Meditation for a Wish: How Does It Work?

GAGalya

Here is my question. We discussed how meditating on something is not really the truth. So what about meditating on a wish? Why does meditation on a wish, or on something in general, work to some extent, judging by what people say? “I sat and meditated on a certain level of prosperity, a house, or something else. I made a vision board and meditated on it.” There is also a well-known book, Mind Power Into the 21st Century. Essentially, it teaches you to meditate on a wish and thereby reprogram your brain. Everything you imagine will then happen in your life. And there are testimonials: “I followed the method in this book, and it all worked out.” How should we relate to that? What is it?

AVAlexander Volchek

To address that, we first need to consider the nature of desire itself. We need a comprehensive view, not just an answer about whether it works, so that people can understand it fully. You just spoke about restructuring how the brain works and wishes appearing. I would ask: am I right that your individual brain affects events in the world and changes in other people's lives? Take any action or change that happens to you. What is the most common wish people set for themselves? More money, for example, or finding a good husband or wife. You need to understand that through this wish you change other people's lives. With a good wife or husband, it is obvious that you are changing another person's life. Someone might say, “I am good too, so they have found someone good as well.” With money, if your money has increased, some exchange must have happened elsewhere. Something happened. Did the amount somewhere else decrease, or what happened? And even if you consider yourselves good people—you attracted someone good and they attracted someone good—what happens when people who are not good make wishes?

Is that possible? Is it possible given how the brain is structured? This subject of desire is very important because modern people essentially live in a constant state of wanting. Constant. It is endless and almost never stops. It ranges from wishes about how I should feel to what my children should do and how they should feel. There are endless streams of desires. Notice again that almost every wish is directed toward influencing other people. Of course, some wishes concern you personally. I agree. But take improving your children's lives, changing their lives, or making things the way you want: “I want my child to ride a horse, become a famous gymnast, become a famous mathematician, or earn a lot of money.” You are projecting a wish into another person's life. But your question was different. You did not ask whether this is lawful, right, or true—or did I miss that?

You asked whether wishes work. You did not ask whether it is lawful, did you? You asked whether it works.

GAGalya

I did not, right.

AVAlexander Volchek

The general question you are passing on from people, the group, the community, society, is whether making wishes come true works. We need to step back again and examine what we base our understanding of human life on. How does a person's life move, and what underlies it? A person enters this life, and in the life between death and birth they decide, together with the spiritual world, who they are to become and what kind of life they are to have. I am speaking very abstractly here, putting all of this in quotation marks. A family is chosen, and they enter it—again, all in quotation marks. That is roughly the outline: they enter a family and have a plan for this life. The spiritual being has a plan for what should happen. Alongside that plan are two areas operating outside it altogether—or three. Let us identify three. There is heredity: you find yourself in a particular family, let us put it that way. Add a particular time in life, particular people around you, a particular century or decade, and so on.

You find yourself in a particular life, which introduces certain adjustments. The second major area is that different characteristics combine in a person's life, and the concept of freedom emerges. Notice that people generally understand freedom as something very positive. Freedom means something wonderful! I ask, “Could you kill someone through an act of freedom?” “No, I could not kill someone through freedom.” “Could you get a million dollars into debt through freedom?” “No, not through freedom.” Apparently, through freedom a person can only receive things: ten million dollars, fifteen houses, a good family, knowledge. They regard all of this as freedom. Look closely, and you will see that all of it is viewed that way. Throughout psychotherapy, and even religious and esoteric discussions, everything is directed toward fighting your original conditions, your ancestral patterns. This is interesting: people fight ancestral patterns, but has anyone ever considered that they are part of their life? It is like saying, “I am going to fight my blood.”

Are you sure you are fighting what gives you life, or what does not give you life? Are you sure that is what you are fighting? Again, people consider only the positive aspects of freedom. But the form of freedom in which you live brings very different circumstances. Very different. There is also a layer of influences that are completely outside your control and unrelated to you. Let us put those influences in a separate area, a completely separate area. They may not even be related to time or the present world. These influences can manifest; let us leave them as an outline to observe. A person exists within all these areas. Imagine, Galya, that a wish arises. They say, “I want to reach a stable income of thirty thousand dollars.” A wish has appeared. I am trying to find roughly comparable figures. I live in the United States, and incomes here are different, so I am raising the figure somewhat. Someone might earn three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, or three thousand dollars a month, but of course no one here earns thirty dollars a month.

That is impossible, given a minimum wage of eighteen to twenty dollars an hour. Impossible. That is also a very important point for understanding. So someone says, “I want to earn money.” The first thing to examine, Galya, is where that wish came from. The first thing is where it came from, what kind of wish it is, and why it appeared. You and I know, and the viewers all know, that people have different wishes. Different. A husband, wife, and money are common wishes, but we all know people who do not have them. I know people who are fairly unconcerned about finding a good husband or wife. When you mention money to some people, they say, “I do not have a desire for money.” Society treats them as liars, as though they are deceiving people. An enormous number of desires are imposed from outside. We will come to that. For now, where did the wish originally arise? Let us examine the layers from which wishes emerge. Could someone have attended a course where they were told to have a particular desire and then accepted it as a given?

As though it were an important condition: they attend a program and are told that being poor is unacceptable.

Being poor is unacceptable. You must earn money. So now they have that desire. Or being alone is unacceptable; you must have someone beside you. Or you must have two children. A particular belief is instilled. You must have two degrees. You must paint. You must have a hobby—I love that word. A hobby is required. Or you must walk twenty thousand steps a day. A desire is handed to the person. Suppose they had no connection to it at all. Let us set that aside as one possibility. They had no connection to it. Their spiritual being was not connected to this wish. Their heredity was not connected at all to this wish, which they acquired and which became part of their present human life. Their karmic foundations, causes, and effects were not connected to it. Suppose that is the case. I said there is still freedom, and there is another element: the influence of particular energies. Let us place that somewhere in the area of freedom and those energies.

Consider the other side. What if a thought arises and grows into an obsession and a desire, born from within? The person did not read it or see it anywhere. It lived with them like an obsession. They did not acquire it by joining a company or meeting friends. On the contrary, because it was already an obsession, they brought it into their childhood and family, to all their friends and parents, like a diffuser, an air freshener, or a humidifier. They spread it everywhere. Everywhere they spread that moisture—or, in this case, the desire. Everywhere. They carried it around, spread it at university, and then at work. It was an obsession and a desire. Of course, people will attach explanations: it appeared because I read a book, saw something on television, heard it from someone, or something else. Where does it arise in a person? What kind of desire is it? Why does one person want to move to another country? They have a desire, an outright obsession: “I cannot stay here, in this atmosphere, in this natural environment, or in this weather.”

Another person develops a firm conviction that they must build a house on this very spot and live in it for eighty years. Why does one person have that wish and another does not? That is important. Let us distinguish this second area: a desire that arose within the person. They did not program their brain to produce it. Talking about controlling the brain in this way is completely inappropriate, completely inappropriate and irresponsible as an explanation of what happens. It is irresponsible to consider everything so linearly, narrowing it down without describing the full picture or the different possible origins of an event. To anticipate what comes next: does the wish you attract change other events, other wishes, and other causes and effects in your life? There is this external influence and reprogramming—but let us leave that for now. Reprogramming the brain: if you reprogram one thing, what happens to everything else at that moment? Do you think you can alter one thing without changing anything else? As though you could restructure the blood and everything else would go on working exactly as before.

No. If you affect the blood in your body, your whole body will change. Everything will change, absolutely everything: your skin color, your hair, everything. Absolutely everything. That is my assumption. I am not a doctor; I do not know this subject. But I assume that if you alter the blood, everything will change. Probably no part of a person would remain unaffected. I do not know whether it affects the teeth, but I assume it would affect them too: their health, appearance, how they oxidize or become more alkaline, or whatever happens to them. Their color, for example. This is very important. It is the number one aspect of understanding cause and effect, the number one aspect when you attract something from outside. Why did I begin with freedom? Even assuming you have freedom, countless films have been made about it. Countless films show people living with freedom and changing events. When you change one event—one event—a whole series of other things changes as well.

Suddenly the person looks down and has no arms. They rewind everything and change it again. Then their child is ill, so they rewind and change everything again. Obviously, the films exaggerate bad consequences, but that is why they show them. That is why. Sometimes it is humorous; elsewhere it has a serious psychotherapeutic or psychological perspective. A serious one. They seriously show what happens. So we have two basic kinds of desire. We are moving in that direction now: a wish brought in from outside that originally had nothing to do with you, and a wish already within you. Why does the wish within you matter? Because it may be—

Again, we can divide it into different lines or streams. I put all these “lines” in quotation marks, because the world is not 2D or 3D, or linear. No current law of physics or mathematics, no laws of quantum fields or anything else, express this multidimensionality. It is not expressed, and it cannot even be conveyed in human language. So we will stay with an approximate explanation and some distinctions. A desire arises within you like an obsession. Is it true to the life you originally planned in the spiritual world, the life your spiritual being is guiding? Is that being breaking through and calling out to you—breaking through and calling out—that you need to do this, look at this, or direct your attention this way? Or is the desire actually something foreign? It comes from the spiritual world, but within the spiritual world it is foreign. It is not what was expected to happen in your life. There is a very important nuance here.

What is foreign, and what should or should not happen? If we consider a person planning their life karmically in the spiritual world, or according to the laws of the Universe, that planning is very relative. There are laws they cannot violate, processes that take place, but they also participate, including as a spiritual being. Could we then say that there is a part that does not belong to earthly life and was not supposed to unfold in this life? If that part exists, things are happening within it. I remember someone very close to me saying, “Do you understand what is constantly happening in the spiritual world, within your spiritual being? Things you do not constantly see or feel when you are not focusing on them? You sit and lead a meeting for an hour, and an entire life is happening there. That life is not one hundred percent about this meeting.” This is a huge misunderstanding of how a person's spiritual being is structured: it does not live an exclusively human life.

That is very important. Very important: it does not live that life one hundred percent. What an incredible misconception—an incredibly vast one. I mean a belief. It is not even a misconception; people do not look in that direction. They have been told to look toward the spiritual world, to develop at least that side. But there is a side that is spiritual life, and it also affects you. Obviously, it affects the components of your spiritual being, and that influence appears here. Now imagine that a wish arises and comes true. As you said, “But it works. Many wishes come true.” It is normal for many wishes to come true because they are supposed to happen. They are supposed to be there. Imagine people wishing to grow up and become adults. You would say, “What a strange wish. You will all grow up and become adults.” Though some of you will die before then.

Some of you will die earlier, but in terms of probability, this will happen for many of you. Suppose we all wish to get sick someday, for example. Someone would say, “That is obvious. It is normal that you will get sick someday.” Someone might even say, “I would like to be sick less often,” and then they are. That is normal: they have reached a period in life when they are supposed to be sick less often. What does that have to do with your wish? Nothing at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with your wish. Nothing whatsoever. Zero. Nothing. The person thinks they attracted it, that they made it happen—and without work, incidentally. It is described as a kind of work: focusing on wishes, drawing vision boards, putting Rolls-Royces on them. I would run a very simple test, Galya. I would gather everyone who had attended Tony Robbins's events—I think he talks about vision boards too. I have nothing against him; he says many very sound things. But I would gather him and all those people and record all the wishes they made, say, fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago. Then I would ask every one of them exactly what happened, strictly wish by wish, step by step, and look at the result.

Not basic wishes that are easily achievable in society. I was born in the Soviet Union, you know. Obviously, I was little then, and I later got my first job as a programmer for a hundred dollars a month. Imagine I had made a wish to earn a thousand dollars. Are you being foolish or not? Ten years later, programmers could not earn less than a thousand. It was impossible. Look, a programmer cannot earn less than a thousand dollars. They just cannot. It is impossible. They could only do that by calling themselves a programmer and turning off the computer. It seems to me that even calling yourself a programmer and turning the computer on means you are already earning a thousand dollars. You can find assignments, extra paid work, a job, and so on. I am not even talking about someone with an education and a broad range of knowledge. Here is a wish that materialized automatically for an incredible number of people. They were born in Belarus, decided to become programmers, took poorly paid jobs, and everyone's income grew. Everyone says, “What a good life!” Incidentally, an enormous amount of manipulation in a country is built on this. An incredible amount. People come along and say, “Look, we do not have that problem anymore.

“We used to have that problem.” Yet they had nothing to do with it. They had no influence on it whatsoever. I have shown people this endlessly in companies and business. Many times in my life, I became the CEO of an existing company, rather than starting one from scratch, and people piled accusations on me: I was a monster, a terrible person, doing everything badly. “Look how suddenly things have deteriorated!” But you are managing a company handed to you by other people. You are moving with their current, the current those people established inside it. Others say, “Look, I took over this company and it grew.” It is simply moving with the current left by other people. In countries, with their political structures and economic situations, that current lasts a long time. This is one of the major difficulties with short presidential terms. Short terms can work in strongly democratic countries where people respond calmly to all of this. I am not arguing for very long terms; those lead to other situations. But generally the terms are short.

For a country, it is like a flash. A brief flash. All these human souls are moving at their own pace, while you arrive and present a completely different direction. We can see people constantly presenting different directions, completely intersecting ones. We live amid an endless number of intersecting lines, with everyone insisting they are right. People have completely different desires. We listed very simple, materialistic wishes, but some people have very troubling desires. Very troubling. They may want to give up their own life, kill someone, steal something, or hurt someone—perhaps because of their sex, race, skin color, or social status. When these desires arise, there is a great deal to examine and understand. The first thing is to direct your attention to where the desire originates. The second is to understand that wishes come true not because you wanted them, but because there are many causes and effects behind them.

Some wishes come true because a person works. Suppose someone wants to earn a decent, stable, average salary in their country. I specifically say average and stable. They work, and they can achieve that through their own work, Galya. But reaching a salary and creating a company worth a trillion dollars are different: you cannot create that through your work alone. Not through your work alone. You cannot. We can talk all we want about manifesting wishes. Let us look at IT startups—I have a great deal of involvement with IT. Look at startups, from the wish—

to the result, the actual final result. People say they want to create a unicorn, a company worth more than a billion dollars—apparently that is no longer fashionable—or make an enormous amount of money. It is not one case in a hundred or one in a thousand. If we recorded every wish, it would be one in millions, or one in hundreds of thousands. One. These people often have extraordinary faith. They have done more than restructure their brains; they are taught this. They are taught it. But again, the most important question is what consequences these wishes bring. That matters most, even before examining their sources. Someone might say, “All right, I will try to understand where my wishes come from, look at my vision board and make one, identify a normal wish that comes to me.” People link it to other things: “I have this desire because I grew up in a poor family and my parents could not provide for me. I will not have that problem; I will be able to provide.” Or, “I was beaten as a child, and I will never beat my own child.” Yet we know cases in which a child grows up being treated that way and then kills someone else.

There is a short British series about this. It is extraordinary: the father talks about his thirteen-year-old son, who murdered a girl, stabbing her six or eight times. In conversation with a psychologist, the police, or his wife, he says, “My father beat me very badly as a child. Very badly, constantly. I grew up saying, ‘I will never beat my child.’” The film does not include that by accident; it illustrates what is happening. It does not mean you should hit children. Look, it does not mean you should hit them. You absolutely must not hit them. The point is that many things happen not because you were or were not beaten. Being beaten could have been connected with other causes and effects. More precisely, I can say with certainty—with certainty—that severe beatings in childhood are certainly connected with causes, certainly at least with the parent's karmic causes, very strongly. Or with changes in the parent's overall consciousness and everything else, with the psychological and physical heredity you received, and, very probably, with your own karmic causes.

But that is a firmly established complex, not freedom. The impact on a person is too great, far too great: through the physical body and spiritual structures. Beating a child, just like beating an adult, is perceived by all their bodies. It is heard everywhere. It creates a whole cycle, an endless cycle of damage. Not every spiritual body, because some participate in human life only to a limited extent. But a huge part of your spiritual being will suffer incredibly, incredibly strongly. Again, “suffer” in the social sense of the word. In the spiritual world, “suffering” is not the word; there are different patterns and causes. So, consequences. Consequences. It is very important that everyone hear and understand this: any fairly significant change in your life, especially if it comes from a state you call freedom—

A state of freedom: changing your life. If money is supposed to be in your life anyway, it will be there. We know an incredible number of people who did not plan to make money, but did; did not plan to become billionaires, but became billionaires; did not plan to have a good family, but had one; did not plan on many children, but have many. They did not plan for their children to be ill, yet they are. Look at the reverse side: people did not plan for that to happen, but their children are ill. They did not plan it. Or they did not plan for them to be healthy: they thought their whole family line was afflicted, yet their children are healthy. They did not plan on brown eyes, yet the child has brown eyes; did not plan on a blond girl, yet she is blond. They did not plan it. They planned something completely different. They planned for a boy and had a girl; planned for a girl and had a girl. Whatever you like. They planned for a boy and had triplets. Anything can happen. They planned on twins; no one was born, they all died. We can find any possible combination in life. But the consequence matters: even if you bring something in from outside this structure, whatever you introduce begins affecting everything else. Take the paintings behind me. You know them, right?

There are paintings hanging here. Not long ago, these two paintings appeared, and now these others have appeared. When they arrived, did they affect the background, everything behind me? Of course. Obviously. I am leading a meeting, and someone asks, “What are those paintings that have appeared behind you?” They did more than affect the background; they began distracting people. At certain moments, they distracted them. If I were to smear a bloody handprint here, like this, I guarantee, Galya—I guarantee—it would affect everyone else's perception. A seemingly small action. But people's wishes concern changing their lives. They do concern changing their lives, very seriously. You need to understand that this changes everything happening to you. There is a saying people use when something happens: a little money is stolen, or someone has a minor car accident. “Good thing you did not pay with your health. You probably paid for something. Good thing it was not your health.” People say that.

That is a childish saying too: “Good thing it was not your health.” What do people single out? They say the main thing is that their health was not damaged. They always return to health in the end, then to their state and feelings, to events, children, family, and how they spent time together. The most important things. At first, of course, they want completely different things. Their wishes are of a completely different kind. They do not want a good wife; they want something else. Here we come to another very important point, Galya. Even when we form a wish, what do we actually want? What does someone really want when they say they want a good wife or want to be rich? What do they really want? Does being rich mean seeing a number in their bank account? Money is an interesting subject, an amazing energy. I was walking with my little one, Damian. He is five—five, five and a half. We were walking together. It is not that I have forgotten because I have four children; the years are simply getting mixed together.

I had an Italian neighbor here. We met and were talking about our children's ages. I realized he did not know a single one of their birthdays. He could not say whether his daughter had been born in January or February. So it varies. This is a different case. I was walking with my five-year-old, and he said, “Dad, what is that store? I have never noticed it before. What is it? Not a store—what is it?” I said, “It is a bank, here in Palo Alto.” “Let's go in.” “Why would we go in? What would we do there?” “What do people do there?” “They keep money there.” “Do you keep your money there?” “Not in this bank.” “Which one do you use?” “Another one.” “The one in our town, in that nearby town we usually visit, where you have coffee?” “Yes.” He asked, “Can I keep money in this bank?” “You are still little.” “What does keeping money mean?

“Is it lying there?” he asked. I said, “Not exactly.” “Where is it?” “On the internet.” That was a bit of a joke. But look: where is it? It is not lying anywhere. It is written on a sheet of paper, simply a number written on paper. Today it is written there; tomorrow it is not. Just a number written on a sheet of paper. When someone says they want to be rich, what does that mean? How have they defined it? There are special courses that tell people to describe fully what it means. The problem is that they usually describe social, financial, or professional things. The point is to learn to see the real truth behind your wishes: what do you want? In a proper exploration, even with a psychotherapist, someone will be told, “You do not want money. You want support and friends, or your wife's support, or your children to believe in you. Or you simply want to find work and find fulfillment through it. You do not want money.”

One of the most important things is not to direct your thoughts toward wishes, but to observe what we have been discussing and then look at what is really behind it. Why am I doing this? It will differ from person to person. I garden, and I understand that some people will diagnose my gardening as something people periodically do at a certain age. They will put me in a particular group—

and classify my gardening that way. It is like people who used to run a business and no longer do: they are described as having downshifted. I remain in business, in different projects and activities, but people use labels like these. They assign you to a social group. What matters is examining why someone actually does it, what is really happening within them. Someone recently interviewed me in English. I asked, “Why are you making this channel?” “I want to help people.” You stop and look: are you sure you want to help, or do you want to be famous? If you want to help, are you sure your videos provide real benefit? Or is it an illusion? Then set your goal honestly: “I want to be famous.” If you want to help people, how many? Do you really need to make YouTube videos for that? Do you really need to spend so many resources, so much energy and money, for a few hundred people to watch a video? He had very few subscribers and a few hundred views per video.

You can see in advance that this person will close the channel. Immediately, you can see it: their actions do not match their stated desire, and they do not match their true desire either. I could see his true desire. They did not match that either. The process would not work. Recently I followed the link and saw that the video was available, but the channel was already closed and had no videos on it. The video was still accessible by its link. That was it. Perhaps this is temporary; perhaps he will have explanations. But this structure does not work. It does not work that way. The desire in his life was perceived, assessed, and described incorrectly. This brings us to an interesting question: does everyone really need to set all these goals? Does everyone need to become famous, become a monk, get married, or have many children—or necessarily have only a few? Does everyone need to work a lot or a little, stop working or start? At what age should they start? Should they work eight, twelve, four, or twenty hours?

Does everyone need to exercise? Does everyone need to run and jump? Do we need to do all of this, this crazy volume of things described in countless books and lectures, talked about everywhere? Do we need to do it? What do we actually need to do? There was a period when I paused my professional life and did not work. Society begins pressuring you because you are not allowed to be out of work at thirty-five, for example, or thirty. It is normal not to work at seventy, although people at seventy may feel lost and destroyed, as though they have no life. Not everyone, of course. But not working at seventy is normal, while at thirty-five you must work. Just as you must start working immediately after university; you cannot be without work. Recently, I think it was my sister who told me about her husband's son—not her own son. He is at university and has developed a desire to travel. We discussed it in terms of what he might do. I said, “Travel.”

In society, if you want to travel, what will people tell you? What will they tell you? “Earn the money first, then travel.” Yes. How long are you supposed to do that? On the other hand, he may have an impulse to experience certain states. It is very important to live that impulse and realize it. Who said he cannot travel?

Cannot travel. Why can people borrow three hundred thousand dollars for education but cannot borrow fifty thousand dollars to travel? Galya, why? Why? Why can they take out a forty-year loan for a home but not for something like this? Because it is unreasonable? Because it is not an investment in their future life? Because it is what—irresponsibility? What is it? People do not regard it as life. They treat it as a little treat, a bit of pleasure. An enormous number of wishes are directed toward that too. People usually draw islands on their vision boards. The most common things seem to be an expensive car, jewelry, a big house, an island. I think every vision board must have an island. What else? Clothes. What else is there? Let us start wrapping up this discussion of drawn vision boards. And be sure to visualize it intensely, write it down intensely, and really tune in to it. Here we reach another interesting point, Galya.

Can you visualize it? Can you recreate that energy? I want to add this, since I have spent fifty minutes answering your questions and taken over your question time. But that is the point of what I am saying. Energy can be altered. Energy can be altered. The question is whether you understand the consequences. But you can alter it. And if you picture something in your mind a great deal and for a long time, you can change something. But it is not guaranteed.