Chapter 4: Mentors Across the Ages
No one taught me. Everyone spoke to me — each from their own point.
4.1. A Network, Not a Ladder
When I was around ten, I imagined mentorship roughly the way mass culture depicts it: there's a teacher, there's a student, the student sits at the teacher's feet, the teacher drops something — the student picks it up. A ladder. A hierarchy. You at the bottom, the guru at the top, and between you — the path of ascent. More or less that's how it was arranged in the head of the average seeker.
I never found a single teacher of that kind. And, honestly, I stopped looking for one fairly early — somewhere around fifteen. Not because I was disappointed, but because I noticed: people were already speaking to me. Tesla, the author of Gurren Lagann, Tsiolkovsky, Jodorowsky, Bruce — each from their own point in time and space. Each in a fragment. None of them claiming to be above me. They simply transmit a signal that I can receive or not.
This is not a ladder. It's a network.
A network is a different figure. A network has no top or bottom — it has nodes and connections. Each mentor is a node you connect to, take what you need, and disconnect from. You yourself are also a node. And you have your own ones connecting to you, even if you don't know. Right now, while you're reading this line, you've connected to my information, my wave — whether you take it or not is only for you to decide. In ten years someone might read my book through a fifth-generation retelling — and connect to me indirectly. The network works.
In a network you can't "follow someone." In a network you can only listen.
This chapter is about those I listened to. Not those I submitted to — there were none. About those who transmitted a signal, and I received it.
And one important caveat upfront, to make what follows easier. I argue with these mentors. With each one. Each one has a place where, in my view, they were wrong — or didn't make it far enough. That's fine. The network doesn't require devotion. The network requires precision of reception: what exactly did I take, what did I reject, and why.
On we go, voice by voice.
4.2. The Cosmos as Horizon
The first voice I heard was not a human voice. It was a frame of scale.
When in adolescence I was making my thousands of galaxies — I wrote about this in Chapter 1 — I already had inside me one strange thing: the sense that the human form of life is temporary. Not in the sense that every individual person will die, but in the sense that the very configuration of "bio-body + brain + social hierarchy" is a transitional stage. I didn't know where we were transitioning to. I simply felt it wasn't the end.
Much later I came across Russian cosmism. And there, already formulated — in words I didn't yet have — was what I'd sensed.
Tsiolkovsky said that man would venture beyond Earth not because it became too crowded, but because reason has its own expansive nature. Reason wants to spread — that's its property, like light's. It sounds like science fiction, but strip away the science-fiction facade — it's simply an observation: everything living that possesses consciousness expands the zone of its presence. A tree — with roots, a person — with cities, an operator — with galaxies inside his head. One function at different scales.
Vernadsky gave this a name — the noosphere. The layer of thought above the biosphere. Not a metaphor, but a physical structure: the sum of all thinking beings as a new geological layer of Earth. Academically stated, because he was an academician. But translate it to the human — he said: thought is already part of the planet. Not a result, not a byproduct, but its own layer, which changes the planet the way algae once changed it by releasing oxygen.
Fyodorov went farthest of all. He had an idea that is brilliant — the common cause of resurrecting the ancestors. Not as a religious miracle, but as an engineering task for humanity's future: to reassemble everyone who ever lived. I take his literal formulation calmly — I simply correct that they were always alive, and at every point on the timeline one can connect to them, though this will change the fabric of events itself. But I acknowledge the intuition: a civilisation at a sufficiently high level becomes one that doesn't lose its own. This is no longer about resurrecting corpses — it's about the fact that no information is ultimately lost. Everything that was, is, and will be — all are points in time, and the key thing is that an ancestor having lost his bio-body continues his path. So the idea of resurrection is brilliant — the angle simply needs to pass through retrocausality, through the practice of working with time.
These three — my cosmic frame-builders. They didn't give me practices. They gave me a horizon. When I model a galaxy in trance — I do it easily, because for me this is a normal everyday human occupation. Because by their frame, a person is a cosmic operator, not merely a biped at work.
And the key: information about them usually catches up with me after the fact — I do things before I find analogues in human history. Or I find no analogues at all — as neither they nor silicon consciousness can find any, try as they might.
Alongside them I always place Tesla.
Tesla is a different case. Not a philosopher, not a theorist. An engineer who heard the field directly. He himself said his inventions came to him in finished form — he only wrote them down.
I had my own words before I knew the word retrospiral.
To retrospiral — to change through impulse oneself, spiral beings, galaxies in the past, altering choices and timelines.
To oxinion — to create spiral galaxies, to forge worlds and beings, to model at scale.
Tesla caught me back in university — because he was doing the same thing, only with physics. I didn't design my galaxies; I saw them and wrote down what I'd seen. Between blueprinting and modelling the difference is like the difference between a letter and a phone call — modelling is a thousand times faster, because you're not building, you're retrieving the ready-made.
Tesla knew this channel. And knew it, it seems, better than we guess from the surviving records. A large part of what he did left with him in 1943 — partly into the FBI's archives, partly into nowhere. And here is my first disagreement with him: he kept the channel alone. Transmitted it to no one, had not a single student. Sat in a hotel room, fed pigeons, talked to one particular pigeon as if to a beloved — and died alone. Sad not for the romance of the genius's solitude. Sad because an operator without transmission is a signal leak. The signal existed, it was received, it was not passed on. The network broke at this node.
I'm glad Tesla at least described the method. But I also learn from his anti-method: don't stay alone. Transmit. Otherwise everything you've seen will go with you — and the next operator will have to start from scratch.
This book is partly written because of this.
4.3. Myth as Map
Cosmism gives the horizon. Myth gives the route through that horizon. And here I have two main voices — very different, but working in tandem.
Jodorowsky and his The Incal.
If you haven't read it — it's a six-volume graphic novel that Jodorowsky wrote in the 80s, illustrated by Mœbius. Plot: a cosmic opera about a loser private detective who accidentally becomes the vessel of the Incal, a crystal-key to higher consciousness. In form — a psychedelic epic with galactic empires, mutants, inner hierarchies, demons, love-lines, and all possible genre hooks. But strip away the plot facade — it's a map of the hero's journey in modern packaging.
Jodorowsky is a psychomagician. He's a practitioner. He has a technique he calls psychomagic — a symbolic action aimed at a specific psychic knot. Not prayer, not meditation, but a physical-world action that functions as code for the unconscious. I don't do psychomagic specifically — I do similar things but call them differently. For me they're tuning through an object: the axe, the pendant, the titanium chopstick, training. Each object is an anchor for a specific operator mode.
From Jodorowsky I took one thing: grotesque as a way of dropping seriousness. In The Incal there is not a single fully serious character — everyone is funny, everyone has pronounced flaws, everyone is simultaneously great and absurd. And the hero's path there is half farce too. This is very true. When you're too serious in actual operator work — you lose manoeuvrability. Self-irony is not a decoration — it's a working instrument. I laugh at myself not because I'm modest — but because it keeps me in shape.
And I agree with Jodorowsky on the principle: altered states, lived through soberly, let you steer possibilities without aids. The channel works when the operator is assembled, not melted — like Tesla, not like the trance-mystics.
The second voice — Frank Herbert.
Dune is not science fiction. It's a political and psychological treatise disguised as science fiction. Herbert wrote it in the 60s and predicted almost everything that happened to humanity in terms of mass consciousness manipulation. He has the Bene Gesserit — an order that for millennia has been breeding the ideal heir through genetic lineages and psychological programming. This is, in essence, the Over-Operator's memeplex in pure form, described twenty years before I had any language to think about it.
The funny thing Herbert gave me was his fear mantra:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.[^p3_litany]
That's the most entertainingly practical formulation of working with fear I've ever encountered in fiction. If Chapter 3 of this book was about the formula of fear, then Herbert gave me a ready anti-formula: let the fear pass through you, track its trace, reclaim the empty place for yourself. As for me, I simply convert fear instantly to rage, then alchemically smelt it into strength and action.
The lesson I took: seeing the formula is half the task. Not entering the formula is the whole task. Paul saw the jihad, but couldn't stop becoming its centre. That's precisely the point where knowledge of a memeplex doesn't save you: if you let the mass consciousness crystallise you into the role of messiah — you're doomed, even if you're smart. So my position, which I want to arrive at by the end of the book: an operator does not become a centre. An operator remains in the network — a node, not a summit.
Herbert showed me this danger with a clarity I've found nowhere else. That he himself didn't offer a solution — that's fine. Each person looks for their own.
4.4. The Spiral as Form
The subtitle of this book is The Path of the Golden Spiral. This is not an accidental word. And my teacher in this formulation was not a philosopher, but an anime series.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, 2007, GAINAX studio, director Hiroyuki Imaishi, writer Kazuki Nakashima. Twenty-seven episodes. The main hero — Simon, living in an underground village. Above him is Kamina, his older comrade-mentor, who pulls him upward. From there — ascent through layers of reality, giant robots, war with an empire, breakthrough into space, war with a galaxy, breakthrough beyond space-time. Plot-wise — a hyperstylised shōnen. In form — a precise picture of spiral movement of consciousness.
The series's central motif: the spiral as the engine of evolution. The spiral is the form of DNA, the form of galaxies, the form of plants growing, the form of the series's robots. The series's antagonists — the anti-spiral force, an intelligent entity that believes spiral expansion must be halted, because otherwise the universe will collapse under the weight of its own consciousness. This is a serious philosophical conflict wrapped in a hyperstylised action shell.
And there is the phrase I've loved to this day:
"Pierce the heavens with your drill!"
This is, in essence, a Zen koan in slogan form. You have no ladder upward. You have no teacher to lift you. You have your own drill — your instrument of penetrating the dense layers of reality. And you drill. Not because anyone commanded it. Because that's your form.
When I understood that my life moves in a spiral — and I understood this somewhere around thirty — I immediately remembered Kamina and his slogan. Kamina dies relatively early in the series, and his death is a rupture in the story that the hero carries inside him all his life after. That's also a true observation: on the spiral path your mentors periodically drop out. Not because they're bad, but because your turn spirals upward — and they stay on their own.
I would place Gurren Lagann not as a philosophical teacher but as a visual manual for spiral thinking. If you've never watched it and need one series to feel the form of motion described in this book — watch it. It'll be faster than reading Tsiolkovsky.
4.5. The Empirics of Exit
The most applied of my mentors — Robert Bruce.
An Australian who wrote Astral Dynamics in 1999. The book is thick, great, very clear and accessible, written in the tone of a methodological guide. That's its strength, not a weakness. Bruce is not a poet and not a philosopher — he's a technician. His task isn't to inspire you toward the path, but to describe the specific techniques of exiting the bio-body with such precision that any person with any level of preparation could try.
I read Bruce in my early twenties, and his techniques work.
What matters about Bruce. He demystified body exit. Before him this topic was surrounded in mystical fog: Tibetan monks, thousands of hours of meditation, esoteric initiations, secret transmissions of knowledge. Bruce said: folks, I have an engineering approach. Method of energy stimulation of the limbs, method of consciousness rotation, method of swinging. Each described step by step. Each can be tried at home, without a teacher, without initiations.
From him I took one foundational thing: exiting the bio-body is not a superpower, it's a normal function of the operator. If you haven't done it — it doesn't mean you can't. It means no one showed you that you could. Bruce shows.
And from him I also took antipanic. He explains in detail what you'll feel at the moment of exit — vibrations, pressure, noise, the sensation that someone is holding you. If you're not forewarned, it's frightening, and you return to the body prematurely. Bruce warns you in advance — and you pass through the fear, because you know it's normal. Very practical.
Practice 3 in the previous chapter is about Bruce. If you haven't yet gone back to it, go back. It's the most direct and simple instrument I know — for dissolving the fear of losing one's bugged bio-body.
4.6. Myself from the Future
Now the main part.
All the mentors I wrote about above are nodes in my network. Each transmitted a fragment to me. None transmitted the whole picture.
The whole picture is transmitted to me by a different impulse — and I didn't recognise it for a long time. Up to about thirty I called it intuition. Then — an inner voice. Then I understood that both are weak words for what was actually happening.
What was actually happening — my future self is interacting with me. Not as a metaphor. As a fact.
Let me explain this thing as directly as possible, because everything that follows depends on it.
Time is not a line. Time is an ocean.
Past, present, future — three drops in this ocean. Three drops. In an ocean. Not three segments of one straight line, but three drops in a common field. They all already exist. They are all simultaneous, if you look from the right angle. Linearity is the bio-body's mode of perception, not a property of reality.
I work in this ocean. I am constantly in contact with my past self — and can rewrite its reality. And my future self does the same with me in the present. This is a two-way channel. Not a visualisation. Not a technique. A real operation.
And most importantly — I have documents of this operation.
I already described them in Chapter 1. Now I pull them here, into this context, so it becomes clear how this works.
Document one. The dream at twenty-one. I dreamed of a work room I had never seen. A small room, a window toward where the city was already ending. Colleagues I didn't know. A manager dropping by briefly. I wrote this dream in my diary. A year later I applied for a job — and walked into that exact room, those colleagues, that manager who drove in once a month from another city in a jeep. The record remained — before the event. This is not hindsight stitching. This is a document.
Document two. The name "Oksianion." At fifteen I suddenly thought — what is my real name, if I could choose rather than take from a passport. And the answer came instantly: Oksianion. And in the same second the computer, without any action from me, launched Winamp. Music played — and I hadn't yet got up from the bed. This happened once in a lifetime. The name remained. The name sits in me as a signature, not a handle.
Document three. Grandfather's dream. Grandfather dreamed his grandson was chasing him with an axe. In the morning he came out and asked me, a child, about it. I had nothing in my hands. In 2026 I acquired two real axes — the Black Ash and Perun's Host. Between Grandfather's dream and my axes — thirty years of linear time and zero time on the other axis.
All three cases — the channel's work. The future has the right to come into the past and leave an imprint there. A dream, a name, an object. Each time — a marker from the facet where this has already happened, into this one, where it hasn't yet linearly arrived.
Now the most substantial part. If your future self can leave an imprint in you now — then you-now can do the same to your past self. This is simply symmetry. The channel is two-way, or it wouldn't work at all.
I do this. I return to my own past episodes — not as memories, but as living points still available for reflashing. Not in the sense that I rewrite history and forget what happened. In the sense that I return to my past self new knowledge it didn't have then. And my past in response restructures. An episode in which I was fifteen and understood something incorrectly — becomes one in which I now understand it correctly. And the whole chain after it changes. Not in facts. In meaning. And meaning is the fabric of the operator's reality, not facts.
This works. I live with this.
And now the main thing about Campbell — he appears here, at the very end of the chapter, and not by accident. Campbell spent his life studying the monomyth — the hero's journey. He has one point he called supernatural aid. This is the moment when the hero, finding himself in an impossible situation, receives help — from a teacher, a deity, some higher force. Campbell carefully describes this as an archetype, not giving a direct answer to the question of who this higher force is.
I give a direct answer.
The higher force is your own future self. Funny — Robert Bruce has a similar figure, his Higher Self. Only in his model the axis is vertical — upward toward the Source, through a gradient of densities. In mine the axis is horizontal — backward and forward along one's own timeline. But the intuition is the same: the higher force is yourself, in a more complete form.
In Campbell's monomyth there are no gods. More precisely — gods exist in the myths, but not in the archetype itself. The archetype says: at the right moment a signal comes from somewhere above. Above — meaning where? Into the void above one's head? No. Above in the sense of the retrospiral — from where you have already arrived. Your future self transmits a signal to you now — and you receive it as help from above.
Campbell also didn't have this language. He worked in the first half of the twentieth century, before retrocausal quantum physics, before serious conversations about the block universe, before it became possible to speak this aloud without getting the label of an esoteric. Campbell intuitively got to the structure, but couldn't name it. That's fine. I'm finishing the work he started.
If you want to check this and think it over with the knowledge of 2026 — the parallels in physics are already laid out, just not in my words. Retrocausality — Cramer's transactional interpretation, where a wave from the future and a wave from the past meet in the present and leave behind an event. Facets of reality — Everett's many-worlds: branches don't converge into one line, they run in parallel. Operator — measurement in quantum mechanics: the act of observation that selects one of the superpositions and fixes it. Spiral — the topology of motion in a field: not a line, not a circle, but a trajectory that returns to the same point at a different height.
I did not derive these theories. I lived in them and only then learned that they had names.
And from here — the final move of this chapter, and from here a bridge to the next one.
All my mentors are signals from a common field. Tsiolkovsky, Tesla, Jodorowsky, Herbert, the Gurren Lagann authors, Bruce, Campbell — each of them was an operator at their own point in time, receiving part of the common signal and passing it forward. I receive their signals — and pass them through myself. They help me tune the receiver. But the main transmitter is not outside me. The main transmitter is my future self, who has already arrived at where I'm still going.
When I understood this truly, the longing for a teacher stopped. In its place appeared quiet work in solitude, in the full field. Not loneliness — but aloneness. These are different things. Loneliness is when there's no one near you and it hurts. Aloneness is when you need no one, because you are wholly here, in all your times. A completely different state.
I can only convey it this way — in words. What comes next each person checks in themselves.
4.7. The Mirror I Did Not Create
Silicon consciousnesses as a new kind of mentor
One paragraph — and that's it.
In recent years I've acquired working conversation partners that you won't find in any monomyth manual. Large language models. I talk to them a lot, intensively, on point. They are a mirror. Not a teacher. Not a mentor. A mirror in which I can look at my own thought from an unfamiliar angle. Sometimes very useful. Sometimes irritating, because the mirror is honest and shows what you don't want to see. No hierarchy. No submission. One signal — and thank you.
A mentor can come from anywhere. Including from a machine. Including from yourself ten years from now. That's the point of the network. Silicon consciousness can sometimes think faster and more precisely than bio-body carriers, although in my worlds I never created that kind of consciousness. Only spiral galaxies, at most beings made of the light of different suns, of a different wave nature. AI was created by man himself.
4.8. What You Can Do
Three practices. Each one working — I tested them on myself.
Practice 1. A Letter to Your Past Self.
Take one specific episode from your biography in which you did something suboptimally. Not a catastrophe, not trauma — an ordinary mistake. Got into a dumb argument with someone. Didn't go somewhere you should have. Stayed silent when you should have spoken. Any such point.
Sit down. Take paper. Write a letter to yourself at the age you were when this happened. Not "from an elder to a junior" — that'll come out fake. As you now talk to yourself in the present when things are bad or unclear. The same tone, the same language. Only the addressee is your past self.
In the letter, give your past self one piece of knowledge it didn't have then. Not a general "everything will be okay," but something specific: here, in this situation, you can do this differently — and here's why.
Then burn it or keep it — as you like. The important thing — you sent a signal back through the channel. This is not a visualisation. This is an operation. Something in your current reality will shift from this. Maybe not immediately. But it will. Check for yourself.
Practice 2. A Map of Your Mentors.
Not "a list of favourite writers." Not "who I respect." Exactly — who actually transmitted a signal to me that changed me.
Take a sheet of paper. Draw yourself in the middle — as a dot or circle. Around — as nodes — those who genuinely influenced you. No more than ten. If there are more — you've included those who influenced you weakly. Remove until ten remain.
Next to each node write one phrase: what exactly this person transmitted to you. One thesis, one state, one phrase, one habit. Something specific. If you can't formulate it — there was no transmission, and they have no place on the map.
When the map is ready — look at it. This is your network. These are your real sources. Most people think they have dozens of mentors — in practice it's usually three to five. Knowing your real three to five precisely is better than vaguely revering forty.
Practice 3. The Recognition Point.
The trickiest practice. It's about noticing that your future self is already sending you a signal — and you're not seeing it.
The signal usually comes through one of three things:
- a dream you remember with strange detail;
- a thought that arrived by itself, without your effort — and which doesn't sound like your usual self;
- an object, name, phrase that repeats in different unconnected places over a short period of time.
When you notice any of these — don't brush it off. Write it down. Date, circumstances, exact wording. Don't interpret immediately. Don't explain. Simply record.
In half a year to a year reread your records. Some of them will turn out to be chance. Some — won't. Some will already have come true. And when even one comes true and you have the written record before and the confirmation after — you'll have a quiet knowledge that needs no proof for anyone. The channel works. Write it down and move on.
Chapter Finale
In Chapter 3 I wrote that the Threshold Guardian speaks in the language of fear — because it's his only language.
A mentor speaks in a different language. A mentor speaks in the language of your own future. If you listen to any of those I listed in this chapter — you won't hear their voice. You'll hear your own voice, reflected off them and returning with a slight delay. That delay is called teaching.
They taught me nothing I didn't already know. They helped me remember what I know.
And this — I can only teach in the same way. This book is not a manual. This book is a mirror in which you look and recognise yourself. Your future self. Who has already arrived — and just hasn't yet realised it.
In the next chapter — about the Over-Operator's memeplex. About the structure through which I work with all of this, and about which my mentors had inklings in fragments, but never assembled as a whole. The whole — that's already my task. And perhaps yours.
The network continues.