How You Affect Other People Even When You Say Nothing to Them

OSOlga Stolyarova

How do our words or thoughts affect other people? Suppose a person feels irritation or other negative states toward someone. They see it, and see how it affects both themselves and the other person, but it takes such a strong hold that they cannot do anything about it. What should they do at that moment? I also have a smaller question: do words and thoughts carry the same energy of influence, or different energies?

AVAlexander Volchek

When we talk about influencing another person in social terms, people endlessly raise the point that not only words have an effect, but thoughts too. Or that it is not just actions, but words, and not just words, but thoughts. This is simply a social description of what happens. Another person is affected not only by actions, words, or thoughts, but by your interaction with them as a whole. What interaction? You walk past someone on the street without doing anything to them, thinking about them, or speaking to them. Is there interaction between you? Yes. Even in ordinary psychology, an image of that person may remain within you and surface later, not immediately. You may make a decision based on it without even connecting it to that person.

When two spiritual beings come into contact, there is interaction beyond actions, thoughts, or words: everything that belongs to the plane of spiritual interaction. For an ordinary person, actions, words, and thoughts are basically interactions in the material world. True thoughts, of course, do not belong to the material world. They arrive through a structure involving spirit, soul, and awareness of the thought—a true awareness of its emergence. I am talking about true thoughts. Clearly, a thought can originate in the spiritual world. A thought may arise, and with it aversion to a person. You may become aware of that thought and think…

…that you are harming the other person. But the thought of aversion came for an entirely different reason. Your spiritual system has seen something, generated something for itself, or interacted in some way with that person's spiritual being. Set everything else aside: if you live in the spiritual world, with an understanding that it exists, then spiritual beings interact and influence one another within it. That is enough. Whatever the influence may be, it exists. And it takes precedence over any interaction through thoughts, actions, or words—over all of it. Your action also has a cause. Your thought has a source.

A word also has a cause: why did you say it, why did you decide to say it now? Where are you speaking from? Are your words dead thoughts held in your own space? Or are they a truth you have just read from the surrounding space and passed on, or a truth someone else has transmitted through you? Imagine that someone sends a message for you, and I say, "Olya, someone asked me to tell you this." You become upset. Who is the source? The person who asked me to pass it on? Me, for passing on those thoughts? Or did you become upset in response to my words, while I have nothing to do with your distress? Some people enjoy bad weather, while others get angry. My wife sometimes says, "Rain again." I say, "It's wonderful that it's raining." Two opinions.

For example, she did not like the rain, while I did. Later, we are walking down the street, and she says, "Rain again." I say, "Yesterday you said rain again was a bad thing." She says, "Not today. I didn't say that today. I like it." There is a reason for a particular state, for what you like or dislike, or for certain thoughts arising. Why did you think about it at all? Why did it affect you now? Why does the weather affect you at one moment and not another? Why does the noise children make affect you sometimes and not at other times? Everyone can be noisy while you remain completely calm, barely even noticing. At another moment, everyone is noisy and you want to destroy them all.

You do not understand what is happening. If you are worried, keep looking at why you asked the question. You say, "I'm worried about my influence on other people." Then, instead of worrying about your influence, think about love for other people. You will have an enormous amount of unconscious influence, some of which may be negative and some positive. You can influence other people positively too. Does that worry you? Having a positive influence on others? You might say, "No, no, I only mean negative influence." But positive influence is still influence. It changes another person and their life. It is entering their life and changing it.

I recently discussed the phrase, "I hope you understand." What lies behind saying that? A specific, explicit desire to change another person's opinion—a craving to change it. It clearly shows that the person saying it is unaware. If someone says it to you, they are completely unaware of what is happening. They have no interest in how you live, what you are engaged in, what you do, or what you look at. They are not interested.

But suppose you think about love for other people: love without a reason, love for a human being as something true, for each person, regardless of whether they have done something good or bad. You may say, "This person has done bad things and should go to prison." But no one can take away my love for that person. You try to understand them: what is moving them now? Every day, I see people doing very bad things. My first question is what is driving the person to act that way. What is moving them now? Why did they do it? That does not mean you need to discuss it with them. Discuss it with yourself: why did they behave that way, why did they take that action?

What energies lie behind it? What impulses? Is it this person's nature, or some external influence on them? That does not mean you should not defend yourself. Sometimes you need to defend yourself very firmly. Why does a person act this way? People want to change other people's opinions. They want others to think as they want them to, as they hear things, as they know them. They want others to think about them in the way they want, know, and hear. Do these thoughts have an effect? An enormous effect. The person's very energy affects everything around them, the entire world. Do you see? If you carry an energy of craving power, importance, or recognition, it will affect the world around you.

Negatively. Consequently, it will affect an incredible number of people you interact with. But you affect other people even when you are not thinking about them. If a bear walked in here now, I would be frightened, even if it had no intention of harming me and had wandered in by chance. Similarly, someone enters a space grumbling, angry with themselves, upset, negative, with suicidal thoughts going around in their head. How do you think the people around them will feel? Do they affect other people? Absolutely. Everyone wants awareness, yet people say, "It's unconscious, so it doesn't matter."

Everything matters. This person affects everyone else: their children, their parents, the surrounding space, everything. People like watching this. They like scrolling through their feeds and looking at people who are extremely happy or extremely unhappy. They often do not want to look at healthy people, because those people do not create dependencies or attachments. Why look at them? An important question here is whether you, as a person, create dependency in others. It is not just about a thought. You thought something bad. So you did. What of it?

Look at it this way: "An energy came to me, and I thought something bad." Do I like thinking badly? No. Is it the truth of my life? Not at all. I do not want to think badly of other people. I want to live with people from a place of care and love. If someone treats me badly, is it normal to think badly of them? No. You still need to live from love and care. Of course there is a social world, and the situation will be resolved within its structures. But that is separate from my relating badly to another human being, wishing them death, destruction, or suffering. Olya, this allows you to be remarkably sensible about your own actions in society. In fact, it brings great clarity and sound judgment to your perception as a whole.

Some might even call it manipulation. If you are aware of everything that is happening, you can act appropriately even in social terms. There are situations where decisions cannot be based merely on an idea of love, where you sometimes need to defend yourself and set boundaries, because people will eat you alive—devour you. Setting boundaries without harming others allows you to sense the social world much better, perceive more of it, and see it more clearly. This takes enormous work. So instead of focusing on thoughts, words, or actions alone, look more broadly.

What am I bringing into the world as a human being? Notice where you bring crap and where you bring butterflies. Observe it. Will you make mistakes? Yes. Then make mistakes. There is no enormous problem in that. What is the problem with having made a mistake? There is no problem at all. Why punish yourself, get hysterical, beat yourself up, and then write in your diary about making a mistake? You made a mistake. So you did. Did you want to make it? Actually, no. Did you want to behave that way? No. A healthy, normal, sensible awareness in your relationship with yourself is the only way.

This is very easy to see when interacting with other people. You interact with me often, and I frequently say, "If you asked this question, it is an example of this. If you asked that question, it is an example of that. If you ended your sentence this way and started justifying yourself, it is an example of this." These are very clear, obvious, elementary things. A person really can use interactions with other people to understand where they are. To some extent, that is necessary. But a real outcome is possible only through communicating and speaking with yourself, only through yourself. This is the one and only way to reach an outcome. There is no other way. No one will help.

I want the people around me to help. Yes, I do. I want many things, but I know these are misconceptions and illusions. The more I remember that, the better. The most important part of today's answer is what I said at the beginning: there is an enormous layer of influence you do not notice at all. The purpose of expanding perception is to notice this influence, step by step, more and more clearly, and become aware of it. That does not mean it will disappear. It does not mean there will be no bad states, bad thoughts, or bad actions.

The question is: what is your foundation? Do you have something to rely on? As always, what is the foundation? It is very easy to discover this in a one-on-one interaction, and to see what a person's foundation is. It becomes very apparent in interaction and in being a student: the ability to take on the student's role. We are entering a time… We could talk about that endlessly. I dislike this kind of discussion, because people in the social world enjoy saying that the times are always changing. I have lived all this time, and the times have changed constantly. Forty years ago, you did not hear that idea much. But what is a fact?

What is happening now is a revolutionary change in people's access to knowledge—seemingly incredible knowledge. What has that brought to human development, to people as human beings? Has it made people better? Has it improved how they relate to one another from love, their everyday state of love toward others? Has it improved that at all? Look around, and look at yourself. Has it? We live in a world where people are afflicted by the ego-computer, whose basic principle is that the most important thing for a person is themselves, their personality.

It would be something if at least the spiritual world and the whole spiritual being mattered. Instead, the focus is very clearly on the personality, and that is all. It is tragic. This will not be resolved by people becoming smarter or studying something, Olya, but through other causes. Even logically, it can only be resolved through other causes. For example, an impulse toward goodness may awaken in people, or a different impulse of awareness of what is happening. The question is not how it awakens. If that impulse awakens, people become kinder.

If an impulse of evil awakens, everyone will simply become more vicious, more vicious still. I gave an example: there was recently that situation in which fifty or seventy thousand people crossed from Morocco into Spain, climbed over a pier, and entered another country. What energy in the spiritual world could produce such a movement, moving fifty thousand people from one space into another in complete unawareness and lack of understanding of what is happening? Even the people carrying it out do not adequately understand what is happening. People will say they were paid—you know the things people usually like to say. First, that is not what is happening there. Second, what kind of influence would make a person want to do such a thing?

Actually, the discussion is not about their being paid. It is about someone prompting and organizing it, falsely telling them that the borders had opened. But that is stupidity in itself. What do you intend to do afterward—swim to Spain, seize something, or what? What are you trying to do? It is stupidity in itself. So what causes it? What energy becomes active in people that makes them take certain actions—for example, go and kill other people? What energy is activated? What is its source? Or they lie. What is the source of that energy? Where is it? Looking from this angle can greatly expand your perception.

Not everything will be clear from the beginning, and not all energies will be accessible. These videos are always filled with energies. They offer a powerful opportunity to expand your perception and truly become aware of what is happening. What is really happening? A person who has not developed, who lacks energy, will feel bad here, because they will feel like a complete robot. Why do people dislike hearing that something comes from outside? Because a person wants to preserve their own importance in making a decision. They want to say, "I brought myself this joy." Yet it is enough to say, "I don't need to bring it to myself. Can joy flow into me, even if it isn't my own? I don't need anything else. I don't even need my own alongside it."

"Can all of it flow into me, a goodness that is not my own?" Not other people's goodness, but goodness from the world as a whole. "My good state, the favorable flow of events—I didn't create all of it. Can it all flow into me? I didn't do all this myself; something is simply happening in my life." People dislike that. They do not want it to happen. Someone would rather live in a tent and say, "I bought this tent myself," than receive a house from the surrounding space. They say, "No, if it wasn't me, I won't accept it." What have you really done entirely by yourself in your life, truly? That is the question a person needs to work on and explore.