To regard esotericism as a product of popular ignorance seems to have also become ignorance lately. Passion for esotericism is growing precipitously. She has long ceased to be the lot of exalted and enterprising ladies, around whom bats fly and the ineradicable smell of sulfur, betraying the demonic origin of the guru.
The modern Moscow esotericist at his best is an intelligent and gifted person with a modern mindset. It is these who create that esotericism that confidently overcomes those of little faith. By the way, scientists do not belong to those of little faith. At least when in 2014 the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo and the Agency for Strategic Initiatives conducted a large-scale study Foresight Competences 2030, it turned out that scientists predict at least two future competencies, whose professional circle of interests includes esotericism and related disciplines. Then more than 2,500 Russian and international experts were interviewed. The purpose of the survey was to identify the most in-demand professions of the future. One of them, even before the end of 2020, will be the so-called coach of creative states. This is a specialistwhich helps to develop creativity and consciously connect the necessary personal resources for this. The second profession closely related to the tasks was named a mind fitness specialist. Simply put, this is someone who knows how to introduce creative people into a state of flow and teaches a conscious rethinking of reality.
However, while scientists predict and are engaged in futurology, all these professions have already quietly entered the market and occupied quite stable niches on it. About 40 large self-development sites have already been launched in Russia. On the most famous of them - Samopoznaniya.ru - almost all trainings and seminars of personal growth are registered. It is visited daily by about 74 thousand people. According to the site's statistics, every hour in Russia, eight new trainings begin on the topics of self-realization, psychological or creative transformation, the development of emotional intelligence, monetary or positive thinking. Spiritual practices occupy about 20% of the total set of trainings and are seriously ahead of psychology and the topic of money. According to the estimates of the same Samopoznaniya.ru, last year more than 99 thousand events were announced on this portal alone,and every fifth was devoted to esoteric and spiritual practices. In fact, you need to understand that there are many more trainings. It's just that many teachers are not registered in this database and are recruiting groups through other channels. The volume of the market for such trainings, according to some sources, may cost more than 450 million rubles.
It would seem, what relation can esotericism have to self-development and personal growth? However, esotericists themselves believe that it is they, together with psychologists and coaches, who can help a person flourish and fully realize.
Moscow training center "Metamorphosis", which acts under the brand of the "Gate of Isis" school and is led by its ideological inspirer, famous in esoteric circles of Russia Isset Kotelnikova, is the leading school in Russia dedicated to tarot cards. All 25 of her teachers are doing just that - they teach people how to enter the flow, develop emotional intelligence, master new tools for influencing their own lives and, finally, rethink reality in the right direction. There is no end to those who wish. Now, for example, there are 25 basic Tarot courses at the same time, each of which lasts about a year. On average, a thousand people study here every month.
The school was founded in the early 2000s, but in its present form it has existed since 2009, when the number of students exceeded 200 people and the prices for hourly rent rose so much that it became easier to rent a permanent premises. Since then, the "Gate of Isis" has been opening ever wider.
It is light and welcoming in a cozy three-story mansion on Bakuninskaya. On the back of the sofa sits a gray parrot. Teachers and students who have already mastered the art of the Tarot are seated in groups on sofas and chairs. There is a course on past lives. Here, with the help of trance and meditation, students try to penetrate the secrets of reincarnation and deal with the mistakes of the past that hinder them in the present.
- This school is based not only on esotericism. Here is psychology, and socionics, and dancing, and children's trainings on creativity, on safety on the Internet, and the whole sphere that concerns personal, everyday issues, says student Larisa, who has been studying here for several years at different courses. - If you can't solve the issue in the usual way, it makes sense to look into other areas. This is for those who want to look at life more broadly. Isset has such an interesting approach, she works with white magic, that is, frogs are not fried here.
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- Aren't you scared? What if this is all a hoax and will have some consequences?
- Isset is not really scared, - Larissa confidently answers.
To get into the hands of a good esotericist in Moscow, as it turns out, is still problematic. Students and teachers in chorus teach me how not to make mistakes along the way. First of all, you need to collect information and see where the legs grow from at the courses. Often, esoteric masters take separate parts of different teachings, randomly pile them up and pass them off as original programs. It's not that bad, but it's pointless, because the part will never be greater than the whole.
- You see, as it often happens, you were taught one technique from NLP and called it magic, but at the same time you were not told about the laws by which the world of esotericism lives (by the way, esotericism is not NLP at all). Nothing good will come of this, - explains the school's press secretary Natalya, also a desperate fan of Tarot cards. - It's like in physical education you were taught to jump over a goat and said that this is a healthy lifestyle. It is, of course, good to jump over a goat, but this is far from all you need to know about a healthy life.
Often homegrown esotericists draw their wisdom from sectarian sources, such as Dianetics. Again, not that this is bad, but it all depends on what you want to get. If you want religion and sect, God grant you health. But if you want to get classical esotericism and experience of its practical application - this is to Isset. Isset has everything systematized, the site has a lot of information about what is taught and where the concept of teaching comes from. It not only reproduces classic esoteric practices. Here they develop their own technologies, which, after running in and approbation, also go to the masses. There are also many people not just with higher, but with higher technical or physical and mathematical education. In fact, we have before us a whole esoteric institute, divided into laboratories and united by one brain center - Isset.
“I worked as a systems analyst in the IT field,” says Natalya, who teaches the course on past lives. - I was very interested in personality typologies, I wanted to understand my strengths and weaknesses, to see myself from the outside. By chance I found out about the Tarot cards and went to look at the description on the site, where I learned about the set for the basic course. I doubted I needed it. But Isset's lectures, which are in the public domain, have already answered a number of my questions about this world. I decided to try it. During the training, I visited Isset several times as a client, each time I received the answers I needed to move on. At some point, my work ceased to suit me, and I went to Isset again. She said that I will stay in this area for a while, but then I will receive an interesting offer. My destiny is to deal with IT tasks, but in a slightly different role. And so it happened. After some time, I came to work at the school as an assistant manager. As a result, I am now involved in the school's IT projects as well. You see, the main question that tormented me at my old job was: why are we doing this? And then I got to a place where I understand what we are doing and why.
Oddly enough, the actual Tarot cards in this tarological center are considered only the beginning of a long journey into the esoteric secrets of life. We are talking with Andrey Kotelnikov, the general director of the center, also a famous tarot reader and husband of Isset:
“You see, you can live completely calmly with an esoteric outlook on this world and at the same time engage in absolutely social action,” says Andrey. - An esoteric is not someone who walks with tarot cards, in a hoodie and reads different mantras. An esoteric is someone who understands that he is alive, lives in a living world. That this world has its own aspirations, its reasons, and not all my desires can be realized. You just need to find your correspondence in this world. The rest are just tools. This is esotericism. And so we have a huge number of people who do not even position themselves as tarologists or esotericists. The tarot, divination itself, is a side effect. It is only a tool. You can learn to guess, or you can not learn. It is important to master practical philosophy as a descriptive model of this world. This does not negate any social,no physical laws. They all exist, but behind them there is an area of esotericism that simply expands the possibilities.
How does the work with Tarot cards work? First, we must start with the fact that the Earth has a single information field, which contains all the knowledge of mankind, from what is the meaning of life to where you put the key to the apartment last night. The followers of Vernadsky call this information field of the Earth the noosphere, and esotericists call the Akashic chronicles. We are all connected to this field. Moreover, we are all able to communicate with this field. When we ask a question, the answer immediately comes. The problem is that we ask the question in a dense form, and the answer comes in a subtle one.
Then I pull out the cards, and I get out of the deck exactly those whose symbolic language corresponds to the answer. My task as a tarologist from a symbolic language, one might say from hieroglyphs, to translate into Russian. Tarot cards help to materialize the intangible answer that the Akashic chronicles gave. Just like a radio receiver helps me to hear music, although I cannot detect radio waves. Tarot is a radio receiver. Much of the tarot reader's job is simply to read. A tarot reader does not need to be clairvoyant, clairvoyant. It is believed that he has some kind of superpowers. No, the skill of a tarot reader is to interpret. I have this radio, for example, it speaks Chinese. Now I need to translate from Chinese to Russian. And the better the tarot reader, the more information he can get from this layout. But the whole answer is already in the layout. So the Tarot is only a tool for translating from subtle to dense.
It is important that the Tarot cards are correctly depicted. This raises the question of the deck itself. If you just draw a circle and write that it is the Wheel of Fortune, this homemade card will not work. All symbols that will help the translation should be drawn on the map, otherwise there is no way. Now Tarot is drawn in different ways, in different styles, using almost cute cats for the entourage. But at the Isset school, only the classic deck of Dr. Papus works. However, even the classic decks can be counted at least four: Aleister Crowley, Arthur White, Tarot of Marseilles and Dr. Papus. Isset chose Papus for its versatility and breadth of use.
The breadth of the use of Tarot cards must be said especially. Since absolutely all information is stored in the Akasha Chronicles, absolutely everything can be asked.
- Otherwise what's the point? - says Andrey Kotelnikov. - I had an interesting student, after finishing the course he went to buy a motorcycle. I went with my friend, who was a techie and knew this. So they looked at the motorcycle, everything seems to be in order. And this student of mine steps aside, makes an alignment and says to a techie friend: “Listen, there is some difficulty here. The cards say that when this machine is running, there will be a lack of internal energy. " Then the techie turns to the seller and says: "What's with the carburetor?" And the seller starts to crumple, well, there is such a thing, the carburetor is not very good. In general, the bike turned out to be bad, and the tarot cards clearly said it.
There is one subtlety in all this, which is very well understood by local tarot diviners. Tarot shows that future, which is the development of current trends. This is the future that will happen if no one changes anything. A logical conclusion follows from this: the meaning of tarot divination is not at all to simply see the future. The point is to change this future and not fall into what the cards predict. It turns out that the maps set something like life navigation: go there, don't go there, it will be bad.
- Here you see what the situation is, - explains Kotelnikov. - All unpleasant cases are the effect of some actions. If I hit a wall with my fist and I have blood on my knuckles, that doesn't mean the wall is bad. This means that my actions were wrong. And here we need to clearly understand what led us to such a result. All of this can be adjusted to get into a different future. This is the whole point of tarot divination - to get into another future. Good clients come to me and say: "You made a deal for me for a year and nothing came true, because I changed this, but I did not do this, because you explained everything to me here." And a bad client comes and says: “You are a brilliant tarot reader! You told me that they would fire me in the summer, and now I was really fired in the summer. " I think: well, you are a strange person! You had six months to prepare!
Isset Kotelnikova, tarologist with 20 years of experience, applied philosopher, creator of the author's Tarot teaching system and founder of the Gate of Isis school, esotericist known in Russia and abroad, sits with her feet on the sofa and embroiders a pink starfish with a cross.
- What for? I ask.
“Because at that moment I’m taking information out of my brain,” Isset explains busily. - The best way to relax. When you are relaxing on Facebook, you still load yourself with information, and when you embroider, information leaves your head, on the contrary. When I realized this, I became very addicted to this business. While embroidering, I came up with a whole course and developed so many projects that it would be difficult to do it in a different state.
Isset, short, strong, with large expressive eyes, really radiates some kind of lively and cheerful energy. It immediately becomes easy and simple with her. She seems to tune in to you and then says exactly what you will understand.
- How did I come to this? I've always been a bit of an alien,”Isset explains. - I actually wanted to become a scientist since childhood in order to invent a perpetuum mobile. But they explained to me very quickly that the conditions were not suitable for this, that there was friction, and the perpetuum mobile would not work. I decided to wait for the conditions to get better for this case. But I knew from childhood that I have some kind of power, that I see something. I was only terrified of this, because I suspected it was black magic. And I categorically did not want to do this. But it itself lived in me. Then I took some action to give up black magic and become a white magician. And I still didn't want to go this way. But when I was 21 years old, our stepfather brought the family to such a state that we had nothing to eat and nowhere to live. It was a terrible time. And then I already read Tarot,and I realized that fate was pushing me in this direction. And I said to those who are looking after me from above: “Okay, you want me to do this, okay, I agree. Just know that I will not believe anything, I will explore everything. And that's when I started doing it seriously. I began to practice Tarot, not magic.
- Are magic and Tarot different things?
- Absolutely! It so happened that in the 1990s everything was mixed. When magic and esotericism began to flourish in the post-Soviet space, everything was heaped together. And the Tarot cards were in the same clip with magic. So right at the receptions and said: let's look at the cards, whether you need to do a love spell or not. Yeah, the cards say that the love spell in this case will be great, we make a love spell This was, of course, wrong. Tarot cards are by no means magic. It's just a tool. And you can't mix magic and Tarot. I hope to live until the time when the tarot cards will finally be recognized, if not by science, then by the pseudo-scientific method of exploring the human soul. In general, we have three instances dealing with the soul: religion, psychology and esotericism. And if they don’t incriminate each other or somehow compete there,then each of these three instances has something to do. For example, a psychotherapist friend sometimes says to me: “Listen, Isset, look at the patient. We have been doing it for three years now, and as soon as we reach the home stretch, the patient has a rollback, and everything starts over. I don’t understand what is the matter, look”. She sends patients to me because she knows there will be a result. Indeed, we are working with a person, then he returns to the psychotherapist, and I ask, well, how are things, and the psychotherapist says to me: “Everything is fine, we have reached the final, there is no rollback!”because he knows there will be a result. Indeed, we are working with a person, then he returns to the psychotherapist, and I ask, well, how are things, and the psychotherapist says to me: “Everything is fine, we have reached the final, there is no rollback!”because he knows there will be a result. Indeed, we are working with a person, then he returns to the psychotherapist, and I ask, well, how are things, and the psychotherapist says to me: “Everything is fine, we have reached the final, there is no rollback!”
- Why don't the cards lie?
“Because they don't read information from a person,” Isset explains. - Do you know that there is a network of invisible connections above us? We are all on this network. Here above you, up there, a little light is on, and this light is connected with all of humanity. Why is this so? Do you know what the hundredth monkey effect is? I'll tell you now. The Japanese islands are so located that monkeys from one island cannot communicate with monkeys from neighboring islands in any way. These monkeys are under protection there, and they are carefully studied. So they brought sweet potatoes to the islands, which they did not grow before. The monkeys quickly learned to eat this sweet potato. But one day, one monkey decided to wash this sweet potato in salt water, and it turned out that this makes the sweet potato much tastier. After that, the most advanced monkeys also began to wash the sweet potatoes with salt water. And when these monkeys washing sweet potatoesit became exactly one hundred, all the monkeys from all the islands began to wash the sweet potato too. How could they know that washing sweet potatoes in salt water is good? Only through the network. And people are also connected by this network. There is such a false memory effect, or the Mandela effect. For example, who is the author of the song "Love me tender"? Are you talking Elvis Presley? And everyone says so. And he never sang this song. This network is the provider of such information. Sometimes it is false, sometimes it is not. Tarot cards help to read the correct information from this network. This network is the provider of such information. Sometimes it is false, sometimes it is not. Tarot cards help to read the correct information from this network. This network is the provider of such information. Sometimes it is false, sometimes it is not. Tarot cards help to read the correct information from this network.
However, it is one thing to read the right information, and quite another to use that information to change the future. On this occasion, people here love a rude, but funny anecdote about Nostradamus, who pokes a cat with his face in the corner and says: "Who will make a puddle here in half an hour?"
“I consider myself a karmic tarot reader,” Isset says. - What does it mean? This means that I am not just reading cards and saying the final conclusion, but trying to find a way to correct the situation. For example, a woman comes to me and asks why she has no children. It seems that she and her husband are trying and medically everything is in order, but there are no children. I lay out the cards and see that the woman bears the stamp of infertility. I can, of course, tell her that, but it won't get any better. And that's when I roll up my sleeves and start figuring out what the problem is. Maybe the reason for infertility is some of this woman's own troubles, maybe it's all about her husband. You know, as it happens, a woman with a fine mental organization marries a man who does not correspond to her in this mental subtlety. This means that a child who may appear from such a marriagewill come to this world with distorted karma, and no child wants to get into such a situation. Then you need to change the pair. In short, I have to work as a doctor, that is, not only to tell the diagnosis, but also to offer a variant of how to remove this diagnosis, how to recover.
Isset sees her role in helping the person overcome what the cards show. It is necessary to unravel the threads of fate, sort everything out and understand where the mistake is in order to correct it. Once, the Kotelnikov couple themselves had to undergo karmic treatment. Four months before the birth of their child, the Tarot alignment showed that the family had an accident ahead, and Isset would have to give birth unconscious by caesarean section. Then a couple of tarot readers began to untangle the strings and look for an answer to the question of how to avoid this. Unraveling the strings led to the fact that the accident did happen, but, thank God, without Isset. This in itself was strange, because Isset was traveling with Andrey all the time. But one day Andrei still went without her. It happened quite by accident, the cigarettes just ran out at home, and Andrey and his friend went to the store in the evening. It was then that Andrey was spun up by car directly to the forest edge. Fortunately, no one was hurt. With the help of a friend, I managed to safely push the car onto the road and return. Exactly the next day, what the cards guessed happened - Andrei was driving along with Isset, and the car began to be brought under a passing trucker. The car was carried on its right side, but it was on the right that the pregnant Isset was sitting. If she hadn’t screamed and Andrei would not have turned to the left, they would have been waiting for the very birth in an unconscious state. But the right strings were already pulled, the accident had already occurred, and everything worked out. They did not fall under the trucker and calmly gave birth at home.that the cards guessed - Andrey was driving with Isset, and the car began to be brought under the passing trucker. The car was carried on its right side, but it was on the right that the pregnant Isset was sitting. If she hadn’t screamed and Andrei would not have turned to the left, they would have been waiting for the very birth in an unconscious state. But the right strings were already pulled, the accident had already occurred, and everything worked out. They did not fall under the trucker and calmly gave birth at home.that the cards guessed - Andrey was driving with Isset, and the car began to be brought under the passing trucker. The car was carried on its right side, but it was on the right that the pregnant Isset was sitting. If she hadn’t screamed and Andrei would not have turned to the left, they would have been waiting for the very birth in an unconscious state. But the right strings were already pulled, the accident had already occurred, and everything worked out. They did not fall under the trucker and calmly gave birth at home.
We can say that this whole chain of coincidences and the Tarot cards were simply mistaken, predicting a non-existent tragedy. But here the reasoning is different. All accidents are not accidental - a good esotericist knows for sure. Invisible threads connect us with everything and everyone, and it is better to poke the cat in the corner in time than to wash away the stinking puddle.
When the "Isis Gate" closes behind me, I, a person with analytical thinking and not at all inclined to mysticism, feel that I want to return and plunge deeper into this cheerful esotericism. And I perfectly understand the thousand people who carefully attend these classes every month. If not the Tarot, then esoteric logic works quite convincingly.
Olga Andreeva
