Tell the Truth “As It Is” or Stay Silent? The Main Illusion in Relationships | 360° Video

AVAlexander Volchek

There is a subject people keep asking about: relationships—personal relationships, family, two people at work, or friends. Someone asks, “What matters more: telling another person the truth exactly as it is, or holding some of it back? Telling the truth as you see it, even if it destroys the connection, or preserving harmony, sometimes softening your truth or not saying all of it? Where is the line between being humane and being destructive?” Then comes an example. You dislike someone's behavior: they speak rudely to a relative or treat other people unconscionably. Do you say something or not? Further questions follow. How do you decide what matters more: that they understand they are wrong, or that you remain close? How do I know I am speaking the truth rather than trying to reshape someone to suit me? That last question is very interesting within this whole discussion. From the very beginning, the question has said, “as you see it”: tell the truth as you see it, even if it destroys the connection, or preserve harmony, sometimes softening your truth or not expressing it fully.

What happens is interesting. A person thinks, “I am not telling you the truth because I am trying to preserve our relationship.” Or, “I say it as it is because telling you the truth matters to me, although I understand it may destroy our relationship.” I have seen this many times: “Listen, you had better not tell that person this information. It will destroy your relationship.” There is an interesting pattern here. Nowadays, people very often set this reasoning in motion within themselves. Deep reasoning—not merely reasoning, but an established belief. It is a very clear belief: “I know and understand the truth, but I will not tell the other person, to avoid creating problems with them.” Given my character, reasoning and explanations, I have encountered this with many people, especially in families. You explain something, and the other person says, “Nobody can prove anything to you. It is impossible to explain anything to you. You will always be right.”

All kinds of people are watching now, and that issue is closely connected with what we are examining today. You need to enter its essence, its true essence, not simply one aspect of intellectual reasoning. Enter the essence so that, in entirely different situations, you can perceive what we are discussing. Truly perceive it. Consciously perceive it. First, pay very serious attention to this: the belief that truth destroys is illusory. The truth really can bring a relationship to an end. It can happen; your relationship with that person can come apart. Equally, the truth can stabilize the whole situation, even though you imagine it will destroy it. Why do you imagine that? Because a person lives with the illusion of understanding two things. First, how the other person perceives the situation. Second, the course of events and how those events move forward.

There are people who live in the material world, and people who live exclusively through that world, perceiving nothing beyond it. They say everything follows the laws of physics, everything has been described and explained, and only the physical body exists. If that is so, then you can completely control the whole process of life and its events. If, on the contrary, you believe you cannot control any of it because everything happens randomly, then the belief I just described immediately becomes unreliable. If all events are entirely random, just as if all events are predetermined, then whether you tell the truth or not, something good or bad can happen. Always attend to those two illusions when considering this question. First, your basic understanding of how another person will perceive the truth you intend to tell them is illusory. It is illusory. We will also discuss what truth itself is; that is where we are heading.

The second illusion concerns how events will unfold afterward. Does what you say matter at all? If two people are destined not to be together, does what you say matter? Does it or does it not? Does it affect anything? Some things affect nothing. Suppose someone is meant to have a car accident on a particular day—today. What difference does it make whether they talk with another person before leaving, if they will have the accident anyway? Whether they talk or not, what difference does it make? I am speaking about an event that must happen regardless. You cannot understand all this through intellectual and material reasoning alone. You cannot. No formula, physics or mathematics will determine and describe everything happening, the arising of particular emotions or states. Why does someone sometimes rejoice when you tell them the truth, including quite serious, harsh things, and say, “Thank you so much for telling me”? At another moment, you seem to tell the truth, but the person gets angry, shouts and curses at you.

Apparently, the same event is happening. Why does this occur? Consider watching this video. Why do you sometimes want to keep watching more, and at other times simply switch to something else? What causes that? It is a question of understanding the energies around us. Again, we are within two illusions: understanding another person and understanding unfolding events. When you mix them—and it is always an illusion, always an illusion—how will the person respond at that particular moment? Imagine you decide to take a trip and choose a country. You come home and suggest it to your husband or wife. How will they react then? Will they be angry or happy? Could it happen that, at different—

Could a person be angry about something at one moment and happy about the same thing at another? Of course, because it all depends on their state at that moment. Perhaps they are in a state of total tension. A nail has been driven into their leg, and they are concerned only with the leg, their physical body. They will not be interested in your trip. “What trip? That does not interest me at all right now. I am concerned about something else.” That is why enormous numbers of people do not want to discuss different subjects or address different levels of importance at once. Someone absorbed in work says, “My work matters now. I will not deal with other questions.” That is what matters to them now. Something else may matter to you. Or you say, “This matters to you now, but in three or four days another issue will matter. Let us deal with it.” But the person cannot switch. They lack the ability to switch between these states.

When you convey information to another person, true or false, understand that you mostly perceive the process through an illusion—unless you truly know how to understand their state or the energy of the words you convey. Words have energy too. Some people always respond negatively to new proposals. Then someone comes along, proposes something, and they respond positively. Everyone asks, “How did that happen? You reacted negatively to everything. Why positively now?” Because words have energy. At that moment, they heard something different. A particular space opened within them. They could perceive more broadly and consider and accept the proposal in an entirely different way. Or they could accept it without proper consideration: the opposite, their space narrowing, their perception diminishing. Because their space narrowed and they perceived less, they made a wrong decision, a negative decision, not a true decision, not the decision they actually needed to make. They made an untrue decision. That is very important: untrue. Learn to study people, observe them, and recognize the incredible number of energies, moments and states involved even in two people understanding different things.

At some point, when you understand and perceive things very well and choose the right moment to convey something to someone, you may begin to see this as manipulation. Why manipulation? You say, “Wait, am I acting and conveying something at a particular moment while knowing in advance how they will respond?” I give people a great deal of strategic advice on broad and serious subjects: business, money, family matters, and very difficult decisions about interacting with other people. Advice on interacting with others often rests on exactly this: you understand how a particular person will behave. You understand it thoroughly, consciously. You truly understand it. You truly understand how the other person will behave, from a real understanding rather than an illusory position. You simply know their actions in advance. Often, though, people do not listen. You tell them how someone will behave, and they do not believe it. They do not believe it; they do not want to believe it.

Because they do not believe it or want to hear it, they make a mistake. Just as they fail to hear outside advice, they personally make a mistake when reaching a decision. They personally make a mistake. That is one area to examine here. Area number one. But we need to move on. It is very important to move on. The next large area, number two, is how well you understand the situation in terms of truth. How well you understand it in terms of truth. An example has just come to mind. Someone once approached me in a group—either V100 or Life—and said, “We have an employee who is dying of cancer. How can we help this person? We want to help. What should we do?” The question was also whether I could help. That was the request: could I help in some way? When someone brings that question, the first thing I always say—the very first thing—is, “Who told you that what you understand as help is truly help, rather than interference in their life, something contrary to their life?”

Are you sure you are truly helping the person? Are you sure you are helping rather than acting manipulatively? It is a very interesting question. Incredibly interesting. First, when someone has a serious disease, cancer for example, and is dying day by day, I ask: could this be the natural course of their life? That does happen. Serious diseases arise naturally. They have causes, including karmic causes and causes arising from that person's actions, which you do not know. You want to alter and disrupt something predetermined in that space. This clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of truth. Even if you consider that debatable, then acknowledge that you do not know the answer here. You could either help or harm the person, and the probabilities are unknown. To you, they are equal. But understand that you are very likely to make a mistake—a major mistake. Moreover, when you ask for advice about doing something in an area you do not understand, you add another mistake on top of that one. The probability of error increases even further.

Uncertainty, actually—the probability of uncertainty increases. Increases greatly. So when we approach knowing truth, what is truth? What is a real understanding of truth? What is real understanding? Should you have been angry at that moment or not? Shouted or not? Quit or stayed? Started a business or closed it? Given up or gathered all your strength to fight? What should you have done at that particular moment? What is truth? We arrive at a triangle of illusion: your own understanding of truth, your understanding of the other person's reaction and their understanding of truth, and how life is supposed to flow—what the actual course of events will be. I have a real estate business. We had a meeting there today and discussed various reasons, advantages and disadvantages of taking out a mortgage.

A mortgage. There are enormous numbers of advantages and disadvantages you can describe. But things also happen that you cannot work out on any calculator. A couple takes out a mortgage on a home, for example, and because they do, they do not divorce. Through having such a big task, they manage to bring their relationship into balance, even though the task seemed disadvantageous. Or the reverse: people buy an apartment and suffer for an extraordinary length of time because, without that apartment, they would have separated sooner. Did they suffer because they bought it, or did they buy it because they needed to go through that suffering? Those who have watched me for a long time know that I always point to these different causal relationships. Entirely different relationships. What actually happened? What was actually supposed to happen? What matters is what actually happened. To understand this triangle, first set yourself the task of seeking truth in general. Not for yourself, not to make everything good for yourself or resolve your own problems, but to understand truth, find it, perceive it and hear it.

The second task is to understand that at every moment you need to make a decision. Every day, you make dozens of decisions about moving forward, perhaps hundreds as you move through different situations. Perhaps hundreds. Day after day, you make a great many decisions. People live in a combination of strongly predetermined things and the possibility of freedom. That freedom will necessarily bring chaos to your consciousness, because freedom means not knowing what events lie ahead. That is what makes it freedom: new chains of events unfolding. If some events are predetermined and people continually generate freedom from every direction, what happens to the compensation for those predetermined events? Compensation exists too. There are predetermined events, events of freedom, and events in which other spaces or people affect the course of your life. Something can be true today and turn out to be untrue tomorrow. Someone may respond angrily today and with complete love tomorrow. Today they may not understand you, and tomorrow they may understand you fully—

without words or explanations from you. Understanding the next step, the circumstances of a person's development through understanding that step and that whole concept of perception, is a very important component. But it is extraordinarily deep. Observing it will take months, years. Again, observe not to obtain a favorable conclusion for yourself, change someone else, manipulate them, resolve your own issue, or prove to everyone that you know the truth, but to come to know truth yourself. That is the answer to the question asked. If you pursue this task in order to know truth, you will find a solution. The whole question will change.