How to Feel at Rest in Any Circumstances

AVAlexander Volchek

I want to begin by saying that our task today is not to explain rest through one particular example. It is to think about it broadly, so that those watching can look at their own lives and understand what is happening for them personally. Everyone has their own situation, their own circumstances and nuances. Some people depend heavily on strenuous physical labor. Others can work only a few hours a day. Everyone is different. Some people do not have a professional job, yet they still get tired. When we talk about rest, the important point is that we usually associate it with work. A person goes to work, for example, and then has days off when they do not go to work, so they are resting. People often say they rest on Saturday and Sunday. But if we really look at it, people who do not work get tired too. They also say they need rest. So what do they need a rest from? From work? From a particular activity? From a certain kind of person? What is rest, actually? What question would I put to us right at the beginning today?

The first question I would ask is: can you rest while recording a conversation like this? Can you rest while analyzing a large amount of information? Can you rest while leading a meeting? Can you rest while programming? Can you rest while writing a text or a book? That is the question I want to ask. And, of course, if you think it through sensibly, you will say, “Of course you can.” It is immediately clear that you can, and we should use that as the starting point for everything. If we understand that someone can rest while speaking, during a meeting, or while doing various kinds of work, someone else might even say, “I rest in the garden after work.” Someone will say, “I go to the garden and rest there after work.” Another person says, “I rest when I read a book.” Another says, “I rest when I make lunch.” For one person, making lunch is work; for another, it is rest. I can say that cooking is rest for me. I cook a great deal. All my life I have cooked for large groups—not a thousand people, but dozens. I constantly do a lot of cooking.

For me, it is an entirely easygoing activity. It would be different if you put me at a grill for twelve hours, or told me to spend twelve hours finely chopping ingredients. I would become physically tired. At the grill, I would probably get hot, and there would be other factors. I can get physically tired; a person certainly can. Likewise, if I go into the garden now and water the flowers or tend some plants, I feel completely calm. But if you tell me to dig fifteen holes in heavy soil and clay, I will get physically tired. So one of the main problems with how people think about rest is that they define it as the opposite of their main activity. In reality, they define it as the opposite of something they are struggling with, something that feels wrong or does not fit. I even know people who say they like their work, yet want to rest on the weekend. What, then, does liking or disliking mean? A great working day is one you do not divide up. While working, for example, you also remember your children, just as you remember your work when you are with your children or at home. There is no division, no separation.

I make a lot of videos. Please support my channel and like the video. Let us do more and more of that today. It is also great when you leave comments. Any comment related to the video is useful to you first of all, useful to me, useful for the channel’s development, and useful to other people. What states do you experience? How do you relate to rest, to your job, to work itself? What do you feel—what do you really feel? If you have not subscribed yet and want to see more videos like this, subscribe to the channel. This brings us to an interesting aspect of your first question: is scrolling through Telegram in the evening after work a form of rest? What is happening to the person? And if someone scrolls through Instagram in the morning or afternoon, is that rest or strain? It is supposed to give the brain a break. But is it easing the load on the brain or adding to it? Is it really a break for the brain? If you are getting five-second snippets of reels or scrolling through a feed, I would even think it could be scientifically demonstrated that you are loading the brain, rather than unloading it. You are switching between a great deal of information instead of concentrating on it. If you tell me you will go outside, sit on a bench, eat ice cream, and look ahead, I can imagine that giving the brain a break. Even then, it is not certain. Everything depends on your state, the state you are in at that moment.

If you are anxious and preoccupied, then sit down and scroll through Instagram, your worries and anxiety may grow rather than diminish. You may become even more tense and uncomfortable. If you do it in the evening, you are also making the effect on your night’s sleep worse. You have dinner late, for example, then immediately lie down with your phone, even though you probably should not lie down right after dinner, and so on. There are many different aspects to whether this is actually rest. Or take one of the central myths: “We will work now, then in six months we will go to Thailand, the Maldives, Turkey, Italy, France, Bali, the United States—wherever.” We will go away. The person waits for that setting, waits for the trip, and says, “That is where I will rest.” But will they really rest there? Or will they arrive with their head full of something? They might be stressed, or spend a great deal of time traveling from place to place. Will they really rest? For me, many trips are work. Last week, for example, I went to Las Vegas for two days with my wife and four children.

That is work. We had to get up early, drive to the airport, park the car, and get all four children onto the plane. Before that, I had to buy the tickets and make all the arrangements. Then we arrived. One car came and left for some reason; the driver did not want to take us. Then another car came. We had to check into the hotel and ask them to hold all our things because we had arrived early. Then go to breakfast. Everyone is running around, this way and that. Then take them to the pool. Everyone is jumping and moving; you have to keep an eye on them all. You have to put sunscreen on everyone because it is forty degrees Celsius outside. Then go somewhere else in the evening. Someone is crying, someone is shouting. It is work—a lot of work. It is much easier for me to sit and lead a meeting, meet people, and discuss major strategies. That is much easier, if you think it through. But I can honestly say that I do not get tired from spending time with my children at all. Still, in terms of the actions involved, it is no less work, absolutely no less. It is a lot. If you look carefully, many mothers and parents run away from it. It is not rest for them; they see something else as rest. I consider this rest too. In fact, can we approach all of life neutrally?

That means living your whole life so that, on the one hand, you do not need a rest when you are working—doing what you call work. On the other, when you are resting, you do not see it as rest, but as living attentively and engaging with life. Then the question becomes: what is our life for? That is a much more important question for a person to resolve than the search for rest or happiness. You also made the point that rest is something pleasant. That involves a self-centered motive: wanting something pleasant for yourself. Notice: pleasant for yourself. In that case, can you experience rest through other people receiving something pleasant? Could you set yourself that task? Can you help people and rest yourself at the same time? Or, as I said, be in a state of neutral, calm perception? I have always asked: why exhaust yourself just to rest for two or three weeks afterward? You can be in a harmonious state all the time, without that need. People have different needs when it comes to rest. One wants to be alone; another wants time alone with their husband or wife. Someone else wants to see their children for once because they work all day.

Someone hates their job and wants any kind of adventure, any opportunity for one. Someone wants to fly on a plane; someone wants to visit a particular country. Everyone has their own idea of rest. If you look carefully, some people love flying. They enjoy the flight itself. I know people who say, “We love flying.” If they fly business class or first class, it matters to them that they get to eat and take the flight. They say, “How great! The flight itself is great.” I remember feeling that way. The flight itself seemed great.

I probably still have a little of that left. You are ready to go; you feel you are resting because you are flying business class. But it is absurd! First, whatever the circumstances, the food is of a very particular quality. It is not a good restaurant. At the same time, you are flying and your whole system is altered. It is not particularly good for a person. You often do not sleep. Everyone says, “Oh, they have such a bed!” What bed? The bed is about four times smaller than the one I have at home. Even if there is a bed, even if you are flying Emirates first class—what bed? You are in a little pod, a capsule, flying along inside it. And you tell yourself you are enjoying it. Why? Why does that happen? Or someone says they rest by sitting down in the evening, watching television, drinking beer, and watching an action movie. “That is definitely rest.” Rest from what? It is a very simple kind of rest. And what is this Instagram rest you mentioned, Olya? It is not shifting your attention. It is reducing your perception, ceasing to perceive life, disappearing from life.

When you say you want to shift your attention during the working day and open Instagram, that is called disappearing from life. “May I turn life off?” Instagram gives you that opportunity. Instagram, Telegram, blogs, news, TV series, movies, alcohol in absolutely any form—they let you disappear from life, stop perceiving it. In essence, it is the same as sitting in a cave. Just sitting in a cave. People have said that if you sit in a cave, you will arrive at a certain realization. That is by no means certain. But essentially it is just that: disappearing from your own life. This is very effectively exploited. If we look at the many different practices and the ways people are drawn in, they are told about ways of disappearing from life. Disappearing from life is treated as an achievement. You might as well say the achievement is how many reels I managed to watch in the last twelve hours, or how successfully I disappeared during a night of clubbing. It is disappearing from life. I am not dismissing everything: there are reasonable aspects to going somewhere alone, to retreats, periods of silence, and all sorts of other things.

There are reasonable aspects to those things. But the underlying approach is to disappear from life. Of course, once someone has disappeared from life, they say, “Wow, this is great.” Some say it is hard, but that is quite something: people who cannot calmly spend a week alone with themselves. Once in their life, they are offered the chance to spend a week by themselves, in silence, and they are afraid of it or cannot do it. That is strange. In an entire life—however long they live, fifty, eighty, forty, a hundred years—they have the opportunity to spend just one week with themselves. A week is nothing, a flash. Some people are afraid, while others elevate it into some extraordinary achievement. An achievement of what? That is the question to ask yourself. So, Olya, it is shutting down perception; it is disappearing from life. That is the first point, and everyone really needs to focus on it. In so many areas, people simply want to escape because they cannot stay with themselves. To be honest, I cannot remember a single day when I was in a state of wondering, “What should I do?”

Or even, “What am I going to do?” Because I always have something to do. What does doing nothing mean? I would happily sit, calmly, for four hours and do nothing. Look: on the one hand, a person runs away from doing nothing, really runs away, and wants to resolve that issue. That is wrong. Yet when they are offered a chance to go away and do nothing, they say, “No, are you kidding? I certainly will not be in that state. Absolutely not.”

OSOlga Stolyarova

You said that someone might go away to rest: they have been working and preparing to fly somewhere in Europe for a week, for example. Sometimes it is hard to disconnect from work. You feel guilty. Or you said you always have something to do. I always have something to do too, but when I want to read a book or do something else, I cannot, because I immediately start thinking about all the tasks I have not finished. Then it feels as though you are always living through work, because your head is full of worries and you never seem to make that shift. So the question is: how do you learn to truly rest amid all of that?

AVAlexander Volchek

The question here is what you actually want to get. Do you want to rest specifically, to get pleasure for yourself, or do you want to work in life? From the outset, I set myself the task of working. If I set myself the task of resting, I will not be able to resolve this question. It simply will not work; there is no way to resolve it that way. When someone cannot allow themselves to sit down and read a book, even though they have worked harmoniously, they have a problem with how they perceive themselves, with loving themselves and the world around them, with understanding love for their own life. There is a problem, or a major question, in that area. That is where attention needs to go, instead of directing it toward rest. Again, it is not a question of rest. Our central topic today is how to learn to rest properly. And this brings us precisely to the need to define, first of all, what you mean by that and what goals you are setting. For example, I certainly go to bed every day.

It is important for me to sleep eight or nine hours. Why is eight hours important? I know my body: more than nine hours is fine for me. Less than nine—and certainly less than eight—does not give me enough rest. Eight or nine is more or less all right; preferably nine. Some people can sleep less. Someone will tell me you can get by with less sleep. I get up early and have a very precise daily routine—an incredibly precise one. However closely I follow it, and believe me, I am extremely consistent about food, my schedule, and everything else, I will feel unwell if I sleep too little or go to bed late. I can do those things: go to bed late, get up early, get up even earlier. I can get up not at five or six in the morning, but at three. I could get up at three every day. That is how my system works. I can easily arrange the circumstances and make myself do it. But I will feel uncomfortable. So you need to perceive cause and effect in what is happening to you. If you say, “I need to work now, and I will rest later”—

Then your way of perceiving the world is out of balance. If you look at yourself and say, “I need to rest on Instagram,” that is a distorted way of perceiving things. “I will rest when I meet friends tonight and go clubbing”—the same distortion. Someone says, “I will rest because I am going out of town.” Who says you will rest there? You might find yourself in an environment that is difficult, or one that leaves you feeling strange after interacting with other people. Last weekend, we visited people on both days—different groups. I live here in Silicon Valley, in the United States, and we visited different homes with many people there. I could see very clearly that when we came back, the connection between my wife and me was in a very particular state. After each visit, our connection got worse rather than better. Interestingly, the people were very different: different groups, different circles, many people. But our connection was worse. Perhaps something had changed in me too, but I could see my wife entering a particular state of experience and communication with those people. So was that rest or not?

Was the person really resting, or resting in some other sense? People very often assess what they want to do and what they do not. Laziness arises in many places. Someone supposedly wants to rest simply because they are lazy and unwilling to work. Often they want rest because their ego is running high and they want benefits only for themselves. Someone wants to rest and insists on it to everyone because society says that is what you are supposed to do. As a result, they cannot find a moment in their life. I have a friend, and recently I said to him, “Listen, Lyosha, when are you going to come and visit?” He keeps saying, “Oh, we need to find a time and arrange it. There are projects going on right now.” I sent him a reel. There is a good reel by Tinkov in which he talks about an acquaintance—the owner of Shokoladnitsa, I think. He says, “I tell him, ‘Let’s meet up.’ He says, ‘I’m busy, there’s the business.’” Tinkov says, “Then go to hell!” I am not talking about the circumstances or Oleg’s wording—that is his choice. I mean the approach. He says, “Then I will not spend time with people like that.” And there is some truth in it.

I sent the reel to my friend, because what is this nonsense about not being able to find time in your life? It would be one thing if you were a father going out to work—

If you were a father working three jobs a day: selling things here, hauling construction debris there, getting the children ready for school, and running around everywhere. But you have an established system and an enormous range of opportunities. Can you really not find the time? And what kind of time are we talking about? It is also a matter of managing your time and understanding what you can do during the day. You know me; you have been working with me for a while. Think how many actions I take, how many things I do, and how many circumstances I deal with. I do not feel like a tired person at all. Yet if I tell you everything I have going on, you will say, “Well, you have the opportunity to travel and rest.” I am recording this video now, and then I am going to the forest with my son. I rented a small cabin. But I also know I have a whole lot of reports to prepare today. I have calls today, early tomorrow morning, and early the following morning. I do not know whether the internet will work in that forest. I had to work out how to have three providers—three cellular carriers I can switch between and choose from.

There is some kind of back road there. How will I get there? I also need to charge my electric car. And I will need to entertain my son and spend time with him. For him, it is a fun trip. I have to book and rent everything, then set off. It would have been easier not to go, but I chose—

OSOlga Stolyarova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

I chose to do it because the opportunity was there, and I thought, why not? I can tell you that a great many people choose not to. They see it as difficult. I still have lots of calls coming in and a huge amount to organize. It would be easier not to do it. I also had to spend money on it. It would be much easier to sit quietly, say, “Listen, I am working,” turn my attention to that, and nobody would object. I could sit there working and thoroughly enjoying it instead of driving five hundred or four hundred kilometers into the forest. Once there, I will also need to drive around, look for places, ask how things work, and so on. That is why I went to bed late yesterday: I was reading about nearby lakes and where the restaurants are. I need to take some food too. I know a bear or some other animal might come by at night. There are many aspects to it. But I make a great many trips like this. It is normal for me, as simple an action as making this recording with you.

For me, overall, it is exactly the same kind of action. In fact, the trip is even simpler because nobody else is there. Your internet keeps dropping out today, for example, and that makes me angry because I cannot do anything about it. On the trip it is simple: there is nobody else. I am with my son, and we can do whatever we want. There is no one to coordinate with, not even my wife. Again, it is a simple action. Here is an interesting point about rest. My mother came to visit about six months ago. We were driving somewhere and I said, “Mom, listen, we have decided to get a dog.” She said, “I heard. Well, think it over ten times.” I said, “Mom, stop right there. I do not want to hear another word.” On one hand, she is conveying her worries about the difficulties. On the other, perhaps there is some inner envy of the opportunities and the ease with which we make decisions. But those are her feelings, her issues. We have had the dog for April, May, June, July, August—five months now. Remember, I also have four children, and the dog is a Russian borzoi.

I was with a group of people here yesterday, and they said, “Sasha, you are really something—you bought a Russian borzoi too! That is just crazy. Deciding to get a dog here means limiting your ability to travel and everything else.” Of course it is work. Of course it is a responsibility. So what? It is responsibility; it is work. Every morning when I wake up, I now have a specific duty. At six in the morning I have to feed the dog right away, then immediately take her out after she eats, because she is a puppy. Otherwise, she will go to the bathroom in the house. And if she does, either I or, later, my wife will have to clean it all up. That is hard, because then there are smells and all the other details. When you take her out to go to the bathroom, you also have to make sure she does not run away. There is a whole set of things involved in bringing her back and everything else. But it is simply an action. I do it because it is simply work. Can you see having a dog as rest? Of course you can, Olya, wouldn’t you agree? Or you can see it as something you absolutely hate, something terribly difficult.

You can see a trip with your son as an ordinary activity, ordinary work, and rest at the same time. In other words, approach it neutrally and calmly. It is simply a trip. Obviously, it is fun for him. He does not go into the forest with a tent every day, even though we live here in what is practically a forest. Still, it is a fun trip, a change of circumstances. Anything new brings my children tremendous pleasure—even a pencil. That is another interesting feature: why does that happen? It is something new for him. But I also want to point out that for a child, it can be work and it can be a problem. For many children, this too is a difficult activity, a kind of work: experiencing particular emotions, feelings, and new states. It would be much easier not to do it, to put him in a room, give him a computer, and let everyone avoid certain things. Everything else is work—or rest.

OSOlga Stolyarova

If I have understood you correctly, I have just realized that my problem seems to be with how I perceive work. Perhaps that is true for most people too. As you said, people focus on rest rather than work. So the question is: what is work? How do you come to love working so that it becomes rest?

AVAlexander Volchek

That is an amazing thing, actually, a very interesting one. When you talk to people about work, they do not respond at all. You hear it two hundred times, and at some point you think, “Damn, so that really is where the question lies.” Then you tell yourself, “The problem is that I need to come to love working on any task.” And there is the trouble. The question turns out not to be about rest, but about seeking pleasure, joy, or different circumstances, instead of simply loving work. Those are different things. Again, wanting to love work and wanting to be pleased while working are different things. You can love work that brings difficult circumstances. I can tell you honestly: when I need to put new plants in on my property—I plant perhaps fifteen or twenty new ones a month—it is really hard work, especially given the sun, the conditions, the heat, and so on. It really is work. Then, after I have planted something, I see that rabbits or rats have eaten it, or the weather has scorched it, or I did something wrong.

That is a lot of work. At the same time, I approach it in a way that makes the whole arrangement feel balanced and harmonious to me. I wanted a garden, and I enjoy it. It looks harmonious to me and brings joy to me, the children, and my wife. Even if it does not bring them joy, it is simply something I am doing now—an activity without a goal, in a certain sense. Can I find a huge number of advantages in it? Yes, but I can also find an incredible number of disadvantages. If you really look at it, again, it would be better not to do it. You would free up enormous amounts of time to watch a series or scroll through reels. That is a joke, of course. Or to read a book, or do something else: you would have more time. But it is a matter of my choice. So, Olya, we come to the question: what is your choice? How do you make it? Before talking about love for work, we need to ask how you continually make decisions. What impulse do you act on? What is the impulse behind your decisions? And once you make particular decisions, what is your pattern of responding to them?

Throughout my childhood and my whole life, whenever someone woke me up, at any hour, I woke easily. I remember a friend of my father’s saying when I was a child, “You can wake Sasha at any time and he will go mushroom picking, hunting, on some trip—anywhere. He will set off at any moment.” It is easy for him to do it, and he will do it without any fuss or questions. The question is whether you have the strength to act. Some people cannot do that. However much you try, however much you explain that they should not be late, or that a person needs some inner aspiration, they cannot do it. Again, we can discuss loving action endlessly. But on what basis, through what causes and consequences, do you make a decision at all? A task comes along, an impulse to buy a dog. What arises in you? Worries about the work and all its aspects, and a lack of understanding of whether you need it and why. It is about correctly understanding the next step. A garden comes into your life. You do not know whether tending it is the step you need to take, and you see it as a difficulty.

As a difficulty. I can tell you that among the people I know, there are dozens, probably hundreds, for whom everything is difficult. That is why they do not take so many actions. It is difficult for them, simply difficult. Every time, everything is difficult. Any action: everything is difficult, damn it, everything is a disaster. I have just written a rather tough message to the person who did a photo shoot for me on Monday. From time to time, he does not reply, and says that when he does not reply, it is because things are hard for him and he is depressed. I have just written, “I think I deserve enough attention for you to reply to my message.” You see, we can talk endlessly about rest and work, but if a person cannot reply to a message—just reply—what are we talking about? That is an aspect of it. If someone does not have the ability or the strength to make decisions, life is very hard for them. You need to give them every bit of love and help you can so that they can get somewhere. It is very hard. You can act and interact with such a person only from love; otherwise, the whole relationship falls apart. Even when I wrote that to him, I wrote from honest, sound, well-intentioned understanding, and again, from love.

I can tell you.

So, again, the question is not how to come to love work. It is how you make decisions at all, why you agree to one action or another, and which impulses operate within you. Some people have an endless impulse of “This is so hard.” Worry and suffering are constantly inside them. Endless suffering keeps arising within them; it simply arises. The person suffers not because of the events around them, but because their soul suffers; they need to suffer. I will not go into spiritual science or spiritual explanations now, but their spiritual system is suffering. Wherever they are—California, Texas, France, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Minsk, Kyiv, Bali—it makes no difference when their system is suffering inside. People often say, “But you are in that kind of place,” or “You were born into that kind of family,” or “Those things happened in your life.” That has no significance at all.

None at all. Of course, circumstances have an effect in some respects, but people are different. Some people are in very difficult external circumstances, yet their soul generates an endless impulse of love. And if you generate that kind of impulse, you will relate to work in a completely different way too. The question is how to make that happen. It can happen only through a person’s intention, the intention they live with. Do they make serving people one of their central tasks, treating other people as they treat themselves? You are at the center of events, and there are people around you. Every one of them is just like you: they are people too, and they are just as important. One of the most significant tests you can do is this: do you treat your own children the same way you treat other people’s children? That is all. If you say, “Of course I care more about my own,” you have lost. If you say, “I feel that I care more about my own, but I would like to treat all children equally,” that is a starting point for successful development, for good and very powerful movement forward.

I am certainly not saying it is possible to do that perfectly, endlessly, all the time. I am saying you can move toward it and continually observe it: look for kindness in people; whenever you talk to someone, remember that they are a human being and convey love to them. At the same time, please operate within social boundaries and standards. Put up walls and set limits with people, but do not manipulate them. Act, on one hand, from the understanding that this is a human being, and from love; on the other, from the realities of life. We live in a society that, unfortunately, is mired in completely different ways of perceiving things.

OSOlga Stolyarova

How can someone who works practically twenty-four seven and eagerly waits for the weekend or a vacation learn to feel and find this rest within themselves? Is there some practice or exercise? What could you recommend?

AVAlexander Volchek

Attention, of course. One of the main things is attention, and setting yourself certain tasks in how you direct it. Rudolf Steiner has a very good daily exercise with particular points of attention. When you talk to someone, watch your speech. Are you speaking in a manipulative mode, or saying only what truly needs to be said? Pay attention to how you listen. When you listen to someone, are you trying to truly hear what they are saying? Or are you listening for what you want to hear and trying to change it through manipulation? Those are the kinds of practices I was talking about that you can do every day. I discuss a great deal on my YouTube channel and on Instagram, and there is an enormous amount of material on my website, in the V100 group, and in the Life group. Those are groups I run for human development. There are all kinds of practices, activities, and actions on my Telegram channel too. Again, everything I talk about is aimed at helping people expand their perception and develop the ability to know their next step. To know your next step, you need to learn to listen to the world.

Observe your thoughts: what do you think about other people, and how are those thoughts formed? Is there a constant jumble in your head, or can you see where particular thoughts come from? Does it happen automatically, without any awareness? Does your day simply pass in a flash, without you being conscious of it? Or are you as aware as possible, including with each person and at different moments throughout the day? There is a whole range of actions you can examine and observe. These may sound like simple things—though they are not simple; I have mentioned very important things. Doing them is enough to move toward an incredibly balanced state. But, Olya, you need to do them for your whole life. You asked what simple practice there is. This is a very simple practice, but it has to be done for life. People do not want to do something for life. Here is an interesting thing: I have a number of practices I have committed to for life. They may change in some ways, but fundamentally I am calm about that. I can simply say, “I will do this exercise for the rest of my life.”

Or, “I will treat my wife this way for the rest of my life,” or “I will wear something for life,” or do something else for life. Can you take on lifelong tasks? How does someone relate to that commitment? You might say to me, “Alexander, what if you had to plant twenty plants a week like this for the rest of your life? How would you feel about that?” Completely calmly. If it needs doing, it needs doing. For life—yes, I will do it for life. That is the problem when someone is waiting for rest, waiting for some situation: they want to escape the present day. Their present day is not all hardship. There are times when a place is particularly interesting and you feel attached to it. I also look forward to trips or particular places from time to time. I am human too, but I try to observe that and not get carried away with it. Try not to exalt it; observe it and see it. For two days now, my son has been coming up to me saying, “There are this many hours left.” This morning he came up and said, “Four hours until we leave,” and so on.

He is counting the hours. I am not. But that does not mean this trip with him is some kind of torment for me. Not at all. I am actually going with complete joy, and there are many aspects I look forward to as well. At the same time, I have different things going on inside me, and I may worry about certain things, such as the internet, as I mentioned. Will I have an internet connection or not? At the gathering I went to, there were people working on particular projects. At some point in a conversation, when you say something that does not fit their view of reality, they start arguing and trying to prove a different perspective to you. It is very interesting to see how capable a person is of stepping back and shifting toward hearing other possibilities in life, instead of fixating on their own perception and proving it right. That is a very interesting aspect: being able to hear. Often in life you only need to hear a little, but first you have to want to.

You have to want to step back from your personality, from yourself. Want to step back. Then life can give you a great deal. A great deal. But if you want rest for yourself, results for your own personality, everything only for yourself, that is a very difficult state. Many people will not like hearing this. They will not watch a video like this under any circumstances, because they want a magic pill, or manipulation, or achievements for themselves. In effect, there is a huge sector of the world telling people how to gain benefits for themselves. And—

In spiritual descriptions, this is called the dark worlds. That is the only name for it; it is not called anything else. Self-interest: gaining something for yourself through other people. It is enslaving other people, manipulating them, arranging things so they bring benefits to you. That is what it is called.

OSOlga Stolyarova

You just said that to understand your next step, you need to learn to hear the world. That seems to sharply contradict what is being promoted in society today. Many people say the opposite: that first of all, you need to learn to hear yourself. I would like to understand this. What does it mean, then, to hear or listen to the world?

AVAlexander Volchek

The most important thing is to know yourself. Truly know yourself. That does not mean knowing your personality; it means knowing yourself completely as a spiritual being and moving toward the purpose of that spiritual being. A spiritual being’s purposes are not tied to the goals of your personality, especially the goals of your current incarnation—or what you consider the goals of this life: marriage, some achievement, a job, professional fulfillment, and so on. It is not about those things. When people say “hear yourself,” they very often mean hearing your ego, your own wants and needs. You can become very confused by that. Of course you need to hear yourself, tirelessly. But what exactly are you hearing within yourself? It is the same with listening to other people. Some people should be listened to, and what they say should be acted on. With others, you should hear what they say and conclude, “That is absolutely not what I should do.” The question is whether you can hear another person and understand who is telling the truth and who is not. Notice the paradox here. It is difficult, and you can get confused. On one hand, you need to learn to listen to other people, hear them, and agree with their actions. On the other, there are many people you should absolutely not listen to or follow.

Look at how much people say. You might immediately respond, “Wait, here is someone saying I should do A, and someone else saying I should do Z in the same situation. Whom do I choose? I cannot listen to both, or refuse to listen to both.” The question is hearing the truth and understanding who conveys it. It is about listening to and hearing the world correctly. It is a whole complex of things, a very difficult one. That is the direction to move in. Again, this is what I discuss in a great deal of my material. Moreover, only you can learn it, follow it, and do it. You can learn it only through your own development. Nobody will ever take you by the hand and lead you there personally. Never. Only you can get there yourself. There can be help and support, useful channels, stories, people, trips, or something else. But whether you get there is your choice. It is no accident that some people choose darkness and others choose light—even if we divide things that way, although I am not inclined to make that division.

If we do make that division, there is a reason those choices exist. A person has a choice. Some choose to kill and enslave other people. Some choose to put themselves above another person. Others choose to put someone else’s life above their own. Such people exist, and they are the ones to learn from. For many people, though, that is unthinkable. They will say, “Are you sick or something? I would never do that.” They will not believe you do it. They will think you are manipulating them, because they manipulate others themselves. If someone manipulates people and lives a lie, how can they believe anyone else? They will not watch that person. They will be afraid—afraid of being burned by it. Many people are afraid of that, because they would have to confront reality in a conversation or interaction. Confronting reality is hard when someone tells you the truth straightaway. Imagine, for example, you are building a business, and someone says, “It will not work for you. It is immediately obvious it will not work.” Interestingly, I was observing many people again yesterday, looking at whether they would manage to do what they were attempting.

Sometimes you can immediately see that a person will not succeed. I approach that calmly and neutrally; it is simply a perception I have. First, I tried to note it for myself so I can see in a year or two how things turned out, if I happen to meet the person again. I also tried to convey as much loving energy as I could so that things would work out for them: in terms of true development, that they might have the strength and wisdom to remain human, to feel sound and calm. I tried to convey some things in words too. But the person will not ask me, “Will I succeed or not?” for one simple reason: they would have to encounter my answer. And that could throw them off balance. That is why many people start arguing or enter into discussions. Yet you can see it immediately. Still, it is their path, their choice. Everything will close down for everyone eventually. What does succeeding or failing mean? What difference does it make whether you fail to launch or fail to keep going for fifty years? Perhaps it works for ten years, and then you die. Or you launch but do not make any money.

Or you launch and make money, but die before you receive it. And so on. Imagine the happiness, right? People say, “You will start a business, and everything will be great.” Someone launches a business and receives shares. They hold them, do not sell, keep accumulating. Then suddenly they die. That is all. Perhaps they had been saying it was for their family too, yet end up leaving the family nothing. Maybe they gave the money to someone else, or it disappeared somewhere. The range of possibilities is very broad and very complex in each individual life. It is important for each of us to learn to sense, see, know, and understand these things in our own life. By the way, I lead a meditation every Friday. It is about truly and clearly connecting with yourself, finding yourself. I will certainly give you an opportunity to come much closer to yourself. If you want to take part in the meditations live, come to my Telegram channel. That is where the links to live Zoom sessions are shared. The link to my Telegram channel is also in this video’s description.

OSOlga Stolyarova

At the beginning, you said that rest also involves noticing whether your actions or your wish to rest create problems for other people. I would like to clarify that too. How does this concern for the comfort of those close to us—or however we might describe it—relate to our ability to relax and feel rested?

AVAlexander Volchek

The strength you gain when you truly help other people—not to rest, not to gain something for yourself, but simply because this is a person who needs help—is incomparable. It is extremely difficult to generate that kind of restorative energy on your own. What comes from other people when you really bring something beneficial into the world and into their lives is incomparable. Of course, if you set yourself the goal of helping two hundred people to gain power and strength, develop yourself, and become more powerful, it will not work that way. You need to understand that you cannot conceal that motive. You cannot hide your true intention, your true desire, within cause and effect. You cannot fool the system. Can the system be fooled somehow? There are many techniques that supposedly do that, but those are very particular mechanisms. So, through helping other people—the more help you give—the more steady and calm you will feel each day. As a consequence, you will be able to recover calmly every day.

I remember someone saying to me, “Listen, Sasha, every day you seem completely renewed. There is never a day, no matter how tired you were or where you worked...” After all, there are so many things you can do. You get physically tired; you can even overload your brain. Yet the next day, it feels as if nothing had happened. Even if you sometimes get so tired that you become worked up and cannot let other people get close to you, the next day it is as though nothing happened. You are completely reset, have reconsidered and processed all the situations, and are in a state of awareness. That is an important state to strive for and move toward. But again, not for your own well-being. You do it because that is what needs to be done in the world. Only because it needs to be done. That is the difficulty, because it is possible to act that way. In that situation, you clearly understand that you do many things whose results you will never receive in this lifetime.

But people do not just want to receive the results in this lifetime. They want them now. They want—

They want to receive them now. They want everything quickly. They do not want to take a slightly broader view of the chain of things they will experience. They look at the whole situation in terms of what they should do so that they, first of all, feel good, or achieve something along those lines. But why do they not want to confront the reality of what will happen? They are not fully ready to be open to the fact that things could unfold in any way. That is very difficult. You understand why: you have to be ready to be told something you will not like. Take someone who goes to an astrologer to learn their future. I am not an astrologer, but a person who goes to one is, in effect, going in search of a good future. That is certainly true of modern Western people, and many Eastern people too—by now, most of them. They go to find out what good things will happen and how to improve those good things, rather than asking what the right course of their life should be. Everything is built around harmonizing unfavorable aspects and so on.

That is a slightly different approach from asking what the right movement through life is for you specifically, as a person—how things should unfold as you move forward. Who says those aspects will not continue for the next fifty years? Who says they will not, or that they will not intensify? There is a film called Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio. In it, they move from one dream into another, going deeper. One of the main ideas is to plant a particular feeling in another person, so that it matures and grows inside them. The film shows them planting a certain state in one of the main characters they interact with, and that state keeps developing. In the same way, you can plant within yourself a true desire for life, an understanding that the world is spiritual, and love for people, and grow it like a seed. Or you can sow a seed of fear that develops and grows like a cancerous tumor, until the person cannot find a single moment of life without being afraid.

There are many people like that, a huge number. It is an obsession they cannot get rid of, and it is very hard. Many people do not have the strength to resolve such things. For many, it is an abyss they cannot cross. They need support. Life often provides a great deal of support; some do not receive it, and some have to live through the experience. There are reasons for that too. The point here is not why someone received it or how it happened. People immediately begin looking for causes: “Why is this happening? I am such a good person. Why is it happening to me?” The point is to learn to perceive it, to see it, and not to cultivate it in other people either. I think that film depicts very well how this feeling is created: something has been developed inside you without your even knowing it. Politics works the same way, as do many forms of social manipulation and many companies. They develop a particular theme, and you begin to think it is true. It becomes true for you; you think it is real. “Listen, if it is being broadcast everywhere—in songs, on television, by the most famous people—then it must be true.”

It may be a complete lie. A complete lie. In fact, that is often what happens. Later, it turns out that it was entirely false, untrue—just an illusion someone described and a person believed.

OSOlga Stolyarova

There is a very well-known saying: “Love what you do, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Many people interpret it to mean that if your work is a true passion, it will not feel like hard labor. That means you can work without rest and without worrying about burnout; the question of needing rest will not even arise. Does a person really need to find some particular calling like that, or does it work differently?

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, we need to examine what is meant. If you come to love work—what does the person mean by work? If they mean something burdensome that you need a rest from, like what we discussed about needing a rest from life, then that is how the idea will be conveyed. I have not spoken with Confucius, and I will not be able to. I do not know exactly what he meant or what nuances he had in mind. What is the point of pulling out a phrase and debating it? Although perhaps there is sometimes a point in looking at it and spending time with it. On the other hand, you need to avoid falling into the idea that all you have to do is find interesting work you love, and then everything will be fantastic because you will not have to work. I do not think it is right to say that a person should not have to work. Again, he was clearly talking about something else. Confucius clearly did not mean that you would no longer have to work. He meant how you would relate to living your life. How would you relate to living your life?

How do you relate to it? Do you see work as life, or as something in which you are not living? This is very important. There is an American phrase: “What do you do for a living?” What do you do for life? It is interesting because you can interpret it in different ways. They mean, “Where do you work?” So are they saying, “Where do you work for life,” with everything else somehow not being life, while there is work? Or do they mean, “Where do you work and earn money so you can live afterward?” You can approach the phrase in different ways, discuss it and look at it very differently. In any case, there is a separation: life is something else; life is divided. Can we bring life together and say that lying on an ocean beach, attending the funeral of someone close to you, sitting in a meeting at work, looking for a job or leaving one, a person being born or dying—all of it is life, the same life, simply with different sequences of events? Whether you have sixteen jobs or no jobs, whether you need to work or do not, whether you depend on money or are independent of it, all of it is life. Different circumstances simply unfold within it.

People just want those circumstances to be wonderful, interesting, and enjoyable for themselves. Notice that. Enjoyment means different things: someone enjoys reading a book, while someone else hates it. For one person, reading ten pages is hell. Someone enjoys spending time with a child; for someone else, it is hell. They do not understand what to do. They start shaking when they are with the child. Different mechanisms and blocks switch on. They are not with the child from a place of fully living the experience and having inner strength. You can often see this in families, in the way mothers or fathers interact. It is visible to the naked eye.