In this conversation with Olya, I examine the central question to ask yourself before meditating. Why isn’t it enough to choose a technique or a posture, or to practice regularly? What happens if a person uses meditation only to get a particular effect? And what should you do if you don’t understand why you meditate at all?
A meditative state cannot be separated from ordinary life. We look at how to see your true point of support and why spiritual development cannot be separated from work, family, money and everyday actions.
Why you sit in meditation
There are people who talk a great deal about how you need to do triathlons, or climb mountains, or run, or go to the gym.
The most important thing in all these matters is always to answer for yourself why you are doing it and what your goal is.
Do you want to prove something to someone? Or do you want your physical body to change visibly? Or to become healthier? Or simply to be doing something? Or to find some friends? Or do you want to call it a hobby, a certain way of spending your time? Why are you doing it? It’s the same with meditation: why do you sit in meditation, or why do you stand in meditation?
– You say: answer the question “why.” If a person honestly answers that question for themselves — sees that in meditation they get calm, for example, or something else, and goes into it specifically for that purpose — what happens then? Is there some effect, or is it all simply pointless? That’s the first question. And the second: what should a person do if they can’t answer the question “why” for themselves, can’t understand why they are doing something? Keep trying to find the answer, or simply trust the way the process is unfolding?
– Which “why” do you mean now: why meditate, or why pursue spiritual development, or what spiritual development is? Or why a person should live? Why a person should come to know life? Why a person needs true freedom? Which “why” do you want to understand?
– Specifically about meditation, I suppose.
Meditation is simply life
– Of course, to understand why meditation, you need to look for yourself at why specifically you want to practice it.
On the meditation channel I say that meditation is simply life, and that a meditative state, expanded perception, is your ordinary life.
And within this ordinary life you are in a state of being switched on. You can tell in your life whether your perception of this life is expanding or not. And meditative immersion is when you are in a state of perceiving — of at least some perception of — your life.
In fact, it’s easy for a person to find this out. You can ask them: “How aware were you today during the day?” The person says: “All the time.” And you say: “And were you perceiving, for example, your attitude toward other people all the time? Were you observing all the time what thoughts arise in you about your own life? Were you trying all the time to understand the causes and effects of the actions you take?”
Were there states in which your sadness affected your actions? When you were eating, did you observe why you were eating? When you were speaking and expressing yourself, did you observe your speech? Where are those words flowing from, what do you want to express to other people? Why are you doing something? Are you doing it to profit and gain an advantage, or because it is a natural state of your body — like going to the bathroom? People don’t go to the bathroom to make money. Or were you doing it because there was some marketing in it?
The guiding value of your whole life
First you need to figure out why you are taking these actions. When we ask what all of this is for, then we need to ask: what is the guiding value of your whole life? Your whole life. And can everything that has to do with meditation be placed onto that guiding value?
Because if you meditate for the sake of a particular area, for the sake of ticking a particular box — say, someone said that if you are calm you’ll earn more, or that if you are calm your relationships at home will be better — then simply know: you are practicing meditation because you need your relationships to be better. Or so that there is more money.
Or you pursue spiritual development because it’s fashionable — then just tell yourself so: “I pursue spiritual development because it’s fashionable.” And the question falls away. Then you need to tell yourself: are you pursuing spiritual development, or are you simply in a certain notion of a fashionable state?
The main, fundamental story of a person is that they don’t want to find a point of support for their whole life.
I know almost no people who want to find the point of support of their life. Olya, what, which states does a person rely on? Listen to their speech. What do they talk about all the time? That there isn’t enough money? That education is an absolute must? That there’s nothing to eat? That everyone is stupid? That they are the smartest? Or is the person always trying to prove to someone that they are basically not bad? What is the fundamental point of support in their life? What actually drives them every morning, afternoon, evening?
Having found this guiding value for yourself, you can of course build on it further. And why should a person pursue their own development at all? And what is personal development? Now the whole world says that the most important thing in a person’s life is to keep learning. But ask these people: why? Learn what specifically, and why? And look: does the person do it to help other people in the world, to work with their ego, to truly come to know themselves and their life? Or to get certain benefits? Really look at why the person is doing it. What do they actually mean by it?
One point of support in all actions
Yesterday we had guests at home, and seeing my garden — there are hundreds of planted plants there, or rather, species of plants — people said several times: “What an interesting hobby you have.” I say: “It’s not my hobby.” For me, my work in the garden is exactly the same as filming this video; it doesn’t differ in any way.
I can tell you very quickly, in two seconds, what guides me and what I rely on. In any action there is always an ultimate point of support. It is the same in all actions. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in pain or feel bad, whether my child is doing well or badly, whether I got married or divorced, whether someone was born to me or died, whether I earned money or lost it, whether I felt better or worse mentally.
I have one and the same point of support in all these actions, always one and the same.
One. Of course, it’s a kind of complex that I would have to describe, but it is one. Whatever happens, I will always come back to it. I don’t have three or four parallel lives. In my central system of perceiving life there aren’t fifteen parallel lives, although I live a hundred or two hundred lives at the same time. Obviously there is an enormous number of subpersonalities in me — from a melancholic, quiet, somewhat creative person to an explosive, open personality. And they are all aimed at one thing.
I don’t divide life into spiritual and material — for myself I don’t divide it. There’s that phrase in America, I’ve said it many times: “What do you do for a living?” What do you do in order to live? And the answer to this question should be professional: a person runs a business, or sells ice cream in a cafe, or is an athlete — anyone at all. What do you do for your life?
Because people have a division: there is life, there are hobbies, there is some kind of work on their own state. What meditations can we talk about here? What expansion of one’s own consciousness?
People don’t even want to look there, don’t want to talk it through, don’t want to be in it, don’t want to live it. They don’t want to observe what they feel, how they feel, what they convey, what they say, what they are doing at all. And we turn on Instagram, TikTok, various news. We look at what is happening in the world. And what is happening in the world at all? What really matters to people at every moment?
Act only through yourself
– And what should be done about it, if people don’t want to?
– Act exclusively through yourself. That’s the whole point: if you live by the laws of the Universe, you have an established support — an understanding that this is your life in knowing everything that happens, in accepting, observing, studying everything that happens — then what difference does it make to you whether people want to or not? No difference, none at all.
The thing is, the notion of love is the same toward people who want to do something and toward those who don’t.
Honestly, Olya, it’s the same. Do you think it’s different? Will you start saying: “I love this person more, I have more respect for them, because they want to develop, and less for that one, because they want to develop less”? What difference does it make? It’s exactly the same kind of person.
That’s why I, for example, don’t react at all to people who say good or bad things in the comments. It’s merely someone expressing something. It doesn’t change in any way the fact that this is simply a person. Someone smarter or less smart — what difference does it make? There are people who measure others by money, some measure by knowledge, some by the ability to, say, draw. They keep measuring by some abilities, without understanding how to look at this person for real.
So sometimes, in the meditations that take place on my channel, you need to close your eyes or open your eyes in order to perceive certain states. And these states will give energies of an incredible nature, so that you perceive truth more broadly, expand your perception more and more toward knowing truth, and finally hear what is true. So that you start paying attention to it and gain the strength to pay attention.
The thing is, most people in the world don’t have the strength to pay attention to other people.
They don’t. Simply to pay attention to another person, not to yourself.
Yesterday some guests came to see us, and during the visit we discussed various things. At times I was practically interrupting people. At some point I realized that I had a choice: either interrupt people or stop talking to them. Some topics need to be started — or we’ll all just sit together in silence. Because people are not in a state of perceiving and getting to know the other. They are in a state of living out their own daydreams and their own states. That is the social world.
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Original video · Russian audio