Why Kindness Is Not Always Repaid with Kindness | What Real Help Is

OSOlga Stolyarova

There is a fairly popular saying: “No good deed goes unpunished.” It seems to be used by people who did something to help someone, perhaps expected something in return, and did not receive any gratitude. Often they say so directly: “How can that be? I helped, and I got nothing back, not even a thank-you.” I would like to understand what real goodness is, what it should or could be. Should it bring people some benefit?

AVAlexander Volchek

When someone says, “No good deed goes unpunished,” that is entirely a construct of the ego-system. One hundred percent, a basic ego-system. We will look closely at what help means and what goodness really is. But what is the person afraid of in that phrase? They fear harm or want there to be no harm. That is one part of it. On top of that, they want an exchange: they want to receive something for doing something. There is a third distorted idea as well: supposedly their goodness led to harm, so they will not do it anymore.

That is another issue. There is also the idea of wanting to do good in order to receive good. There is a whole series of false ways of perceiving human life here. What would a true way of perceiving life look like? What would a framework of truth be? Imagine the person said, “I will do good regardless of what I receive in return. I will refrain from doing harm, not so that good will come to me or so that I will avoid harm. I will refrain from doing harm because that is fundamental to my worldview and my values.”

Here is something interesting: a person can immediately ask themselves, “Am I ready to think this way or not?” Most people are not. They are willing to describe it using all sorts of characteristics and concepts, go into deep analysis, different techniques and details, and look for other causes and effects. They are willing to do anything: social causes and effects, psychological ones, perhaps, whatever you like. Anything except simply say, regardless of anything that happens, “I do not want to do harm. Whatever happens, I want to bring good, simply because it is truly right.”

Someone will say, “What if it happens in a situation where someone hits you? Are you ready to turn the other cheek?” I say: let us not think that way right now. Let us not compare those situations or examine them now. Let us consider the basic framework first. Are you prepared to think, in general, that you want to bring good into the world? Is that present in your consciousness at all? Even if only five or ten percent. Someone will say, “All right, I understand. In general, I am ready.” But are you really ready, every time you do good, to remember that you are not doing it to get something? To remember that every time? Even when you do something good in order to receive something in exchange, do you understand that it is then a social arrangement?

For example, I bring you a kilogram of mandarins, and you give me ten dollars. That is simply a social arrangement, not a question of goodness. At least you are not deceiving yourself: if you want an exchange, it is about exchange, some social understanding of things, rather than goodness. What is good and what is bad? Many people pay money for bad actions too. That matters. Many do not pay for good actions. Just as many people leave a tip for poor service at a restaurant, while someone else leaves no tip for good service. This is not about goodness; it is about a way of thinking socially. Can you, as a person, think this way? I ask myself, “Am I capable of thinking this way?”

If I think this way, I have no problem understanding what comes next. Once we have this foundation—and without it, there is no point in looking further or listening to the discussion—I can examine the following. Can there be situations where I do good for people and good comes back to me? Yes. Can there be situations where I do good and nobody notices or ever knows about it? Yes. Can I do good and receive harm in return? Of course. Can harm be done to me while a great deal of good happens elsewhere that I do not connect with this situation? Of course.

The question is: what do you live for? What is your true intention? Can you do good, receive good elsewhere in response, and suffer greatly as a result, or cause someone else to suffer greatly? Can you do good, experience harm here, while elsewhere another person conveys something good to you or receives something good? Can you do something good that is not good for another person, that their system does not perceive as good? People often say, “This person is ill; we need to help.” When you help, is that good or harm? If we consider the spiritual world and see that this was what the person wanted, then you are doing harm to them, because they needed to be ill.

Imagine someone starts a company and begins having problems with it. Starting it was a mistake, and they need to close it. You do something good by helping them develop the company. But if you look at the bigger picture, you are bringing them harm, not good, because they are in a system that should not be developed. The only thing they need to do is close the company, not keep developing it. Are you bringing them good, then? This is incredibly fundamental. What is the issue? When a person thinks they are doing good for someone and wants something in return, or even thinks in terms of “But I did something good,” trying to assess it, they are essentially placing themselves at the level of some deity, some extraordinary energy.

The question is: what is good? In the social world, people evaluate goodness according to certain criteria. Firing someone is bad; hiring them is good. Offering a job is good. Helping carry a bag is good. Raising an employee's salary is good; withholding a bonus is evil. But if we look more deeply, we see that good and evil are clearly not measured by those criteria. If we take a broader view of the world, we see that there are aspects in which the concepts of good and evil do not exist. Is there a space where they do not exist? Of course. Even consider a particular event in your own life.

You receive a bonus somewhere, set the money aside, and then it is stolen, for example. There seems to be neither good nor evil, just some balance taking place. Or someone receives their salary and dies. What did they need that money for? They never spent it. That happens a lot too. There is a higher level where there is neither good nor evil, even if we consider, at the very least, a person's birth and death. That is where we should begin when considering good and evil for someone, the causes and effects they live through, and the events they experience. At least begin there, with life as a whole. In the context of that whole life, is this really good for that person or not?

Another aspect: can you give someone a smile from the heart, see a person and think, “I wish this person well”? When you expect nothing in return and do not try to assess goodness in any way—specifically, to assess it—but simply think from love and from the heart, can that be negative? It cannot. Not in any way. The act of judging matters enormously: whether there is any evaluative judgment at all. Of course, if there is judgment and assessment, there can be no question of good and evil.

We see how heavily the world manipulates this. “It was good that the parents beat the child. Look how well they turned out.” Or, “It was good that the parents paid no attention to the child. Look how independent they became.” But there is the opposite story too: they paid no attention, and the child drowned. There are different factors and dimensions at the same time. There is also the question of identifying cause and effect. Perhaps you paid no attention because you lacked the energy and strength, and the child succeeded at something not because of that, but through entirely different energies. Those energies of yours may instead have made perception harder for the child, leaving them in a very difficult state in their thinking and perception.

Yesterday I read a post online that said, “We analyzed the richest people on the planet, and here is what their upbringing had in common. Their parents did not answer when the child asked a question, or gave them free time during the day, or did something else involving activities, school, or something else.” A list of factors. Complete nonsense. How did you define success? I can find you a thousand other people for each example and show that this did not lead to success at all, that letting someone play outside with hamsters and ants did not make them successful.

There are also people who were not allowed to do those things, who were restricted, and grew into very healthy people. Are there basic principles of upbringing? Yes. But to examine those principles, we need at least a broad view and an understanding of how we see a human being. If you see a person as a physical being and recognize only the material world, how can we compare approaches to upbringing if I see a person as a spiritual world? That does not mean someone is right or wrong. But analysis is pointless, because we begin with different values for assessing a person, their joy, happiness, comfort, perception of life, difficulties, and life as a whole.

What criteria will we use to measure their life? Otherwise we end up saying, “They seem to feel fairly good. They turned out to be a decent person. Their children seem decent.” Does someone stop being a decent person if their child kills someone? Who is to blame: the parents, teachers, neighbors? Who exactly? The child became someone bad because they were meant to become someone bad. Even if their parents behaved inappropriately, were those direct parental actions that influenced the child's life? Or was it an energy the child evoked in the parents, so that the parents could not behave differently with them?

What is it? That is what matters. A few days ago, I had a situation where I shouted at the children quite a lot. I may get that angry once every five or ten years; I do not know. Interestingly, I was in quite a good state. There was just one thing that happened that day. It is important to ask: was my behavior appropriate? Clearly not. Could I have found other solutions? Yes. Did I need to find other solutions? I do not know. But there was one circumstance: that day, we had gone somewhere, and my daughter lost consciousness. We called an ambulance.

I seemed to take all of this fairly calmly, unlike my wife. She handled it with strength, but not calmly. I was calmer, but even so, having your child collapse in your arms several times is an experience of its own. There seemed to be reasons for it that would leave no lasting consequences. But what happens to the spiritual world at that moment? What happens to your energies? That is the one circumstance I can examine from the day I shouted at them: this event narrowed my perception. I lost a certain amount of energy. You could see that I was calm, because the shouting was triggered at a particular moment.

I needed to record a piece of content, sat down to prepare it, and was interrupted. After shouting, I came back to myself, sat down to prepare the material, and delivered it as usual, as if nothing had happened. That shows that I was in a state of normal, healthy perception. Yet something was missing, something I failed to see, something went completely wrong. I could make up an explanation and tell the children, “Look, I am shouting at you because you were doing something wrong too.” A strange position. Why were the children shouting? Perhaps they were in that state that day because their sister had fainted. Could that be a reason?

Could it affect them more strongly than it affected you? We never like that, do we? We like to say, “Oh, you are suffering today. Please go ahead; you have a problem, we will leave you alone. You have an exam, of course.” And we need to surround the person with care. “Oh, you are getting divorced, of course you have a problem.” The person says, “Listen, I am handling this divorce much more easily than you handle your ordinary day. Or I am handling this death much more easily than each ordinary day.” The question is what energies begin to move. Returning to that incident, my daughter was having her ears pierced and kept blacking out as they put in an earring. She came to and was lying there, saying, “I do not want to die.” Obviously, that was her reaction.

I told her, “Take a wider view of the Earth.” This was very interesting. There is something you can do when you feel bad—and this applies generally, when you feel emotionally bad or unpleasant states are triggered. You could even call it a meditative state; it may help someone in some circumstances. You begin to perceive the Earth more broadly. She said, “What does that mean?” I said, “You remember where we live. Picture a map in your mind; take a wider view, as if looking at everything from higher up.” She said, “I do not understand what you mean.” I said, “Keep doing it.” Later, we came home. I said, “You know, when someone says, ‘I do not want to die,’ the most important thing at that moment is to tell yourself, ‘I am ready to die.’”

She said, “Dad, listen, I did not want to die in the shopping mall where I was getting my ears pierced.” She is sixteen. I said, “We never know where we will die. But if we are already dying, at the very least we let go. On the other hand, you can ask all the higher powers to help you, all the light, all the sunlight, all the energies to help you get through this. As soon as you move into fear and it starts eating away at you, it drains your energy and takes you over. It is impossible to remain with it. Fear becomes madness.” The influence of these events is obvious. Just last night, my wife came to me and said, “Whenever I think of that day or see that photo from the ear-piercing place, I feel sick.”

That is energy laid down within you, a fear that can last a lifetime. I remember my own fear. My father had episodes of arrhythmia, and I was seriously afraid that he would die. That fear stayed until the end, until he died—ten, perhaps fifteen years. Every time he had an arrhythmia, or every time his perception was narrowed. This is interesting. Suppose he and his friends had a drink somewhere. You are a child, and you see your father drunk or sober. It is not that my father drank a lot, but they could certainly have a drink. You see a person with narrowed perception. That is interesting. I talk a great deal about expanding perception.

What happens when you see and feel someone whose perception is narrowed? I want to tell you right away that seeing a person with narrowed perception makes you feel very bad. When you see your parent that way, you have a specific idea in place: they might have a health problem now; they might die. It leaves enormous imprints within your own system. What does it mean to lose consciousness? It means narrowing perception completely. In human terms, it means completely narrowing conscious perception, because there is still a whole spectrum of unconscious perception. It does not mean your spiritual system kept you in one place. But your perception has narrowed. You see a person with narrowed perception and feel tremendous fear.

Fear for that person or for yourself? That is the question. Of course, for yourself. “What will I do? Where will I be? What will happen inside me?” There is an enormous range to it. There may also be fear for the person. But what exactly are you fearing for them if this is their destiny, for example? You should at least begin by asking yourself whether this could be the natural unfolding of events, and allow for the possibility that this is how it is meant to happen. At least do that. Of course, it is not easy. When something happens to your own child, it is not easy. You are in the unknown, in complete uncertainty of perception at that moment. That is why another person with expanded perception will naturally have a calming effect.

Fundamentally, they will have a calming effect. Even if being near them is difficult socially or emotionally, overall they will calm you, because they bring the most balanced spectrum of energy. They will not project their own narrowed background state onto you. For some reason, that makes me think again of people's comments. I often see comments on YouTube videos, especially on our AI channel, which reaches a wider audience. People write such nonsense and negativity; it is unbelievable. There may not be many such comments, but there is a lot of negativity in them. You read them, and the negativity is there.

Someone who writes and conveys negativity in a comment is, in any case, in a state of narrowed perception. There is one exception: if they were asked, “How do you perceive me right now, positively or negatively? What do you think of how I look, how I speak, or what my character is like?” If nobody asks these things and the person sends them out anyway, their perception is clearly narrowed. You can always observe yourself: when you want to judge, gossip, or add another comment, it is a signal that your perception is narrowed. If you constantly want to do it, you are constantly in narrowed perception—relative to yourself. I am certainly not setting some universal level of one hundred for everyone's perception. People's perception cannot be compared that way.

All spiritual systems are fundamentally, incredibly different. But what you certainly can do is assess your own state within your own reality. If you are at least perceiving the Earth and yourself on it, apart from any particular personality trait, then the urge to argue, discuss something, or offer some description of someone will not operate in you, or will operate less. That brings us to this division into good and evil, into judgments about another person: who is good and who is bad.

Judging your own actions as good or bad, especially in terms of understanding the development of the spiritual world and spiritual systems, is fundamentally evil. Unfortunately, the judgment itself is not good. When you are truly living in love for people, truly understanding goodness toward them and service to them, that comparison or evaluative judgment will not arise. It simply will not arise; it will be absent at the foundation. You can go on to analyze for yourself—specifically, analyze, investigate, study the harmony of that situation.

You can study it, but it should not become endless analysis and comparison: is it good or bad, shameful or not? What are you getting for it? Fear of receiving harm is fear. This matters: fearing harm already places your whole perception in a negative spectrum. The very fear of receiving harm itself…