Almost everyone sooner or later asks themselves a question like this: close the business, leave, end the relationship, move to another country? How can you tell whether it is a genuine inner impulse or an attempt to escape an unresolved state?
In this episode, I look at what really lies behind the desire to change your life radically. Why do moving, divorce, a new job, a new partner or a retreat not guarantee an inner reset? Can you leave fear, anxiety and old states in the past, or do people carry them with them into their new life?
How to tell a real impulse from running away
Our topic is the desire to drop everything and leave. How do you tell a real impulse from running away? A person has the desire to quit, leave, change their life abruptly, close a business, leave a relationship, change country or profession, cut ties — any radical decision. How do you understand whether this is really a genuine inner impulse, a stage — or an escape from an unresolved inner state?
It’s interesting, after all, how a person puts the question to themselves: I have a problem — how do I decide? Imagine a person saying: “I’m conscious, I have a conscious approach. I want to observe what is happening. And within my consciousness I want to decide: do I genuinely see that I shouldn’t do this, or do I want to run away?” You see, there is a problem in this whole situation. A phenomenal problem.
A conscious attitude toward such a story says the following: these concepts don’t exist at all. Once again: there is no such concept as changing your life, there is no such concept as running away, there are no such concepts as “this is happening rightly or wrongly,” “this is happening out of an unresolved state or it is truly needed.”
And what if precisely because of your unresolved state you need to move — because you are in a strange state you haven’t worked through?
The causes and effects of people coming together
Let me give an example. Today’s topic, as always, is very hard to take in. A man and a woman live together, and they have a conflict. When they lived together, one person lived with the other as a part of their own life and couldn’t imagine life without them. And for the other it was simply a kind of entertainment, like furniture. That’s how these people lived. Then they come to feel that the relationship isn’t right and they can’t be together. The question arises: what is the right thing to do in this situation?
When you start examining this situation, you see the problem in how this family was originally born. What was it based on? From the start and as their family developed, these people acted out of their particular psychophysical problems. And we come to understand this picture. And here something very interesting arises — when we start discussing it and looking at whether it can be resolved well, badly or some other way.
If these people had been developed from the start, approached each other humanely and seen the whole picture of what was happening from the outset, they would never have had this marriage.
It’s not that the marriage would have been different — it wouldn’t have existed, there would have been no such relationship. Just as there would have been no such business partnerships, no such contracts between people. Why? Because there were causes and effects for these people to come together. People came together not because they wanted to.
When men and women come together for any long period — I’m not talking about coming together for a week — in most cases in the world these are deeply karmic causes and effects. The causes and effects of people coming together — not even of these two specific people, but of the specific circumstances of their lives.
Could it have been different? It could. It always seems it could be cleaner and better. Just as it can always be far more difficult: people kill each other.
When we examine such a situation between people — and this is very important for returning to our stated topic of “drop everything and leave” — it is very important to get to its essence: what is really happening, should this situation be happening at all, should these people divorce?
You will be living through something either way
Should this divorce happen because it has to happen, or because someone has to live through something? This reasoning is idiotically abstract. It is social, intellectual reasoning, not a harmonious understanding of causes and effects. From the point of view of life, your control over what will happen to you and what needs to happen to you is very relative.
And whether you live through grief in a divorce or grief without a divorce — what difference does it make if you are living through the same grief, the same state, the same fear? It’s like living through fear about money with money or without it. What’s the difference? Someone will say: “No, it’s better with money, there are lots of advantages.” Once again: we are talking now about the presence of a fear about money.
If every morning you wake up and your fear tightens your chest, then whether you have money or not, it will go on tightening your chest.
So when we come to the question “should I, for example, close my business now — because it is the right path or because I need to live through something?” — you will be living through something either way.
The very approach of dividing situations by what I need them for is absurd at its core. The question itself is absurd, because everything in our life simultaneously happens for something, and everything in our life simultaneously happens simply because it happens, for nothing.
A person needs to stop endlessly dividing their life in search of an answer: am I shooting this video because I need it for something, for some experience of mine to live through — or am I simply shooting this video? I am both at the same time. It is simply part of my day and my life. I could have not shot this video at all. And at the same time I am shooting it for certain experiences — and I don’t even try, and don’t want, to understand them all.
Where I need to understand, I sort things out, get into them, study them. I am very strongly oriented toward studying causes and effects. But on the other hand, I understand that there is an enormous, simply endless number of things whose causes and effects I am not capable of understanding — I won’t understand them. It is the simultaneous presence of both.
There is no such thing as a reset
And so we come to a very interesting part of the topic I was given. There is such a notion as a reset. People go on spiritual trips, retreats for it, so that it becomes the starting point of a new life. How do you act correctly when the desire to change your life radically arises?
There is no reset at all. What reset? Take a shower, wash yourself — a sort of reset. Take off your clothes, get new clothes, even find a new family, move to another country. You were yourself and you remained yourself.
You can change your last name — you’ll reset your last name. But your structure and your spiritual being have remained exactly the same as they were.
In general, if you look at life, imagine a person’s life — fifty, seventy, a hundred years. As the spiritual being was at the beginning, so it remained. This life has ended, but the spiritual being is the same. What reset? For the spiritual being, in this case, there is no reset at all.
What does a person want to find in a reset? They want to disappear and be created anew. Then your reset means you mustn’t remember anything. So let’s look at a serious reset within a person’s real life: erase all memory completely. Erase everything, absolutely everything. And you are such a person — you know absolutely nothing, remember nothing: not your children, not your relatives, not the past, not your current life.
There are probably some people in the world who will say: “I’m ready for that.” But let’s agree right away: if your memory has been erased, that doesn’t mean your life afterward has become good or bad. It has become something. Do you really need that? What kind of reset do you want?
A controlled reset
And a person says: “But could I have a controlled reset?” What does going on a retreat mean? It’s a controlled reset. “Could you please remove this at the retreat: my chest pounds here in the mornings, I feel uncomfortable, fear. And here I have some impulse: I don’t like how my wife behaves. Could everything at the retreat somehow get meditated away so that she stops behaving like that? And could I reset how I feel about myself? It seems to me I don’t feel myself very well. I see people who feel good — they want to earn billions of dollars. Could I reset in the same way and get the same?”
That is, through a reset a person wants not just to remove certain characteristics from themselves, but to bring new ones into their life. In a controlled way! Once again: a controlled reset.
I tell everyone: if you go on a serious retreat — there are places that can, on the whole, shuffle your life a little. And even then, from the point of view of the world’s spiritual development, nothing has happened. But in those places there is no control of yours at all.
Because if you can control it, then you can live constantly evoking such states. Imagine you can control the amount of money in your account. So why go to some retreat to increase or decrease your money or to change your fear? Just snap your fingers and snap your fear away. Snap your fingers and create silence for yourself. Tell yourself: “I will wake up calm every morning” — and wake up calm. Otherwise it is all uncontrollable, and you don’t know what is really happening: you’ve started waking up calm, but what is happening somewhere else?
Where these states come from
I was recently asked: “If you feel good with a certain person, does that mean you should, for example, do business with that person? Or that you should be together with that person?” I said: “It means nothing at all. It only means that at this moment you feel good with them. First, it doesn’t mean you will feel good with them in a year. And second, figure out what you mean by ‘good.’”
People often come to see me here and say: “What a space you have, what energy!” They look at the view. And since there is a view, the view takes all the energy on itself. If we were in some room, a person would say: “What a good day, what energy!” If we were shut in a room with white walls, where everything is white and there is nothing — just two tables standing there: “What good energy here!” A person would even say: “There must be good energy here because there’s no furniture.” We would say: “Fine,” put in furniture, close the windows — and there is absolutely nothing. And the person would feel good — and would start finding some other reason why it is good here.
The more we narrowed the various circumstances, removed the standard social circumstances, the more the person would cling to something. At some point they would say to the other person: “Maybe I feel good because you are here beside me.” But when you have an unbelievably beautiful view from the window, people will, of course, say: “What energy here!” But does that mean that if you came to live in this view, you would feel just as harmonious?
And people, to get away from this circumstance, came up with sayings: “Good things in small doses.” Or, on the contrary: “You need to soak up a little bad to then see the good.” Someone says: “No, you need to soak up the good to see the bad.” Not understanding that there are different causes and different circumstances. With different people it is absolutely different.
Someone looks at a beautiful wife and thinks: “What a wonderful wife I have for life!” And someone else looks at a beautiful wife and thinks: “How nice it would be to find ten more just as beautiful.” Where do these states come from? That is a big question.
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Original video · Russian audio