staying overnight at each other’s houses, sharing beds, to spare themselves the trouble of coming over, or start to thrash violently in the trap of Karma, viciously tearing off their bodies everything sticking to them. Those too stubborn and stupid end up with their heads ripped off (basically, they don’t need those useless things anyway).

Note that while human astral shells take about a couple of months to renew and restore themselves, the causal Karma shells change at least every six months, mostly every ten to twelve years, and can even stay the same in some ways until the person dies. Most magicians — let alone ordinary people who spend most of their lives pointlessly, administered with a homemade local anesthetic — don’t know at all how to reach the causal level, so they can’t get the upper hand of changes on that level. This leaves even magicians, witches, and mediums helpless, and they tell you they can’t change destiny, Karma, and the like. At least those of them do who deal honestly. Underhanded practitioners will give you a 100, 120, 247, or 568.78 percent guarantee of success, depending on how insolent they are and on how well they can count their patience’s money with their fingers trembling with greed.

But the fact that the guarantee is given not by the agent but on behalf of the agent’s Guarantor goes unnoticed since in real life no guarantee as such is in order. One law of Creation — one that holds that the 100 percent efficiency lies out of reach (otherwise, space would wrap itself into a cocoon) and that efficiency in excess of 100 percent is a black hole — is perhaps not worth explaining if you didn’t get it when you were in the seventh grade.

But that’s off the point. What I want to say is that the inevitability of Karma — the cause and its manifestations — calls to mind a simple and convenient analogy to rail track. Karma is like a railroad in many ways, indeed.

1. Just as a train rolling down the track doesn’t have the option of steering off track, so, in the final analysis, you cannot escape your destiny. For example, if you are born a man, becoming a woman and making babies are something of a problem…

2. The train is always on the move, and it can’t stop. Similarly, neither can you: even if you fall so low as to become a hobo, dropping out of society, things will keep happening to you as you near your death, the end of your journey.

3. And here’s an interesting thing. The train weighs tons, so swerving, slowing down, and speeding up aren’t easy unless the train drops some weight. Likewise, if you are to get away from it all, you need to go out of town, turn off your cell phone, and hit the pause button on your brains after picking up a case or two of whatever it is that grabs your fancy. In a word, when all is said and done, the truth is that the way the train and destiny take don’t depend on you. Even the engineer is not in control — all they can do is step on the gas or the brakes (the human equivalent of that “gas” being the biological clock).

4. So the only way to control the train is to join one track with another and put up a railroad switch at the joint. Few have ever thought that the train is actually steered by the track switcher, not the engineer. If the switch is on one track, the engineer can’t cross over to the other, no matter what they do. The best they can do is slow down, waiting for no one knows what. That is to say — and this is something important to highlight — the train is controlled externally rather than internally.

5. This analogy agrees well with the actual functioning of Karma. Causal Karma structures are quite stable and strong, which makes them similar to rail track.

6. But why is it impossible for you to have free reign over your destiny? Why does your destiny send you swinging as chance wills it? The answer is, you’re not even the engineer, and switching the tracks is the switcher’s job. And note that trains outnumber rail tracks by far. Life-trains and blind destinies crash all the time.

With all this in mind, you realize that a stalker is someone who knows that they’re not the engineer but a passenger on the train controlled by the track switcher. That’s why stalkers are the laziest type of magicians: most of the way, they just ride on the train, enjoying the dining-car menu and conversation with their fellow travelers. If you meet a magician who, while they are on a roll, is too lazy to even be lazy, they’re most likely a more or less conscious stalker.

The next chapters will take a look at how stalkers enter into a dialogue with track switchers and change trains.

Chapter 8. The secret of the secret, or the mysteries of the divine secret service

The previous chapter discussed how the destinies of most people (excluding magicians and stalkers) are controlled, at the causal level, by external causes. To put it differently, for the destiny train to turn, the track switcher must switch the tracks — while the passengers in compartment 3 continue, perfectly unaware, with their heated discussion over a glass of something strong.

This mechanism serves a protective purpose, allowing some people to enjoy free will, for a while.

But who’s the mysterious track switcher? The answer is paradoxically simple. But first, here’s a joke:

A commission of demons enters the place where sinners are burning in boiling cauldrons. A man jumps out of the first cauldron, makes for the table standing near it, grabs a bottle of Russian moonshine, pours himself a full glass, and runs back to the cauldron. There’s an old demon sitting at the table, and the head of