mikhailovich, but he put his finger to his lips, hinting at me to keep silent. And that’s all… How can I not start believing in God after this?”
“Oh, you know, a similar incident happened to our neighbor,” said a woman around thirty years old who had joined the conversation. “He, by the way, gave me the address of the chiropractor. He was receiving treatment one day. And last year, our neighbor got into a trouble. Remember, if you are local, that explosion at the mine? He was buried under the support. As he told me, ‘I was lying alone in the darkness, buried by rock. I was terribly afraid of being buried alive. I had already bid farewell to life, to all my relatives. Suddenly I saw before my eyes, as if from the fog, the figure of our chiropractor, who said so calmly with his melodious voice, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. It’s too early for you to die. I will stay with you, until you are saved…”’ And when he came back to consciousness, he said he was already being pulled up by rescuers. He alone survived out of the entire crew. After that case, the man completely changed. He stopped drinking, started to believe in God. His wife and kids can’t stop rejoicing. He became a really nice guy!”
Meanwhile, the line moved ahead. In front of the crowd someone came out in a white smock. I was so surprised that my bag almost slipped out of my hands.
“Sensei,” I silently whispered, but in the next instant yelled at top of my voice, “Sens…oops, Igor Mikhailovich!!!”
Sensei turned around and, on seeing me, gave a sign to come up. I barely squeezed through the crowd. My heart was beating fast in my chest. Having greeted me, he asked, “Why are you here? What happened?”
“Well, my mother has problems with her back…”
We moved off to a corner, where Igor Mikhailovich lit a cigarette.
“My father’s general gave us this address,” I let out all the ’state secrets’ in a single breath. “He even gave us his Volga.”
Sensei glanced at the cars.
“Ah, Alexander Vasilievich. How’s he doing?”
“Well, as he said to my dad, he has had no problems with motion for two years.”
“Alright. And what happened to your mother?”
I began telling everything in detail, actively gesticulating with my hands from excitement. Having listened to me, Sensei pronounced, “Alright, take your mum and follow me.”
I ran up to my mum with joy and said that Igor Mikhailovich will take us out of order. My mother was happy, of course, but she was very surprised. She got up with difficulty, and we returned with her to the chiropractor.
“This is my Sensei, Igor Mikhailovich,” I introduced him to my mother with indescribable pride.
We walked deep into the house, filled with people waiting. In the waiting room stood a trestle-bed, and in the corner there was a small icon with a lit lamp. I helped mother undress to the waist and lie down on the trestle-bed. Walking out of the room, I saw how Igor Mikhailovich inclined above mother’s back, palpating her vertebrae with his hands. Already behind the curtain in the neighboring room, I heard Sensei’s voice, “Yes, you know, here is a serious problem, a dorsolateral prolapse up to seven millimeters in segment L4-L5 that’s causing stenosis of the intervertebral foramen. As a consequence, it leads to a compression of the spinal root.”
“Can you explain it more simply?”
“Simply saying, it’s a disk herniation. As a result of the destruction of the disk, its sequestrum, in other words, small pieces of this disk, dropped into the spinal canal towards the spinal foramen and are pushing on the spinal root. That’s what caused these pains… This, of course, is a serious problem, but curable.”
Behind the thick curtain, I heard a light crackling of vertebrae and a few unusual claps. In a few minutes, Sensei called me so that I could help my mother get dressed. Having agreed on the next visit, we bid farewell and slowly walked towards the car.
“How are you?” I asked my mother.
“It’s all right,” she replied.
When we were driving home, the entire way I couldn’t calm down, thinking about Sensei. I considered him everything: physicist, chemist, philosopher, historian, orientalist, physiologist. But an ordinary chiropractor, that was too much! Well, not ordinary, but pretty famous… And still, with his inconceivable potential of knowledge, with his phenomenal abilities and, in the end, with such unusually pure human morals, he could become a prominent scientist, politician, or whoever, moving up the ranks of society with his level of knowledge. But what is he spending his potential on?! If it weren’t for how he helped my mother, my mind would have kept rebelling longer.
Driving out of this god-forsaken place by back roads, we drove past a shabby, half tumbledown church, evidently built before the revolution. My thoughts switched to thinking about the eternal, about God, about faith, about the Great. And suddenly a thought flashed across my mind, “Sensei really helps people! With his hands he cures thousands of bodies tormented by pain, thousands of souls seized by sorrow, restoring people’s health, faith, and joy of life… God, that’s how all the Great acted! Each of them went to people with an open soul and performed good deeds. Sensei one time mentioned about… Can it be that he…? Oho!”
I feverishly began remembering all the moments, supporting my guesses. After coming back home, I reread in my diary everything concerning Sensei’s personality. Yes, the fact that he is a chiropractor supplemented the main missing link in my logical chain in proving it to my own mind. “It is most important that he cures the bodies and souls of different people. Consequently, speaking with such a huge number of people, each of them with his concrete destiny, problem, and pain, he knows much better than all politicians the intentions of the common people, their attitude towards life, as well as their spiritual level of development. It’s not possible to imagine any better profession for the earthly life of a Bodhisattva.” These discoveries caused a wave of small ants on my skin while my solar plexus began tickling with its spiral waves.
As soon as my agitated thoughts began to calm down, my common sense hurried to take up the vacant place. On the other hand, I thought, “Why did I exalt him so much? Maybe all this is just my imagination. I got tired, worried too much, had heard in line the different conversations, and have made hasty, fantastic conclusions. Alright, he helps people, he has a talent for this and abilities, so what? Simply, he is a good professional, as that woman from the line said. That is all. By appearance he is a common man, with a common face that looks like all other human faces. His appearance does not differ from others. He is the same like everybody…”
And here I noticed that the deeper I developed my common sense theory, the more something bad appeared in me, some kind of anger or something, some kind of dark envy that Sensei possessed such talent and abilities and I didn’t. And here, my thoughts became so dark that I even got scared of myself, “Stop, stop, stop! Who is creating a tempest in a teapot? Comrades, it isn’t me! Can the soul really think so badly? No. It is kind by itself. Where did all this filth come from? It is not my opinion. Some kind of fixed ideas, thoughts which impudently keep coming back again and again, and they awaken in me anger and hate… These are the instincts of the animal nature!” And here I completely got angry with myself and thought, “I am fed up with them! For how long can I keep being a dumb, stubborn beast?! I’ve had enough, simply had enough. If I continue like that my whole life will pass in evil intentions and vanity…”
Then I was visited by another thought, “Maybe because of our blown-up egocentrism, we don’t notice what wonderful chances destiny grants us. And for the soul, wandering through the centuries in darkness, maybe, such a chance occurs only once in a thousand years. Who knows what we don’t see because of our envy and anger. God, why are we so blind? Why do we start really valuing something only when we lose it? Why do we praise the Great only after their death?”
Christ was crucified because of somebody’s blown-up megalomania and our gregarious egocentrism. And what a great man He was, how many good deeds for human souls He could’ve done. If He were alive and people opened up their hearts at least a little, maybe human civilization would’ve made such a jump in its evolution that we, their descendants, would already live in a real, united, free society, without borders and government, without violence and terror, in a world of harmony. But no, even during the life of Jesus few people really valued Him. But the majority, probably, were envious of Him, gloated and upbraided Him with their animal vanity, with rottenness, with hate and indifference. But after His death everybody started