If Ivanov had not discovered the gift of healing people from the most diverse diseases, sometimes incurable by other means, then he would hardly have been able to achieve any results in disseminating his teaching. It was his miraculous healings that brought him fame and glory among the public; they were what enabled him to begin to have followers. Their worship of the Teacher’s unusual abilities unexpectedly influenced him himself. In the last years of his life, Porfiry suddenly began to speak of himself as God and to seriously declare his own immortality. And he meant physical immortality, not spiritual immortality. There was also something insane about the idea of physical immortality, but what else could become the logical completion of the idea of absolute health, reinforced by the appearance of superpowers in its messiah?
Any person who has conquered his own weaknesses and limitations begins to sense power in himself, and he who overcomes even the laws of human nature and has power to heal people begins to sense his immortality. That is an essentially normal state for a mystic, but one who has passed through training in a school will know that power belongs not to him but to God, and he is only its conduit, and in fact rather weak and limited. In Ivanov’s system, God was replaced by Nature, and his feeling of his own power was not explained by anything. Equally inexplicable was his feeling of eternity, timelessness and endlessness, from which appeared the sensation of his own immortality. From this sense, multiplied by internal power, a new idea was born: I am immortal! And kind followers already helped Porfiry to come to the next thought – I am God! And perhaps he came to it himself, under the impression of people worshipping him; in general, there isn’t any difference.
People love to create idols for themselves, in order to add to their need to bow before someone of great significance. Quite a few legends circulated about Porfiry; he could stay under water for 15 minutes, and there were numerous witnesses of this; he could be seen at the same time in different places; in short, all sorts of things were said about him. Checking the reliability of these legends is now impossible, and there is no point in such a check. The main thing is that the fame that came to Porfiry began to change his awareness of his role and significance. From a conduit of the Idea he suddenly was made a new Creator, and, as befits God, decided to create a new Adam – a perfect person. In Ivanov’s conception, the new Adam must from birth live in complete fusion with Nature and be immortal. A new humankind would begin with him, free of illness and suffering of the body. The act of a new creation must be made in a place of power – on the Chuvilkiny Hill, which was located next to Ivanov’s native village, and which Porfiry considered a particularly sacred place.
Now, it would most likely work – to give birth to a child on a hill, and to have a fairly widely- known man assist at the birth, who nevertheless had the status of first-group disabled for schizophrenia. But it 1975, this was impossible. Despite the fact that one of Ivanov’s followers decided to enable the birth of the new man (Porfiry was not the father of the child) and she had already been brought to Chuvilkiny Hill by the start of her contractions, the mystical act was interrupted by a local policeman, who took the child-bearer to a birthing center. Thus, in the most banal fashion the great experiment was cancelled, to which Ivanov for some reason never returned. Maybe the moment had been missed, or perhaps Porfiry understood the total senselessness of this caper. Nevertheless, more followers were added, and the worship along with the deification continued.