What kind of experience is necessary, and what kind of experience destroys your life?

– Often, when something unpleasant happens to us, we say that it had to happen: “This is for my experience, I will learn a lesson from it.” Is there always a lesson in events, or is this an illusion? Where do we stop looking at reality and start engaging in self-soothing? Why do people say: “It means it had to be this way”?

– When a person says that a bad event that happened was very important for their life, they are trying to justify a negative result. The most important thing in this case is to understand and acknowledge: the person is trying to justify a negative result and shift responsibility from their life onto something else. This is an unhealthy understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

A person tells themselves: “If an event happened, then it had a cause, and I needed to be in it.” It sounds logical, but in life one can observe many examples when people substitute meanings. They do not take responsibility for what is happening. They say that the events are not personally connected to them: “They had to happen, but I am not guilty of this. My personality is not guilty. Someone else is guilty: the flow of events, karma, other people, the world, the gods, but not me.”

To calm themselves, a person overlays an additional interpretation and says that this had to happen.

– Are negative events necessary for experience?

– There are situations where experience is truly necessary. For example, to learn how to cook, practical experience is needed. To understand how much salt to add, it is not enough to read in a book “one and a half teaspoons per 100 grams of meat” — you need to feel it. This feeling is formed through repetition.

To hammer a nail — experience is needed. To drive a car — experience is needed. You can read many books and watch many videos, but you will not learn to drive well. It is commonly believed that if a person studied at Stanford, then they are more competent in everything. And if they graduated from an agricultural technical school in Mogilev — then not. But in reality, in driving, a brand does not play a decisive role. In a technical school they teach how to operate a truck or a combine — this gives a sense of dimensions. Then a person will drive a passenger car calmly.

For a skill, experience is needed. But is the experience of an accident needed? Is the experience of a child’s death needed? Is the experience of a serious burn needed?

To drive well, is the experience of an accident mandatory? There are people whom an accident taught. And there are those who, after an accident, began to drive worse and experience constant stress. The same type of event produces different results. A person can get burned while cooking pilaf in a cauldron with boiling oil and never approach it again. And another, who has never been burned, will cook calmly and efficiently.

I know many people who have never been in an accident and drive excellently. And I know those whose cars are damaged on all sides. You do not want to get into a car with them. This is a good example of living through experience.

This is especially obvious in severe events. A person’s child died — and they closed themselves off. They raise a second child out of fear or from the feeling that life is already lost, and not from fullness of life.

I talk with a mother, and she tells me about problems. I say that one can fully immerse oneself in problems, or one can come to me and live through new events. This is a choice.

There are people who go on vacation and already worry that it will end. Then they return and worry that the vacation has ended. Then the question arises: why was this experience needed? It would have been better not to go at all.

They say that corporate parties are a useful thing. I treated them cautiously. A corporate party is an uncontrollable event in a company. An action may occur that leads to negative consequences. Yes, employees get acquainted, communicate, but a conflict may happen. Someone may quarrel, someone may fight, someone may become too close, and this will affect further work. It is important to understand what truly influences the future and what does not.

I have a plot of land, plants grow on it. Is it useful to gain experience working with this land for years? Yes. But is it useful to pour poisonous chemicals on it that decompose for a hundred years? Such experience is not needed. Is it possible in life to spill nuclear chemicals? Anything is possible.

As you recently said, in “Harry Potter” it is shown: when a person kills another, their soul splits. This is an image of irreversibility. There are actions that cannot be undone.

Is it necessary to live through the experience of a house fire? This is an irreversible experience. It is not mandatory in order to learn how to handle fire. Many people know how to handle fire safely without having experienced a fire.

There is experience that causes deep psychological trauma. If a boy at age 12 is severely beaten, he may begin to fear the street. His sense of safety may be disrupted. When a boss raises their voice, he will experience the same reactions as if he is being beaten again, and he will not be able to cope with it. Society often says: “You need to fight, you need to be beaten — it hardens you.” But this can cause severe trauma.

Now there are many false cause-and-effect constructions. People often say: “If you perform a certain action toward a child, in the future they will definitely go to a psychologist and deal with it.” But are you sure that this particular action will create that specific problem? Are you sure the influence will be direct and inevitable?

– Does it follow then that one should not learn from events and extract lessons?

– No, it is necessary to analyze causes and effects. To learn to drive, experience is needed. This is important to clearly understand for yourself. But you should not go out to practice during rush hour on a twenty-lane highway with only ten hours of practice behind you. And you should not get behind the wheel after five sleepless nights. There are objective patterns.

When we speak about the need to analyze experience, it is important to divide events into those where analysis truly matters and those where it does not — and determine this in advance.

And then not tell yourself: “How good that I got into an accident — this is an excellent experience.” “How good that a wife left a man — this is useful experience.” “How good that a child died — this is a lesson.” “How good that I was fired.” Such formulations sound strange. It is important to understand why you want to analyze this. What are you looking for in this event?

There are events worth analyzing. For example, you got into an accident. One can analyze factors: speed, fatigue, inattention. But to claim that the accident happened specifically so that you would learn to drive better is doubtful. Divorce is not necessarily given to train future relationships. Perhaps an incorrect choice was made from the start.

There are situations that do not require deep analysis. In France at a retreat, my teacher hit her head on a cabinet and said: “This event has no special reason, I just hit my head on a cabinet.” People like to look for hidden meanings: “I spilled tea — it means the energy went wrong.” But sometimes everything is simpler: I gestured and hit the cup. This is not a mystical sign.

In the modern world, people tend to see mysticism where it does not exist. It is important not to deceive yourself.

– If not to search for experience and signs, then how should one correctly understand what is happening?

– Here it is important to understand one thing for yourself: experience is not a sign, it is a fact. It is an event that happened.

I gave an example: a person killed another and went to prison. The cause of imprisonment — is it in the murder or in the fact that he “needed” to go to prison? This is simply one of the actions. And also a karmic person appeared: “random” murders from freedom practically do not happen. This is a great rarity. Was the murder a cause or a consequence? This is not a sign, it is a fact. One must learn to calmly analyze it.

Analyzing the causes of what is happening is a healthy position. But without shifting responsibility.

Imagine: we go out to Los Altos Hills and start selling jackets for $5,000 on a closed street where there are only seven houses and almost no passersby. Is such an “experience” needed for building a business? This is absurd. Some people enter obviously non-working scenarios, and then justify them with words about “life necessity.”

There are many social attitudes: to achieve success, you need to study eleven years in school; to have money, you need to work a lot — do you agree with this?

– No.

– Not necessarily. One can be born into a wealthy family, one can receive benefits. One can marry a wealthy partner. One can receive company shares. And conversely — one can work very hard and not receive a достойный income. Everything will not unfold that way.

The key question: do you truly want to understand what is happening in your life, or do you want to reduce current stress, confirm your rightness, or justify yourself?

Often a person already knows in advance what answer they want to hear. It is pleasant for them to hear familiar things; complex or unfamiliar information they reject. But if you have already heard something fifty times, why listen to it again? Why should I affirm myself in what I already easily convince myself of? Why should I strengthen doubts in what I already doubt?

How interesting it is to truly learn how life is arranged — obviously, this is something not simple. When the goal of analyzing causes and effects becomes the study of one’s own life, the spiritual world, real patterns — for the sake of knowing the truth, and not for the sake of short-term benefit — this gives a powerful inner movement. This gives a deep understanding of what is truly happening around, why certain events occur.

One of the worst strategies is to begin evaluating cause-and-effect relationships in other people’s lives, making logical errors. Constantly analyzing: why is this happening to them? What does it mean? Where does it come from?

An example from life. We were recording a shoot at home. During the recording my wife quietly walked around the house, then put meat in the oven and did not turn on the extractor. Gradually the house filled with the smell of lamb. Is this a good action or a bad one?

– A wonderful one, it’s lunch.

– She could have done it to feed the children, could have done it to feed herself, could have done it out of care for us: filming is going on, everyone is working, later they will eat. It is unlikely that her goal was to cause irritation in me, although it is not easy for me to be in a space with intense smells. Smell is an impact, it affects. One might say: “What sensitivity!” Then imagine that I spray air freshener in the room and suggest you continue filming. Every person has a limit of perception. At a certain level of impact, anyone will want to leave the space.

One person performs an action, and another lives through the consequences. At the same time, the event may have nothing to do with me. But I live through the experience of being in this smell. Should conclusions be drawn from this? If yes — which ones? To say that one must not put meat in the oven? In response one can hear: “I cooked lunch.” To say that one must turn on the extractor? One can hear: “I was thinking about food, not about the extractor.” Or: “You occupied the house for filming, and I was cooking.” Or is this nonsense that should not be thought about?

At the same time, the event has an impact. We even cited it as an example. Our life is a chain of simple, everyday events. One can see causes in them that do not exist. One can invent mandatory rules for my wife or we can move to another space. But we chose to film at home because it was more convenient and economical in time. We wanted to focus on the content. But one can ask a question: perhaps it would have been worth choosing another space, spending more time, and obtaining a more harmonious atmosphere? Perhaps then the content would have turned out better — without the smell of meat or without a dog twitching its paw.