Curriculum Vitae

If you are here, perhaps, you want to know something about me personally. Well… 

Looking on my life today from the late of my fifties, I see three parts – before 1994, 1994-2006, and from 2006 onward.  

Part 1. Preparation (1970 - 1994)

I was born in 1956 in Moscow. My parents were of Jewish origins (“Jews by nationality” in Soviet bureaucratic language) and this circumstance played important role the first 30 years of my life.

The first important event in my professional life happened in 1970 when I decided to connect my life with psychology.

However, it was much easier to decide than to realize. The state anti-Semitism prevented my admitting in Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State Lomonosov University (the only place in Moscow preparing psychologists at those years). In 1973 when I finished school, from more than one hundred excellent prepared talented Jewish school-leavers of our famous “Vtoraya” school only two were admitted in Lomonosov University. In force of the personal circumstances I had no other choice but sharing the common destiny of my Jewish schoolmates – studying in one of the second-sort technical institutes.

But the miracle (without any quotation marks) happened – I was admitted in the best Soviet scientific institute, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT, "Fiztech") in the Faculty of Applied Mathematics, Control and Management. Among one hundred students who graduated our Faculty six years later, I was the only one Jewish.

Meantime my goal, psychology did not become less attractive, and all these six years I learned psychology in parallel with mathematics and physics. In the institute itself, all my efforts were directed into the border fields between the psychology, on the one hand, and the subjects, which were taught in MIPT – first, of course, physics, applied mathematics and computer science, but also philosophy of science, on the other. In such a way, I studied, made my first researches and wrote my first scientific works in modeling of decision-making, investigating of the biophysics of neuron, modeling neuron networks, psychiatric diagnostic, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and philosophy of psychology. Besides, beginning from my fourth year in the MIPT, I attended the psychological courses of my own choice in Lomonosov University as unattached student. Most important from them were lectures on General Psychology of Prof. P. Galperin, whom I listen two years, and of Prof. A.N. Leontiev as well as the course of Prof. A. Luria on neuropsychology. At the same time, I worked as Senior Research Assistant in Institute of Forensic Psychiatry and spent almost all my free time in the libraries reading psychological literature.

When I see my student years from today, I'm realizing that what happened was best. The level of education in MIPT was much higher than one in Faculty of Psychology and I graduated the institute with professional culture much higher than I was able to reach in any other place.

I did not see the sense to enter the Faculty of Psychology as a student aiming to get second diploma. And since my Master thesis in applied mathematics was near the doctoral level and only small work was needed to transfer the Master thesis into the Doctoral dissertation, I decided to conduct Doctoral study in computer science (mathematical cybernetics). Again I tried to include in my research as much psychology as possible: the mathematical methods for prediction of development of mental deceases in forensic psychiatry as well as the studies of some neuronal models of brain entered in the Dissertation. I defended my Doctoral thesis in fall 1982, but declined the offer to continue academic carrier in mathematics and computer science deciding concentrate my life on psychology. Indeed, I spent only part of my three after-graduate years preparing Doctoral dissertation. The rest was given to psychology.

My psychological work went on two lines. The first was the work for hire in the laboratory of neurobionics in Central Research Institute, where I worked almost six years modeling neural networks and studying speech perception. I failed to find something "more psychological": Six months before my graduation, I investigated almost all Moscow psychological (or border) laboratories but found nothing – nobody wanted to employee Jewish being afraid of troubles in case this Jewish will decide to emigrate.

However, much more important was the second, "underground" line of my work. My duties in the laboratory of neurobionics demanded only small part of my time, leaving enough for work in “pure” psychology. Yet in student years I wrote my first work on philosophy of psychology “Psychology as science and psychology as art”, which was warmly met by both Department of Philosophy of MIPT and by Professor Galperin. After graduation, my work in this field became more intensive. In 1979 – 1983 I wrote “Essays on philosophy of psychology” (vol. 1 “Philosophical and methodological matters” and vol. 2 “Psychology of Activity”), “Psychological Notebooks” (in seven parts) and “Psychological Diary” (in 14 parts). These works were not published (in Soviet time, this was impossible; later I had neither time nor strong wish to accomplish the publishing), but they played the important role in forming me as a psychologist.

What I wrote about? Very early I discovered that the scientific psychology deals only with small part of psyche, which may be investigated in framework of Cartesian (positive) paradigm, and that knowledge of this small part is not enough for most applied tasks starting from counseling. Thus, my goal was to make the field of the psychology broad enough to deal with tasks of human development in all their complexity. In other words, I wanted and still want to transform the psychology into science of soul.

In the second half of 1983, I ceased the life of “scientific hermit” and once again began searching psychological employment and simultaneously writing the works for publication. I published some works but two and half years my search did not bring any positive result. And only in the middle of 1986 when the spring wind of Perestroika became perceptible, the Faculty of Psychology offered me the position of Junior Research Fellow.

Next eight years were perhaps the only period in my life when my carrier was similar to “normal” academic carrier: I moved from Junior Research Fellow to Assistant Professor, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy-Chair of the Department of Psychology and Engineering of Knowledge. I wrote near 50 pieces of scientific writings, from which about half (including two textbooks and one collective monograph edited by me) were published, and about half remained unpublished. Among the lasts were the reports in a number of projects and Lections on discrete mathematic in psychology – the original course of lections, which I gave every year in 1989-1993 for more than one hundred students of the Faculty of Psychology. Besides I supervised eight Master theses, the authors of the four of them were recommended for doctoral study, as well as directed all educational work of the Department. At the same years, I visited first time USA and wrote my first works in English.

I worked in the vast variety of fields: psychosemantics, psychometrics, methods of the psychological assessment and computer-based assessment, organizational and personal counseling, formation of mental skills and computer-based methods of teaching, cognitive psychology, methods of prediction in psychology among others. 

The collapse of USSR made academic work impossible and in 1991 I created own company working more in business than in science. Besides, approximately at the same time I began to realize that the crisis of psychology, which I saw almost from the very first days of my psychological studies, could not be overcome in frameworks of paradigm, which dominates in academic psychology, and that principally new approaches are necessary.

My business went successfully and after 2 years made unnecessary working for hire allowing me to concentrate on writing the book I thought about already several years. Thus, the new phase of my life began.

Part 2. Breaking-through and sowing (1994 – 2006)

Next twelve years I did too many things but two main were observing and thinking. Some thread led me to deeper and deeper understanding both psyche and world until I found myself in front of the magnificent picture of Reality. Following this thread I left "pure" psychology and spent many years of realizing the general philosophical topics including philosophical anthropology and later history of culture, history of religion from the point of view of new developmental psychology, which I discovered in my journey.

The main results of these twelve years became three big books (Psychology of Dukhovnost (of Spiritual Life)(1996), The scientist's Conversations with the Teacher (2000), Light of Life(2006)), which cover extremely vast set of the subjects not only of psychology but also (and sometimes even first) of philosophy, history, sociology, theology, science of culture and even geography. The leitmotif of all these books is (using non-academic language) discovery of God, or (if you more like a scientific wording) the discovery of openness of the systems, which have been considered almost all history of scientific psychology as closed one (in the spirit of classical behaviorist “stimulus–response” model). In reality, the External Force acts outside on these systems (psyche, or culture, or society as a whole etc) and in significant degree pre-determines the fate (that is the sequence of states) of these systems. The discovery of This Force changed my views on the world and on psyche in so broken-through manner that it became rather difficult for me now even to accept my authorship of what I did before.

I did not market my books having neither time nor skills and deciding to allow texts to work themselves. But when Light of Life was finished, to my big surprise I began realize that I must do now the different work – one I never thought I will do – to propagate what I found, to teach others what I was taught myself. Light of Life sowed the seeds of new understanding of human being, humanity, and the state where all we are today. I have to help them to grow.

What are these seeds?

Today the world needs the crucial change of paradigm. We need to realize that our world is not one, in what our predecessors lived five hundred (or even one hundred) years ago. Our world is much bigger not saying much more complex. And both our place and our goal in World are not what we thought recently. These are not to satisfy all our needs and to have as much material things as possible. Our goal is development – the development of each individuals and the development of each society.

Of course human beings developed all the history. But we developed being not aware of our development. Now the time is coming when our development has to become deliberate and as such much more fast and effective.

These main ideas have to be propagated in a variety of forms understandable by different people with different cultural and professional background.

Part 3. Dissemination (after 2006)

Since I saw important role of Russian culture in the future history and besides I master Russian much better than other languages, I started from the audience of general Russian public. In the middle of 2006 the hermit–academician transformed himself into extremely active publicist. For these 8 years I wrote on the problems of modern Russia (politic, church, moral, state of public mind, history) as well as on more common topics as personal growth near 1000 articles and countless (perhaps tens of thousands) comments in different forums (some of them were of the size of newspaper’s article). In this way I have tried to facilitate the spiritual development of my readers. This work had to result in the individual consulting, and sometimes it had.

But the general public was not the only target audience for me. My message addresses to the elites no lesser than to general public, and among the different types of elites, – to professionals in humanity and social sciences. Here the other language was needed – the language of “objective” knowledge, language of scales, measurements, testing validity etc. What were insights when I wrote Light of Life have to be transformed in the form of hypotheses verifiable by means of the methods, which are acceptable for the critical mind.

This is how in fall of 2008 I came to the idea of PSYROOTS project. However the first attempt was not fully successful. Although I found many professionals who were interested in the idea of what I called depth sociopsychology (studying of the content of collective unconsciousness, which is responsible for the differences between nations and cultures), our consortium failed to win funding from European Commission. But idea of PSYROOTS led me to the thought to write some articles about the new psychological agenda. In such a way, the book "Psychology XXI. Or XXII?.." was written in 2009, and two years later the last of its five chapters grew into Comments to Mathew. Scripture by eyes of Psychotheology.

In the same 2009 I started another pilot project "Coat-of-Soul" aiming to transform the work of self-cognition from the occupation of new age intellectuals into a broad cultural trend and even into youth fashion. However, again my first experiments revealed that the time for this does not come yet.  

My next bid attempt is starting now, in 2014: Web Institute of Higher Psychology was founded with a huge research agenda – more than 60 projects in 9 fields expanding the traditional scope of psychology are expecting now the researchers, who are brave and ambitious to research them.

Not less ambitious project has to be proposed to society as a whole – Society of Development: embedding in society the self-growing structures aiming facilitating spiritual growth of both own members and overall society. The idea of such society came to me in the last chapters of Light of Life, and I elaborated it all last eight years.

Society that develops all its members purposefully is an imperative of our time. This is an important part of new thinking we all need. But to make this idea viable a variety of unknown yet organizational forms have to be devised. Search for these forms and attempts to devise them are what I see as the main task of today. Of course, accomplishing this demands collaboration of many workers, in particular, because to make the idea viable we need first to make it hearable. Thus, we need a choir to sing this song loudly. Can we create such choir today? Only the future will answer.  

But even if the right time did not come yet and the society is not ready to accept the new reality we entering in, somebody has to prepare the soil for tomorrow.