Where Real Meditation Begins

AVAlexander Volchek

Some people talk a great deal about what you ought to do: take up triathlons, say, or climb mountains, run, or go to the gym. The most important thing in all these cases is always to answer for yourself why you are doing it. What is your goal? Do you want to prove something to someone? Do you want to change the way your physical body looks? Do you want to become healthier? Do you simply want something to do? Do you want to find some friends? Do you want to call it a hobby, a particular way to spend your time? Why are you doing it? The same applies to meditation. Why are you doing it? Why do you sit in meditation, or why do you stand in meditation?

OLOlya

You say we need to answer the question of why. Suppose someone answers honestly and sees that they are doing it for something: they find calm in meditation, for example, or something else, and they go into it specifically for that purpose. That is my first question: what happens then? Is there some effect, or is it all simply pointless? And the second thing is, what if a person cannot answer why? If they cannot understand why they are doing something, what should they do? Keep trying to find an answer, or simply trust the way the process unfolds?

AVAlexander Volchek

Are you asking why we should meditate, why we should pursue spiritual development, or what spiritual development is? Or why a person should live? Why a person should come to know life? Why a person needs true freedom? Which “why” do you want to understand? In order to—

OLOlya

Specifically meditation, I suppose.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course, to understand why we meditate, you need to look at why you specifically want to do it. On the meditation channel, I say that meditation is simply life, and that a meditative state, expanded perception, is your ordinary life. Within that ordinary life, you are engaged. You can distinguish whether your perception of this life is expanding or not. Meditative immersion is when you are in a state of perceiving your life, of having at least some perception of it. It is actually easy for a person to find out. You can ask, “How aware were you throughout the day today?” They say, “All the time.” You ask, “Were you perceiving your attitude toward other people all the time?

Were you continually observing the thoughts that arose about your own life? Were you always trying to understand the causes and effects of your actions? Did sadness affect something you did earlier? When you ate, did you observe why you were eating? When you spoke and expressed yourself, did you observe your speech? Where are those words flowing from, and what do you want to express to other people? Why are you doing something? Are you doing it to profit and gain an advantage, or because it is a natural state of your body, like going to the bathroom? That is natural for the body. People do not go to the bathroom to make money. Or were you doing it because there was some marketing involved?”

First, you need to understand why you are taking these actions. If we ask, “What is all of this for?” then we need to ask what values guide your entire life. Your entire life. Can you apply those guiding values to everything connected with meditation? If you meditate for one particular area of life, to check a particular box—say, someone told you that being calm would help you make more money, or that being calm would improve your relationships at home—then simply recognize that you are practicing meditation because you want better relationships. Or because you want more money. Or perhaps you pursue spiritual development because it is fashionable. Then just tell yourself that.

“I am pursuing spiritual development because it is fashionable.” Then the question falls away. You need to ask whether you are pursuing spiritual development or simply living within a particular idea of what is fashionable. The fundamental issue is that people do not want to find a foundation for their whole life. I know almost no one who wants to find that foundation. Olya, what does a person rely on? What states do they rely on? Listen to their speech. What do they talk about constantly? Not having enough money? The absolute necessity of an education? Having nothing to eat? Everyone being stupid? Being the smartest person themselves? Or are they always trying to prove to someone that they are a decent person overall? What do they rely on? What is their life fundamentally built on?

What drives them every morning, afternoon, and evening? Once you have found those guiding values for yourself, of course you can begin to build on them. Why should a person pursue their own development at all? What is personal development? The whole world is now saying that the most important thing in a person's life is to keep learning. But ask those people why. To learn what, specifically, and for what purpose? See whether they are doing it to help other people in the world, to work on their ego, to truly come to know themselves and their life, or to gain certain benefits. Really look at why the person is doing it. Why, in fact? What do they actually mean by it?

We had guests at our house yesterday. Seeing my garden, with hundreds of plants planted there—or species of plants—they said several times, “What an interesting hobby you have.” I said, “It is not my hobby.” For me, working in the garden is exactly the same as filming this video. There is no difference. I can tell you very quickly, in two seconds, what guides me and what I rely on. There is always an ultimate foundation for any action. Whatever happens, I have that ultimate foundation. It is the same in everything I do. It does not matter whether I am in pain or feel bad, whether my child is doing well or badly, whether I get married or divorced, whether someone in my life is born or dies, or whether I make money or lose it.

I have the same foundation in all these actions, always the same one. Whether I feel better or worse mentally, the foundation is the same. One foundation. Of course, it is a whole set of things that I would have to describe, but it is one. I will always come back to it, whatever happens. I do not have three or four parallel lives. In my central system for perceiving life, I do not have fifteen parallel lives, even though I live a hundred or two hundred lives at the same time. At the same time. Obviously, though, I have an enormous number of subpersonalities, from a melancholic, quiet, creative person to an explosive, outgoing personality. An enormous variety of subpersonalities, a great many of them, but they are all directed toward one thing.

For myself, I do not divide life into spiritual and material parts. I do not divide it. There is that phrase in America, which I have repeated many times: “What do you do for a living?” What do you do in order to live? The answer is supposed to be about your profession. Perhaps someone runs a business, sells ice cream in a cafe, or is an athlete—whatever it may be. What do you do for your life? People make a division: there is life, there are hobbies, and there is some separate work on their own state. What meditation can we talk about then? What expansion of your own consciousness?

How can we talk about expanding your consciousness at that point? People do not even want to look there, talk about it, be in it, or live it. They do not want to live it or observe what they feel, how they feel, what they convey, what they say, or what they are doing at all. They do not want to be in that. So we open Instagram, TikTok, or various news sources. Look at what is happening in the world. What is happening in the world? What matters to people? What matters to them at each moment? What actually matters to them?

OLOlya

And what do we do about it if people do not want to—what do we do about it?

AVAlexander Volchek

Act only through yourself. That is the whole point. If you live according to the laws of the Universe, you have an established foundation and an understanding that your life consists of coming to know, accepting, observing, and studying everything that happens. Then what difference does it make to you whether people want to or not? It makes no difference at all. Love is the same toward people who want to do something and people who do not. Love is the same toward those people. Honestly, Olya, it is the same. Do you think it is different? Would you say, “I love this person more, or respect them more, because they want to develop, and I love this other person less because they are less interested in developing”?

What difference does it make? They are just as much a person, exactly the same in that respect. That is why, for example, I do not react at all to people who leave positive or negative comments. They are simply expressing something. None of that changes the fact that they are a person. Whether someone is smarter or less smart—what difference does it make? Some people judge others by money, some by knowledge, some by their ability to draw, say. They are constantly measuring people by one ability or another without understanding how to truly look at that person, how to really see them. Sometimes, then, you need to close your eyes or open your eyes during the meditations on my channel in order to perceive certain states.

Those states will give you energies of an extraordinary kind, so that you can perceive truth more broadly, expand your perception further and further toward knowing truth, and finally hear what is true. So that you begin to pay attention to it and gain the strength to pay attention. Most people in the world do not have the strength to pay attention to other people. They do not. Just the act of paying attention to someone else, not yourself. Simply paying attention to another person. Yesterday some guests came to our house, and during the visit we discussed various things. At times I was practically interrupting people.

At one point I realized I had a choice: either interrupt people or stop talking to them. I had to introduce some topics, or we would all simply sit there in silence. People were not in a state of perceiving and getting to know someone else. They were living out their own reveries and their own states. That is the social world.