Spiritual Practices: How to Avoid Harming Yourself ~ Spiritual Development

AGAnna Gurina

Sasha, I've collected the most common questions people ask about spiritual and energy practices. Some may seem absurd or irrelevant to you, but these are the things people are interested in and ask about. I'd like to go through them and hear your views.

AVAlexander Volchek

Mm-hmm.

AGAnna Gurina

Let's start. Can you harm yourself by doing spiritual and energy practices?

AVAlexander Volchek

“Spiritual and energy practices” is such a broad term. It is like asking whether you can build a house for one dollar. You can—by drawing it on a piece of paper. There is a house drawn on paper, a house made of modeling clay or Lego, and a hundred-story skyscraper. There is a huge difference between those houses. There is just as much difference between what people today mean by spiritual and energy practices. Can a person suffer some kind of harm in that field? Probably, because people today make up ideas about what spirituality is. If we regard spiritual practices as part of the material world—there is a material world, and spiritual practices exist within it—then, looking at them that way, there clearly are practices that can harm you. For example, people take certain substances and call it a spiritual practice because someone took that substance three thousand years ago. If we look at it from the position that there is a spiritual world, with the material world inside it, we must always understand that there are things beyond our awareness in the material world, and processes that people do not control.

So these processes can indeed lead to harm. What always matters is, first, whether you understand the framework you are starting from when you think about spiritual practices, and second, whether you understand what happens during the practice. Besides, harm is possible in anything. What is a spiritual practice? If there is a spiritual world with the material world inside it, even our conversation right now is a spiritual practice, because it is a lived experience. Someone may say, “Okay, but let's talk about something more specific. A person sitting in meditation, for instance.” What if someone is having lunch, switches off for ten minutes, then switches back on—is that meditation? Or can meditation never happen over lunch, only in a special room? What if someone walks into a store and suddenly sees something, or walks into a cave and sees something? Is it impossible in a store but bound to happen in a cave? What if another person touches them and some kind of energy passes through their whole body? Is that impossible if a family member or friend touches them?

But if the Dalai Lama touches them, then it can happen? What exactly is supposed to happen? What do we mean by this, and what is actually there? People can harm themselves anywhere, in absolutely anything. Can you harm yourself by opening a refrigerator? Of course. You might somehow pull it toward you and have it fall on you. All kinds of things can happen. Can you harm yourself by drinking this coffee? Of course—you could choke and die, for example. Or perhaps bite off a piece of the glass. There is a whole range of possibilities there, too.

AGAnna Gurina

Mm-hmm. Thank you. Now, the third eye. Does it exist? How do you open it? Can it be opened? It is a very popular subject among people interested in esotericism. Many talk about the ajna area in the middle of the forehead, which they say is responsible for clairvoyance and intuition. You can find lots of courses online on how, in seven days...

AVAlexander Volchek

How to open an eye in seven days.

AGAnna Gurina

The third eye, yes. And that brings up fears: is it dangerous? Could you lose your mind, and so on? What do you think about the third eye?

AVAlexander Volchek

First, when we discuss something like the third eye, we need to look at why we want to do this. If someone wants to broaden their vision, as you said, or perceive everything more widely, they need to look at what affects that vision. Does vision depend only on the third eye, or on something else as well? At least ask yourself that question. Or what kind of vision is the third eye supposed to give you, and of what exactly? When we ask this question—you've heard a lot about the third eye yourself, haven't you?

AGAnna Gurina

Yes, of course.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is a common question, something widely discussed on YouTube, and you've heard about it, too. The question to ask is: what actually is it? What sort of structure is it? How does it work? What are its advantages, disadvantages, and consequences? It is like beginning to see with your eyes. Is that positive? Yes. But if a person cannot see and does not understand what seeing means, giving them some sight may reveal things they are not ready for. For example, suppose the apartment next to yours is a drug den, or people are regularly being raped there, and you do not know. You run into the people who own it and exchange greetings: “How are you? What have you been up to?” You have a good relationship. Once you learn it is a drug den or that people are being raped there, you will not merely stop greeting them—you will be afraid even to walk past. You will develop a negative attitude toward it. So if you want to broaden your vision, the question is not about the third eye. It is why you want expanded vision in the first place.

You must understand that you will begin to perceive ranges of things you know nothing about, even in practical terms. There is a very strong rule in spiritual science: the more you see of the spiritual world, the less fear you must have. You cannot be afraid in the spiritual worlds. If you go deeply into spiritual perception—and that is what I am talking about—the understanding is that there is a spiritual world, and the material world is just one part of it. I mean perceiving what people are generally considered unable to perceive. You need to understand that you will start seeing things you must be prepared for. For instance, are you sure you want to see all the way through what will happen in your children's lives, or your own? You will inevitably encounter death. The question then is whether you will like that age, that process of dying, or those details of life. Are you sure you want to learn all those details now? That is one side of it.

There is another side that needs to be examined and understood in its own right: how does a person actually develop their perception? Is expanding perception really just opening the third eye and gaining some knowledge or clairvoyance? Or is it getting to know yourself and connecting with yourself more and more? The fundamental difference is the direction of movement. A person says, “There is a material world with a spiritual world inside it,” or, “There is a material world and some sort of spiritual world, but the material world is what really matters.” They want to acquire something that lets them look into that spiritual world, or off to the side. Once they get it, they say, “I am becoming stronger in the material world.” There is another framework, and it is important to consider it. There is a spiritual world, with the material world inside it, and you are a spiritual being in that spiritual world. What you currently perceive is not merely a small part of the spiritual world, but a small part of yourself as a spiritual being. The task is not to see or know more as a personality—as Alexander Volchek or Anya Gurina. It is to connect with yourself and get to know yourself through that connection.

As you connect with yourself, you are already an extraordinary spiritual being. Every person is a vast spiritual structure. But what is the difference? In the framework I am describing—connecting with yourself—the goal is not to develop the personality called Alexander Volchek. It is to connect with my spiritual being so I can discover how that being develops. Those are different things. As I connect with my spiritual being, my perception will automatically expand, because otherwise I will not be able to perceive it. Naturally, that expansion will broaden my perception of everything that happens. By perception I mean all the different forms of intuition, inspiration, imagination, clairvoyance, images in color, forms, thought-images, knowledge, hearing, understanding, and holding different worlds—worlds within time and beyond time. There is so much. But the purpose is not to build up my personality so I can read the future and buy the right stocks or the right business. Why do people usually want to read the future? What would you want to do if you could read it? You probably would not want to learn your child's fate. As soon as I started telling you various things about that fate, you would say, “Sasha, I don't need to know that.”

Because then you would have to live with it. Your perception, your current feelings, and how you would live with that knowledge would be very particular. Usually, people want to learn certain things—and, more specifically, good things. They want to know how to buy stocks and profit from them. They do not want to find out whether they will go bankrupt or make money. Someone tells them, “You will go bankrupt.” They say, “No, you got something wrong. Can I speak to the next person?” The next person says, “You will go bankrupt.” “Can I try someone else?” “You will go bankrupt. You will go bankrupt.” It is very difficult to engage with that. Or, “Your children will die before you.” Useful information, but rather particular, isn't it? And on it goes. Or you will develop a particular illness...

...and spend ten years in a coma, or feel increasingly unhappy. What is it you want to learn: events, or your own lived experience? What difference do all these external parameters make—the number of children, wives, a wife or husband, deaths, money in your account, trips? What matters is how you feel at that moment. Do you feel fulfilled, joyful, happy, whole, and in harmony? Or do you feel afraid? What difference does it make if you earn money while simultaneously worrying that you will lose it, that someone will steal it, or that you have eight hundred sixty-seven lawsuits, or whatever else? What do you want to know? Do you want to map out the whole picture in your head using this third eye? Do you understand how many interconnected details you would have to learn? You would be learning them endlessly. What is happening to this at that moment? What is happening here, and here, and here? There is not enough time to find it all out. You will never see the complete picture that way, because if you want a complete picture of twenty years, you will have to spend twenty years seeing it.

When will you live? Perceiving twenty years at once and knowing them simultaneously is a different kind of perception. You say, “I simply know.” Someone says, “But you haven't lived through those twenty years.” “But I know.” That is a different perception. The question is what a person means by it. There is usually an enormous, staggering amount of manipulation surrounding the third eye. Certain areas of the body do express particular structures and states. You can press on them, direct energy or lasers at them, do whatever you like—but things may only get worse, not better. At the same time, there are many people who have done nothing and perceive both past and future. They have done nothing, and they do not even talk about it. People always want some fascinating energy or something to rely on that they do not actually understand. Let me put it simply: you've heard a lot about the third eye. Tell me its structure, its nature, how it worked before. What is its structure and nature? How does it work?

You would immediately say, “I know absolutely nothing about it.” So what is it? An organ or an energy organ? In which bodily structure does it exist—the physical body or the etheric body? Are you awakening something physical, etheric, or astral? Or are you awakening nothing at all and establishing some kind of connection? What exactly is happening? Does everyone have it? Is it always dormant, or not? Is it partly awakened or fully awakened? What does fully awakened mean? Are there just two states, zero and one? Vision is not simply zero or one. It has many different states. There seems to be a zero in the case of a blind person, but even there you can consider the other things that person perceives. Beyond that, there are different kinds of vision. What are those kinds? When someone says, “I opened my third eye,” does that mean there are differences in perception? There is color and black-and-white vision. Animals, birds, and humans see differently, and there are different aspects of perception there, too.

Or someone sees only the future or only the past. Once you have seen something, can you do anything? Can you change what you have seen? And what if what you saw has not come to life or started affecting you in some other way? That matters. People want fairy tales and incredible things without examining what they are. Once again, that assumes a material world with the spiritual world inside it. That is how 99.999999 percent of what you will find describing the spiritual world presents it.

AGAnna Gurina

I see.

AVAlexander Volchek

Does a multiverse exist? Yes. Really—a multiverse? Of course. Where did that concept come from? The reality of a multiverse is far more substantial than the version people describe or can imagine. Obviously. There are things the human brain simply cannot process. We get scientific evidence and images of flashes, and people say, “We've seen a flash in space, or a new black hole, or a new pattern, or something else.” A computer can draw some sort of model. Forty years ago it could not, and now it can. But everything is much more complex. Again, if the spiritual world were part of the material world and everything could be described by the laws of physics, it would all have been described already. It is simple: everything would already have been described. Instead, something gets described, and people say, “People a hundred years ago were idiots; we've become smarter.” Well, wait a hundred years. Wait and see.

You do not even need to wait a hundred years. Let's see how thirty- or forty-year-old scientists in 2050 talk about the 2000s, the 1980s, or 1900. Just the 2050s—I'm not even talking about the 2090s or the year 2150. Wait and see how they discuss those people, what they say about doctors and their methods, and how they regard them. When we look at doctors from a hundred fifty years ago, we say, “What idiots they were! Medicine today is something else!” But if we look honestly, the risk of error is catastrophically high, and an enormous number of things remain completely unknown. Many things have certainly improved. The question is why. Who brought about those improvements? Why did a particular person acquire that knowledge at that moment, when someone three hundred years earlier did not? Why did that happen? We say there are genes and ancestral programs. So why did someone three hundred years ago not use that gene or ancestral program and accomplish it? A person says, “Well, I'm just that smart.”

AGAnna Gurina

Here's a question. Some believe that if they grow their hair long, they will become more spiritual and energetically stronger. In various—I don't know, even, I think...

AVAlexander Volchek

Traditions.

AGAnna Gurina

Traditions, yes. Even in orthodox circles, there is this belief that...

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes.

AGAnna Gurina

Unclean spirits, and so on. Haircuts and all that, yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Here in California, for example, with its wide variety of cultures and religions, you often see people from certain traditions who wear long hair under special coverings. There is a whole tradition from India—I don't know what that way of wrapping the hair on the head is called. Men wear it, for example. Some boys and men have never cut their hair in their lives, while others grow it out. Again, where does this come from? From certain traditions at a certain time. The important question is whether it still applies and matters today. Fifty years ago, it was important to have a good horse to get from point A to point B. If you did not have a horse at home, you were at a disadvantage compared with people who did. Probably the same was true three hundred years ago. Or it was important to keep your own cows, because at a certain time you might have died without them: you would not have had food, a regular supply of milk, and so on.

Now there are stores and food available. You do not have to keep cows. You can do some work and buy milk or meat, and you do not need a horse. Having a horse will make your life more expensive, not easier. In the past, a horse could pay for itself; now it cannot. Someone will say you can breed and sell horses and make a business of it, but that is not what we are discussing. If you and I buy horses, we will have problems, restrictions, and difficulties. It will be hard. There will be a strong smell; everything will stink, and we will smell of horses. Sasha will refuse to film us, and we will have all sorts of trouble. We will simply have created problems for ourselves. When we discuss the many different rituals, the key question is whether that ritual still works at the current stage of human development. People develop over thousands and tens of thousands of years. They change—not just physically, but in their soul, their soul-and-spirit system. That is important. Their spiritual being changes as well, just as the whole spiritual world and all spiritual beings change, along with all material manifestations, including planet Earth.

Change takes place. People can say whatever they like, but planet Earth changes. It looked different thirty thousand years ago, and different three hundred thousand years ago. It looks different now and will look different thirty thousand years from now. Change happens, and there are always different kinds of actions a person can take. Look at a brief span of human development, at least in our current physical form. I am not even talking about the psychophysical form, because our soul-and-spirit system, in terms of the present soul, is a fairly recent formation. But even if we consider only the physical aspect and go back several thousand years—when we start talking about tens of thousands, questions already arise.

Tens of thousands of years is already questionable. There is this myth: “We've analyzed what things looked like eighty thousand years ago.” You cannot even determine what lies at a particular point on the ocean floor. You cannot predict when an earthquake will happen or what the weather will be. The margin of uncertainty is endless. You can analyze within a certain range, but what are you saying when you claim to analyze people millions of years ago, or what will happen millions of years from now? It is absurd. I always say people should go to prison if they get it wrong. If they received a Nobel Prize and were wrong, they should be imprisoned, not let off. They often get a reprieve—from death and all sorts of other consequences. It should be the other way around: they should be punished. They made a mistake and caused a problem for humanity. Look at what happened with COVID. Many doctors and politicians should go to prison for telling people false things, drawing the wrong conclusions, and then changing laws and so on. Obviously. And they were not prepared for it, either. Everyone had said they would prepare us and take care of things.

It turned out they had not. The system turned out to be completely ineffective. Then they quickly made adjustments and destroyed enormous numbers of economic systems. They were not ready for that, either. Economists were not ready, nor were politicians, businesspeople, and all the others. A whole range of people who tell others what to do had no complete understanding of how to act in real life. So, returning to rituals, the most important question is whether a ritual works now. That is it. How effective is it? How important is it really? What are you trying to accomplish with it? If you want to create a marketing image for yourself, perhaps it matters. Or you may live within a social system that expects it of you. There are countries today where it is normal to have ten wives and choose a different woman for the night. In other countries that is unacceptable, impossible, illegal. You would probably go to prison for it. All on the same planet Earth. So there are places where you have to wear your hair long, or families where you would be thrown out otherwise, because that is a rule within the family.

Similarly, in some homes you must take off your shoes, and in others you do not have to. In some places your teeth are expected to be clean; in others they are not. People set these expectations. Why am I explaining all this? Because people use such things to decide whether someone is a guru, or whether they should do something themselves. Or they do it because they heard about it somewhere. Why did it happen? My hair is a certain length simply because that is how it turned out. I like it this way. If my hair did not grow, I would be bald. So does that mean a spiritual person cannot be bald? Someone with spiritual perception cannot be bald? That is an illusion. It is like saying a bald person cannot earn money or have children. It is an illusion, because the reasons someone is bald lie in entirely different factors, unrelated to what we are calling their spiritual strength.

All these ideas about how a person must look or speak are illusions. It is astonishing that people do not understand that a highly spiritually developed person can kill someone. Remember: someone who is very spiritually developed, sees past and future lives, and lives within a whole hierarchy of values and truth can kill a person. Some cannot; some can. Some will even do it consciously. They may kill two hundred people while remaining in a state of perception. People confuse what a spiritually developed person actually is. Or define it for yourself as someone who lives according to certain truths. But there may be a person who is not spiritually developed yet is much stronger at projecting energy or fireballs, reading minds, changing the past and future, scanning space, being filled with energy and power, entering meditative states or samadhi, and various other abilities and manifestations. Then simply acknowledge that and define it in real, specific terms. Life will become much easier. Now: do crystals or pyramids amplify energy? Crystals, pyramids, magical rituals, and particular drawings belong to exactly the same category as what I just described about hair.

Some things can enhance something. Imagine I am traveling from one village to another. Buying a horse might help me do that. Someone else might buy a helicopter, while someone else might simply move to another city. One person will be busy choosing the right horseshoe; another will move to the city and be done with it. There are things that really can help. There are also enormous numbers of things that cannot, and many that can have a negative effect. What matters is understanding the scale of the effect. Imagine a coffee shop. Would the right light bulb help? In principle, yes, because the space needs light. But if eighty bulbs are already on, and you replace an energy-saving bulb with another kind, or use a brighter or dimmer one, perhaps the place is already bright and only opens during daylight hours. It may make no difference to the result at all.

You need to keep asking what deserves your attention and what does not. Some people watching want to understand spiritual perception: what should I actually do? There are many possibilities, with very different levels of effectiveness. The differences in the final result are enormous. If I want lunch, there is a difference between sitting and meditating on lunch, reading books or watching YouTube videos about having lunch, and simply opening the refrigerator and eating something. Even if you eat something that tastes bad or looks unappealing, you have at least moved toward the goal. You have eaten and nourished your body. All those other activities may expand your knowledge of how to do it properly and what approaches to take, but they do not move you toward actually eating. It is easy to understand real action when it comes to food, and difficult to understand real action in spiritual development.

It is incredibly difficult to understand what a spiritual action in development actually is. Imagine you do not even know what you can eat from the refrigerator. You open it, think, “I'll eat that,” and swallow a bag. If you do not understand, you could poison yourself. When I said to open the refrigerator and eat, a sensible person would presumably choose something appropriate. But send a dog to eat from it, and it might grab something and get poisoned—open a container of medicine, for example, and eat something it should not. Children can do the same. They may not recognize the danger. We know how to identify certain things. Understanding spiritual life is an incredibly broad process. Many procedures involving crystals, burning candles, and rituals do nothing at all, or produce only tiny effects. Why? Because you do not even understand what you are doing. There are countless rituals you would never perform if you understood what they really were and where they led.

But people like a bit of magic and ritual. Completely nonreligious people who never go to church suddenly step inside and stand there. If someone does something, they start copying it. What is that person actually doing? It is especially interesting how many Russian people enjoy visiting temples in another culture—Hindu or Buddhist temples, for example. They go there without understanding anything, including the language. At least at home they have some understanding of the language being...

...used in the readings. There, they do not even understand what is being read or told to them. Some readings say, “Prepare me for death as soon as possible, for an imminent transition, so I can reincarnate sooner and pass through this life more quickly.” A person participates in that. You ask, “Do you even know where you are? What you are agreeing to? What ritual you are taking part in?” But people enjoy it. Someone puts a dot on their forehead, and they think it will open their third eye. They are dressed in particular clothes and shown certain actions and movements without understanding them. It is absolute idiocy. I apologize for being so blunt, but it is important to recognize this when we discuss these ordinary, real questions people ask.

AGAnna Gurina

Let's talk about meditation. Some people are afraid it will turn them into emotionless vegetables. Meditation teaches equanimity and nonattachment, doesn't it? What if a person loses the ability to feel joy, love, and concern?

AVAlexander Volchek

That is one of the biggest misconceptions, and it is an invention of the material world. Look at the assumption again: there is this enjoyable material world, and a person supposedly enters some narrow area created by it. Who said the spiritual world is unfeeling and emotionless? First of all, why would you want to enter it? If you think it turns you into a vegetable, why go to that particular corner of the material world? If there is supposedly a spiritual world off to the side, people head there for power, for something new, to expand their ego and perception. You say, “There is the material world and some imaginary spiritual world, and connecting with it turns me into an emotionless vegetable.” That, too, is a projection of the material world. Then there is the question of what meditation is. Sitting on a chair with your eyes closed? For two minutes, ten, or fifteen? People write, “I have meditated fourteen thousand times.” How long each time—a minute or two?

Hours? Holy crap—twenty thousand hours, thirty thousand hours! So you measure quality in hours. What a marvelous thing, to measure the quality of meditation in hours. What if you were just sitting on a chair, doing nothing that had anything to do with meditation? It is like saying, “I stood at the stove.” Fine, stand there. You can stand at the stove for ten hours and cook nothing, can't you? You can sit with an open book and read nothing. “I sat with a book for fifteen hours.” Fine, sit with it. Or you have a stain that will only come off with a particular cleaning product. You get in the shower and say, “I stood in the shower for eight hundred sixty-seven hours.” Go ahead, but the stain will not disappear. Nothing will change. You may even end up with another stain. Do whatever you like with it; nothing will happen. That is important to understand. This is the basic issue if you see meditation as a material activity, like yoga or physical exercise.

Or you read somewhere that meditation is a particular action performed in a particular posture. If that is how you see it, perhaps you will become an emotionless, hardened person—just as other things you do in life can make you hardened. But suppose you see meditation as expanded perception, a state of awareness at any moment: sitting, standing, walking, eating, taking a shower, touching someone or not, planting or buying flowers, working with a client or helping an employee develop. You are in a state of perceiving and hearing the spiritual world. You move beyond the little sphere of material perception into spiritual space, understanding the whole a little more broadly, even if it only comes in flashes. How could that meditative perception make you emotionless? Where would you lose the emotion? Why does someone think they can lose it? Because they think they control it. If you control it, set a timer so a negative emotion switches on in two and a half hours, then set another so a positive one switches on in three hours.

Like hell you can. Go on, generate a negative emotion. You can turn yourself inside out, but you cannot produce it right now just like that. You would have to do something—dive headfirst off this curb, for example, or hit me on the head with that thing. That might produce something negative. But just sit here and generate a negative emotion now. You cannot. Likewise, someone is feeling positive, then something negative comes over them. I say, “Bring the positive feeling back. Right now. Go on!” Why can't you? You supposedly control your emotions. When someone says they might lose their emotions in meditation, imagine how egotistical that premise is: they are immediately claiming that they control their emotions in the first place. It is a complete lie, utterly untrue, and it disrupts a person's life.

AGAnna Gurina

Another popular question: can meditation replace a psychologist or antidepressants?

AVAlexander Volchek

That is like asking whether buying a new house can replace earning money, or whether getting married can replace brushing your teeth in the morning. It is exactly that kind of question. Probably, if someone goes to a psychologist to talk to another person, meditating alone will not replace that, because their aim is to talk to someone. It is simple: I came to a psychologist to talk; I sit alone on a chair, and there is no one to talk to. It is the same with food. Video coaching on how to prepare food will not replace actually eating lunch, eggs, or soup. I can watch the video as much as I like without eating any soup. The important question is what you are doing and why. Why are you taking antidepressants? Why are you seeing a psychologist? What is your real underlying aim? Once you know why you are doing it—for example, to have someone to talk to—you can consider what else might serve that purpose. You could call someone or go to a café.

I could give a trillion examples of ways to talk to people. You could stand at an intersection, stop each person, and have a conversation. There are countless possibilities. Someone else says, “I see a psychologist or psychotherapist to understand why my side hurts, why my eye twitches, or why I lose my temper and yell at my children.” Sit down and ask, “How else can I understand why I yell at my children?” Then start working on it. For example, note every time you yell, or say the word “yelling” each time it happens. Simply start registering it. It will work—one hundred percent. What else could help you understand? You could read a book or watch a video. What does meditation have to do with this? How is it connected? Perhaps you want to visualize the cause of your yelling in meditation. Or you want to relax a part of your liver in meditation so you will stop yelling. But first you would have had to realize that you yell because your liver is tense.

Explain how those things are connected. Once you have understood that, you need to look at what meditation does. Someone says it calms you down. Are you sure? There is a good example. About fifteen years ago, when I was boxing, someone told me, “Boxing relaxes your training partner, but it makes you more aggressive. You are more aggressive afterward and in the following days. He relaxes during it and remains more relaxed afterward. You relax a little only because it is exercise, but the boxing itself intensifies your aggression.” You need to understand that entering certain states, or spending time in silence, can increase your aggression rather than reduce it. So can interacting with other people. First, you must examine exactly what you are doing and how aware you are. What is the point...

...of comparing psychotherapy, meditation, and antidepressants? People do not understand what they are comparing. If you ask who should treat a tooth, you name a doctor—a dentist. Fine. But who should treat the energy in this area of the etheric body? Who treats energy in that body, in etheric space? Which person do you go to? Suddenly everyone falls silent. We have entered an area where people say, “Sasha, what are you even asking?” Who treats the state that shows up as tension toward my children when they behave a certain way at home? Or what happens when ten people are around me and someone touches me—what do I do about that? Or when I stand too close to someone? Yesterday, I think, you said, “Don't crowd around me. I don't want lots of people standing so close.” Remember when the children suddenly came over? Who do you see about that? Who do you work with?

What is the field of psychotherapy that deals with it called? Notice that you cannot even name the field, and psychotherapy has different fields. That is before we even get to spiritual teachers or spiritual healers, or which meditation to do for it. If someone treats meditation as a procedure, like taking a pill, they should know which pill they are taking, and a doctor should prescribe it. Who prescribed your meditation? Who decided you needed it? Who determines which meditations people should do? Usually, people decide for themselves. They watch someone and say, “Joe Dispenza seems like a cool guy. I'll put my headphones on and go along with it. Besides, he says it is scientific. Masha and Katya do it, so I'll go, too. Petya has lots of money, so I'll go. Tony Robbins goes to this guru, Jeff Bezos goes to that one, and I heard Elon Musk himself visits another. And this one—why, he's Putin's spiritual advisor! So I'll go there, too...”

“I won't be able to get anywhere near him, but at least I can look from the outside at the temple he visits once every six months.” That is how people act when it comes to details and knowledge. The problem is that even when taking a pill, they do not understand how it works. Ask ChatGPT about any antidepressant, and it will give you a whole range of information that no doctor has told you. Or you have high cholesterol and are prescribed statins. Ask how statins work and what else should actually be done. You might ask your doctor, “May I ask something? International practice suggests entirely different approaches. Why are you prescribing statins for me, when they will clearly cause this particular problem?” The doctor looks at you and says, “What? Tomatoes, cucumbers, what's that? I need the bathroom,” and leaves. That is an important set of issues for the smart alecks.