Meditation for a Wish: How Does It Work?

We discussed the idea that meditating for something is not about truth. Why, then, does meditating on a wish, or for something specific, work to some extent?

Judging by what people say: “I sat and meditated on prosperity, a house, or something else.” There are vision boards, after all. People meditate on them. Or take the well-known book Mind Power Into the 21st Century. It teaches you to meditate on your wishes and reprogram your brain so that everything you imagine begins to happen in your life. People write reviews saying, “I followed the method, and it all worked out.”

How should we understand that? What is it?

First, we need to look at the nature of desire as a whole. We should not simply answer whether it works or not, but help a person truly understand it. Especially after hearing that the brain’s functioning is being restructured and changes occur, I would ask, “Am I understanding correctly that your individual brain affects events in the world and changes in other people’s lives?”

Any action or change in an event in your life involves other people. Take the most common wishes: more money, a good husband, or a good wife. You need to understand that, through this wish, you are changing other people’s lives. With a good husband or wife, that is obvious: you directly affect someone else’s life.

Someone might say, “I am a good person, so another good person will find me.” But when it comes to money, if you have gained something, an exchange must have happened somewhere. Something has changed: something elsewhere has decreased or been redistributed.

That raises another question: what happens when the people forming wishes are not good people themselves? Is that possible? And is it possible at all in terms of how the brain works?

In other words, there are endless numbers of wishes.

Notice that almost every wish is directed toward influencing other people. Yes, some wishes concern only ourselves. But even when someone wants to “improve their child’s life” or “change their life,” they are still projecting their own wish onto another person.

“I want my child to know how to ride a horse.” “I want my child to become a famous gymnast.” “I want him to become a mathematician.” “I want him to make a lot of money.”

But you asked a different question. You did not ask whether it was legitimate or true. You asked whether wishes work. We should step back and look at the broader picture. What are we drawing on when we talk about a person’s life? How is it structured? What is it based on?

A person enters this life, and even in the space between death and birth, together with the spiritual world, they decide who they are to become and what their life is to be. Let’s describe it that way, provisionally. Then a family is chosen, and the person enters it. That is also a simplified description, but that is roughly the path.

They enter this life, and the spiritual being already has a certain plan for it, some understanding of what is to happen. Alongside that plan, several other ranges of influence operate outside the plan itself.

1. The first layer is heredity. You arrive in a particular family, at a particular time, in particular surroundings. All of that already makes its own adjustments.
2. The second layer is that a person lives amid a combination of different characteristics, where the idea of freedom arises.

Notice that people usually see freedom as something entirely positive, as though it always means “getting something good.” I ask, “Could you exercise your freedom by killing someone?” No. “Could you exercise your freedom by getting a million dollars into debt?” No.

People see freedom only as the opportunity to gain something: ten million dollars, a good family, knowledge. If you look closely, that is precisely how freedom is understood, even in psychotherapy and in religious and esoteric discussions.

People fight ancestral patterns without even considering that those patterns are part of their lives too. It is like saying, “I am going to fight my own blood.” Yet blood is what gives life. People fail to notice what, exactly, they are trying to fight. So the freedom you live with contains many different circumstances.

1. The third layer consists of separate influences beyond a person’s control, which may not even seem directly connected with them.

These influences can manifest independently of time, of the current world, and of your will. Let’s leave them as a separate area to observe. A person is present in all these realms simultaneously.

Imagine that a person develops a wish: “I want to reach a stable income of $30,000.”

I am deliberately using figures like these because I live in the United States, where income levels are different. I am trying to find a common frame of reference. Someone earning $300 or $500 a month, or even $3,000 a month, is impossible to imagine here, given a minimum wage of $18–20 an hour. Incidentally, that is a very important point to understand.

The first thing to examine is where this wish came from. Why did it arise?

People have different wishes. When I give examples involving a husband, wife, or money, those are simply the most common wishes. But we always know people who do not have them. I know people who are quite relaxed about finding a good husband or wife. Others, when you bring up money, say, “I have no desire for money.” Society calls them liars. It thinks they are lying.

An enormous number of wishes are imposed from outside. So the question is where a person’s desire fundamentally comes from.

Let’s look at the different layers from which wishes arise.

• Could it be a wish someone received from outside? For example, they attend a course and are told, “You must not be poor. You have to make money.” The wish then arises in them.
• Or they are told, “You must not be alone; you have to be in a relationship,” “You should have two children,” “You need two degrees,” “You must have a hobby,” or “You should walk 20,000 steps a day.” A particular structure of desire is being imposed on them.

Suppose their spiritual being, heredity, and karmic causes and effects originally had nothing to do with this wish. It simply became part of their current life. That brings us back to freedom and the influence of particular energies.

Now let’s look at the other side.

What if someone has a thought that gradually becomes an obsession and a desire, and that desire was born within them? They did not read, see, or hear it anywhere, or receive it from friends, parents, books, or society.

Instead, the desire lived within them as an inner impulse, and they themselves spread it around them. They brought it into their family, childhood, university, workplace, and friendships. It was as though they became a transmitter of that state, like a humidifier emitting their desire instead of moisture. It lived inside them as an obsession.

Then the question becomes: what is this desire? Where does it come from? Why does one person develop an almost painful desire to move to another country? Why do they feel, “I cannot stay here,” “I cannot be in this atmosphere,” or “I cannot live in this climate”? Meanwhile, someone else has an unshakable conviction that they must build a house right here, in this place, and live in it for 80 years. Why does one person have one wish, and another an entirely different one? That is an important question.

This is the second source of desire: a wish born within the person, not because they “programmed their brain” for it.

In my view, talk of controlling the brain is a completely tactless and irresponsible description of what happens. It treats everything too narrowly and linearly, without trying to describe the whole picture or understand the different possibilities and potential causes of an event.

That is before we even ask whether attracting something you want changes the other events in your life, your causes and effects, and your other wishes. When someone says, “We reprogrammed the brain,” the question is what happened to everything else at that moment.

Do you really think you can change one thing while everything else stays the same? It is like saying, “We will change the blood, but the whole body will keep working as before.” No: if you change the blood, the whole body changes. Everything changes: skin color, hair, the state of the body. I am not a doctor or a specialist in this field, but I would assume that changing the blood would affect absolutely everything. Perhaps even the teeth: their health, color, condition, oxidation processes, or something else. This is a very important aspect of understanding cause and effect, probably one of the most important.

When you attract something from outside, you need to understand that it does not happen in isolation. That is why I said freedom brings different consequences. Enormous numbers of movies are built around this: someone begins changing events in their life and discovers that changing one event automatically changes a whole chain of everything else. They change something, and suddenly they have lost an arm. They rewind and change it differently, and now their child is sick. They rewind again, and other consequences follow. Yes, movies often exaggerate this, sometimes for comedy, sometimes for drama. But the underlying idea is very profound.

We have two contrasting kinds of desire. That is the distinction we are moving toward understanding.

1. A wish brought in from outside that originally had nothing to do with you.
2. A wish that existed within you.

Why does a wish that lives within you matter? It, too, can be “divided” into different lines or currents. I am speaking approximately, because the world is not linear. It is neither 2D nor 3D. This multidimensionality is not expressed by any law of physics, mathematics, or quantum fields. It cannot even be fully conveyed in human language. So we are left with an approximate explanation.

This raises the next point. A wish that lives within someone as an obsession or inner impulse: is it true to this particular life, the life their spiritual being originally planned? Is that why the spiritual being is pushing the wish through to them, crying, “You need to go in this direction. You need to do this. You need to pay attention here”? Or is that wish also foreign to them?

It may come from the spiritual world yet be foreign to your current life—not something that was actually supposed to happen here. That is a very important nuance.

What does “foreign” mean? And what does “supposed to happen” mean?

If we consider that a person plans their life in a particular way according to karmic causes and the laws of the universe and spiritual world, that planning is still relative. There are laws that cannot be broken, but the spiritual being still participates in the process.

Could we say that some part of life has no direct connection with a person’s earthly existence, and that movement is also taking place within that part?

I remember someone very close to me saying, “Do you understand that your spiritual being is constantly living a vast life in the spiritual world? Constantly, even when you do not see or feel it. You may sit in an hour-long meeting while an entire life unfolds in the spiritual world. And that life is not 100% connected with the meeting itself.”

If you look carefully, you realize how enormous a limitation on perception this is. A person does not even look in that direction. Simply being told, “Look at the spiritual world,” already seems like a big step. That already feels like enough.

In reality, there is another side: spiritual life itself, which also affects the person.

Then a wish arises in life and comes true. The question itself said, “But it works. Many wishes really do come true.” It is normal for many wishes to come true; they were supposed to happen anyway.

• People may say they wish to grow up and become adults. You would say, “What a strange wish. You will grow up and become adults anyway.” Yes, some may die earlier, but in terms of probability, it will happen to most people.
• Or someone says, “I want to get sick someday.” Obviously, you will get sick someday.
• Or someone says, “I want to experience less illness,” and suddenly they really do. But perhaps they have simply reached a period in life when they were supposed to experience less illness.

What does that have to do with the wish? Nothing at all.

Yet the person thinks they were the one who attracted or created it, without much effort. In systems like these, though, it is often presented as work: focusing on wishes, making vision boards, visualizing, doing special practices, and so on.

I would run a very simple test. I would gather people who took programs like these 15 years ago, wrote down their wishes, and visualized them. Then I would check in detail, item by item, exactly which wishes came true—not basic wishes that become attainable in society anyway.

Here is an example. I was born in the Soviet Union. My first job as a programmer paid $100 a month. Imagine that I had written on a vision board then, “I want to earn $1,000.” Ten years later, practically any programmer was already earning at least $1,000. It had become an ordinary market reality. Someone might think they had “attracted” their wish, when it was simply the natural development of society and the profession. It seems to me that someone who called themselves a programmer and simply turned on a computer could already find some side work, an assignment, or a project and reach that income level. That is without even considering people with education, experience, and a broad range of knowledge. There is an example of a wish that seems to have materialized automatically for enormous numbers of people. They were born in Belarus, decided to become programmers, got modest jobs, and then everyone’s income gradually rose. They say, “Look how well our wish worked.”

Enormous amounts of manipulation are built on this. People are told, “You used to have problems, and now you don’t,” even though the people saying it had nothing to do with the changes that occurred.

I have seen this endlessly in business. Many times in my life, I have joined a company not from the beginning, but as CEO of an existing business. You arrive, and immediately people pile on: “You ruined everything,” “It’s your fault,” “Look how bad everything has become.” But you are running a company that other people handed over to you. You are following an existing current: the processes, decisions, and consequences put in place before you. Likewise, many people come along later and say, “The company grew because of me.” It simply continued along the course other people had set earlier.

If we look more broadly at countries, political structures, and economic processes, that current runs for a very long time. This is one difficulty with short presidential terms. I am not talking about excessively long terms; that is another extreme with its own consequences. But very short terms also create a flash effect, like a brief impulse for a country. Millions of people and millions of souls live within it, moving at their own pace. Then someone arrives and begins showing a completely different direction of development. We see people endlessly proposing different paths that cross one another. We live amid countless intersecting directions, each person arguing that theirs is right.

The same is true of wishes. We have discussed fairly simple, materialistic wishes. But there are other, very troubling desires: the desire to give up one’s own life, harm another person, steal, destroy someone, or hurt someone because of their sex, race, skin color, or social position. This is a vast area for reflection and understanding.

The first thing to do is turn your attention to the source of your desires. At the same time, understand that wishes come to pass not simply because you wanted something, but because enormous numbers of causes and effects lie behind them.

Some wishes are realized through work. For example, someone wants to earn a steady salary at the average level in their country, and works toward it. They can achieve that through their own labor. But creating a company worth a trillion dollars solely through your own labor is impossible.

We can talk all we like about wishes materializing, but look at technology startups. I am involved in that field. Look at how many people want to create a unicorn, a company worth more than a billion dollars. In terms of actual results, though, there is one success in hundreds of thousands or millions.

If we actually recorded all people’s wishes and compared them with the results, we would see the difference. Many of these people have extraordinary belief; they are taught to restructure their thinking, visualize, and believe in the result. But the most important question is different: what are these wishes, and what consequences do they create? That is the main question.

Even when people begin examining and analyzing the sources of their desires, making vision boards, and trying to understand which wishes are “theirs” and which are not, they still begin linking those wishes to past experience.

• For example: “I grew up in a poor family. My parents could not give me anything, so I want a lot of money to keep my children from living that way.”
• Or: “I was beaten as a child, so I will never hit my own child.”

We know enormous numbers of situations where things develop very differently. For example, there is a British series in which a father talks about his son, who, at thirteen, killed a girl by stabbing her repeatedly. The father says, “My own father beat me very badly when I was a child. I grew up determined never to hit my own child.” I am not giving this example to justify violence. You must not hit a child. That is not what this is about at all. The point is that many things happen for reasons beyond whether you were beaten or not. The circumstances in which a child was beaten are already connected with an enormous number of causes and effects. I can even say that if a child was severely beaten, it is definitely connected with causes: at the very least, the parent’s karmic causes, their inner state, changes in their consciousness, and the family’s psychophysical heredity.

But that is an established complex of causes and effects, not freedom. The impact is too great: through the physical body, the psyche, and spiritual structures. When a child is beaten, all their bodies perceive it, just as an adult’s do. It is heard everywhere. It creates a whole cycle of damage.

Not every layer of the spiritual being perceives it, because some spiritual parts participate in human life only to a limited extent. But an enormous part of the person’s being will suffer terribly. Here I am using “suffer” more in its social sense, because in terms of the spiritual world, “suffering” is not quite the word. Different patterns, causes, and effects operate there.

It is very important to understand the principle of consequences itself. Any reasonably significant action you change in your life, especially if you do it from a state of so-called freedom, begins affecting everything else.

If money was going to come into your life anyway, it will come. We know enormous numbers of people who never planned to become wealthy and did, who never planned to become billionaires and did, who never planned a good family and had one, or never planned to have many children and have many.

But there is another side. People did not plan for their children to be ill, yet they are. They did not plan a difficult life, yet it happens. Or the reverse: they thought everything would go badly because “our whole family line is like that,” but the child is born healthy. They did not plan on brown eyes, but the child is born with brown eyes. They did not plan on a blond girl, but a blond girl is born. They planned for a boy and had a girl. They planned for one child and had triplets.

We can find endless combinations like these, but the key point lies elsewhere. If you bring something into your life—even outside its main structure, even a seemingly small change—it begins affecting everything else.

Here is a simple example. There are paintings hanging behind me. Some time ago, new paintings appeared here. Did they begin affecting the space when they arrived? Of course. People started noticing. Some asked, “What are those new paintings behind you?” They did not simply become part of the background; they began changing perception and distracting people. Or imagine this: I am sitting in the same space and suddenly smear blood on the wall. It might seem like a small action, but I guarantee it would completely change everyone’s perception.

In terms of changing your life, wishes are directly connected with that change. It is important to understand that any significant wish begins to alter everything happening around you.

That is why, when something happens—money is stolen, someone has a minor car accident or loses something—there is a saying: “At least you didn’t pay with your health.” It is an interesting phrase, because people immediately single out health. If you look closely, in the end people almost always return to that: health, their inner state, how they feel, family, children, how they lived, and whom they spent time with. At the beginning of the journey, though, their wishes are usually quite different.

This brings us to a very important question: what does the person actually want? When they say, “I want to be rich” or “I want a good family,” what do they really mean? What is wanting to be rich? Do they want to see a large number in their account?

Money is an extraordinary energy. I was walking with my younger son, Damian, who is five and a half. Suddenly, he asked, “Dad, what is that place? I never noticed it before.” I said, “It’s a bank.” He asked, “What do they do there?” I said, “They keep money there.” He said, “Do you keep money there?” I answered, “Not in this bank. In another one.” He asked, “The one near where you drink coffee?” I said yes. Then he asked, “Can I keep money there?” I said, “You’re still little.” He asked, “What does keeping money mean? Is it sitting there?” I said, “Well… it’s sort of not sitting there.” He asked, “Where is it, then?” I jokingly answered, “On the internet.”

But think about it: where is money actually kept? It may not exist physically. It is simply numbers, a record. One number is written today, another tomorrow.

So when someone says they want to be rich, it is very important to understand exactly what they mean by wealth. That is why courses teach people to describe their wishes in detail. The problem is that they usually describe only the social, professional, or financial aspects.

The point is to learn to see the real truth behind your wishes: what you actually want. In a deeper exploration, even with a good psychotherapist, someone might tell you, “You don’t want money. You want support. You want your friends to believe in you, your wife to support you, your children to see you. Or you simply want to find fulfillment through your work.” Often, people do not want the money itself.

For example, I garden, and I understand that some people will see it as a typical pursuit for someone of a certain age. They will automatically place me in a social category. It is like saying people have “downshifted” when they have stepped away from active business. I am still involved in business, projects, and other activities. But people need a label.

It is much more important to look at why a person is doing it. What is really happening within them?

Some time ago, I was interviewed in English. The interviewer said, “I want to help people through my YouTube channel.” That makes me want to pause and ask, “Are you sure you want to help people? Or do you want to be well known?” If you want to help people, are you sure your videos actually help? Really help? Or is that an illusion? If you want fame, admit it honestly, because that is a different wish.

The next question is: if you want to help people, why YouTube specifically? Why put so much effort, money, and energy into a channel watched by a few hundred people? This person had very few subscribers, and the videos had minimal views. You could already see that he would close the channel because his actions matched neither his stated wish nor his true inner desire.

And indeed, after a while, the channel disappeared. The video was still accessible through a link, but the channel itself was gone. Perhaps there were explanations for that. But the whole arrangement did not work from the start, because the desire had been misidentified and described incorrectly.

This brings us to another interesting question: does everyone even need to formulate wishes? Does everyone need to become well known? Become a monk? Get married? Have many children, or few children? Does everyone need to work a lot, or a little? Eight hours? Twelve? Four? Does everyone need to play sports, run, and jump?

What does a person actually need to do? Enormous numbers of books have been written and thousands of lectures given about it. Everyone tells everyone else how to “live properly.”

There was a period when I was not working, and society starts putting pressure on you. At 35, you are “supposed” to work; at 70, you are allowed not to, although even then many people feel lost, as though life has ended. But at 35, you must. Just as you are “supposed” to start working immediately after university.

My sister recently told me about her husband’s son. He is at university and suddenly said he wanted to travel. We discussed it, because society immediately says, “Earn some money first, then travel.” But a person may have a real inner impulse to experience certain states, and that impulse may be very important for their life.

Why can someone take out a $300,000 loan for education but not borrow money to travel? Why is a 40-year mortgage considered normal, but travel is not?

Because one is considered “an investment in the future” and the other “indulgence” or “pleasure.” People simply do not see it as part of life. Enormous numbers of wishes are built around images like these. Vision boards usually show the same things: expensive cars, jewelry, enormous houses, islands, beautiful clothes. It seems to me that an island should be a mandatory element of every vision board. Then the person is told, “Visualize it,” “Tune in to it,” “Think about it constantly.”

This raises a very important question: can visualization really change energy? Yes, energy can be altered. The question is whether you understand the consequences. And indeed, if you picture something in your mind for a very long time, you may change something. But it is not guaranteed.

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