I am like a parapsychologist,” said Lena, which was good, as she had finally said something close to a recognizable word — “psychologist”— with a recognizable meaning.

Up to that point, she hadn’t made much sense. She said she was also an “energetik,” and was touting a course on “energy conscience” and “electrotransformation” that promises to help you “go through backwards in the levels of time,” which sounded like something connected to time travel, or perhaps a way to transform your body into an animal.

But it was much more serious than that. In the course, called Access+, the teachers promise to take you back in time to the “starting point of the materialization of thoughts,” which is pretty far back.

The course is “one of the most progressive methods of freeing the conscience and balancing the energy of the body on all levels” and ten times more effective than psychoanalysis or life-coaching, Lena said.

“It’s the transformation of thoughts that stop us from being happy,” Lena explained in one of her more lucid moments. “It balances energy in our souls,” she said. “Do you know what energy is?”

How do you answer that question?

The ad for the two-day course at the start of August was stuck up all over a sleepy Russian town.

The seminar is run by Mikhail, a former foreign languages teacher who left for the United States, went to Columbia University, dabbled in lots of esoteric subjects, found his energy and is now teaching here.

His web site, Lumibridge.com, has a picture of him standing on a large rock, a bandana around his head, his unbuttoned shirt flapping in the wind and his hands spread out, as if he’s about to take flight.

Lena shifted up a gear when she found out that I was a foreign “businessman,” and offered me a personal course in energy transformation. She went on to tell me that she was also a clairvoyant and could tell a lot about people without even seeing or speaking to them. My cell phone must have an MTS add-on that protects you from inquisitive clairvoyants, since she didn’t have a clue that I was a journalist.

All this might be the path to the light, if it were in any way understandable and didn’t sound like — and this is not being mean — hippy nonsense. That may actually be a bit mean to hippies.

Mikhail offers a course in “channeling” as well — each series of classes costs 5,000 rubles. If that sounds too cheap, there are also VIP versions available in Moscow.