Kozyrev’s Mirror: reflections on ‘Cosmic Consciousness’
I recently finished Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity, a book published in 1992 by V. P. Kaznacheev and A. V. Trofimov, two Russian scientists who undertook a series of experiments to test aspects of their scientific theory they term “New Cosmogony”. This piece will be somewhat of a book report, but their ideas have crossover with quite a few different avenues of investigation that interest me, and I’ll be drawing out some of those links as I go.
The edition I read was found online. It was translated into English from the original Russian, and it was not always easy to follow the terminology the translators used. The first couple of chapters in particular are very dense and full of complex cosmological and philosophical concepts expressed in quite archaic vocabulary. I shall try my best to draw out the essence of what they say, as well as summarise and discuss the experiments they carried out, including with the famous Kozyrev’s Mirror. I’ll talk about the results published in the book as well as the strange side-effects and anomalous perceptions experienced by participants.
As usual, my apologies to the trained scientists out there for my superficial understanding of some of these topics.
What is “New Cosmongony”?
New Cosmogony draws from various influences. The first is “Russian Cosmism”, which the authors summarise thus:
On the whole this is the greatest Renaissance of national culture directed tot he paradigm “The world as a living organism” instead of the previous one that defines the world as a “colossal mechanism”.
They go on to say:
Firstly, cosmoplanetary Living Matter is various in its unity. It concerns the variety of the material structures of Living Matter, including its reasonable forms. Secondly, the interaction (interpenetration) between Living and Inert Matter requires some other vision of the Universe’s integrity.
Immediately, this brings to mind the ever-flowing debates about dualism, quantum mind, and neurobiology that are still ongoing today. In the modern West, science shies away from — is almost institutionally against — any whiff of suggestion that consciousness is more than an emergent property of organic matter. Even today dualism is often derided as ‘spiritualism’ or ‘animism’, with all the cultural and colonial undertones of that language. But, as we shall see, the authors are not bound by such caged thinking.
Other influences they list include Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky, whose work proposed the idea of a noosphere, a planetary “sphere of reason” made up by human mental activity. But the main influence on their work comes from N. A. Kozyrev, a great Russian astrophysicist who, because of the unfortunate circumstance of being sent to a Stalinist gulag for a decade, missed developments such as Einstein’s theories of relativity and formulated some very strange theories of his own about space, time, and matter.
Kozyrev and “time energy”
Kozyrev was very much a scientific heavyweight. He published his first paper at the age of 17 and graduated at 20. He predicted moon volcanism before any other astrophysicist in the USSR or the West. And he was unafraid to challenge conventional thinking.
In the popular tellings of his theories that you might find on YouTube, Kozyrev’s theories are almost always misrepresented as “time = light” or similar. In fact, when looked at with a modern lens, Kozyrev’s proposed “time energy” is more similar to what we think of as “zero point” or “physical vacuum” energy. He essentially suggests that time energy is everywhere in the universe, and all physical matter is constantly interacting with each other in flows of energy. Think of sponges under water — they’re soaking but water is constantly flowing in and out of them. You can squeeze them to remove water temporarily, but once you let go, they return to an equilibrium of saturation.
For Kozyrev, this type of energy is in everything, everywhere, all at once. Any change in time appears instantaneously in all the time energy, and thus non-local interactions were possible without violating relativity, because no matter is moving at superluminal speeds.
Time energy does, however, have properties like other types of energy — it can be sped up and slowed down; it has density; it can be reflected. The main effect of time energy is negentropic; that is to say, it counteracts entropy and stops material bodies from disintegrating into their constituent parts.
Kozyrev also thought that his time energy was what caused the noise that is captured by audiovisual equipment, which we would now call “quantum noise”.
For a much more comprehensive and scientific review of Kozyrev’s work, I recommend this excellent piece. For our purposes, the authors of Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity tested his ideas by investigating whether altering certain conditions, such as the strength of the magnetic field and an environment designed to reflect time energy, had an effect on non-local, mental communication by humans. To create such an environment, they used large sheets of aluminium rolled into a sort of cylindrical chamber, known as a “Kozyrev’s Mirror”.
Human brains as field computers
Before we get into the experiments, we have to talk about brains. A major theoretical assumption the authors made was that human consciousness (translated from the Russian as “Intellect”) rests not in the neurons and synapses of the brain, but in the field created by them. Their theory of how higher intellect arose in humans is:
…within the “computer”, that is, within the multi-neuronal organization of the Brain, where all neurons are bound to each other by conducting fibres and every neuron possesses a definite cellular protein-nucleic substance of the field form of organization of Living Matter, there occurred an “explosion”. In the course of this event the field continuums and the field local forms of each neuron became integrated into a united Field Computer.
This “explosion” was caused, they suggest, by fluctuation caused by cosmic influences causing alterations in the Earth’s magnetic field.
The idea that the mechanism behind higher intellect is contained in field form in the brain has found a new lease of life in conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory, first proposed in 2002 — a decade after Cosmic Consciousness — by Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey. McFadden shows that by considering the brain as a field computer, many of the problems facing other models of consciousness can be resolved, in particular the “binding” issue. I have not seen McFadden credit the work of Kaznacheev & Trofimov, and he seems to have approached it from the ground up (as opposed to K&T’s top-down view). He has shown in recent papers that there is a great deal of experimental support for this theory and I find it (from a layman’s perspective) pretty compelling.
In Cosmic Consciousness, however, they go even further, relating the informational field of the human mind to a universal informational field, i.e. Kozyrev’s time energy. The authors postulate that all living matter is highly sensitive to and capable of interacting with this informational field.
Kaznacheev & Trofimov’s experiments
The authors of Cosmic Consciousness describe three sets of experiments they carried out: distance effects on biological matter, or as they put it, “Kozyrev’s Plant”; telepathy experiments from natural sites of geomagnetic anomaly; and telepathy experiments using Kozyrev’s Mirror. The first and third were carried out from a research base they established on Dikson Island in the polar regions of Siberia. This location was chosen as its latitude (73' 30") was close to the latitude of 73' 05", which Kozyrev’s experiments predicted as having zero value of time forces (p. 111–115).
I am no academic scientist, and maybe some of the text is made less comprehensible by translation, but the descriptions of the experiments were somewhat frustrating to try to understand. Structurally the authors refer to each of the three sets of experiments together, jumping between discussing them. I’ll do my best to summarise but there will invariably be misunderstandings on my part.
The key theoretical idea to grasp is that time energy is, to the authors, a field, and appears everywhere at once. Energy can flow in that field and contain information, which can be influenced by biological matter, especially human consciousness. This is in essence the same concept as the holographic “matrix field” referred to by remote viewing practitioners. This flow of energy is converted to other forms like EM radiation and is therefore detectable when analysing a subject’s EM field.
Distance interactions with biological matter (televised plant experiments)
In the first series, they created a device which used a biological “receiver” — in their case, a China Rose plant — wired up to devices measuring the electric potential of its leaves and a magnetometer monitoring the magnetic field strength at its roots.
They placed this setup within a sealed environment and did a series of experiments where they disseminated an image of the plant via various means —in newspapers, local television, national (satellite) television, and telepathy. Members of the audience were invited to attempt to mentally influence the plant, and write to the scientists with the exact time and conditions of doing so. They then analysed the data from the plant to see whether the influence had any effect.
According to the authors,
…it was demonstrated that practically any person may distantly effect [sic] a computer system with bio-indicators. The direction of this effect, along with other factors, is determined by the helio-geophysical situation at the moment when the experiment was conducted, and also before the [participant]’s birth.
Somewhat frustratingly, the authors don’t publish the data results from the plant experiement. From reading the discussion of results (p.127), they claim that both positive and negative effects were indicated. They assert that effects were especially strong on one particular evening and anomalous phenomena such as “a plasmoid burst” and a disk-shaped UAP with a luminous tail were observed at the same time as the broadcast.
Telepathy experiments carried out in anomalous geomagnetic zones
Another set of experiments were “distance information” — what we would refer to as telepathy or psi — broadcast by individuals in various environments that had a magnetic field quite drastically different from the general surroundings. Individuals with high reported psychic abilities were chosen.
The first set of these were carried out in various ancient sacred sites in Bulgaria. Some of the sites contained magnetic anomalies, and some not. The success of the telepathic broadcasting was compared between these areas.
Sites that contained magnetic anomalies included the central part of a Thracian sanctuarium (sacred site) at Kabile in Bulgaria, a mountaintop rock shrine at Belintash, and a cave near Bailovo. The recipients of the images transmitted telepathically were located in Novosibirsk, around 2700 miles away.
According to the authors, the telepathic transmissions were by far more successful in these anomalous areas.
Again, frustratingly, no precise numbers are given, just this graph. Many of the graphs in this book have a similar issue with lack of precise data (at least to me). They did give a specific example of images transmitted/received on one particular occasion:
A further set of experiments carried out around the magnetically significant area of the Perm Anomaly where imaged were transmitted to Novosibirsk:
The full description of these experiments (p.75+) is worth reading, if only to find out about some fascinating ancient sites that were previously unknown to me. There’s no reason to doubt the existence of the magnetic anomalies referred to by the authors, some of which are quite famous — I found travel blogs talking about how weird it was to walk through the cross-shaped sanctuarium at Kabile, for example. Magnetic fluctuations are known to have all sorts of physiological effects on biological organisms, something the authors also studied. But it was the amplifying effect on the “distant communication” that was most intriguing.
Telepathy experiments carried out in Kozyrev’s Mirror
Finally we reach the Kozyrev’s Mirror experiments. To summarise, the research team created a device out of coiled sheets of aluminium, a material which according to Kozyrev’s experiments reflects time energy.
The design was
…constructed in such a way that the time-energy flows emitted by a man would reflect from the aluminium surface of the sphere and thus be concentrated in a certain place.
The team goes on to say:
…a placement of a man in this special space influenced him in his psycho-emotional perception, memory, verbal and nonverbal sensory perceptions. It has been found that when in this device (the Mirror) a man can easily and naturally transmit his visions to his partner over a distance of thousands of kilometres. (Novosibirsk — Dixon [sic] island; USSR — USA).
Some examples of these transmissions are given in the book’s appendices. For example, here are the results of the transmission to the USA, received by a researcher sitting in Central Park, NYC:
The following is an example of an image transmitted from Kozyrev’s Mirror and the images received by children of the Nganasan people, an indigenous group from the Taymyr Peninsula known for maintaining shamanic practices.
The bulk of the experiments involved transmitting images over a shorter distance, though — around 100m or so. Compelling results are given for the amplifying effect of Kozyrev’s Mirror on these remote transmissions.
Various other factors were also found to influence the success of distant transmission. For example, on the days of a solar eclipse and a magnetic storm, success rates drastically increased. Also, participants who were born after a period of high magnetic activity while they were gestating, or at certain phases of the moon, were more likely to see success.
The authors suggest that Kozyrev’s Mirrors can be seen as “funnels” in which the “intellectual field” — what I’ve been calling the “nonphysical realm” and others call the noosphere, the matrix field, etc — can be concentrated and manipulated. Essentially, that these devices can be used to amplify telepathy and other similar skills.
However, the practical usefulness of these spaces may be limited, because the research team found that there were many unexpected side-effects for participants.
Anomalous perceptions by participants in Kozyrev’s Mirror
The mass-appeal reporting on these experiments that I’ve seen inevitably focus on the strange experiences of those participating in the experiment. Of course these are interesting, but I hope the reader will forgive me for coming to them last, as I wanted to try to present the information in the book in a structured, organised way (a concern which appears not to have been a priority for the authors themselves).
I will try to categorise these in a helpful way. The records and drawings included in Supplement I are quite comprehensive and worth reading in their entirety. As far as I can tell, we can break the anomalies into these types:
- Physiological/psychological effects caused by being in or near Kozyrev’s Mirror
- Visual and audio perceptions outside of the experiment’s parameters
- Anomalies observed around the experiment’s location during the time of the experiments
Some of the records seem to be ‘raw’ data in the sense of being contemporaneous accounts and drawings, but some were obtained through hypnotic regression, which is an outdated method that has by and large been discredited. I will try to avoid referring to information obtained through this method.
Physiological/psychological effects on participants
Some 83% of the 47 participants during one phase of the experiments experienced “unusual psychophysical phenomena” including:
…body spatial geometry alterations (36%), split personality (24%), sensation of displacement in Space (42%) and distinct visual perception of bygone life episodes (63%).
Reading through the participants’ accounts, there are multiple reports of sensations like dizziness, waves of pressure, headaches, feeling hot or cold, the feeling of falling or flying, feeling a “pulse” of energy in the body, dissociation, and shaking/trembling.
Many of the researchers and participants also experienced a feeling of fear — a kind of “emotional pressure” which made them want to leave the room with the Mirror. One described it as “like a wild terror that couldn’t be explained”. The fear seemed to have a “fixed frontier” some 2–3m around the Mirror.
The researchers also recorded the EM fields of the participants using a technique called Kirlian photography. I am not sure the validity of this method is very supported, but essentially it’s a type of contact photography which produces an image of the EM field around an object. It’s important to note that various factors like moisture etc. can affect the images produced, so take the results with a grain of salt. But the researchers found many changes in the fields of participants after being in Kozyrev’s Mirror:
Anomalous audiovisual perceptions
Many if not all of the participants reported seeing visuals of strange symbols, figures, and landscapes during the experiments.
Some of the symbols perceived are listed below. Interestingly, many of them are repeated. The first symbol (three solid circles inside a larger ring), known as the “banner of peace”, was on a piece of paper which the researchers placed inside the Mirror early on in the experiment.
It is pretty interesting that various participants perceived similar or identical symbols during the trials. Some of these like the eye and dot within a circle are very familiar to those of us who have practised meditation/explored altered states. Others seem to have religious/mythological significance.
Many of the participants also reported seeing one or more humanoid figures, often dressed in a white suit, known as the “white stranger”. This figure made itself known to the participants, on one occasion saying “good morning, it is me”, as if to a friend. At times it expressed concern that participants had been in the mirror too long, and overall appeared to be benevolent.
Many participants felt that these figures were extraterrestrial visitors.
Another type of vision which appeared to participants were passages of their lives, especially childhood memories, and passages which they felt were of previous lives.
There were also more generalised visions of phenomena such as balls of light, UAPs, various shapes, clouds, lightning, etc.
Phenomena observed during the experiments outside of the space
Over a few days in December 1990, multiple UFOs were observed by residents and researchers flying over the buildings.
There was an increased Aurora Borealis during this time and various anomalies were observed.
Summary
It’s hard to know how to treat this work, which seems to be fairly unknown even among nonphysical and phenomena researchers in the West. Certainly the lack of a clean, modern translation doesn’t help matters. Some fault can also be attributed to the authors for the occasionally chaotic way the experiments are presented.
However, a clear picture emerges of a dedicated research team which carried out multiple series of experiments with at least a reasonable amount of scientific vigour. I have necessarily left many of the details out of my summary but I hope to convey that they spent a lot of time and effort and certainly produced some interesting results.
I would love to see Western and modern researchers continue the investigation into Kozyrev’s Mirrors and his other ideas.
