Addiction to Self-Development

AVAlexander Volchek

Why do people want to keep developing endlessly, yet constantly feel undeveloped or inadequate inside? The number of books you read seems to lead to development, but it can also lead to severe degradation. The modern mindset says we need to reach endpoints: earn a million dollars, buy an apartment, have two children, find a wife or husband. What exactly are we measuring? When you look at a person as a spiritual being, Olya, the idea of a race and development falls away. People today are certain—absolutely certain—that they must constantly learn something and do something. They have an incredible conviction that it is an absolute necessity. Society broadcasts this constantly: an endless process of studying and learning. There is a very clear instruction to remain in a constant process of learning and studying. Constantly. Endlessly, constantly studying. Why? Let us examine why. Take the time people lived in, for example. People lived in the Soviet Union. It still existed when I was born. Of course, I was a small child and did not really experience the Soviet Union as such, but I was born there, in 1983.

People born in the fifties, sixties, and seventies had a somewhat different attitude toward learning and studying. But they too had the idea that you needed a particular education in order to—what? To do what? To avoid being a factory worker, for example. Yet in Soviet times a factory worker could earn much more than an engineer working in an office. “Office” is a relative term for that period, but broadly speaking, an office. The factory worker would earn more. Why, then, was that the attitude? To show that you were intellectually capable, not stupid. Even when I graduated from school in 2000 and was applying to university, if you did not get into a good university—first of all a state university, which mattered in our country, and a top one—you were stupid. That was the attitude. It was tied from the outset to being stupid or intellectually undeveloped: how other people perceived you. A comparison. In essence, elevating one person above others.

When people say you need to study more, this is what they mean: “I studied more, so I am smarter, I know more, I have more opportunities.” People have been drawn into a kind of factory system. Even within this period, there were differences in how people saw things in the sixties and seventies in the United States, or in the sixties, seventies, and eighties in Iran, especially considering the changes there at the time, and in Russia and China. Entirely different ways of being formed. We are approaching an important point about human development. The fundamental question for today's discussion is why people want to keep developing endlessly while constantly feeling undeveloped or inadequate inside. There is the layer I have just described. Then there is another important question: behind all of this, people see changes in themselves. They want to change. If we truly look at a person at their source, they are not coming to Earth for the first time—in most cases, this is not their first time. Their soul has lived other lives, and it comes with a particular path.

There is a particular path, and it takes shape in the first decades of life. We recognize that some things are predestined and that freedom also exists. Even if we say something is predetermined, that predetermined element has to take shape as a particular path. That is how it takes shape. This is very important. The formation of this path does not necessarily mean the person is developing. Who told you they were developing at that moment? The life of this spiritual being is unfolding within this incarnation. The word “development” is very relative here. We say a child is developing: they were small and grow bigger. But then what? They die. The body then only deteriorates. Some doctors say it develops for a year and then deteriorates. Someone else may say it develops for fourteen years and then deteriorates. What happens to the system after that? Does it deteriorate in any case, or what? Is it definitely developing, or are certain processes taking place within the physical body? There is a particular process of formation in terms of a person's awareness of life.

By about twenty, people generally know how to read, write, count, walk, move their arms, and recognize different colors. A certain formation has taken place. Modern people understand that formation in terms of the information they have consumed or the number of books they have read. Yet we know an incredible number of examples showing how relative that is. What exactly does it indicate? Simply a number of books, or development? Reading a certain number of books may seem to lead to development, but it can also lead to severe degradation instead. Or take the number of flowers someone has planted: have they developed, or simply performed certain actions? Is the number of holes they have dug or cups of coffee they have drunk development? People will laugh about coffee and say of course it is not development. But how is it different from books? I mean consuming books, specifically the quantity. The fundamental question is whether people develop at all. Everyone wants development and change. Yet people also say, “Listen, you used to be normal. Now you have changed and become strange.”

Or, “You used to be normal. You changed, started drinking, and became strange.” They pick extremes. The change itself seems to displease the other person. Why? Because they are always looking in relation to themselves. People assess every change and process in relation to themselves, rather than to the other person, that person's life and path. What is that person's path? What path are they meant to live? How many years are they meant to live? What are they meant to encounter? What states do they need to experience and live through? What family and professional life are they meant to have? What is their path? This is not about deciding that becoming a businessperson, politician, or ice cream seller is right. There is no difference. The question is to study what is there. Which role it is makes no difference. No difference. I have many plants in my garden. It would be like the plants arguing about which is better or cooler, which flowers for six months and which for two days.

A plant, a flower—one flower and another. Someone may like one more and another less. But how we relate to them matters. In relating to another person's life, we need to understand that we should not compare their professional achievements or knowledge: whether they earned a Candidate of Sciences degree or a doctorate, defended an incredible number of dissertations, wrote a huge number of articles, or gave countless talks. What are we comparing them with? What exactly are we comparing? What do we want to establish? I recently had an interesting conversation with my mother. We were discussing someone else's child, and she said, “His daughter does sports professionally.” I asked, “What does doing sports professionally mean? How is it different from my daughter doing gymnastics nonprofessionally? How is it different? Is it a word, a label? Do you know how many hours a day she practices, who her coach is, what school she attends, or what her goal is? How exactly did you decide it was professional? If my child practices gymnastics independently for three hours every day and another child attends a club three times a week that is called professional, who is doing it professionally?” We live in a world of comparisons.

What are we comparing? I have recorded thousands of hours of video in my life. Am I a television presenter by profession? No. Did I graduate from a specialized university? No. Have I even taken courses? No. I do not even know what word to use for how people in this field are usually classified. Have I spent fifteen years doing only this? No. But I have enormous, incredible experience organizing different things—

organizing these different settings and doing this work myself. In different places, offline and online, with different numbers of speakers, at conferences and all kinds of events. Enormous experience. An almost absurd, extraordinary amount. Is this professional activity or not? How do we measure it? Should I have read a great many books on the subject to become a professional? Or spent my whole life doing nothing else to get that box checked? What exactly needed to happen? Is someone with fifteen years better, or someone with one year? Today, with the development of artificial intelligence, we see many young people of sixteen, eighteen, or twenty becoming millionaires because they entered this era of research and science in AI. We know that older people, around sixty, have fallen out of this race—people who once studied programming or engineering. And people my age: I did a great deal of programming in my life and was a programmer myself—

although I am not one now. That is interesting too. Who am I, then? People my age who work in programming—I have many acquaintances and friends who do—consider themselves top-class because they have experience and will get results. But will they? What happened to the people who were sixty? Why did that happen? It was only a tiny change, yet a huge number of people could not handle it. There is still an entire generation that finds computers and phones very difficult to use. The generation of my four children will clearly be living in an entirely different reality. They encountered a completely different reality of what a computer or phone is. Completely different. Three of my four children do not have phones. They do not have them. Only my fifteen-year-old daughter has one. We recently discussed Australia's new law banning all social media for children under sixteen.

I shared an interesting thought while speaking at an AI conference. I said, “If people, including politicians, had thought this through properly back in 2007, 2008, 2009, or 2010, when social media started developing—or 2004, 2002, 2005—they would have passed a sensible law making social media age-restricted like alcohol.” That would have been it. Children would not have used social media, and everything would have been fine. There would have been no arguments, conflicts, details, or all these restrictions to discuss. It simply would not have happened if serious rules had been introduced. Someone will say people would still have broken the rules. They do that with alcohol too. I mean a consistent approach, a shared approach in society: the direction of thought and attention, how everyone relates to it. If there were no driving-age restrictions—sixteen in the United States, eighteen in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, perhaps later in some places—children would get behind the wheel at ten. I think there are countries where they do.

I do not know all the traffic rules in Africa, for example. I think there are less developed countries where children can simply get in and drive, even transport others. We see this with child labor and children having weapons in their hands. Weapons—how quickly a child is given one. It is simply an approach, a rule people have been told about or have not, just like rules about social media. Returning to this important question of human development and understanding it: I am recording this video now while talking to someone who is twenty-four. You cannot see that person in the video, but I am explaining this topic to them. At twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, how does a person feel? They will say, “Of course I have developed. I have changed compared with who I was. I have developed.” That is some kind of indicator. Developed how? In what sense? In terms of society and achievements, or in terms of knowing yourself as a spiritual being—truly knowing yourself?

Have they developed, or have they almost stopped developing? If we rely only on the signs of social and material development promoted in society, people stop developing at twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven—twenty-four to twenty-eight, roughly. Today, in the twenty-first century, people stop at that age. They stop developing. This is very important. They do not develop. Reading books, going to conferences, and watching videos are abstractions. For the past ten years, people have had incredible access to an enormous amount of information, at least in developing and developed countries. Undeveloped countries have full access to YouTube and everything too. So what? What have we seen over the past ten years? What has happened in the world, in society? Have people begun treating one another better? What does intellectual development lead to? Usually, to speaking correctly, being more literate, polite, and cultured. Do we really see a more cultured, more polite society, or not? I recently came across a Soviet video in which women were being interviewed. March 8 had just passed—I do not regard it as a holiday at all.

I did not wish a single person a happy holiday. The holiday does not exist for me—not that it does not exist, but I have given myself the opportunity to spend at least a few years without being caught up in it. To relate to women with love every day, to remember women every day, every minute, rather than on one special day. The video was interesting. Women in the Soviet Union were filmed in a city—I do not know which, or perhaps in several cities—and asked what gift they hoped to receive on March 8. “Flowers, perfume, flowers, perfume, flowers. I want my husband to love me. Perfume, flowers.” Everywhere they listed perfume and flowers. “I want flowers. No one has given me flowers in so long. Or they are hard to afford now. I want flowers. I want flowers.” If we look at social media around March 8 now, we see a completely different consciousness and feeling. Completely different. Again, in a developed society. Which society is undeveloped: the one in which they wanted flowers and perfume, or today's? Which is more developed? It is an interesting question.

Which people are more developed? Which people are more developed? Those who know there are eighteen kinds of mandarins, organic and nonorganic bananas with codes starting with nine or four, different varieties of avocados and cuts of steak, countless kinds of cars, and countless people online offering opinions? What? Can you imagine all that noise? I cannot even find the words. What kind of development is this? How does development result from it? What does result? Or someone says, “I am developed because I have read these forty books. That is why I am developed.” I have read quite a lot of spiritual literature—not an enormous amount, but a reasonable amount. In general, I never used to read anything. In business, I read one or two or three books. Very few. I may have discussed the number in interviews ten or twelve years ago; you could find more detail there. That was around when I finished reading those two books. I remember reading one in perhaps 2010, or maybe 2009—

or perhaps 2013. I do not know. Around then I finished those couple of books, perhaps two I managed to get through. I am not sure I read them all the way through. I read something. I have always used this example despite my enormous experience managing companies and creating a huge number of management technologies and techniques in marketing, sales, product, development, and countless other areas. KPI systems and all kinds of things. Not because I read something somewhere, translated it, and packaged it into a hefty volume. An astronomical amount. Recently, in one of my businesses—a real estate business in the United States, where I was not involved in day-to-day operations—I helped create a new incentive system. With—

a colleague who has worked with me for sixteen years across different businesses. I was discussing one incentive system with her and said, “This system is perfect. I came up with it in three days while away with my partner. I had never created a system like it. It is completely unique and new.” It makes all the other incentive systems seem meaningless. Why? Because you keep working things out and selecting a system for the specific case. It is not that the others are meaningless; you select the system for the particular situation. I could talk about incentive systems for ten hours, suggest different ones, and explain their types, nuances, and details depending on the number of people and everything else. It all depends on the case. So, two or three books in business, and then I entered a period of reading a great deal of spiritual literature. A great deal. I encountered Rudolf Steiner and found his library, which says he gave more than five thousand lectures. Many were turned into books. There are up to five hundred published volumes—I do not remember the number, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred—based on lectures or books he wrote.

Most are books compiled from lectures, or lectures put into that form. Most. I began reading them by the dozen and encountered something very interesting and amusing. It really is amusing. Amusing, but also a truth of life. And for a person, it ought to be sad. It ought to be sad. People who say they have spent twenty years studying spiritual matters or esotericism do not actually study particular people's documents and books in full. They form an opinion after watching one video with that person or reading one book, then quote them everywhere, endlessly. Endlessly. They read Sun Tzu's The Art of War and talk about him everywhere. What else have you read? What else do you know about that person or what they did? It is like people singing English songs or using them as background music without understanding the lyrics. Someone often asks, “Why did you put this mourning song over a happy event?”

Simply because they liked the melody, perhaps, or because everyone knows it. You do not understand what the song says, what words it uses, what its content is, or why it was written. You do not know its meaning. What, then, counts as learning? My sister graduated in philosophy. She told me, “As I now read authors in the context of spiritual development, I recognize some I encountered in philosophy. First, I realize I could not possibly have understood this back then. I did not have those questions or that impulse. I approached it purely academically, and it was meaningless—memorizing and learning material without understanding it.” That is not understanding. Yet this is how people acquire professions. They become graduate students, master's degree holders, and doctors. Do they really understand the subject? Do they truly live it—is it their life? Or is it a box checked, a certificate? What is it? The United States has a talent visa, and it is interesting to see how many people try to qualify for it.

There are criteria, and they were written a long time ago. Some things were written long ago. For example, if you have thirty YouTube videos with thirty thousand views each, they will not count because it is YouTube. But if a good media outlet has written about you—Forbes or The New York Times, or, in Russia, Vedomosti or Kommersant—you meet the criteria. If you have judged a competition, that matters. If a newspaper wrote about it, it is significant. If no newspaper wrote about it, even if thirty or fifty thousand people attended, it is not significant. What is this? Boxes people buy their way into checking. They buy them. Then you see people arranging something in Forbes Kazakhstan or in Malaysia. They arrange these additional placements. I chose this example deliberately because it matters: some perceptions are outdated. It is important to understand the meaning. At some point, for example, many countries established that you could bring in ten thousand dollars in cash.

Europe set a figure too. Later it became ten thousand euros, because local currencies such as marks were converted to euros. In the United States, you can actually bring more, but you have to record it and report it. Many places allow you to declare it, but the point is that a figure of ten thousand was established. In some places it is lower, a little lower in Turkey, for example. Different countries have their own rules. But ten thousand twenty-five years ago and ten thousand now are completely different things. Border officers still ask the same questions. Someone close to me recently flew to America with exactly ten thousand. At the border they asked, “How much money do you have?” “Ten thousand.” “You are breaking the rules.” “No, I have exactly ten thousand.” “What, ten thousand and one cent?” “Exactly ten thousand, in a bundle. Nothing else.” “Why do you need ten thousand?” The person looked at them and said, “I will be in America for two weeks.” “But why ten thousand?” They could not understand the question. “I will buy a bag, and it will not even be enough.” The question remained the same, but times changed.

Twenty-five years ago—twenty-five years ago—you could celebrate a birthday for fifteen people for a hundred dollars. You could put on a banquet, at least at home. Now, for a hundred dollars, four people can each buy a croissant and a coffee. Times have changed. Some prices and things have not, but times and prices have changed. Prices really have changed. Money is different. Some people still have the same amount of savings, of course, but the attitude used to be different. A million dollars in the nineties and a million now are different things. Many people's apartments now cost a million dollars, but that has not made them rich or dollar millionaires. They have no other money. They still need somewhere to live, and nearby apartments all cost that much. It is a changing sense of changing processes. What is happening to people? Are they developing or not? These energies all matter to perception. I am giving many examples because they matter, not because I am getting off the subject.

I am giving many examples to help you grasp the breadth and enormous scale of this topic: at forty, a person remains exactly the same person. I remember a very capable psychotherapist telling me this in a session. He is also a partner in our psychology school, a very strong professional. He said, “Do you think your mother is different now from when she gave birth to you? She is the same person.” That is very important to remember and recognize. But it is very hard to recognize. Very hard. People have hope, endless hope that something will happen: that another person will change, a relationship will improve, or a situation in the world will change. Always hope. But that hope is not grounded in understanding that the most important thing is to look at what is truly happening. When the task is not social, material, or mental development, but knowing the truth—acting truthfully, rather than developing. Notice: acting truthfully, acting truthfully, genuinely.

Taking the actions that are needed. Taking the right next step and acting truthfully. This is not about development. There is no idea of “Have I become smarter or better? Am I acting truthfully more correctly or incorrectly?” There is no comparison of right and wrong action here. It is not comparable, not an object of comparison or an indicator to display. “I have come to know more truth.” As soon as someone says that, they step off their own path of development. Immediately, in two seconds.

Their own. Immediately, in two seconds, they step off their own path of development. All those questions then fall away. You look and ask, “Should I make peace with this person? Build a relationship with them? Part ways? Join this partner or close out our business together? Leave this job or stay?” Wait—that is not the point. The point is to act truthfully, and any events may happen, because your task is not to prove who is right or wrong. Your aim is not to construct good or bad relationships. It is to treat other people well. A person at twenty-five may then ask, “Am I right in thinking I am amazingly mature now?” Of course: by twenty-five, you have taken shape so you can live your life. Those tasks—whether you graduated from this university or that one, whether you did a particular job—what bearing do they have on it? What bearing? You did what you were meant to do. You did what you were meant to do.

If you did the wrong thing, let us examine that. Why did you do it? Someone says, “Because my mother told me to do the wrong thing, or someone else did.” Are you sure you will now begin hearing yourself—hearing what you need to hear and doing what you need to do? How did you recognize that? Notice something interesting. Many people who make money later say they spent too little time with their children or did things they should not have. Everyone looks at them and asks, “Can we make a lot of money too?” They listen not to hear that they should spend more time with their children, but to learn how to make a lot of money.

OSOlga Stolyarova

What is the reason people focus on external development, then? Is it simply because society is like that and they are used to it, or why does it happen? Why can people not focus on knowing the truth from the outset? Look in that direction right away? People gravitate toward the material. What is behind that?

AVAlexander Volchek

When you ask why people do not focus on truth immediately, when exactly should that begin? They are born, emerge, and instead of simply crying, shout, “Truth!” Their first word is not “Mom,” but “Truth.” They are still in a process of formation and development. At first they are influenced by other people, society, the social environment, and the energies of the time. They have a particular type of soul, karmic causes and effects, and an enormous current carrying them, including established misconceptions. Olya, your question about why a person does not hear truth immediately amounts to this: imagine they have a path. They must live through some number of incarnations to reach solar energy and move to a different level, even within the hierarchy of developed spiritual consciousness—a being that no longer needs to incarnate. Imagine that path must be traveled. There was some point of creation and consciousness, and there is a point here. In fact, these points are abstractions; they do not exist. Life moves in the same way before and after them.

Even if we defined these points—there is a realm of time and a realm outside time—suppose we defined them. From somewhere along the path, you ask why the person is not already at the other point. That is the point: they cannot be there immediately. To get there, they must live through lives. Olya, they must live through lives. Moreover, if you were there, you would not be talking to me now. You would not be talking to me. If you reached that point now, you could snap your fingers, so to speak, manifest a body of light, and disappear. You would no longer need this life. As I said, at that point you no longer need incarnations. You do not need to be born. Of course, your own personality interests you. You want to go on living a good life. But your spiritual being says, “Wonderful. I no longer need to do this. No more being born, no more looking after all of this.” It is like moving from one climate to another. I no longer need to buy a winter coat here.

I do not need it anymore. Why would I keep buying winter clothes for myself and all my children? What for? I will not wear them here. I may wear them occasionally when I go to the mountains, another country, or another city, but it is no longer a constant, important, obligatory event. Changing summer tires for winter tires is no longer necessary. There is no snow here. Where I am, there is no snow. I do not need a snow shovel, a brush, or an ice scraper for the windows. I did not use them much before either, but I do not need them now. That matters. You would no longer have a further life to live. That is why the question itself is absurd—simply absurd—useless, meaningless. It has no significance. This does not belittle you or make you stupid. Not at all. The question is why a person is not born with truth. But that is not the task; it is not how life moves.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

Then there would be no movement. Everything would be constant. Everything would be constant. But the modern mindset says we must reach endpoints: earn a million dollars, buy an apartment, have two children, find a wife or husband, bury someone properly, bring someone into the world properly, have our children outlive us, get one education, then a second or third, get a job, accumulate entries in an employment record or put together a résumé, have a social media profile, watch a certain amount of content, and so on. These are things we are told to do as goals or achievements. Do they matter at all? Do they matter, or not? What are we comparing? Someone opened ten businesses, twenty, thirty, or one that lasted a long or short time. They bought one dog, two, or four. Their dog knows sixteen commands or forty-eight. What exactly are we measuring? What exactly?

OSOlga Stolyarova

It is simply more comfortable to live when you have some resources.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is more comfortable to occupy a place. You are absolutely right. It is more comfortable to occupy a particular place or slot in society so people can define who you are. I live in Silicon Valley, California. When we go to gatherings, people approach my wife and ask what she does. She says, “I am with the children.” But they want drive, a business, or some other activity. “I am with the children.” It does not seem to fit a slot, and people want to put her in one. There are places where that sounds perfectly normal and no one would even ask—where if you said a woman worked, people would look at you strangely, avoid you, and not talk to you. Elsewhere, if you are with the children, they look at you strangely: “How? Don't you want something else?” People are always wanting. What does wanting mean? What is it? Is it an inner struggle or a natural, healthy state of consciousness? Are you struggling, or is it simply a natural action? A natural action, or a struggle to prove something to someone? Again, this matters: is it a natural action?

Do you want to learn piano so you can play for others and show them you learned? Is it a hobby? Or is it a natural action—you simply do it? What is it? You have an impulse and a source for doing it that may be very different from other people's reasons. Why are you doing it? Is it better or worse than running a marathon? Better or worse than starting a company that becomes a unicorn? Better or worse? Or are these simply actions, including the convergence of different circumstances? Should we look at the person's system: where they are, why they are in this state, what state it is, what impulses they have and what impulses are acting in them now? Why these particular impulses? Why does one child want to draw a great deal, sitting and drawing, while another wants to walk around and tumble? What impulse is acting in them? They may be in the same place. What are these impulses?

Why does one person have an impulse to talk with one person and another to talk with hundreds? What is that impulse? What is it? Why does this happen? That is what we need to examine. Some people want to connect with others but meet no one, however much they want to. Others do not want to socialize, yet people surround them endlessly. We need to look at the person. Being surrounded by people does not mean they know how to communicate. Who told you they do? We know—

an enormous number, an incredible number, of famous people surrounded by others who clearly do not know how to communicate. So many do not. Then there are very strong people, developed in their consciousness, perception of life, and understanding of everything, who live in relatively isolated surroundings. They may come to work and sit quietly, unnoticed by anyone, yet be incredibly open within themselves. Modern society shows this clearly—less with men, more with women. What do people look at? Clothing, appearance, makeup. You can do fascinating things with people's outward image. But what is inside? What is really inside that person? What drives them? What drives them: greed and doubt, or freedom and love? There are different outward characteristics. Someone is born a sheikh, someone a prince's son. Someone is born a sheikh and is killed immediately, or their whole family is killed.

Someone else is born rich and stays rich until the end of their life. Circumstances vary enormously. Notice that regardless of upbringing or schooling, we see people who received the best education in the world—a royal education, for example—linked to cases of child prostitution. What are we talking about, then? There is your education, your access to extraordinary circles in terms of consciousness and the information being conveyed. Yet people still say, “That one comes from a village and is stupid; this one is smart. This one speaks correctly; that one does not.” They do not look inside at who the person really is as a spiritual being and as a human being. When you look at someone as a spiritual being, Olya, the idea of a race and development falls away. It disappears. It no longer exists. What development are we talking about? You understand that all this is social glitter. It is life, and life is lived through ordinary actions, not unique ones.

Ordinary actions, not unique ones. Not through how many people see you or get to know you. All of this gets mixed together. It gets very mixed together. Across my channels, I have something over a hundred thousand subscribers now, and tens of thousands of viewers. The weekly audience is certainly tens of thousands. Those figures do not register with me at all. Not at all. Tens of thousands of people watching me is simply a number. A small one. I perceive it as very small; it does not register. Hundreds of millions watching—that is a number. These tens of thousands—what kind of number is that? Why do I perceive it this way? On one hand, my consciousness and perception are very calm: tens of thousands or one person. But even socially, my frame of reference for these figures has shifted. I remember a photograph of my father hanging in my grandmother's home when I was a child, from when he appeared in a newspaper in Germany or somewhere.

My father worked a lot with different countries from 1991—or 1989, then from 1991 onward. He appeared in a newspaper, and it hung there. To be precise, he worked that way for a period. He was in that newspaper: “Oh!” And it hung on the wall. Just a newspaper seen by some number of people, but the feeling attached to it was very significant. Very significant. Everything depends on how you perceive it. What I am saying matters: how do you perceive it? If you do not see it neutrally, as the layer of glitter I described, your emotional calm and perception of life change direction. You start seeking truth in other social aspects and sensing progress, rather than movement through life in truth over years and decades. It comes in any case. But even when it has come, even when you have stepped onto that path of movement toward truth, simply keep moving forward. Without judging what is behind you. There should be no judgment of what came before—

whether it was good or bad. Good or bad. Some things are simply interesting. Yesterday I went to dinner at a restaurant with my middle son. We were sitting together after eating, and I was waiting for coffee. He asked, “Dad, what was your first car?” He had been asking which cars were fastest. I said, “A VAZ-2109.” I looked it up and showed him a blue one. “What was the second?” “A Volkswagen Vento.” I showed him. “The third?” “I had a 2000 Audi S8.” I showed him. It means nothing to him—he is nine, looking at cars. “What was next?” “A Porsche Panamera. I had a Porsche Panamera.” “And next?” “A Mercedes, and some other cars here. You probably remember those later ones. Oh, no—I had a Rolls-Royce.” I showed him something and said, “There were three like mine in the world.”

I said, “I had a Rolls-Royce Phantom Art Deco.” He asked how much it cost. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” We had been discussing prices: sixty thousand, eighty thousand, an expensive car at a hundred and thirty or a hundred and seventy thousand. These were figures to him. As we walked, he told me the cheapest car cost something like seventeen thousand, the lightest weighed seventy kilograms, and the heaviest thirty tons. He was telling me sizes and things he had heard, perhaps by asking Alex or somewhere else. I said, “If your friends ask what cars your dad had, tell them he had a Rolls-Royce.” It is interesting to learn. I would have found it very interesting if my father or grandfather had had a Rolls-Royce at thirty. “I bought it at thirty,” I told him. Of course, he does not grasp that. He does not grasp it. What matters is my attitude. Olya, I feel about having a Rolls-Royce at thirty exactly as I do about having read two business books.

Honestly, I have very good feelings about it: a Rolls-Royce at thirty. I am glad it happened at thirty, and I do not make the kind of judgment people might make if they bought one at sixty. It is good to experience it at different ages, in different states and periods of life. It is living through a period of life. How interesting was that period and that experience? First, it is a very good car. I have never turned down a Rolls-Royce and will not—though circumstances can vary. In general, I am very open and relaxed about it, especially a Rolls-Royce Phantom. It is an interesting circumstance. The question is how you relate to it and whether you see it as a final achievement or simply an action. The memory is exactly like a memory of meeting someone or taking a trip. For some reason, someone's funeral just came to mind. Memories, events in life—that is all they are. A trip, not measured by its timing, the people you met, or your age, but simply a trip.

I remember a trip on a bus to Czechia, in 1992 or so, when I was nine—or 1993, maybe 1994, something like that. Some memories from around 1993. It is the same kind of memory, a flash, like remembering a country place or a business. Many businesses are simply memories to me: there were certain partners. You open photographs and look at them; you were moving around somewhere. Memories. My mother recently gave me many photos, including a stack from Paris, perhaps from 2005. I was in Paris in November 2025. Twenty years had passed. You see the same places, and it is simply a memory. I could not work out or remember who had photographed me there. A single continuous line, the same line. No division between now and then. I did wonder what I ate then, what restaurants I could go to, because I had—

a clear feeling that I probably could not go to certain restaurants then as I can now. But in reality the state is the same. How do you feel that it is the same state? What difference does the restaurant or what you ate make? Many people still eat the same sandwiches. My food is somewhat different, but people eat. In some ways it may have become simpler, in others more elaborate. Back then I could drink beer; now I can drink only water and will drink only water—or tea or coffee. I could drink tea then too. I did not drink coffee in those years. I definitely did not drink it for a long time; I started when I was older. It is an interesting feeling, that it is the same. Simply the same. I do not feel that my first car, the VAZ-2109 I had at eighteen, is something special. What do I remember? Alloy wheels, perhaps. I probably did not tint the windows—

or maybe I did. I do not remember. I installed a stereo. My friends and I drove around. Some memory. Nothing overwhelmingly strong. I clearly understand it was a VAZ-2109, an old clunker. Obviously a clunker. An Audi S8 was a different feeling. This is the reality of sensations and understanding. It is not a childhood memory of how good bread and butter tasted, spreading butter on a slice of white bread. People often have flashes from childhood, old flashes. Looking at old photographs brings many states, flashes of energy. It is important to try to live through and observe those energies. That awareness, those memories, are being erased for people now. With so many videos and photographs, it all gets erased. You stop understanding where reality is. Very soon, people will stop understanding it. They will have to turn to the spiritual world. Inevitably. More and more people will begin moving toward it, because otherwise they will not know where reality is, which memories are real and which are illusions based on photographs. You look and do not know whether you actually saw your grandfather or simply remember his photograph.

Do you really remember him? If I ask my children whether they truly remember something, they say yes. But do they really, or is it because everything was recorded on video and they keep watching it? They have watched so many times that they say, “Of course I remember that video.” If, from age five, you spend twenty years watching footage of the apartment you lived in at five, by twenty-five you will feel you remember it perfectly. But do you remember it from the video, or from your own actual awareness? I had a partner, Andrey Rogachev. I remember him saying, “I remember falling off a chair when I was one.” It was interesting, because I do not remember anything. Everything before eighteen is switched off for me. Before ten or some other age, there are two or three flashes, and even those may be invented reality. I do not know. Some people remember. He said, “I remember myself at one or two.” Some people remember themselves very clearly.

Memories. What are these memories? What are they like, and do we need them? Do we need them, and what are they based on? Holding forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years of life in your head, twenty-four hours a day—subtract sleep, so perhaps eighteen hours, though sleep matters too, or sixteen hours—for fifty, sixty, or seventy years is not easy. Not easy at all. It is interesting to access that information as a store of information about events in the world. There are realms such as the Akashic Records, different realms you can turn to for information. Like a library, there is a library of all spiritual knowledge. No library in the world contains that knowledge. You can return to an event and see what actually happened: the states you experienced, what really happened at home or at work, what was actually happening at that time. What really happened. That is very interesting.

Try to give yourself this very clear starting point now: you have not changed in the past ten years. That is a very important state from which to move forward. And watch my other videos.