Bakhtiyarov, who had just flown in from a conference in Egypt, delivered the opening remarks. Wiry, with short gray hair and a dark mustache, he carried himself with a studied calmness that came across at times as diffidence. He explained to me later that he had begun his career as a medical student at the Kiev Medical Institute, but was expelled for distributing “provocative literature” on campus. In the late sixties, the K.G.B. labelled him “politically unreliable,” and sent him to prison for two years. When he got out, he switched to biology, and eventually became a psychologist. In the nineteen-eighties, despite his history of radicalism, he ended up working for the Soviet government on a project to develop a set of stress-management techniques for cosmonauts, soldiers, and other individuals in states of psychological extremis. Those techniques form the basis of psychonetics, a quasi-mystical, quasi-philosophical self-help movement whose goal is to develop “technologies of human consciousness.”
After I asked several times for a demonstration of these technologies, Bakhtiyarov pulled up a piece of software on his laptop. Half a dozen colored circles were slowly bouncing around the screen like billiard balls, shooting off in new directions as they collided with each other. Bakhtiyarov instructed us to try to look at the screen as a unified gestalt, instead of focussing on any individual ball. “Your attention creates subjects and objects as it filters a stream of data,” he said. “With deconcentration, we have no objects, just a feeling of everything in a single integrated whole.” After a few moments, the balls all went black, and we were supposed to keep track of their original colors as they continued to bounce around the screen. It was, of course, impossible. But, according to Bakhtiyarov, it is through exercises like this that a psychoneticist can begin to access deeper layers of intuition about the world.
Psychoneticists may be the world’s strongest believers in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For them, language is a barrier that gets in the way of a holistic perception of the universe. “A psychoneticist must have nothing unconscious. Everything must be conscious,” Bakhtiyarov explained. “This is the same goal as Ithkuil. Human beings have a linguistic essence, but we are in a transitional stage to some other essence. We can defeat and conquer language.” He sees Ithkuil as a tool to bring all of one’s unconscious thoughts and feelings under conscious control.
In addition to the University of Effective Development in Kiev, there are psychonetics laboratories in Kharkov, Odessa, Zaprozia, Minsk, Elista, St. Petersburg, Alma-Ata, Krasnoyarsk, and Moscow, where practitioners try to find ways to access “deep layers of consciousness” to become “more effective in business, increase willpower, creative skills, problem solving, and leadership.” At the conference, Bakhtiyarov announced that, beginning the following semester, Ithkuil would be made a mandatory part of the school’s curriculum in Kiev and at satellite campuses in three other cities.
One of the conferees, a graduate of the University of Effective Development named Gennadiy Overchenko, explained that he had used psychonetics to develop skills in a variety of disciplines where he previously had no expertise, from chess to cooking to gouache painting. He later told me that, after half an hour of meditation, he was able to sight-read Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” despite being a novice pianist. “In the past two years, I have never fallen (including on ice), and have not dropped or broken anything,” he continued.
Another conferee, Marina Balioura, described how, while under the influence of psychonetic techniques, she could simultaneously write two different sentences with each of her hands. A young lawyer named Ilya Petichenko recounted an exercise that uses Ithkuil to “go into the field of pure meanings.” His wife, Victorya, explained how psychonetics helped her “just bounce off the floor with creativity.”
