This episode is about relationships, advice, help, control, spiritual development, family roles, ego, love, and the ability to see another person beyond your own expectations. How can you share your discoveries, knowledge and experience with your husband, wife or another loved one without becoming their teacher and without trying to reshape them to fit your idea of the right way to live?
The central question is not only whether to share with a loved one or stay silent. It is important to see what state you are doing it from: from love, truth and a desire to be of use — or from ego, a desire for recognition, to prove you are right and to change the other person to suit yourself.
How we impose a particular role on a partner
You are developing, but your loved one is not. At least, that is how it seems to you. You read books, take courses, go on retreats and want to share what you have understood. You are certain: “I just want to help this person.” And here a very interesting question arises: what is happening between you and this person at that moment? Are you simply sharing something that has become personally important to you, or are you quietly beginning to decide how the other person should live, how they should develop, what they need to know and understand, which direction they should be looking in life at all?
At some point a sincere desire to share turns into pressure or into an attempt to reshape someone close to you to suit yourself. Let’s look at what really lies behind advice and how to talk about important things without destroying closeness with another person.
The question: how do you share your discoveries without becoming a teacher to a loved one? Where is the line between a sincere desire to share and an attempt to change the other person to fit your new idea of the right way to live?
The key construct in this question is this: we are not talking now about how to be a student and a teacher — we are talking about the notion of a social teacher. This, by the way, is remarkable: through this question I will raise a very broad subject today. It is a big observation.
Imagine a marriage in which a husband and wife say to each other: “Listen, you shouldn’t be my manager at work, you shouldn’t be my teacher, you shouldn’t be my student.” For example, the wife teaches at a school and the husband comes home from his job at a factory. And she sincerely wants him not to be her student at home. And sometimes it’s the other way round: the husband comes home from the factory and says: “I don’t want you to treat me the way you treat the children at your school.”
And this situation, you see, is absolutely all of life on planet Earth. A person simultaneously doesn’t want the other to be a student, a teacher, an employee, a subordinate or a manager. A business partner? No, not a business partner. Then what? A husband or a wife. In other words, a person from the outset, a priori, wants to play a particular role or wants the other person to play a particular role.
I once had an interesting case, and just in the last few days I looked at it a little differently. One person — quite an interesting one, close to me in terms of psychotherapy — once told me: “Alexander, do you realize that if your wife got interested in certain things, she would move away from some of her own duties or habits? For example, from taking full, one hundred percent responsibility at any moment — say, for wiping a child’s bottom.” “Say” — I am giving one end of the range here: always solving any issue for the child. “And what would you do? If necessary, you would resolve this situation differently. You would make the right decision for yourself. You could go to the child yourself and open the door, or you could ask your wife to open the door — she would always do it. But in fact you could find another forty-eight ways for someone to open the door for the child. In other words, you would choose, and your wife would not choose — she would do it herself.”
For a long time I carried this situation, this question, around with me, observing it. And a few days ago one simple thing dawned on me: it makes absolutely no difference to me what happens — this is all abstract reasoning. Who will open the door for the child, or who will or won’t spend time with me at any whim or wish of mine. I have a whim — I can invite my wife to have dinner with me or go somewhere at any moment. And in ninety-nine percent of cases she will agree.
If she invites me, I will have an enormous range of choices about everything that happens. But if you actually look at this situation, she agrees because she wants to do it. If my wife doesn’t want to, she will never agree. And she is unlikely to agree to do something she doesn’t want to do. And where I don’t agree, I don’t agree because I see another option and I don’t want that either. But at the same time I look quite seriously at whether the other person wants it, and I am often ready to adapt to the other person too. So in our situation it is not at all a given who is more open to doing household chores or fulfilling the other’s every wish. It is a big question: who is more open?
Who is whose teacher in a relationship
So who is whose teacher? Let’s set aside the topic of roles for now — we will definitely need it to resolve this question. And let’s move on to the next one: how do you even compare? Here, in the question, it said “a sincere desire to share.” Or is it the very way a person perceives things: if they are learning something, then they are a teacher to the other?
And who told you that if you have read eighty books, you are smarter than your husband or your wife? And who told you that if you have started sixteen businesses, you are a more developed person than your husband or your wife? Who told you that if you have personally given birth to fifteen children, you know more than your husband about raising children, about how to approach them? Of course not. Who told you that you are a more developed person?
Does knowledge make a person more developed?
Can there be a situation where a person attends an incredible number of courses and training programs and does an enormous amount, while another does nothing at all — and yet the first is less developed? Of course, that can happen.
Take the ages from ten to twenty and from thirty to forty. Between ten and twenty, a child takes in far more information and knowledge in terms of learning. Is the child more developed than a person between thirty and forty? People usually say: “Of course not, they’re a child.” But they are learning. Does this mean that there are people who will study for decades and never in their lives even come close to other people who seemingly don’t spend any time on it? Of course it does.
How we limit our own relationships
This is one of the points that is incredibly important to remember for the next construct — I will come back to it when we resolve the question of roles.
If you want to relate to your husband or your wife based on their role, on your understanding of that role, on the restrictions you place on that person — so that they don’t talk to you as a teacher or as a student, as an employee or as a boss, don’t talk to you as they would to a shop assistant but somehow differently, don’t talk to you as they would to children but talk to you as a wife or as a husband — then you should at least know that you want to restrict this person in who they really are. You want to restrict them. You want to shut them up. You want to change them. You want to subordinate them to your own circumstances, to reshape them to suit you.
And reshaping someone to suit you is no longer a question of teacher or student. It is a question of a pet dog. It is a question of a collar.
That is why there is so much talk in society about how the dog should sleep in the bed too. This is all an exaltation of various things, a failure to understand that a dog is a dog and a person is a person. There are people who know how to live with dogs but don’t know how to live with other people. There are people who treat their pet cats well but endlessly bring dirt, envy and suffering to other people. Or they treat other people like cats, dogs, fish or hamsters. They treat other people as nothing at all.
Courses, books and retreats: the illusion of importance
So the question itself: if I study, go on retreats, if I have read a great many books, or taken some courses at Stanford, or courses on how to paint pictures or play the piano — on the one hand, this in no way prevents you from interacting with another person, naturally, with all the richness of this knowledge. But on the other hand, it in no way sets you apart or separates you from the other person.
A person has simply been somewhere and wants to share all of it. Why? They want to show that they are smart, they want to increase their importance, they want to display their ego more widely.
Recently my wife showed me a video — I happened to see it with her — in which her friends and mine, husbands with their wives, were sitting in Moscow and watching some video. A friend of my wife’s was in that video. I ask: “What is this video?” She says: “They filmed this friend at work for some work video. And they all sat down to watch it.”
It gave me a very interesting inner feeling, a state. After all, for someone, appearing in a work video that two or ten people might see means far more than it does for a person who was filmed in a video that ten thousand people saw. And interestingly, for other people the very fact of watching it can mean much more.
Like for my grandmother. I used to visit my grandmother and grandfather — my father’s parents — and behind the glass where their books stood hung a scrap of a newspaper with my dad in it. Some German newspaper, I think. Just a scrap of some newspaper — we don’t even know which. Was it a German newspaper the whole world saw — I don’t know what they have there: Deutsche Welle or Press? Or was it a paper for a local community of five people? Or a company’s internal newspaper that no one ever saw? What kind of newspaper was it anyway? But what significance it had for those parents that it stood behind that glass!
Why the feeling matters, not the scale of the achievement
Or take, for example, my own presence in newspapers. I put out a great deal of content, and I have given an enormous number of interviews. How many different magazines have written about me? Clearly, for some people that is nothing, but a lot has been written — Vedomosti, Forbes and Kommersant. And how much of all this has nothing to do with the people close to me. And in the end you start worrying not about the fact that mountains of these newspapers have already piled up, but about the fact that people aren’t proud of it, for example.
The point is not in the number, not in the volume and not in the quality. The point is in the feeling. The whole truth is just in the feeling — in that newspaper that hung behind the glass.
How labels and achievements distort the image of a person
This is an interesting aspect. I am now creating a lot of different resources of my own, because I am heavily involved in the technology industry and in various businesses — I have a lot going on. And because of my life, I have to create various press releases about myself, descriptions of myself on different social networks, on platforms of different quality. Describing yourself on LinkedIn is one thing; sometimes you need a résumé — that’s another. A third is when you need to talk about yourself in some business community. A fourth is when you run a program where people have come to learn from you, and you hold a spiritual retreat.
An interesting aspect — I was just thinking about it, and I was thinking about it last night. I am once again rewriting a lot of things on my website, in the website’s structure, together with artificial intelligence — obviously, it reworks an enormous amount of text for me. And artificial intelligence reminds me of my editors, who see a part. This is very interesting.
They always see a part and try to fit a person into a particular mold — of who this person is. But what kind of personality is this person?
And yesterday ChatGPT 5.6 Sol was writing a press release for a well-known global company in the field of artificial intelligence — for my project ToTheMoon, where we talk about artificial intelligence, to show that we are a major media outlet. And while describing this media outlet, it first tried to make me a blogger. Then it said: “No, you’re not just a blogger, you are an entrepreneur — you are a blogger-entrepreneur.”
Describing my milestones, it presented me, and I say to it: “You have presented me…” It even drew milestones like this: look, what kind of person is this? In 2003 and 2004 he was an engineer. In 2007 he started his own business. In 2010 he was already the CEO of a serious company. Then he starts his own business. CEO of a company in such-and-such a year. Then CEO of a large company again. And he has a project — media.
And you tell it: “You have presented me as a person who was a programmer, worked as a programmer at some company, started a business, tried to build his own startup. And he has a blog.”
Imagine: we have averaged out absolutely all the people in the world who have had a path. And most people — except the sons of sultans — have had some starting path. Unless the person was a minister since childhood — these days children become ministers at fourteen, at sixteen, sometimes at twenty. A person had some path; they simply worked as someone. It doesn’t matter: someone shuffled papers, someone mowed grass, someone got a job in sales, someone as a programmer.
So there was some path. And it turns out that all the people who have ever started a business and launched their own blog are the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Elon Musk or Ivan Ivanov from some village who has an Instagram blog with ten followers. What difference does it make how many people? Ten or ten thousand?
After moving to America, I noticed a very interesting thing about blogs. America is not just an American market of three hundred million people. It is the English-speaking market of the whole world. When you live in Belarus, your market is Belarus. When you live in Russia, your market is Russia and Russian people in general. But when you live in America, your market is the whole world.
And I started seeing some well-known bloggers, well-known people, with a million followers each. You open the profile — this well-known person has two million followers. And you think: why so few? Why does the governor of California have two million Instagram followers? Surely he should have about thirty million. He is the governor of California, he is Gavin Newsom. Everyone knows him.
His might and power in the world exceed the power of ninety-five percent of the world’s presidents. This man runs the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world — California! Few people know that this economy and Gavin Newsom’s power are, in effect, greater than the power of the president of Russia. This is very interesting. Someone will say: “No, he doesn’t have access to nuclear weapons.” And that’s where they will end their understanding of power, their understanding of a person’s influence. And his influence, by the way, is concentrated — his power is concentrated. He doesn’t have eighty governors under him, spread across an enormous territory. He has a very compact, clearly defined territory and very clear power. And two million Instagram followers. That’s all!
But the point is that I looked at those two million people. It turns out that in reality this isn’t a question of the number of followers. And the system describes all of you the same way, whether you are Gavin Newsom or Elon Musk. Because Elon Musk, and Gavin Newsom, and everyone else hardly have any followers in proportion, if you take, for example, Ronaldo — who has the largest number of followers on Instagram. Or is Ronaldo more famous, more important, known by more people in the world?
Everyone says: “Everyone knows Elon Musk.” That’s not true. Clearly more people know Michael Jackson — really know him. Or will Elon Musk fill a stadium with as many people as Madonna will for a concert? I am in no way belittling anyone here. This is very important to understand. It is important to understand these gradations of definition — even by artificial intelligence, which on the whole is not constrained by ego — when we describe or talk about some person, who they really are. But, alas, we describe a person by some standards, by some parameters.
Love or ego: the key criterion for any advice
And the most important thing: when we compare, say that we have taken some course and wonder whether we should become a teacher, what to tell our wife and what not to tell her — that is ego. It is all very clear. What state are you saying this from? And you don’t need to take a course for that.
Are you saying this out of love for the other person? Out of love for the world? Are you telling the truth? Or are you doing something to elevate yourself, to be more important, to get your wife or husband to praise you, to appear to be someone else?
It is very simple to figure all this out. But you have to look. Have you at least asked yourself these questions? Have you asked the other person any questions at all? Do you truly see the whole system? What state are you acting from — having truly stopped?
Like with this video. Why am I making this video? To make things better for husbands? To make things better for wives? What am I making this video for? What state am I acting from myself? To be a teacher? Or for what? A teacher — for whom?
All advice begins with inner silence
It all begins with this silence, which will usually be cut out in editing, which no artificial intelligence will notice and which today it cannot understand. It all begins with silence — with the silence of interaction, of working with yourself.
And there is a great difference in how you tell it, how you convey it, what state you are in at that moment.
A spiritual impulse in an interaction
And for that you need to understand that behind a person stands an infinite spiritual world. Which, in your relationships — in terms of whether or not to share your development — governs this far more than you do. And which sends impulses through you — the impulses the other person needs.
How you handle these impulses, whether you are able to hear this information, not interpret it, truly understand it, truly make sense of it — that is where the truth lies. Truly knowing what to do — that is where the truth lies.
We are used to punishing people on the basis of a particular written law. At the same time, an enormous number of people in the world endlessly make mistakes from which an incredible number of people suffer, and bear no responsibility for it. It is astonishing that a doctor will easily kill another person on the operating table because he has all the documents for it. While someone who has no documents will go to prison for it. Although from the standpoint of the spiritual world the responsibility is the same. This is very important to understand and to hear.
The most important thing to understand
And there is one more phenomenal thing to understand and hear in this question: it is not you who chooses whether another person becomes your student.
Whoever asked this question is a complete egoist at heart. It doesn’t matter whether it was artificial intelligence, my editor or some person. Because however much you act in the role of a teacher, whatever new and interesting things you tell, only the other person — their spiritual being, their consciousness, at least their consciousness — can take the position of a student in order to receive your information. And this will happen not by your will, however much you set yourself up as a teacher.
That is why an enormous number of children, when they are sent to school, are told: “You must listen to the teacher.” They say: “I don’t really want to. I don’t like it.” “You must listen to me as your dad.” “But I don’t want to, Dad. I just don’t.” “You must listen to me as your mom.” “No, not today. I’ll listen to some strange man, but not to you.” So what governs this? What energies govern it?
A simple exercise
How can you make sure that you personally, when telling another person something, say it from clarity and from a feeling of love for them? This, by the way, is a very simple exercise. Every time you speak, ask yourself: are you saying this out of love or not? And look at love. Everything will become clear. A person says: “I have looked at it — how do I decide what’s next?” Keep looking at it — that is enough.
And on the other hand — how the other person, when they listen, can hear it openly. The task of people in interaction is to find this balance.
And this balance is not a matter of zeros and ones. It is an endless search of all living beings in general — of living people and of non-living ones on Earth.
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