Loneliness: how to stop being afraid and live well

AVAlexander Volchek

Today, once again, we have a very important topic. It concerns not only how to work through loneliness, but also how to approach being alone so you don't want to escape into solitude either.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Loneliness. Today, I would like to talk about loneliness, how to overcome it and stop being afraid of it.

AVAlexander Volchek

To approach loneliness, truly understand it, and find a state in which you feel harmonious, let's begin a little more broadly. With loneliness, of course, we immediately need to ask what causes this state to arise. I suggest starting with why a person feels good. When someone feels good, let's simply say "good." We won't add "joyful" or "happy," just good. When a person feels good, loneliness as such isn't present. They can feel good alone, in complete solitude, or among many people. This is very important, because an enormous number of myths and manipulations in the world have been built around loneliness: by people, different groups, teachings, politicians, traditions, and principles within countries. What relatives do around loneliness. An enormous amount has been written about how important it is not to end up in that state. When we speak of loneliness, do we mean a person being alone, or someone who can feel lonely while surrounded by an enormous number of other people?

Where does loneliness come from? Does it arise because no one is around, because you have no friends, acquaintances, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, children, or parents? Or is loneliness something else? Can a person feel lonely while surrounded by large groups?

OSOlga Stolyarova

Definitely.

AVAlexander Volchek

Then why do they feel it? What is going on inside? The next question a person needs to ask in examining loneliness—to truly understand it, you need to study it and understand how it works—is whether loneliness is something bad. Is being alone a bad state? Is it bad at all or not? Is it bad? When someone says, "I am lonely, I feel lonely," what are they concealing behind that? Different people may conceal different things: feeling lost, emotionally unstable, depressed, anxious. Many things can hide behind the idea of loneliness. Someone may even describe feeling alone in their principles, approaches, and views. Which matters more: having many people around who share none of your views, positions, approaches, or actions, or having no one? Look at society and people today, in the twenty-first century: an enormous number choose difficulties in communication and relationships over being alone. They are willing to suffer with another person, suffer because of how that person behaves and what they do.

But they won't exchange that for being alone. Again, ask what really matters more: having people around in a situation that is false to your own state or perception, or being alone? At least when you are alone, you don't have the problem of being surrounded by people who definitely don't share your principles in life, approaches, or topics of conversation. Which matters more: being with people who say killing people is good and take part in it? Someone says, "No, I won't be with people like that." What about people who constantly drink, constantly lie, constantly hit you? Or being alone? People often choose to stay with those who hit or lie, rather than be alone. Why? Why is a person afraid? Why are they afraid? What energy is held inside that makes them see being alone as something negative? That is why I asked a very important question at the beginning: is being alone bad or good?

OSOlga Stolyarova

For me personally, it is good. But there are people who feel bad in it. What should they do, those for whom being alone is bad? No, I simply always feel good. I don't know, I just feel good. I am not afraid of being alone. On the contrary, I often feel better by myself than around other people, if we mean the social aspect: whether people are nearby or not. What should those who feel bad do?

AVAlexander Volchek

Do you prefer being alone to being with other people?

OSOlga Stolyarova

I can't answer that, because I probably haven't had a situation in life where I could test it, where I was removed from the social world for a very long time. That hasn't happened. But as an inner feeling, especially lately, roughly speaking I want to go live somewhere in the Altai, feed goats, look after cows, and simply withdraw from the social world. And it—

AVAlexander Volchek

What kind of energy is that?

OSOlga Stolyarova

On the contrary, I really want it.

AVAlexander Volchek

What kind of energy is it? Why does a person want to do that? There is another side: a person may want to escape into solitude. Someone wants to escape into solitude, not because people around them lie or deceive, but to escape bustle, work, real life. Some people want to escape life. Again, today's topic is very important. It concerns not only working through loneliness, but also approaching being alone so you don't want to escape into solitude either. Specifically, escape into it. That matters a great deal: studying that energy itself. There was a reason I asked you the question. In answering, you showed the energy of the opposite side, a somewhat unhealthy perception of the word or the energy. You revealed that opposite energy, because there is no parameter here. You also defended yourself, saying, "I'm not afraid." Everyone else, enormous numbers of people, fear loneliness, but I don't. What is that inside? What is inside that wants this? People especially mention the Altai, mountains, or India.

Who told them they would find solitude in the Altai? And what kind of solitude? Do they definitely need to do it? Is doing it really necessary—

For this particular person? Is it their life's task? There are indeed tasks where a person needs to enter complete renunciation, give up comforts, money, social rewards, certain aspects, and family. There are incarnations and lives in which a person needs to leave. But does everyone need that? Is it your path? What is that path based on? An inner longing and genuine hearing of what is happening? Or a myth? When you say, "I would like to leave," then leave. You have the opportunity. Everyone has—well, many people have that opportunity. You live in St. Petersburg, not Palestine. You can do it. You aren't living in Afghanistan. You can move within one country without difficulty and do some kind of work there. You are intelligent, an intelligent young woman. You will certainly find work and live there. Then why aren't you doing it? You spoke about it so eagerly. Why aren't you doing it? That matters too. If a person has a longing, what should they do with it?

Likewise, there is the opposite, insatiable craving for communication and social contact. There is craving and fear of being left alone. Fear. Fear so strong that a person puts everyone else in chains. Enormous numbers of parents put their children in chains because of their own fear: "You'll leave me alone. How will I manage without you?" And so on. Enormous numbers, and not necessarily when they are older; it happens at any age. Other parents don't mind. You can see it. Some readily send their children to study in other countries at twelve. For many people, that inspires horror and a strange feeling: how can someone do that, and why? We need to look at the reasons those parents do it, the reasons for their state, their motives and impulses. I know many parents who generally seek to keep their children dependent, for example. Just as many husbands and wives want to keep their families dependent. Conversely, many children want to keep their parents dependent. People want to keep employers dependent, or employers want to keep their employees dependent.

There is a great deal of this. Overall, we live in a world where people want to keep one another dependent. I began by asking: what does it mean to live well? What is living well? If we examine living well itself, feeling good, it doesn't specify whether you are alone or with someone. It doesn't specify that at all. It doesn't. Either is possible, because you can live well, feel good, and be in complete isolation, or feel good in a large society. Feel good, truly, genuinely good. The question is whether you can feel a hundred percent good at all. What do you think? Can you feel a hundred percent good?

OSOlga Stolyarova

No.

AVAlexander Volchek

Why?

OSOlga Stolyarova

Again, through interacting with you, I know and understand that there is always better and, as you say, always worse. A hundred percent would be an endpoint. That is what you talk about. I don't yet know what feeling a hundred percent good is.

AVAlexander Volchek

I don't perceive good as better or worse. That is the whole point: even when you refer to interacting with me, I don't perceive good as better or worse. When we say better or worse, there are parameters for comparison. When I say good, there are no parameters for comparison. Can you feel good? That doesn't mean better or worse, just good.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Well, apparently you can, probably.

AVAlexander Volchek

But you just said you couldn't.

OSOlga Stolyarova

I said you couldn't feel a hundred percent good. But generally good—I feel good now. Despite certain external circumstances, I feel good. I can say that, but I don't know whether it is a hundred percent.

AVAlexander Volchek

I can ask you ten questions right now, and you will say you don't feel good.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Most likely. I can change your opinion with questions, of course. Why do you need to keep defining your state throughout this video? We are filming, and you keep defining it—and you must by no means cut this out. You define your state: "Here I feel good, here I know, here I'm alone," and so on. There is a reason for this desire for a particular kind of confirmation. In fact, when you feel good, you definitely don't have that state. Look, feeling good means not identifying or comparing yourself with anything at all, and not treating the question "Do I feel good or not?" as important. The question itself disappears. It doesn't exist. The question itself doesn't exist. This is difficult to understand because you need to be in that state to understand the question itself. Questions cease to exist. When you feel good, you won't say, "I feel good." There will be no desire to say it, no better or worse. It doesn't matter to you what another person thinks. It doesn't matter to you to say it for your personality or ego, to single it out, prioritize it, or achieve it.

It doesn't matter to you. In that state, none of it makes a difference. This is a fundamental point to become aware of. Many people won't even want to enter that state, because it is beyond the personality's control. In that state, what happens isn't what you want. When you feel good, what happens isn't what you want. That is very important. Something happens, without a plan, out of pure freedom, in complete chaos. But that chaos isn't what you like. I have outlined something abstract for many people, something to observe from the outside, at least to observe that state. Simply to observe it and establish some knowledge of it. It may flicker through for a minute, five minutes, an hour, or never at all. Perhaps someone experienced a state like it in childhood, or perhaps they never have. People often give childhood as an example. Not always. Perhaps they did experience it; perhaps they didn't. No one takes an interest in how a child feels, really opens it up and looks at what is actually happening inside.

What is the catch in this question from the beginning? The catch is that enormous numbers of different processes are always happening within a person, including negative ones. All sorts of processes. How can you be in harmony within those processes, freely observing and perceiving everything that happens? You can knock someone out of feeling good: cut off their arm, and they will clearly enter a state of stress. At least their physical body will. I don't know anyone who could remain calm like that. In theory, they are possible, described somewhere in books or treatises: someone in a certain state who remains calm, harmonious, and well when their arm is cut off. But that is the highest realization, and basically not a human being, but some spiritual hierarchy or energy. Not simply a human in physical flesh, having completely brought the physical body under control. So, basically, anyone can be knocked out of a certain stability at the level of the mind and body. How can you remain stable, at least when your arm isn't being cut off? At least then.

Not being cut off, yes. At least when you look around and everything seems calm. How do you live without an enormous urge to move to the Altai, or, conversely, to move to the city? How do you live in harmonious perception and, most importantly, hear what is really needed? For example, you may know you need to move to the Altai but can't do it now. You don't leave because of certain circumstances, and you respond well, very calmly. You have no difficulties or negative judgments about it. You respond calmly. If something arises, look at it: why live through it or not? Look more broadly at what state actually matters. Many people do this: someone wants to be alone, so they get divorced. "I need to be alone now." Many people do that. The question is whether it is a healthy next step for that person. I often say that knowing your next step is fundamentally important. It is a person's most important understanding. Throughout the day, you make enormous numbers of decisions: truly know your next step. The next step.

What should I do? Do I need to move to the Altai or not? Do I need to be with this person or not? What should I do? That matters a great deal. A great deal. On one hand, what matters is the foundation of harmonious perception, and we can see that this isn't a question of understanding loneliness as such. On the other hand, there is knowing your next step. Working on both sides opens a person's ability to perceive and understand loneliness. Essentially, loneliness will pursue a person endlessly throughout their life, because their spiritual being entered and then the person forgot everything: everything they were to do, all their actions and approaches. Somewhere deep in the soul, there are impulses of understanding and knowledge, a striving to understand that the world is spiritual, not merely material, not just what we see with our eyes or perceive here, and not merely social. This will create an inevitable unease that also takes the form of loneliness. The more broadly a person begins to see, the more they perceive, the more and more they perceive, the more loneliness they will feel.

Loneliness in relation to what?

OSOlga Stolyarova

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

This is very important. Loneliness in relation to what? Loneliness arising from loneliness, from how you interact with other people. An insatiable desire simply to be in spiritual space, although in fact the person is already there. In fact, they are already there. The task is to feel spiritual space within life, here and now, in life. If you tell people why they actually came, what they are doing, and what their path is, they will be overwhelmed by a total wave of loneliness and not knowing. If you simply tell them, tell their brain and put a scientific stamp on it—people like scientific stamps and certified documents—say, "Here, it has been proved to you," but don't bring them closer to a felt sense of the spiritual world, the energies of peace, love, and truth, knowing and hearing God. If a person hears the spiritual world, they cannot be lonely. They cannot be lonely. How could they be alone?

It cannot be present there; it simply doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. You cannot isolate that person anywhere. Such rooms don't exist. They don't exist. They exist in mystical fantasy films, where someone is isolated from the spiritual world in a room. I don't know of such rooms. In the social world, I have never seen a room that isolates a person from spiritual perception. If it isolated their spiritual perception, they would have to die immediately, instantly. They wouldn't be able to connect with their astral body. As soon as that connection became impossible, the etheric body would immediately begin to withdraw, and the physical body would begin to disintegrate. Immediately, instantly. Well, it would last for some period of time. That is why I don't know of such rooms.

OSOlga Stolyarova

As you are speaking, do you know what I have realized? I said I am not afraid of loneliness and so on, because I seem to be making a division again. In my perception, loneliness seems to be bad, and because I'm not afraid of it, I am generally okay. Perhaps that is also a mistaken attitude toward loneliness. Then how should a person approach it? Suppose someone watching now feels lonely in certain ways. What can we say to help them look at their state differently?

AVAlexander Volchek

As I said at the beginning, let's return to the beginning. Someone says, "Thank you for everything you have said. But please tell me how." I say, "I was explaining how." Let's return again to the description I gave at the beginning. First, with regard to being alone, identify for yourself whether it is a bad state. Look at whether it is bad. Understand that when you are in a state of feeling good, it isn't a question of loneliness.

Direct your attention toward knowing your next step. Direct your attention to knowing it. Then take a large set of actions to work toward feeling good, truly good, truly feeling good. Simply fighting loneliness—what is that about? Why fight it? As you broaden your perception—I keep saying you need to broaden your perception, broaden it—I have a friend whom I told that for many years. Recently, he went on a retreat and told me, "I finally understood what broadening my perception means." I thought, "You haven't understood what broadening it means, but you have understood a little piece." He said, "I understood what broadening my perception means. Now I can say I understand." I think he will come back in three years and say he has understood it anew again. You need to feel more, see more, perceive more. If you are in a state of expanded perception, any person watching, the very act of observing loneliness becomes real, not illusory. The most important thing about loneliness is to stop living in an illusion that you understand its causes.

Someone says, "I feel lonely because I don't have a husband. I feel lonely because I don't have children. I feel lonely because my children moved away. I feel lonely because my parents died. I feel lonely because I don't have friends," and so on. "I feel lonely because I work fourteen hours a day." The person finds an explanation, but not a real one. What matters most is beginning to dig down to the real causes. As a very simple action, on the other hand—on one hand, we are talking about broadening perception and working toward a state in which you feel calm and good. Work toward being able to identify your next step. On the other hand, approach it through the causes, through the causes of your experience of loneliness. "Let me understand the cause right now." You won't. It doesn't work that way. These things don't work that way. We are discussing how to shape consciousness so that you can perceive yourself in a healthy state over the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or a hundred years.

Move toward perceiving more broadly, toward feeling good. At least become calmer and calmer, more and more, and feel good for more of the time. Look: good for more of the time—

Look: good for more of the time. That is very important. Be able to recover quickly, recover quickly from whatever happens, because all sorts of things will happen in your life. In many lives, a great deal of bad things will happen. Be able to recover quickly. There is the stress you experience immediately. How do you recover from it afterward? Do you create another psychological trauma and carry it for the next forty years, or process it very quickly and move forward? Whatever happens: a snake frightens you, a bear appears, someone dies, your arm gets cut. It doesn't matter what event. You are fired or hired. Whatever the event, recover quickly. That is a very important quality: recovering quickly. But people don't want to recover quickly. They want bad events not to happen and good events to happen. They don't even think about it. I rarely meet people who come asking and working toward how to recover quickly. We see it in the professional world: athletes recover quickly, for example. We are told about animals that recover quickly. We see examples in business describing how someone recovered quickly and earned money, quickly understood the situation and acted, quickly adapted to the world and acted.

Recovering quickly is a good, healthy quality. But the average person doesn't come asking for that at all: "How can I recover quickly?" Not "How can I feel good?" Look at the difference again. It is fundamental. The difference isn't about life feeling good, but about aiming to recover quickly. When I talk about perceiving broadly, why don't people latch onto it? Because I don't tell them what great things they will get. I say perceive broadly, and perceiving broadly isn't great. Know your next step. "Can I not know my next step and simply feel good?" What does a person want? To be a robot, which they already are. Most people today are robots, enslaved robots. Not because of the job they have or the family they live in, but because of themselves, their personality, the ego-computer, Lucifer, Ahriman, many things. Because of themselves. A human robot, with causes, without awareness, taking into account the structure of the human being, the world, its details, and everything else. A person is a robot and wants to remain that robot, simply in good circumstances.

The Matrix gives a very good example. One of the traitors says, "Can you put me back, give me everything I want, and erase my memory so I don't remember what real life is like? Then I can calmly go on living in the Matrix." The person chooses to go back and be a slave, an absolute slave, an absolute slave, to be returned and placed inside the Matrix. That is what he chooses. It is a good, instructive, deeply instructive example of what people really want. They want pleasant freedoms, good events, great food, interesting and attractive people around them. Beauty. Some want more of a particular kind of beauty, others less, depending on their taste and how developed their feelings and senses are. They want various kinds of fulfillment. They want many things, but not simply, "Let me perceive more. Let me work harder. Let me know my right next step. Let me recover quickly, regardless of what happens." Again, regardless of events. Whether you are sent to live in a village or anywhere else, develop these states regardless of events. If you start looking for people like that, first, they won't be easy to find. Second, in the modern world, at least most of the famous people others watch aren't about that.

Not about that at all. You can quickly determine whom you are following. Very quickly. Everyone wants to follow someone. I remember having a very wealthy partner. He had more than a billion dollars. He had reached a billion a very long time ago. There were some acquaintances, fairly wealthy guys, who kept asking, "Does your partner do spiritual practices too?" He kept saying, "What difference does it make?" People want spiritual practices, guidance, peace, knowledge about the world and how to act from people conveying something entirely different. Choose whom you want to listen to and learn about. Look at what the person really conveys, what lies at the essence and root of it. Then know where it ends. If you choose someone who promotes constant striving for achievement and says life is impossible without major financial achievements, know where it ends. The end is very simple. Suppose you have sat down, studied, and understood that a person's state isn't connected with money, for example, or that loneliness isn't connected with money at all. How will you work with that?

Someone tells themselves, "I'll earn money and figure it out then." It doesn't work that way. It doesn't. Who told you that you will earn the money at all, spend it properly, or get anything from it in terms of your own state? Who told you? "Then how do I learn, or where do I start learning, to restore my state?" First, if you are listening, feeling, and perceiving broadly, and fear arises because something went wrong at work, can you grow another space alongside it? Simply by looking at a tree, its beauty, the beauty of the sky, or your own child or someone else's, can you bring forth a state that is more expansive and encompassing than the fear? The central thing is learning to disidentify, not remain directly identified with the process that brings on the difficult state. For that, you need to see its cause, or be able to perceive the state from the outside at all. Be able to pause for at least a minute and perceive it. People find that so difficult: perceiving a state. You give them an exercise for the day: whenever you see a person, feel a surge of love.

The person comes home in the evening and thinks, "I noticed five times and missed eighty-nine." Why didn't they notice? For some reason. This is a quality you need to work on very seriously, really work, work incredibly hard, incredibly hard. Broadening perception itself creates a basis for healthy discernment. On the other hand, you could simply speak about knowing certain techniques. But knowing techniques doesn't resolve the issue, because a situation can always be worse, and no technique will help if you don't have strong perception. Imagine: there are people close to me who know they can always turn to me and that simply talking with me automatically helps them recover enormously. Enormously. Even looking at my photograph helps them recover. Someone says, "I know this and understand it completely. But when something happens, I don't remember it. I may remember ten days later." The perception doesn't arise. So knowing a technique or having some—

Text will do nothing to remove the situation in which you cannot see and truly perceive another person, because you have to work on this constantly, keep at it. It is enormous work, enormous, tireless work. I have recorded—I don't know how many—hundreds, more than a hundred videos on this channel. That is a lot, a great deal of different information. It is enormous, tireless work, not a one-time action. I lead meditations every Friday. Today, as we record this, the nineteenth meditation has just taken place. That is a great deal of work for people: living through nineteen meditations and setting aside the time. Time has to pass. You can't just sit down and watch nineteen meditations in one day. In theory, you can, and it would probably be beneficial. If you enter a certain state, why not? There would be benefit. Still, some things have to be lived through and take time, just as certain wounds take time to heal. For example, the human physical body renews itself over seven years. There are energies in spiritual processes that affect the physical body and give it certain impulses. For those impulses to begin functioning fully within the system, it will take three, four, five, or seven years.

At least in seven years, the whole system will renew itself. If it hasn't renewed, what do you expect? In seven years, everything will leave with the skin and hair. Everything will leave, simply everything. The entire system will renew, all the cells will renew, everything. There is energy that takes time. People simply don't understand cause and effect. Someone attends a meditation, and four years later a certain state begins to develop, but they don't make that connection. Where would the connection come from? Modern people are used to wanting a one-time result or remaining in repetitive actions that concern restraint, rather than exploration. Often it is restraint, not development, though the restraint can be useful too. The question is what a person truly wants. Do they want the chaos of freedom, or a joyful, cool, wonderful robotic life? What do they want? In The Matrix, the character whose name I don't remember—a secondary character, a good one who wanted to become bad, who betrayed them—I think that was in the first film. It is a very clear indicator of your choice, of what you want, what you really want. Look how many people enter lucid dreams, where they can perform enormous numbers of real actions and feel them.

How many people would like to be a superhero in The Matrix, immerse themselves in the Matrix, put on a headset, and drop into another reality? A great many would choose that: immerse themselves completely in another reality rather than remain in truth. It is no accident that truth in The Matrix is portrayed so negatively: people eat who knows what, wear dirty clothes, have no clean water, can't wash, and so on. That is the counterweight. It is shown as in life, showing what people pay attention to, what they truly choose, what really interests them. What really interests them. A person is a slave to their own system, in which they don't want freedom. At least calmly acknowledge that, like the character in the film. Acknowledge it calmly and go on living calmly. Know that you are a slave because you don't want freedom; you want cool, exciting events. If you truly want freedom, want to broaden your perception, want to sacrifice yourself for the true world, are you ready to do it for others? Do you want to hear the spiritual world, truly begin to breathe? There are many opportunities for that here, which I discuss on my channel and in other groups.

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