How to Hear What Could Change Your Life

AVAlexander Volchek

A person can be told the same thing for years. Each time they reply, “Yes, I hear you. I understand everything.” Yet they keep living within the same system and making the same decisions. Time passes, and they find themselves in the same situation again. They feel they tried to resolve the problem, tried to let it go, but they never took what they were told as an opportunity to see what was happening differently. Why can someone keep saying they understand everything while not hearing the other person? Why do we sometimes begin to understand only after we face the consequences? And how can we truly listen without missing an opportunity for our own development? You think you tried to let the problem go, tried to resolve the issue and listen, but you did not. You kept nurturing the idea, holding on to it. Imagine someone working with me who asks, “Sasha, what should I do in this situation?” I say, “Wait a second. These situations are not what matters in your life. What matters is how you communicate with your wife, for example. Or how you communicate with your employees.

Or how you feel toward other people every morning.” The person says, “No, that does not interest me.” People say, “Stop being angry with your mother, your contractor, your employee, or your partner.” The person says, “Yes, of course I will think about it, but…” And they pay no attention. They do not take it as the opportunity we were talking about. I gave you this advice for several years, almost every time we met. Every time, you cut it off: “I hear you, Sasha, but that is probably not the problem. There are other problems, other circumstances.” After several years, you face serious resistance arising from all of this. Imagine someone raising a child. People tell them, “Do not behave that way. Do not try to make your child get straight A's. Do not try to make them the smartest, or make them develop a skill you do not have yourself.” The person says, “Okay, I will listen to your videos and go to some counseling, but I will not pay attention to what is really happening.” Time passes, the child grows up, and a problem emerges in the relationship.

People see the problem and realize, “This is the consequence of that.” What is most interesting is that when I tell you now that you did not listen to me for several years, did not hear a very clearly described mechanism, you still do not hear it. You do not understand what I mean. How can I explain it? That energy is not open to you. Take the example I gave about a child, or the partnerships I know of where people endlessly direct negativity at each other. The key is to think about another person in the same way you think about yourself. Until you have done that, you can go on endlessly saying that you understand everything. You can even live in the fantasy that you are aware of what the other person is telling you. But I mean something entirely different, qualitatively different. There is always a price to pay for this. Always. There is always responsibility. The question is not whether the price is financial or not. It is paid because that is the proper course of karma.

What is supposed to happen in your life happens. What is not supposed to happen does not. That is your life. That is why I do not even try to fix it or say anything. But there are moments when a person can hear something and transform an experience through another person's freedom. When I give you advice, or gave it before, I give it from freedom. I did not want you to beat someone else. I did not want someone else to beat you. I did not want another person's victory. I gave the advice from freedom, as a true understanding of the situation: what to do and what not to do, which lesson a person needs to live through and which they do not. Imagine two people interacting within a company who have a conflict. Or two business partners in conflict. Let's consider a case separately from family life. Two partners work together, and both do bad things: deceive, manipulate, defend their own interests, and act from their own positions.

That is usually what happens. One wants to build a business to satisfy childhood wants. The other does it out of fear that nothing will work out and they will not gain recognition, so they try to make money. Each is driven by a selfish motive. They have not sat down together and said, “Listen, I have this trauma. I endlessly want to make money because I worry it will run out.” The other says, “I have a trauma too. I need to show the whole world that everything works for me, and prove it to my wife. But we are running a business, and a business needs to make money. So let's first build a business that makes money and does not deceive its customers. Second, let's think about how to solve our own problems and take care of each other's concerns. Let's help you gain your wife's recognition. When we are together with her, I will tell her how great you are. And you will take care to remember that I am always worried about not having enough money in the future. Let's agree to do that and look after each other.”

But no, people act from their selfish motives. If two people are doing that and I were speaking to either of them, my only advice would be, “Stop acting from your selfish motives.” I would not be concerned with the other person. The only thing you can do is stop acting that way. They say, “But if I stop acting from selfish motives, the other person will carry on.” At least you will stop. At least you will stop disturbing the balance of life, the balance of the Universe. Stop acting from your selfish motives. If you want to build a business to win your wife's recognition, set aside that motive and shift your focus to the business making money and its customers being satisfied. Start thinking about the customers and the money in the company. That means thinking about the company, your partner, your employees, and yourself too, rather than just yourself. Start making rational decisions, and at the very least you will help the company; you will help everyone. But people do not want that. No, they do not. You tell them, “Do not do this in the business.”

They say, “No, what do you mean, we should not do it? We are going to do it because proving something matters more to us. We have dug our heels in. We came up with an idea, and we are going to implement it.” Like when you began telling me about your idea today. I said, “You will not make money from it.” I repeated it four times. You did not once ask, “Sasha, could you explain it to me, based on your experience and all the details?” Inside, your attitude is, “Be quiet. I do not want to know. I do not want to hear it.” Yet that was the best advice I gave you this morning: do not pursue this. You could say, “Great, Sasha. Thank you for telling me. I will go and do something else.” Or ask, “Could I rework this idea somehow so that it makes money?” I said, “If you are doing it for money, I have suggested another way this idea could help you make money.” But you do not like that. You want something else. You want the experience of doing something different.

I understand the situation: you want to plant trees in a desert, but they will not grow there because there is no water. I tell you, “There is no water.” You look at me and say, “What bullshit.” If you came back and said, “There is water. We brought it in, and I have a signed contract with people who spent a billion dollars bringing everything else into the desert. I just happen to be standing there at the right moment,” then fine. That is why ten thousand out of ten thousand and one startups fail. That is why the companies do not work out. Not even one percent succeed; far fewer do. That is why. How do we get people to start listening? Yesterday I filmed a video about this. I filmed a lot of videos, then picked up my iPhone and made a reel: stop fighting. Stop fighting. Endless conflicts with the people around you are really an endless conflict with yourself. Stop fighting. Stop this hatred. How much more can there be? How many people's lives are ruined by conflict?

People's lives, ruined by conflict. I am not even talking about the large-scale conflicts created by people in power. I mean ordinary things. So much is destroyed by conflict. Conflicts—most of them—begin with selfish motives, with not wanting to understand another person or other people, not wanting to let someone go. Let go when you are right, and when you are wrong. Work that out. It is an interesting point: how can you easily resolve a conflict? Let go, whether you are right or wrong. I have a separate episode where I examine compromise in detail: whether a person truly changes the way they act without violating truth, or simply gives themselves up while continuing to act from a selfish motive. “Compromise” is an incredibly interesting word. Watch that episode; the link will be in the description. Someone visited me a couple of weeks ago who was involved in a very serious conflict. I could see very serious energies there. I told them, “Your situation can be resolved fairly easily.” There are no unresolvable situations. A situation is unresolvable if you have killed someone and are hiding it from everyone. The person thinks, “Oh, it must be unresolvable because when people find out, they will put you in prison.”

No. It is unresolvable because you cannot bring that person's life back. Even then, from the perspective of the laws of cause and effect in the spiritual world, it can be resolved. It does not mean that people who have killed someone can no longer develop as spiritual beings in spiritual realms. They can. There are certain limitations. But “limitation” is a relative term from the social world. They can develop. Even that issue can be resolved, although from the perspective of life it is a very serious one. Someone says, “The unresolvable situation is that I will be put in prison.” But that is a natural consequence. When you look at the task of letting go whether you are right or wrong, everything looks completely different. People reassess their values. Imagine a conflict between people that is just verbal. Then it reaches the point where someone has to pay a thousand dollars. The person sits there thinking, “Could I go back to the verbal conflict and not get into it? I was not planning to spend a thousand dollars.” They no longer want the verbal conflict; now their issue is the thousand dollars. Then the conflict goes further, and they are told, “You will face a restriction for ten years. You will not be able to leave the country, for example.” And this is someone who loves to travel.

They say, “Can I pay the thousand dollars and another five thousand on top, so I do not have this problem?” They are told, “Not anymore.” Then someone adds, “You will also be unable to see your child for the next five years.” They say, “Can you ban me from traveling abroad instead? I will pay the money, but let me keep seeing my child.” At that point, a great many other things no longer matter. Something more serious, something close at hand, becomes important. How did it all begin? With ego. It all began with ego. Can you find a balance with it? Why do I put it that way? Because you cannot get rid of ego. It is woven into all your physical and spiritual systems. It has penetrated your blood—your spiritual blood, not even your physical blood. Physical blood renews itself, after all. You should not even set yourself the task of removing it one hundred percent, because the world might say, “Then perhaps you will not be living here.” You would not need to live in this world if that were the case. But can you find a balance with it?

That is the question. You find balance under one condition: you accept that it exists and that you will have to live with it all your life. To live with it without being ruled by it, you will have to pay attention to it and make an effort throughout your life. Throughout your life, not for one day. This is not brushing your teeth or telling yourself to get up at eight or six in the morning. It is not doing a thirty-minute workout. It is constant, endless, daily work on how ego is present in you. Constantly. Not letting it loose to do whatever it wants; that will not work. It means watching how you act toward other people, how you act toward yourself, how you make decisions, and what thoughts arise about these things. This is the only way to resolve all the situations connected with the ego-structure.