Karmic management. How to manage your life and achieve results?

AVAlexander Volchek

Can karmic management really bring you money? How can we actually manage the flow of events in our lives? How can we understand our own flow of events? What is the right next step to take at any given moment?

DMDmitry Mugenov

If we want to manage a business effectively, we read books about how to manage it, right? Especially in the States, business books that give you formulas are popular: do this, and you will get these business results. I would like to discuss a book called Karmic Management, and the idea that you can manage karma as a system: take certain specific actions and get specific results in terms of wealth, well-being, perhaps health, or social outcomes. In this book, karma is described as a manageable system in which you sow the right karmic seeds and get the right karmic shoots as a predictable result. Can you really manage karma as a system, like a business system? Take clearly defined actions and get guaranteed results?

AVAlexander Volchek

When we talk about karma—you are talking about karma now, right?—it is a very fashionable subject. Very fashionable. The phrase "karmic management" came from a particular author, but obviously it is used absolutely everywhere today. The reasoning goes like this. Let me expand your question a little before we get to what karma means: if you do good things, you will have lots of money. If you do good things for other people, everything will go well for you. There is a very clearly stated law, and people take that law to mean, "Can I do good things for other people now and receive benefits for myself?" That is the specific reasoning in this book, and in the idea of karmic management generally. When we say "karmic management," we mean managing karma. What is management here? Managing karma. Before we get to that, let us first work out what karma actually is. That is very important. At least take a look at what it is you could manage. Right away, we need to emphasize very strongly that karma is not a concept limited to the past year, two years, three years, or this lifetime.

The very idea of karma means that karma existed before your life, and that in this life you live according to cause and effect and certain laws of karma. Karmic management presents the idea that everything you do has causes and consequences. Everything that happens has causes and consequences. I want to set aside a whole section to focus on the word "management." Right from the start, on "management." If we look at various clubs, business communities, business education, and books, there is a great deal of promotion of the idea that, for example, your business must have a mission or provide value. This comes out of the same area: if you have a mission, money will come. Not that money comes because you have chosen the right business model and know how to work with clients and collect payment from them. Or because you know how to manage finances properly. Instead, if you do good things, those good things will bring you money in business. What is management in a company? Imagine one business involves running a coffee shop, and another involves running a factory that sells heavy steel reinforcing bars. That business has two clients.

But four hundred customers walk into the coffee shop every day. It is in a particular location. To manage a business, at the very least you need to find out what kind of business it is, where it is, how it is situated, who its customers are, what its business model is, and the average sale. What product are we actually selling? What is the product? What does it cost to produce, who are the employees, what are the company's goals, strategy, and principles? And a lot more. There is a big difference, right? We sell coffee at retail. We might go to Los Altos here in Silicon Valley to have coffee at Satur, or we might go to a factory in the Urals that produces reinforcing bars. An absolutely enormous difference. So, to manage a business and talk about management—I am quite strong in business management, in the concept itself, in understanding finances, sales, marketing, production, logistics, service, all of it—you need to understand the company you are managing. When we talk about managing karma, at the very least we need to understand karma. What does understanding it mean? It means asking: what are the causes of what is happening in my life right now?

What are the causes of what is happening right now? What are the reasons I record videos for a YouTube channel? What are the reasons I ended up living in Silicon Valley, moving here at forty? What are the reasons? Why do I have four children? What are the reasons? Why am I in business? I have businesses in IT, education, investments, real estate, and consulting. Why do I do those things? What are the reasons? What are the reasons for our personal relationship, for our friendship? What are the reasons? What are the reasons we have a dog? You nearly stepped on its paw, right? Or you did not. What are the reasons we have a dog? What are the reasons? Why do we have these particular people, this particular crew, filming these videos? What are the reasons I live in this house? What are the reasons? What are the reasons for the particular state I am in, good or bad? What are the reasons? Just recently, literally twenty minutes ago, I was walking around the apartment getting angry with some of my employees. Was I angry because the employees did a bad job? Or was I angry because I am in a bad mood today? I am not in a bad mood, but suppose I were.

Am I in a bad mood because of the weather, because of the way my wife is, because of the way my mother is, or because you are here visiting? Why might I have done that? Or because my child came out this morning and looked at me the wrong way, or because I got food poisoning, made the wrong food? To talk about karmic management at all, we need to understand karma. And here is the first mistake people make when they talk about karmic management. Our task today is in no way to disprove something or say something negative about it. Our task is to understand, so that we can make the right decisions for ourselves and understand how we can actually manage the flow of events in our lives. How can we understand our own flow of events? What is the right next step to take at any given moment? What next step should we take when a particular thing happens? Do I really understand the causes and consequences correctly? Correctly. I gave a simple example here: what does a person's mood depend on? When we use an example from business management, the claim is that the business will get more clients because you will do good things at the reinforcing-bar factory.

Does that not sound strange to you? Imagine a reinforcing-bar factory with two buyers. Just two large buyers. Some global company buys from the Urals—say, a global Chinese company—and a domestic supplier buys to resell. What good things can you do for the world by selling reinforcing bars? People start making things up out of thin air. I do not know, provide employee benefits. I do not know, make your reinforcing bars tastier, warmer, better, so that love shines out of them. What is supposed to happen? What are you supposed to do? In management generally, you have to understand the numbers and the goals. We cannot walk into a reinforcing-bar factory and say, "Right, to grow the business, we need to put up the right sign." At the factory they say, "What sign? We do not have a sign." A person goes through life without knowing themselves, without understanding how karma works. Again, this is very important. If you think of karma within a one-month time frame, you can manage that; at least your brain can get some sort of grasp on it. There are mistakes here, the whole thing is wrong, but at least we can somehow fit it into our heads.

But if you think about karma in terms of other lives—and the person who wrote this book says, in karmic management, that other lives exist—then we have to understand that there is karma, a certain amount of it laid down in another life. And here a question arises.

Another life. And here is the question that arises. Imagine you have accumulated negative karma amounting to minus one hundred. In a year, you can create positive karma amounting to plus one. You huff and puff, creating positive karma and working through old karma. Just working through the old karma. People love to say, when something is going well for them, "That is because I have good karma." If something is going badly, they say, "Now I will do good things, and things will get better." But things might still go badly for another four lifetimes. Or five lifetimes. Who told you things would get better? Who told you they would get better at all? Or perhaps you are doing certain good deeds now. Right now, you are doing certain good deeds. Are you doing them because they are true, because doing good deeds is a truth of this world, or to get a good result for yourself? I want to say right away: if you do good deeds only to get a good result, you will get bad karma. That is obvious. This idea of doing things for other people for your own sake, to receive good karma, is an illusion.

There is no such pattern. Someone comes along and says—this is point two, a very important point, a big section—someone comes along and says, "Alexander, but surely it is normal for a person to think about themselves too." It is normal. It is normal to see patterns and to know that, broadly, the flow of the world is such that if you truly do good things, good events will come in terms of your life's development. We will discuss what events will come in a moment. If you act from truth, good events will come. But you do not act so that good events will come; you act because it is true. You do not refrain from killing a person because you fear bad consequences for yourself. You refrain because you know you must not kill people. Those are different things. There is a very good account involving a Hindu teacher. A student asks him, "How could you have just killed a mosquito?" He says, "I killed the mosquito because it was just eating me." The student says, "How could you kill a mosquito? You must not kill animals or harm any living being."

He says, "You are reading all the scriptures incorrectly. They say that you must not feel the desire to kill, but you may do it to protect your own life as a human being." There is even a very interesting aspect here. In Hinduism, it even says that a human being stands above that. I will not go into higher or lower now. There is a big difference. You want to kill animals, and you fight that desire. If you are fighting it, keep fighting: you wanted to do it, and you still do. Or you do not want to do it in the first place. Do you not want to kill animals so that everything will go well for you? Or do you simply not want to kill animals because that is true? Those are incredibly different things. That is point two. An interesting point arises. Look, we have covered two areas here. Let us examine a third area. Let us examine a third area and look at it in terms of—the water has just boiled—let us look at the third area. We will step aside a little and look at a very important point people make. Look, a very important point. If we read Karmic Management carefully, good deeds in karmic management are supposed to lead to money.

Look, karmic management has a very clear logic: good deeds lead to money. But who told you there is a pattern connecting positive actions to money? Who said such a pattern exists at all? And here is a very interesting question: what would you choose? Would you choose to do good things, improve your inner state, remove anxiety and stress, find balance in how you perceive the world and hear the world—or would you choose money? You would choose the first. In some respects you might say, "Can I split it up? In this area, can I choose the first option, working on my state? And there is a certain area where I would like to influence money." But I would say this: are you sure you have enough strength, the necessary state, attention, everything? Do you have enough to be able to truly understand cause-and-effect relationships? What does truly understanding cause-and-effect relationships mean? It means knowing exactly how this affects money. In business, you hear me say this very often: it is very important to decide that, if you are running a business for profit, you are running it for profit. You are not doing it for a mission, or to create certain values or benefits. You are doing it to make a profit.

Then you can make that profit with a strategy and principles—principles aimed at protecting human health, at doing some good. But your number one priority, the essence of it, is making a profit. Even in basic definitions, corporate charters, and the names of various kinds of companies—for example, there are limited liability companies in Russia and Belarus—it basically says that the company is created to make a profit. If it is not for profit, there is even a separate name for that kind of organization. A nonprofit organization, for example, right? A nonprofit is aimed at something else. So a commercial organization is always aimed at making a profit. There were whole debates about OpenAI, for example, and the idea that they were not aiming to make a profit. Then they said, "No, we are a commercial company. We intend for people to make money from this too, and we aim to make a profit." So the third major point in our discussion today is whether people truly see patterns. Truly see patterns. Are you, as a person, capable of seeing the patterns in your own actions? If you bring about a particular event, what does it lead to? This event, this good deed, even if you do it for another person: does it lead to money appearing in your life, to your living in the right location, to your having the right or a good circle of people around you, to your health, to the health of your family, for example, to healthy relationships with other people—or to something else?

One of the most important issues in karmic management, Dima, is confusion about these causes.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Then I suggest we explore the next question a little. The author proposes literally reading your current karma from current events in your life. For instance, if a problem arises, it means there was an action of a similar kind in the past, even if we do not remember it. There is an example of an employee who constantly complains: he has problems with his manager and is unhappy about them. The explanation is that apparently he once did something like that himself, and now he is supposed to learn certain lessons from it. Can we really draw such direct connections, unambiguously linking specific events in our lives to specific actions of ours in the past?

AVAlexander Volchek

First, I want to say that this is childish reasoning. The level of this reasoning is completely childish, completely childish and abstract. Let me give you a very simple example. Imagine someone has children in this life. They have children now, but had no children in their previous life or the life before that. Could that happen? It could. How would we bring karma into it? How would we connect it, describe it, describe these circumstances? Or you have a wife in this life, but did not have a wife in the last life. How would we describe those circumstances?

DMDmitry Mugenov

Or perhaps you were a woman in your previous life.

AVAlexander Volchek

Or that. Or you were a different sex in your previous life. Does everything really have karmic causes and consequences? This is a very important point. And how does karma operate across different periods of a person's life? What do we mean when we ask whether everything really has causes and consequences in terms of the karmic path? If we say that everything has causes and consequences in terms of the karmic path, that means freedom does not exist. Only karma exists, and absolutely nothing else. If only karma exists and nothing else does, that is a kind of automatic process. There is an automatic process, because when you say, "I will make certain efforts now to bring about good," are you making those efforts automatically, like a robot, or out of freedom? Someone says, "I did good things, and that is why I had good results afterward." Are you sure you did those good things consciously? Did you not do them because you were supposed to do them in terms of karma? And if you say, "I will do them differently," then you are trying to alter karma, because you were prescribed not to do them differently, but to live through other actions.

To do that, it is important to understand them, to know how they work. But if you do everything from a karmic position, if you—

A karmic position. If you act and live solely from a karmic position, there is no freedom at all. If there is no freedom, you cannot make a single free decision, even about influencing karma. But if freedom is present, freedom sets non-karmic areas in motion. Areas that are not karmic at all. You simply live, take certain actions, and create them. That is one of the most important aspects people overlook when thinking about karma. First, people forget that freedom of action exists. A human being has freedom to create. But there is also inheritance, the inheritance a person is born into. Three thousand years ago, that inheritance was not felt the way it is felt today. Today a person may often never get as far as fulfilling their own karma. They may remain within that inheritance and receive a whole set of causes and consequences that have nothing to do with them. We can look at what "nothing to do with them" means through this example. Imagine a karmic event occurs. One person kills another, for example, or someone commits a robbery. You look at it, read about it in the news, and feel sorrow over that event.

The event itself was karmic, but your sorrow is not karmic: it is newly created. You created it anew, brought it about, created it. It is an entirely new action, not even tied to that particular event. Understanding this gives you a different view of your own causes and consequences in what happens. Your own causes and consequences. So, to answer again: approaching the example you described from this book as though such neatly arranged patterns exist is an abstraction, because people have different lives. In one life, someone may be a very important person in society, with a thousand people around them. In another, they may lead a very modest, ascetic life and get to know ten people in their entire lifetime, for example. Establishing patterns like that is simply an illusion and an absurdity. But again, before approaching it, let me first remind you: to manage something, you need to understand it, understand its foundations. If you do not understand the foundations, how can you manage it? That is a major point I have been describing today.

Another point I described is the difference between doing good things to create benefits for yourself and having a true inner foundation: doing good, true things because they are true. For example, I always relate my actions to truth as much as possible. We could go off into a long discussion of what truth is. But there are some things that are very clear. For example, as I said, killing people, lying, deceiving, or wanting to harm another person generally. Or, for example, wanting to love other people. Constantly being in a state of wanting to love other people, regardless of what they do. There are no causes and consequences in that, no notion of making things good for me. Good in material terms. And you chose something interesting, right? You did not choose money. You chose your own state and mood. It would be one thing if people did good things, or Karmic Management said and gave examples showing that if you do good deeds, your state will improve. Over a long period, that influence really does exist.

But money is not part of that. The aspect of money itself is not there. It has a different nature, an entirely different nature. When someone says, "Money does not buy happiness," there is a very sound meaning in that. You can be absolutely flooded with money, flooded with money, while suffering in terms of your health, your relationships with other people, and mutual understanding with those close to you. What difference does it make? You have more money. Besides, if it worked that way, all the richest people in the world would be very healthy people who bring good into the world. If we look at it that way, there would be no such thing as stealing. Anyone who stole would immediately become poorer. But we know perfectly well that there are people who steal and whose fortunes grow. They do not become poorer as a result. All you have to do is open your eyes and look around. Open your eyes and look around. Look at the incredible number of examples of people having money for very different causes and with very different consequences: from someone born swimming in gold to someone who did the very best deeds in life and did not receive a single penny.

We all know very good people who do incredible things but are very poor. And everyone knows very rich people who are morally repulsive. That expression fits, if we want to really understand it. When you chose—this is a very interesting point—when you chose the first option, your state, did you have any doubts? Just now, when we were pouring tea.

DMDmitry Mugenov

I did not have doubts. I had an internal asterisk: "But!" A "but." It is still very frightening to let go of the money issue. It is very frightening just to go toward that state. Very frightening to go somewhere and end up with a huge, beautiful smile, happy, but without a penny to your name. What holds you back is fear, a fear of poverty. That connection. That is why I thought the fundamental mistake here was this: why do we buy a book like that, why do we read it, why do we try to follow it? Probably because, from the start, we base it on our own illusion that what we are striving for is measured in money. That if there is money, if money comes, everything else will follow. But that illusion is so worn out that I do not even know how to discuss it anymore. And the book seems to be about that. Although very often, even books about money turn out in the end not to be about money. Good, wise authors write that way. Something similar is happening here too. There is another thought that came to me. I do not know how to connect it.

The thought was this: essentially, if you have not understood things and are not starting from truth, this is not karmic management. It is an attempt at karmic manipulation. You try things, set false goals for yourself, misjudge the situation and the circumstances that arise, and take actions that are also false, that do not fit. You misjudge the current circumstances and look at causes and consequences incorrectly. You have not fully understood the theory of karma itself either. You are striving for something false, doing things that are false, assessing everything incorrectly, falsely. It feels as though, once you have laid everything out so incorrectly, it will not lead anywhere. I mean, it—

AVAlexander Volchek

It resembles what marketers do in companies. There is so much of that. In the modern world, an enormous number of employees come in and propose an enormous number of actions with their eyes closed. It is like buying advertising in Google AdWords or Yandex Direct and then having a conversion rate of a few percent. It is just an abstraction. It is like walking into a business that deals in reinforcing bars and saying we need to hire cashiers. Or going into a coffee business and saying we need to hire wholesale salespeople, salespeople who work in wholesale.

DMDmitry Mugenov

There is a thing called a cargo cult.

AVAlexander Volchek

Simply proposing an action that actually does not—look, it is not merely pointless. It will make things worse and lead to other sad consequences. Dima, it is very important to see that people who practice karmic management want to improve things without understanding that it will be a great blessing if nothing happens, because there is an enormous chance of making things worse. When you are in the chaos of different actions you just described, taking certain actions without understanding the theory or the practice, without understanding the actual causes and consequences, you need to understand—

Certain actions. You need to understand that you can improve things, or you can make them worse. If you can make them worse, how much worse, and how badly? And you are gambling with your own life. Gambling with your own life. Moreover, there are very clear, objective things here. Very objective, I will say again, very objective. If you want good things only for yourself personally, and have not actually developed an inner system of wanting something for other people, that is a guaranteed loss. The next aspect I want to examine in the whole subject of karmic management is this: what is the time frame for particular actions to come to fruition? Look, this is incredibly important for your perception. Imagine we went to university. You went to university, and I went to university. We arrive to study, and we have some expectation of the result. For example, people often say—or a person is at school: you study at school so that later you can learn a profession, for instance. There is a deferred result, often years away. I have four children, and if my son who is in fourth grade asks, "Why am I studying at school?" the answer is, so that there will be some result later.

That is how people will answer, although I would offer my own explanation: that it is simply part of life. But basically, people will say there is this cause, and a consequence follows later. After a long time—ten years, for example. If he is in fourth grade, obviously some result is perhaps fifteen years away. Imagine you do certain things and the resulting events are not supposed to happen in a month. People want things right away. People want an immediate effect. Right away, instantly. They say, "We will spend a month doing good things for our boss at work, and let there be money, let there be a good attitude from the boss, for example. The boss's good attitude will bring us lots of money." It is very interesting: if we start looking into it, what exactly leads to money? You have to help other people earn money. What does helping other people earn money actually mean? If you helped someone earn a dollar, only a dollar will come to you. How do you earn a billion, then? How do you earn a billion? You have to help someone else earn a billion. But that is laughable. Now, about time: what if you take certain actions—let us even suppose they influence something—but those actions will take effect in fifteen years?

Are you ready for that? Please write about this in the comments: what are you ready for, and how do you see this aspect for yourself? Under the video on YouTube. How do you see it? What do you feel here? What is your state, what is your sense of it? What events have you experienced that you believe really worked in terms of cause and effect? And what if it happens not in fifteen years, but in fifty?

DMDmitry Mugenov

And what if it is not in this lifetime?

AVAlexander Volchek

What if it does not happen in this lifetime? And what if you are already fifty or sixty, and you realize you do not really know how much time you have left?

DMDmitry Mugenov

So if someone wants to manage karma, they have to be prepared to live within this concept of karma, right?

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes.

DMDmitry Mugenov

They say, "I want to manage karma."

Then be prepared to live within that concept. The concept says that causes may be in a past life and results may come, say, in the next life.

So, in principle, if you are going to practice karmic management, you have to be prepared for the results to come in the next life.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is not just a matter of being prepared. You have to understand that an enormous number of results, an enormous number—in fact, all the biggest results—will not come now. To understand that, you need at least to take a brief look at the movement of karma throughout a lifetime. At least look at the theory. Look. Look, there are theoretical things. For many people, what I am about to say will sound like a theory. There is also an inner state of experience in which you truly mature and see the events that happened to you before. Five thousand years ago, a person looked back and saw the events that had happened to them. Three thousand years ago, they looked back and said, "I do not remember my past life, but I know those lives existed." Today someone looks back and says, "There were no past lives at all." So for most people today, this is theory. Imagine it is not theory, or at least that you believe it exists. You believe in that layer, look at it, understand it, live within it, are in it. Then let us examine it theoretically. For the viewer, it is always theory. Theoretically: how is karma lived through in this lifetime? During the first twenty-one years of a person's life, karma is established.

What does "established" mean? It means the events that happen in this life up to the age of twenty-one occur so that, after twenty-one, events begin that work through the karma needed in this lifetime. The karma that the person's soul and spiritual system chose—in other words, what you as a spiritual being chose to have happen. A person struggles against many things, but very often they are struggling against themselves. Their soul and spiritual being says, "Hear me. I was not planning to run away from bad events in my life here. Hear me. I was not planning to become rich in this life. I wanted to live this life in poverty because I need to work through karma." Or we live a wealthy life not because you are such an impressive personality now, but for reasons of a different kind. Reasons unrelated to your current personality and the brain that read a clever book and started drawing conclusions. You have to understand that, if good things happen in your life, you should be grateful to yourself. But not to Alexander Volchek or Dmitry Mugenov: to yourself as a spiritual being, the being who had many other lives. Many other lives. Not because you were so clever that you came to record videos, say, or so clever that you came to earn money, or so clever that you ended up with lots of children.

Speaking of children, I always say this: I have four children. What education, I wonder, did my wife and I receive so that we could have four children? Where did we study for that? I know an enormous number of people who have read a billion books about children and have no children. Did I do good things in this life so that children would be born to me? I will say nothing about the first child. After that, I could construct some kind of reasonable chain of reasoning, but even that would just be an abstraction. To do that, I would also have to see and know how many children are karmic and how many are not karmic, born of conscious choice and freedom. Those are not karmic things. There are things you create out of freedom. This is very important. Again, very important: some things happen out of freedom, are not connected to karma, and do not create karma. You receive certain good things not because you accumulated good karma, but because you were able to do them out of freedom. And what is good karma anyway? What does the concept of good karma mean? Is it better to live out of freedom or out of good karma? What do you think?

DMDmitry Mugenov

I think that, in a person's life, you cannot choose which is better here.

AVAlexander Volchek

No, choose: out of freedom or out of good karma.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Right now, I am choosing out of freedom.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is the movie The Matrix. Look at what good karma is. Good karma is when one of the characters in The Matrix—I do not remember his name—betrays his original team and says, "We agreed that afterward you would erase my memory and put me back into the Matrix." That is an example of good karma.

DMDmitry Mugenov

Give me good karma.

AVAlexander Volchek

That is what he says: "I will be rich, impressive, famous. I will know nothing real. I will simply have good karma." From the perspective of karmic management, that is the essence of this good karma. Someone else chooses freedom and says, "I will not choose that good karma. I will choose freedom. I will choose a true life." The person chooses a true life. They do not choose pleasant happiness; they choose dirt, strange food, all sorts of unpleasant stuff. Later, when they enter the Matrix, a man sits there eating a steak and says, "How great this is!" Because it is not real. He receives an unreal sensation, one he cannot get in that other life. This is escaping reality. It is the film Ready Player One, about virtual reality, and an enormous range of other things. Black Mirror shows a great deal of this. These are examples of good karma, of a predetermined life rather than a free one. When we talk about everything being good, that is a predetermined life. It is not freedom. Let us return to describing life and its time frames. Karma is formed over those twenty-one years. All the events that happen in a person's life are directed toward—

Those events are directed toward realizing karma afterward. This means that you think you are doing good or bad things, for example, that lead to a certain karma, when in fact they create causes within this incarnation so that the consequences of past causes can occur. If you examine this, it is called an inverted space of cause and effect. What is an inverted space of cause and effect? I will give a simple example: someone killed another person and went to prison. We think and say that they went to prison because they killed someone. But what if you consider this: according to their karma, they were supposed to end up in prison, in certain conditions, and to get to prison, they killed someone? It turns out—and this is very important—that prison itself is the cause of the killing. Prison itself. The killing is the consequence of that cause. They kill someone in order to end up in prison. They simply do not control this. Yet in the social world, in the basic reasoning of the social, material world, we see a completely different pattern. From twenty-one to twenty-eight, there is what is called a double period of forming karma and living through karma.

Karma is still being formed and lived through simultaneously, but it is already being lived through. From twenty-eight to forty-nine, karma is lived through. What does that mean? You live through the karma you are supposed to live through in this lifetime. The illusion that "we will change everything here now" is a complete abstraction. You are trying to cope with a moving current of water. A river flows, and you try to thrash around in it. You thrash around a little, grab a branch somewhere, catch hold of a rock somewhere else, or smash your head or accidentally die. Or you take the wrong current and stop moving along the river altogether. You find a nice place and sit there, but you are no longer moving along the river or living through your karma. You sit there thinking how great you are: "I helped someone in the river, and we made it ashore." You have simply altered your karma. Wait for another lifetime, and you will go on living through all those aspects then. People do not want to be in that position. An example comes to mind. I have an acquaintance who is also a student of mine and worked with me a great deal.

I remember he went on a trip and said, "Alexander, I think I have matured enough for spiritual development. I live a spiritual life." I asked, "You really live a spiritual life?" He said, "I live a spiritual life." He was heading to the Altai on a trip, and I was traveling in Europe at the time. I said, "Listen, you are going to a very serious place in the Altai with a serious group. Different things happen there. Let us assume from the start that you are prepared for something serious." He said, "I am ready for really serious spiritual development." I said, "Then let us talk right away about how this trip could rewind, fast-forward, and fulfill your karma." Many people want to live through their karma quickly, to fulfill it. Everyone has to understand that you have an accumulated layer. When you do certain things, you want them to finish playing out, to pass: "Let me work through them and then live with a clean suitcase full of money." Incidentally, people think of good karma, again, as a clean suitcase full of money. But that is an illusion. I think the Matrix example highlights it very well. I said to him, "Imagine that on this trip you fast-forward through five lifetimes of karma.

You live through all of it, a whole lot of things, and fast-forward to a point where certain events have to happen that were not planned for this lifetime. Those events involve your children having to die, your health having to be very badly damaged, so badly that you will have to live with a severe disability. For example, your arms or legs are torn off. You will have to live through grief and suffering around you. Are you ready for that?" He said, "One hundred percent no." I said, "Then what kind of development are you engaged in?" He said, "Definitely not spiritual development." It is hard to argue with that, because if you are on a karmic path, you have to be completely calm about the things I described. First of all, this is not a black cat crossing your path. If you truly live with an understanding of the spiritual world and karma, you take it calmly when people tell you different stories about what could happen to you. You understand that an ordinary story, an ordinary account, cannot alter your karma so that your children die and your arms and legs fall off. Moreover, if you live according to the universe's laws of cause and effect, you accept that the events that must happen will happen without your involvement.

You accept that you do not remember or know the hell and horror you brought into the world. I am not even talking about the fact that you do not realize how much hell and horror you brought into this life. You accept it and go on living with it. It makes no difference to you what bad or good events occur, because spiritual development holds truth for you. He was the one who came to me. That man's name is Dima too. Dima came to me on that call. I even remember where I was walking in Spain. I was walking down a street with a little hill. That moment is imprinted in my memory, how I answered him. He was the one who introduced it: "Alexander, I am on a spiritual path." A spiritual path in terms of truth. Why did I ask you again today? Did you immediately choose the path where your state matters to you, or did you still choose money? You said there was a little asterisk that lit up about money. That is the essence of it. It reflects reality. What is a person really ready for? And what does a person really want? Really! Truly! What do you really, truly want?

I give one of the hardest examples of a choice a person can face, as a way of testing, observing, and studying yourself in life. There are your own children and other people's children. If you had to save someone, whom would you choose? You know the answer, right? You can philosophize about it, offer your opinion, and so on. That is not the question now. Whom would you choose: your own or someone else's? If you ask my wife, she will definitely say her own. She will not hesitate. She will say, "Are you an idiot?" If you ask her mother, she will definitely choose her own. Ask my mother, and she will start choosing an answer that is the opposite of mine, or pick something unusual. Ask me. My answer is this: I try very hard in my life to treat all people equally, regardless of how closely we are related by blood in this life, how close they are to me through my karmic lives and karmic experience, or whether I am seeing this person for the first time. Because this is a human being. If such a situation happens, I will try to make a decision and act according to the laws of the universe, treating people equally, trying to do that. I have no other answer. In my own life, there is no other answer.

Without a doubt, there is no other answer. What does the mind start doing? What happens to an ordinary person? As viewers, you can enter into this now—and write in the comments how you feel, what you truly feel at this moment. The mind starts saying, "But imagine it really happened. Imagine it is happening right now. Here is the actual event: whom would you choose after all?" A whole system starts spinning inside you. But you have to choose, and choose for real. What do you rely on? And do not deceive yourself. It is the same with karmic management. After listening to all our explanations, the different paradoxes we identified, the things you described as paradoxes too, write them down very precisely and clearly. Say plainly to yourself: am I capable of managing this at all, of doing it, of being in it? If I want to understand it, what can I do as a person? What can I really do? How can I really look at my life? What can I contribute at a particular moment? Because when these currents are moving—the first twenty-one years of life, then twenty-nine, forty, twenty-eight, forty-nine years of life—

You have to understand that this is an enormous, overwhelming current, and that freedom within it is illusory. At the very least, you need to know: are you creating karma now, or has it already been created? Is this action taking place out of freedom, or is it imposed by the surrounding space? It is important to understand that a country has karma. There is a very interesting point about a country's karma. I think we have discussed it, right? The same answer applies, incidentally, to this: imagine a plane crashes. Were all the people supposed to crash? You know these kinds of cases. Were all the people supposed to die in a flood? This is very well described through the karma of a country. Imagine certain events happen in a country, and the country has a certain karma. You were born at that moment, and the country's karma is not so perfectly balanced—

The country's karma is not perfectly balanced with your own karma. There are mismatches. An event occurs that gives everyone plus ten. Plus ten. For some people, that plus ten offsets the minus ten they had. For others, the plus ten offsets a previous minus five and leaves them at plus five. Others had plus four hundred. This plus ten arrives, and there it is, another plus ten. There is a very interesting point. If someone had minus ten and received plus ten from the country's karma, they have reached zero in this life. Suddenly, right now, zero. Has their karma been erased, or what? Do they no longer have to work through the things they did? I want to tell you: they do have to work through them. A new current will arise for them to work through, possibly not in this lifetime. Just as with someone who died in a plane not because of their own karma, but because of the karma of another space, the karma of the time, or chance. In the next life, it will simply be balanced by a number of other things. This is very important. It will be balanced in their next life, because many people say, "Why are bad things happening to me?

They were not supposed to happen, for example." Imagine a person could see all of karma. There is nothing terrible about it: this can happen to you, and it will balance out. In that case, you need to understand and be very clearly aware that there is always the possibility of a very good flow of events that does not belong to you, and a very bad flow of events that also does not belong to you. The essence is not whether good or bad things happen to you, but how you truly develop as a person. Can karmic management really bring you money? How can we actually manage the flow of events in our lives? How can we understand our own flow of events? What is the right next step to take at any given moment? If we look at various clubs, business communities, business education, and books, there is a great deal of promotion of the idea that, for example, your business must have a mission or provide value. This comes out of the same area: if you have a mission, money will come. Not that money comes because you have chosen the right business model and know how to work with clients and collect payment from them.