How Does Where You Live Determine Your Success? The Shocking Truth!

OSOlga Stolyarova

I've noticed that people sometimes write in your comments, ‘You're in California, so it's easy for you to talk about building a beautiful, happy life. We're over here and don't have those opportunities. You have more opportunities.’ I'd like to begin by asking about your personal experience. You're originally from Belarus, then you lived in Moscow for thirteen years, and a few years ago you came to America. I'd like to hear how that was for you. Did where you lived affect your personal development or any of your achievements?

AVAlexander Volchek

The influence of location on personal life is a question that prompts endless reflection in all sorts of people, although some never think about it. I can say I never particularly planned any of the moves in my life. I'll get to the connection between a place and what happens there. If I'm in Monaco, is it necessarily great? If I'm in California, am I necessarily happy, with money falling from the sky? If I'm in Paris, am I necessarily bursting with joy and freedom? Or if I'm in Minsk, must I feel that life is hard? One important thing to consider is what drives a person: first, their impulses, and why they experience a particular state. Second, what drives their desire to compare their region with another one. When I was in Belarus, I had no desire to move anywhere at all. I definitely loved where I was, and I wasn't particularly interested in being away from the people close to me.

Did I feel that everyone living in another country had it great? I don't know. I probably didn't understand the breadth of the world, cause and effect, or how things worked. Are money, joy, and happiness connected to a particular location? One person may feel incredibly positive emotions in a place, while another feels a very strong rejection of that exact same place. A close friend recently spent several weeks with me. America had been just some country to him. He'd had an American visa several times but never came here. Then, completely spontaneously, he bought a ticket two days before the flight and came to visit me. During his first days here, he kept asking in the street, ‘Where's the dirt? Where are the fat people? Where are the people who look a certain way?’ He was working from stereotypes, although it was clear he didn't really know this country: its characteristics, its people, the differences between states, the details of everyday life and pay. He didn't understand any of that. He was living inside a particular state of his own consciousness.

It's like going to another country and saying, ‘Is ten dollars for coffee expensive or cheap?’ Olga, is a ten-dollar coffee expensive or cheap?

OSOlga Stolyarova

It depends on the coffee. If it's an Americano, then compared with prices here, it's probably expensive.

AVAlexander Volchek

What if it isn't an Americano?

OSOlga Stolyarova

If it's something delicious and elaborate, then no.

AVAlexander Volchek

You see, you're making the right comparison: you're comparing prices within the place. My friend and I were walking recently, and I asked, ‘How much does an Americano cost at Coffeemania?’ Incidentally, an Americano doesn't cost ten dollars here. We had just been in Orange County, then flew to Hawaii, and sometimes we'd find places where you have a coffee for seven or eight dollars. I told him, ‘Convert it at the exchange rate and work it out.’ He said, ‘Oh, it costs the same as at Coffeemania.’ But notice: a person compares prices without comparing like with like. On the one hand, they compare the coffee. On the other, they don't consider that California's minimum wage is nineteen or twenty dollars an hour. What does that mean? Whatever job you do, whatever you do and wherever you are, you can't earn less than thirty-two hundred dollars a month. You can't earn less than thirty-two hundred dollars. If you earn twenty dollars an hour, you're probably much more relaxed about a five-dollar or three-dollar coffee than someone earning two or three hundred dollars a month in the regions of Russia or Belarus.

If you divide their earnings, they make less than two dollars an hour, or perhaps two dollars an hour. Of course, a three-dollar coffee is expensive for them—not just expensive, but unaffordable. They haven't lived in that culture. What culture? A country where people have been having coffee with breakfast and going to cafés for forty or fifty years. A certain norm develops. Just as you and I, Olga, clearly have different norms from our parents. Your parents probably didn't go to coffee shops as often as you do. The fact that there are more coffee shops now doesn't explain it. There were coffee shops or other places then, too, but they didn't go as often or view them the same way. Or they would say more than once, ‘There's Americano, and then there's flavored coffee or something else.’ This is an important part of comparison: how much a person earns. If people earn twenty dollars an hour, they'll probably have a different attitude toward flying and air travel, for example.

Of course the air travel system will develop very differently. Russia has cities with relatively extensive connections. Moscow, for example, has twelve million people and, I don't know, a hundred and forty thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand—or ninety thousand flights, I think. We need to check the numbers; we'll show the statistics. San Francisco has slightly fewer, while New York has one and a half or two times as many. San Francisco itself has eight hundred thousand residents, although there are people living in the surrounding coastal areas. Los Angeles has more flights than Moscow, too, and so does New York. Why does that happen? My friend and I also drive around and discuss how people get around. When people earn more money, they have a different degree of freedom to travel and move around. That doesn't mean they fly abroad more often. In America, people actually travel to other countries less. Though I think people in Belarus and Russia don't fly much either. Most of the population has never even left their own region or city, let alone the country.

Most people don't move around much. But domestic travel, for example, grows much more strongly. There are reasons for that, and we need to discuss and examine them calmly. My friend arrived without understanding these things, carrying an impression of how everything worked. Someone writes, ‘You have it great in California,’ while the very same person also says America has problems with its attitudes toward people's gender, for example, or too much crazy freedom, or bad food. Unfortunately, the idea of bad food is very widespread. I don't understand—actually, I do know where people get it, but it's absurd. Do you really think the world's biggest economy wouldn't have the widest variety of food? How does your mind allow you to come up with that? It's the world's largest economy, enormous. If California were a separate country, it would be the world's fifth- or sixth-largest economy, above both Belarus and Russia. A single region. Do you really think there would be little available there? Meanwhile, people who say it's wonderful somewhere else are themselves in a strange, unhealthy state.

Let me remind you again, I lived—

Let me remind you again: I lived in Belarus until 2010, with no desire to move anywhere. When I moved to Russia, to Moscow, it was because I got a new job there, and it happened completely spontaneously. Looking at people in Moscow, I could see they had more opportunities in certain respects. They really did. But that didn't mean I sat there saying, ‘You can do that over there,’ or ‘You have it good over there.’ You can always find somewhere better. You can always say you were born into the wrong family, at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances. Always. Now we come to the larger question you asked: in my case, was there a relationship between where I lived and what I achieved? First, I felt quite good working in Belarus. I thought my career, professional life, and business were developing well. I managed both to work and to start a business there. When I moved to Moscow, everything developed on an entirely different scale, and I thought, ‘Now this is scale.’

I hadn't understood that scale before. When I moved to California, I thought, ‘And what about the scale here?’ But it depends on what we're comparing, what we're doing, and whom we're doing it for. Some companies operate on a scale that goes far beyond a single country. Most such companies are in the US, or many are in China. But that doesn't mean such a company couldn't be built elsewhere, or by people with a particular focus. Strategically, if I'd understood the path ahead, I'd probably have told myself, ‘Graduate from university in Belarus and go straight to the States.’ From the perspective of my goals, ambitions, and desire to develop, that would have been the right move. At the same time, things unfold in a certain order, and we have our own wishes. If someone wants to open a chain of ten coffee shops, they probably don't need to move from Minsk to Moscow, from St. Petersburg or Kazan to Moscow, or from Moscow to Silicon Valley or New York. They clearly don't.

It depends on what a person wants to do and create, what they want to engage with, and where they want to be. We're now talking about structure and the scale of money. But why do things work out or fail to work out for someone in a particular country? About fifteen years ago, I began hearing ideas from Vedic astrology suggesting that your fulfillment depends not simply on a country's economy, the people around you, or the salary you earn, but on how you and your life connect with a particular place at a particular time. At one point, a person in Minsk can earn a great deal of money; at another point, that same person in Minsk won't earn anything. The same person can move to New York at one moment and earn a lot, or move there at another moment and be completely destitute. Of course, many people will now say, ‘We know those people who go abroad and end up scraping by in poverty.’ That's an opinion, too.

There's the opinion that everything is fantastic for all of you over there, and alongside it, the opinion that you're all scraping by in poverty. There are radically opposite views of what appears to be the same reality. When we see this, it's important not to deceive ourselves about cause and effect: why things go well for someone here or there, why they succeed at all, and what opportunities they have. Obviously, there are countries where I can't do certain things, no matter what I do. If I want a community of ten million people watching and developing spiritually with me as I share knowledge, ideas, approaches, texts, and practices, I clearly can't create it solely within Belarus, because a little over nine million people live there. I can't do it. What's more, I can't capture the entire market. That's what happens if we focus very narrowly on one country. Someone will say, ‘But there's the internet.’

We're not talking about online. Take restaurants: it's the same thing. You can't open two or three hundred restaurants in a particular city. It's impossible. You couldn't build Starbucks in Belarus. How would you do it? There isn't enough country in terms of regions and people who would be Starbucks customers. We'll show the statistics on how many Starbucks locations there are worldwide, and separately in the US, to illustrate it. We couldn't do it. There are things we definitely can't, or couldn't, do. There are places where certain things are entirely impossible. If you were born in Palestine, at least over the past twenty years, you would hardly be able to work on modern ventures while staying there. What opportunity would you have? Or suppose you were born in a country without internet access. If access is blocked, you obviously can't do it. A good example now: businesses in Russia are isolated from modern artificial intelligence models. Obviously, companies can't implement many things they could implement in the US—or things they can't implement in Europe because of legislation, rather than sanctions or blocks.

It's impossible. You simply won't be able to do it under any circumstances. The system won't allow it because it operates differently and has its own rules. You might buy a house or apartment in a particular community or town and have no right to rent it out, because the rules say only the owner can live there, or perhaps the owner's friends, but you can't rent it out. Those are the written rules, and you need to understand them. If you find yourself in that situation, there's nothing you can do, and of course it has a strong effect. Or suppose you live in a village where there are only women and no men. You obviously won't find a man there. If none arrive and none are there, you won't find one. You need to leave to meet a man; he won't appear there no matter what you do. And you won't see a tiger there either. If you live in Irkutsk, tigers aren't running around there.

You can meditate, read books, and watch intelligent people, but there won't be any tigers there. Many people attend coaching programs, training, business courses, and universities and want to see tigers. There aren't any there. It's the same with places where there are no mushrooms. Go into the forest, study videos, do anything you like to learn mushroom picking. Become a professional, take a mushroom-picking tour. But if I go outside here now, there are no mushrooms. When I lived in Minsk, I went to a country place fifty kilometers away and picked porcini. Here, I could search every millimeter with a magnifying glass and not find a porcini in my area in the next hundred years. If I go three hundred kilometers away, I can find them; here I can't. People's main problem is that they don't see obvious connections. I'm talking about simple things in the material world. But there's also your timing, which strongly affects whether something is meant to happen for you. You might be in a village full of men, or in a particular place, yet be unable to go mushroom picking or meet that person because of other circumstances with other causes: karmic causes, hereditary causes, your timing, and everything else.

The country itself has an influence, and so does the surrounding space. There are many reasons things might not work out for someone. The important thing is to understand them. Again, so many people complain about problems with mushrooms when they simply can't have mushrooms where they are. They can't. That's important. Or they say, ‘I can't pick blueberries,’ and they can't. Or, ‘I can't start a business.’ There are places where you can't start a business.

Places where you can't start a particular kind of business at all. I'm not just talking about launching a chain of a thousand coffee shops. You can't start that business, or create an IT project where you can readily raise ten or twenty million dollars and then get a valuation another hundred or two hundred million higher. You can't do it from certain regions, however hard you try. Venture funds in Palestine are hardly investing thirty million dollars each in technology projects, with incubators there. Hardly. We're talking about something absurd. Do whatever you want—you can't do it. So what then? Sit and worry, saying everything is wonderful elsewhere and terrible where we are? What do you do about it? Do you even need to ask yourself that question? What should you look for? Should I move to another region and find venture investors there? Should I move to find mushrooms? Or perhaps I don't need mushrooms at all and can live peacefully without them.

There are so many people like this. I've been in the States for two and a half years, and people say, ‘How I've missed borscht! How I've missed salo, zefir sweets, toffee…’ They list all sorts of things. First, there's no problem making borscht. None at all. It may be harder to make your own salo—cured pork fat—because buying the right type of fat in a store to salt yourself can be difficult, though the process itself is very simple. But suppose someone can't, or it isn't sold. Maybe you don't need to eat it right now? You've eaten salo many times, and plenty of borscht and zefir. You've seen a particular setting. Maybe you don't need it anymore, or don't need it now. Meanwhile, the person says, ‘I don't want to go back to eight months of gray skies and rain. I absolutely don't want that. I don't need it. But I do want salo.’ Wait a minute, then—let's go back to the gray skies and rain.

Maybe what you miss is the rain or gray sky. A person complains wherever they are. Or says, ‘There were better restaurants where I lived.’ First, there are plenty of very good restaurants here. There are also many cuisines that weren't available in Belarus or Russia, even in Moscow. Although I do think Moscow has the best restaurants in the world in terms of the range and everything else—I'm talking about a particular concentration or certain details—there are still plenty of restaurants here. It's another matter if we go to a different state, say Missouri or Louisiana, where there may not be a wide choice of good restaurants or certain stores. Then go a hundred kilometers out of Moscow, or drive from St. Petersburg toward Moscow, stop halfway, and live for a year in one of the towns there. Tver, say. Or Tula—Tula, not Tver, right? Live there. Or go in another direction.

Smolensk, between Moscow and Belarus. Live there. Better yet, go to an even smaller town. Pick one on the map, live there, and look for restaurants and a good variety of food. Walk into a store and look at the choice of meat, fish, salads, fruit, and vegetables. Such an enormous variety of everything! So many jobs and everything else, right? The question is always what a person is looking at. I remember discussing different countries in Moscow about three years ago. One man said, ‘I'll never leave. How could I leave my birch trees?’ Then I come to California, walk around, and see birches growing on people's properties. Quite a few. Not an overwhelming number, but a fair number. And besides birches, there's so much else. An incredible number of oaks. I have two or three hundred oaks on my property. There are enormous numbers of redwoods and eucalyptus trees. All of this matters when someone compares places or approaches the question. What comparisons are they making, and do they fully understand what's there?

I had an interesting experience when we moved to the States: where would the children go to school? Polina, my wife, and I agreed that, regardless of the circumstances, we wouldn't think about the children's schooling for a whole year. We have four children, and we decided not to focus on that question. Why? We knew it would cause us a great deal of stress if we concentrated on it while deciding where to live. We didn't yet know whether we'd be in Europe or the US, or in which location, and that could keep us from making a decision. Our children's schooling wasn't the primary issue in our lives. It is for some people, and that's fine, but it wasn't for us. We have four children, not one, and they're in different age groups. There's an eight-year gap between the youngest and oldest. That's a significant span. So we decided not to think about it. We moved, spent six months in Europe and then Asia, and finally made it to the US.

We arrived in the US and found ourselves at a school. It turned out schools in the US were free. Not only did they exist and offer a choice; they were free. And in the region where we ended up, they were extremely good—among the top one percent of US schools, for example. There's also a system for choosing a school. There are fee-paying schools and free ones, and you can understand how to choose among the free schools: for instance, by living at the right address, in the right location for schools. Then you get into a certain tier of schools. I remember a friend telling us, ‘You're enrolled; you're going to school.’ My wife and I couldn't quite believe our children would attend that school for free. We had a particular belief. Recently I saw a politician from Belarus or Russia saying, ‘Look, in America and Europe education costs money, while here it's free.’ You smile because it's funny to hear that message. I think they don't know themselves.

They aren't trying to deceive people; they don't know, because there's a general belief that you have to pay for everything everywhere else in the world. My nephew has been attending an excellent school in Poland for free. Yet there's a belief that it can only be one way. Or that everything is terribly expensive, with education costing fifty or eighty thousand dollars a year. Yes, schools costing fifty or eighty thousand dollars a year do exist. Some cost a hundred thousand, but free schools exist too. Free doesn't mean worse. It depends on where you are, the region, what you need, and the details you want. Then it depends on what you're comparing, how you compare it, your approach, and what you want to get. What do you want? What are you trying to compare and obtain? You hated your own education all your life. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in the Russian-speaking world don't like the education they received. Their attitude toward school is very particular. You didn't like your education, but if you succeeded, you say, ‘What a wonderful teacher I had!’ I've known people like that, too.

‘I'll send my child to that same teacher.’ Three years later you ask how it's going, and they say, ‘We've already taken the child out of that school.’ But you sent them to your own wonderful teacher! People compare without asking whether they understand education at all: how a child should be taught, what they need to be given and receive, what matters to them and what doesn't, what system they actually need, who they'll become, and what approach suits them. Those are the questions that should matter first. Instead, someone says there are menstrual pads in the boys' bathroom, or a bathroom that both boys and girls can use. Wait a second: is that what you're comparing, or something else? If you watch television, everyone in American schools walks around with a gun. Are there troubled schools with particular populations? Obviously. Just as, if someone remembers going to a village dance in their youth in Soviet times, I don't think anything good came of it.

Girls might not understand that, but boys will understand it very well. Nothing good came of it. Actually, I think that applies to girls, too, if you weren't one of the locals and didn't know your way around.

If you weren't local and didn't know your way around. Again, what are you comparing, and with what approach? The first school my children attended here never had a fence at all. Nothing. You walked outside, and there were hills and mountains around you. Everything was open. It depends on the region, doesn't it? Some schools will have fences simply because of where they are—if there's heavy traffic around them, for instance, or different kinds of through traffic. Of course. But if there's nobody around, why put up a fence? Unless it's an educational system where children might run away for some reason. Why would they run away? Why would a ten- or fourteen-year-old want to run away? What's happening to that child? What's going on inside them? What's bubbling up? What are the circumstances? People don't understand, see, or feel these things. I didn't even know how the school system worked: elementary school from first through fifth or sixth grade, middle school from sixth through eighth, and high school from ninth through eleventh.

When I heard ‘high school,’ I always thought it meant university. It's a higher school, isn't it—higher education? I didn't know there were separate kinds of schools. People tell me, ‘We have the same thing.’ It isn't the same, because back home it all happens in one building, whereas here the schools are in different buildings. They're different schools in their own right. A school with only seventh and eighth grade can have a thousand students, in just those two grades. These are different things and different places. So the question is always what we're comparing, where we're saying people have it good or bad, and what is good or bad. I know many people who like it and many who don't. It's the same all over the world. Many people are happy living in all sorts of countries, and many are absolutely unhappy. Everywhere, regardless of age, sex, race, or country, people feel very differently. Some have lived with grenades flying overhead for forty years, yet live calmly and feel at peace inside, accepting life.

Others live in what outwardly looks like paradise—a social paradise with plenty of money—yet are utterly unhappy and unfree, without understanding the details. America has always loomed large and indistinct in the Russian mind. Rudolf Steiner wrote in 1915 that America would always provoke two attitudes in Russian people. Some would say America is the enemy and must be fought: everything is good here and bad there. Others would say everything here is shit while everything in America is wonderful, and that's where they need to be. They'd spend their whole lives wanting to get there. Many never would, but they'd keep striving for it and feeling something was wrong with their own lives. I can tell you right away that Americans don't care about Russian people one way or the other. Not at all. Many didn't and still don't know what's happening there, where, or how. It doesn't interest them. I think every Russian person is interested in America, but believe me, the reverse isn't true. I'm talking about people in general. It makes no difference to them. Now, because of the internet, particular circumstances and reports, and knowing the names of presidents, some people occasionally use certain words. American presidents also use the current conflict and other presidents' names in their campaigns.

That's the only reason they know about it. No other reason. It makes no difference to them.

OSOlga Stolyarova

So there's no point in comparing? Why do people compare this way? It seems like a mindset of ‘Everything is bad for me, and somewhere else is always better.’ What can we do about it? How do we get out of it?

AVAlexander Volchek

There are reasonable comparisons. If we're starting a business, we may need to compare business models, unit economics, different ways of acquiring customers, or ourselves with certain competitors. Those are reasonable things to compare—but only if you understand them. Unfortunately, nine out of ten businesspeople compare without understanding. They say, ‘My product is better,’ based purely on a feeling, or ‘My product is unique.’ It's good that we have ChatGPT now. An American recently told me, ‘I have a unique product in artificial intelligence.’ A rich man, a very rich man. I immediately asked ChatGPT, ‘Find out what products like this exist around the world.’ It instantly gave me a long list. What's going on? In terms of a person's inner state, comparison arises from their own insecurity and weakness, from an unhealthy inner state. From a great many ego structures and disappointments. Other things influence these comparisons too, including the region where you live.

A region can broadcast these comparisons endlessly. If you hear comparisons on television every day, you'll compare every day. If, from childhood, you constantly hear the opposition between you and America and that you'll be at war with America, you'll live in that state. If you're endlessly told that the men or women around you are unattractive, you'll develop that opinion and compare where people are attractive or good. If you constantly believe there's no work here, or it's bad, you'll constantly compare. Other people's opinions have an incredibly strong influence. I always say one of the simplest ways to move forward in the social world is to pay attention during the day to this: what another person thinks about you isn't the truth. With every person you interact with, consider what they actually think of you. Are the ideas, thoughts, statements, and recommendations they offer you coming from love, freedom, and acceptance?

Or do they express them simply because they feel like it? Or out of their own weakness, selfishness, and disappointment? Why do people communicate certain ideas and thoughts? What's happening? It matters. All of it has a strong influence on your own inner firmness and confidence. If you're constantly surrounded by the chaos of hearing about difficulties, you'll automatically live in it. I live in Silicon Valley, which seems like an extraordinary concentration of wealth. NVIDIA is here, for one: constantly among the top three companies in the world by market capitalization, and a couple of weeks ago it was number one. Three and a half trillion dollars, or 3.3 trillion. How many countries' budgets is that? Apple has a similar market capitalization. Google is a little smaller, almost the same. Facebook, Meta. Elon Musk and his projects, Tesla. It's a ten-minute drive to the office. There is a concentration of wealthy people here, and not just those people at the top. It's important to recognize that in America, when someone in a company is rich, thousands of other people there are rich too. That's very different from the culture in Russia and Belarus, where there's one rich person—

The owner of the company. It's very different, and important to understand. In California, more than a million households earn over half a million dollars a year. More than a million households! A million households earning half a million dollars. That's their annual income. It's quite a wealthy region. At my children's school, the average—the median—teacher's salary is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Someone will start shouting, ‘But look at housing costs!’ What housing, specifically? What exactly are you comparing it with? Which particular—

Which particular housing are you comparing? What type of home do you have? In which region and location? A location thirty-five minutes from the ocean, an hour from snowy mountains, two hours from the desert? How many locations are we comparing, and on what basis? In this wealthy region, everyone constantly feels they have to work. They can't exhale; they always want to work. All the time. I'm talking about the area known as Silicon Valley. Nobody here calls it Silicon Valley; it's called the South Bay, the southern part of San Francisco Bay, although it stretches out considerably. San Francisco itself has a slightly different work vibe. But in this area, everyone wants to work constantly. Everyone says, ‘It's so hard! You have four children? That's crazy—you probably have no time.’ They don't ask about how wonderful your life is, how much joy there is, or how many good things are happening.

People almost always live with one thought: ‘I have to work hard.’ Someone listening says, ‘Wait a second, I'm not going there.’ Why would you? There's a good joke about working hard: ‘Listen, I've got a plan. I'll work without a day off, get ahead, start a business, get rich, sell everything, and invest in stocks. By forty I'll retire and finally lie on the beach sipping cocktails and relaxing.’ The other person says, ‘What do you think I'm doing? I'm already on the beach with a cocktail.’ Someone says, ‘I'm already resting. Why do I need that whole chain of events? Why all this chasing?’ Someone in an entirely different region will say that. It depends on what you see and want to get, your goals, why and where you're going, what dream you're building, and what you're doing for yourself. Some think it's bad if a professor moves to another country and becomes a taxi driver. Someone else moves, becomes a taxi driver, and is happy, saying, ‘Thank God I did this.’

I know both kinds of people. Both. It's all very different. What's our main task? For every single person, it's to be able to make the right decisions and determine for ourselves what we truly need to do right now. Not in some imaginary way, not because someone somewhere is doing or watching something, and not through abstract discussions. What do I actually need to do? I know many people who spend decades disliking where they live. If you don't like it, you need to act: do whatever you possibly can to make the move happen, understanding what you're doing. Trust that, trust life, and understand why you want to do it. It's always important to understand why, or you'll face a great deal of disappointment. If you lived under an illusion and wanted to move simply because you had pain and unhappiness inside, that same pain will remain inside when you move somewhere else.

So many people say, ‘We miss our homeland.’ They don't miss their homeland. Take them back, and they ask, ‘Can you send us back again?’ It's an inner state. The other aspect is to work through acceptance and understand that human life flows the way it flows, and we don't have that much choice. In some places there is a choice; in others there isn't one at all. You can't change who your parents are, but you can change your attitude when you interact with them. You can choose not to drink or use drugs, and try to communicate with people genuinely and honestly, with love and freedom. You can pay attention to not deceiving yourself or others. You may not manage it. There may be energies constantly pushing you toward deception, but you can keep trying. Often, though, a person doesn't have freedom. Many people will never move anywhere or travel to see another country, just as some will die early and others later.

Many people's children will die before they do. Many will have no children; others will have many. This freedom is very relative in terms of those choices. It certainly isn't a controllable process. A person's freedom lies in their state of observation, in neutrally observing what happens. Here's a good example from the last few days. I was in Hawaii. A friend came to visit and kept saying, ‘Let's go to Hawaii, let's go to Hawaii.’ I said, ‘All right, let's go. I don't like Hawaii, but let's go.’ We chose an island I hadn't visited and flew there. He walked around saying, ‘It's wonderful! It's amazing!’ I said, ‘Maybe my eyes have become jaded. I don't even register other places anymore.’ Then I'm standing on the balcony, with the ocean perhaps a couple of meters away, right beneath my feet. I think you saw that balcony. People kept calling to say, ‘Enjoy your vacation! Have a good time!’ I said, ‘I'm not on vacation. We came out here together, and we have lots to discuss. I'm working; I have things to do, business discussions.’

‘All sorts of things. I've simply moved into a different space.’ Again they say, ‘Enjoy your vacation!’ The point is that I perceived everything happening there exactly as I perceive things now. I'm at home now, and my perception is exactly the same. There's no difference. Someone might say, ‘That's just because you have a beautiful view at home, too.’ No. If I begin to exalt Hawaii, put it on a pedestal, and emotionally declare that it's better, you'll automatically feel that things here are worse. First, that would be disrespectful to every other place, to other people, and to myself. Then I would have to feel bad everywhere else, bad in ordinary life, and good only on vacation, while relaxing, in another place or region, or in a store. On the other hand, if bad things happen, I'll feel very bad. Could I instead feel neutral during good events, neutral during neutral events, and neutral during bad ones too? There is no such thing as good and bad events.

There is no such thing as happiness and unhappiness. Be in a state of understanding and accepting what is happening here and now. In that state, a person has the opportunity—and this matters—to make the right decisions and act. Very often, they can act from freedom. That's where some freedom appears, where they can embody it. They have no disappointments. I had no expectations before going to Hawaii, and none after arriving. We were in Hawaii—okay. But what if I return thinking, ‘Back to that job again’? I know so many people like that. You go on vacation together, and they've barely had time to get there. You're sitting with them in Turkey, France, Italy, the US, or anywhere else, and they say, ‘Oh, we have to leave soon. We'll be back in all of it, going to that job again.’ What is that? There are real breaks and disruptions, yes—

There are breaks and disruptions. Someone will say, ‘I don't have the opportunity to go to Hawaii.’ There are plenty of opportunities I don't have either. You can't go to Hawaii? Ninety percent of the time, I can't take a trip like that either. I have to take the children places, for example, or have business meetings. There are many things to do and many limits on what I can do. I don't have the opportunity either. So what? You can always find something unavailable to you that is available to someone else. There isn't a single person in the world who can do everything. Not one. You can say, ‘They have eight children; I have four. I don't have the opportunities that person has.’ Someone says, ‘I only have one, but if I had four, I could just as easily have eight.’ That's not true. I also don't have the option of being without children. Someone who has no children has that opportunity, too. Olga, you don't have children. That's an opportunity in itself. I don't have it; I already have children.

What's more, I've had them for fourteen years, and they'll always be part of my life from now on. I don't have another option. Some people can call their father; I can't, because my father died. Some can talk with a brother or sister, while others can't because they have no siblings. Someone says, ‘But your mother is alive. I never had parents at all.’ That's an opportunity they don't have. There are always opportunities we don't have. Always. For anyone, these comparisons are envy, their own ego. Identify that envy. If you won't recognize it, then don't. Keep living as you do, in the state you're in. To the spiritual world—the world is spiritual—it makes no difference.