Can You Decline Spiritually While Thinking You Are Growing?

AVAlexander Volchek

We often say, ‘This person is developing, while that person, on the contrary, is deteriorating.’ And I was asked: if there is deterioration of the personality, is there spiritual deterioration too? How does it happen, and how can you tell that someone really is deteriorating spiritually? But on what basis do we decide any of this? And can we truly see what is happening to that person? That is what I suggest we look at today. What do you understand by deterioration of the personality?

OLOlya

Deterioration of the personality? When someone isn’t developing in any way on the material level, for example. They aren’t developing any skills or abilities they might have, they aren’t studying anything, just something practical like that. If we move toward psychology, when they treat other people badly, when they feed and reinforce their ego through certain actions, that is deterioration of the personality to me.

AVAlexander Volchek

So if they treat people badly, you consider that deterioration. What if they used to treat people badly at a level of minus ten thousand, and now it’s minus nine thousand? Is that deterioration or development? They still treat people badly. They used to kill a hundred people at a time; now they kill five.

OLOlya

Well, no, it’s a complicated question when it comes to people. If someone treats people badly, whether it’s at minus ten thousand or minus nine thousand, it is deterioration in any case. But if they used to treat people badly and now treat them well, that is evolution.

AVAlexander Volchek

And if they start treating them badly again afterward?

OLOlya

Well, that’s how they live, back and forth.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, something very interesting emerges. First, when you began describing deterioration in the material world, you said it was easy to describe. You started talking about skills, achievements, material results. Then you said that if we look at it psychologically, we can consider how someone treats people. But whatever questions I ask, in your answers you will lean on… The way a person treats people will always win out. At some point it will always win out. It’s like the time I was sitting with my nephew and my daughters, and I asked one daughter how she felt at school. She said, ‘Six out of ten.’ I went on to ask, ‘What grade do you have in physics?’ She said, ‘An A.’ ‘And in math?’ ‘An A.’ ‘And in English?’ ‘An A.’

I said, ‘If you have the highest grades, why do you feel like a six out of ten?’ She said, ‘Well, because everybody gets those grades.’ I said, ‘Where would someone be if they did badly at school, really badly?’ She said, ‘Around a two.’ And I said, ‘What if that person does badly at school but loves every person, treats everyone with love?’ That’s where the questions started. If a person loves other people but looks bad, smells bad, and does badly at school, practically anyone will gradually say, ‘Well, if they treat everyone well, then of course they’re a good person,’ and start raising their rating. Not everyone, of course. There is a group of people who will say it’s all complete nonsense, that the most important thing is money, or the most important thing is school grades.

But basically, whatever you go on to say, something awakens in a person. They can’t dismiss someone who treats people with kindness and love, who sincerely helps everybody, not for their own sake but for others, and does it simply because that’s what they do, because that’s how they feel. That immediately raises the person’s standing. When we talk about this, then, a person’s life contains a huge number of different events that a modern person, with their thinking and brain, fundamentally cannot measure against one another. People generally do not possess vision, spiritual vision, spiritual perception. They cannot determine what is truly significant, truly significant, and what constitutes deterioration or development.

We’ll now move partly into how to look at this in the spiritual world. If someone earns money in the material world, is that development or deterioration? Imagine they earn a lot of money in the spiritual world. Is that development or deterioration? From the material world’s perspective, it is development, of course. But the next, fundamental question is: how do you measure it? First, in my example of killing ten people and then killing nine, you didn’t dare say the person was developing. You simply didn’t dare. But if I said someone earned $10 and then started earning $20, you would say, ‘Of course they’re developing.’ But with people, with killing people, no: you must stop killing people altogether to develop. Or you must stop thinking badly of people altogether to develop.

What does it mean not to think badly of people? Can a modern person remain outside the influence of certain forces that produce a negative influence, a negative opinion of other people? Can a person do that? If we look at the true causes, at the spiritual world and the reasons such things as a negative attitude toward other people arise, we will see that there cannot be a situation in which a person is totally, one hundred percent free of it. Of course it is theoretically attainable, but fundamentally, a modern person does not inhabit those energies. In any case, they have various impulses of negativity toward other people.

Do you have impulses of negativity toward other people? Of course you do. So do I. It is present; it lives. Of course it has a degree of influence, an impact, its particular details. But you can’t study or assess that degree of influence and impact in material terms. So if it is there, are you constantly deteriorating? Look, fundamentally a person evolves and develops. Fundamentally. That development can happen through very different circumstances and paths. A person can live through negative aspects of their development. Even if we look at human development on a cosmic scale, at humanity’s descent into its present state, in terms of perceiving the spiritual world, of knowledge and the structure of the world, humanity has deteriorated.

Yet it is an evolutionary process of development. That is the path it took. Can we say that because it took that path, it had to happen, that it is the natural path through which a person acquires a certain system of energy and knowledge, a certain state, so as to find sunlight again, this time within themselves, and truly see and know what human life is? Including, of course, knowing the entire spiritual foundation of human life. Then it would seem that the person is developing and moving forward. They are definitely evolving.

They are definitely evolving. In terms of the laws of cause and effect, which, by the way, arose because of the emergence of dark energies, not light ones. In terms of the law of cause and effect and karma. Again, this process arose as a consequence of the arrival of dark forces that wanted to take hold of humanity. Because if karma had not arisen, people would have deteriorated completely, wouldn’t they? They would have deteriorated in any case. Olya, take away cause and effect in your life, and you will deteriorate completely. You won’t be able to recover. You can recover only because you are constantly living within a system of lessons, even though you don’t want to live in it.

There are some paradoxical things within that system of lessons. You could say the more powerful the lesson, the more a person develops. Someone might say that. But at the same time, it isn’t so. A powerful lesson can lead to sadder consequences, where a person cannot restore cause and effect and becomes much more subject to certain energies that will take hold of them forever. There are already people on planet Earth who have no ‘I.’ This is a very difficult matter. Various accounts do indeed describe aspects of a person at some point ceasing to incarnate and, in effect, ceasing to develop.

Because incarnation is currently necessary for evolutionary development. And with incarnation, look again at death: death came as a consequence of the emergence of dark forces. Without it, people would not have been able to develop normally through evolution. They would only have deteriorated. They would have deteriorated. And don’t imagine that human spiritual beings are these awakened, awakened, incredibly powerful spiritual forces of an angelic nature. Not at all. So the question you are asking needs to be studied meditatively. You need to immerse yourself very deeply in it.

And, of course, set aside your own material and social reasoning that leads to false conclusions. It really is very difficult to find patterns and draw conclusions here. After all, we live in a social world. And when you live in a social world, you will inevitably remain subject to the laws of karma. You could call it being a hostage to them. Quite thoroughly, because impulses will inevitably be operating within you that create new karma. You don’t only work through karma; you create it. And I want to tell you that in most cases, serious things happen entirely outside a person’s awareness.

Without them understanding what is happening or where they are, where they really are. So when we speak of the spiritual world, it is very important to understand that a person’s development in the material world is not a result of, or necessarily a cause of, their spiritual being’s development, for example. You can gain prosperity in the material world, increase the material activity you described at the outset, be famous, socially respectable, socially established.

You can have power, a good job, a profession, strive to develop and improve your skills. At the beginning, you were saying what you really think in all those phrases, weren’t you? You will strive to develop your skills, move toward that, and not work at all on the tasks that concern your true path. Worse still, not notice them, see them, understand them, or pay any attention to them, and fail to pay attention to what matters most. Pay no attention to it at all. You have seen and taken part in different kinds of exercises yourself. Even things like treating other people well, watching your words, for example, or your speech, watching your thoughts, watching how attentively you listen to another person.

How much attention do you give that in hours each day? And how much attention each day do you devote to judging someone, gossiping about someone, discussing someone, or developing materially, earning a certain amount of money? Paradoxically, these days we measure everything by time spent on something, by experience. How much experience is there in this? Really, how much experience? How much does the person work on it? What are they actually learning? In how many universities, schools, family conversations does this come up? Let’s leave family conversations aside and keep schools and universities.

The news today. Is there information about how important it is for a person to treat others properly? Are people carefully taught how to listen to other people as a subject in its own right? Of course that does exist. Let’s not pretend otherwise. In some places, attention is paid to being able to listen to another person. It is instilled in some places. Interestingly, it is often instilled in American schools. On the whole, I like the American education system quite a lot. If we compare it with something else. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s even a seven out of ten, probably.

But what I mean by seven or ten would differ somewhat from the education systems around the world. Here is an interesting point: when a young child starts first grade, they regularly gather together and listen attentively to one another every morning. The children are spoken to very politely; people smile at them. My son has just started fifth grade. He comes home and says, ‘Why can’t they keep talking to me at school the way they used to?’ It’s the same school. Elementary school covers the first five grades, I think. Five, six, seven, eight… Yes, they have five grades. ‘Why can’t they talk to me the way they used to?’ he asks. So there really is a certain expression of care toward children at that age. I didn’t have that in kindergarten, and certainly not at school.

It was the army there. It was more like a proper army, honestly. More like a proper army. So, of course, spiritual deterioration in terms of your spiritual being… Again, deterioration and development are possible everywhere, if we use those words. Of course, there is a layer of perception of spiritual space, and life in general, where time doesn’t exist, where there are no divisions, or where it doesn’t matter whether you exist or have disappeared. But if we move into a layer where we make assessments, then of course, in terms of a person’s spiritual system, deterioration exists and development exists. And it is primary.

And when you say, Olya, for example, ‘If materiality exists, if the material exists, then the spiritual definitely exists’… Spiritual deterioration and development can exist while the material may not exist. And we really shouldn’t overstate the significance of our own lives. Honestly. If you enter into what is happening and look at it with real understanding, any inflation of importance, the importance of this life, this time, this week, is a material illusion and nothing more. Just as this week wasn’t important to you a year ago, or what will happen ten years from now isn’t important to you. Supposedly it is, but that is merely an imagined importance of the future.

It isn’t a real feeling of that day, of how, what, and where things will happen, or under what circumstances. The circumstances will change depending on how things unfold. So, of course, in terms of the spiritual world a person can sink very seriously. But to look into this subject at all, you need a sufficient conviction that life is spiritual, that the spiritual is primary, and that the material world is a projection of the spiritual world. Otherwise, thinking about spiritual deterioration makes no sense at all. What happens in the world becomes important to you roughly as it does in a computer game, where you have a saved character and need to play through a level. It becomes about that important. In reality, everything is only of passing importance.

And the instincts surrounding the fundamental, real things will take over much faster. Especially in severe emergencies.

OLOlya

There’s this phrase that material reality reflects what is within. And just now you also said that the material is a projection of the spiritual. Are those about the same thing, or different things? And what does a projection of the spiritual mean, then?

AVAlexander Volchek

It is quite clear that the material world is a projection, and also a reflection, because it is a consequence. But it is only a part. Rudolf Steiner describes, for example, how positive events occurred in the spiritual world at the end of the nineteenth century, with the light spiritual forces victorious over the dark ones, while in the material world victory came to the dark forces. There are connections, and the spiritual world is always primary in the events that unfold. Always primary, never secondary. You could point out, ‘Wait, if a person can create karma, then haven’t they created it from here, from the material world?’ But that isn’t so.

It is the impulses of your spiritual being and your system doing something within a particular set of events. You feel, for example, or a person may feel, hatred toward other people. They may feel hatred toward others without having read textbooks about it. In our world there is a lot of talk about people being taught to hate, for example, or reading it in books. But if you actually look, actually pay attention, some people don’t read anything. They grow up in the same family. One wants to kill a kitten; the other wants to save it. Why does that happen? What is that energy?

What is that energy, without words, without any books or descriptions? You could read one person a thousand texts saying kittens should be killed, and they wouldn’t believe it or do it. They would become even more horrified by it, more afraid of it. They wouldn’t go in that direction. Someone else will believe it the first time and say kittens should be killed. A kitten is a useful example because many people observed this in childhood in the behavior of their peers or relatives. And not only with kittens, but with different kinds of animals. It is simply an observation. Just as someone thinks it is acceptable to hit another person. Some people think they can hit someone, don’t they? They think they can hit someone, or think they are in charge. They think they are in charge. Well, they think they are in charge. Until what point are they in charge?

Then society has decided, I don’t know, that your parents are in charge until you come of age. That’s how it works. But the age of majority is an invented parameter. What world did you take it from? How did you divide things up, and how did you teach that authority? So deterioration is straightforward in terms of the spiritual world; that’s very important. It isn’t merely straightforward. It is a perfectly real possibility for the system to deteriorate. Then the question, again, is what we mean by deterioration, Olya. If you look at what actually happens in the world, people are made presidents and then put in prison. People receive awards and ovations, and then they are punished and beaten cruelly.

People listen to someone, show them to others, link to their videos everywhere. Then it turns out that person hates other people. This is simply everywhere now. People look at the short term. Even if, at the moment that person is speaking, they carry a positive energy, who says they won’t carry a different energy twenty years later? Even if people did examine it and see it. And the person needed to live through that positive energy, needed to experience it to prepare, for example, for a difficult path in which an impulse of hatred would activate within them. Is that deterioration, Olya, or not? Imagine that initially a person has an impulse toward positive development and movement.

They help everybody a great deal, everywhere. But a time is coming when a particular energy of fear and apprehension must activate within them, developing a very strong negativity toward other people. My question to you is: is that a person’s deterioration, or is it the law of cause and effect, or simply life? In this case, look, there is no deterioration at all, because this is an aspect of the person’s development laid down from the beginning. Who told you it was deterioration? And so people say, ‘He’s downshifted,’ or ‘He’s become stupid.’ Of someone else they say, ‘Look how wonderful and famous he’s become.’ First, for thirty or twenty years, he tormented children, fought, and killed kittens, and then he became a philanthropist and really did become a positive person.

But in the first part of his life he carried extraordinary negativity, truly extraordinary negativity, because of certain energies. Someone will attribute it to his simply having developed. Or you could attribute it to a particular energy simply being activated in him, and that’s all. That’s all. It’s like one person being born into a family without money and another into a family with money. From the material world’s perspective, if you remove the spiritual world and the cause, the person immediately has an absolute achievement, a result. And we always love looking at those achievements and results and assessing them that way. People don’t want to assess them differently and truly look at causes and consequences: what really happened to the person, what is changing inside their system, and whether they really have deteriorated.

Or is this the natural development of their life? Have they truly developed, or are they actually at the lowest point of their development and haven’t managed to achieve anything? Things were simply bound to go well for them in any case. Imagine things were supposed to be good for someone at a level of a hundred thousand, but at the beginning of life they were at five, and later they reached a thousand. Everyone will say, ‘Holy crap, what progress!’ But they haven’t developed. They were supposed to reach a hundred thousand. They did everything they could to avoid getting there. So a thousand happened automatically. How do we assess this? How do we look at it? It’s like all the utterly unreasonable discussions about the second, third, fourth, or fifth generation of wealth and money.

Who will become smarter, who will become stupider, who will spend the money properly, and who won’t. Simply a meaningless discussion. All of it will drag a person still further into darkness. You can have these discussions reasonably, independently, normally. Why not? But while doing so, you must remember the foundation, the real foundation that exists: what is real and what is imagined, what is real and where you are acting because it is the socially correct model of behavior or the required one. That is the question you need to resolve.