– Many people live in debt. What should you do if debt causes stress?
– Imagine that the entire world lived in debt all the time, starting from childhood, and this topic evoked positive emotions. This is theoretically possible. Is it possible to play such a game in which a person would tune themselves to the idea that debts are a positive emotion? It is possible. If debts evoked positive emotions, then for people it would not be a problem.
Why do I give this example? There are people whose cause-and-effect relationships are structured in such a way that they will always be in debt, and their task is to relate to it calmly. Whatever a person does, whatever actions they take, whatever happens, they will be in debt. What is more important:
- That there are no debts?
- Or that the state of being remains harmonious?
What will you choose? You want to choose the absence of debt. That is the mistake. Because you may choose the absence of debt and receive a very bad state, even worse than the one you feel when you have debts.
What is your attention directed toward? Toward truly working on yourself, restoring your state, and developing yourself as a spiritual being and as a human? Or toward solving the problem of debt? If you say that your attention is directed toward solving the problem of debt, then toward which line are you moving?
Imagine:
- You have debts, and your state is minus 500. You feel terrible every morning.
- You have no debts, but your state is minus 500, and you feel terrible every morning for another reason.
You think that you feel bad because of the debts. Are you sure that you truly understand the cause of your experiences, your suffering, your emotional state, and your sensations? Or is it a logically constructed explanation? Or, on the contrary, because you feel bad, you have debts?
If the connection were like this: you feel bad, therefore debts appear. You want to fight the debts. But I say that this is a losing situation: even if you defeat the debts, but you continue to feel bad, and the reason is not the debts, you will still continue to feel the same way.
In such a situation it is important to truly understand why you feel this way. You do not always feel this way directly because of material or social events. A person does not feel bad because they do not have a husband or wife, and not because they do have a husband or wife. A person does not feel bad because they have a job, and not because they do not have a job. All possible variations occur at the same time.
A simple example. Did you feel better 15 years ago than you do now, or worse?
– Better.
– Better? Fifteen years ago you lived in Irkutsk. You were 18 years old. At 18, did you feel better than you do now? I am talking about the internal emotional and psychological state—about emotions, about living life, about the feeling of fullness of life, about the perception of the surrounding space, about the perception of people, about the ability to perceive the world. Did you feel better or not?
– Most likely, no.
– Look how sharply I showed you that you did not feel better. You say: “No-no, I remember something; back then I did not perceive the world as strongly. I did not feel the world as strongly.” Did you have many debts when you were 18? You do not even know whether you had them or not: for you it was not a concentrated problem. Just as in 10 years you may not even remember whether you had debts, and you may connect the cause of your state with something else. Or in 10 years you will feel a hundred times worse and say that ten years ago you felt excellent, even with debts.
The question is: with what thermometer do you measure your state? The problem is that a person does not have a thermometer that measures emotional state the way a regular thermometer measures body temperature or scales measure weight. So that you could simply look honestly at how you actually felt while being in a particular situation.
Why is it that when you live not in Irkutsk but in California, when you have a wife; when you have interesting work; when you have a lot of free time; when you live in a house, in an open space, and not in Lyubertsy and not in an apartment in Irkutsk; when you have the opportunity to choose whom to communicate with and whom to be around—to be in a space of drunk people, bandits, or in a space of intelligent and interesting people; when you have the opportunity to earn money; when you live in a space of balanced weather and nature—you have an ocean, snow, warm weather, nature—and in this state you feel bad. Then what is responsible for this?
Is it necessary to deal with debts, or is it necessary to deal with something else?
When you say “deal with debts,” you do not want to go to the root and the cause of the appearance of debts. Before dealing with the cause of the appearance of debts, it is worth allowing for one thing: debts may exist for your entire life. Perhaps there is a fundamental cause that you do not control and will not control. It may be present throughout your life. Perhaps you have not even yet seen what real debts are.
There are different concepts of debt. For example, you have not been blocked in twenty countries because of debt to the state; no one wants to kill you for debts. You are not sitting in prison for debts, not locked in some space. You have not been killed for debts and no harm has been done to your health. There are different states. It is worth at least looking at how you feel. It clearly causes you distress.
The first thing that must be done is to deal not with the debts, but with the distress. First you need to remove the distress. If you do not deal with your state in relation to this problem, it is practically impossible to find the cause and the solution, unless life itself leads you to this solution. You are acting with your eyes closed. When you are in a state of stress regarding a certain problem, you are inadequate in making decisions about that issue. Therefore, first you must deal with the stress and learn to calmly live through the state of debt.
That is why I suggest imagining that all people on Earth would live with debts. Then everyone would relate to it very calmly. Now there are 24 hours in a day. Can you imagine what will happen to the main population of the Earth if you tell them that the day will have not 24 hours but 16? It could lead to a nuclear war. But if people are born who from childhood know that there are 16 hours in a day rather than 24, do you think it will make any difference to them? It will make no difference.
This is exactly the problem of modern human thinking: the problem of understanding reality. If it happens that a day has 18 hours, then it has 18 hours. Nothing terrible. We will live further. Moreover, perhaps it would even be wonderful if there were 18 hours. Or perhaps it would be wonderful if there were 40 hours.
Modern society is capable of creating a problem out of anything. Endless discussions will begin. Some will say that if there is too much time, people will go crazy. Others will argue that if there is too little time, people will not have time to live. But if you look at the facts, if you remove planetary aspects—the sun, the moon, and other astronomical factors—essentially nothing will happen. What difference does it make?
As long as you choose the resolution of debt rather than your own state, as long as you choose the creation of a material asset rather than the true understanding of the world, you will remain in a lost state and in endless distress.
The question is different:
- will you have enough strength to deal with your stress and your state?
Not every person can deal with their stress.
A simple task: people are sitting in a room, everyone is well-rested, the recording is going on—and they begin to fall asleep. “Do not sleep. Why are you sleeping now?” The person tells themselves: “I will not sleep,” and still begins to fall asleep. What is this? It is a lack of understanding of the causes that act on the system; a lack of understanding of why the body decided to transition into sleep. It is a lack of control over the process.
This means inadequacy within the process and the absence of its perception. If a person honestly says: “I understand nothing in this process and do not perceive it,” that will already be an honest position.
For example, a person must admit: “I do not understand what happens to me at night, because I cannot fall asleep with a snap of my fingers.” Do you know at least one person who can fall asleep with a snap of their fingers? I do not. People can study anything they want, but they cannot do a simple thing: fall asleep with a snap of their fingers and wake up without an alarm at the appointed time, calmly implementing this action.
Therefore it is natural and normal to immediately allow for the possibility that you will not only fail to work through the issue of debts, but you will also not understand your state in relation to debts.
Then the question arises: what should be done?
- Gradually allow that debt is possible.
- Allow that in this area you may experience stress your entire life.
- Begin calmly observing and studying this from these positions. This will gradually give real life rather than self-deception.
I am not talking about a debt that appeared accidentally and can be quickly repaid. I am talking about a debt that is a fundamental problem. In life, the presence of debt can resemble the natural process of brushing your teeth. It goes along with life. There are people who have never experienced debts in their lives. And there are people who are constantly in this state. I know people who have never owed anything to anyone in their entire lives. They do not even know what it means to owe someone.
Please note: this does not mean that people necessarily were born into different families or were in different conditions.
Let us take my family. I have a wife. It would seem that we should be in the same perception of financial, material, and social aspects, including in relation to money. But if I am the person who earns money in the family, and she has not worked for 15 years, the question arises: if I have a debt, does she live through it? No. If she owed something to someone, I would most likely live through that state. But in her system this does not happen.
Some people have the ability to remain in a state of debt constantly, while my wife has the ability not to feel debts. She does not live through them; she does not pass them through herself. Even if some debt appeared now, she would not feel it or live through it.
This is similar to another situation. We have four children, and my wife and I are quite calm about what kind of education they will receive. We have different views, but we do not show strong concern about it. At the same time, there are people who have one child, and they worry incredibly about what higher education the child will receive or where they will work.
But my wife worries very much about something else. For her, the real horror would be if the children ended up in some bad, negative situations: for example, if they started using drugs. This causes her the strongest distress, which works in a completely different way than it does for me. I also know people who, in general, are indifferent to the condition of their children from the point of view of health. They may not call them for 10–15 years, not know where the person is, and for them this is not something important.
I give these examples to highlight one thing: there are different forms of perception that depend on time.
Such an answer will not satisfy you. You have a clear belief that comes from a bad state: you believe that the cause of your bad state lies precisely in this.
But you must search for the real cause of your state and allow for the possibility that a person may be in various life problems and at the same time experience endless love for the world, for themselves, and for others, without constantly experiencing negative feelings.