Where Is the Line Between Love and Making Excuses? | What Is True Love?

AVAlexander Volchek

Can you love someone who has hurt or betrayed you, destroyed something, or done something terrible? Where is the boundary between love, forgiveness, responsibility, and the point when you need to stop interacting? In this episode, we explore one of the hardest subjects in human life: how to love a person without excusing their actions. We will discuss why people excuse themselves on the grounds of fatigue, their personality, circumstances, or outside energies, and why none of that removes their responsibility. Most importantly, can you see a person beyond their mistake without supporting the evil that has manifested through them? I am Alexander Volchek. On this channel I discuss expanding perception, which naturally leads to growth in a person's life, relationships, work, and inner state. I think that after this video, your view of what love is may change considerably.

Can you love another person? In essence, you need to love another person—any person. As I said about the things happening around us: there are wars in the world now. There have been wars, there are wars, and there will be wars in the coming decades. You can rail against this, or you can look from a higher perspective and understand it as part of the cause and effect of human development, under all these circumstances. I am not excusing anyone in any way. People die. That is very bad, but it is part of the cause and effect of human development. Even if you begin by looking at yourself: if people close to you were killed, why did that happen to you? Or if people around you are killing others, why did that happen? Trying to stand apart or make comparisons in terms of your own self is only a desire to save your own personality. The one thing you can do is truly look at other people from the understanding that absolutely anyone can be loved. That is why I have said, say, and will keep saying: this is one of the best exercises in a person's life. You can make it your only practice and do nothing else. It requires no meditations, retreats, trips, practices, or clever teachings.

It is to observe every day how you act toward another person, what you feel toward them, what you experience in relation to them. Is there love? Look for love for another person. Look for it in every glance, conversation, and encounter. Look for love even when you need to uphold certain social norms or a social contract. There is such a thing as a social contract, right? When we meet, there is a contract. Someone takes a job, hires someone else, sells someone a product, or buys something. There is a contract and certain agreements. You have agreed on particular terms. But even within those terms, remember that you need to feel love for the other person. Remember that. It is so important, so powerful and necessary, regardless of what that person has done. There are reasons for what they did. That is not an excuse. But if you understand the chain of events, you understand that the person does not even know what they are doing. When you look at the chain, most of the time people have no idea; they do not understand what is happening. They simply do not understand. Is it easy to accept that?

It is not easy. I think I have mentioned this in some of our meetings. About ten years ago—eight years ago—a horoscope was made for my wife. The person in India who made it told me about certain aspects of her behavior. It mattered to me then. I rely on a different point of support now, but I will explain. He said there were things she would do that she did not control, that were not her wish. That became a very powerful motivation for me. When she acted, or acts, inappropriately, remembering that information could calm me down. Not excuse her—that is not the question. I could look from a higher perspective and calm down. Why? When a person does something good or bad—I lead a great many spiritual meetings, and people always ask, “Did this person do it consciously?” Everyone wants to know. Did they know about it or not? Everyone wants to understand whether they knew. I tell everyone, “What difference does it make whether they knew or not?

“They did it, and they are responsible for it.” Everyone wants to use knowing or not knowing as an excuse. Knowing that planets influenced this person, that something external affected their state, seems to excuse them. It is like women's menstrual cycles: society excuses women's behavior on the basis of the cycle. It excuses it. With all due respect, I always say that this is a narrowing of perception, and you need to remain in a state of expanded perception. Why, then, do you not excuse men? If I go to work for fourteen hours, come home angry in the evening, and snap at everyone, why not excuse me on that basis? But society does excuse it. Society says, “He worked. He is tired. Give him a beer.” Society excuses it, but you cannot use that as an excuse. Of course physical states exist. If you plunged a knife into my leg with all your strength right now, or a bear appeared in front of me, I would behave inappropriately. My physical or psychophysical reaction would be more than I could withstand.

My physical body would not withstand it; it would start behaving inappropriately. But the psyche can behave inappropriately too, affecting the physical body and your consciousness even more than a direct physical influence. It can happen in different ways—in very different ways. So there are external energies that led a person to certain actions. In fact, most of the things you do in life are uncontrolled energies. Notice that I used the word “external.” That may give someone the impression that they are not responsible, and that astrology, for instance, is an external energy. But it is external only in relative terms. Look carefully: on the one hand, these are external energies. Someone was born at a particular moment in the planets' positions, and all the planets move. Everything moves and shifts. The sun moves, and we all move. We are always moving, not only revolving around the sun. The sun itself moves, heading, you might say, toward the center of the Universe along a particular trajectory, shifting, and everything else moves relative to it too. But human beings develop. In the spiritual world, everything is constantly developing: every planet, every spiritual being, every system. God, in essence, develops. God. That is very important. The whole divine hierarchy develops. Everyone develops; everyone is in motion.

Everyone. Not only particular spiritual beings or dark hierarchies—Lucifer developing, or Ahriman developing. All the divine forces themselves develop. The spiritual beings of the planets develop. Everything is in motion, in a state of change. Here, by “development,” I mean change, not a positive or negative quality. I mean change. So if a person was born at a particular time, on the one hand, supposedly they are not responsible for that. But in fact, they chose the time and date of their birth and their entry into a particular family. They chose it as a spiritual being together with other spiritual hierarchies. And even where they did not choose—if someone says they did not choose it—there is a karmic basis. All right, it is a karmic basis: they took certain actions that brought them to a particular state, and then take further actions. So why should you not love them? Then the question becomes: whom do you love more, your mother or another woman? Your child or someone else's child? That is exactly what this is about. Olya, look: that is exactly what this is about. The point is not what bad thing someone did. I always give this example.

Whom would you choose to save: your own child or someone else's? There is no answer, because “Whom would you choose?” is a foolish question. But you do have your own point of support. If you immediately say, “I would choose my own,” you are perceiving truth falsely. Perceiving truth falsely. You cannot make that choice at all. You have no right to it. You have no right to it. If you relate to people with love, you have no right to it. Someone will say, “But a blood relative is still a blood relative.” There: you have separated one person from another on the basis of blood. And if that blood relative did something not very good, while the other person was positively saintly, whom would you choose? Someone says, “If it was not very good, I would still choose my own.” What if they did something very bad? Whom would you choose then? And what does “very bad” mean? It means something a person has decided is very bad. One person thinks having a glass of wine is very bad. Another thinks it is good and normal to drink—

Normal to drink a bottle of wine every day, but heroin is bad, or vodka is bad. They say, “Wine is good for you. Vodka, not so much.” Someone says, “Vodka is bad—vodka is fine, but cocaine is bad.” Someone says, “Cocaine is fine, but heroin is bad.” Someone says, “Heroin is fine, but killing a person is bad.” That is the society we live in. And someone says, “Selling heroin is fine.” Olya, not using heroin—selling it to other people. Selling it! These are shadows. Valery Lomovtsev has this concept of “shadows.” These are shadows of the third order. There are different kinds. I will not go into it now and contradict it, or not contradict it, or perhaps describe it incorrectly. But Lomovtsev describes these shadows in an extraordinary way. It is an incredible force. It is worth reading about. In his Practical Worldview books, he describes shadows and worlds: worlds as a positive phenomenon, shadows as a negative one. Drug dealing is one of these shadows. But there is a higher level: someone who does not deal drugs directly but creates the conditions, makes decisions, and allows or disallows the drug trade. Those are shadows. Those are shadows. They do not touch it themselves, but they authorize, choose, and make decisions.

These are high-level world politicians, powerful politicians, major financial structures, and various organizational structures that control all of it. We went to Las Vegas over the weekend and put on Casino, with Robert De Niro, in the background. A friend was with me. He said, “The people shown in this movie are nobodies in terms of society's financial system.” They are portrayed as rich: expensive cars, gold, luxury, money. But they are nobodies. The mafia leaders, the mafia bosses, are nobodies. The company owners above them are nobodies too. There are higher structures, particular corporations or people who make all these decisions, because it is a matter of power. As soon as I started talking about shadows, power entered the picture. Olya, look: can you love every person? Everything else pales when we get into subjects such as power and shadows above even the second or third level. It immediately becomes very serious. So you should not even ask yourself, “Can I, or should I, love someone who has done a particular thing?” You should. You can. It is incredibly important for saving humanity, because otherwise you are fighting the wrong ones. You are fighting the wrong ones.

A person cannot kill someone else purely out of their own personality and personal desire. They cannot do it. They would be under the power of particular energies; they cannot do it themselves. But as a spiritual being, a person can personally enter a state of love for everyone, within their own system. It is an extraordinary state. Do you see? An extraordinary difference. A person cannot kill someone on their own. But they can exist in love. They can truly live that love. They can do it honestly, genuinely, in truth. True love is not about making excuses; the two are not connected. I was talking about people excusing themselves. When you love another person, you love them. When someone does something bad, they do not need to be in that space of excuses. They need to understand that they are doing something bad, something wrong, or that their perception is narrowed because they are tired. Recognize it: you are tired right now, physically unstable, unsettled, unable to withstand things. Hear that and acknowledge it from within your own system. Recently my wife came to me in the morning and said something about one of the children not saying hello.

I said, “Listen, whatever day of the week it is, whatever state we are in—whether we are the best of friends or in a conflict—when I see you in the morning, if I say hello to you, you say hello back. If I do not say hello, you do not say hello to me.” She said, “I cannot think in the morning. That is how I feel.” But that is precisely the point: you have to try. The next morning I came into the bathroom, and she said, “Hello.” To me it felt almost like a jab, because it was not natural. But good for her. That is what making an effort means. Why did she do it the next day? She made an effort, Olya. Why did the person do it the next day? They tried. If a person keeps trying, these things will disappear. You have to try. I remember a female friend of a close friend of mine saying, “Sasha, I get up in the morning and cannot do anything about myself. I want to destroy my husband. Until I have coffee and something to eat, I cannot control myself. It is impossible.” She asked, “What can I do about it?” Make an effort for the other person. Make an effort for the other person, and for yourself too. For yourself.

Do you understand that you are destroying yourself every day? Destroying yourself. Make an effort. I want to tell you that this is an extraordinary way to save yourself: if you feel that way every morning, try. Try for your own sake. Try for your own sake, please. Try! Look at it and see that this behavior is inappropriate. Try to understand it, look at it, study it. There are so many ways to investigate it now. Maybe you ate too much before going to bed, or the house was too warm at night. What happened? Why is it like this? Perhaps you need to sleep alone in a room. Try to resolve it. Honestly, truly try. If you try, things will be all right. Things will be good. Then it is not a matter of being tired after work or having your period. Those things explain something. It is natural and normal that if I go into the garden and dig holes for four hours, I will be physically drained and may react a certain way when someone asks me to dig one more hole. But if I am trying, if I am trying, the world will bring everything into alignment; things will line up. It is natural for a person to be tired.

It is natural for a person to have impairments. But that is not an excuse, Olya. I also want to say that there are a great many people in the world who are unwell in how they perceive life and in the energies moving within them. We are used to excusing the visible things science has shown us, or things written in some book. So categories such as ADHD were introduced, or people were divided into choleric and melancholic types, creative and systematic types, thereby excusing their behavior. But that equates a person with a material substance, a bolt or a saw, rather than with a human being. They are equated with an object and told they have a particular property: if you use them the wrong way, you will cut or hurt yourself. These categories were introduced as excuses, among other things. Then we see that rationale break down. For example, in America over the past two years, with the new administration, this has been discussed a great deal: there are fifty laws supporting people of different races, but not white people. And, as people say, the people most harmed in society over the past ten years have been white men.

On the one hand, there is some truth to this in terms of different people being demeaned in different societies, social strata, and countries. On the other hand, it is inappropriate. We see it on religious grounds, when people say, “If you do not pray in a particular way, you should be killed.” Or that if you belong to a different religion, you should be excluded, expelled from the country, or stripped of citizenship. That is a false belief, something false. Truly false. I am telling you truthfully: it is false. That brings something very important to your attention, Olya: you really need to love a person and come to know that love. Love for every person, regardless of their actions, with an understanding of who they are, what energies work within them, and what it is you are supporting and loving. Do you love the person, or do you love those energies? A great many people in the world love energies.

For example, someone makes a trillion dollars, and everyone immediately listens to them. Everyone immediately listens to everything every billionaire says. But people turn a blind eye to the fact that this person may have ten wives, use drugs, visit particular kinds of establishments, or destroy other people. So what do they love? They love certain energies. Love the person, not those energies. The person. You do not love someone for their money or the balance in their account, or for their adornments. You love their spiritual substance, their structure. You love that person, truly love them. Then it is possible. Otherwise, it is impossible. You will always be living a lie. You will love your child for particular actions, and then they will do something you consider bad. There are things you consider bad by definition: killing another person, for example. But not everyone thinks so; some people readily support it. And there are things you consider bad such as a child breaking a cup at home. Or do you love this person and then interact with them, understanding that life has different social arrangements and that they might break a cup?

Can you scold them? Go ahead, scold them and explain the rules. But the love does not disappear. Can there be love that is independent of these social events? That is the question a person should ask themselves and observe every day. If there is anger or irritation inside, look for the reasons it is happening, not excuses. A person will deceive themselves. We filmed another video together today, and I said that I am in a particular setting, in a space brimming with life, where supposedly a person should feel incredibly harmonious. But a person can feel absolutely terrible in that space. They can even excuse it by saying, “I feel bad because this place is too good.” We hear that often: “You have too much good in your life. You need something bad; you need to immerse yourself in something bad.” Some people immerse themselves in something very good and become even more truthful; their love grows. Other people immerse themselves in something good, and their ego grows, because they have the cause-and-effect connections for living through that structure of energy and that karmic experience.

So a person's task is to distinguish truth from an incredible number of social, mental, and scientific actions, events, and preconceptions. To distinguish it, just as you would see light and love in every person, regardless of their race, blood, connection to you, or actions—regardless of anything. Give that person love. Give any person love. Give any person love. That is the truth.

OSOlga Stolyarova

But love does not mean interaction. You can love someone and not interact with them.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course, as in the preview for this video. Of course. Olya, once again: what do you mean by love? That is the whole point. Can a man love another woman more than his wife? Look, that is precisely it. Taken as a whole, a person should love everyone equally. Even if I use the word “should,” in quotation marks, of course: equally. Beyond that, you have different experiences with a particular person, a different experience of life. But to say that a woman loves this man more and that one less because of something is to divide people into different strata. Of course I have one mother. I am not making divisions; I understand that I have one mother, but I want to relate to all women with the same love I have for my mother. All of them. That is wonderful. I have two daughters. I want to relate to all children and all women equally, the way I do to my daughters. And to relate to my daughters with the same love I have for my mother and my wife, and for you. Equally. To try to relate equally, remembering this.

When you remember and know, “This is the truth,” everything is all right. Then I act and make different decisions. Social decisions. Yes, I have blood ties with them, hereditary and psychophysical ties, and so on. Our experiences differ. But I have a great deal of shared experience with you too. I have spent a lot of time discussing different things with you. I have spent far more time discussing life with you than with my wife, my mother, or my daughters. Should I diminish that experience or exaggerate it? For what purpose? What do we want to compare? Do we want to compare it with blood kinship, or with someone being a wife or a mother? Are you sure? Do not compare. The whole point is that comparison is meaningless. It is absurd. You do not even need to ask yourself that question. Remember love for the person. But again, remember that loving a person is not because of shared experience or because you have spent a lot of time with them. It is not even known whom I have spent or will ever spend the most time with, because life is not limited to this life, or to past lives.

That is very important. There will be many more intersections in the world and across lives. At the very least, there are still years and decades of life ahead. For some, perhaps years; for others, decades; for others, days. What difference does it make? From the perspective of the spiritual world, you and I also have spiritual interaction. Imagine: every night a person falls asleep, and their astral body and their “I” separate from the physical and etheric bodies. Their astral body and their “I”, the part of their spiritual system that constitutes them, live in the spiritual world. They interact with other spiritual systems, among others. With whom do they interact more there: their wife, their daughters, you, or other women? That is a big question from the perspective of the spiritual system. That division does not exist there. It would seem not. What division? There is a division there, but it is on a higher level. Of course, if society explained and showed this to everyone from their very first day of life, day after day, and guided them toward it, people's attitudes would be completely different. But parents do not benefit from doing that. Parents want their children to love only them. Many parents want that—not all, of course. But they want their children definitely to love them and treat them in a special way.

They might let their children leave a neighbor's home uncleaned, but in their own home, the children have to clean.