The most important thing about the spiritual development of a person

AGAnna Gurina

Sasha, can meditation and visualization attract money and success? Does the law of attraction actually work that way?

AVAlexander Volchek

That is a very good question, and an enormously broad one. A vast amount of literature has promoted this idea over the past few decades. Notice that, on one side, people believe in it fiercely; on the other, a huge number of people keep saying, “Oh, here they go again with their success hype, their self-help scams, or whatever else.” The whole reaction produces an opposing response. This is important. There is only one way to understand it: look at why particular events happen. The point is not whether visualization can attract something, but what causes an event to occur. Suppose an event is meant to happen in the future. It has to happen; it is fate. Imagine that fate exists. Whether it actually exists is a separate, enormous subject, but suppose it does, and an event must happen in ten years. For that event to happen ten years from now, the person has to attend a particular training program where they go through a process of visualizing certain things.

Fate arranges things so that these steps happen in order for that future event to occur. Looking for causes in the future rather than the past is very important for understanding time. Most people look for causes in the past. Consider causes in the future: that there may be a cause ahead of us. For example, I moved to America two and a half years ago, and you and I met seventeen years ago. You had a strong influence on my move. Perhaps we met and interacted so much in order for me to move to America. Or did I move to America because we met and interacted so much? Those are fundamentally different things. If you explore this broadly, you will see some very interesting possibilities. For example, if my move to America was so important, could the events that led you to begin your own move have come together so that I would move there? Look at them from that perspective and at what influenced them. Imagine it is so. Allow even a tiny fraction of a percent of that possibility, as though watching a cartoon. You will see that many events you connect with your own fate or that of people around you may have nothing to do with those fates.

You are fulfilling an entirely different fate. Fundamentally, that is how it works. Someone asks, “What is my purpose? What is my fate?” Part of your fate can be to participate in someone else's fate or in a particular event. Everyone likes important events. If I became president here, or became famous, you would say, “Ah, then I agree that my fate was to make Alexander Volchek famous.” As it is, you feel half comfortable with the idea and half not: something appeals to you and something does not. What is there to debate? Look more closely and deeply, and you will see how differently cause and effect can appear. Even children may be born so that particular events can take place. The space around us can bring things about: being hired or fired, businesses opening or closing, relationships at home between husbands and wives or with parents. Documents, visas, and wars may arise so that certain future events line up and happen—and they may not be your own events. So when we ask whether visualization or intention helps bring things about, we need to understand how things happen and why: because of karma, heredity, your own choice, someone else's choice, the space helping it happen, or a people or country helping it happen.

Or perhaps you simply attended a program where someone transmits that kind of energy. They transmit it because they have that power. Everyone assumes that the people who have power in intention and money are the people who have money. That is not true at all. The causes lie in entirely different dimensions. This is the only way to approach and study the question. Then you can decide what to do and how, what to change or leave unchanged, what helps and what does not, and what sets off entirely different reactions. For example, can you set an intention, gain something in a powerful way, and lose something elsewhere? Of course. Imagine you are the mother of two daughters and say, “I want to build a strong business,” and you direct your intention toward that. I tell you that business depends on repeated actions and how much you work. You say, “In my business, talking to clients is important, for example. So I'll work sixteen hours a day.” You build up one area, and something gives in another. Yet it does not work that simply. It does not automatically mean that your basic happiness elsewhere, or your relationship with your children, will get worse or better. And so on.

Still, overall, you may lose something elsewhere. With energetic intentions, these exchanges happen very often. They are very difficult to track. You need to understand that the world often has no problem exchanging one thing for another. But you do not negotiate which things. You do not discuss their relative weights in advance; you do not understand the weights of these energies.

AGAnna Gurina

Sasha, let's also talk about paying for spirituality. Many people believe spirituality should be free, but we see plenty of examples of a session with some great guru, their books, or their events costing a great deal of money. People feel very differently about this. Please tell us what you think.

AVAlexander Volchek

There are always these questions: what do we mean by spirituality, and how do we perceive it? One view is that there is a material world, with spiritual activities inside it. Another view is that there is a spiritual world, and the material world exists within it. When we ask whether spirituality costs money or is free, in the first view it obviously has a cost. At least within the material world, it costs time or action. People may call something charity, but they want something in return: likes, views, subscriptions, or a large or small amount of money. What difference does the amount make? You called something very expensive. People say, “That price is fine, but this is very expensive—far too expensive. It can't cost that much.” Why can it, or why can't it? That is a question of your own perception of expensive and cheap. When we perceive spirituality this way, we are simply evaluating something within the material world. Yesterday we were walking and talking about Aman hotels. I said, “It's certainly an expensive, high-end hotel. In New York, and in Utah, in Death Valley, it costs more than four thousand dollars a night.”

You said, “Not four thousand—it's a thousand dollars.” We looked it up together, and I said, “Look: six thousand. Sometimes it's forty-five hundred at the cheapest time, but usually it's five or six thousand.” You might feel that a thousand-dollar hotel is expensive, or a fifteen-hundred-dollar hotel. For someone else, a three-hundred-dollar hotel is expensive. I was walking with Polina yesterday. When she was young, she worked at the reception desk of a five-star hotel in Minsk. I think you visited it: we went there together to see her after a nightclub. A night cost three hundred dollars. Recently one of her friends stayed there and posted photos. Now it seems entirely ordinary to stay there: what's three hundred dollars for a hotel? Back then, it seemed very expensive. Now six thousand dollars a night may seem expensive—a substantial amount—whereas back then three hundred felt unaffordable. It seemed strange, out of reach, and incomprehensible. This matters. When we discuss whether spirituality is expensive or cheap, we first need to understand what we are trying to calculate, how we are evaluating it, and how we measure whether it costs a lot.

And expensive for whom? I recently posted about a trip I am organizing this summer. There is a group of ten people, and the trip costs a hundred thousand dollars per person. Some people hear “a hundred thousand dollars for a week” and think, “Okay.” For others, it is completely incomprehensible. “What is that? That's an apartment in Minsk, or in Smolensk. What do you mean?” Their frame of reference cannot take it in: what is it, and how is it possible? “For one week? Are you serious?” People relate to time differently; that person does not perceive that time in the same way. It is simply a different perception—a material one. If we move away from the view that there is a material...

If we move from the view that there is a material world with something spiritual inside it to the view that there is a spiritual world containing the material, we see that any spiritual event is priceless from the material world's perspective. That is the first thing to recognize: it is priceless. Why? Because everything outside the material world is beyond price in material terms. There may be agreements, accessories, or actions, but people cannot properly exchange energy or calculate it even in the material world. What, then, can we say about the spiritual world? How much does it cost to change the way karma unfolds over a span of thirty years, give or take? Or to change ancestral events or heredity, or harmonize particular energy flows over five thousand years? What even are these things? People are not truly prepared to look at, or pay for, things that actually have value: silence, or an inner state of calm. They visit a place, experience a particular state, and pay for it. They say, “Oh, some energy just moved through my side. I felt something. I felt something here too.”

Four years later, the person opens a business, for example, and says, “I opened it myself.” They make no connection. Or the reverse: they felt something here, something happened to them, and four years later they closed their business. They do not connect it with the real events taking place in the spiritual world. They do not understand why wars happen, why some countries shrink while others develop, why some economies grow and others decline, or why some people make money and others do not. Why do some people have children and others never do? Why does one person die earlier and another later? Why is someone ill all their life while someone else is not? Why does someone feel deeply happy while someone else becomes endlessly more unhappy? How can a person pay money for that? They cannot even examine the simplest aspects of perception and draw sound conclusions about who truly helped them. They like to say, “I had a good teacher in eleventh grade,” or, “A professor did something for me.” It is simply an illusion. Or, “My parents did the right thing: they beat me with a belt, I did my homework, and look who I became.” Are you sure you became who you are because you were beaten with a belt?

Or are those things unrelated? Being beaten with a belt made you someone who cries every night, while your money comes from an entirely different influence that you simply do not notice. Perhaps it is the presence of your wife or husband beside you—just their presence—or living in a particular house or place, simply being there. People do not see these patterns or hear them, and do not want to see them. Someone buys an apartment or house for its renovations or location. But perhaps that location is negative, while another location is truly worth paying for. Simply being in another person's presence may be worth paying for, regardless of what they say. What do people want to buy now? They ask, “How many hours did the person work? How many hours did the massage therapist work? How many hours did the psychotherapist work?” What do hours have to do with it? You are living a life. If something in that life has not been properly corrected, you lose years or energy that could have allowed you to do something else of real significance. It is not merely that something hurt a little. Some energy failed to transform because you ended up in the wrong hands, with the wrong person or psychotherapist, at the wrong practice or meditation, or in the wrong place.

The wrong thing transformed you, and everything went in a completely different direction. So what is each thing worth? People are used to thinking, “This is worth money because that person has a lot of money,” or, “Because that person has accumulated a lot of hours,” or, “Because they have written books.” Look at how many people write books now. “But they've written a book! They've written three books, six books!” They could have written eighty-nine. Now we have these impressive AI models saying, “Would you like us to write six hundred and ninety-four books using your vocabulary?”

“Yes, and we'll transcribe every one, do everything, create complete audio versions, put them everywhere, and say they're yours. We'll draw pictures for you too and say you drew them.” But what is the point? That is not what matters. In terms of energy exchange, that is not a true exchange; it is a false one. The most important thing to understand is that real spiritual life and spiritual development are priceless. When you understand that there is a spiritual world with the material inside it, you see that, on one hand, spiritual development is completely free. Any discussion or conversation, going to the bathroom, eating, working, meditating, practicing—anything at all—is spiritual life. It makes no difference whether we are filming, planting flowers, sitting in a special posture, or traveling to a cave where six hundred and eighty-seven thousand people have meditated and which is therefore considered important. Perhaps they only accumulated negative energy there. It does not matter: all of it took place spiritually. And what is spiritual is not necessarily good for a person. Let me repeat: not necessarily good. From the spiritual world's perspective, the working through of your karma may have accelerated, and you die tomorrow. Excellent: the karma was lived through correctly.

But the person says, “Could I not do that? I want to live a while, look around, and experience things differently.” There are so many illusions—endless illusions in which people live. So on one hand, it is free. On the other, we have been talking a great deal today about exchanging energy: you need to learn to pay for energy appropriately and understand whether what you give is truly equivalent to what you receive. We live in a world where exchanges are unequal. People subscribe to Netflix. I watch a film on Netflix once every three months; someone else watches series all day long. Our exchanges are not equivalent. The price is averaged and balanced so they can charge everyone more or less the same. Suppose I pay twenty dollars a month. I should have paid fifty cents, while someone else should have paid two hundred dollars. It is a balanced exchange, but often not balanced in our favor at all. Does that mean a person will end up in balance anyway? No. You can spend a great deal of time out of balance and with an entirely wrong amount of energy. Understanding and making sense of this is a very difficult, very substantial task for a person.