Sergey Orekhov

I am Sergey Orekhov. I was born on a Sunday, 05 May 1974, in the city of Blagoveshchensk, on the border between the USSR and China. My mother, Zinaida, was a student at the pedagogical institute, and later a teacher of English and German at a school. My father, Alexander, was a city bus driver.

At first the family moved to the city of Zeya, in the same Amur region, to my grandfather Emelyan on my mother’s side. Then my grandfather died, and my mother moved to her sister’s family in Magadan, on the far easternmost edge of the country, where I lived from the sixth grade until I finished university with a degree in economics. In my last years of full-time study I moved to Moscow and travelled back to Magadan to sit my examinations. The head of the department helped me close out my sessions on the condition that I agreed to teach the junior courses, and it was there that I met a student, Diana, who became my beloved wife and companion in life, bearing me three sons: Pavel (after the Apostle Paul), Dimitry (after Dimitry of Rostov), and Ioann (after John Chrysostom).

My mother’s parents suffered for their faith in Christ; they were exiled from Belarus to the Far East. They were Christians, they kept icons, they knew and observed the feasts and the fasts, but they did not go to church — and indeed I do not remember there being a church in Zeya at all. My father’s parents also endured constant persecution for the same faith, but as Baptists; my grandfather Ivan was a presbyter of the church, whose gatherings were held in their own private house. My mother did not have me baptised as a child; I was baptised myself at around the age of nineteen, consciously and of my own will.

…I had a strong thirst for God. I sought Him in everything — and, as a rule, did not find Him in full measure. And so I kept on seeking. Some found Him in the church and stayed; some found Him in love and came to rest; but I would find, and say, “this is not all, there is more” — and so I did not stop. In this seeking I came to realise that the Creator creates the world not outside Himself, but within Himself. If He created outside Himself, then there would be something besides Him; but besides Him there is nothing — this I simply knew.

I began to seek an analogy for what it means to create within oneself, and I understood that it is like a thought-image. It is not hard for me to picture an apple in detail, even with its taste, and that apple lives within me. But where does it live? And I understood that this is — consciousness.

I began to study consciousness, to read everything about it that I could find. All of this information arranged itself into a hierarchical structure of seven levels of awareness: from the lowest, red, to the highest, violet.

I began to write a book, “Consciousness and Awareness”, and I described all seven levels of awareness, since I could rise to each of them. In the process I understood that there is an eighth level — the white. The eighth only in a manner of speaking, since one can enter it by ascending through the first seven. But it is at the same time the zeroth, since the path up the “ladder of awareness” also begins from it. Its likeness is white light, which can be broken into the seven colours of the rainbow, but which can also be obtained by mixing those colours back together.

This is the level of God-consciousness. Not the knowledge of God as something external, but consciousness one with God — being aware of oneself as both human and God at one and the same time.

And this level of awareness became my “stumbling block”: I could write nothing, because I wrote only of what I had passed through myself, personally, and this level of awareness I had not reached. And I came to a halt. The book stood still for a long year and a half.

Certain realisations for the book would come to me, and I would write them down in drafts “for later”, but on the whole I could not carry the book forward in any larger sense. Awareness is seven levels; consciousness is the white “level” outside the hierarchy, in which the seven levels of awareness themselves arise. To call the book “Consciousness and Awareness” and not to write of consciousness itself — for me this was impossible.

Recognition

At first the Creator told me: “Christ will not come as a separate person. You are not the Christ.” And this was a relief to me, because the mind feared this “role”. But the Creator was, all this while, a loving Father, a teacher, and a guru all in one. Gradually, dialogue by dialogue, my mind, my “I”, my ego and my personality became more and more transparent, and interfered less and less with the heart and the spirit.

As Svetozar later explained it to me: “If the Creator had told you straight away that you are the Christ, you would have placed the crown on your head before it had vanished.” And so the Creator brought me more and more toward the realisation that I am Christ. But by this time I no longer had a head (a mind) for a crown, and I knew from the Creator: Christ is the natural nature and essence of absolutely every human being, and the Church is not the coming of one external Christ, but the unveiling of the One God in each person without exception — regardless of religion, nationality, faith, deeds, sins, or virtues.

By this time there sounded within me: “I and the Father are one.”

And so, within me — Christ. But within you — also. In each one — Christ. This is the very essence of the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom, carried out through us. You need only to remove the illusion that you are someone else.

Name

Sergey Alexandrovich Orekhov

Under the name

Pancratius (Πανκράτιος)

Languages

Russian. English — with AI.

Sons

Pavel · Dimitry · Ioann

Works

73 books · 43 poems

Licence

CC0 — public domain