Spirituality has become a new form of ego

AVAlexander Volchek

You are asking whether someone can disguise ego-driven ambitions as spiritual development, when in fact there is no spiritual development at all. Those are simply the words being used, while the person is entirely driven by ego systems. In modern times—probably over the past hundred years—the language of spiritual development has increasingly served as a disguise for ego structures. So, can this happen? I would say that most of what we see is like this. Most systems and people conveying the idea of spiritual development today are ego systems, ego structures. Why? Because most of these messages aim to manipulate people on one hand, and to give those people ways to manipulate others on the other. First, there is the power of the systems being promoted. They then describe and offer power to the person in exchange for something: money, for example, or other related actions. This is very important. We will examine it in more detail and more broadly. It does not mean we have already answered the question and you can stop watching. We need to examine why this happens, what it is, and what each person can do with themselves—how to make decisions in these circumstances, when you realize you are surrounded by an endless number, an endless multitude, of ego constructs, ego ambitions, ego goals, and ego systems.

An incredible number of these structures. First, let us look at why this happens. It comes down to what a person means by spiritual development. It is very simple. If spiritual development means gaining a personal benefit through processes, tasks, or activities labeled “spiritual,” what else could it lead to? What could it lead to when someone goes to a meeting to have cards laid out and find out how to make more money? Or has a horoscope prepared to find any opportunity to improve their life? Or visits a clairvoyant to change another person's perception and bring that person under their power—to change how the other person feels about them, for example? Or goes to someone to increase their own wealth? That is a very interesting point. Does anyone understand what happens when you change things and increase your own wealth? What happens on the other side? You have increased it on one side. Does everything on the other side decrease or not?

Has it decreased for everyone else at that moment, or not? You should ask yourself that: does it decrease for others at that moment, or not? In principle, this question applies to everything. To joy, pleasure, emotional stability, calm, and all kinds of benefits. If you receive more benefits—if you change the structure of what you receive—do those benefits decrease on the other side? People are forever wanting to change their karma, but they want to change it in relative terms. They want everything to become good for them all of a sudden, or to work through something so everything suddenly becomes good. They do not want to take actions directed toward what is generally recognized as truth. Or at least take actions that will bear fruit not even in this life, but in future lives. They want to change things right now so they feel good. But if you alter karma, events, and the links between cause and effect, you are obviously changing them for more than yourself. Any change in your own life affects a huge number of other lives. At the very least, however you describe or present it, that follows if you live with an understanding of the connections between events, causes, and effects, rather than a scientific theory in which you say you can develop only your own brain or your own life.

If you can develop only yourself as an individual in scientific terms, then let us not discuss spiritual development at all. But if a person is already using these words, they understand cause and effect, and the causal connections among many different events in different people's lives. So when they increase their own well-being, what happens to everything else? Does it really increase for everyone else? Does that actually happen, or not? We see an enormous number of slogans from politicians, economists, cultural figures, educators, and religious figures. What do they say? “Let us improve the lives of everyone around us. Let us make everyone's life good. Everyone's.” Yet they do not understand why, for example, there was a time when there were a billion people, then two billion, and now eight billion. They do not know how many people there will be in ten years. They do not know. Scientific papers are written and calculations are made, but they do not actually know or understand. And they do not understand why, whatever they do, we do not see people's well-being increasing. That is what we do not see: an increase in people's well-being. Of course, different descriptions are used. They say people live longer, and measure human life by its duration or by average income per person.

They have certain indicators. They might measure access to knowledge, for example. Obviously, access to knowledge in the world has increased enormously. That is obvious. It has increased fantastically, especially with the arrival of artificial intelligence and access to it. Access to knowledge, specifically. But does that improve a person's actual life? To answer that, we need to understand what a person's actual life is. What is it? We arrive at the question of what it means to live well. When a politician, economist, religious figure, or other leader uses the idea of “living well,” what do they mean by it? And what does a person themselves mean by “living well”? That determines what happens when someone pursues spiritual development or takes certain actions. What does living well mean? People have started using a very fashionable phrase: “It means benefiting others.” And you ask, “Benefiting them how? What benefit, exactly, are you bringing?” There is an interesting example that is extremely difficult to take in. I think I have discussed it in some videos.

Imagine a person who is born, and whose soul—their entire spiritual structure and system—understood at birth that they would need to live through various events and die young. At eighteen, for example. That was the plan: the world's plan, the plan of spiritual beings, and the plan of this person's spiritual system. An agreement with the spiritual world. Not an agreement at the level of the material, social consciousness of an incarnated person who thinks everything here can be changed. It is the purpose of that spiritual structure. It wants to live that way. It understands what happened and says, “Yes, I need to live this way. I absolutely need to die early so that I can go on living in balance and live through the entire karmic structure.” Yet people want to fix their karma. How? They want to make it better. They do not want to live through what is happening. Olya, have you seen many people who want to live through their karma—who want to learn about it and live through it? Learn about it and live through it.

UPUnidentified participant

No.

AVAlexander Volchek

Everyone wants to fix it, right? Everyone wants to upgrade it, to improve it. Even with astrology, people do not really go to an astrologer to learn something. They want adjustments. They want to hear what adjustments they can make and introduce them. Modern astrology is heavily built around that: telling people what to adjust. Do not wear this color here; make this event happen. Buy your wife flowers here; get a dog here; spin around your own axis here; release a live fish here. From modern to ancient astrology, at least as it is presented today. But what about learning what I need to do? That is the point. For that soul, that spiritual structure—and it is not only the soul.

The spiritual structure contains more than the soul: spirit, soul, the astral body, etheric body, physical body, and the “I.” It is an enormous structure, a large one. So this person needs to die at eighteen. Is helping them live longer a good act? Is it good or not? It is very important to ask yourself that and clearly recognize where you stand and how you perceive things. Is it a good act? On one hand, helping another person is good. On the other, it is relatively good, because what exactly are you helping them do? What do you want to help them do? Avoid their destiny and their life, upgrade the whole structure, and not live through these events? There is no problem with that: the spiritual world is arranged so a person has the possibility of not living through all the tasks laid out in their karma, and of carrying those tasks forward. That is how the system works, and it is good that it works that way. Even if two people have come to carry out potentially, provisionally, the same action, one may live through it fully and move on, while the other may never even approach it or touch it. They will then go around again. They will go around again, start another round.

So have you helped that person or not? If we look at it, in fact, that is not help. In fact. Help would mean helping them make sense of what is happening, understand what is happening and why, accept it, become aware of it, and then observe and move forward—observe and live through it. There can be paths of freedom and different events through which a person truly moves forward. Things change; their life changes, and they live not eighteen years but fourteen or twenty-eight. I mean it can go either way: their life can become shorter or longer. There is another point we need to understand. You may help someone live through their karma, and they die earlier, not later. They complete their current task earlier, and the conditions of their life do not allow them to carry out the next tasks. They will need to die to carry out those next tasks; they can no longer accomplish them in their present circumstances. Notice that, generally, this is where people stop wanting to look any further. They do not want to look further. They do not want to study further.

So when we discuss what real life is, the position you are looking from matters. Someone says, “Still, though—love.” I ask, “How is love connected to the length of a life? How is helping someone connected to how long they live?” But we live in a world built on indicators and parameters that measure life expectancy, for example. The fact that someone spent fifty of their sixty years in endless torment—inner torment, inner instability, destructiveness, envy, lies, a desire to harm others, their own unease and rejection of what was happening around them—we can leave that out. What matters most is how many years they lived. People always cite age. Age. Even when we consider life and its quality, someone says, “I would like a healthy body, so I will not eat sugar, for example, or smoke, or drink alcohol. I would like to get there.” Immediately people tell them how someone's great-grandmother, grandmother, neighbor, or someone else lived to a hundred and twenty and smoked every day. Immediately. They talk about it endlessly, citing all kinds of examples.

First, without looking at that person or understanding their structure. And second, there is the very act of bringing those things into the discussion. The person is saying, “I want stable perception, so I do not want to drink alcohol.” The point is not the length of life; it is how I feel in terms of perceiving reality. Alcohol reduces perception. That is clear. We could discuss it endlessly. Again: it reduces perception, narrows it. That is why a person does not feel—they do not feel what is happening. What happens the next day if they have drunk a lot? The same thing happens if they drink a little; the effect is simply noticeable when they have drunk a lot. Their perception expands and they see what is happening to them. That is why they feel so bad. But they see what is happening within the limits of the perception available to them. Some perception cannot be taken away, though—for example, perception of one's own physical body. Some things cannot be taken away. At that moment, perception was narrowed so much that the person stopped perceiving their physical body. Now a little of it has been returned, and they begin to perceive it. They say, “I feel terrible.” Then someone offers them a pill, for example.

To do what? Narrow perception. Again, to narrow perception. An enormous number of medications are built around narrowing perception. Someone will say, “No, there are special drugs for expanding perception.” But you need to understand what kind of expansion: expanding what, and narrowing what? Do these drugs really expand the full perception of every system, or do they narrow some systems and expand others? When your perception is expanded, you are allowed to see something you should not see. Is that good or bad? As you then experience a series of events, do you really understand the causes and effects that arose from that expansion of perception? So again, when we discuss what it means to truly live, we also need to examine what we mean by it. What does it mean to truly live? Is it a long life, a certain amount of money in your account, apartments for yourself or your children, or a certain number of children? Or is truly living something else? Measuring your professional work, achievements, health, relationships with your wife, husband, or children—your family, whether you have children or not—by real criteria, rather than measures such as a golden, silver, or platinum wedding anniversary.

What are those criteria, then? Do you measure your relationship with your children by how many apartments you bought them or what education you gave them, or by real criteria? What are those real criteria? What are they? Do you measure professional achievement by real criteria, or by the money in your account, the years spent in a profession, or, nowadays, the number of jobs you have changed or professions you have tried? Or do you use real criteria, genuine criteria? What are real criteria? Do you measure your life—measure your life and emotional state—by the number of trips and vacations you have managed to take, or by real criteria? In terms of a vacation, what is a real criterion? What is it? Is it singling out that vacation and becoming elated about it, or treating a trip as an ordinary event? The only way for this to work—the only way—is to treat any trip as an ordinary event. Wherever you are, it is ordinary life, the same day of your life. You are at home in a closed room, drinking coffee in the kitchen. You are on Zoom, working from home, or on Zoom at the office, or you have come to work at a factory. Or you have gone on vacation to Bulgaria and are sitting by the sea, even if it is your first time in ten years—or you have gone to your country place.

It is simply an event in your life. Your life remains the same life. The same life. Whether it is forty degrees Celsius outside, twenty, or minus twenty, it is the same life with different events. When we ask ourselves what real criteria are, a conversation like this naturally leads us to ask, “Do such criteria even exist? Do they exist, and can we measure this somehow?” Modern people are built this way—modern people, and that matters: they want to measure everything. People were not like this two thousand years ago. Five thousand years ago, they certainly were not. They were nowhere near needing to measure their lives by the parameters we are discussing. This concerns humanity's movement and development over thousands of years, and our presence here and now. There is an intense fascination with turning everything into parameters. A very strong fascination with measuring everything that happens. Perhaps it is people's ability

to keep looking for some criteria for comparison. Now, as someone in the modern education system might say, I should explain things very simply, the way people are used to and want to hear. I should say, “Let us identify ten measures of spiritual development,” and call the video “Ten Measures of Spiritual Development.” Real ones. That would be a marketing title. Purely a marketing title, even if that is what this video is called. I do not know its title while I am filming. The team gives it a title later, not me. It is a marketing title people want and like, one they will click on, with a high click-through rate. When we look at what real life is, it is important to approach the question of what we are doing here, rather than how to evaluate our lives. If we make understanding and coming to know one's life a person's main task, there are no parameters. I often tell people that the most important focus of their attention is understanding and coming to know their own lives. They ask, “How do I measure it?” Once again, they want to introduce a parameter.

But how can you measure something if you do not know where you are going? How can you measure it? Where does that desire come from? People want to be ahead of someone else. They do not want to fall behind. They are always afraid they have fallen behind somewhere, or lost their way. Then comes the question: how can I find a state of calm in which that question no longer arises? That question will keep arising automatically within the system, because a person's main task is to come to know themselves. In modern reality, if that is the main task, the question will naturally arise: “What percentage of myself do I know?” To stop that question arising, you need to begin perceiving the world from more than its material side. A person needs to understand that the world is primarily spiritual and secondarily material. “Secondarily” in quotation marks—that is very important. Many things need quotation marks, but we can say “primarily” without them. To understand this, to strive to understand it. If they strive to understand this and then make coming to know the world their task, they will not ask what measures of knowledge there are.

Because from the perspective of the spiritual world, human development is infinite. The development of any spiritual structure is infinite. There is no end. Where there is no end, you can never measure a parameter. Infinity has no percentage. A percentage of infinity does not and cannot exist. Even if you try to draw it, the number—or whatever we are looking for—remains unknown. A percentage of infinity is still infinity, whatever we do and whatever happens. It is still unknown. So someone who lives with the understanding, or the desire to understand, that the world is spiritual will not want to measure this indicator. It is unnecessary, meaningless, absolutely meaningless. It only feeds the ego. The only thing to do is live—live from the position, “I want to come to know my life.” Not make it better or live longer, but come to know it. No one is forbidding you to set goals, want children, build a family, have fifty-six professions and eighty-nine hobbies, or visit every country in the world sixteen times.

No one is forbidding you to set goals for earning money. But those goals are merely points. Not linear points, not points in 2D or 3D space—simply points. Any reasonable person, any reasonable person who is moving toward continually coming to know and studying their life, understands that all those goals and points may always remain unreached, because they are only points. Moreover, they have no significance. What matters is coming to know your life. People then learned to create another layer of deception: “If there is a particular karma, I would like to know my purpose and find out whether I can achieve an income of a billion dollars.” They have still set themselves a particular parameter, an indicator. They set it themselves. It is absurd. If, twenty years ago, someone had asked whether it was possible to earn a hundred billion dollars, everyone would have said they were crazy. Impossible—perhaps one person might achieve it someday. Now that we see fortunes of more than a hundred billion dollars, people readily set goals of billions.

People did not set goals like that before. Am I right in thinking that if a hundred people appeared with ten trillion each—if someone simply made up a number and devalued the whole world in terms of those figures—everyone would say earning hundreds of billions of dollars was not so hard, because there were even more people with more? What has changed? What is different? Why did you say one thing yesterday and something else tomorrow? We see an endless number of people lying and deceiving others today. They say anything. Anything at all. If people say anything at all, there is no need to resent them. Calmly recognize what is happening. A person is coming to understand their life, and different goals, states, and plans arise in their consciousness. Different states arise during their life. At eighteen, they may think they do not want a family or children; they want to work. At sixty, they ask, “Why did I not spend time with my children or pay attention at eighteen to starting a family?” Or a child suddenly arrives and they think, “Work?

“I will love my child my whole life. I do not want to work anymore.” Or something happens, a person reaches a certain age, and suddenly they want to be an artist rather than a programmer. Something happens. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the point: the task is to study life. All kinds of events and desires can arise in life. Today there may be one desire: “I do not want to live in this country. I want to move to another.” Tomorrow, they have moved and decide to return to the country where they lived, saying, “I am so happy I came back.” Or the reverse. The point of life includes observing and keeping track of your desires. Studying it. Why did I have one desire here and another there? Why did I like blonde women before and brunette women now? Why did I like dark-haired men and now blond men? Study that and observe it, rather than turning it into a conflict within yourself—or, conversely, manipulating it and saying how great it is that your states and particular desires are changing. Or someone says, “I do not want anything right now.”

They are told, “You are depressed.” “I want so many things right now.” “You are scattered. Focus.” “So what should I do? Pull myself together or spread myself out?” That is not the point. The point is to study and observe it. Why are relationships with children good in one family and not in another? Why, within the same family, does the father have a good relationship with one child and the mother not, while with another child it is the other way around? With a third, everyone has a good relationship, and with a fourth, everyone has a bad one. That is our life: studying all of this without indicators and without a goal. There is incredible joy to be found and seen in it. Even in what I have just described, notice the sense of harmony and joy that appears. Suddenly the indicators are unnecessary, because indicators mean a struggle: either someone has power over you, or you want power over other people and the world. That is not how to live.