Porfiry Ivanov

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Porphyry (Porfiry) Korneyevich Ivanov (Russian: Порфирий Корнеевич Иванов) (February 20, 1898—April 10, 1983) was a religious leader, who conquered Nature, wrought wonders, and healed people. He developed a teaching how to become healthy spiritually and physically, and left about a hundred notebooks with his articles, poems, parables, and tales. He often spoke and wrote in parables, and many of his words require interpretation; and many more of his works were written in the period of his development into the God of the Earth, as he was named for his life and deeds. The most important of Porphyry Ivanov's works are "Praise Be to the Lord" Hymn, Dear Child, The Victory of Mine, The Teacher Writes It, and About Nature.

Contents 1 "Praise Be to the Lord" Hymn 2 Biography 3 A Half a Century Experiment 4 Quotations 5 Commentary 6 Bibliography 7 External links

[edit] "Praise Be to the Lord" Hymn

Porphyry Ivanov asked to start telling about him from his hymn; and it is known his words that there is a secret in, and it must be unclosed. Below is an interpretation of this work.

Has been fulfilled the Lord's word—
The God of the Earth came to the world.
He shall banish death and bring life in fame.
He shall banish death and bring life in fame.

The Messiah gave people a work,
And there is our word,
"It's the Way of Holiness. Praise be to the Lord.
It's the Way of Holiness. Praise be to the Lord."

Has been fulfilled the Lord's word—
The God of the Earth came to the world.
He shall banish death and bring life in fame.
He shall banish death and bring life in fame.

The Messiah gave people a work,
And there is our word,
"It's the Way of Holiness. Praise be to the Lord.
It's the Way of Holiness. Praise be to the Lord."

Porphyry Ivanov

[edit] Biography

Porphyry Ivanov was born on February 20, 1898, in Orekhovka village, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. He came of a poor coalminer's family. His youth passed very much like that of other people of his generation and social status. There was a hard work in the mine to help his father to feed family, troubled years of revolution and civil war in Russia, a marriage with two children, usual concerns for daily bread and the self-education at late night hours.

Since his young years he was often asking himself: why do so many people suffer and live such a hard life? Why is it that whatever man does, however good living conditions he creates for himself, he can rarely escape illnesses and feelings of dissatisfaction and can never escape death? Is man doomed to that fate, or maybe there is a way to change the course of human life?

On April 25, 1933, as Porphyry Ivanov wrote in his diaries, a "new", "unprecedented" idea came to his mind. It was the answer to his questions.

He realized that people had chosen a wrong path of life. Fearing cold and severe aspects of Nature, we isolate and hide ourselves from her and surround ourselves with a "warm" and "comfortable" artificial environment. As a result, human life and survival have become fully dependent on the availability of such artificial conditions. Indeed, we need food, clothes and habitation—otherwise we should die of hunger and cold. We need various machines and technologies to secure our means of life and make life more comfortable.

To satisfy our ever-increasing needs we constantly struggle with Nature and destroy her, forcibly extracting from her all we want. But Nature is alive, and she responds to this plight by her own means—by diseases, natural disasters, by making each man subject to death. Our selfish and consumer-minded approach towards Nature inevitably extends to the relations among people. The result is the continued spread of the animosity, mutual mistrust, envy, indifference and feeling of loneliness.

Yet, Nature and her three live bodies—earth, air and water—contain all necessary forces to preserve human life. We simply do not know how to use these forces, and Nature will not let us know as long as we wage our war against her. So, man should try to change his mentality and then his practical attitude towards Nature. Fear and aggressive self-centering should be replaced by love, trust and acceptance of all natural conditions in their entirety. Nature will reciprocate, giving man more of physical and spiritual health. Man will eventually become free and independent in Nature, needing no artificial equipment to sustain his life.

When his war with Nature is stopped, there will be no more victims and casualties on both sides; why should man have to die then? "There is no death in Nature. People have created it by their own wrong actions," Porphyry Ivanov writes. Dependence made man concerned mostly with his struggle for survival and left little room for higher aspirations. So, with dependence driven out, nothing will any longer prevent man from attaining his ultimate predestination—to get filled with the Holy Spirit and become an immortal temple for God.

Such ideas sound incredible even now, and they certainly did so at that time. It was necessary that someone lead the way and prove that the alternative, "independent" path does exist in Nature and it is not just a fantasy. Porphyry Ivanov realized that he was the very person whom Nature selected for this mission. "I have been required in Nature," he would write later.

So, at the age of 35, Porphyry Ivanov changed the course of his life. He started to go gradually without clothes, testing different natural conditions. Ultimately he remained in knee-long black shorts only. Barefoot and almost naked, he could stand at 30—40 °C frost, or spend a winter night outdoors wandering in the snow-covered fields. For quite long periods of time (up to 100 days) he abstained from food and water, exploring whether man can preserve himself by means of another source which exists in the surrounding natural bodies—air, water and earth.

Never before was there a man established such a new relationship with Nature. Soon he also felt in himself the capability to help sick and needy people. Wherever he went, he never refused to receive those who asked him for help. He cured thousands of people of such diseases as cancer, ulcer, tuberculosis etc. He raised the paralyzed, brought back sight to the blind. For his extraordinary power people often called him Master of Nature.

Most widely he had become known as Teacher. He taught people what to do to restore health, as defined in a broad sense of his words "health is the notion of life". According to Porphyry Ivanov, no medicine, no special physical techniques and exercises will help if your whole notion of life and, therefore, your actions are wrong. The only way to acquire the right notion lies through opening oneself to Nature. Cold water and other natural factors not only toughen up body, but they also awaken mind and consciousness. Man starts to learn a new way of living in Nature by means of simple natural actions that were summarized by the Teacher in his practical recommendations.

Although they look very simple, behind each of them stands a unique experience of the man who passed through hardest ordeals. His way had never been easy. Eyewitnesses recall that sometimes he was trembling all over with cold. He used to say, "I'm a living man, and I feel this cold a thousand times as strongly as you do. But I take it with patience." What was even harder to withstand, as Porphyry Ivanov wrote, was the "coldness of human hearts". Most people did not understand what he had been doing and why. Because of his "strange" ideas and "improper" appearance, he was often subject to mockeries and insults. With bitterness he wrote, "People hated my naked body and said it had no place in civilization. 'Go away,' they told me. 'You are not one of us but an unwelcome stranger. Get off the face of the earth!'" Official medicine, authorities and society dismissed Porphyry Ivanov as just insane. More than that, as a "socially troublesome element" he was often locked up—a method frequently used by Soviet authorities of that time to exterminate all phenomena not fitting into official ideological and behavioral patterns. Porphyry Ivanov spent close to 12 years in harsh conditions of prisons and mental hospitals attached to the Ministry of the Interior.

Throughout the years of his experiment (1933—1983) Porphyry Ivanov sought to make his ideas and practice familiar to a broad audience. He addressed many local and central newspapers and magazines, sought meetings with renowned doctors and scientists, wrote letters to the Ministry of Health, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and other organizations. However, he was constantly turned away and denied any access to the mass media. In the late 1970s, he was even put under house arrest at his home in Verkhny Kondryuchy village, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. It was only in February 1982 that the first large article about the Teacher came out in Ogonyok, a popular Moscow magazine. After this publication which was titled A Half a Century Experiment, restrictions were eased and Porphyry Ivanov was allowed to receive people coming to him from all over the Soviet Union.

It was particularly in the 1970s—1980s that more and more people, looking at the life and deeds of this man, came to call him God, or God of the Earth. But even those people did not know that the Teacher had already almost fulfilled his mission, as the idea of independence in Nature and the practical teaching had been laid open for all people. On April 10, 1983, Porphyry Ivanov died. His body was buried near his home in Verkhny Kondryuchy.

Porphyry Ivanov never maintained that man can become immortal and fully independent in these days, or even in the foreseeable future. According to him, this is a matter of a long gradual evolution of mankind. Therefore, at present no one is expected to imitate his example by walking naked and barefoot—it is both unnecessary and unfeasible. What the Teacher himself asked people for was merely to follow his recommendations.

[edit] A Half a Century Experiment

How to live without diseases? Generation after generation dreamt about. But we must recognize with deep concern that even now, despite the tremendous achievements of medicine, mankind does not suffer from diseases less than formerly. We shall not talk about serious illnesses, let us take a common cold. According to statistics, more than half of all cases falls into this category.

There are many various methods that help man to stay healthy, and the tempering stands first among them.

Unfortunately, the influence of cold upon man has not been studied enough. But the healing qualities of icy water were known millenniums ago, and now the wisdom of folk medicine is successfully adopted by doctors. For instance, in Kaluga City No. 1 Hospital the cold is used in treatment of neuroses and bronchial asthma or, in the Kirov Sanatorium in Yalta, hypertension and neurasthenia are treated with the help of winter swimming.

The healthy influence of cold upon the organism was explained by I. P. Pavlov as a result of the "shock of the nerve cells" from the sudden effect on the nervous system. But there are many questions about the influence of cold upon man that still remain open.

This is why, in our opinion, the experiment of Porphyry Korneyevich Ivanov is so valuable. This citizen of the Voroshilovgrad region has been testing himself for almost fifty years. He has so inured himself to cold that he can spend many hours outdoors only with shorts on and barefoot in the winter!

He will be eighty-five years old, and during half a century of his friendship with the frost he never caught cold nor was sick with respiratory disease or flu. But before he began to temper himself he was often sick like anyone else...

I found out about Porphyry Korneyevich from the writer V. G. Cherkasov, a zealous follower of the simple system of superior health, developed by this man. And he is not alone: only in Moscow I know more than several dozen engineers, doctors, scientists who became the followers of Porphyry Ivanov. Following the example of the Teacher (as everyone calls him), they run barefoot upon the snow; and though in the past they were fairly often sick, now they forgot about diseases, and thank their fate that she brought them to Porphyry Korneyevich.

Before visiting him in Verkhny Kondryuchy village, where he lives now, I read about him in the book The Reserves of Our Organism written by two doctors, N. Agadjanyan and A. Katkov:

"In any frost he walks barefoot upon the snow ... and without feeling any cold."

It sounded strange—does not he really feel cold? That was the first question I asked Porphyry Korneyevich.

"I don't feel cold?!" He exclaimed. "I feel it, even more than ye. Only ye are afraid of it, I am not. I made a friend of the eternal human enemy."

"And ye indeed have never been sick?"

"Why on earth? I am sick all the time. I am sick from the thought that I am capable, but prohibited to transmit my ability to people."

"Some say that ye believe in God."

"They tell a lie.^[1] I believed until I realized that God remains not in the Sky, but on the Earth—in the people were able to gain a victory over themselves."

This uncommon man has an interesting fate. He was born in a poor family, and like to his father, became a coal miner. He descended into the mine for the first time at the age of fifteen, and did there a variety of jobs. In 1917 he was conscripted into the army.

"I wasn't in time for the war," Porphyry Korneyevich narrates, "the Czar was thrown off from the way."

However, he had to war as a partisan. He derailed the interventionists' trains, once burned an English airplane, and was rewarded for that by the command. After the war he restored mines in Donbass, participated in the collective farm movement, led a forest crew.

Now, when Porphyry Korneyevich is in his eighties, he amazes people with the boldness of his reasoning. He was ever such a man—daring, courageous, thoughtful. One day (it was in the Caucasus, he stood over the sea, upon a high rock) a thought came to him, "Why has it been arranged so that man spends in well-being only half of his life—while he is young; but when he reaches maturity, and it seems that he should live and live for the others' good, it doesn't happen—diseases fall upon him, making him unfit, forcing to think not about the business for which he came to the Earth, but about himself? Diseases make a man an egoist. Don't many of human troubles happen because of man doesn't know how to conquer his powerlessness? No matter how much thou wilt bundle up, it won't save thee from diseases. Why not to do the opposite—not hide from Nature, but walk toward her, become close to her and merge with her?"

And Porphyry Korneyevich decided to prove—at first to himself—that it is possible to tame the "unkind forces of Nature" (his expression), and turn them to man's own advantage. He began to walk without clothes in the frost, at first for a few seconds, then up to half a minute. Increasing the time more and more, he became able to go outdoors in the snowstorm, dressed only in shorts, and spend hours in a field, in the strong wind and hard frost. He used to return all covered with snow and ice, in the wreaths of steam, and the villagers were perplexed whether he would be in bed with cold (or maybe with something more serious) tomorrow.

But that is in the past. Now, having retired, Porphyry Ivanov is set upon transmitting his unique (unique undoubtedly!) experience of tempering to the people, scientists. And what about the scientists? They are not in a hurry yet. Maybe they do not know about Porphyry Ivanov?..

"I address to people," Porphyry Korneyevich says, "My dears, all your diseases stem from your mollycoddlement: from the warmth, tasty food and rest. Be not ye afraid of cold, it mobilizes, as it is in to speak now, the body defense forces. The cold throws into the body a hormone of health. Let everyone think what is more important for him—a business or small enjoyments. For everything there must be a victory. Man must live in victory; if thou dostn't get it, thou wiltn't be worth a doit... What for get treatment if it is possible and necessary not to let disease into the body?!"

Marx has said that a civilized man must be able to withstand Nature as the ancients did it. Porphyry Ivanov is able to withstand Nature. The basis for that is his system. He had been developing it for almost half a century, and has strictly followed it. The system is strikingly simple at a glance, consists of mere seven rules, and some of them seem to be irrelevant to health. Judge it yourselves.

The first rule. Live with the constant wish to do good to people, and if thou hast done that, newer recollect of, and hurry to do more.

The second rule. Try to do everything with pleasure and joy. And until thou hast learned to get joyfulness of doing a job, consider that thou dost not know how to do it.

It would seem that the hoary old man talks not about health, but in essence he talks about the most important health—the health of soul. Verily, is it possible to cure for body without it? Here are his other rules:

Drink neither wine nor vodka.

One day a week go without food and water.^[2] At other times try to eat less meat, and eat less in general. ("Now people simply suffer from gluttony, they eat twice more than their nature requires. Excess food prevents clear thinking.")

Walk barefoot all the year round upon the grass or snow, at least for a few minutes a day.

Every morning and evening bathe in cold water.^[3]

The photo correspondent Edward Ettinger and I experimented with this. At first we declined it point-black. I was afraid to think about it, moreover, I was suffering from a sore throat and cold. Only when we have seen how disappointed Porphyry Korneyevich became ("So ye also don't believe me?"), we decided to risk it—for the sake of mankind healing. But when he poured upon each of us a bucket of icy-cold water (it was about ten degrees^[4] outdoors), we realized what the unearthly feelings are. By the way, after half an hour my sickness was completely gone. We took the cold-water procedures every day, but only at the end of the fifth day of our visitation in the house of Porphyry Korneyevich we did begin to get taste to it. Of course, by no means we appeal to anyone to follow our example right now. We are only telling the facts.

And the last rule. Frequently be outdoors with naked body, as in summer as in winter. ("Let the body breathe and learn to take warmth from the cold.")

Someone may think that it is nonsense. But let us hear from one of the followers of Porphyry Ivanov, I. Khvoshchevsky, Ph.D., a specialist in the area of thermodynamics:

"By his unprecedented experience P. K. Ivanov was able to show that under the cold conditions the human organism begins to constantly produce internal energy. It may be that this experience echoes with the genial, perhaps, but not well founded hypothesis of K. E. Tsiolkovsky about the gradual and gratuitous absorption of energy from the surrounding cold bodies. Indeed, we know very little about man and his potential. It is possible that in unusual, extreme situations the organism shows unknown capabilities; at present we can only guess about them. This is why the experiment that Porphyry Korneyevich Ivanov has been realizing upon himself for over half a century is so important. It is difficult to find the similar example of such a perseverance..."

In the village Porphyry Ivanov has many followers, and first among them is his wife Valentina Leontievna. Some time ago she was very ill, now, in her seventy years old, she considers herself perfectly healthy.

"I am afraid," she says, "to miss even one day in winter of going to the frost undressed and pouring icy water upon myself. What if diseases come again, as it was twenty-five years ago."

Just as Porphyry Korneyevich, Valentina Leontievna eats very little. Working the whole day (as any other peasant woman), now she tires much less than it was before she became a friend of the cold and began fasting. It is very likely that these two factors are related, and one helps to bear the other.

Verily, the mysteries of the human organism are endless!

On our way to the airport we stopped in the district center Sverdlovsk, to talk about Porphyry Ivanov in the District Party Committee. The secretary of the District Committee Nadezhda Konstantinovna Kovalyova has said,

"Unfortunately, we're not able to estimate this unique man at his true worth. Here are no specialists for that. And honestly speaking, we have no time to occupy ourselves with him. The district is big and complicated, for we mine the earth for coal. But if you would help to attract to Porphyry Ivanov attention of the community, scientists..."

This is what we are trying to do here.

Sergei Vlasov

[edit] Quotations

• I ask and beg of all people: come and take thy place in Nature. It is occupied by no one and no money on earth can buy it, and thou canst get it only with thy own deeds and labor in Nature for the good of thyself, that thou wilt feel easy.
• The Teacher asks you as his dear and intimate disciples not to be silent, but act. Ye have gotten the teaching, keep it in the healthy heart.
• I came to reconcile you with Nature.
• All ones know how to die, but it is necessary to learn to live.
• There is no death in Nature.

[edit] Commentary

[edit] Bibliography

• Сергей Власов. Эксперимент длиною в полвека. Москва, «Огонёк» № 8, 1982. (Sergei Vlasov. A Half a Century Experiment. Moscow, "Ogonyok" No. 8, 1982.)
• П. К. Иванов. Труды. Москва, 1992. ISBN 5-88553-002-5 (P. K. Ivanov. Works. Moscow, 1992.)
• Надо жить научиться. Москва, 1993. (It is Necessary to Learn to Live. Moscow, 1993.)
• Бог пришёл на землю для спасения человековой души. Дебальцево, 1994. (God Came to the Earth to Save Man's Soul. Debaltsevo, 1994.)
• Учитель Иванов. Надо изменить поток сознания людей. Санкт-Петербург, 1994. ISBN 5-7116-0075-3 (The Teacher Ivanov. It is Necessary to Change the Stream of the People's Consciousness. St. Petersburg, 1994.)
• Учитель Иванов: «Я жизнь предложил людям». Москва, 1995. (The Teacher Ivanov: "I offered life to people". Moscow, 1995.)
• Учитель Иванов. Жизнь и учение. Москва, 1996. (The Teacher Ivanov. Life and Teaching. Moscow, 1996.)
• Бог природы. Сборник свидетельств очевидцев Учителя Иванова. Казань, 1999. (The God of Nature. The Contemporaries' Memories of the Teacher Ivanov. Qazan, 1999.)
• Учитель Иванов. История Паршека. 100 лет со дня рождения. Москва, 2003. ISBN 5-249-00048-7 (The Teacher Ivanov. The History of Parshek. 100 years since the birth of. Moscow, 2003.)
• А. Ю. Бронников. Учитель Иванов. Его дорога. Москва, 2006. ISBN 5-488-00456-4 (A. Y. Bronnikov. The Teacher Ivanov. His Road. Moscow, 2006.)

[edit] External links

• (English) The Teacher Ivanov
• (English) Porphyry Ivanov. Writings
• (English) Akbar Ali Muhammad. The Word of Vladimir Vysotsky
• (English) The Teacher Ivanov: Life and Teaching - Resource Library
• (Russian) The System of Porphyry Ivanov - Informational Portal
• (Russian) Porfiry Ivanov - The Center for Apologetics Research