Can You Make Allowances for Someone Without Excusing Their Actions? | Seeing Others More Broadly

OSOlga Stolyarova

Alexander, there is an idea in the book Two Lives, expressed in this sentence: “Set aside the prejudice that a person is what they seem, and judge them only by their actions, trying to put yourself in their position and find a justification for them.” What does it mean to truly find a justification for a person? And should we try to find one for everyone? The first association is that justifying someone means declaring them innocent. People say, “How can you justify a murderer, a rapist, or a maniac?”

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, the most important place to begin examining that sentence, before talking about justifying murderers and rapists, as you put it, is how we usually judge a person. We usually judge people on the basis of our own perception of reality. You have your perception of reality. It is shaped by a great many energies, causes, and effects, and it is unique in relation to anyone else’s. You should always understand that your perception of reality differs from another person’s. Accordingly, that other person has their own perception of reality.

When you start looking at that person, suppose, for example, you like red. When someone expresses a different opinion about something involving the perception of red, your immediate thought is, “How can that be? Red is a good color.” You have that belief. Some people have an inner belief that they need to be alone all the time. Others have an inner belief that they need to be surrounded by lots of people all the time. The beliefs differ. My wife and I have a close female friend who is always saying, “I love walking alone by the ocean.” My wife looks at her and says, “I don’t like that at all. I don’t understand it; I can’t even grasp it.” She cannot grasp or perceive it. Why is it one way for one person and another way for someone else? That same friend thinks, “How strange. Surely everyone enjoys it; surely it makes everyone feel good.”

That is the person’s own inner feeling. So when you approach another person from the outside, you need to understand that they are completely different. They have a different system of consciousness, a different system for perceiving actuality and reality, their own particular system of perception. Their own impulses are at work within them. There are many different themes hidden in that sentence. The first is to understand the person, to put yourself in their place and understand them. What are they actually thinking about? What are they actually perceiving? Usually, when we judge someone and try to put ourselves in their place, we do it through our own reality.

For example, imagine that someone close to another person dies, and for us the death of a loved one is a terrible thing. We immediately go up to the person and say, “This must be so hard for you.” But it may not be hard for them. They may be experiencing it calmly, understanding that death is everywhere around us, with us every day, and that everyone will die. Now this person has died, and they are calm about it. For someone else—or for you, for instance—it may be an extraordinary fear, while for another person it is a completely calm situation. So even when we first approach the idea of putting ourselves in someone’s place, we still do so on the basis of our own states, feelings, and understanding of reality. To approach a different understanding of reality, we need to acknowledge that it exists.

You need to acknowledge that another reality exists, to want to acknowledge it, to accept that another person has the right to be in different states, hold a different opinion, exist in different energies, and have different causes and effects at work. That is their right. On the one hand, it is a right; on the other, those causes and energies may simply be at work in them. There are situations in which the person cannot change them. I recently had a discussion about what is bad and what is good. Someone said to me, “I see these people killing others. How do you relate to that? What kind of souls are coming here?” I asked, “And what does your soul do?” I said, “When you compare yourself to someone who kills other people, you think their soul is bad and you think you are good.”

You have stepped away from it and said, “I am a completely different person.” But in fact, if we look at the concept of “bad,” it is present everywhere and is boundless. The same is true of “good”: it is everywhere and boundless, depending on the angle from which you look. From the perspective of human development and light, of divine energy and a person’s movement to the next level in the spiritual hierarchy, all people are bad and good at the same time. As a person moves forward, they develop particular circumstances of their life. And an event then seems no longer to be bad, but simply an event present in their life. In this case, for one person, killing another person is an enormous problem.

But shouting at other people or thinking bad thoughts about them does not seem to be a problem. Fundamentally, though, if you look from the outside, these are all problems. Clearly, some things are more serious failures in the development of the spiritual system. But to compare in this way and say, “Why has a soul like that come here, or fallen so low?” I gave this person an example: even within the hierarchy of spiritual beings, there is Lucifer. Lucifer is a fallen angel. That is a fairly high spiritual hierarchy; an angel, the angelic hierarchy, is more developed than a human being. Even when we say “demon” or “devil,” these are more developed spiritual systems. So let us return to the fallen angel.

This angel belonged to the angelic system of development, to a higher level of development than a human being, and was unquestionably more developed in terms of good and bad, purity of consciousness, and perception of reality. Then this system decided it needed to move according to its own laws and rules. There is a person who thinks killing people is right. And you, I told the person I was talking to, think it is all right to get angry at someone: you must not kill, but being angry inside is allowed. Or you do not regard your own anger as an extraordinary problem. But none of this means you are more highly developed spiritually, because there are powerful spiritual systems that have decided to kill people.

Moreover, they have decided to kill people en masse. They have decided to destroy the human being as such, or humanity as a whole. This is a highly developed spiritual system, a very highly developed one. They have their own impulses and reasons for this. Their cause-and-effect relationships are relative, but they have their own energies and impulses through which they move and make decisions. This can even be described in nonhuman terms. So when we approach and look at another person from the position you described—taking their side—we really need to understand that they may have different reasons, different impulses, and different approaches, including nonhuman or anti-human ones.

There are people who do not perceive other people at all. It makes no difference to them that someone has been killed. I am deliberately using extreme examples so that we can recognize the reality of what is happening and understand what is actually going on. They do not have that impulse, and a great many such people live among ordinary people. They have no impulse to preserve another human being at all. They have an impulse to preserve themselves, for example, or to do something else, to fulfill some task in life. How can you take that position without your own judgment? On the other hand, the statement you quoted has a phrase at the end. How does it end—with forgiveness, or what?

OSOlga Stolyarova

“And find a justification for them.”

AVAlexander Volchek

Exactly: find a justification. Look, justification in this case is not a social construct or a social pronouncement. If you truly understand that these energies may be present in a person, you do not need any further explanations. That is the justification; it is the truth, the actual truth. In relation to another person, you always know they are a human being, and you will always convey love toward any human being. Love here is an energy with no beginning and no end. It means you understand that you will still convey love to that person. You may not support their way of life or many of their approaches. Yet at the same time, you still convey love toward them as a human being, while understanding that they are acting from their own impulses.

Moreover, you need to understand that every person always fails to perceive part of themselves. Always. There is no human being today—no such structure—who perceives everything, one hundred percent. That cannot happen; it is impossible in principle. That is the essence of movement: development is endless, and within endless development you cannot perceive everything in its entirety. Perceiving everything in its entirety would, in essence, have to stop that development. So you do not fully perceive yourself either. In working with this sentence, you need to understand that everyone, including you as a human being, has distortions. You have distortions too.

That comparison is not being made for comparison’s sake. It is meant to make it absolutely clear that you have distortions, so that you can examine them further and move forward. You can go on judging other people endlessly, but if you do not understand and soberly recognize the distortions in your own system, if you do not understand that you are not a developed system, this will lead you nowhere fundamentally. You may keep thinking, to the very end, that you are an aware spiritual being, a wonderfully developed spiritual being or system that moves along doing everything correctly, aware of everything and understanding everything. But if you were fully aware of yourself, you would also be fully aware of another person.

At the very least, you would not be puzzled by the fact that people can kill other people or take their own lives, any more than by the fact that some people like eating apples and others do not. You would be calm about some people not wanting children and others wanting them. There are people who do not want humanity or human beings to develop, who want everything to stop. That makes sense when the world contains energies and spiritual structures that want to halt human development. Obviously, some people will express this very strongly, because every person is infected by the dark world. Every person. They live amid it. Even someone in an incredibly pure state still lives amid it, still exists within it.

This is not a pure space. The idea that we live in a pure space of love, compassion, and tremendously powerful energies is incorrect. Does an infinite space of love, compassion, purity, and sunlight exist among us? Of course it does. But at the same time, a great many other things exist alongside it. If you live solely according to social trends and political laws, or the laws of a country, then of course someone is always guilty and someone else is always right. Some people somewhere have decided who is guilty and who is right. They set up an organization—for example, the UN—and say there, “This person is guilty and this one is not.”

“This one may behave that way, and this one may not.” Who decided that? People? What are people? It is always a limited number of people who made a particular decision somewhere, or perhaps a larger mass of people. Someone will say it was the majority. But do we not see concrete examples in world history of the majority being wrong? We see such examples endlessly. And when we talk about the majority, Olya, the concept of another individual disappears. You become part of a mass. Then regard yourself as part of that mass too. What freedom can you talk about then? What movement can you talk about? Say, “I am part of the mass; I move within it.” A social mass, for example, a mass of particular prejudices. Identify yourself with that social mass through your passport, your name, your skin color, your religion, or your beliefs.

Through whether you like that actor or that reel. Go ahead and assign yourself to that mass. But there is a completely different choice, a different possibility: look at yourself as an individual and look at another person as an individual. Everyone wants to see themselves individually while judging everyone else according to rules. Everyone wants individuality for themselves and wants to assign everyone else to the mass. “My life exists, and everyone else is the mass.” Look at everyone individually and, at the same time, at everyone as a mass. It is also true that everyone forms a mass. Because if you take all the causes and effects and the movement of life together, your freedom is negligible. Broadly speaking, it does not exist.

If you take the whole picture, what do you control in this life? You cannot even control what time your eyes open in the morning, or close your eyes and fall asleep instantly, or change your mood. We cannot control even seemingly simple things. We cannot abruptly make different decisions and tell ourselves, “Now I like red,” then immediately shift into a state of not liking it. Can you really do that? Do you realize how limited people actually are? We all know people who say, “I like the style of the seventies,” or, “I like the style of the nineties.” Someone says, “I like Paris.” Someone else says, “I hate Paris. I like Abu Dhabi.” “I like blondes.” “I prefer brunettes.”

There is a particular state inside. If a person lives with a sense of their own omnipotence, or even with an understanding of genuine freedom, then change your opinion. Obviously, someone else likes the opposite or something completely different. Some people do not care about it at all. Here is an interesting point: for some people it has no significance whatsoever. They do not understand what you are talking about or what you mean. It is like our friend saying, “I like walking alone by the ocean.” What do you mean? What exactly do you like? The temperature of the sand, the water? What exactly?

She is talking about a particular state, and you start wondering, “What is that?” When we talk about the ocean, a certain space opens up for people. If I say “walking in the city,” everyone thinks, “Well, that is just a walk in a city.” The ocean is different. The ocean adds a particular feeling, a state. Although most people in the world have probably never been to the ocean, have they? Do you remember the meditation I filmed by the ocean for my channel? We can add it here and show it. I said very clearly there that the energy present by the ocean is very specific. When someone says they like walking by the ocean, that means a particular spectrum of energy and the person being within that spectrum. Why does it arise at all? What is this emotion the person experiences? What is this abyss they fall into?

I am thirty minutes from the ocean, so in terms of energy the ocean is very close to me right now. I live a little south of San Francisco, in what is called the Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area. It is what people generally know as Silicon Valley. It lies behind hills that separate it from the ocean. So that is the ocean I always picture. Incidentally, I even have an image here—I think it is a picture of Big Sur. While I am recording with you, there is an image on macOS. There is a version of macOS called Big Sur. Big Sur is both a settlement and a region on the Pacific Ocean. I want to tell you that the Pacific Ocean is a very particular place: it does not evoke the same feeling as the sea.

I was recently in Nice, in France. It gives you a somewhat different impression straightaway. So to me, a walk by the ocean feels like a walk by the Pacific Ocean. And it is not quiet. Yet it draws a person into silence, because it is an abyss. How can we truly understand this? Why can the same image, the same state, evoke different feelings? If I show you this picture, there is a well-known highway running here, and a bridge. I have opened this screen so our viewers can see it too. Can you see the screen here? Here is the road, and here is the bridge. This is Big Sur, the Big Sur area. These are the hills that separate it from everything else, though this is a little farther south of the San Francisco Bay Area, on the way to Los Angeles.

If you go to the right, you will reach Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. If you go to the left, you will reach San Francisco and then Northern California. This is the famous Highway 1. It will evoke particular emotions in you personally, and they will certainly not be mine, if only because you have not been to this place. You will have an impression connected either with the image or with the energies. If you can see and feel that energy, it will wash over you. And there are many spectra there; many different spectra of energy may wash over you.