What If You Took the Wrong Step? Can You Change Your Destiny?

OSOlga Stolyarova

I have a question about the Next Step concept. You say it is important to understand your next step. Can a person take a step that is not truly theirs and change what was supposed to happen? Something they were destined, or karmically meant, to experience in this life—but they act in such a way that they do not experience what may have been intended for them?

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes.

OSOlga Stolyarova

What does that affect? Is it a problem for the spiritual being, or for the person in this life?

AVAlexander Volchek

To approach an understanding of whether a particular event or action can be changed—and we will get to that—people need some abstraction. They keep thinking about it in abstractions. First, it makes sense to recognize fundamentally that no person can understand the complete structure of all the causes and effects of their spiritual being and existence. I mean all of them. When I say "no person," I am ruling out practically every possibility. We are not considering the few people who can see the broadest possible range.

For the overwhelming majority, it is impossible. Even if you have just thought, "That's me," let that thought go. Why adopt this attitude from the beginning? Because you understand that you cannot comprehend everything, given the limitations of the physical body and of what a human being is, the etheric body, the astral body, the soul and spirit, the I, the spiritual structure, the world. There is so much involved. Once you understand what karma is, you realize that even if you could see the full range of everything all the time, the brain could not process it. No brain could, even if it were activated one hundred percent. What would it process? How?

At least, that kind of activation does not exist. Perhaps only in the film Lucy does the brain become activated enough to process every connection. And what do we see there? The person dies, falls apart. Once their brain switches on like that, they disintegrate. Adopting this attitude is important; it gives you a strong foundation. You ask, "Then what can I rely on? What matters in my life? Is it following the laws of the Universe and not violating certain values? Or is it fulfilling my karma?" Then, of course, you ask yourself, "How can I fulfill something I will never fully understand?" It will always remain an abstraction.

But I can rely on something fundamentally higher and at least try not to violate the laws of the Universe. I can pay attention to that. Of course, I will also study cause and effect, different currents, and the structure of karmic connections. I will study present, past, and future lives, connections between people, the planetary and extraplanetary structure of the world, time beyond time, the incarnations of planet Earth, and so on. I will study and observe it all. But I understand that this is only part of what helps me follow the laws of the Universe. It will help me follow them better.

Studying all of this is not the fundamental goal of my life. People tend to use the idea selfishly: "How do I fulfill my karma? Can I live my life without making use of or fulfilling it?" These questions must come from somewhere. Why do you need to know? Why do you need that knowledge in order to live by your values? Right now, why do you need it? Will it somehow give you the strength to love other people? To look at every person you meet today from your own heart, and notice where you act falsely—where you deceived someone, appropriated or took something, or looked at someone with irritation?

Valery Lomovtsev has a very good description of this. Among his restorative texts is one called Repentance. It describes many things concerning human actions, actions people really do take. You could list them. Sometimes people read the text for the first time and say, "No, that's not about me." It is all about you. Truly reading it means knowing, "This is definitely about me." The task is not to get rid of it. The task is to act truthfully. Those are completely different things: getting rid of something and acting truthfully. You can act truthfully while still carrying it with you, by noticing it.

Some things you will not change. At the very least, you will not change whether you are a man or a woman. There are things you cannot change, and your spiritual structure cannot be altered. Something interesting happens when you find a foundation and understand what you can really rely on, particularly through studying how life develops. Then you begin to approach more fundamental questions. Still, I want to look a little further: can I go through my life without karmically fulfilling what I was supposed to experience here? Yes. This is described in a great deal of literature on spiritual science and in various examples.

You can also look into a person's life. It can be seen through spiritual sight, though not always, not everywhere, and not in everyone. You can see when someone is not following their own karmic life. Is that a problem? Here is an interesting point. Imagine you are fifty—let us say seventy—and you go to someone who tells you, "You aren't following your own karma." You say, "That's it. I'll start following my karma." Is that really the right impulse? Or is it to understand what happened, why you were moving in a different direction, and then continue in accordance with truth rather than karma? The social understanding of karma is highly distorted.

Karma can be understood only through spiritual sight, exclusively. No verbal description or text can give you an understanding of it. Only spiritual perception can. Could you understand karmic connections over the past year, social connections, without spiritual sight? Probably, but that would be a narrow understanding of certain things. Why did I pick up this glass? Because I just wanted to. Some things are understandable; others are fundamentally complex. Why did this series of talks come into being? That is fundamentally difficult to perceive. Could there have been something other than this series?

A cycle of planting in the garden, perhaps, or spending time alone. Some people think that giving lots of talks makes them a blessed guru. But time spent with yourself may be quite equal in value to things happening in the outside world. What is really contained in that source, that energy? What is the actual cause of the event? The question then is not how to live according to karma, but how to study karmic connections, strive to know and understand them, and live by the laws of truth, the true laws of the Universe. There are also areas where you will already be constrained. Unfortunately, few people today perceive the spiritual world from childhood with everything in their lives supporting the preservation of that spiritual sight.

There is the karma of a country, a people, and a space. There is the karma of time, which has a fateful influence on what happens to you, beyond your control. Everyone needs to understand that there is always something higher, and it may have greater significance, to put it in social terms. Somewhere, you may have to be erased; something may have to not happen. People like to say, "This didn't happen for me because fifty thousand other people got to smile." Adding a positive thought, of course. But the world's structure of cause and effect cannot fit into any computer, artificial intelligence, or written record.

Spiritual observation of the world's multidimensionality and simultaneous spaces of time and timelessness cannot fit into any system of calculation. There is no language for it. Human language, at least the languages we have today, cannot convey it. Current science cannot convey it either. How can you communicate that state or copy it? When a person understands that they can study karmic connections and begins doing so daily, distant echoes may sometimes emerge. But only through spiritual sight of different structures can they see what is an experience of karma and what is human freedom.

Remember that human beings today have freedom. It may give rise to new karma, although pure freedom itself creates nothing. Some people may form new karma on that basis, or they may not. It is an endlessly new process. Our lives are not simply karma that must be lived through. Vast parallel layers are also moving; there is no single layer. Someone visits a clairvoyant who says, "This is your destiny and your task." Which layer have you described? Which part of the person's life? How could you say what matters most in this space, on this wall? Olya, what is the most important thing?

The whole wall? A particular painting, a color, a frame, or the person sitting opposite it? The light falling on the wall, or not falling on it? This figurine that someone bought or gave to someone else? Or the fact that someone painted a picture? What matters most? Singling out karma like that is social thinking. Your question carries that energy. People keep asking these questions in society when they want to add a little esotericism or an absurd idea of spirituality, rather than truly understand that life is all of this, the whole of it.

It is not separate or independent, as though there were my life over here and some karma over there. It cannot be that way. If you live only in the physical world, then live only in the physical world. Stop talking about karma, or causes and effects that are not governed by the physical, scientific world. Rely strictly on scientific facts. I know practically no one who does that. Almost everyone I know—ninety-nine percent—lives without understanding or even acknowledging the spiritual world's existence, let alone experiencing it as primary, permanent, and constant. Yet I know practically no one who actually lives exclusively within the physical and scientific world.

All the time, without exception: inwardly, even in silence, and outwardly, in every description, circumstance, and detail, whatever happens. And of course, you must never play these games with karma. I think we made a video about that, which we can highlight here. It was on my personal development channel. I do not know which channel this video will appear on, because I also have a spiritual development and meditation channel. This is spiritual development, too; that channel simply focuses more on meditation. We discussed something called "karmic management." It is a very serious game, and you need to understand that you will have to answer for it.

You will have to answer for it, guaranteed. You need to approach it carefully, consciously, and sincerely.

OSOlga Stolyarova

I want to clarify something. You said a person might be meant to experience something in life and yet not experience it. What does that mean? I was thinking that perhaps they act unconsciously, or something like that, and as a result do not experience what they were destined to. That is how I understood it.

AVAlexander Volchek

On one level, it is important to remember the need to understand karmic and causal connections and the influence of different structures: someone may not be living their own life, following their own path, or may be affected by certain damage. But that is only an observation of the person. It cannot be their foundation or the beginning of their spiritual path. Do not start there, although of course you should approach it eventually. Recently, someone in Life, my spiritual development group, asked about something I had said: that heredity negatively affects a person's karmic task. They said, "But doesn't our lineage also give us strength?"

Indeed, there are ways in which lineage gives strength. You do not come into a particular family for no reason; that, too, is a karmic connection. These things are not all separate. But things can be layered on top of you that were not planned. You can become mired in them, remain in them, be sucked in. Just as in ordinary life, a group of people can draw you into certain actions, something bad or, conversely, something positive, and turn your entire life toward a completely different reality. I understand that very well. I have four children. We can do and say anything we like, but if any of them develops close friendships, has a boyfriend or girlfriend, or encounters a teacher or anyone whose energy captures them and who they tune into, that person can transmit any range of energies to the child.

Of course, all of this has limits, and so on. But it can happen and lead the person into a different reality, outside of karma. Olya, a few years ago your life somehow brought you to me, apparently quite by chance. You started working for me and have been constantly immersed in a particular framework of knowledge. You are not just around that knowledge. You have firmly developed very precise mental structures that guide and support your life. You did not have them before. I guarantee it; you definitely did not. You have developed them. On the surface, you are still the same person, taking or not taking actions and making decisions as before.

Your friends and acquaintances would say, "Olya, you're exactly the same." And you are. But look a little deeper, and something has become very clearly established in you. We might call it a virus—in a positive sense here—an energy that keeps telling you to treat people well, to look for truth in people's lives, or that the spiritual world exists. It has begun to repeat like a mantra in your life; it lives in you. You still go about your life and talk to people as before. But when you talk about this to someone else right now, in August 2026, they look at you without understanding what is happening. Times will change, and they will begin to perceive you differently.

Right now, they do not understand, but this structure has arisen in you. Were those energies chance circumstances that came to you outside your karma, or were they karmically determined? There is really no difference, Olya. You need to live the life you have. Moreover, if I told you these energies were not karmically determined but came from some other reality, would you want to give them up? You would say, "No, don't take this away from me." Then you would ask, "Alexander, what reality is that?" Why does it matter which reality? Is this your new karma, or some combination of freedom and karma? Any freedom places you in a new chain of cause and effect, which, in today's reality and with the current human spiritual structure, will still be expressed in karma. Karma is a counterweight to the presence of certain dark structures in the world.

Would you reject it? What would you say? It has formed. Does that mean it is positive karma? Or only relatively positive, because it kept you from meeting certain people—or did not—or from experiencing certain states with them and having those states arise? Yesterday my wife's mother said, "Sasha, your life isn't bad. You were brought up well." I had been discussing parents. I said, "It depends on the perspective. I've done many nasty things and lived with many bad things in my life—very bad things." She asked, "What bad things?" I said, "I clearly wanted to deceive someone at times, use someone, steer things my way, avoid seeing happiness in each person, avoid seeing joy in each person.

That is enough," I told her. "That is enough." We could add social examples: how I treated my physical body, the professional decisions I made, or how I interacted with my family. But what I have said is enough. I did not meet every person with the perception that they are divine light. I did not want to. I did not even know that was so. The point is not whether I can now maintain that one hundred percent of the time, in every conversation, guaranteed never to lose my composure. I certainly can lose it. If two bears came in here now, believe me, I would lose my composure physically.

Psychophysically, I certainly would. But fundamentally, I will keep remembering what every person is. That is all. Or suppose I once had a bad thought. Ask many people whether it is okay to gossip, and they will readily say yes. Fundamentally, you should simply know that it is a negative phenomenon for a person's true development. Bingo! Go on gossiping, but at least know it is negative. If someone will not admit that to themselves… I know I did not admit it fifteen or twenty years ago. So I told her, "What are we talking about? What are we comparing in terms of who I have become? If we want to compare social things, did my parents really influence my ability to run YouTube channels, manage companies employing thousands of people, hire or fire a thousand people, or have millions of customers?

What did my parents have to do with that? Nothing. What did they have to do with my learning to write essays and entire books? Before university, I sometimes could not even memorize a poem and could not write school essays. Or did they have something to do with it? If so, let us examine the reality of that. What actually happened? What are we trying to connect? Did we inherit an achievement, something nasty, or can we look at what we really received from our parents? What is real? A shared current of energy, for example. Olya, the only thing you can examine is energy, in all its forms. If you look a little more broadly, you stop dividing it into good and bad and simply observe these energies, because they are all beautiful.

In fact, observing even the most negative energies will inspire awe, believe me. These energies are at least of a higher order than some stupid social occurrence like earning a hundred dollars yesterday. That is why people enjoy seeing fantastical worlds or paintings: they convey something greater. I am not against bank balances growing or earning money. The question is recognizing and understanding the structures that govern these energies, and understanding the structures and energies themselves. You might sit there and say, "Interesting. But what's interesting?" I have just described the whole structure of your present energetic perception, something I had not previously described to you from the outside.

That is the reality of a person's development. After this, however I assess you, whatever good or bad things you do, I will assess that structure. However many articles or Instagram posts you write, good or bad, whether you reply on time or fail to post something or disappear, none of it can overshadow my perception of your actual present state. That is who you are. Everything else is a tiny detail, an abstraction. Of course, at the social level we still decide whether to work together, whether to pay money or not, and questions of salaries and other payments. But can we perceive another person? What do we rely on in getting to know them?

There it is: "All right, I'll tune into the real Olya." Once I have seen the real Olya, I can think about whether to raise her salary, fire or hire her, or tell her that she did something well or poorly. Believe me, that gives a deeper understanding of what is happening. Instead of telling a child, "You're not being good today," ask what that actually means in the child's life. Look at them a little more broadly, and you will see that their shouting, argument, or conflict means nothing compared with their life and who they are. Nothing at all.