The secret of spiritual and material balance

DMDmitry Mugenov

If I go too far into spirituality, my material life will suffer. I will lose money.

AVAlexander Volchek

People tend to judge spirituality by certain measures. If someone has spent ten thousand hours sitting in meditation, they are more spiritual. Where are you deceiving yourself, and where are you not? This kind of content is for people who truly want to understand what things mean, who truly want to develop. Money is a consequence of the manifestation of the spiritual world. The reasons some people have money are always spiritual.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Today, many people feel as though they live in two parallel worlds. One is what we often call everyday reality: business, money, responsibilities, obligations. The other is about spirituality, meaning, inner peace. Often, fears arise inside: if I go too far into spirituality, my material life will suffer. I will lose money. But if I focus on making money, on business and money, I will have no time for spirituality. I will miss something there. How can we bring the spiritual and the material together? How can we keep either aspect from suffering, from destroying something in the other?

AVAlexander Volchek

I am going to answer your question, and at the end I will give you a very good practice for perceiving harmony within yourself and the material and spiritual worlds as one. Dima, when we speak of the material and spiritual worlds as separate categories, I immediately want to point out the following. Some people look at life exclusively from a material standpoint. There is the material world, business, the actions a person takes throughout life. There is family. Everything happens according to material laws, scientific laws. Everything is based on our current perception through the ordinary senses. Other people say, “We live in the spiritual world. We are in the spiritual world. This material world of yours is just some kind of maya.” They like using words like maya. “This life of yours is whatever it is. There are laws of the spiritual world, and we live by those laws.” But if we look fundamentally at how all of this works, what is our topic? Today's video is about the gap between money and spirituality. As we approach it, we should look at an example. Someone wrote to me in one of my private groups, where classes are held.

She wrote, “I had this career, I was progressing, and then I began pursuing a spiritual life. As I did, money took a back seat. Material life took a back seat. I am pursuing spiritual development, and now I wonder: will there be no money in my life, or can I somehow bring money into it? I am afraid that if I start focusing on money, I will no longer pursue a spiritual life or spiritual development. I will have no spiritual development.” This example is fundamental to our society—extraordinarily fundamental. There is another way people are described when we look at them: if someone is very rich, they must also be spiritually developed. I had a partner who was very wealthy, a billionaire, and even then I devoted a great deal of time and attention to spiritual development. There were also some people from another business. I remember them asking me questions about spiritual development. At one point they said, “What does your partner think about this?” I said, “What difference does it make what my partner thinks? Why does that matter?” It mattered to them because this person had a billion dollars.

What was their thinking? If someone has a billion dollars, they must know exactly how to develop spiritually. Obviously, if Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang or Sam Altman published a book about spiritual development tomorrow—a book about spiritual development specifically as a spiritual treatise, not vague remarks somewhere, as many of them make, but a direct discussion of it—it would be very easy for them to turn it into an enormous religion, for the whole world to worship and practice. People want to believe it. They want to. People look at rich people and treat what they say as the truth about what is happening. This concerns not only spiritual development, but also how to raise children, the rules of their own lives, and everything else. They cite what time these people get up, where they are, whom they spend time with, how they live, what conclusions they draw. They rely on them and want to copy their particular model of behavior. So, again, some people see a direct consequence: if I intensify my spiritual development, I will have more money. Others live in a kind of pseudospiritual world.

They perceive the world through pseudospirituality—not that they live it, but that they perceive the world that way—and have no idea what patterns connect it to money. In fact, they believe there are no patterns at all. There are none; they simply do not exist. So we first need a starting point. This matters: I will base today's discussion on it. On what? On the existence of a spiritual world, with the material world within it. The material world is not primary. The spiritual world is primary, and the material world is part of it. We have this division into the material and spiritual worlds. I would call the world itself, life itself, the Universe—everything—spiritual by definition. Within that are different structures, including the material. Including the material. Comparing the spiritual and material worlds is not like comparing an apple and an orange. It is like comparing an apple and the experience of passion. Clearly, comparing an apple and the experience of passion makes no sense. You can somehow compare an apple and an orange, or an apple and a banana. You can even somehow compare an apple and a person.

I mean, you can somehow compare it with a dog, too. But an apple and the experience of passion are simply incomparable. So if the world is spiritual and the material is part of it, and money, too, is a consequence of the manifestation of the spiritual world—a consequence within the spiritual world—we have to understand that the reasons some people have money, the reasons some have money, are always spiritual by definition. We are talking about the causes of money. Let me identify two causes of money again. Many things, many different factors, influence a person's life. One of the most important influences is their particular karma. There are karmic reasons why a person is or is not meant to be wealthy. One of the biggest mistakes concerning the karmic cause of wealth is when someone suddenly makes a great deal of money, associates that with good karma and says, “Look how good I am. I have made a great deal of money.” They say, “I know how to benefit the world. If I benefit the world, I will have money.” There is a term, “karmic management.” The way karmic management is presented amounts to this: do good things, and you will have a lot of money.

Look, the actual point about karma—the actual point about karma. If we move into discussing karma in terms of “do good things and you will have a lot of money,” it will always end very badly. It will always end badly. What is the error in thinking when someone says, “I do good things, and I have money”? They may have money for karmic reasons not because they are good, but because that is what their destiny calls for right now. People tend to judge spirituality by certain measures. If someone wears a particular kind of clothing associated with religion, they are more spiritual. If they read certain spiritual literature, they are more spiritual. If someone has spent ten thousand hours sitting in meditation—

—done ten thousand hours of meditation, they are more spiritual. If they go to certain retreats, they are more spiritual. If they are affiliated with a club, a church, a religious organization or a spiritual community, they are more spiritual. People are seen as more spiritual on the basis of certain indicators. The woman in my earlier example said, “I live a spiritual life. I am afraid I will stop living a spiritual life when I start focusing on money.” In other words, “I am afraid I will take off my religious clothing, my robe, and become an unspiritual person. I will stop sitting in meditation, and I will be unspiritual. I will say something harsh or angry, and I will be unspiritual. I will punish someone, and I will be unspiritual. I will steal, and I will be unspiritual. I will do something bad, and I will not be spiritually developed. I will stop attending certain events, and I will be unspiritual. I will stop reciting mantras, and I will be unspiritual. I will spit, and I will be unspiritual. I will look at other people unkindly, and I will be unspiritual.” When we talk about a spiritual person, again, we are saying that every person is spiritual.

If we use this concept at all, we use concepts such as other lives, incarnations, spiritual beings, God, archangels, angels, whatever it may be. You light candles in churches, everywhere. You must have at least some area of observation, some area. If you have any at all, you talk about the soul, the soul, the spirit, the astral body, the etheric body, whatever it may be. That means you see life as spiritual and a human being as a spiritual being. Regardless of their actions, a person is spiritual, regardless of what they do. They may be chilling on the couch, going to the woods for a picnic with their children, filming a video, giving a lecture, killing another person or rescuing fur seals. They are a spirit, a living spiritual being. When we talk about their level of spirituality or development, we have to ask ourselves: if they are a spiritual being, what are we comparing? Physically, we compare people using certain indicators. You and I wear these wristbands. We recently put them on; we wear fitness trackers. A fitness tracker assesses us by certain parameters and criteria. Sasha has one on, too. It assesses our condition by certain parameters and criteria. As someone with a fairly analytical mind, I see an enormous number of errors and false readings.

Right? But it makes an assessment and tells me, “You are two years younger.” My sister's ring tells her, “You are ten years younger.” My wife is told, “You are five years younger.” Someone else is older. My partner is told, “You are two years older.” They say, “Your pulse is normal, or good, or bad.” There are certain indicators it used to establish that. It says a person needs this much sleep, that your heart should beat roughly like this, that your heart rate should be this and your skin temperature that. It has set certain parameters. Then we look at a person's appearance and say, “They look more or less healthy, walk symmetrically, are a normal height, have a certain skin color.” If their skin is yellow, people say they are ill. Blue skin: ill. Too white: ill. A little pink, normal: a healthy person. If the entire visible eye is white, people say the person is blind. They make an assessment. If an arm is missing, they say, “An arm is missing; they are unhealthy.” They judge by certain parameters. When you move on to studying and comparing your spiritual development, name just one parameter you can use for comparison. That is what I want to ask you.

Do you know even one parameter that you personally can use to compare people in terms of their actual spiritual development? No. Do you, Sasha? Even one? No real one. Look, this is extraordinary, isn't it? You are intelligent people. It is extraordinary. Sasha alone has filmed more than a hundred videos with me on this subject—a great deal of content. He has listened to hundreds of hours of content with me; I do not know how many. You are developing in this area, immersed in it, giving it an enormous amount of attention. You go on retreats, sit in meditation, study different literature and books. You read, watch and study a great deal yourself, but you do not know a single real indicator for comparing a person's spiritual development. That is incredible! It matters a great deal when we approach your question: if someone wears a particular robe, are they more spiritual? I understand that you ask this because other people ask it. You have brought up the question. It is not a question that keeps you awake at night, that you carry around with you. But it still matters. It is very important for our society.

I have seen so much of this. People are judged by certain criteria. Someone says, “Look, this holy person has arrived.” They are dressed in clothing unfamiliar to Europeans, from a religion unfamiliar to Europeans. People are told that this person comes from a line of Brahmins stretching back eight hundred and sixty-seven incarnations, or something like that, and they already believe it all. They are already on their knees, even the most unbelieving people, complete atheists who said just yesterday that none of it exists, that the whole world is material. Physicists, mathematicians, scientists, Nobel laureates tremble before some icon brought to them. They do not even understand what that icon is. A good example of a living icon is the Dalai Lama. If we look up the Dalai Lama on Wikipedia, there will be a great deal about who he is, where he was born, how he lives, what rules he follows, who serves him, his family, his home, the conflicts around him. All sorts of things. But the most important aspect—you have heard a lot about the Dalai Lama, haven't you? Do you know who he is in the spiritual world? It is described. Do you know what he is in the spiritual world? How does that happen? How is it that society knows a person and certain rituals have grown up around him?

If the Dalai Lama came in now, would you get up, or would you keep lying there? Your mind and body would certainly get you up. I think even my Russian borzoi would get up, because she is Russian. There was a joke the day before yesterday. Dima and I were walking the dog, and I said, “This dog is hard to train.” An American woman told me, “Probably because she is Russian.” Of course I laughed along with her, because she had a good sense of humor, although I thought she might not have meant it as a joke. I said, “Actually, I have employed a great many Russian people, and they are very easy to train.” Dima, I am Belarusian, after all. Dima, being Russian, did not entirely agree with me. He objected: “Not always.” But the point is, even my Russian borzoi would get up. My wife, for example, would become a complete believer. Are you kidding? She would become the most devout believer. My mother would become the most devout believer when she saw the Dalai Lama. Why does this happen? Even someone who condemns him would become a believer. Do you know what matters most? Even someone who speaks badly of him would become a believer.

Or take any other guru with billions of followers. Any guru with a lot of followers: we will see this problem. Look, here is the issue: there is an actual spiritual being. It says he is an avatar of Avalokiteshvara. First, what does that actually mean to people? They have been told something and given a description of what it is. Of course they do not know what an avatar is, let alone whose avatar he is and what that originally means. What is it? Look, I am not mocking or laughing at these things. I am talking about them and offering a very deep energy for perceiving reality: where you are deceiving yourself and where you are not. This kind of content is for people who truly want to understand what things mean, who truly want to develop. People drawn to the superficiality or the embellishment will not watch this video. Why would they? It is completely pointless for them. It is far more important to talk about what is trending, what is super interesting. Recently I was talking with someone very close to me spiritually. We remembered an open meeting I led with a woman in 2019. The woman said to me, “One of our students is asking what she should do about her husband.” In response to that question, I answered as follows.

I said, “Every situation is highly individual. In your situation, I see no resolution.” To society at large, that was a very abstract answer. To society. But in answering that person, I gave her the energy that was truly coming through. The woman I was speaking with really disliked it. Afterward, she objected strongly. She began throwing standard steps at the student: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. But we know that when there are problems with a husband, sometimes you need to hug him very tightly and care for him, do all kinds of things with him. In other cases, you need to separate from that person. Sometimes that person is your life, and karmically you have to be with him, even if he does the worst things in life. In other cases, you need to separate even if he is the most angelic person there is, because something particular needs to be realized in your life. This is not about husbands specifically; that was just an example. The point is broader. Each person has an individual solution. The question is: what do you want to hear?

The question is: what do you want to hear? Do you want an embellished, pretty version of events? Or do you want the actual truth? Do you want the truth as it really is? Dima, on this question of measuring spirituality, it is crucial to understand something basic and tell yourself—and I mean the people watching this video and those around us—“As a human being, in most cases I cannot identify another person's spiritual nature or level of development, because I have nothing to go on. I do not even have a theory.” We have just seen that even the people here, immersed in this, cannot draw on even a theory. Of course, you could bring up a theory. You could say, “Listen, I can still draw on a theory. I know there are concepts of the etheric body, the astral body, the development of the I, karma and observing karma, the energy of human freedom, a particular network of meridians within the etheric body, observing a person: do they live in accordance with causes and effects, do they deceive or not?” Of course, you can present some kind of theory. Of course you can. The question is whether you can assess it. Can you compare it? If you can, how reliable is that?

We know that even in today's world, scientists cannot value businesses. They say, “This business is guaranteed not to be worth more than twice as much in five years,” and five years later it is worth a hundred times as much. They cannot even value businesses—mathematicians, physicists, whoever it may be. The very best business investors cannot value a business. The most extraordinary business analysts cannot assess what is happening. How can you make a complete, guaranteed assessment here?

DMDmitry Mugenov

The logical question that follows, I think, is: what should a person do if they want material well-being and money, and also want to develop spiritually? How can they combine the two? What practical steps are there? What should they do today, tomorrow, right now? How can they combine the spiritual and the material?

AVAlexander Volchek

Here is an important point. If you want to do business, do business, based on the existing concepts of business. If you do not see the spiritual causes and effects in business, do not understand how they work, and do not understand how to operate or manage things in that realm, stick strictly to business. Without illusions. Do not add illusions to it. Next: if you can recognize that the entire world is spiritual, you will never ask how to combine the spiritual and material worlds. You live them both anyway; they are combined anyway. The world is what it is. They are already combined. It is like asking how to combine having a liver inside me with the fact that I speak. Is there even an answer to that question?

DMDmitry Mugenov

It is a good one.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is just as stupid as asking how to combine the material and the spiritual. Stick strictly to business, based on material considerations. But if you know that everything has a spiritual cause and allow for that, observe it from the sidelines. Do not try to manage something you do not understand. To learn to manage it and begin doing so, you need to understand it. You have to learn. You need to devote your life to studying spiritual science, to genuinely studying the world, its spiritual component, its spiritual foundations. Devote your life to it. Now ask yourself: how much time have you devoted to it? Remember, you recently asked, “Is it normal that I spend three or four hours every day reading spiritual books? Maybe I should give a little more time to business?” I told you, “Dima, listen, you have lived forty-five years. In those forty-five years, how much time have you truly devoted to spiritual development?” No, this is not a matter of time. To return to the first question, the woman I mentioned at the beginning: “If I start focusing on money, I will stop developing spiritually.”

Spiritual development happens all the time, at every moment: when I pet the dog, when I say these words, when I breathe, when I perceive the space around me, when I observe the processes going on within my system right now, when I observe processes in the spiritual world right now, when I develop other senses, when I live with perception rather than mechanically, when I feel the space and what is happening around me—not just when I sit down to meditate. Can you add making money to that? Of course. Add forty-eight hours a day of earning money on top of it if you like. That will neither distance you from nor bring you closer to a spiritual perception of life. If you earn money while recognizing that the world is spiritual and studying the spiritual world, by all means. Will you have more money because of it? There is no fixed relationship there. That does not mean no or yes. There is no fixed relationship. Will my liver start working better or worse if I talk for thirty minutes a day instead of three hours? Incidentally, I find it strange that nobody has done a scientific study on this. I think you could win a Nobel Prize for it.

But to me, it is absurd. Those are exactly the kinds of patterns these wristbands often try to identify—patterns that do not exist. To finish, let me tell you something from Vedic culture. There are an enormous number of astrologers in the world. Many of them try to learn from treatises, ancient books and descriptions, or things certain renowned teachers or other people said. One feature of Vedic astrology is the various assignments astrologers give people to harmonize their lives, the so-called upayas. To a European or a modern person, these upayas look completely abstract. For example, someone is told, “Every day, at a specified time—8:04—you must stand naked on a red mat and turn three hundred and sixty degrees around your own axis.” I am not joking. I am telling you how it is. Supposedly, this will harmonize your relationship with money, for example. Something along those lines. This assignment has been passed down through the generations. Someone passed it on, invented it, created it or perceived it, and so on. There is an explanation of why it happens, what energy is set in motion. There is a description of the energy involved.

Right? If there is such a cause and effect, someone saw the energies and connected them—connected those energies to each other in a description. Some people try to grasp this, to see the patterns. There is also such a thing as a false pattern. For example, I am sitting here in this room, and someone says, “We are studying Alexander Volchek. To understand him, we now know why he is happy. He is happy because his fireplace is on. Or we are happy because he has that frame with glass hanging there, or because those two little figures are standing there. Or he speaks differently when the dog is lying at his feet than when she is not.” In reality, these are false patterns. They mean nothing. I remember an astrologer I knew calling me and saying, “Could you tell me about it?” Another astrologer, one with a greater reputation, had given me certain assignments. She wanted to take my assignment, combine it with what she knew about me, and work out what other people she could give the same assignment to. Those are false patterns, patterns that are not real, without an understanding of the details.

I really like that ChatGPT has now appeared. As you say, Dima, all the knowledge most people have about Vedic astrology—the logical knowledge, not a real understanding of the energies and what is happening—is now in ChatGPT. You can ask all those questions: what to do, when to do it, what mantra to recite, when to sit on a chair, when to stand, when to spin around on a red cloth or a green one. Should I get a long dog, a short one, a white one, a green one, a Russian borzoi, a Thai ridgeback? It can explain all of it logically. What a person needs to learn in life is to stop deceiving themselves and understand where they actually stand. When you run contextual advertising in Yandex Direct or Google AdWords, understand whether you are really managing it, whether you know the rules, or whether there is a chance of error. If there is, how large is it? Identify that potential error and that risk in advance, and understand the risk. People do not understand it. They do not agree with it; they will not accept it; they do not want it that way. They do not want to understand that their—

They do not want to understand that their chance of success in managing their lives, doing various good things and combining spiritual and material development is less than one percent. Their chance of successfully managing it. If we are talking about management, the chance of success is less than one percent. Consequently, the chance of combining spiritual and material life—if we start from that absurd concept—is virtually nonexistent. You are doomed to fail from the outset. It is as though I started studying how my talking affects my liver while one person drinks a bottle of vodka every day, another smokes cigarettes, a third runs difficult trails for four hours and a fifth sleeps all day, without taking any of that into account and studying only the parameter of my speech. That is how modern society lives. That is how modern society lives in today's world. The most important exercise a person can do for themselves—the most important one of all, enough for an entire lifetime—is to keep remembering every day, in every situation, that the world is spiritual. Even if, for you, this is not knowledge but simply a belief, if you keep remembering it and making it part of your field of perception, it will bear incredible fruit in the future. It will create unique ground for you to receive the tools for development you need and take the actions you need to take in your life.

Doing this one simple thing is enough.