In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I examine a sentence from the book “Two Lives” — about judging a person only by their actions, trying to put yourself in their position and find a justification for them. Can you justify a person without justifying their actions?
We talk about why, when we put ourselves in someone else’s place, we still look from our own reality, what justification really means, and how to see another person more broadly.
How we usually judge a person
– Alexander, in the book “Two Lives” there is this idea, this sentence: “Set aside the prejudice that a person is what they seem, and judge them only by their actions, trying to put yourself in their position and find a justification for them.” What does it truly mean to justify a person? And should we look for this justification for every person at all? Because the first association is that to justify means to make a person innocent. And people say: how can you justify a murderer, a rapist or a maniac?
– Look, the most important thing to begin with when examining this sentence, before talking about justifying murderers and rapists, as you put it, is how we actually usually judge a person. We usually judge a person on the basis of our own perception of reality. There is your perception of reality. It is shaped by a great many energies, causes and effects, and it is unique in relation to anyone else. You should always understand that your perception of reality is always different from another person’s. Accordingly, the other person has their own perception of reality.
Suppose, for example, you like red. And when another person expresses some opinion of their own where the perception of the color red is involved, your basic thought is: how can that be? Red is a good color. You have that belief. Some people have an inner belief that they need to be alone all the time. And someone else has an inner belief that they need to be among lots of people all the time. The beliefs differ.
My wife and I have a close friend, and she is always saying: “How I love walking alone by the ocean.” My wife looks at her: “I don’t like that at all, I don’t understand it, I can’t even grasp it.” She can’t grasp it, she can’t perceive it. Why is it one way for one person and another way for another? And the same friend thinks: “How strange, surely everyone finds it pleasant, it makes everyone feel good.” This is the person’s own inner feeling.
Acknowledging that another reality exists
So when you approach the perception of another person from the outside, you should understand that this person is completely different: they have a different system of consciousness, a different system for perceiving actuality and reality, some particular system of perceiving reality of their own. Their own impulses are at work in this person.
There are many different motives hidden in this sentence, after all. And the first motive shown there is to understand this person, to put yourself in their place, to understand them. What is this person actually thinking about? What do they actually perceive? We usually judge a person by putting ourselves in their place through our own reality.
For example, imagine that someone close to another person is dying, and for us the death of a loved one is a horror. We immediately go to this person and say: “How hard it must be for you.” But it may not be hard for the other person. They may be living through it calmly, understanding that death is present everywhere around us, with us every day, and that every person will die. And now the loved one has died, and they are calm about it. For you, say, it is an extraordinary fear, while for the other person it is a completely calm situation.
So even when we approach the notion of “putting yourself in someone’s place,” we will still put ourselves in their place on the basis of our own states, feelings and understanding of reality.
And to approach a different understanding of reality, you have to acknowledge that it exists. You have to acknowledge that another reality exists, want to acknowledge it, want to acknowledge that another person has the right to be in other states, to hold another opinion, to be in other energies, in other causes and effects — that this is the other person’s right.
On the one hand, it is a right, and on the other hand, such causes and such energies may be at work in them. And there are situations in which this person cannot change them.
I recently had a discussion about what is bad and what is good. And a person says to me: “I see these people who kill other people — how should I relate to that, what kind of souls are these that come here?” I say: “And what does your soul do?” When you compare yourself with another person who kills other people, you consider their soul bad and yourself good. It’s as if you stepped away from it and said: “I’m a completely different person.”
The notions of bad and good are boundless
But in fact, if we look, the notion of “bad” is present everywhere, and it is boundless. Just as the notion of “good” is present everywhere and is boundless — depending on the angle you look from. From the standpoint of the development of a human being and of light, from the standpoint of divine energy and a person’s transition to the next level in the hierarchy of the spiritual system, all people are bad and at the same time good. Because it is a fact: a person, moving forward, develops particular circumstances of their life. And then an event seems no longer to be bad, but an event that is present in their life.
And in this case, for one person the killing of another person is a super-problem, while shouting at other people or bad thoughts about other people are not a problem. But in reality, from a fundamental standpoint, if you look from the outside, these are all problems. Clearly, some things are a more serious aspect of the non-development of the spiritual system. But to compare like this and say: “And why has this soul come like this, or fallen so low?”…
I gave this person an example: take the hierarchy of spiritual beings — there is Lucifer in it. Lucifer is a fallen angel. That is a fairly high spiritual hierarchy: the angelic hierarchy is more developed than a human being. Even when we say the word “demon” or “devil,” these are more developed spiritual systems.
So, let’s return to the fallen angel. This angel was in the angelic system of development, that is, in a higher hierarchy of development than a human being, and was unquestionably more developed in terms of the notions of “good” and “bad,” and of purity of consciousness and perception of reality in general. And then this system decided that it needed to move according to its own laws and rules.
There is some person who considers killing people right. And you, I tell this person, consider it right that you can get angry at someone: you mustn’t kill, but inside you may get angry. Or you don’t consider your own anger an extraordinary problem. But that in no way means that you are more highly developed spiritually, because there are serious spiritual systems that have decided to kill people.
Moreover, they have decided to kill people en masse. They have decided to destroy the human being as such, to destroy humanity as a whole. And this is a fairly highly developed spiritual system, seriously highly developed. They have their own impulses and their own reasons for it. These systems have a relative cause-and-effect connection, but they have their own energies, their own impulses by which they move and make decisions. This can even be described in nonhuman language.
So when we approach another person and look at them from the position you voiced — taking the other person’s side — you really must realize that the other person may have different reasons, different impulses, different approaches, including nonhuman, anti-human ones.
Justification is the real truth
There are people who do not perceive other people at all. It makes no difference to them that someone has been killed. I deliberately give extreme examples — in order to grasp the reality of what is happening and understand what is really going on. They don’t have that, and a great many such people live among ordinary people. They have no impulse at all to preserve another person. They have an impulse to preserve themselves — or to do something else, to carry out some task in life. How can you put yourself in their place without your own judgment?
On the other hand, the statement you quoted has a phrase — how does it end there? With forgiveness, or what?
– “And find a justification for them.”
– Find a justification. Look, justification in this case is not some social construct, not a social pronouncement.
If you truly understand that such energies may be present in this person, you no longer need any explanations. That is the justification; it is the real, actual truth.
And you always know that this is a human being, and you will always convey love to any human being. Love in this case is an energy that has no beginning and no end. It means that you understand: you will still convey love to the person. You may not support their way of life, not support a great many of their approaches, but at the same time you still convey love to them as a human being — and you understand that they act from their own impulses.
You have distortions too
Moreover, you must understand that every person always fails to perceive part of themselves. Always. Today there are no structures about which one could say that this structure, as a person, perceives everything one hundred percent. That cannot be, it cannot be a priori. That is the essence of movement. Development is endless, and within endless development it is impossible to perceive everything in its entirety. Because perceiving everything in its entirety would, in essence, have to stop that development.
That is, you do not perceive yourself fully either. You must understand that everyone — you too, as a human being — has distortions when working with this sentence. You have distortions too.
This comparison is not for the sake of making a comparison, but to understand very clearly that you have distortions — so that you can examine them further and move on. Because you can endlessly busy yourself with judging other people, but if you don’t understand and recognize, normally and soberly, that there are distortions in your own system, that you are not a developed structure, it will fundamentally lead you nowhere. If you keep thinking to the very end that you are an aware, wonderfully developed spiritual being, or a system that moves exclusively correctly, does everything correctly, is aware of everything and understands everything…
Because if you were aware of yourself in your entirety, you would be aware of another person in their entirety too. At the very least, you wouldn’t have questions about the fact that people can kill people, can commit suicide — any more than about the fact that some people like eating apples and some don’t. You would be calm about the fact that many people don’t want children and many do.
There are people who don’t want the development of humanity and of people and generally want everything to stop. But that is logical when there are energies and spiritual structures in the world that want to stop human development. Obviously, there are people who will convey this very strongly, because every person is infected by the dark world. They live amid it. Even if a person is in incredible purity, they still live amid it, still exist amid it.
Individuality and the mass
This is not a pure space. The story that we live in a pure space of love, compassion and tremendously powerful energies is incorrect. Does an infinite space of love, compassion, purity and sunlight exist among us? Of course it does. But at the same time a great deal of other things exist alongside it.
If you live exclusively by social trends and political laws or the laws of a country, then of course someone is always guilty and someone is always right. And who is guilty and who is right was decided by some people somewhere. They created, for example, the UN organization and said at the UN: “This one is guilty and that one isn’t. This one may behave this way, and that one may not.” And who decided that? People decided? What are people? It is always a limited number of people who made a specific decision somewhere. Or somewhere a larger mass of people made the decision. Someone will say that this is the majority. But don’t we see concrete examples from history in the world where the majority is wrong? We endlessly see examples of the majority’s mistakes.
And when we talk about the majority, Olya, the notion of another person disappears. Then you are a piece of the mass. Then assign yourself to a piece of the mass too. What freedom can you talk about then? What movement can you talk about?
Say: “I am part of the mass, I move within this mass.” A social mass, for example, a mass of some prejudices. Identify yourself with this social mass — by passport, by name, by skin color, by religion or by beliefs. By whether you like or dislike this actor or this reel. Assign yourself to this mass.
And there is a completely different choice and a different possibility — to look at yourself individually and to look at another person individually. After all, everyone wants to look at themselves individually and at everyone else according to rules. Everyone wants individuality for themselves and wants to assign everyone else to the mass: my life exists, and everyone else is the mass.
Look at everyone individually and at the same time at everyone as a mass. That everyone is a mass is also true. Because if you take all the causes and effects and the movement of life, your freedom is negligible. On the whole, it doesn’t exist.
If you take it all together — what do you control in this life? You can’t even control what time to open your eyes in the morning, or close your eyes and fall asleep instantly, or change your mood. We can’t control even seemingly simple things. We can’t abruptly make different decisions: tell ourselves “now I like the color red” — and immediately switch ourselves into the state of “I don’t like it.” Can you do that? Really? Can you imagine how impaired people actually are?
We all know people who say: “I like the style of the seventies,” “And I like the style of the nineties.” Someone says: “I like Paris.” Someone says: “I hate Paris, I like Abu Dhabi.” “I like blondes,” “And I like brunettes.” There is a certain state inside. Essentially, if a person lives in a mode of a certain omnipotence of their own, or of understanding true freedom at all — change your opinion. After all, obviously someone likes the opposite, or something completely different.
Why the same picture evokes different feelings
Or there are people to whom it doesn’t matter. Here a very interesting aspect arises. There are people for whom it has no significance at all. The person doesn’t understand what you’re talking about, what you mean. As our friend says: “I like walking alone by the ocean.” And what do you mean? What exactly do you like? The temperature of the sand, the water? What exactly?
She is talking about some state, and you start thinking: what is that? After all, when we talk about the ocean, a certain space opens up for people. If I say “walking in the city,” everyone will think: that’s just some kind of joke — a city. But not the ocean. The ocean adds a certain sense of a state. Although most people in the world have probably never been to the ocean.
Remember, I had a meditation by the ocean on my channel? We can add it here, show it. And I said very clearly there that the energy present by the ocean is very specific. And when a person says they like walking by the ocean, that is a certain spectrum of energy and the person being in a certain spectrum of energy. Why does it arise at all? What is this emotion the person receives? What is this abyss the person falls into?
I am thirty minutes from the ocean, so in terms of energy the ocean is very close to me right now. I live a little south of San Francisco — what is called the Bay Area, what people usually know as Silicon Valley. And it lies behind hills from the ocean. I picture that ocean all the time. I even have a picture up right now, by the way — I think it’s Big Sur. I’m filming with you, and in parallel there is a picture on macOS — there is a version of Mac called Big Sur. Big Sur is both a settlement and a region on the Pacific Ocean.
I want to tell you: the Pacific Ocean is such a particular place, it doesn’t evoke the feeling of the sea. I was just in Nice, in France — it’s all a little different there, a different impression straightaway. And so for me a walk by the ocean feels like a walk by the Pacific. And it isn’t quiet. But it will lead a person into silence, because it is an abyss.
So how do you truly understand this? Why can the same picture, the same state evoke different feelings? If I show you this picture — there is a famous highway running here, there is a bridge like this. I have opened this screen so that our viewers can see it too. Here goes the road, and here stands the little bridge. This is Big Sur, the Big Sur area. Here are the hills that separate it from everything — this is already a little south of the Bay Area, San Francisco, on the way to Los Angeles.
If you drive to the right, you will reach Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. If to the left — you will reach San Francisco and then Northern California. This is the famous Highway 1. In you it will evoke certain emotions — in you personally, and they will certainly not be mine, if only because you have not been to this place. You will have some impression connected either with the visuals or with the energies. If you can see and feel this energy, it will wash over you. And there are so many spectra there — a great many spectra of energy may wash over you.
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