If there is karma, does a person have free will?

AVAlexander Volchek

Knowing what happens in the future is not freedom. What do we mean by free will? This is very important, because the question is whether free will must be connected to truth. Karma is being fulfilled and formed at the same time. It is important to understand that karma is not simply a set of actions put into you at some earlier point. It is something being created now and constantly, endlessly projected into a person.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Question number one: if everything in life consists of karmic relationships of cause and effect, where in that system is there room for genuine free will?

AVAlexander Volchek

I went outside and spoke to Veta. She had her friends over. I said, “Veta, please be a little quieter. Shout in some other part of the property, not here.” Do you know what she said to her friends? “My father said we have to shut up.” I came back and said, “I never said that.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Wow!

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

And Veta is such a little angel, already using language like that.

AVAlexander Volchek

“Shut up,” yes. I can just imagine what the children thought: her father came out and told them to—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, you know, there he is in his jacket.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes. And he told them to shut up. That is a very interesting interpretation. A very interesting interpretation. You asked a question about this, and it is an interesting feature of how we perceive everything. She did not respond to her friends emotionally. She did not mean that her father had said, “Shut up.” She was translating into English, and the children joke around with each other using “shut up.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

They use it regularly.

AVAlexander Volchek

They use it regularly. She used it simply as slang. But there is a big difference between telling your friend to shut up and your father coming over and saying, “Shut up.” There is a difference, isn't there? You say to your friend, “Hey, shut up,” or something. Then an adult comes out and says, “Shut up.” The children go home and say, “Listen, their father is so strict. He came out and told us—”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

We are not going to visit them again.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, we are not going back. There were two other people there, two other girls, and each one perceives that energy in her own way. Every person has an entirely individual perception of all this. Moreover, one of those girls might have a very difficult perception of that energy because, for example, she may often have been told to shut up during childhood. I mean the way that word is used. If we said “shut up” in Russian with anger and aggression, a person would withdraw into themselves. I came out and greeted the children very openly. One girl smiled and said hello; the other did not even look up at me, although she knows me very well. And she is a well-mannered, decent girl. Why didn't she look up? Clearly, she feels shy. Clearly, there is some inner withdrawal and something she is working through. We do not know what happens in children's homes or what is happening with their energy. And just now you were asking about—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Karma.

AVAlexander Volchek

Whether everything is karmically predetermined. Yes, whether everything is determined by karma. Here we need to look at why one person perceives another in a particular way. For example, one child sees her friend's father and smiles at him, while another may close herself off. On the one hand, we might think she is withdrawing because there could be difficult psychological or psychophysical conditions at home, difficult circumstances connected with her parents' behavior or that of other relatives. Or perhaps neighbors, or someone else's behavior, has this effect. Perhaps she was frightened by something as a child. Perhaps there were other difficulties. Anything could have happened. On the other hand, there may be an energy in the child's spiritual system that transmits a certain restlessness, or what we see as withdrawal or closedness. That is how we see the energy. Moreover, there may be an energy in a child that covers their vision and perception like a veil. They see the spiritual world but perceive the physical world only partly, not entirely as reality. Naturally, that puts them in a somewhat withdrawn state. You know yourself that if you enter a sufficiently deep meditative state, perceiving not just the material objects of the material world but spiritual worlds, you begin to perceive them so intensely that you move a little away from the physical world. What another person is saying and how their speech is structured no longer matter quite so much to you.

You become immersed. For example, I led a meditation this morning. A young woman wrote—actually, a young man wrote: “I became immersed in the vibration of the sound. I stopped hearing what was being said to such an extent that I became immersed in the vibration of the sound.” What does he mean? Essentially, what you are being told no longer matters. You feel the energy being transmitted within. To return to the example of children, at certain ages children are a little more inclined to perceive things. Later their consciousness closes off. Especially after eleven or twelve, it closes off very strongly. A person may perceive completely different worlds, a completely different space, without hearing what is around them at all. They are perceiving something of their own. So when we approach karmic causes again—whether everything in the world is karmic, whether every relationship of cause and effect is karmic, whether everything is predetermined—the important thing is first to understand how a human being's system is structured. However much we examine children's karmic processes, today's fundamentally material-minded person does not approach a child with the idea that a particular energy may be present within them at that moment.

People do not even approach adults that way: an energy may be present in someone at that moment that takes precedence over everything happening around them. This is not a question of what they hear but of a huge range of their actions, including awareness in making decisions—awareness of what they are perceiving at that moment. Yesterday I recorded a video in response to someone who asked: “I truly sense that the other person is wrong. But if I tell them the truth, we will separate.” The main issue there was: are you sure you know how the other person will hear that information? And are you sure that what you are hearing is the truth? Let alone whether you know what the actual discovery of the truth will bring. Some truth will destroy the space around you, while other truth will bring people together. Although it would seem that it—

UPUnidentified participant

Will heal.

AVAlexander Volchek

Will heal, of course. Although it seems it cannot, that it is impossible under any circumstances. In reality, it transforms the energy so profoundly that those people will stay together for the next forty years. Although, again, it seems they will go on hurting forever. So many relationships are endless pain. You yourself have lived through relationships that eventually end, especially when people die: you live with something unspoken, something unresolved, a lack of understanding between you, and then suddenly it is cut off. It is cut off in any case. That is different from being with someone and feeling that there is not a single thing catching at you. Nothing catching at you. It is like someone walking past a tree, getting irritated by it, and digging it up. Yet there is another tree you do not notice at all. It provokes nothing in you; there is nothing catching at you. You perceive it either in balance with your energy or without noticing it. We are now approaching this question, and it is an enormous question, incredibly large. To approach it, it is important to understand where energies arise in a person and what kinds of energies arise.

Why does a person hear something in a particular way at a particular moment? Notice, too, an attitude like the one that arose at the house. Imagine a child who does not often visit other people's homes going to someone's house. They might form the idea that you cannot make noise in any home. Or decide that they were being noisy, or think, “There is something wrong with me.” You can lay that on yourself: “I was making noise.” They were not being noisy. They were just playing with the dog and were excited about having it there. A beautiful dog, jumping around. All they were told was: “Kids, move somewhere else and be a little quieter here. There is plenty of room—two hectares of land. Go a little farther out and nobody will hear you. You can do absolutely anything you want there. Or move to another part of the house. Nobody will hear you. Set off firecrackers, play the piano, shout, yell—nobody will hear you at all. Just move a little farther away.” Yet a child could develop a lifelong trauma. What is that energy that forms for an entire lifetime?

On the one hand, there are energies already present; on the other, there are energies arising, being born. Let us start from that angle. There is no other way to approach whether karma applies to all of life or not. When you and I live our lives, especially as adults—not at five, ten, or fifteen, when energies act in a slightly different formation and the spiritual system of the person who has been born is structured differently—certain basic things are present. Judging by how my daughter is shouting now, she does not care at all about what I said. That is obvious. The basic situation for adults, for people whose systems have formed, is that a certain range of energies is at work. On one side are karmic causes. Karmic causes. It is important to understand that this is not simply a particular event in our lives that is supposed to happen. At that moment the spiritual being is formed in certain energies, or spiritually that structure—

Energies, or a spiritual structure, or a set of those spiritual energies. “Being” is an interpretation; put “being” in quotation marks. It is an interpretation for material understanding. A person consists of that range of energies; certain energies are present within them. In the spiritual world, the spiritual expression of that being currently takes this form. It is represented by this structure, and a certain set of energies is constantly absorbed into the materialized structure. On the other hand, when the spiritual being made the decision to incarnate—speaking conditionally, of its own will or otherwise, in agreement with spiritual hierarchies, worlds, spiritual beings, and the causal law of incarnation and of the entire universe—it put that karma into a certain sequence of actions and everything else. It is important to understand that karma is not simply a set of actions put into you at some earlier point. It is something being created now and constantly, endlessly projected into a person. That is one side. On the other, as a person develops, they find themselves in a particular family. As a result, they acquire a whole range of psychophysical and hereditary causes and effects. We might say these seem to be combined with the karmic system, but in reality there is an entire set of them.

You, for example, have a clearly expressed set of these influences that has nothing to do with your spiritual being. Your spiritual being says, “This has nothing to do with me. It is not mine. This is not my structure. These are not my programs at all.” But when you live within them, it is like putting someone in a room where everyone drinks beer, say. You get used to beer. Or to red walls, or a certain buzzing sound, or a streetcar passing outside. You come to regard that as normal life. Inevitably, it becomes embedded in the person's system during their current incarnation. It becomes part of their life and begins to affect the flow of events. By affecting that flow, it changes the flow of future events. This is not an abstraction or just some joke. What happens to a system that was supposedly programmed by cause and effect from the beginning when a stream of uncontrollable hereditary causes and effects pours into it? Completely uncontrollable: it keeps being sown, endlessly sown and layered on. The question is how you perceive it. When I went out and said that, did I then express a certain energy toward my daughter or not?

At that moment I did not transmit any psychophysical heredity to her. None at all. Right at that moment. But in principle, I could have. The third stream that forms comes from human freedom. A person still lives through impulses of freedom. It is important to understand that people want freedom on the one hand and want to know what will happen in the future on the other. Knowing what happens in the future is not freedom. It is a total prison. Freedom is when chaos can break out a minute from now. Chaos means you and I are alive now and not alive a minute later. It means allowing for complete chaos. If you say you are making a decision out of freedom, you are changing things. You were not supposed to get cancer and die five days later. Suddenly you get it and die. Instant death. That is freedom. Freedom is chaos, as a first approximation for understanding freedom within the current human hierarchy or generation. People live with different systems of perception and different degrees of the presence of freedom itself. So when I just went out and gave the children that particular energy, all the children perceived it—actually, let us use adults as the example.

Adults perceived that system, because things are different with children; their time frame is slightly different. They perceived it, and you and I perceive and live within an extremely broad range of causes and effects. On the one hand, these are strongly predetermined by karma. On the other, heredity pours in like an avalanche, like a train, like a wildly rushing river that you cannot cope with. It has already penetrated every part of your etheric and astral system, caught hold of your “I,” and affected everything around you. Third, there are the changing consequences of the freedom that exists. Now another issue arises. A person lives in a space; you and I are not isolated. Can we isolate ourselves? We can. We can move into isolated worlds where, speaking conditionally, only we are present as spiritual beings. Right now, for example, we have definitely moved into one of those worlds. I can see that we are in a completely isolated environment, even outside time. It is a very particular energy. On the other hand, we live here and are not isolated here. Even if, over there, we are together but I am not affecting you—I am simply present in the space and you are there on your own, alone with yourself—here we are still together.

That means we affect one another. And what affects each of us is not simply our karmic system, our hereditary system, or our freedom, but this entire range of completely uncontrollable combinations. It acts constantly and creates an incredible tangle. No brain and no computer in the world today can construct this system of patterns, this flow of the world's reality and its laws of cause and effect. On the one hand there is complete predetermination; on the other there are worlds like the one we were just in, where there is no predetermination at all. We can move into something else. Yes, we have moved again. What predetermination is there? It does not exist there at all. It has nothing to do with being predetermined, because human karmic law arose when Ahriman appeared among living human beings toward the end of the age of Atlantis. It operates because a particular component of a certain energy appeared. That is a relationship of cause and effect of an even higher order. As people say, there is the horoscope and there is what is above the horoscope. If you are above the horoscope, there is your own conscious structure, which belongs to no horoscope. Obviously, that is so. Obviously, that is so. Every person always has an impulse, and you could call it a cell of light.

This human artifact, these human spaces, this structure, this process—you could use an endless number of words—belong to no horoscope system. Then everything looks very complicated, doesn't it? People want a very simple answer: “What is karma here? Tell us about karma. Tell us about cause and effect.” But fundamentally, you encounter a situation that is far from straightforward. You realize there are external actions. That is why there are such things as the karma of a country. A country's karma can affect people through negative events they were not supposed to experience, just as it can through positive events they were not supposed to experience. There is the karma of a space, present in particular places. There are people and events that change, or can change, another structure. It is important to understand that your spiritual being develops. This is not about you developing as a personality; your spiritual being is also developing in parallel. It lives within a spiritual structure, a spiritual system, a spiritual world. That spiritual being can develop outside incarnation, and it can also deteriorate. By development I mean movement and change—simply change, both positive and negative.

There are no words “positive” and “negative” there, but there is change. If your spiritual being has changed, what happens to you here at that moment? What exactly happens at that moment? That is what matters. Only that way. Any other line of reasoning will be incomplete. Even this line of reasoning raises an incredible number of questions and does not answer itself. How do I understand, at this moment, what I can do out of freedom and what I cannot? But that is the task of a person's life: to truly study truth and understand what is really happening, what is truly happening, instead of living automatically like a robot in automatic illusions and automatic actions, as any other person's life unfolds.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

You know, a question came to me as you were answering. It would seem that to make decisions out of free will, you need to enter a state of awareness. That expression is a little worn out, but it still carries weight. Yet if we return to children, they have free will too, don't they? A child, a soul—if we believe in this paradigm—exercises free will when choosing its life and life experience. I am describing my understanding of what I have heard; correct me if necessary. Then the child is born and apparently has no awareness at all, remaining in a kind of unconscious state until a certain age. More or less all the decisions are made by the parents. How is free will expressed in an infant or a child of two or three? Can free will manifest over the course of that child's life? Or is it connected with age somehow? There is a slight inconsistency in my mind: on the one hand, a person as a spiritual being always has free will, but on the other, they must be in a state of awareness. And awareness seems connected with an adult consciousness, doesn't it?

Please explain that.

AVAlexander Volchek

First of all, the spiritual being is not in a state of awareness, and the spiritual being is not in a state of freedom. This is very important.

This is very important. Mm-hmm. There are hierarchies above the human being that are not in the state of freedom people are talking about. What freedom does a person mean? The freedom to do whatever they want, including actions that disrupt the balance of the universe. Whatever they want, based on their ego, their ambitions, and their personal decision, regardless of how the order and process are structured. A person is told, “You must live twenty years, and then you will die.” They say, “But I don't want to die.” “Your child must die before you do.” “But I don't want that to happen.” What we mean by free will is very important. Again, a very important point is that the spiritual being does not exist within a system of freedom. This is incredibly important. Moreover, if a person's spiritual being possessed even that material freedom, it would become mired in darkness. That is precisely why karma appeared. Yes. That is precisely why karma appeared: to lift a person back up. Otherwise, what would happen? They would live, become mired in particular materialistic events, pass into complete unawareness of the time between death and birth, and want to come back and continue accumulating that unawareness.

Only karma allowed a person to avoid falling into that situation. Only karma. Death also made that possible. Illness made it possible. There is a whole range of different states, depending on what influence acted on the person. These were consequences intended to limit that material freedom. That is not the material freedom a person is supposed to obtain. Another aspect is that if the human soul had not developed in this way and reached the state of the consciousness soul, a person would not have reached the point of receiving and becoming aware of the light of truth from within, rather than perceiving it only from outside. A great many spiritual hierarchies of a very high order perceived that light and set out on the path of immense light by receiving it from outside, not from within themselves. A human being now has the opportunity—not just an opportunity, but a path—to receive light from within, from themselves, and see that light within themselves. But this is not the free will people love talking about: “I do whatever I want.” The question is whether free will must be connected to truth.

You said something interesting: if a person enters awareness, that means they are an adult. But what awareness are we talking about? A child, for example—you and your children: who is more spiritually developed, you or your children? I think that could be completely unrelated to age. Right, if we are talking about—of course it is unrelated. Look, if we say a spiritual structure exists, and the physical body is merely a consequence of that incarnation or embodiment, then it is completely unrelated. Completely unrelated. So when you say a child possesses freedom unconsciously, the question is: doesn't the child possess it? Can a one-year-old transmit an energy to their mother that closes her off from seeing all other men, or leads her to take her own life? Of course they can. Or leads her to earn a great deal of money? Of course they can. I am deliberately giving extreme examples so we understand that other people's energetic influence is colossal, catastrophically large.

It is not for nothing that even Vedic culture considers—this is about children—the birth of a child to be the greatest upaya in a person's life: the greatest thing that changes their life, that compensates for it in one direction or another. It is especially important to understand that any person, absolutely any person, can have an incredibly powerful influence on another person, or may have no influence. When a child is born, that child is certainly not a structure attached to you. Your children are not yours. They are spiritual beings who have come from another world altogether. I may be much closer to you than all your children put together in terms of the being's spiritual structure, the worlds experienced, parameters, orders, karma, encounters, energies, correspondences—anything. Or your children may be closer to me than to you, much closer. I am deliberately speaking abstractly, saying “may,” so we do not get into the structures of particular children. But it is very important to realize that your children may be much closer to me—much, almost unimaginably closer. Material society and the material world do not allow this to be discussed. The only thing people discuss is that, in religion, parents cannot be their children's spiritual parents.

Find spiritual parents outside the family. That is the only message conveyed from outside, which is very strange. Not just strange: it is a distortion and disruption of the system, a deliberate distortion and disruption so that a person does not understand what is happening, so that it is completely hidden. A child is born still able to hear something of the spiritual world, and gradually that hearing closes off. Why? In part because the present world loads the child with the circumstances that exist now. It is not for nothing that all these descriptions say: shield the child from the social environment as much as possible. Shield them as much as possible. As much as possible. Why? So that they can hear and continue hearing the spiritual world. But this is practically impossible when the parents themselves are completely engaged in the social world, acting and living like robots. Like robots. Then there is the process of the child's own system taking shape and, so to speak, becoming embodied in a physical structure. That is something of a play on words, but there is still embodiment. In the first seven years the physical body forms; the child moves from the mother's physical body into their own. In the next seven years the etheric body forms, and in the next seven the astral body completes its formation.

And the fully formed “I” enters the person, bringing the process to completion. Naturally, there are transitional phases. The etheric body comes in earlier, then the astral body; all those transitions exist. During this time, the person's karma and system take shape and all these aspects are created. At the same time, a mass of heredity is pushed into them, including heredity connected with the period in which they incarnated. That is important. Rudolf Steiner has some good descriptions of this. He explains why not many initiates are born at the beginning of the nineteenth century or at the end of the nineteenth century: if those initiates were born then, they would not awaken by fourteen. A great many people on Earth live not within karma but within psychophysical heredity. This is a very important point. Not within karma. They have not even come close to their karma. People discuss karma and free will, yet they have not even approached their karma. They have not come close to it. Even for me, that is a shocking statement. They have not even approached karma. I thought everyone lived within karma. Of course. Are you saying that—they have not even approached it, have not come close. And when a person says—in what sense?

They have not worked through some part of their—They have not worked through it. Over those twenty-one years. Their social history. They have not worked through it; they were unable to. The spiritual being could not get through what they picked up in the first stages of life. Their spiritual being could not enter it at all. It is not for nothing that in all the descriptions we have read, whether from a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, or today, we find this: two people are supposed to fulfill similar karma at the same time. One fulfills it; the other does not at all. When we say freedom exists, it is important to understand that karma can also be adjusted. It can be fulfilled earlier or later. That is obvious. A person thinks they are performing certain actions out of freedom. Who told you that you are not performing them out of good karma from another life? Everything goes well for someone, and they say, “That is my personality's karma. Look how many good things I have done. That is why everything is going well.” But when things go badly, they say, “Oh, that is because I did something wrong fifteen incarnations ago.”

They have not even investigated what incarnation is, what time exists between death and birth, how long they lived, what they saw and where, where they were, or what the different aspects were. They understand nothing of it. Just words, just words and abstractions they set in motion among themselves. But Tanya, realizing that you may not even be living within karma is very sobering, if you truly realize it. It is also important to realize that complete freedom is not that free will. Notice that you added “will” to the word “freedom.” Free will is a materialistic, personal, egocentric concept. It always means a person's will as a personality, not as a spiritual being. It is the freedom of physical matter over the spiritual being. Are you sure your spiritual being wants you to be free? Are you sure? The spiritual being incarnated and considers that this person should have children who will die before they do. The person tries to save them. The spiritual being resists, saying, “We do not need to save them. We need to live through their deaths.” Moreover, the person creates impulses in the opposite direction, endlessly binding their spiritual being even more tightly to the physical world.

Then the spiritual being suffers because of it. It suffers both at the time and afterward. As soon as the physical body dies and the etheric and astral bodies detach from the physical body, incredible torment begins for the spiritual structure and system. Torment, always torment. Always. Where there is karma, there is always suffering. That is why so many branches of spiritual teachings, religions, texts, and treatises direct a person entirely toward living through that period.

Toward living through that period and the importance of experiencing that transition and becoming aware of it, of how extraordinarily important it is to live through. Why? Because if you truly pass through that transition properly, you will continue moving forward afterward. But to do that, a person must be interested in what happens outside karma. I remember first hearing statements like this: a particular action has just taken place. You go on a trip, attend a teaching, a retreat, a session—whatever it is—and you are told, “This action happened so that in your next life your system will be balanced in some way.” People look at you and say, “But that is not what we paid for.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

We wanted to sort things out in this life.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course, people are not interested in that. But if you actually look, developing your current spiritual structure is much more important than developing your personality. Developing the spiritual structure is much more important. Moreover, you will not awaken if your spiritual structure is suppressed by a huge number of different systems. You can do anything you like: meditate on snow, the sky, money, textbooks, Stanford, light, awakening—absolutely anything. But if your “I” suppresses the astral body and is caught in various dependencies and limitations, if worlds have invaded and different viruses and spaces are inside, then whatever you do will have no effect on it. It is completely pointless. Absolutely pointless. Yet you keep creating and inventing things. I always say: you live in a closed room and can invent anything you like. That will not stop the sun from appearing outside every so many hours. Depending on where you are in the world, you see it differently. The movement of days and the daily cycle will not stop. Do anything you want, anything you want, and change things: that structure will not change. In many aspects of what people do, Tanya, their spiritual being does not simply fail to change. It actually deteriorates.

There are tremendous things that are simply degrading from the spiritual world's perspective. If you and I rise a layer above incarnation, or move into the time between death and birth, into the broader time between birth and birth or death and death, between different incarnations, and go higher and higher, all this starts becoming increasingly useless. There is always a zone where the entire flow is, on the one hand, predetermined and, on the other, unimportant. On the other hand, it is unimportant. Another aspect: I have a meditation channel, a different channel from the one where these videos are posted, with a different kind of content. In one of those meditations I showed the next zone of energy, which lies beyond freedom, beyond chaos. There is such a word as “beyond”—in quotation marks here, because “freedom” is an abstraction. Freedom and chaos are already incredible concepts for a human being. But it is important to acknowledge that it is chaos. To acknowledge, Tanya, that if we enter it, you personally might not want to enter freedom.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

I know that for certain, yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Because as soon as I add—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

It is amazing—

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

—because I was thinking about exactly this just recently. One of my flights was canceled, and I found myself trying to predict, to anticipate how events would unfold. A particular picture formed in my head of how things should be. I tried to reassure myself by thinking, “That is how it will happen, because there is a certain order in the world. The plane will take off and reach its destination.” How frightening it would be to live in a world of chaos and complete unpredictability.

AVAlexander Volchek

Freedom is unpredictability. I can describe a huge number of events to you now. The question is how you react. Will you react calmly if you understand that you will die tomorrow, or your children will die, or an earthquake will happen here, or you will be killed, raped, or kidnapped? I am deliberately naming bad events. You will probably react well and calmly if a hundred billion dollars appears in your account, right? But people usually do not like bad events very much. You will not like some good events either. You will say, “Stop. Please stop these events, because I am not sure I am ready to live through them right now or to be present in their full scope.” That is a real test of how ready you are. If you are not ready even for this, even for freedom in thought—look, Tanya, this is only freedom in thought. When you are deeply immersed in different worlds, in many worlds at once, there is such chaos that your physical body contracts into a fear unlike any other. No other fear even compares with it. And that is before we speak of how a spiritual being contracts when it encounters certain energies.

Truly.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Is fear, after all, a product of the physical body, or—

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course not. Of course not. What fear does a physical body have? Tanya, a person has died and is lying in a coffin.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

You know, when someone close to me died recently, I was advised to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Traditionally, as we know, it was read and continues to be read to accompany a person's soul on its journey. I was not reading it so much for that purpose. I wanted another layer of understanding, another picture of how everything happens—someone else's perspective, for example. It said something very similar to what you are saying: at a certain point karma no longer matters, and a person enters a certain space. Again, this is my understanding of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is obviously very profound, and everyone understands it at their own level. But it is as though the person enters a space between life and death, naturally falls into intense fear, and their mind or consciousness hallucinates all kinds of fears that are precisely what that karma consists of. If the person remains calm, at some point they have a choice: return to Earth, move into higher worlds, or merge into a single stream and return to God. It is very interesting. The impression is that what you did throughout your life does not matter; what matters is how you managed to learn to deal with this by the end of your life.

How would you comment on that? What is your view of this process specifically after death? What happens to that karma?

AVAlexander Volchek

The important issue here is how a person approaches studying such things and why they need them. Do they need them as an abstraction, or to understand truth and the path of their current life? Fundamentally, someone may believe in nothing and give it no weight, yet as soon as somebody dies, they go to church and light a candle. Or they believe in nothing, then readily sit down to discuss karma and reincarnation: “Yes, of course I believe in reincarnation.” If you believe in reincarnation, you must understand that there is something above you and the importance of your life, something above the importance of this life. Obviously, your life is not the only important one, because the entire system matters. Other incarnated people who seem to have had nothing to do with you—whom you do not even remember—may matter more to reincarnation than you do. Your present reincarnation is just a tiny flash within the spiritual being's entire system. People also tend to exaggerate how many reincarnations they have had. There are two aspects to what you are asking. The first is what happens to a person after death and before birth.

It is important to realize that there is time between death and birth, and that the time between death and birth is longer than the time between birth and death. What does that mean? The time between reincarnations is substantially longer. Substantially longer. And we need to study—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

So time does exist there.

AVAlexander Volchek

Well, if we are comparing.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Time as we see it.

AVAlexander Volchek

Wait. If a person says they incarnated in Florence in the fourteenth century, then time exists. If they incarnated in the fourteenth century and died for the last time then, seven hundred years, or six hundred and something years, have passed. So there is time.

From the perspective of the world's life. Look, this is very important: if we say time does not exist there, does that mean people incarnate into different periods of time, development, and movement here? That is not the case. To even approach an understanding of a space outside time requires an awareness of time. You and I are sitting here, and I see a space outside time. We are in a kind of golden zone outside time. To become aware of yourself in that zone and understand what the flow of time in it means, you have to see that zone. Otherwise it is impossible to become aware of it. It is only intellectual reasoning. The human brain is not developed enough to comprehend mentally the absence or presence of time.

Today, that degree of development simply does not exist. The human brain cannot remember what happened throughout twelve hours yesterday and easily reproduce it. What are we talking about? Let alone fully reproducing what happened over the last three hundred and sixty-five days.

Fully reproducing every day, everything in detail, everything a person saw or perceived. We cannot even reproduce in words, all at once, what I see right now. I can start describing it: there is one painting, another, and then a plate, and on the plate one little petal, another, a third, inside it. I can describe something, but my system perceives much more simultaneously. Moreover, apart from my eyes, I am simultaneously perceiving dozens of different spaces, worlds, states within time and outside time, and everything else. So the point is not whether time exists there in relation to incarnation. The point is that, relative to our current time, that period is longer. Mm-hmm. It is longer. There is even a period described as roughly seven hundred years between incarnations. Seven hundred years! If you look at that seven-hundred-year interval, you realize people have not had that many incarnations on Earth—not thirty, forty, or fifty. People like throwing around parameters: “I have an old soul,” “a new soul.” That is childish babble. An aspiration of the era, too. It is children on a playground arguing about who is bigger or better, whose father will come and beat someone up.

Who built a sandbox or something. It is an absolute abstraction. That whole approach is extremely abstract. It always comes from not knowing. Here is an example: if you want a cup of coffee, you get behind the wheel, know where to drive, and take a particular road to get coffee. Yet a person says they live in freedom when their life is really: “I am going I know not where, to find I know not what.” Moreover, they are walking with their legs tied and their eyes closed. I will not reach the coffee shop with my eyes closed, even with my legs untied. I will not find it; I am guaranteed to die. Trying to get there from here, I would certainly die. If the coffee shop is right outside your door and you open it, will you die too? If someone has one there, perhaps they might feel their way along the wall and reach it. Perhaps. Even that is very uncertain. But with their legs tied, that is it. This is how a person moves through life while discussing karma and trying to approach it, or what is written in The Book of the Dead, through these concepts.

Moreover, that book was written at a particular time and conveyed that time. The question is: which time? Mm-hmm. What was it describing? It is important to understand that when we see the spiritual world, we see what is current, present, or future. Time changes and moves. A human soul five thousand years ago and a human soul now are different. Two thousand years ago and now, they are different. Different. Even if you go into Vedic astrology, you see that Jyotish itself existed fifteen hundred, or however many thousand years, before our era. But the astrology people use to draw up horoscopes took shape about fifteen hundred years ago. Moreover, different schools use different times. You think, “Wait a second. There was knowledge there, and then someone gave it this form. How did the people who shaped it see it?” That knowledge allows an initiate to orient themselves. Are you sure all the rest of you can also orient yourselves and act like ChatGPT? Today, no astrologer is needed. There is ChatGPT, which can do all this much more powerfully than any individual human brain in terms of taking in all those books and performing the mathematical calculations. That is obvious. It will calculate it much better.

Now you can put twenty people together, draw up a chart, and search every variation in every treatise, every Vedic school and teaching, every movement of the planets, every deeper level. “Give me the deaths; give me absolutely everything.” It will calculate it better than anyone else. But are you sure that is how it works? What is the energy doing the calculating or carrying out the action? This is a good answer for understanding what actually—it is an interesting answer, by the way—happens after death. Then you said something very interesting. ChatGPT has no energy, right? What energy? No, of course ChatGPT has energy. It has a source. But it is not a human being and not an initiate. ChatGPT is not a spiritual being. Is it a consequence of certain energies? Of course. But ChatGPT itself is not structured as a spiritual being. That is very important. Moreover, believe me, Tanya, to high spiritual hierarchies ChatGPT is simply a laughable construction, nothing at all. Some forms of control from the spiritual world. People making artificial intelligence do not understand that they are being shaped, rather than being the ones controlling it. If a programmer writes something, it is not because they are clever. It is because certain hierarchies deliberately gave them the opportunity to see it.

This is very important. I have thought about that, actually. Why didn't all this appear earlier? Of course! That is a very logical question. Why was it invented only now? People answer: everyone used to be stupid, and now everyone is clever. That is what they say. But it is not true. The same thing was happening a hundred and fifty years ago. People invented something and said, “Look how foolish they all were, and how clever we are.” Then they receive a Nobel Prize, a hundred and fifty years pass, and people say, “They were wrong. We are right. Look what we have discovered and where we are going.” The question is: who gave you the opportunity to see this? Who let you perceive it at all? Why did you see it? And are you sure it should be shown rather than kept hidden? Are you sure it should be revealed? Everything has its consequences. Tanya, I want to focus on a very interesting point in your question. We are certainly not explaining The Book of the Dead right now. Mm-hmm. Those are large, separate subjects for studying and understanding the breadth of perception. This is not intellectual perception. That book cannot be understood in material terms.

Of course. Here is the very important point I want to make. You said that toward the end of life it is important to arrive at some awareness of everything that is happening. There is great power in that. If we look at a person's birth and the intervals of life, we see that in the first twenty-one years they are basically building karma in order to live through it. The events that happen to them happen not because they are karma but because they are needed for the person to live through karma later. It is important to understand this: a person went to prison not because they killed someone. They killed someone in order to go to prison. In most such cases, that is how it works. People do not understand the order of cause and effect. The person needed to be in prison and undergo certain trials, so they killed someone for that purpose, rather than the other way around. Karma forms over those twenty-one years. During the next seven years, karma is both fulfilled and formed. Then from twenty-eight to forty-nine, karma is fulfilled. What happens then? I am giving time periods here. Naturally, these are somewhat approximate, to help us perceive this and at least understand that it exists.

A person today still has particular stages of life. Four thousand years ago, everything happened differently. What happens—We don't know that. What happens after forty-nine? Not within this framework, Tanya, believe me. Not within our life? Of course. What happens—All right. The important question is what happens now, what happens to someone after forty-nine if their karma has been fulfilled. I have groups where people study spiritual development and awareness of truth. Some are older. This is an interesting point: a person hears this and says, “So I have already lived through everything.” Just as you said, it is interesting to realize that some people never reach their karma. Some others say, “Then everything has already passed for me.” We try to influence an older person, talk to our parents or someone else, but that person has already lived through everything. What are they supposed to do? This time is actually needed not to create something new, but to truly live through, analyze, and understand what has happened in their life. By analysis, I do not mean social or material analysis. I mean knowing truth, knowing even more of the truth of what is happening, paying even more attention to what has happened.

In fact, you need to cultivate an understanding of what has happened at every moment. Otherwise, you will not be able to approach it. Psychophysical influences and heredity will overwhelm you, and you will become a robotic being. Today that is how most people are after about twenty-five or twenty-six. Seven hundred years ago it was after twenty-nine; two thousand years ago, after thirty-three. So you mean the age is falling? Of course it is falling. That is already a downward movement. Another aspect: you might say, “Sasha, what is happening? Why do some people seem to open their eyes at forty-five and become clairvoyant?” Because a person can become an initiate at forty-five. They can readily become an initiate. People start comparing experience, but we have already said that comparing experience is pointless. It is like comparing a child's experience with an adult's. Different energies operate in each period, and there are different stages. Between forty-two and forty-nine, for example, a fairly high hierarchy, a fairly high spiritual hierarchy of energies, begins to act on a person. If they have no connection with it, of course they will be completely asleep, completely robotic.

But if they are strongly connected with it, they will awaken even further, and we will still move forward. Humanity will move forward. The time will come when more and more people become aware and awaken, but time will change. This “more and more” does not mean now. People usually hear it and think, “Okay, when? In three years?” Even ten years is too long for them.

UPUnidentified participant

Even ten years is already too long, isn't it?

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

How long have we been promised this? Since 2000, I think, we have been told that some great transition has happened.

AVAlexander Volchek

[Unclear fragment.]

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

They say it every year. Yes, but—

Essentially, it is—

AVAlexander Volchek

People will keep inventing things. They stand there saying, “It is a new moon: do this. It is a full moon: do that. Or this is a particular year—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

An eclipse.

AVAlexander Volchek

“And these are the energies now—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

An eclipse window.

AVAlexander Volchek

“And now there is an eclipse, and now something else has arrived.” They tell people all kinds of things. There are people who—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

But that is an attempt to predict reality, precisely to avoid chaos.

AVAlexander Volchek

The task is to become aware of reality. To avoid chaos, you need to become aware of reality, not predict it. Start with yourself and become aware of who you are. Are you a material person, a physical body, merely a collection of organs? Or are you a spiritual structure that currently also has a connection to a physical body? It is important to realize that. Even when a person realizes it—Tanya, draw the parallel within yourself—even if you have intellectually proved to yourself that you are a spiritual being, the personality is still convinced that it is the most important thing, that everything in the spiritual being is directed toward the personality. But it is important to realize that everything cannot be directed into the personality. Some part must remain in the spiritual world. By definition, the physical body is not number one. We are now moving beyond ordinary matter. If the physical body were number one, it would not disappear.

There is something else. And if there is something else, that is an extraordinarily important point. Any mind should be able to recognize this calmly. Otherwise, people say, “We live in an entirely material world,” and then go to church to light a candle for their child's well-being, or have a child and baptize them. Why baptize the child if you live in a strictly material world? What sort of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, or scientists are you if you baptize your child? What are you doing? Are you truly aware of this process? Do you truly realize that Christ has risen? Or is this a joke?

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

What are the consequences for someone who is a physicist? I actually know many people like this. They believe in nothing, but under pressure from their wife, grandmother, or cousin—

AVAlexander Volchek

There are no consequences at all.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

They think, “All right, why should I mind? I'll go and have the child baptized.” What are the consequences for them? What consequences? You know, they do it to avoid a conflict.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, the important thing is that you never know who was the source of that thought. You may want to baptize a child, and everyone may be sure it is your wish, when in fact it is the child's wish, not yours, or the wish of the space. That is the first point, Tanya. We always need to truly examine the attitudes people form. The causes can be radically different, depending on where they are within a space. A person may live in a space where they simply will not survive without particular actions; survival will not happen. There are no consequences. It is an illusion of consequences. It is simply the movement of a person's life and heredity, that hellish river and railcar in which they cannot even take a breath. What consequences? They are not breathing there anyway. On the contrary, even thinking about consequences introduces at least a small note of something: “I have started thinking about something.” A person keeps inventing some supposed form of punishment or recovery based on particular actions, without understanding that this is merely a railcar. The inventing itself is also a railcar. What consequences? What consequences? Even killing a person has a relative karmic consequence if it was predetermined.

It is an incredible violation of the law of the universe and of truth. It has incredibly large consequences in the spiritual world in terms of energy. But there are driving forces and a process. Some people within that process, including people who commit murder, are simply cogs. Simply cogs. If we look further, they will still break through into awareness and move to the level of human development. Most of them. Will some spiritual beings be unable to incarnate, or become mired in a prehuman layer or remain at a preangelic level? Of course they will. Of course they will. Yet if we immerse ourselves in and expand into different spaces of being, at some point we arrive at a place where everything is predetermined. Or we enter a space where it does not matter. In a great many spiritual spaces, there is no concept of black and white. It does not exist.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

That is—

AVAlexander Volchek

I am not removing the need to observe laws. Tanya, I am in no way removing a person's obligation to observe the laws of the universe—the laws governing the movement of energies. Within those energies there is a very clear relationship between people, a very clear manifestation of love for one another, compassion, and so on. There are energies in which a human being is created and which bless and move them. The law of karma will simply come into operation afterward. This is very important. They will go on living through the law of karma. I am in no way removing that. But we must understand that if a karmic law of correction exists, something exists above that law. At that level, if the law will fulfill itself, what difference does it make? Imagine, Tanya, a one-in-a-trillion chance that a person will bring about a good event. Let trillions of combinations of time pass: at some point, that event will happen. At this moment it is simply one of trillions; there will be a trillion repetitions. Naturally, probability does not work exactly like that there, but at some point it will happen. That is all. So if we rise above karma, karma will do its work.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Then the laws of the universe and religious commandments are different things, right? Why are we born into this state you called sleep, without awareness of these laws? Why weren't we given the textbook? Why are these the rules of the game on Earth? How is an ordinary person on the street supposed to know the laws of the universe? Like a blind kitten, to use that kind of metaphor, they stumble around without any idea what they can rely on. They are handed religion and social structures. Why is everything so complicated?

AVAlexander Volchek

Tanya, you have to understand that thousands of years ago people did, in a sense, have textbooks. There were people they listened to. Gods descended to human beings and told them what should happen, because people could see spiritual beings of different hierarchies. When they lost that ability, spiritual beings of different hierarchies descended through people and conveyed a great deal through them. Today we live in a time when people must become aware of everything happening from within themselves. Of course, they will also perceive it through other people, including those who are more initiated, or through avatar structures. So, again, human beings have had an enormous number of opportunities to become aware of all this. At certain times they have had fewer opportunities. That is the course of human development. If people had remained aware of external gods, they would already be very highly developed. Very highly. But certain structures of another kind intervened in the world and in human beings, introducing a new sequence and a new course. At the same time, they gave people the possibility of developing their structure as an energetic being differently, so they could eventually move into the next hierarchy: the new angel who will become an angel for the next hierarchy of human beings.

But that will no longer be on this planet. Now we are moving into the description of planetary incarnations, a different layer of perception and understanding altogether: what the incarnation of planets means, which range someone is describing, and at what point in time. So why wasn't a person given a book? If you were given a book, you would have no freedom at all. Your question is very interesting because it brings us back to the beginning. It would seem wonderful for everyone to follow a book, but then there is no freedom. No freedom; there is pure light. That is precisely why spiritual beings and high hierarchies have pure light. There are spiritual beings that have strayed from the path, shifted by different energies. Even Lucifer. Who is Lucifer? A fallen angel, a hierarchy far above the human being. In terms of spiritual development, this is an incredibly advanced spiritual being who can give you initiation, clairvoyance, vision, medicine—

Vision, medicine, anything you like, by taking over your consciousness and perception. Because he said, “I want to be a little outside. I want to remain a little outside.” There are also new, different, quite powerful dark structures that do not belong to the category of beings such as angels. Other structures have formed. Moreover, there are extraterrestrial beings, other worlds, different kinds of entry. There are a great many structures. So the important answer is very simple: you would have no freedom. Not free will, Tanya. That distinction is very important: not free will, but this other, true freedom. The freedom that lies beyond freedom and chaos. Something toward whose awareness and development a person moves, something they can reach only when they truly hear this light—not merely within their physical body, etheric body, astral body, and “I,” but when they permeate these and form a whole set of new bodies through which to be present there, to truly exist with this light. That is another kind of perception altogether. In the same way, people three thousand years ago reasoned differently. Our conversation would have been, to them, either a conversation between gods or a conversation between people who ought to be killed.

But that is not because we are more intelligent. This is very important. It is not because we are more intelligent. People turn it into a matter of personality. The human soul has a structure today that allows this kind of reasoning. The structure of the soul. The question is where someone is speaking from, what they are transmitting. You can always ask that. When people listen to me, where am I speaking from? Am I transmitting dead thoughts, something from my soul, something from a particular space, energies of the future or the past? Am I reading the Akashic records? What am I transmitting, what am I describing? That does not matter. It is like people asking, “Did you read this in a book, or see it somewhere else?” What are you transmitting? What energy are you truly transmitting? Movement toward freedom will also proceed through how a person truly perceives and hears everything that is happening. Truly hears it. Hears rhythms—not just the rhythms of the planet's heartbeat, but the rhythms of different spiritual beings' energies, the nearby presence of dark and light forces, harmful energies, blood, dirt, light, people's love and darkness. Simply hearing the energies and impulses of sunlight, the energy of Christ.

When a person can hear more and more—and that “more” is endless. There is no end to it, Tanya. Do you understand? There is no end to this hearing. People always want to put an ending on it: “This book describes more. These people did more. This idol did more. This spiritual being did more. This saint did more.” They want an endpoint. There is no end. There is no end to this knowing. Even if we approach something supposedly final, at that point the concept of beginning and end disappears. It does not exist there. The very fact of an ending does not exist.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Along with beginning and end, you keep talking about dark and light forces. Even in Lucifer's example, that is not the same as comparing good and evil, is it? Good and evil are more human categories, products of the mind. Dark and light are about something entirely different. How do you see that?

AVAlexander Volchek

Tanya, these are all materialistic descriptions using words.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

The limitations of human language?

AVAlexander Volchek

You see, in some spaces Lucifer will appear to you as a very light-filled being.

Or if you place this outside time and space, the descriptions say Lucifer transforms. He cannot remain within a system of imbalance; he will still transform into light. Ahriman does not transform, but Lucifer does. Ahriman will burn. That is why he cannot know what love is, although it would be an extraordinary spark for him. There is a good film, The Book of Eli. It shows people who rape and kill and want power trying to obtain a book from the main character. I like that actor very much. Why do they want the book? To convey certain words to people and gain power through those words. This is an incredibly powerful illustration of what dark worlds actually want to do. They want to use the power of the other side, including the spark within a human being that is inaccessible to them. They want to reach it. A person goes deeper into it, and they want to reach it all the more. They take greater and greater possession of the person. The person goes deeper, and they want to reach it even more. Again, it is a very particular situation. On the one hand, it is uncertain: who wins and who does not?

On the other hand, there are no winners or losers. Everything is predetermined. Or none of this exists as such at all. Tanya, dark and light, bad and good—all of this is a game of the mind and reasoning. It is the same as calling someone bad or good. Is a life bad because someone is homeless in San Francisco and injects drugs? Or because someone was born in Palestine and grenades explode nearby every day? Or because they were born into a family of killers who put rifles in their hands and tell them to kill? Or is this simply the path they follow, their life? There is a very good description of this: when a child comes to school, or a person comes to a priest, assess them not by their experience, what they amount to in the material world, their achievements, merits, or résumé, but by their spiritual being. Become aware of their karma and the aspects of their perception. Imagine realizing that it is not even their own spiritual being acting, that the person has been completely overtaken by structures that have gained power over their system. What will you do then?

How will you understand it then? Truly become aware of the structures, and then draw conclusions. Then draw real conclusions. The question of dark, bad, white, and light begins to disappear. Most importantly, people look for dark and bad, evil and good, to improve their own lives, not to understand truth.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

They want to improve their own lives.

Improve their own lives. That is their central concern. That film shows an interesting aspect, too. At the end, when they find the book, they see that the book does not exist. There is nothing there, because he learned it all long ago. He recites it all and knows it completely. That impulse of light, of the sun, of energy, the voice of the gods, of God—whatever you call it—is transmitted through him. That is precisely the example. A great many films show quite powerful, substantial energies, even though they may be made as action movies with a particular kind of appeal that people enjoy. But if you look from a slightly higher perspective, it is a good framework for understanding what is happening. Why do these people need that energy? It has been this way throughout life. Look at all the films about people searching for the Grail, driving around in tanks and looking for it. I will soon be going into those spaces myself, to Egypt. Like Indiana Jones, fighting the Nazi soldiers searching for the Grail. He opposes them and is also collecting something there.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Everyone is looking for something.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, everyone is looking for something, trying to touch something sacred that offers a certain power and authority. First, they do not understand at what point in time it had that power and authority, why that particular person could possess it, who actually held that power, or how they themselves could come into contact with it. I always tell people: you want to obtain a power you could never bear. What power do you want? If you merely learned what is happening within you, you would remain on your knees for the rest of your life, unable to get up, asking for forgiveness, truly becoming aware of the actions you perform. A person wants to lift and press a thousand kilograms and says, “Of course, I can control that energy. I can handle it.” They do not even understand that it is a thousand kilograms, that what they have is an illusion, that they only see it in a picture, only perceive it in a picture. Life will not even give them the opportunity to experience it that way. It does not work like that. It is simply ridiculous. It is kindergarten. Like a child casually saying, “I can climb that tree too. I can jump off that mountain too,” or do something else.