What kind of experience is necessary, and what kind of experience destroys your life?

AVAlexander Volchek

A person tells themselves, “If an event happened, there was a reason for it, and I needed to be in that situation.”

DMDmitry Mugenov

This will give me experience. I will learn some lessons from it.

AVAlexander Volchek

Karma is to blame, other people are to blame, the world is to blame. That is not a sound understanding of cause and effect.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Very often, when something unpleasant happens to us, we say, “Well, it must have been meant to happen. This will give me experience; I will learn some lessons from it.” Where is the truth in that, and where is self-deception or illusion? Where do we stop looking at reality and start reassuring ourselves? Why do people say, “It must have been meant to be”?

AVAlexander Volchek

When someone says an event happened, it was bad, and it was very important in their life, they are trying to justify a negative result. The most important thing here is to understand and acknowledge that. They are trying to justify a negative result and shift responsibility for their life onto something else. That is not a sound understanding of cause and effect. A person tells themselves, “If an event happened, there was a reason for it, and I needed to be in that situation.” It sounds reasonable enough. But in life we can see an enormous succession—an enormous succession—of statements and ways of thinking in which people completely substitute one meaning for another. They do not take responsibility for what happens. They say these events have nothing to do with them: they are supposed to happen, they must happen. “But I am not personally to blame. My personality is not to blame. Alexander Volchek or Dmitry Mugenov is not to blame. Someone else is: a different flow of events, karma, other people, the world, the gods. Not me. I have nothing to do with it.” To reassure themselves, they add another explanation on top: “I have nothing to do with it.

It is not my problem, but it had to happen.”

DMDmitry Mugenov

But in general, do we need negative events, bad events—events we call bad—for experience, or not?

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, there are things for which experience is necessary. To learn to cook properly, you need experience. It is very specific experience, but you need it. To understand how to salt food and how much salt to add, you need experience. I do not mean understanding it from a cookbook: you open it and read “one and a half teaspoons of salt per hundred grams of meat.” I mean sensing and feeling it. You salt food; I salt food by feel. But that feeling has been formed through experience. We have salted things thousands of times and know how to do it. You need experience to hammer in a nail. You need experience to learn to drive. We can read vast numbers of books and watch vast numbers of films. This is an important distinction: where experience is needed and where it is not, where bad events are necessary and where they are not. You can go through a trillion books and attend the very best universities, but that will not teach you to drive well. In our world, though, people assume that if you graduated from Stanford, you are somehow a better driver. If you graduated from an agricultural technical college in Mogilev, you probably cannot drive.

But if we look at the facts, the brand matters only in a very relative sense when it comes to driving. Other factors matter. Does Stanford even teach you to drive? An agricultural technical college does: you learn to drive a truck and a combine harvester, and get a feel for the dimensions of a large vehicle. Obviously, you can then handle a passenger car. Still, to learn, you need experience. But do you need the experience of a crash? Do you need the experience of a child's death? Do you need to get burned in the kitchen? That is a big question. Do you need a crash to drive well? We can observe that some people learned to drive well after a crash, while others not only failed to learn but became worse drivers and more stressed behind the wheel. Seemingly the same or a similar event can produce completely different results for different people. Take a burn in the kitchen. Someone may cook on a grill or make pilaf in a kazan. It is very easy to get burned: there is a lot of boiling oil, and everything is scorching hot.

They have a negative experience and will no longer go near it. Yet someone who has never been burned may cook very well, just as someone who has never had a car accident may drive very well. I know many people who have never had an accident and are excellent drivers. I also know many whose cars are dented on every side. I do not want to get into a car with them. You know people like that too; you do not want to ride with them. This is a very good example of living through experience. When we talk about experiencing negative or positive events, Dima, it is important to understand that having lived through particular circumstances does not always determine whether positive or negative things will happen afterward. It does not determine that at all. People also draw mistaken connections. A car accident is an obvious example, as is the death of another person. Someone's child dies, they close themselves off, and they raise another child out of fear, or out of a feeling that their whole life is already lost, rather than living a full, rich life.

I talk to my mother, and she tells me about problems. I say, “You can talk about your problems and immerse yourself in them, or you can come to me and experience a new life and new events. You can live through problems, or you can live through new events. That is a choice you have.” Of course, she could come, experience new events, and worry about them. You know how some people go on vacation and, as soon as they arrive, worry that it will end? When they return, they worry that it has ended and they have to work again. What was the point of that experience? They would have been better off not going on vacation at all. Better if there had been no vacation. People say company parties are a good thing. My support for company parties has always been qualified. I always said a company party is an event I cannot control within my company. Something may happen there that has negative consequences for my employees. Everyone says, “But that is good! Employees get to know each other, become friends, and socialize.” I say, “Yes. But something bad could also happen. Someone might quarrel or hit someone. Or, conversely, people who should not become too close may do so, and it will affect their work afterward.”

It is very important to see what affects their work afterward and what does not. I have a plot of land with plants growing on it. Is it good for me to gain experience, year after year, of plants growing in that soil? Yes. But would it be good to pour nuclear chemicals onto it—something that completely destroys the soil? Do I need that experience? You would say, “Sasha, are you an idiot? Why would you need that experience?” Some chemicals take a hundred years to break down. If you pour them there, you will never get them out again. They will penetrate so deeply that you would have to replace absolutely everything. It is not even clear how; most likely, you would have to move away. That is an experience I do not need in my life. Can you spill nuclear chemicals in your life? What do you think?

DMDmitry Mugenov

Of course. Anything can happen.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course it can. You recently brought up the description in Harry Potter: when someone kills another person, they do not simply experience killing; their soul splits. That was shown in Harry Potter. You gave that example, right? It is irreversible. An irreversible thing. You cannot put it all back together. Do we need the experience of this house burning down right now? That is irreversible experience. In this particular case, it is irreversible. We definitely do not need it. Someone might say, “It helped me become more comfortable with fire.” But I know many people who are already perfectly comfortable with fire and handle it properly without that experience. It does not cause them enormous stress. Moreover, some experiences cause incredible stress. If a boy is badly beaten on the street at twelve years old, he will be afraid to walk down the street

and will not develop certain qualities for interacting with other people. Someone says that is useful experience. Society often tells you that you need to be beaten up, get into a fight, and experience negative events. But Sasha sits there shaking his head and says, “It would have been better never to have had that experience. Why go through it?” Do you know the psychological trauma it causes? Do you know what happens afterward, when you are afraid not just to enter an apartment building or see a stranger, but when your boss raises their voice a little, you experience exactly the same thing as being beaten on the street, and can do nothing about it? This is very important. There are now so many—so many—false ideas about cause and effect, false constructions. People say, “You do this particular thing with a child, and they will see a psychologist about it in the future.” Are you sure that this specific action will create that specific problem? Are you sure it has that effect, that it will definitely affect them that way and definitely lay that foundation?

DMDmitry Mugenov

So does that mean we should not learn from events at all, or draw lessons from them?

AVAlexander Volchek

No, you absolutely need to understand causes and effects and examine events. Again: to drive—to drive—you need experience. You need to be very clear about that. Do not go onto a twenty-lane highway, ten lanes each way, at rush hour to practice driving. Do not stay awake for five days and then get behind the wheel, or get behind the wheel in those conditions with ten hours of driving experience. Those are very clear relationships. Why do you need to know this? When we ask whether to study experience, ask ourselves, “Why do I need experience?” and examine it, we need to distinguish events where it matters from those where it does not. Decide that beforehand. Then do not tell yourself, “How good that I had an accident—good experience! How good that his wife left him—good experience! How good that his child died—good experience! How good that you were fired—good experience!” That is a strange way to look at it. Ask why you want to understand and study this, what you want to find, what you are looking for.

Should we learn from certain events? Yes, from certain events we should. Some events happen in life, and we say we need to examine why they happened. For example, you had an accident because there was a karmic cause for it. But you did not have the accident in order to learn to drive better. You did not divorce someone because it would give you experience of building relationships in the future. You divorced them because, for example, it was predestined, or you made a mistake with that person from the beginning—not so that you could build a better relationship with the next person. You simply made your own mistake in choosing that person in the first place. There are also things you do not need to analyze. Here is a good example. We were at a retreat in France, and my teacher hit her head on a cabinet. She said, “There are no causes behind this event. I simply hit my head on a cabinet.” There is no need to analyze it, although people love to. They like to say, “Aha, look at how I just spilled my tea.”

You want to say, “Something must have been wrong. Perhaps the wrong energy was moving, perhaps anger or aggression came through. That must be why you spilled the tea.” No, I was simply gesturing, waved my hand, and spilled my tea. There is no energetic cause. The cup did not rise because I was doing something good or bad, but because I decided to lift it. Nowadays people look for mysticism in actions like these. There is no need to look for it here. And do not deceive yourself. Do not deceive yourself about moving forward. Simply do not deceive yourself.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Sasha, if we are not looking for experience and signs, how should we make sense of what happens?

AVAlexander Volchek

There is one firm thing to understand: experience is not a sign. It is a fact, an event that happened. It is life. I have occasionally used this example: look at where the causes and effects are. One person kills another and goes to prison. Did they go to prison because they killed someone, or because they needed to go to prison, and this was simply one of the actions that presented itself? Someone karmically connected to them came along too. After all, people are not killed at random. That is very rare. Was killing that person a cause, or was it an effect? It is not a sign; it is a fact. Events happen, and we need to learn to examine them calmly and sensibly. One of the healthiest approaches is to try to understand the causes of events without shifting responsibility. Suppose we go outside here in Los Altos Hills, stand on the street, and start selling jackets for five thousand dollars.

We will stand right here.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Selling them to passing cyclists.

AVAlexander Volchek

My street is closed, right? There are only seven houses. There will not even be anyone passing by. Do we need that experience to build a good business, or not? It is absurd. Nonsense. The idea itself is nonsense. What do many people do? They go through experiences or events they do not actually need, events that are not genuine or healthy. They want to go through unhealthy events and then justify them by calling them a necessity of life. There are socially accepted ideas like that: to succeed in life, you have to spend eleven years in school. To find a good job, you first need to acquire certain experience. To have money, you need to work hard.

DMDmitry Mugenov

No.

AVAlexander Volchek

To have any money at all, you need to work hard.

Do you agree that to have money, you have to work hard—that you have to work at all?

Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. You can be born with money in your account. You can receive benefits without working. You can marry someone who earns money while you do not. You have money. You can happen to join a company, receive shares, do no work, and have a pile of money fall into your lap through stock options. You simply have a lot of money. Equally, you can work very, very hard and have no money; nothing goes right. You do not get paid because the company decides to cheat you as an employee. Other circumstances arise. There is no such fixed relationship. It is very important not to deceive yourself about causes and effects, but to try to understand them naturally and genuinely, without shifting responsibility onto someone else. The main question here, Dima, is this: do you truly want to understand what happens in life? Or do you want to resolve your immediate circumstances—for example, relieve your current stress or enter a new dependency that confirms you are right or wrong? People often ask questions having already decided what answer they want to hear.

Having already decided what answer they want to hear. It is striking how often people like answers they have heard before. They like hearing information that pleases them. As soon as you hear something difficult, challenging, or unclear, you say, “That is nonsense,” and stop listening. I would take the opposite approach. Why hear something I have heard fifty or sixty times? Why reinforce something I can already easily convince myself of? Why deepen doubts about something I already doubt? How interesting it is to discover how life really works, truly how it works. That is clearly not simple. So when we analyze the causes and effects in our life, we can make our purpose the study of our life, the spiritual world, and real causes and effects in order to discover the truth—not to obtain short-term—

not to obtain short-term benefits. That creates incredibly powerful movement. It brings an incredibly deep understanding of what is happening around us, what is really, truly happening. Why do particular events occur? One of the worst things you can do is judge causes and effects in other people's lives while constantly making these errors in reasoning. Constant errors in reasoning. Judging what happens to other people: why is it happening to them, what is it? Look at today: we are filming together. During the shoot, my wife was walking quietly through the house. Then she put meat in the oven. We are filming at home. It is a large house, but she did not turn on the range hood, and the whole place is gradually filling with the smell of lamb. Did she do something good or bad?

UPUnidentified participant

Wonderful. It is lunch, after all.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, on one hand, she may have done it simply because she wants to feed the children. Or because she wants to feed herself. Or because she wants to bring something good, thinking, “The guys have come to film today. Everyone is working; let them have something to eat afterward.” Right? It is unlikely that she put the meat in the oven to irritate me. Certain smells are difficult for me to be around. Smells enter a space and have their own effect. Their own effect. You might laugh and say, “Volchek is so intolerant.” I would say, “All right, let me get some air freshener, spray this whole room, and see how you feel in here.” Why? Everyone has their own capacity for what they can take in. There is always a limit, and at a certain point we will definitely run away. A person does something. It may have nothing to do with me, karmically or in terms of experience or anything else. Meanwhile, you and I are experiencing being surrounded by that smell.

But a completely different person performed the action. Should we take some experience from it? If so, what? Tell my wife she cannot put meat in the oven? She would say, “Oh, get out of here! I made you lunch.” “You need to turn on the hood before putting the meat in.” “I was not thinking about your hood. I was thinking about lunch for you.” Or, “You took over the house, and I was cooking.” Or is this simply something meaningless that we should not think about? Yet notice that it has an effect. A seemingly insignificant event has had enough of an effect to become part of the shoot. We have described it as an example. Life is a succession of ordinary, simple events in which we may see causes that are not actually there. Or invent requirements for experience my wife supposedly needs, create rules, or move ourselves to a different space. We chose this space because filming here was more convenient today and saved time. Time. We wanted to concentrate and film particular content. But perhaps we should have done the opposite: not tried to concentrate here, spent a little more time filming in the car or somewhere else, where we could find harmony in a different space.

The content would have been much better because the meat would not have been bothering us, or something else. Or a dog twitching its leg.