In this video, I look at why a person cannot always truly hear what contradicts their desires and their familiar view of a situation, and how, because of this, we miss the chance to see what we have not yet noticed ourselves and keep coming back to the same conflicts and consequences.
Using examples from relationships, raising children and business partnerships, I talk about hidden selfish motives, the ability to see another person, responsibility for your own decisions, and why intellectual understanding alone is not enough for real change.
“Yes, I hear you, I understand everything”
A person can be told the same thing for years. Each time they answer: “Yes, I hear you, I understand everything.” And yet they keep living in the same system and making the same decisions. Time passes, and they find themselves in the same situation again. It seems to them that they tried to resolve the problem, tried to let it go, but they never took what they were told as an opportunity to see what was happening differently.
Why can a person endlessly say they understand everything and still not hear the other person? Why do we sometimes begin to understand only when we have already run into the consequences? And how do you truly listen, so as not to miss an opportunity for your own development?
You think you tried to let go of the problem, tried to resolve the issue, to listen. But you didn’t try — you were nursing the idea, staying with it. Imagine: someone is working with me and asks: “Sasha, how should I act in this situation?” I say: “Wait a second. These situations don’t matter in your life. What matters is how you communicate with your wife, for example. Or how you communicate with your employees. Or how you feel toward other people every morning.” The person says: “Nah, that doesn’t interest me.”
Everyone says: “Stop being angry at your mom,” “Stop being angry at the contractor,” at an employee, at a partner. The person goes: “Yes, yes, of course I’ll think about it, but…” — and pays no attention to it. They don’t take it as the opportunity we were talking about.
I gave you this recommendation constantly for several years, at almost every meeting we had. And you cut it off and said: “I hear you, Sasha. But that’s probably not the problem. The problems are different altogether, the circumstances are different.” And after several years you run into serious resistance from everything that is happening.
Imagine a person raising a child, and they are told: “Don’t behave like that. Don’t try to make your child get straight A’s. Don’t try to make your child the smartest, or make them develop some skill that you yourself don’t have.” The person goes: “Okay, I’ll listen to your videos, go to some psychological sessions here and there, but I won’t pay attention to what is really happening.” Then time passes, the child grows up, and some problem shows up in the relationship. People see the problem and realize: this is the consequence of that.
To think about another person the same way you think about yourself
And the most interesting thing: when I tell you now that for several years you didn’t listen to me, didn’t listen to a very concretely manifested mechanism — you don’t hear it even now, you don’t understand what I mean. How can I explain it to you? This energy isn’t open to you. As in the example with the child that I gave, or in partnerships — I know stories like this, where people are endlessly negative.
After all, the key thing is to think about another person the same way you think about yourself. Until you have thought about them the same way you think about yourself, you can endlessly say that you understand everything.
You can even live in fantasies of being aware of what another person is telling you. But I mean something completely different — qualitatively different.
There is always a price to pay for this — absolutely always a price to pay, always responsibility.
The question here isn’t whether the price is financial or not. The price is paid because this is the right karmic course. What is supposed to happen in your life happens. What is not supposed to happen in your life doesn’t happen. That is your life. That is why I don’t even try to correct it or say anything.
But there are moments when a person can hear and transform a certain experience through another person’s freedom. When I give you recommendations — or gave them — I gave them to you through freedom. I had no wish for you to win against someone or for someone to win against you, no wish for another person’s victory. I gave these recommendations from freedom — as a true understanding of the situation: what is worth doing and what shouldn’t be done, which lesson a person should live through and which they shouldn’t.
Each one moves from their own selfish motive
Imagine a situation: two people in a company interact with each other, and they have some conflict. Or two partners who have a conflict in business — let’s look at this case separately from family. Both partners do bad things: they deceive, manipulate, defend their own interests, act from their own positions. That is usually how it goes.
One wants to build a business to balance out his childhood wants, and the other does business out of fear that nothing will work out for him and he won’t be recognized, and so he tries to make money. And each of them moves from his own selfish motive.
They didn’t properly sit down together and say: “Listen, I have a trauma: I endlessly want to make money because I worry it will run out.” And the other one: “I have a trauma: I need to explain to the whole world that everything works for me, and prove to my wife that everything works for me. But we are running a business, and a business does have to bring in money. Let’s first build a business that brings in money and doesn’t deceive customers. And second, let’s think about how to solve our problems and take care of each other’s problems. Let’s make sure your wife recognizes you: when we’re out with her, I’ll say what a great guy you are, and you’ll take care to remember that I worry all the time about the money I won’t have enough of in the future. Let’s agree to do it this way and to take care of each other.”
But no, people act from their selfish motives. And if I were talking with either of these two, the only recommendation I would give is: “Stop acting from your selfish motives.” The other person wouldn’t interest me. The only thing you can do is stop acting that way.
He says: “But if I stop acting from my selfish motives, the other one will keep going.”
At least you will stop disturbing the balance of life, the balance of the Universe.
If you want to build a business so that your wife will recognize you, but you remove this selfish motive and switch to the idea that the business has to make money and the customers have to be satisfied — you’ll start thinking about the customers and the money in the company. And that means not about yourself, but about the company, your partner, the employees, and yourself as well. You’ll start making decisions rationally — and, at the very least, you’ll help the company; at the very least, you’ll help everyone. But people don’t want that.
Trees in the desert
You tell them: “Don’t do this in the business.” They say: “What do you mean, we won’t do it? We will, because proving something matters more to us. We’ve dug in our heels, we’ve come up with an idea, and we’re going to implement it.”
Like today, when you started telling me your idea, and I tell you: “You won’t make money on it.” I repeated it to you four times: “You won’t make money.” And not once did you ask: “Sasha, could you explain all the details to me, based on your experience?” Your inner state is: shut up, I don’t want to know this, I don’t want to hear it. Even though this is my best advice to you this morning: don’t do this thing.
You could have said: “Oh, great, Sasha, thank you so much for telling me. I’ll go do other things.” Or asked: “Can I somehow rework this idea so that it makes money?” I said: “If you’re doing it for the money, I’ve offered you another option — how you can make money on this idea, how it can help you make money.” But you don’t like it. You want something else. You want the very fact of a different experience.
I understand that it’s a circumstance like that. You want to plant trees in the desert, but they won’t grow there — there’s no water. I tell you: “There’s no water there.” And you look at me and say: “What nonsense.” If you then came and said: “There is water, we brought it there, and I have a signed contract with people who spent a billion dollars bringing everything else into the desert, and I’m simply standing there at the right moment,” — okay.
That is exactly why, out of ten thousand and one startups, ten thousand don’t work out — not even one percent work out, far fewer. That is exactly why companies don’t work out.
Stop fighting
How do you get people to start listening? Yesterday I was filming a lot of videos, took my iPhone and shot a reel like this: stop fighting. Endless conflicts with the people around you — but in fact a person is in endless conflict with themselves. Stop fighting, stop this hatred. How much longer? How many people’s lives are ruined by conflicts? I’m not even talking about the large-scale conflicts that people in power stage. I’m talking about simple things. How much is destroyed by conflicts.
And all conflicts from the outset — most of them — are built on selfish motives, on unwillingness to understand another person, other people, on unwillingness to let them go somewhere.
Let go somewhere, even if you are right — and when you are wrong. Figure it out. This, by the way, is a very interesting aspect. How do you easily sort out a conflict? Let go — regardless of whether you are right or wrong.
I have a separate episode where I examine in detail what compromise is: when a person truly changes the way they move without violating the truth, or simply gives up on themselves and keeps acting from their own selfish motive. In general, the word “compromise” is incredibly interesting.
A couple of weeks ago I had a person with me who has a serious, big conflict — I see really serious energies. I tell him: “Your situation can be resolved fairly easily.” There are no unresolvable situations. There is an unresolvable situation — if you have killed a person and are hiding it from everyone. And the person goes: “Oh, it’s unresolvable probably because when they find out, they’ll put you in prison.”
No, it’s unresolvable because you can’t bring that person’s life back. And even then, from the point of view of the laws of cause and effect of the spiritual world, it is resolvable. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has killed someone won’t be able to develop as spiritual beings in spiritual spaces. They will. There are certain limitations there — although “limitation” is a relative, social word here. But they will. So even such a question is resolvable, but on the whole, from the point of view of life, it is a heavy one. And the person says: “The unresolvable part is that I’ll be put in prison.” But that is a natural consequence.
When you look at the task as one where you have to let go — whether you are right or wrong — everything becomes completely different. A person reassesses their values.
Imagine: people have a conflict between them, a verbal one. And then this conflict turns into someone having to pay a thousand dollars. And this person sits and thinks: “Hmm, can I take back the verbal conflict and not start it? I wasn’t planning to spend a thousand dollars.” He no longer needs the verbal conflict — for him it’s now a question of a thousand dollars. And then — bang! — the conflict has gone further, and the person is told: “And you’ll get a ten-year restriction — for example, you won’t be able to leave the country.” And the person loves to travel.
The person goes: “Can I pay the thousand dollars and another five thousand on top, just so this problem goes away?” He is told: “Not anymore.” And then they come up and say: “And you also won’t be able to see your child for the next five years.” He says: “Can you ban me from traveling abroad instead — I’ll pay the money too — but leave me my child?” And at that moment a huge number of things no longer matter, and something more serious becomes important — what is right there beside you. And what did it all start with? With ego. It all started with ego.
Can you find a balance with ego
Can you find a balance with ego? Why do I put it this way — “find a balance with ego”? Because you can’t get rid of ego. It is sewn into and has crept into all your systems, physical and spiritual, it has penetrated your blood — your spiritual blood, not even your physical blood: physical blood renews itself, after all. And you shouldn’t even set yourself the task of removing it one hundred percent, because then the world may say: “Then perhaps you won’t be living here.” Then you don’t need to live in this world, if that’s how it goes. But can you find a balance with it? That is the question.
And balance is found under one condition: when you accept that it exists, and when you accept that you will have to live with it all your life.
And to live with it all your life and not live under its power, you will have to pay attention to it and make an effort all your life. Make an effort all your life, not for one day. It isn’t brushing your teeth, or telling yourself at eight or six in the morning: “Get up.” It isn’t doing a thirty-minute workout.
It is constant, endless, daily work on how this ego is present in you.
Constantly. Not letting it loose along the lines of “do whatever you want” — that won’t work. It means watching:
- how you act toward other people;
- how you act toward yourself;
- how you make decisions;
- what thoughts you have on these subjects.
This is the only way to resolve all the situations connected with the structure of ego.
🎥 Video for this article
Original video · Russian audio