Visualizing dreams, vision boards, the law of attraction — this is one of the most widespread ideas in modern popular culture. Millions of people print out pictures of houses, cars and relationships, fixate on those images — and wonder why it doesn’t work.
In this conversation with Tatyana Tsvetkova, I unpack this idea through a personal example and explain why, by visualizing, a person does not bring their dream closer but in fact gives it a significance that life never asked of them.
I don’t need to visualize it
– You mentioned a house. Recently I was walking with someone — a fairly close friend of mine, actually — and we were talking about houses. Every now and then I like to show people that in France and Italy a great many big castles and mansions are for sale, and they cost quite ordinary money — one, two, three million dollars. A dream home, you would think. I don’t have a house like that. And I was showing him these, and he says to me: “So print it out and hang it up, so you can do it,” and so on.
– Visualization.
– And at that moment I said to him: “Why would I do that?” For me, looking at this house is the same as if I were discussing with you right now that I need to buy ten new pots of plants. It is no goal for me at all. I now live in a house that exceeds the expectations and ideas I would have had about the home I wanted to live in — if I had set them for myself, say, five years ago. And it just happened that way — not because I visualized it. There are things I wouldn’t even have been able to visualize: I wouldn’t have had real, genuine confidence.
We are not talking about simple fun — you just printed something out for yourself. If you look at what many people have hanging at home, it is often some castles or expensive cars.
– I think everyone has more or less the same ones. A private jet…
– Have you noticed that the houses are similar? As if from England — an English house. Very similar.
– A sort of chateau.
– A chateau, yes. Similar things, but it is not that person’s space. If I hang up a chateau, it will probably be my space. And you’ll say: “Well, that’s Sasha.”
– Actually, yes. It’s like your dog: how naturally she looks next to you.
– Yes. And interestingly, this same person — we once went to Filoli — says: “Oh, this is the size of your house and your grounds.” Although you look at it and think that for America this seems like too grand a format. But that’s what he tells me. Still, I don’t need to visualize it, because it is meaningless.
If you visualize it or hang it on the wall, you give it significance. And that doesn’t mean it is supposed to happen in your life at all.
You have put energy into it, given it significance, but it is not supposed to happen in your life. And life says: “Well, this won’t happen. Cry, I don’t know, worry, but this won’t happen.”
Visualization and karmic fulfillment
– Can’t there be an effect like this: you visualized some apartment, I don’t know, a one-room one somewhere, while fate had completely different things in store for you, but you fixated on that apartment so much that life rearranges itself? Or does a person not have that kind of power over life after all?
– It absolutely happens. You have to understand that there is a karmic movement of life: how everything in life is supposed to happen, how it is supposed to happen in fact. For example, your move to the States or mine is a karmic fulfillment. The number of children is a question, but the very fact of having children is a karmic fulfillment. Your move to the States is definitely a karmic fulfillment, right?
– Yes, no question about it.
– Can you introduce a modification into this fulfillment? Of course you can. A huge number of lives go by without even beginning to realize their karma. That is something of an abstraction, because karmic things happen to you in any case: you live as the structure of your spiritual energy system and you have absolutely no control over it.
Energy controls you. It is you who have been plugged into a billion cosmic and solar sockets, not you who are in control from this side.
And when the time comes, it will be switched off. And you yourself will switch it off — within your spiritual being. Exactly as I can close my computer now or hang up the phone. But here you can resist it, wheeze, play the wrong music. Or you can use someone who will switch you over a little. But it’s all right: later you will die, be born again and fulfill what you were supposed to fulfill.
Could you have stayed in a one-room apartment and had that dream come true, rather than getting a ten-room apartment? Everyone would think that way. Yes, it can be that way too. But the point is that, by karma, a person might have had an entirely different destiny and a different life — there might have been great suffering.
By buying a one-room apartment somewhere, with this action he didn’t really buy an apartment, but stayed in a particular place and veered sharply off his path. He simply created an enormous new block of karma for himself that he will have to live through. And on top of that, he hasn’t yet lived through the old one.
The thing is, in the spiritual world there is no concept of living through good and bad. It is all an illusion, it is all a human invention, human thoughts. It is not a structure, it is not real, it is not alive. If you and I are talking about what is alive — this is not alive.
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