Commentaries from Jonathan Waterlow
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During at least the 1970s, before alcohol increasingly took control of his life, Azazello pursued a spiritual quest in tandem with his use of mind-altering substances (see my essay for more on this subject). His often hallucinatory drawings provide glimpses of that quest and the psychedelic visions which opium conjured up to represent the journey. But in this notebook, we can see him reflect explicitly on this search for (self-)understanding.
On p.4 he makes a list of the Noble Eightfold Path to liberation or enlightenment, which runs: ‘Right View; Right Resolve; Right Speech; Right Conduct; Right Livelihood; Right Effort; Right Mindfulness; Right Samadhi’. Countless works have been written over millennia to explain the deep and complex nature of the Eightfold Path, so suffice it here to say that the final state of Samadhi is essentially the highest state of meditative consciousness, in which one’s mind is perfectly focused and in the moment.
We don’t know if Azazello had a meditation practice, but on p.8 we find him reflecting on what such a practice would involve and thus allow him to walk the path towards the deep tranquillity of Samadhi. ‘It’s a state of vibration, a state of Samadhi. Here I sit straight, without actions, without words, without thoughts, with feelings directed inwards. I sit like this for 4 hours. Afterwards I take 3 Sukha Purvaka breaths [yogic breaths drawn in, held, let out, and held again for counts of six]. Thoughts which have arisen [during this process] develop into wonderful thoughts which develop into pure rapture. I am in Samadhi’.
It seems unlikely that Azazello found the self-discipline to pursue this intensive practice, but the idea of it – or at least of where the Path led – fascinated him. His notebooks are filled with evidence that he was a tormented soul, lost and in search of a sense of place and meaning, to be freed from intense self-doubt. Opium allowed him a temporary reprieve from these problems, and he tried to use Buddhist frameworks to help guide his drug reveries, searching for a lasting sense of peace. Yet even though he filled this notebook with spiritual ideas, practices and definitions, they are ultimately more a catalogue of unfulfilled hopes than a reflection of the life he managed to lead.
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On this page, as in so many from this notebook, Azazello gathers together various words and ideas drawn from his reading of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He both lists terminology he finds in those sources and plays with them, drawing out chains of thought which he tried to connect to his own life.
Here it’s worth noting that he continues to tease out the nature of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, which seemed to fascinate him personally, and which was also a concern held by all hippies. They strove to live a more ‘authentic’ life than mainstream society, privileging the truth of ‘istina’ over the merely factual ‘pravda’. ‘Istina’ was a far more meaningful, felt, and authentic truth than simple facts. Buddhism offered Azazello much food for thought in this realm, with its complex teachings that almost every aspect of our experience of the world and ourselves is an illusion – a narrative which can serve to give our lives meaning, but which ultimately brings us only continued dissatisfaction.
In the lower quarter of the right-hand page, Azazello sketches some musings on this subject (whether he copied this directly from a book, or if these are his own words is unclear). He writes that ‘Istina is the correspondence of expression and essence, of form and content. Correspondence is unity’.
This principle was deeply familiar to him as a hippie: their flamboyant clothing, wild hairstyles and dedication to acts of playful subversion were all part of the same concept. As he put it in an interview, they chose to present themselves differently to the norm, because ‘the external should match the internal’, which was also what he strove to do with his artistic creations. In the pages of his notebooks, he struggled to bring the deep personal worlds of istina, which his opium reveries brought forth from his subconscious, and give them some more tangible existence in the physical world.
On this page, he continued to write: ‘Non-correspondence – difference – contradiction – lie – non-istina’. This was the unwelcome alternative – to live a lie, even if meant a quieter life within the Soviet order. Yet, by the era of late socialism it seemed that everyone was living some kind of lie – mouthing the expected ideological words in public, while living by quite different values and practices outside the spotlight of official attention. For many, this came to be simply the way things were – the price of a quiet but relatively comfortable life was to don the masks expected by the regime. But for Azazello and those like him, the friction between the internal and external worlds was too much to accept, even if, in the end, they could only exchange it for another kind of friction, as the mainstream grated painfully against their authenticity.
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On this page of Azazello’s most spiritual notebook, he adds a good dose of levity and humour to his soul-searching. Under a heading that implies he’s exploring the pros and cons of istina (a ‘truth’ more deeply felt than the merely factual ‘pravda’), he brings the Buddhist quest to discover and understand the causes and conditions for all things in the world (the underlying principles of karma) down to earthy realities.
He writes ‘I want’ in Russian, then ‘fuck’ in English, listing it as the ‘cause’. He adds as the ‘consequence’, ‘make fuck’. This crude English rendering suggests he’s playing with these deep spiritual concepts with his trademark wry humour, but he swiftly returns to a more complex investigation of the nature of truth. He writes that ‘Istina is neutral’, meaning that it doesn’t have positives and negatives except in our perception and judgement. The ‘truth’ just is, and as such, if we can get in touch with it, it ‘destroys illusion’.
To illustrate this, he draws up an idiosyncratic list of words that reflect the movement from ‘cause’ to ‘consequence’, or, rather, the way in which istina reveals the nature of our (and Azazello’s) unhappy existence. In this, Azazello is essentially exploring the nature of what Buddhists call ‘Samsara’, or cyclical existence, which he makes explicit reference to on several other pages (most notably on p.3 where he writes in large letters of ‘The Jaws of Samsara’).
Buddhists are surprisingly fond of using chocolate as a metaphor to help us understand the issue. We believe that happiness lies in the chocolate, so we eat the chocolate to feel happy. But if happiness truly lay in the chocolate, we would keep gaining more happiness the more we eat; instead, as many of us know all too well, if we keep eating we soon feel sick and all the happiness disappears. Or, to take another example, if we’re out in the sun and feel too hot, we long for the shade; yet, when we retreat to the shade, we soon feel too cold. Back and forth we go, trying to find lasting happiness, but it continues to slip through our fingers. This dynamic – of desire for material things or states, which we confuse with the true happiness of liberation from the world of illusions – is the nature of Samara. We grasp at things from a sense of continuing dissatisfaction (or ‘suffering’ as it’s often translated), yet unless we can find some deeper, more spiritual truth, our relief is only ever temporary. This is the istina which destroys illusion – an often painful process subjectively, even if istina is itself neutral.
And so Azazello’s rather peculiar list jumps through the following sequence: ‘To please/like. Beauty. I want. I take. Filth. No longer please/like’. In other words, the gradual intervention of istina turns desire to ashes in his hands.
Azazello’s own quest to live a meaningful and authentic life was riven with these cycles of frustration and disappointment, which also mirrored the highs and lows of his opium experiences. The thrill of seeing other, more attractive worlds withered in the shadow of the grey Moscow skyline and the painful withdrawal symptoms which followed. Nevertheless, he continued his search, trying to break free from the illusions of the material world and to find a steadiness inside himself. As he writes at the foot of the right-hand page, ‘The true-hearted is one who honours the god within themselves’. Even in his drug reveries, this is what Azazello sought to be; yet, if he occasionally tasted the rarified airs beyond the wheel of Samsara, those moments were always short-lived.
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Throughout his notebooks, it’s clear that Azazello was a man in search of himself, hoping to discover and hold tight to some sense of meaning and purpose in his life. Living in a Soviet world which seemed to offer no place for him, a continuing sense of alienation and pain followed him throughout his life, as it did many hippies, despite their flamboyant and colourful attempts to carve themselves a different world within the Soviet edifice. If many took it as a badge of honour to be labelled ‘crazy’ by a sick society, a disproportionate number of hippies self-harmed, killed themselves, fell prey to substance abuse, or simply disappeared (see my essay for more on this subject). Being an outsider could always remain painful, even when consciously embraced as a lifestyle and identity.
Part of Azazello’s attempts to combat this emotional pain was to search for something he could hold onto – some greater meaning which the Soviet master narrative could never provide him. In this notebook we can see that during the 1970s and early 1980s, he not only engaged with the specific ideas and terminology of Buddhism, but was grappling more generally with a search for happiness and self-assurance, which he frequently wrote about in terms of a search for God. In his later life, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he would become an Orthodox believer, but before this he wrote about ‘God’ in a looser sense. This was ‘God’ in the sense of a guiding coherence and meaning to life, ‘spirit’, the ‘way’, the ‘Tao’, and its many other names.
On p.39 of this notebook, he wrestled with the idea that God exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. He writes that ‘A vacuum is just as real as a physical object, like a pen. But at the same time there is no pen, no vacuum – there is only God’. ‘God’, he writes (or copies from something he was reading) is what exists in everything. ‘Nothing also has materiality’, but everything is God.
Although Buddhists wouldn’t use the word ‘God’, the principle remains closely aligned with the Buddha’s teaching. Buddha-nature is inherent in everything, he taught, and there is harmony in the world which we can perceive if we try to.
For Azazello, to have faith in some greater meaning and order was deeply attractive. ‘The more faith in God and fidelity to him a person has, the greater likelihood a person has of happiness in life. Happiness is an entirely real possibility in human life’, he wrote on p.44. Happiness was bound directly to a sense of knowing his place in the universe, of being able to believe that there was some meaning to it and to his life. Although he wrote ‘God’ here, in the context of his Buddhist reading and spiritual searching, it seems clear that he was grappling to find some way to arrive at that feeling. It’s little surprise, then, that he would convert to the more mainstream faith after the end of the USSR: his search continued, and when a more prominent community of faith became available to him, he would be drawn into the fold. Sadly, this does not seem to have provided him with the peace he sought; he continued to wrestle with his inner demons, and alcohol and stimulant abuse would ravage his health until the end of his life. Azazello remained the eternal seeker, never to arrive (or at least never able to stay) at the peaceful destination he sought.
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Amidst his spiritual reflections and yearning for a greater sense of meaning and purpose in his life, Azazello used mind-altering substances (predominantly opium) to enter other worlds and to look deeper inside himself (see my essay for more on his drug use and the worlds he found beyond the doors of perception).
But while he could find comfort in his opium reveries, which showed him visions of fantastical and yet, to him, more meaningful worlds, he could not carry the reassurance and sense of purpose he found there back into his everyday life. Integrating drug experiences and revelations is often the hardest part for people who use mind-altering substances for self-discovery and growth, and Azazello had little support in his attempts to do so. In the end, his notebooks, covered with fantastic, psychedelic artwork, were perhaps the only place in which he could try to carry his drug experiences back with him from the zone of kaif.
On this page, we find him directly wrestling with this problem in a long stream of prose. In later interviews, Azazello was often flippant and throwaway when he talked about his drug experiences, but in this passage we gain a rare insight into his contemporary internal struggle to integrate those experiences into his life, and his doubts as to whether he should even try.
‘The tragic delusion of the drug addict —> The projection of one’s own subjective euphoria onto an external world governed by objective laws of material profit, the world in which you are not YOU (in the sense of I, personality, individuality with a capital letter), but only a speck of dust, one of many millions of creatures, which this objective world is capable of perceiving only as identical with an objective being whose necessity or unnecessariness is determined in the eyes of this world only by the sum of your sensible, material qualities and properties, i.e. by your form, and not by the metaphysical content of Platonic love (ready at any moment to move into the non-Platonic and just waiting for the chance), kindness and good-naturedness that are not your constant, legitimate, enduring essence, but are induced by a drug for a brief moment. That is, illusory!’
(Трагическое заблуждение наркомана —> проекция собственной субъективной эйфории на внешний мир, управляемый объективными законами материальной выгоды, мир для которого ты – вовсе не ТЫ (в смысле Я, личность, индивидуальность с большой буквы), а всего лишь пылинка, один из многих миллионов существ, которого этот объективный мир способен воспринять только как такое-же объективное существо, нужность или ненужность которого определяется в глазах этого мира лишь суммой твоих чувственных, материальных качеств и свойств, т.е. твоей формой, а не тем метафизическим содержанием платонической любви (в любой момент готовой перейти в неплатоническую и ждущей лишь случая), доброты и благодушия, которые не являются твоей постоянной, законной, выстраданной во времени сущностью, а вызваны наркотиком на краткий миг. т.е. иллюзорны!)
Here, Azazello laments his own ‘delusion’ that he might successfully project his subjective world onto the everyday one in which he found himself. He felt his true self was invisible to the rest of the world, which was a source of deep personal pain, and here he seems to (begin to) give up the hope that the inner worlds he was exploring during his drug experiences could ever be more than passing illusions. The father of American Psychology, William James, wrote that things learnt during altered states of consciousness carry a ‘noetic’ quality – a sense of revealed truth which cannot be denied at the subjective level. And yet, while James argued that this quality lingered after the come-down, Azazello struggled to hold on to those ‘truths’ and feel their existence in the material world.
It seems clear that by the mid-1980s Azazello used drugs, particularly alcohol, as a means of escape from the world, rather than as an escape to more meaningful internal experiences, as he had in the preceding decade. Vision became vice, and so he began to abandon the belief that his delicate, deeply personal opium journeys held any lasting value for him. Nevertheless, it’s not entirely clear whether the punctuation point after the last line (‘That is, illusory’) is an exclamation or a question mark. This was a notebook in which he explored many different ideas and perspectives on life and its meaning, so even if it’s not a question mark we find here, this was very much a forum in which he continued to question the world and himself. Nevertheless, here we find him moving a step closer to abandoning the idea that drugs could help him to find and live a meaningful life.