The Main Mistake in Visualizing Your Dreams

AVAlexander Volchek

You mentioned a house. Recently I was walking with someone—a fairly close friend—and we were talking about houses. Every so often I like to show people properties in France and elsewhere in Europe. There are lots of very large castles and mansions for sale in France and Italy, and they cost quite ordinary amounts: a million, two million, three million dollars.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, especially.

AVAlexander Volchek

Quite reasonable prices. They look like dream homes, you might say. Dream homes. I do not have a house like that. I was showing him these, and he said, “Print it out and hang it up so you can work on it,” and so on.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Visualization.

AVAlexander Volchek

I said to him, “Why would I do that?” Looking at that house is the same to me as discussing with you that I need to buy ten new potted plants. It is not a goal for me. The house I live in now exceeds the expectations and ideas I would have had about the home I wanted five years ago, if I had set them out for myself. It happened that way, not because I visualized it. I did not visualize it. There are things I would not even have been able to visualize; I would not have had the real, genuine confidence. We are not talking about doing it for fun, printing something out. Look at what people have hanging up at home: often pictures of castles or expensive cars.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

I think everyone has more or less the same ones.

AVAlexander Volchek

Have you noticed how similar the houses are?

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

A private jet.

AVAlexander Volchek

As though it were from London—from England. An English house.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Very similar.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

A sort of chateau.

AVAlexander Volchek

A chateau, yes. Similar things, but they are not that person's space. If I put up a chateau, it would probably be my space, right? And you would say, “That is Sasha.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Actually, yes. It is like your dog.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, it would be—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

How natural she looks beside you.

AVAlexander Volchek

Interestingly, this same person—we went to Filoli one day—said, “Now that is the size of house and grounds for you,” and something else. You look at it and think that seems like rather too grand a scale for America. But that is what he was saying. I do not need to visualize it, because it is meaningless. If you visualize it or hang it on the wall, you are giving it significance. That does not mean it is supposed to happen in your life at all. You have put energy into it, given it significance, but it is not supposed to happen in your life. Life says, “It is not going to happen. Cry, worry if you like, but it is not going to happen.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Could it work like this: you visualize some one-room apartment somewhere, while fate had entirely different things in store for you, but you fixate on that apartment so much that life rearranges itself? Or do people not have that kind of power over life?

AVAlexander Volchek

That absolutely happens. You need to understand that life has a karmic movement: the way everything in life is supposed to unfold, how it is actually meant to happen. For example, your move to the States or mine is the fulfillment of karma. The number of children is a question, but having children at all is the fulfillment of karma. Your move to the States is definitely the fulfillment of karma, right?

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, there was no other option.

AVAlexander Volchek

Definitely the fulfillment of karma. Can that fulfillment be modified? Of course it can. A great many lives go by without even beginning to fulfill karma. That is something of an abstraction, because karmic things happen to you in any case: you live as the structure of your spiritual energy system, and you have absolutely no control over it. Energy controls you. You have been plugged into a billion cosmic and solar outlets; you are not operating the controls from this end. When the time comes, it will be switched off. And it will be you yourself, as your spiritual being, doing the switching off. Just as I can close my computer now or hang up the phone. Exactly the same. But here you can resist, rasp, play the wrong music. You can resist, or use someone who switches you over a little. It is all right: you will die, be born again, and fulfill what you were supposed to fulfill. Could you stay in a one-room apartment, have that dream come true, and miss out on a ten-room apartment? Everyone would think about it that way. Yes, that can happen too. But the point is that a person might have had an entirely different destiny and life in their karma, perhaps with great suffering.

By buying a one-room apartment somewhere, they were not actually buying an apartment: they were staying in a particular place and veering sharply off their path. They created an enormous new block of karma that they will have to live through, and they still have not lived through the old one. The thing is, in the spiritual world there is no concept of experiences being good or bad. Those are all illusions—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Human inventions.

AVAlexander Volchek

They are all human inventions, yes, all human thoughts. It is not a structure. It is not real; it is not alive. If we are talking about what is alive, this is not alive.