Going on a Retreat for Spiritual Development May Be an Illusion

AVAlexander Volchek

You need to understand that the very idea of going on a retreat for spiritual development is an illusion. That does not mean you should not do it. Let me ask you: is going into your garden to plant things a retreat or not? Is spending time with your children a retreat or not? There is the WHOOP band, and there are many, many other bands. They work in a very particular way internally. People designed them according to their own understanding of what counts as recovery for a person and what counts as strain. For example, in WHOOP, meditation is recovery. Every time I meditate and then analyze it in ChatGPT, it tells me, “You clearly were not meditating.” Why? Because it understands meditation according to the way people generally think of it today: a state in which the physical system is calm, which is very strange. A calm physical system, right? Take playing with your children. It has that activity: playing with children. The list is selective; it does not include everything in life, but it includes playing with children. That is also treated as a state of calm. Playing music, on the other hand, is strain. Parents who have children know that playing with them is a state of calm and relaxation only in a relative sense.

Can it be relaxing? In theory, yes. In theory, yes. But I know few people who experience it that way. I take it calmly. I cannot say I have some incredibly vast experience, but I have four children, and sometimes it is calm and restorative for me. WHOOP has a recovery measure. At other times, it is extremely stressful. That is a very good example for you. A very good example. Retreats are generally perceived as recovery. Would you agree? But a retreat can obviously be an enormous strain. Obviously. It can put a strain on your system for years to come instead of restoring it—a strain on your system for years to come, a strain on your system for years to come. Or it can be restorative, or it can be nothing at all. Nothing. Just words. Someone told someone something, and that person liked something about it at that moment. Here I am, sitting here this morning. It is 8:40 a.m. Since several cameras are filming me, we will be able to show the view I have, and perhaps even let you hear the sound from the other microphones—the birds singing, for example. Judging by that view, if you look at it, it is a super-retreat. Pure bliss.

The ultimate paradise. What else is it? What else is it? What I see in front of me now is obviously the ultimate paradise. An ultra-paradise. Does that necessarily mean I must be in a state of recovery? If it does, I do not need any retreat. I can stay right here, never go out or go anywhere at all. If someone lives in a city, in a forty-story building with other buildings very close by, as in Hong Kong or Cairo or any big city like that, then a trip into nature creates a particular state. But all it does is create a particular state, change that state. I have said many times: everyone should visit the Pacific Ocean. It is a very particular state, a different one. Of course a person will recover more in nature. That is logical and natural for a human being. Obviously, you should do that. And obviously, when someone lives in a big city and goes on a retreat, they go into nature. Where are retreats usually held? In nature? Usually they are. Why are they held in nature? Can a retreat be held inside a building? Can it? Could a retreat be held in Las Vegas, in a casino building?

Clearly it could. Obviously. It depends on what we mean by it. Let us look up the word “retreat.” Let us look at it now. I often refer to this: what is a retreat? “An organized event involving a temporary break from everyday routine for spiritual, mental, or physical recovery. It is not simply rest, but deep immersion in yourself, whether through meditation, yoga, or living in harmony with nature.” More words, and they have worked yoga into it. You could attach eight hundred and sixty-seven other practices, techniques, or words in just the same way. But the important part was “or physical recovery.” All right: if it is physical recovery, it could be simply rest. A strange phrase that contradicts itself, isn't it? It can be physical recovery, but not simply rest. It is an organized event involving a temporary break from everyday routine. So what matters to people is that it is an organized event, which is a complete abstraction. Can you be on a retreat all the time? Look, it is like the word “meditation.” A temporary break from everyday routine. Because the world perceives life as routine, rather than as life. It is obvious, isn't it? The world perceives it—not the world, but the modern person.

Modern science sees life as routine, so you need a break from that routine. There is routine, and then there is some little diversion. A person lives their life and perceives it as routine. They go somewhere else, are given a different perspective and a different state, and are told, “This is not routine.” They say, “Great, I have rested. And not just rested: I have also—what did it say?—recovered mentally or spiritually.” Spiritual recovery is a funny notion. So they have left their routine to recover spiritually. But daily work and perceiving your life as life rather than routine are precisely where spiritual recovery can happen. As soon as you say, “My life is routine; I want to recover spiritually,” you are degrading spiritually, not recovering. You are degrading spiritually. The opposite is happening. “Deep immersion in yourself or living in harmony with nature.” Then they add more. Notice how they go on adding things. There is another definition: an international term for time devoted to spiritual practice. That is what it says next. There are solitary retreats and group retreats. Group retreats often include instruction in meditation practice. Some are held in silence, while others—there are all kinds of things.

Retreats are often held in the countryside, in the mountains, or in other places far from civilization. And off it goes: dark retreats, all kinds of different retreats, prayers. “Retreats play an extremely important role”—and then it moves into religion, where they play that role, in Buddhism and so on. But that is the point. A person is in a space like this. What do you think about the people here? This is a small part of Silicon Valley, a nice neighborhood in Silicon Valley. A nice neighborhood. There are not all that many neighborhoods like this here, but still. The camera might even pick up houses belonging to prominent owners or executives of some of the world's best-known companies. We will not name anything, so you cannot tell which. But the point is: are they in a permanent retreat, or are they never in one? What brings that state about? How does it arise? That is a very interesting aspect. From the perspective of meditation, as you say, “When I listen to your meditations, I experience all kinds of different states.” Yet you remain in the same place. You do not travel anywhere.

That is the point of expanding perception. Having the impulse to ask, “How can I maintain this state all the time?” is not a bad impulse, provided your foundation is that you maintain expanded perception in order to benefit the world and to understand all of this. You increasingly form this core within yourself: I need it for the sake of knowing. Period. For the sake of knowing. Simply to perceive what is really happening. Believe me, that is enough for now. For knowing, simply for knowing. Someone will say, “Why know? To become clever?” This is not about the intellect. Not about the intellect at all. It has nothing to do with it. It is for the sake of knowing.

Through different practices, a person can do this. I am not diminishing or dismissing the importance of retreats, good states, meeting interesting people, and living through those experiences. Especially since people mostly live in the absolute prison of their own personality and their own mind, unable even to look themselves in the eye and ask what is really happening now, what is going on around them. What illusions am I living in? What billions of illusions, what trillions of illusions? This is an opportunity for them. It really is an opportunity. I organize trips and meetings like this myself, hold sessions and many public meditations, lead groups, and answer a huge number of questions because it is an opportunity for a person—a major opportunity. But here, again, it is very important to look at where you have come and whom you have come to see. If the international definition is “time devoted to spiritual practice,” then essentially anyone who says, “We will be doing a spiritual practice,” might not even be deceiving anyone. Anyone can organize a retreat. Just as my youngest son, who is five—six; it is hard to keep track of the ages—can teach you math.

He can, can't he? I am at home now, and I just walked through the house. He was watching The Fixies. Their cartoons might explain something about math. I think it is a very old cartoon brand. I have seen different children watching it, and I think I have heard something. It might explain a bit of math, for instance. Then he will come out and start telling you about math. Will he be talking about math? Yes. Should you study math with him? I do not think so. You can listen to him and talk with him without treating him as your math teacher. When you go on a retreat, you need to understand perfectly well where you are going and with whom. But people are ignorant—completely ignorant—of what the spiritual world is. They know nothing about it, have absolutely no understanding of it. So all you have to do is put up a sign, and they come running. Just as they run toward signs saying “Healthy food,” “Environmentally friendly products,” or “Good-quality clothing.” They run toward the advertising without working out what it really is. Take food. A couple of days ago, we went to a local market.

Markets are often held here on weekends, sometimes on weekdays. I live in California. California is the biggest agricultural producer among the US states, producing all kinds of food. It is a major supplier worldwide too, with very substantial volumes. There is everything: from olives, almonds, and pistachios to oranges and all kinds of fruit, meat, anything you want, rice. Markets invite small producers, and small farmers often have stalls. There are a huge number of farms here. When someone comes to a market, they react to the idea of a farm. As another example, a couple of days ago I drove into Nevada. There are lots of signs there for, say, some milk brand: “We get our milk from family farms.” Family farms: the business and the farm belong to families. The idea that it belongs to a family leaves people with the impression that this is great. But whether it is great is a big question. Great in what sense? For the development of business and entrepreneurship, or in terms of quality?

How does a person perceive it? What does it appeal to in them? Will they buy that milk because they think it is healthy, or to support local entrepreneurship, for example, so corporations do not take over the entire sector, as they do around the world? The same thing happens at markets. You walk around and see “family owned” everywhere: a farm owned by a family. You automatically perceive those products as high quality. But if you look closely at the signs, not all of them say “organic,” for example. To a Russian person, the word “organic” means nothing: well, someone wrote “organic.” Write “green” on red, “red” on green—what difference does it make? Write whatever you like. There are some laws, but they are not as complex when it comes to organic products. Here, the criteria are very strict. We were recently learning about bees. A close friend of mine opened a large apiary in Sochi, inspired by the idea of organic honey. His approach is to take no more than twenty percent of the honey from the bees, because the bees themselves need to eat it. They need to have it there; it needs time to mature, and so on.

There is an enormous amount involved, all kinds of things. You realize that to put the word “organic” on honey here, you have to meet an incredible number of criteria—a staggering list that seems almost impossible to fulfill. I have seen those lists, at least. They are very complicated. So the food does not say “organic,” but the very fact that it is at a market is enough. People grab everything because they perceive those products as better than what is in the store. But that is a big question. A big question. Just like farm-fresh milk: a big question. Or local, farm-produced honey. What if there are fields nearby treated with chemicals, or neighbors' yards treated with chemicals? What difference does it make? The neighbors' flowers may have been treated. I have a large garden with hundreds of flowers and plants I planted myself. I see an incredible number of wild bees coming there. An incredible number. There are a lot of them, and somehow they do not sting me. I do not think they sting anyone—though they might sting my dog. He comes over, stands there, and keeps trying to eat them in the flowers. But some of my plants have been treated with products, many of which might themselves be organic—products for growth and so on.

But these are products applied from outside, and some organic compounds do more harm than chemical ones—what people call “chemicals.” I am not a great expert in this, so I will not go into it. I might use an inaccurate term, but I know that some organic compounds cause much more serious problems for people too, not to mention animals, insects, and everything living. The way a person perceives a word or an idea is also the way they perceive a retreat. And the same applies to meditation, Olya. How a person perceives meditation is very important. If we type “meditations” into YouTube, most of the results will be calming meditations: pleasant music that has a reasonably beneficial effect on a person's consciousness. Obviously, someone listening to that music will recover a little. That is normal. Their perception has been closed off, and they have been given only music to listen to. They put on headphones, their perception is closed off, and they listen to music. The music brings them into a certain state of consciousness. But there is a big difference between what we are talking about—expanding perception—and a little recovery. A big difference. So, does sleep expand perception?

Then the most important way for a person to recover and expand perception is sleep. Not a retreat or anything else: sleep. Learn to sleep properly. But if someone sleeps five hours, goes to bed at one in the morning after drinking wine and eating meat—eating a lot altogether—or shouting at someone, arguing, or watching a TV series, then suddenly gets up at some odd hour, with no fresh air in the room, that is it! What recovery can we possibly talk about? Do not concern yourself with retreats, states, or any of that. Simply work on restoring your system. Notice that sleep restores not only the physical system, but a person's entire spiritual system. This is very important. Incredibly important. It restores all their bodies. An enormous, essential part of the spiritual work in a person's life happens when their astral body and their “I” come together to live independently of the physical and etheric bodies. They detach, leaving the physical and etheric bodies behind for that time. This is an absolutely incredible necessity for the spiritual system. It is the greatest spiritual restoration in a person's life. The greatest, Olya.

The greatest, Olya, and the most constant. Because even if you sleep only three or four hours, that is four hours of sleep. But people do not understand what sleep is. I see so many people who tell me, “Oh, I hardly need any sleep. I am doing so well.” Wearing bands is fashionable now, and they have developed some decent software. It is not even a question of fashion anymore. They have made good software for the bands and good, modern sensors. A person can see whether they actually slept or merely thought they had rested. I know many people who say they feel well, but when you open their app and look at the sensor readings, things turn out not to be so good. The person says, “Oh!” Then the question is whether they have enough awareness to recognize that things are not so good. A friend came to visit me, and there was a time difference. I asked, “How did you sleep?” He said, “I slept wonderfully.” I said, “Let me see your app.” He opened it, and I said, “Look: you were in bed for four and a half hours and slept for two hours and twenty minutes.

You were not asleep at all for an hour and forty-five minutes.” He said, “Oh, right, I lay down then, but first I decided to look at my phone. Oh, of course, I made two calls that evening. And here—yes, that is right, I woke up.” I said, “You did not get any sleep at all.” He said, “Interesting. At first, my consciousness perceived everything as fine.” At some point I realized something very interesting. I used to tell many people I had trouble sleeping. But when I started wearing different devices, it turned out that, by ordinary standards, I did not just have no problems: my sleep was excellent. I was mostly at ninety or a hundred percent. Excellent! But to me, it had not been excellent before, and it still was not. The question is what you pay attention to, what you register, what you see, and what you truly want to live through and work through. And most importantly, notice the real actions you can take right now, without paying tens of thousands of dollars or setting aside some astronomical amount of time. What can you do right now to recover spiritually, physically, and emotionally?

Come to my meditations.