The Biggest Lie About Your Purpose: A Discovery That Changes Your View of Life

AVAlexander Volchek

The answer to the meaning of absolutely anyone's life is always the same. Always. You can't find a different answer. It makes no difference to the spiritual world how you lived—by the laws of the universe or not. I think Einstein would have thrown up if we'd said that to him.

OSOlga Stolyarova / Tatyana Tsvetkova

Some astrologers can tell people what their purpose is. So is that all an illusion too? Our topic today is purpose. How do you find it? Some connect it with a profession; others say it's much broader. People say that if something is your purpose, you should be willing to do it even for free. That's what they call purpose. I'd like to ask several questions to understand this myself, dispel some myths, see what's real, whether purpose exists at all, and how to find it and integrate it into everyday life. First: does purpose exist at all, or is it an ego-driven need to be useful to the world—to believe I was born for something greater?

AVAlexander Volchek

When people ask this very common question, ‘What's my purpose?’ I always remember a joke that, I think, everyone involved in real human development tells. An old man goes to a seer and asks, ‘Please tell me what my main task in life was.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘What was it?’ ‘Remember when you were eleven and hit a boy at school, and they expelled you?’ ‘Yes, I remember.’ ‘Another girl took your place at that school.’ Silence. ‘So?’ ‘That was your purpose: to free up that place for the girl.’ ‘Was there anything else?’ ‘No, nothing else.’ That's how it is. Everyone who wants to discover their purpose wants to see that they've done something special, important, impressive, or worthy by social standards.

That's where their thinking starts. The central question when discussing purpose or a life's work—the first thing absolutely anyone should examine—is this: why do you want to know your purpose? What's the specific reason? A whole torrent of possibilities will arise. ‘Perhaps I'm on the wrong path. I should be on my own, correct path, and then things will work out better.’ You used the phrase ‘I'm wasting time.’ Could someone have a sincere impulse to seek and understand the essence of things? Yes, but they probably wouldn't use the word ‘purpose.’ At the very least, they'd begin asking how life really works, why particular events happen, how the chain of causes and effects works, and how they can act within it. They might ask themselves, ‘If I'm asking this, doesn't that mean I don't understand what's happening at all?’

‘I don't know what will happen in the future. I don't understand how my life came together or how I ended up here and now.’ That isn't a question of purpose. The very word ‘purpose’ is something exalted. Let's quickly look up what it means. It's worth looking at the word's etymology, definition, and how different perspectives use it. The model has started searching and is giving philosophical, religious, and esoteric definitions. ‘Purpose is a person's deeply felt, enduring, significant reason for existing: what they believe makes it worth living, learning, working, and developing.’ Interesting. You began by asking how people usually understand their purpose. ‘My purpose is to build a company employing ten thousand people. It will manufacture tables—wonderful tables that enhance other people's lives.’ That's how people usually think about purpose. Or, ‘My purpose is to have six children and raise them as geniuses who will achieve results.’ They're looking for what the definition calls an enduring, significant reason for their existence.

By examining the term itself, we can quickly get to what purpose means. If we're looking for an enduring, significant reason for existing, then let's look at why a human being exists. Why does a person exist here and now?

OSOlga Stolyarova / Tatyana Tsvetkova

Why would I?

VBVitaly Bogdanov

To live as many happy days on this earth as possible.

AVAlexander Volchek

Why happy ones? What about unhappy ones?

VBVitaly Bogdanov

It's harmony: happiness on one side and unhappiness on the other. You understand the balance. If you were happy all the time, you wouldn't know what happiness was.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, but you can live without happiness. That's happiness. People look for happiness as a requirement of life. But look at harmony and balance: they contain no concept of happiness. In harmony and balance, there's harmony and balance. Happiness isn't present there, just as a great deal of money isn't present in harmony and balance.

VBVitaly Bogdanov

Could your purpose simply be living happily, rather than planting trees in a forest and doing things like that?

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, you're using the phrase ‘living happily.’ Notice this: people don't simply want to find their purpose. They want to establish very clearly that their purpose must be something easy. But the definition we read says, ‘What they believe makes it worth living, learning, working, and developing.’ So I'm someone who will work only for the sake of my purpose: to make ten thousand tables and have six children. That's why I'll work. It's what I consider worth doing it for. Could a person work because it's human nature, and live because that's human nature—simply live and accept what happens in the world, whether it's happy or unhappy, bad or not bad, understanding that this is life? When someone speaks of purpose, they're heading for an endpoint. An endpoint stops development. Again, the definition says what makes it worth living, learning, working, and developing. That means this purpose cannot be material. They're living, working, and developing for something throughout their entire life. What material thing could you develop for all your life?

What single thing? Perhaps your homeland—you could invent that answer and say you live and develop for it. It can't be your children, because you don't have children from the beginning. Besides, they don't belong to you. They grow up and say, ‘Dad, Mom, you're free to go. We're living our own lives.’ And that's true: as spiritual beings, they don't belong to their parents.

OSOlga Stolyarova / Tatyana Tsvetkova

Alexander, there's another situation. Someone lives thirty or forty years and achieves certain heights, but at some point everything they've accumulated materially loses its meaning. That's when they begin asking, ‘Why am I alive?’ It's less an endpoint they want to reach than a higher meaning—a reason to live and keep moving forward.

AVAlexander Volchek

When someone has lived thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years and says their life wasn't quite right and money turns out not to matter, that's interesting. We listen to countless famous entrepreneurs explaining how to live and develop. Then, years later, they tell us they lived the wrong way: they should have spent more time with their children, worked less, allocated money differently, or that certain actions were wrong. Then my question is: why did we even—

Why did we listen to these people at all? Why listen now? Their perception might still be distorted. They're running around endlessly searching and broadcasting their search, not the truth. That happens a great deal. When someone reaches forty and says they're dissatisfied with their money, family, children, or where they live, the first question is why they're in that state. The problem isn't the money, wife, children, or all those other things. Why did this state arise? Five years earlier, they could have been making much more serious mistakes in terms of development, their inner state, and analysis, yet they didn't feel they were living the wrong life. Why did the feeling arise now? What were they doing? Where were they? In that state, they say, ‘Look, there must simply be a purpose.

I'll find my purpose, and everything will work out.’ They're looking for the Holy Grail—a single magic pill you take and everything becomes wonderful. It's an entirely selfish approach to say, ‘Nothing is right in my life, so I need to find my purpose. I'll find it now.’ In fact, that's how they lived before; they just didn't talk about it in those terms. Many people say, ‘First I have to work for ten years, then start a family, then work another fifteen years. Once I have lots of money, I can travel. Once I can travel, I can take five minutes to breathe.’ They keep pushing everything further into the future on an enormous scale. This is the same: ‘There's a magic pill. Once I find it, everything will be good.’ It won't. That pill doesn't exist. If we focus on the word ‘purpose,’ they really don't understand life's meaning. This raises a vast, profound range of questions. Can someone find a foundation that makes these questions never arise in their life at all?

How do you find that foundation, so these questions never arise—so you never feel this uncertainty about what life's meaning is, what your purpose is, or which way to go? There's another point. I began with that joke for a reason. A person wants to choose a purpose and a meaning for their life, one they agree with. They're forty, have earned money and lived their life, and now feel bad. A twenty-five-year-old watching thinks, ‘Ha! That's you old people talking about yourselves.’ Someone tells the forty-year-old, ‘That was your purpose: to live this life. That was its meaning.’ Again, purpose is an exalted concept with fundamentally egotistical terms. People want to find and explain the reason they exist: ‘Please tell me why I exist, and then I'll decide whether to accept it.’ They're told, ‘That was the meaning of your life. You lived it to earn money, experience different emotions and circumstances, take various actions—reasonable and unreasonable—and end up where you are.

That's the meaning of life.’ The answer is always the same for absolutely everyone. You, me, Vitalik—at any point, it is the same. We can't find another answer. The meaning of life is to live. Simply to live. People want to make it concrete, find and describe something wonderful and beautiful. But there's always something more beautiful, someone richer, someone happier, and happier still. There's no limit to happiness. What does ‘simply live’ mean? Let's examine it. Presumably, there are laws of the universe and true and untrue actions in human life. Someone says, ‘All right, simply live—but live according to the laws of the universe.’ Then they ask, ‘What if I haven't lived by those laws? Wasn't my life's meaning supposed to be to live by them?’ From the universe's and spiritual world's perspective, it makes no difference how you lived: by those laws or not; living out your karma or remaining trapped in heredity without reaching your karma; becoming a free spiritual being who senses spirit and acts out of freedom and chance, or not doing so.

It makes no difference to the spiritual world. One person lives one way; another lives differently. What's the difference? The spiritual world has far more complex examples. Take Lucifer, a fallen angel. In the spiritual hierarchies, an angel is above a human being, not below or behind. The spiritual world has experienced something like that. What is one person deciding to do something bad or something else by comparison? It's a cycle. That's the point. A person lives through stages, and the current human structure involves making enormous numbers of false moves and mistakes. ‘Could that be their purpose?’ It isn't purpose; it's simply life. Purpose doesn't exist. Human beings have one task as spiritual beings: to develop along the correct evolutionary path. If we narrow it down, there is no other task. Everything else is a smaller task. Can we identify those smaller tasks? Yes.

Are there tasks within a particular lifetime involving specific actions, realizations, and so on? Yes. In one sense they're connected to that life, and in another they aren't. Sometimes there's a small point of connection, sometimes a large one. We're speaking of many lives and incarnations. Anyone discussing purpose must first ask whether they live on the assumption that the material world invented a spiritual world and purpose, or that a spiritual world exists in which there is purpose. If the idea arises in religion, psychology, and esotericism, and asks why a person exists, then presumably the person understands that their existence isn't limited to one lifetime. If it is limited to one lifetime, what purpose are we even talking about? Like this video we're recording: its limits are very clear because it has no life. We turn off the computer, and nothing more exists. There are no energies or order here. If someone says they have a purpose, then they aren't free.

Consider someone who says, ‘My life is limited.’ They began thinking at ten or fifteen, if they began at all. If they have a purpose within this limited life, they should know it. Why would they have to search? If they say, ‘I don't know it; some spiritual world devised a purpose for me,’ then at the very least they must admit they're a slave and don't control their whole life. But here's the catch: they believe everything they do is theirs—they achieved it, did it, and live it. Listen carefully to most people talking about spiritual development or anything like it. Phrases keep slipping through that deny the spiritual world's existence, dismiss it as nonsense, and suggest people know everything themselves. Don't just watch one video. Watch forty.

Forty videos. Listen carefully to the person's reasoning, phrasing, and conclusions. Again, the main question is why you began thinking about purpose. If you did, you feel bad or burdened. Or you want once again to manipulate everything around you, prove how impressive you are, and make everyone see you as a serious person. That's why people get so carried away talking about people with a purpose, such as Elon Musk or famous presidents. They're the ones with a purpose; everyone else is scum. Those very people speak of everyone else as scum. That's why there are wars, why millions are killed, and why they don't care about anyone else. Those who support it would like to take their place and do the same: kill millions and treat other human beings as worthless, having put themselves on a pedestal and declared, ‘I have a purpose. This is my purpose.’

Everyone else simply has a worse purpose. That raises an interesting question: if people choose a purpose, some purposes must be better and others worse. It's ego all the way through, their own yardstick. So what about the person's inner state, Vitalik? Isn't that more important? If I don't feel a need to search for purpose, what is there for me to discuss with you or anyone else? Someone says, ‘You don't feel that need because you haven't reached a certain enlightenment, state, or understanding.’ No, I simply feel very stable and well. And when I don't, I don't create illusions about magic pills. I try to understand why it's happening and how it works, while recognizing that it's life, a part of my life that I'm living through. Perhaps that is happiness: being able to live a life that isn't always pleasant, where bad things happen, yet remain grounded.

If that's happiness, then it is. People are simply used to associating happiness with good events and achievements. If happiness means feeling equally neutral about earning a billion dollars or losing a billion, someone being born or dying, starting a new venture or closing it, I'd call that happiness. It's a great blessing to feel calm and free in some area of life. For example, my mother hasn't worked since 1994. My father worried about money throughout my life and died at fifty-four. My mother didn't worry about money. After she was left alone, she still didn't worry, even though she hadn't worked and had less money because my father had been the one earning it. She has never worried about money. Talk to her, and that worry simply isn't there.

You might think that makes someone uninteresting. No, they're blessed not to worry about that subject. Can you imagine the happiness of not worrying about money? My wife doesn't worry about what to do or which business to pursue. That's happiness. Vitalik, we're always thinking about what to do, what to launch, what business to build. My head is constantly buzzing. I have more than twenty businesses and endless projects to discuss, and I'm always thinking of something new. That's happiness too. I feel good about it. But it's a blessing for her as well, because what happens in my life would be difficult for many people. They would worry. Worrying about money is a problem in today's world. My mother simply doesn't worry about it. Imagine that. She has other worries, but not that one.

This worry about money is an unhappy aspect of life. I can tell you that I experience this a great deal: those thoughts, the thoughts themselves. It's a very particular, complicated kind of energy.

OSOlga Stolyarova

You say you and some other people have these worries, while your wife or someone else doesn't. Could a person's worry about money arise under the pressure of responsibility—for example, having to support a family?

AVAlexander Volchek

The volume or amount of what someone does doesn't determine their worry. I can guarantee that, not just from observing thousands of people, but from my own experience. There are long periods when I do an enormous amount and don't worry. At other times you do nothing, want nothing, yet worry. It isn't connected to the number of children or to responsibility. Let me give you an example. I came to America at forty with a wife who doesn't work or intend to, and four small children. Three were small, really, although even the oldest daughter was only twelve. All four were children. In Moscow, I'd become accustomed to an expensive lifestyle with a lot of spending. I didn't move to America and take a job at Google earning three million dollars a year—

—which covered some of my expenses. That isn't what happened. Nor did I move with enough money saved for four hundred lifetimes. I meet people who say, ‘When we moved from the Soviet Union to America, we had a hundred dollars in our pocket. It was very hard.’ I listen and wonder what was hard. They arrived, immediately received help renting an apartment, and had support. Someone found a job and started earning. Why does having a hundred dollars make it hard? I'm the one with a problem because I'm used to spending a lot, and I have to maintain that. All those bills, phones, services, people, projects, image, reputation, businesses, new businesses, partnerships, flights, trips, food, clothes, infrastructure, houses, cars—I have to maintain all of it. I can't simply stop; I'm accustomed to it. That's hard for me. Besides, I'm forty, not twenty-five. I didn't arrive in New York from the Soviet Union with that same feeling. I came here at forty.

I have a reputation and a great many achievements. I'm coming to a new country too, but I'm not starting from zero, free to work at McDonald's for twenty-five dollars an hour, in a coffee shop, or as a project manager for a hundred dollars an hour. I can't simply go and be a project manager now. At twenty-five I could. I opened my first software company in 2007, when I was twenty-four. I could comfortably earn very little and live on a thousand dollars a month. My partners and I paid each other a thousand dollars then. For some people that was a lot of money in 2007. Why did we do it? We were investing in the business. I could have earned more; I'd previously earned more as an employed project manager. I was twenty-four then. I can't do that now, because I have four children.

Again, a reputation and a great many other things.

A great many things. So why did other people feel it was difficult while I didn't? Everyone around you tries to create that sense of difficulty and impose it on you. Especially people from the Russian-speaking world: they keep asking how much the house costs, whether there are gay people in the schools, and saying, ‘You live in California. Americans must be strange. There's probably nothing to eat.’ Strange questions that don't make sense, followed by how hard it all is. I look at it and wonder: what's hard? Things are much better than before. I can't say they were bad before, but my current situation is better. My children's education is clearly better. It would have been much harder for me to provide that level of education otherwise. I feel calmer and freer about it. I wouldn't have found this solution. Besides, I very much wanted my children to study with a wide range of people, not only the elite or specially selected children.

I never wanted that. I always wanted them to live with diversity. Even in their previous schools, my daughters were among different kinds of people. Diversity is very important. I recently saw a wonderful statement at school, which I posted and wrote about. Let me read it. It was on the wall in my daughter's classroom when I attended an event. I can't imagine that statement being on the wall at my school: ‘Truth isn't when everyone gets the same thing. Truth is when everyone gets what they need to be happy.’

OSOlga Stolyarova

Let me see whether I've understood you. There is no purpose, so broadly speaking there's no point asking that question. If you're seeking a higher meaning, it's better to ask what the meaning of life is. From your answer, that means living your own life while fulfilling the human task you described: knowing yourself and coming to your true self. Is that right?

AVAlexander Volchek

Let me expand on that instead of simply saying yes or no. One of the most important human tasks today is to widen your perception and begin seeing more of the world. With narrow perception, you see only a tiny piece. It's like thinking you know what's happening in the world because you watch television, while never going outside. That's narrow perception: not understanding what's happening or knowing what's out there, living in a box. How often have people deceived us at school, in kindergarten, at work, or in partnerships? How often have we deceived one another ourselves, including on the basis of false information? I always find it interesting when scientists receive Nobel Prizes and then, some time later, someone wins another Nobel Prize by proving the previous person wrong and finding something else. Then put the first one in prison. How many medical errors have there been, medicines released, tests performed? Professors and businesspeople say things that aren't true.

A businessman tells everyone how brilliant he is, and then—bam—his business dies. So were you deceiving us? You explained how things should be done, and it was deception. Politicians are deceived too. Think how often parents deceive their children about how life should be: ‘If you don't do this, you'll have problems with girls; if you don't do that, you'll have problems with boys; you won't find a job.’ Endless deception. A person's task is to live while widening their perception: trying to see what's true, understand how things really work, examine cause and effect, and know the real action they need to take. What you should seek is the ability to act correctly at any moment. That isn't one action; there are endless choices every day. Where should I go? Should I call this person or do something else? Stay quiet or speak? Make this health decision or that one? Why does one person hear, ‘Go to a doctor and get checked; you might have cancer,’ go, catch it early, and get cured—

—while another hears the same thing, says, ‘I don't have cancer,’ and dies of it? Why did one listen and the other not? Or someone does get checked, the doctors make a mistake, and the person dies. Or they get checked, but no one can help. Their cancer is cured, but another illness develops and they die anyway. There are other causes. Try to understand those causes truly, every time, through continual observation. Then life becomes incredibly expansive and vivid. Life isn't measured by ‘I just need money to do all these things.’ Its vividness doesn't come from money; that's guaranteed. Can money help and create good things? Yes. But it can create negative things too. Criminals might attack you, steal your money, and kill you for it. Money can cause you to fall out with many people. We live in a social world. Money can help or destroy you. You can afford to fly somewhere, and that very plane crashes.

There are endless stories like that. So money isn't the point. Again, that doesn't mean you shouldn't earn it. I'm in favor of earning money, discovering the world, learning, and taking an interest. Everyone has their own path, but the number of events, feelings, experiences, states, and moods in a life certainly isn't about money. We were discussing the garden: the joy doesn't come from having paid lots of people to create it. It comes from something else, whether others made it, you made it, or you did nothing at all. Simply looking at a tree gives you joy. How do you experience that? Why can one person look at a tree and feel blissful joy, as though they'd helped tens of millions of people, while another says, ‘It's just a tree. Cut it down or don't—it's firewood’? That's worth noticing and examining. There are endless things like this. Today we're recording a video and having all sorts of sound problems.

Not once have I felt a problem, stress, anger, or anything like that. I could have, but nothing arose. Did you feel it? No. Olya was a little worried about the sound. Just a little.

OSOlga Stolyarova

I wasn't worried.

AVAlexander Volchek

You weren't either. Yet sometimes you can get angry. Could I have? Haven't you and I gotten angry about things like that—so angry that everyone could see it? The table would shake. Everyone would know. For some reason, it arises at one moment and not at another.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Someone watching this might hear you say ‘widen your perception’ and wonder how to tell whether their perception has widened to some degree. Are there criteria that let them recognize, in the moment, that it has expanded a little?

AVAlexander Volchek

The question itself has a reason. You're asking because you immediately want to reach a particular step. You'll never reach it, for one simple reason: there is no endpoint to widening perception.

None. If you think you've widened your perception and reached the end, you've stopped developing. If you don't want to stop developing, you need to recognize that this means you've stopped. And if you've stopped, you're regressing. A person tells themselves, ‘I've stopped developing.’ So say to yourself from the outset that there is no final state of ‘expanded perception’; you'll always be dissatisfied with that. You want wider perception not to know the truth but to gain benefits. That's the fundamental difference. I want to widen my perception only to know the truth. That's real human development: living, widening perception, and getting to know your life, rather than trying to live well. What are you doing it for? If you say you're expanding to gain benefits, then you aren't perceiving. It's that simple. You wanted an answer. If you tell yourself you want perception to obtain benefits, I immediately say, ‘You're regressing.’ It's a false path. There is only one way to widen perception: you do it for something other than yourself. That doesn't mean it has nothing to do with you.

That doesn't mean you'll learn or see more, or that you're on the right path. Nor does it mean you'll gain benefits in life. You may not even feel this perception at all. And another thing: knowing the truth is extraordinarily difficult for people today. They're so mired in lies that discovering the truth will put them in hell. Simply knowing it will make them feel incredibly bad, because they'll find out what's really happening: how people deceive and manipulate one another, why, and what people around them want. We live in a world where everyone lies. ‘Then what is truth?’ That's a rather abstract question; it depends what you're asking about. To continue your point: if I throw these headphones on the floor and say I didn't do it, that's a lie, isn't it? Yes. And there's the truth. That's why I say the question is very abstract.

I'm talking about learning ordinary truths: that your mother deceived you as a child; that people have been manipulating you for five years; that the government lies in nine out of ten actions; that people are killed for no reason; that ninety percent of medicine works incorrectly or with some deception. There's a great deal that's correct, and a great deal involving deception. ‘What if the headphones fell because they were supposed to?’ Fine. The question is who dropped them—you or me? Don't lie if I dropped them. I did. Maybe it was supposed to happen. There's no need to suffer over it. I always say there's no problem if a bad action happened. Vitalik, there's even no problem if someone lied. The question is whether they realize it. Do they know it isn't real or true, that it violates the laws of the universe, and that they'll bear responsibility? They do it and recognize what they've done.

They may want to fight it and be unable to. You don't want to shout at your wife, but you do; you can't hold back. You don't want to yell at another driver because they looked at you the wrong way, yet you do, knowing you shouldn't. Something inside creates that pattern, and you can't find balance. Admit there's something within you that you can't balance. Admit it and start working with it. Don't say it's actually something wonderful that helps you grow. Please don't build explanations on top of it about why it happened or where. Don't deceive yourself: it happened. That's a fact. It doesn't diminish anyone or elevate anyone. The question is whether the person really wants to understand what's happening. If they don't want to look at it or understand, there's nothing you can do. Then you shouldn't tell them.

I say nothing in response to nine out of ten questions I'm asked, even when I know the answer. Why would I? Sometimes it won't work, isn't right, or simply isn't needed. It's wasted time, effort, and energy, setting a process in motion in the wrong direction. You don't need to live through it. I can say a great deal from the state I'm in now, but I don't downplay the many bad things I've done or the harm I've caused others. I don't erase the harm others have done to me either. It happened. Does that make my life unhappy? Not at all. The good things I or others did don't make my life unhappy or happy either. They're events that happened. That's the essence of my life; it's my life. And there's plenty of time ahead to understand what's happening, how, and what transformations, details, and feelings are involved.

OSOlga Stolyarova

What if someone really does want to understand? Take me: I want to widen my perception, understand the truth, and learn to see it. But a person has an ego, which seems to get in the way; perhaps it's getting in my way now. My ego could make me mistakenly believe I understand the truth.

AVAlexander Volchek

Don't try to settle it. People always want to figure everything out; don't try to settle this once and for all. There is no answer to ‘What is the truth?’ It's a question you must ask all your life, without being disappointed that you acted falsely or didn't know. People feel disappointed that they didn't know the truth, but they'll never know the whole truth. Keep asking throughout your life, seeking truth and taking an interest, instead of trying to settle it here and now. That's what the ego can latch on to: resolving it here and now. It certainly latches on to your motives. If, again, you want to understand so that your life will be blessed, what difference does the eventual answer make? You'll say, ‘I understand everything.’ But the request came from the ego: ‘Figure this out so you'll feel good.’ You investigate whether you knew or didn't know and eventually say, ‘Now I know.’ Yet the ego was the source of the question. It makes no difference whether you found out or not.

You're still inside the same structure and closed circle. To understand it, you need to look at all these systems and structures from outside. To do that, you have to admit that the world is nonmaterial; otherwise it's useless. We're trying to explain from within the material world what that world hasn't described. It hasn't described everything else, and never will. We hear myths about distant planets and stars: ‘We've studied galaxies; we know where humanity will be.’ Yet they can't fully calculate earthquakes, predict which virus will appear, or count how many will die in a war. They don't know what will happen with artificial intelligence or which professions will appear or disappear. They argue endlessly for years. They didn't even know about artificial intelligence before it appeared; then they started arguing. Before that, they were talking nonsense. How do you expect to explain things from that state? Explain what?

For example, two six-year-old children born to the same parents: one looks at a kitten and their heart melts with joy; the other wonders how to cut its head off. Where does that impulse come from? From science? They're twins. Someone says, ‘But this one came out three seconds earlier.’ So what? And then—

—five years pass. The one who wanted to kill the kitten is helping the whole world; the one who rescued kittens has killed a person. ‘But you told us it was because one came out earlier.’ It turns out to be the opposite. These examples can seem funny or provoke strange feelings, but they're the truth of our lives. This is the only opportunity a person has. There are things worth working on seriously, instead of nonsense. It's much more important to ask yourself every day, through observation, ‘What is the spiritual world?’ That leads to much greater discoveries than setting thousands of goals, seeking purpose, going on retreats, and doing all those things from a material impulse. They don't affect your inner state, whatever anyone says. If a particular energy is pushing you into a certain state, it doesn't care that you're running around the material world, riding roller coasters, skiing, running marathons, or having children. It makes no difference to that energy.

It will keep acting as before, and it may expand, like a volcano, a fissure in the earth, or the ocean. We can plan anything, and tomorrow a wave washes it all away. Everyone says, ‘We miscalculated a little; it came four hundred years early.’ Four hundred years either way is nothing in the universe. Someone says, ‘We've studied this and discovered what happened two million years ago.’ Then what's four hundred years? And what did you study? How do you know? With some instrument? Tomorrow there's a new instrument and a new discovery. So were all the previous people deceiving us? Put them all in prison, then, to be fair. The whole world would be a prison. The only thing you can do is stop fighting an external prison and start developing yourself, working on and understanding yourself. Find me one person who knew their purpose, lived it out completely, and finished it, without a spiritual explanation.

Some people will say, ‘Our purpose in this incarnation was to travel part of a spiritual path.’ I have no objection to that. But find me a businessperson who completed their purpose. Show me that it really was their purpose; examine their life from A to Z. It's easy to talk about people from the past: ‘Einstein died, he discovered this, and that was his purpose.’ I think Einstein would have thrown up if we'd told him that. He'd say, ‘No, I disagree. There was so much else in my life that you don't even know about. You've imposed this on me.’ That's why billionaires talk not about how their purpose was to build their company, but about wanting to help people in Africa or Asia or spend time with their children. Take Bill Gates. He's giving all his money away, not to develop Microsoft. He said, ‘I'll give away all my money until the end of the world to help children in Africa and others.

And I regret working so much and not spending time with my children and family.’ So does that mean he shouldn't have done what he did? Should he have helped children in Africa from the start—or helped his own children and given it all to them? It's a very complicated question. Please don't think I'm judging this brilliant man, who has lived a substantial life with many positive and negative things, true and false decisions, bringing benefit in some places and destruction in others. He has certainly brought destruction into the world—in vaccines and computers, obviously. We don't yet know whether the future use of that money will bring benefit or destruction. Will people develop as human beings because of it? What could the benefit be, other than helping people widen their perception? Or will it make them regress? We know money can lead to either development or regression. There's no correlation. Charity isn't inherently an act of development. It can involve development or regression, depending on many other meanings and motives.

Why you do it, how, what you base it on, and where you're going. If you were lost for fifty years, why decide not to be lost in the fifty-first? Are you sure you have the strength? Who's stronger: someone who hasn't been lost for decades? Our lives are short, including our working lives. I'm forty-two: roughly twenty years as a kid and twenty of conscious life. If I've lived all those twenty years consciously, I'm clearly stronger than someone who earned fifty billion dollars but lived consciously for only one year out of thirty years of conscious life. That's how human reasoning works. I don't think that way, but people do. What harmony do you live in? What state are you in? Where are you? People don't want to reason that way. I had a very wealthy business partner. Some acquaintances, also very famous businesspeople—I won't name them—asked, ‘What does your partner think about spiritual development?’ I said, ‘What difference does that make?’ They'd asked me something about spiritual development, and I'd answered.

This was eight or ten years ago. They wanted my answer backed up by that person because he had a lot of money, as though money validated it. But what measures are you looking at? Look at the actual parameters of someone's life, and things appear differently. You'd have to confront another reality, change your priorities, and admit to yourself what strength rests on: money, achievement, science, or something else. Of course you find some people interesting to listen to and others not, if your values align and you don't really want to acknowledge what's actually happening in their lives. Any good psychotherapist will say, ‘Why are you trying to be like that person? Look at the other parts of their life. Don't get close or you'll catch what they have; you'll catch that hell around them. If you want to get close, understand that you're doing it to resolve a particular issue, wearing fifty protective suits so you don't catch everything else.

Or you're manipulating and living from the ego. That's lying and deception.’

OSOlga Stolyarova

Many people who believe in purpose also turn to astrology. They examine their natal chart or something like that, and some astrologers can tell them what their purpose is. So is that all an illusion too?

AVAlexander Volchek

If they call it ‘purpose,’ it's a lie.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Or what is this purpose they're talking about?

AVAlexander Volchek

Don't forget another point: you have to understand what's meant. People can use ‘purpose’ to refer to particular tasks they work through along their path. That's perfectly reasonable as a description of tasks. I have tasks: I'm raising children and have responsibility for them. There are things I have to do. It would be strange—

—to say I don't have to do them. In theory I could refuse, but I do have tasks: at least keeping an eye on and supporting their health, feeding them, and looking after them. Those are simply tasks. Again, ‘purpose’ implies an endpoint to a person's task. If it's a description of values, life's meaning, or the laws of the universe, I have no objection. Are there laws of the universe? Yes. True guiding principles? Yes. A difference between truth and lies? Yes. There are levels where there isn't, where truth and lies don't exist, but there are situations where they do. The headphones are in my hands or on the table—in my hands or on the table. Don't drift into abstraction. Someone will say the distinction doesn't exist. There are levels where it doesn't matter, as I said it doesn't matter to the universe which path a person takes, because they'll turn around eventually.

That's how the laws of the universe work: a person will turn around. Are there forces that want to lead people into darkness? Yes. They've fought and keep fighting endlessly—well, not endlessly; they have an end. For a certain period they fight to lead a person another way. The person follows their path, and other forces will appear that lead them away. They can appear at any moment. Keep looking at what's true and why things happen. Why, for example, did someone invent new AI models now? They swagger and say they're clever and impressive. Why did that thought come now rather than two hundred years ago? Do you know why? Because some Petya Pupkin thinks he's clever and that's why he came up with the idea, instead of asking why it came to him or where it came from. He thinks he's clever and did it himself. That isn't so. Those certainly aren't dead thoughts from the brain, written down on paper. That isn't what this is. It's always fascinating to examine why these events happen.

Look for the real causes, beyond why a politician decided something. That's only a link in the chain. Look deeper. Why is it happening at all? Why did my business work here but not there, or keep working in another case? Why does one person have children and another not? Is it intelligence? Someone says it's genetics. What genetics? What are you talking about? People don't want to face this because it's very difficult. Suppose someone has a child through artificial fertilization. It's hard to truly understand that from the spiritual world's perspective. Everyone knows how it works materially; there are countless articles, and research keeps developing and producing new conclusions. But there are no ninety-year-olds conceived that way. Not enough time has passed. No one knows what will happen when children conceived through artificial fertilization have children through artificial fertilization, who in turn have children through artificial fertilization. It's a hard question to ask because it touches very difficult matters and inner states.

It's very complicated, and there are many things like that. Someone recently commented, ‘This enlightened man lives in California; everything is wonderful for him, while I'm struggling and merely existing.’ How did you decide that? Maybe everything isn't wonderful for me. What is this comparison? Everyone constantly compares themselves with everyone else. If people didn't need to compare themselves with others, there would be no murder or lies at all. It's all comparison. At some point the human ‘I’ appeared; it hadn't existed before. It enabled tremendous human development, but people don't even recognize their ‘I’ or connect with it. They only dimly sense it, which has also led to enormous ego structures.