Stop Believing These 3 Myths | Myths About Spiritual Development

AVAlexander Volchek

An enormous number of practices, techniques, and things associated with the words “spiritual development” lead to a person's degradation and bring them under control. They do everything to lead people away from their true freedom. Or why does someone say they're always feeling love while you're feeling anxious? An illusion of social time, of the social world. Don't do this under any circumstances. Don't allow yourself to do it. It's a huge manipulation that feeds your ego incredibly strongly. Hello, my name is Alexander Volchek. This is my channel about human growth and development—personal, professional, and in business. Today I invite you to take a new look at the very idea of spiritual development. To settle, once and for all, the misconceptions that exist in today's world. What is spiritual development, and what is spiritual life? Knowing this really helps people grow, develop, and move forward. Be sure to watch the video to the end, because some of these misconceptions are things you definitely need to uproot in yourself. So, misconception number one: separating spiritual development from the rest of your life. Thinking that spiritual development is one part of life: esotericism, certain meditations, or some separate practices. Many people generally regard spiritual development as one component of life.

Even many people who present themselves as part of the spiritual development community say that you need to find a balance between the spiritual and the material. They look at human development like this: a person goes to the gym, goes to work, spends time at home with family, has hobbies or personal pursuits, and then has a separate spiritual life. “I spent two hours at the gym, eight hours at work, and five hours a week on spiritual development, so I'm developing spiritually.” Or someone says, “I've sat in meditation for twenty thousand hours, so I'm developing spiritually. I've been on forty-eight retreats, so I'm developing spiritually. I've attended an enormous number of programs, training courses, coaching sessions, constellation work, practices, trips, and energy sessions. I've taken all sorts of substances. Of course I'm developing spiritually, because I do all these things.” In reality, though, the person is separating spiritual life from the whole of their life. Essentially, they've divided up their entire life. If we look at that list, they've divided their life into components. I always say it's a profound misconception to separate spiritual life from the idea of human life.

A human being is a spiritual being. Human life is inherently spiritual; it inherently comes from the spiritual world. Our life as a whole is a spiritual life, and everything within that life is within us. So if I go to the gym, that's part of human life, part of my life, and of course part of my spiritual life. Because life is spiritual. If I talk with my family at home, that's part of my spiritual life. If I look after my health, that's part of my spiritual life. Reading books is part of my spiritual life. Going to work is part of my spiritual life. Starting a business is part of my spiritual life. Going on a trip is part of my spiritual life. It doesn't matter whether you go on vacation with your family or travel separately for a particular practice. The question is how you live this life. When you look at it from that perspective, it becomes clear that spiritual development is happening constantly. Here I use “development” to mean both genuine, true development that helps a person grow, and development that leads to their degradation. It's an enormous mistake to assume you can go on a retreat once a year and everything will be wonderful in terms of spiritual development.

While every day you live in anger, anxiety, expectations of others, demands on others, coercive power, mockery, judgment, talking about other people, endless illusions, and desires to take possession of something. Then—just like that—you drop out for a week, spend a week meditating, and everything is good. It doesn't work that way, and it never will, under any circumstances. More precisely, it does work in terms of life, ordinary human life: the person is simply degrading spiritually, because they're degrading in their life as a human being. They don't understand the cause-and-effect relationships that really, really underlie it, that are really playing out there. What actually causes the events in their life, what actually develops them, and what degrades them. That's a profound misconception. Simply looking toward the fact that life is spiritual, being aware of it, even observing it, is an incredible force for human development. It develops a person tremendously. Simply having that in view. You can spend five minutes every day paying attention to it. Even if you don't believe it, even if you have doubts, if you have any strength at all to move forward and genuinely develop, make it something you observe.

Not a spiritual life that exists separately, not studying what that separate thing is, but the very fact that your life is spiritual. That the foundation of your entire life is spiritual, and that you are a spiritual being. You aren't simply a material presence that appeared in this world. You aren't just a physical body; you're a fully fledged spiritual being. People are sure that a human being is a physical body, yet they say that when someone dies, they become an angel. Why does that happen? What's going on in that person's head? You're already a spiritual being. The second misconception is believing that spiritual development is always positive. We understand perfectly well that if spiritual development is human development, human life, then obviously all sorts of events happen in a person's life, both positive and negative. Some events genuinely develop them and lead to growth—what I mean by expanding who you are. Other events develop them in a direction that leads to degradation. An enormous number of practices, techniques, and things associated with the words “spiritual development” lead to a person's degradation and bring them under control. They do everything to lead people away from their true freedom, away from becoming genuinely free, truly free.

Away from genuine growth, from a sense of beauty, from love, kindness, and joy. Joy not only at earning ten times as much money, but at absolutely anything that happens. A person hangs wallpaper, hammers in a nail, runs a meeting for a thousand people. It doesn't matter what they're doing. They see their own child or someone else's. They experience joy in life, in the life they're living right now. An enormous number of books are offered, an enormous number of actions are proposed. Notice that I'm not in any way urging you to decide that some particular actions are wrong. I'm telling you that many things associated with spiritual development lead to degradation, lead to falsehood. Genuine spiritual development—what helps a person grow and develop—consists of actions they take in accordance with the laws of the universe and in truth. This question always concerns people. Someone says, “All right, Alexander, what is genuine development, then? What are actions that truly align with truth? With truth. How do you tell whether an action is true or not? How do you tell whether it's genuine or not?” Here, once again, my recommendation is that what matters isn't the fact that you've learned to determine whether an action is true or not. What matters is that you're trying to explore this and find it out.

If you don't know, leave it open to doubt. There will be things where you'll feel very clearly, beyond question, unequivocally, one hundred percent, that an action is true, that it's genuine. Just as I know that a genuine action is acting according to the value of not deceiving other people. A true action is wanting to benefit others rather than harm them. A true action is genuinely seeing all other people as people, rather than as objects for your own gain. Or a true value is not killing other people, rather than saying they're being killed for the greater good and that it's beneficial. Some things are clear from the outset. Some things are open to doubt. Suppose…

Something that's open to doubt. Suppose you doubt that a human being is a spiritual being. Although, really, that's a difficult thing to doubt. But let's suppose you do doubt it. Most people living in the twenty-first century doubt it. At least don't deny it, then; make it something you observe. Observe it and consider, when different events happen, to what extent they really take place solely within the bounds and aspects of the physical world. Even if your position is that life exists and is partly spiritual, define the boundaries of that spiritual life for yourself. Like the gym. You've set the gym apart as a separate thing. In the same way, set spiritual life apart according to certain circumstances and aspects, and find its boundaries. But will you be able to find the boundaries that explain why things become so hard and difficult for you at a particular moment? In the gym you can identify it: I added too much weight, did too many exercises, miscalculated something. Identify it when you wake up in the morning feeling bad. Or when negative emotions or apathy simply arrive in the middle of the day. Or why someone says they're always feeling love while you're feeling anxious.

That's a very good thing to observe, a very good task. It lets you see the second misconception I described: that spiritual development leads only to positive things. It doesn't. But on my channel there's a video with a practice that doesn't take much time—or at least you can give it whatever time you want. You can set aside five minutes a day, and it will definitely, definitely allow you to grow tenfold, genuinely expand tenfold. Take a look; there'll be a link to that video here. Let's move on to the next misconception. This one is the belief that spiritual development has a final point B. There's some state you're in now, and someone says, “You aren't doing anything spiritual. You haven't developed at all. You're at zero.” Then there's a state where someone says, “I've reached the final point of spiritual development.” One particular state. It's absurd, surreal. First of all, everyone is always in a state of spiritual development. Absolutely everyone, whoever they are: me, that person, you watching. Absolutely everyone is in a state of spiritual development. At this point you may want to say, “Look, when it comes to my spiritual development, I've spent all that time in meditation and practices and gone on retreats every year.”

“Look at Petya. Look at Masha. They've never done any of this in their lives. They don't even know those words.” But assessing people's spiritual development by how many socially recognized spiritual actions they've taken—what the social world considers spiritual—is a complete illusion. Masha may indeed not know any impressive terminology, may not know what energy centers or chakras are, that spiritual hierarchies exist, or that there were eras of Lemuria and Atlantis. But that person will be genuinely developed in how they relate to others. They'll be at a completely different phase of spiritual development, in a state of kindness, calm, and expressing love, rather than bustling about, needing to do a vast number, an endless number of things in order to consider themselves spiritually developed. That's one side of it: there is no zero. The other side is that you need to stop comparing altogether and stop being certain that you know how to compare people's spiritual development. Essentially, there are no parameters or concepts for comparing people by their level of spiritual development. It's an illusion. Within human life, a person's spiritual being and spiritual development, there is no truth that lets you compare people by their importance or lack of importance, their significance or insignificance, their level or lack of a level of spiritual development.

It simply doesn't exist. It's an illusion of social time, of the social world. Don't do this under any circumstances. Don't allow yourself to do it. It's a huge manipulation that feeds your ego incredibly strongly. You need to stop comparing yourself in ways that place you above other people or put you below them. It's important to pay attention to that. It will let you see that there are no levels, that spiritual development isn't about levels—no levels, medals, awards, rankings, or ratings of any kind. That's not the point at all. That's why you need to know that there are no levels. The third area within this misconception, where it fundamentally shows itself, is that spiritual development has no final point. You don't arrive and say, “That's it. I've finished everything.” Because if you had completed your spiritual development, become an utterly blissful, extraordinary being, that question wouldn't even arise for you. You'd dissolve. You wouldn't live. You certainly wouldn't live as a human being, and you wouldn't live at all. Every spiritual being in the universe, in all worlds, lives through movement and development.

It has no final point. A final point is death, dissolution, disappearance. That doesn't exist. It simply doesn't exist. It's an illusion. What do we do with this? Perhaps we should ask right away: what do we do with it? Keep it in your awareness. Simply keep it in your awareness all the time. Say it to yourself as an axiom, like one plus one equals two. Repeat axioms to yourself. Some things are very understandable, precise, and clear. You simply need to know them. You simply need to know them. There are an enormous number of organs in my body that I've never seen in my life. I don't know whether I have them or not. I don't know whether I have a heart. I don't know whether I have kidneys. I don't know whether I have a liver. I don't know whether I have intestines. I'm told they're there, but I don't know. I haven't seen them. I haven't cut myself open. I haven't seen them. Someone has had an ultrasound: some picture, a whole bunch of things in there. There isn't a camera or a photograph that would simply, easily show me absolutely everything. I don't know this. If we look at it in ordinary terms—not from the perspective of what I feel or of seeing organs, but from a materialist perspective—I don't know that blood moves through my body.

Who said that in the first place? Who said it's there? I don't know it. But because I've been told about it, I have the opportunity to observe and study it. That's how you need to encounter and confront these three misconceptions: by observing and studying them. The problem is that people were told their blood moves, then forgot about it. They don't pay attention to it, study it, or observe it. They're deeply convinced of it, but they don't study it. I'm proposing that you not become convinced of it. I'm proposing that you observe it, study it, just as you would study the movement of blood, how the nervous system works, or the structure and composition of bone tissue. Understand the difference: the blood you see when you prick your finger isn't the same as the blood moving inside you. It's different. You're seeing something different, not what's inside you. Even the color you see is different. It isn't the color that's inside you. Who told you that this is what's inside you in the first place? Someone might say it came out a different color, but we know an enormous number of things that change color when they enter one environment or another.

What's more, blood outside the body isn't alive. It isn't alive. Share in the comments what other myths about spiritual development you've heard. A new video comes out on my channel every Wednesday. My name is Alexander Volchek. My channel is about human growth, genuine human development. Of course, genuine human growth and development is spiritual development—true spiritual development. See you next time! Don't forget that you're a spiritual being, a spiritual person, and you're developing spiritually in any case.